The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  Alisha pulled a thin smile. “But you speak my language.”

  “Down to hobbits and white mountains,” Brandon said quietly. Alisha curled her fingers against her chair’s arms to keep from wrapping her arms around herself at the reminder. She and Brandon shared more than just a history with the CIA, a fact that Alisha’d allowed herself to forget. They’d discovered in one another common ground based from youthful adoration of science fiction and fantasy stories, something so very ordinary as to seem remarkable to Alisha. It was still another part of Parker’s appeal—a camaraderie she’d never shared with Reichart.

  On the other hand, Reichart had been a perfect match for Alisha’s adventuresome streak. She lowered her chin to her chest for a moment, working to put relationship ideas about both men out of her mind, then lifted her gaze to Brandon again.

  “Lilith found a tiny thread while she was collecting data for her war games, Alisha. A misappropriation of funds so small it could hardly matter, except my father was overseeing it.”

  “So? What’s it for?”

  “Living expenses,” Brandon said quietly. “Medical expenses.”

  “Medical?”

  “For a newborn,” Brandon said, “and her mother.”

  Chapter 3

  “A…” Alisha got to her feet, staring at Brandon. “A newborn? A—Cristina? Cristina had a child?”

  “About four months ago. It makes sense,” Brandon said. “The Sicarii are obsessed with procreating and keeping their lines intact. Lilith backtracked the data until she found Cristina. Dad’s been funneling CIA money to support her.”

  “Why? Why wouldn’t the Sicarii just take care of her?”

  “Maybe they are.”

  Alisha’s jaw snapped shut and she looked away. “We knew he was dirty, Brandon.” The vestiges of hope Alisha had held in Greg’s favor had shattered at the light of triumph she’d seen in his eyes on hearing of Richard Boyer’s death. “I’m sorry, but what in hell do you expect me to do about it? Right now I’m grateful the Sicarii are off my back and I’m still alive.”

  “Come on, Alisha.” Brandon stood as well, spreading a hand in supplication. “People like you can’t just stand back and let the world go to hell.”

  “People having babies isn’t quite the world going to hell.” Even if it was a one-time friend and confidante having the child; even if the child was meant to perpetuate the bloodlines of the Sicarii. That group was almost beyond Alisha’s ability to comprehend, their ambition to elevate thinned blue bloods to the ruling seats of the world such a throwback to another time that she balked at the idea of them.

  “Alisha, this isn’t about Cristina’s kid. It’s about Lilith, and why I can’t go to my father for help. I need you.”

  “Does this kind of pick-up line work on a lot of girls? Come with me, the fate of the world depends on it? I’ve done my share of saving the world, Brandon. I’m done with it. I’m out.” Her stomach tightened again at the words, fighting against regret that pooled in her throat and slid downward.

  “People like me,” she added, echoing his earlier words almost inaudibly. She knew what he meant: once upon a time another friend had said the same thing, in more words. People who believed if they were not right there in the heat of action at that exact moment in time, the world as they knew it would be in desperate trouble. That was what people like her were like.

  The world had gotten on without her just fine for the past ten months. Alisha put her shoulders back, chin lifted as she looked at Brandon. “I’m out,” she said again.

  “Alisha, they know about Lilith. She came up against one of Erika’s watchdog programs. It read her as a virus and wiped some critical code.”

  “Erika.” A short laugh erupted from Alisha’s throat. Erika’d been the friend who’d defined people like her for Alisha. Earthy, sexy Erika, whose pragmatic streak was rivaled only by her absolute glee in outsmarting the people around her. She’d worked for the Agency nearly as long as Alisha had, though her specialty was as different as it could be—Erika hacked security systems and developed cutting-edge toys for field agents like Alisha. “Shouldn’t an AI be able to protect herself against firewalls?”

  “Erika’s been using my research to improve her security systems. She’s at least as smart as I am, Alisha. I can’t provide for every possible contingency.”

  “At least?” Alisha found a brief smile. “She said she dumped you because she pounded you in some kind of math test.”

