by P. R. Adams
He shook his head. “They thought you were dead. I wasn’t even sure myself.”
“They’re too young for this. I shouldn’t have involved them.”
“They’re adults. Like it or not, they get to choose. How old were you when you signed up for the Army? You think you were ready for it when you killed your first person?”
I glanced back at the unit that was our only shelter. “As a soldier, it’s pretty straightforward: point the gun, pull the trigger, kill the enemy. What we’re doing here, it’s different. Ichi’s had to kill people who were—”
“People who were trying to kill us. Her father was one of the best there ever was at it. Look at her for what she is. She’s not the little kid you promised to protect.”
She hadn’t been a little kid for years. “I can’t let Norimitsu and Tae-hee down.”
“You won’t. But maybe it’s time you walked away.”
“Walked away? I was trying to. I was minding my own business back home. They came for me. They killed Margo.”
“Your high school sweetheart? That’s pretty…cliché.” He bowed his head and smiled. “Sorry.”
Clichéd. That was a nice way of saying amateur. Stupid. “I’d used that place before. No one knew. It was my mother’s property, but we had it put back under her father’s name when…” Danny knew about the injury, about the old man going to jail for good, and about the guilt I felt for not being there for her. “I guess someone at the Agency figured it out eventually.”
Danny’s lips twitched. “Going home. That’s…it’s…um. Why? You don’t fit in any better than me, do you?”
“Worse.”
“Yeah. You hated it, didn’t you? Right?”
“I didn’t understand it. Don’t understand it. Lots of bad memories. More now.”
“So don’t go back. Like I said before, a new life, live it fast. Remember?”
I did. “I wanted peace, but I couldn’t escape them.”
Danny shrugged. “What Stovall did to you, that had to have been in the works for a while. He had to be running some sort of surveillance, some sort of tracking. This whole game, what you two have between you, it’s messed up.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Um.” Danny scraped his boot on the steps. “Like I said, maybe it’s time to walk away. Give it a break, make sure you’re seeing everything clearly.”
“You think I’m too close to this? It’s too personal?”
“I think they did a lot of damage to you, Stefan.” He sighed. “I don’t think I’d even be able to walk around if I went through what they did to you.”
“That’s the conditioning.”
“Never should have taken that. Should’ve walked away when they gave you the ultimatum.”
I should have. But it was who I was now.
A door creaked behind us. Huiyin stood in the opening. “Chan has something.”
I hurried back with long jumps, not even worrying about the water. Inside the room, Chan rocked on the mattress, black-metallic fingernails scraping along the legs of the VR goggles I’d come to dread. The pair I used sat at the edge of the bed, waiting.
Chan’s eyes flicked up, locked on me. A slender tongue licked sweat from above quivering, black-painted lips. “They left a trail. Don’t want to go in.” Chan pointed the goggles at mine. “Not alone.”
Danny shut the door, glanced at the goggles as I picked them up. A twitch screwed up his face. “Think, um…” He looked around the room. “Just think about what I said.”
I tapped the VR devices against the back of my hand. “Yeah.” I slid the goggles on. “Later.”
Chan’s voice shook as the goggles came to life. “Coleen Fanon. She has money?”
“Lots of it. She made a mint running a couple companies into the ground before going into politics. Didn’t you read the dossier you gave me?”
“Skimmed. That computing device? Different. Can’t figure it out.”
Chan had become obsessed. Given the problems with drugs I’d already seen, this was dangerous. “Maybe it’s time we looked at it from another angle.”
“Different Gridhound?” Defensive. Hurt.
“I was thinking trying to attack it through hardware.” I pushed the goggles down my nose to look at Chan, who seemed frozen, absorbed in the VR world. “I already have the best Gridhound.”
Chan’s head drooped slightly, and a smile threatened to settle on twitching lips. “Maybe not the best.”
“The best.” I slipped my goggles back on and found myself in the dark room with black eggshell seats lit by LED strips.
“Got a name for you. From Denver. Dale Rappaport. Former Navy.” The image of the computing device guy popped up, with the name beneath.