  Pure surprise washed over Brandon’s expression. “Is that why—what a bitch,” he said, but there was a note of amused admiration in his voice. “I’m going to have to call her on that.” The amusement fell away and he tensed his shoulders. “Assuming I ever get to talk to her again. When her security system ran into Lilith it sent warnings back before Lilith was able to break free and escape. Erika reported the anomaly to Dad. It was just a matter of time before it led back to me and they figured out what Lilith really is. I took her and ran.”

  Alisha’s eyebrows flicked up. “How do you know it would’ve led back to you?”

  Brandon exhaled in frustration and sat down again, lacing his fingers together, then loosening them again in a spread. “Programmers have a certain voice to their programming style, like any kind of writer. If you know what you’re looking for, you can figure out who wrote the original code. With Lilith, she’s done so much reconfiguring of her own source code—”

  Alisha held up a hand. “You lost me.”

  Brandon pursed his lips, then nodded. “Lilith rewriting her source code is like you rewriting your DNA. It’s like hacking the things that intrinsically make you what you are.”

  “Which is impossible.”

  “For you,” Brandon said. “Not for an artificial intelligence. Imagine having almost infinite processing power and access to datafiles, and using those to instantaneously perform gene therapy on yourself. That’s effectively what Lilith’s capable of doing, and has done.”

  Alisha nodded slowly. “Okay. And?”

  “And all that gene therapy has disguised her original code enough that it’s not immediately clear that it is my work.”

  “Whereas taking the code and running will tip pretty much anybody off, Brandon. I thought you’d had field training.”

  “I said they wouldn’t see it immediately, Ali. It probably didn’t take Erika more than forty-eight hours, if that long, to determine the underlying source code’s creator. Maybe less, if the watchdog program took any snapshots of what Lilith was doing. She’s very logical, but she has leaps of intuition that computers don’t share. Those leaps would look like something a human would do, but people can’t absorb and respond that fast. That leaves artificial intelligences, and I’m the only one working on AIs anywhere near that level of advancement.”

  “More than forty-eight hours,” Alisha repeated. “How long ago did you run, Brandon?”

  “Six days ago.”

  “Six—! Jesus Christ, Brandon, anybody could have gotten out of the country in six days, especially if there weren’t any immediate bulletins to watch for him! What are you doing here?” Worse, how many people might have deduced he’d come to her, and even now be moving against their location? It shouted setup, a situation Brandon had forced her into more than once. Anger welled up, making Alisha’s hands ache with the need for action. Two quick steps and a sharp chop to the back of his neck would disable him. She held herself still through force of will, making herself remember the horror on the scientist’s face when he’d realized he, too, had been betrayed by the Sicarii. Give him the benefit of the doubt, Leesh, she told herself, though her fists knotted as she listened to Brandon’s speech.

  “My sources all dried up,” Brandon said helplessly. “Everyone I’d ever gone to for money, passports, smuggling, anything. None of them would see me. They’d disappeared, gone straight, just flat-out refused, you name it. I didn’t want to leave under my own name, and I can’t get any papers to get me out of here.”

 
; “You don’t have extra papers of your own?” Disdain colored Alisha’s tone before she brought it back under control. Even ten months out of the job, she had three separate sets of identification stored in safety deposit boxes in the immediate area, and several more throughout the country and the world. Perhaps half of them were legitimate—Agency-issued, in other words—but the others had been collected through a decade of undercover work, and would allow her to change identities almost at whim.

  “Nothing the Agency hasn’t provided. I’m research and development, Ali, not a field agent. I’m not supposed to need a dozen IDs. Besides—” he spread his hands “—I’ve got BranCo Technologies, the quantum processor and drive development company that I’m running. Disappearing’s kind of a problem when you’re CEO, even if the company hasn’t gone public yet.”