“Navy?” I chuckled. “He did okay holding the gun. That’s surprising.”
“Computer guy. Pretty good. Worked for a couple name companies. Went quiet for a while. Thought he might be doing something big.”
“Bigger than trying to kill me?”
Avatar-Chan looked almost hurt. “No.”
“I’m kidding.”
A fragile smile, come and gone in a blink. “Yeah. So Rappaport. Was working for something big. Big money. Data center build-outs. Ever hear of a company called SunCorps?”
“Should I?”
“No. Nothing about them until about a year ago. Weird.”
It was weird. Very weird. “Why’d you ask about Fanon’s money?”
“Ran some good crypto.”
“They all do, don’t they?”
“No. Primo. Proprietary.” Avatar-Chan’s fingers were steepled beneath a chin that seemed more prominent. It took me a second to realize that the ever-present hood was pushed all the way back, the magenta hair fluffed out and wild. The spikes were completely gone. The avatar’s facial tattoos covered less flesh. There was even a difference in the hoodie jacket—less baggy, unzipped. The T-shirt beneath was also less baggy. I could make out the faintest swell of breasts.
I focused on stillness, doing my best to keep my avatar from reacting, but the questions… “How’d you hack it, then?”
That produced the same shy, uncomfortable smile the real Chan had shown moments before. “Breadcrumbs.”
The dark room shattered, replaced by Douglas Fanon’s mansion. Avatar-Chan stood on the lawn, eyes closed. When they opened, they glowed.
I looked around, unsure what to make of that. “You okay?”
“Building things, that’s all.” The lawn took on a clarity that put me back earlier in the day. Grass lay crumpled where someone had run over it. A breeze puffed out Avatar-Chan’s hoodie, revealing faintly umber flesh on arms that had no hint of muscle to them at all. There was no mistaking the breasts or the slender body.
And then the wind died. Avatar-Chan pulled the hoodie jacket closed. Self-conscious.
Lines glowed beneath the ground—the Grid.
Avatar-Chan waved a soft hand at a line that glowed differently from the others. “Hardened. Crypto. A good million dollars.”
“He’s a lawyer. It might be part of his practice. Or maybe it’s something that was installed by the original owners.”
“Douglas Fanon’s the original owner.” Avatar-Chan walked along the glowing line. “The alarm. When you broke in? It ran on this line. And on the Grid. The emergency response? There was another unit. Not just medical and security. Firm he works for. They pay for his bodyguards.”
The lawn disappeared, and we stood in an office that nearly mirrored the one where Huiyin had shot Douglas. But this office was smaller and didn’t have a fireplace. The desk was more modern, slightly less ostentatious, the floor polished tile. A shelf off to the side was loaded with thick, leather-bound books with titles that screamed legal references. “This is where he works?”
“His office.” Avatar-Chan plopped into the leather chair and threw a leg over one of the padded arms. “Biggest clients? Chinese corporations. Korean chaebol. Japanese keiretsu.”
&
nbsp; My real stomach flipped. Huiyin’s decision to go after Coleen Fanon suddenly seemed less odd. “When we attacked, the firm was tipped off.”
“Sent a security team to the mansion.” Avatar-Chan spun the chair around.
“And contacted our Miss Fanon?”
Avatar-Chan’s head bobbed up and down, magenta hair like silk in the office’s subdued light. “Took the case from the police. Running the whole thing.” Avatar-Chan tapped the desktop, and a computer terminal rose. Swift typing and swipes, then a confident twist, and the display was pointed toward me.
“You’re in their system? I thought you said the connection was hardened?”
“All systems have a vulnerability. This place, it’s HR and IT support. Run out of Singapore. They outsource to India. They use a data center in Vietnam. No encryption between any of the sites. Password scraping’s a breeze.”
“Shit.”
Data flew by, sentence fragments highlighting, freezing, going into a document window. The document came together: dates, names. Connections.
Avatar-Chan stared at the hoodie’s zipper. “These people. The ones who sent Huiyin. Who are they?”
“MSS—Ministry of State Security. That’s…it’s complicated. They operate differently—”
“You trust her?” The avatar’s lips twisted. Jealousy? Suspicion? “Huiyin?”
“Never trust a spy. Ever.”
Avatar-Chan’s magenta eyes flashed to mine. “Except you. Trust you.”
I looked away. “I’m not a spy. I just kill people.”
Avatar-Chan coughed. “There’s a virus in their system. They have IT people working on it. Testing the encrypted lines. Searching for the source. Tracking back all communications, capturing data traffic, tearing it apart.”
The chair transformed into what seemed like a typical office chair, the desk into what I imagined a computer person’s desk might look like. I’d seen Agency contractors at work in the belly of the headquarters—sickly pale, hunched, leeched of life as they toiled away. Some people inside the Agency recognized the work of these people for what it was: life-saving, critical. Stovall hated the computer people. He mocked them. Anything that had a chance it might diminish him, he tore it apart.
Avatar-Chan leaned forward, chin on upturned hand, head shaking slightly, examining a huge display. “They’ve got the source. Douglas’s library.”
“You inserted a virus into Fanon’s system?”
Avatar-Chan tapped the screen. “Unencrypted traffic, password scraping.”
“But why? Your breadcrumbs?”
Avatar-Chan brought up several screens, and once again the highlighting, copy and paste process took over. The security team was examining all traffic, even Coleen Fanon’s encrypted Grid traffic. Could they break the encryption if Chan couldn’t? The answer appeared on the screen: They’d sent a communication of their own over the same connection, encrypted. Unbreakable. Untraceable.
But Chan had the credentials!
A new window opened and filled with garbled, meaningless junk. Avatar-Chan typed some commands in, fired off an app, and the junk became separate files—video and the tracking data. The tracking data was selected first. In its own way, it was also meaningless junk, at least to me.
The computer room became a gray global Grid, with magenta relays and white packets speeding along. Several of the packets glowed as they flashed from relay to relay. Then they reached a point and began coming back together.
Avatar-Chan leaned in, and this time a confident smile settled in to stay. “Biloxi, Mississippi. Old data center.”
“In Mississippi? I didn’t even know they had electricity there.”
“Running water, too.”
At first I thought Chan had missed that I was joking, then the smile on those black lips spread and a chuckle slipped out. “Well. I didn’t even know you had a laugh in you.”
And like that, the smile was gone, along with the virtual world. I pulled my goggles off. Chan’s magenta eyes jumped from one screen to another. Worried.
“What?” I glanced at Danny. “Visitors?”
He grabbed his rifle and reached for the door, Ichi close behind.
“No!” Chan held up a finger. “Not here yet but coming. And power’s too low. We need to go.”
I tossed the duffel bag onto the mattress. The bag had become home to most of our gear, even some of Chan’s. My data device went inside; my pistol came out. Chan stuffed computer equipment into the backpack—fast but not panicked.
“Chan?” I waved a hand in the space between us, blocking Huiyin’s vision with my body.
Chan looked up. The glow was there in the magenta eyes but not the brilliant flux of power from the VR. Black-painted lips trembled slightly.
I gently patted a shoulder that felt every bit as soft and muscle-free as it had appeared in the VR world. “Thank you. We needed this.”
The smile—authentic—flashed across those lips.
Danny and Ichi drifted out into the dusk, a few splashes, then the rustle of leaves, and there was nothing left of them. I hauled the duffel bag to the door and pushed it open.
Huiyin stood in the doorway, unnecessarily close, shoulder pressed against my chest. “You have something?”
“A location.” Did I see suspicion in her eyes? “It’s more than we had before.”
She stayed there, warm against me. Then she, too, was gone.
Chan shouldered the backpack. There was annoyance in those magenta eyes. Annoyance and…I couldn’t place the rest of the complex bundle of emotions, but when Chan squeezed past, there was the same unnecessary closeness, and this time, when Chan glanced up, I was sure of what those magenta eyes held within them.