  “BranCo Technologies,” Alisha said through her teeth. “You think your life’s in danger and you’re worried about a couple of computer chips? How many years did you spend undercover with the Sicarii? You should know better, Brandon.” She lowered her chin, teeth still pressed together. “All right. All right, I’ll get you papers, and I’ll get you over one of the borders. You’ll fly out of Mexico or Canada, and then for Christ’s sake, don’t come back.”

  Gratitude darkened Brandon’s eyes to sapphire. “Thank you.”

  “I’m not doing this for you. Did it ever occur to you that people might’ve thought you’d come to me? I’ve been a spy my whole adult life, but I didn’t bring it home. You just did. So I’m doing this to protect Teresa and the boys, and to get you out of my life. Don’t forget that. I’ve got to make some calls. Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.” Alisha turned on her heel and stalked out of the living room, her own words echoing in her mind. I’m doing this to get you out of my life.

  If she kept telling herself that, maybe she’d start to believe it.

  Old habits died hard. The pay-as-you-go cell phone Alisha kept in her bedside drawer hadn’t, until that moment, been used. There was no reason at all to own it, except it couldn’t be traced to her. She’d thought nothing of it when she’d picked up the phone a few days after returning to California: untraceable numbers were always useful in her former line of work. You could take the girl out of the spy business, she thought wryly, and returned the phone to the drawer, pulling her lower lip in concentration.

  Ten months: it seemed like no time at all, and yet almost insurmountable. The man she wanted most to call, a corpulent crime lord whose touch stretched far beyond his Roman home, was beyond her reach. She had pressed Jon’s favors too far, and owed him too large to ask for another. But in an ever-changing world of espionage and danger, he was stable, the most likely to still be in place.

  And the least likely to care whether she’d left her cage and was flying free. She had less chance of hearing from the others she’d put out calls to, especially if it was well-known that she’d walked away from the Company nearly a year earlier.

  “Give it some time, Leesh,” she murmured to herself. Six feelers would probably result in at least one hit, and one was all she needed.

  All Brandon needed, she corrected herself. This wasn’t her situation or concern. Alisha unfolded from the bed to pad silently down the ranch house’s hallway to watch Brandon from within its shadows. He sat with his head thrown back against his chair, as if he slept, but she could see the tension that lined his temple and jaw. Not only did he not sleep, but he wasn’t resting anything more than his eyes. The mockery of relaxation would only leave him more tired, in the end.

  Who had taught her that? The child-like ability to throw away all cares and sleep deeply, relaxing completely, for the scant hours that a mission might allow? Even before the thought was complete, Alisha huffed a breath. It had been Reichart, of course, whose own ability to put aside any problem in the name of precious sleep had shown her the path of doing it herself. Alisha inhaled slowly, bringing her heart rate to a calm, centered beat as sleepiness swept over her. She could be asleep in seconds, from this state.

  Which would serve no purpose at all, except to prove to herself she had better field training than the man trying to relax in her living room. Alisha drew herself up into a tall, strong tree pose, resisting the urge to shake her head at her own competitive streak. The grounding sense of the pose energized her body, from soles to crown. In that focused state, one thought drifted through her mind: there was someone she hadn’t tried calling yet. Then she folded the idea away and shook herself out of the yoga asana as she entered the living room. If no one responded to her call, she would consider her last option. Then, and only then.

  “This will probably take a few hours. You should get some rest,” she said aloud.

  Brandon flinched upward, hands closing on the chair’s arms. “I was napping.”

  “You were trying to,” Alisha said. “There’s a spare bedroom. Why don’t you go lie down for a while?”

  Brandon gave her a weak smile. “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t be inviting you to rest in my house. I said I’d help, Brandon. Don’t get cute. Go rest. I’ll wake you when I’ve heard back from someone.”

  Brandon pushed to his feet, watching her. “Thanks. Again.”

  “The more I help you the sooner you’re out of my life. Don’t read anything into it. Just go rest.” Alisha jerked a thumb at the hall and let Brandon find his own way, taking the path to the kitchen herself. The phone was in her hand, thumb punching in a familiar number, before she thought the action through. Late-afternoon sunlight poured in the kitchen window, making the room look clean and bright, though a glance at the clock told her it was closing in on ten at night Eastern time. Alisha brought the phone to her ear, expecting an answer regardless of the east-coast hour.

  “Anybody but you, Ali, and I wouldn’t have picked up.” The woman on the other end sounded cheerful, not irritated. Alisha grinned, putting her butt against the counter as she folded an arm under her breasts.

  “Hi, E. Really? Anybody? What about that guy you were seeing? Raymond, Ricardo, Rumpelstiltskin, whatever it was?”

  “We are so over,” Erika said with a sniff. “His beautiful biceps didn’t make up for his infinitesimally small package.”

  “Erika!” Alisha’s eyebrows shot up and she laughed out loud, making the woman on the other end say, “What? What? He was dumb, Ali, no brain cells to rub together. What’d you think I was talking about?” The last word stretched into aboot, remnants of Erika’s Yooper accent coming through.

  Alisha laughed again, hugging her arm around herself. “Man, I miss you, E. Give yourself a hug from me, huh?”

  “Consider it done. What’s wrong, Ali? Can’t be too bad. You’re calling me from your personal land line. That means I can’t get in trouble if I get caught helping you out.”

  “You sound disappointed. Besides, you say that like I only call you when I need help.” Alisha grinned out the window, watching suburban evening traffic catch sunlight and bounce it around the streets.

  “All right, it is true that you may have put in a few calls over the last ten months just to say hello. It’s getting really boring, Ali. You should consider getting back in the business.”

  Alisha sighed and pushed a hand through tawny curls. “Yeah. About that, Erika….”

  “Oh, rock on,” Erika said happily. “You’re coming back. What do you need from me?”

  “I’m not coming back,” Alisha insisted, then sighed again, unable to quite believe it herself. “But I’ve got a situation.”

  “Would that situation’s initials be Brandon Parker?”

  “You know, I should be surprised, but I’m not.” Alisha pulled the phone away from her ear, gave it a dry look, then put it back.

  “Yeah, well, he lit out of here last week like his tail was on fire. I’ve been pretty much waiting to hear from you since.”

  Alisha bared her teeth at the window, a frustrated burst of motion. “I was afraid people would think that way
. Is he that predictable, or am I? Never mind. Look, E, can you get somebody out here to keep an eye on my family for a while? I know it’s not de rigueur, but I’d feel a lot better.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Greg’s still pretty sore about you leaving. He might not be agreeable.”

  “Then find another way. Please.”

  “Yeah.” Erika’s voice went low, the sound of a promise. “And you’re not predictable,” she added thoughtfully. “Or maybe you are. Mostly I figured, if I thought I needed to bail, my first stop would be Alisha MacAleer’s house, because if nothing else, she both could and would take care of my sorry skinny ass. And he’s got a thing for you, so it stands to reason.”

  “Oh, great.” Alisha stared at the ceiling. “Speaking of reason, does he have a legitimate one to be concerned?”

  “I love how you say that,” Erika said. “Like you’re asking a real question, except all the words in it are designed to get the maximum information from me while imparting no data from you.”

  “You’re not supposed to notice that, E.” Being caught out brought a smile to her face, wide enough to color her words with amusement instead of accusation.

  “I know, but my giant pulsating brain can’t help picking up these subtle intonations in your speech patterns.”

  Alisha’s smile turned to brief laughter. “Your brain has graduated from being mighty to being giant and pulsating?”

  “I didn’t have anything else to do besides upgrade, after you left. It’s dull as dishwater without you calling in with side missions, you know that?”

  “You mean other people don’t do that?”

  “Would I tell you if they did?”

  “Probably not. But look, E, about Brandon…”

  “All right, all right. Everything I know is that the code I unraveled clearly has his signature, and that I think he must be working on some kind of massive new AI, and I honestly don’t know why that made him flip out and run.” Another considering silence fell, before Erika added, “Okay, that’s like totally not all I know, but it’s all I know that’s relevant to this conversation. I could stun you with my repertoire of knowledge on other subjects.”