And I was worried.
Chapter 15
Biloxi was a disaster zone. Huiyin kept our SUV below forty on the pothole track they had the audacity to advertise as a highway. My joke about electricity proved frighteningly prescient, with half of the little wooden shacks and brown brick homes we drove past clearly without power and the others only showing few signs of having some. The ground was a mucky brown, still laced with the detritus left by the most recent tidal wash. We were far enough north that the dredge work of the last hurricane wasn’t so obvious, but the stench of raw sewage and dead fish seemed to be everywhere, carried on a soft breeze driven by the last heat of the day.
Ichi covered her nose with a towel she had stolen from the hotel we’d spent the night in. “How can people live in this?”
Huiyin’s lower lip jutted out. “Not everyone has choices about where they live.”
It was strangely defensive, but with her eyes hidden by reflective lenses, I couldn’t make anything more of it beyond a quick flush on her cheeks. I rolled up the front passenger-side window, thankful it wasn’t summertime.
Danny’s motorcycle—black, but more of a trail bike than a performance bike—hung back about sixty feet. He had a small cargo pod attached to the back. Our drone.
Chan tapped my shoulder and pointed to an exit coming up on our right. “There.”
Huiyin twisted around. “I know the way.”
I winked at Chan, not missing the fact that the hoodie was pulled back, revealing not magenta spikes but lustrous waves. That hair covered ears that had once held LED piercings along the top edge. Covered or not, I knew those piercings were gone.
Chan leaned back, black-metallic fingernails a little slow to cover a smile that hung around longer than any previous ones.
Proximity was causing problems. Ichi’s interest in Huiyin and the Chinese agent’s apparent hostile rebuffing had been my main concern as we’d made our way through West Virginia. Now I had to worry about Huiyin. She had gone from the long-lingering press against my chest to trying to share a room with me on the outskirts of Atlanta. I couldn’t tell whether that had been meant to irritate Ichi. Or Chan, who now seemed to be equating trusting me to…something else.
I had ended up bending to Ichi’s will and sharing a room with he
r, but that only seemed to make things worse all around. The entire drive down to Biloxi had been one long catfight, with sides shifting between the three of them.
It was exhausting, and I just wanted the mission to be over.
We rattled along on the side road, which was even worse than the highway. Tall trees grew on the right side, providing slivers of shade. The trees came to a stop at the edge of an old gas station, now boarded up. About fifty feet beyond, another road crossed the one we were on.
Huiyin pulled around to the back of the gas station, close to a boarded-up doorway, and powered the vehicle down. She leaned back in her seat, sighed, and pulled her mirror shades off, tucking the end of one of the legs between her lower lip and gum. “Another thirty minutes of sunlight. You want to wait here or…?” She twisted around to glance at Ichi, seated behind me. Unspoken: Send Ichi in to scout.
I popped my door. “Let’s get a look from overhead first.”
Danny’s motorcycle pulled to a stop. He swung a leg over it, then put his helmet on the seat.
Chan joined him assembling the drone, which sped things up immensely. I did what I could to help. Ichi climbed to the SUV roof and watched; Huiyin wandered off, dark hair fluttering in the breeze.
When the drone was launched, Chan ran back to the SUV and pulled one of the bigger computer devices out to get into our target’s security. We would have guard patrol patterns, positions, and radio chatter before too long. Danny concentrated on the control system, but I caught his eyes jumping from Chan to Ichi to where Huiyin had gone and then to me. “Uh, you okay?”
I snorted. “Why do you ask?”
“You look worn out. Not in a good way.”
“Remember how we always used to have those jealous fights—you getting pissy about Jacinto sleeping with me, me getting all worked up about you and Clemens being so happy together?”
Danny’s head slowly turned toward me. “Um, is this about me sleeping with Morena?”
“You slept with Morena?” The female of our Brazilian driver twins had never shown interest in any of the men on the team to my knowledge, which had made it easier having her on the team.
