The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  Laughter burbled through Alisha’s voice again. “I’m sure you could. You usually do. You’re the brains of this outfit. I’m just the muscle.”

  “That sounds so completely like you’re coming in. You’re back in the game, aren’t you, Ali? You’re coming home. I swear I’ll get somebody on your family, make sure it’s all cool. Just come in before I die of boredom. You are coming home, right?”

  Light glittered in the corner of Alisha’s eye, too red to be sunlight. She frowned, turning her head toward it, and caught a dancing red dot as it sparkled through her line of vision.

  Years of combat-trained instinct took over before conscious thought could process the glimmer of light. She hit the floor, phone still clutched to her ear, though even extraordinarily alert hearing could no longer make out words. Instead she could count the number of bullets firing as they shattered the glass of her kitchen window and slammed into the cabinets she’d stood in front of. Alisha flung an arm over her eyes, protecting them, and scrambled across glass-littered linoleum toward the kitchen door. There were no voices accompanying the shots, no words to pick out of the crashing sounds, except for Erika’s alarmed, “Alisha? Alisha!” That cry came too slowly, the vowels stretched out to hearing tuned to life and death rather than ordinary exchanges.

  Alisha hung up the phone with a snarled, “Yeah. Looks like I’m coming home.”

  Chapter 4

  Brandon met her in the hall, more fully awake than he’d been since his arrival. Alisha grabbed a fistful of his shirt, dragging him closer to the floor as she snarled, “Give me one reason I shouldn’t put a bullet in your leg and throw you out there for them. Fucking Sicarii followed you, Brandon. CIA wouldn’t open fire.”

  “I don’t know.” Brandon’s voice was low and intense. “I wouldn’t think any of them would be shooting at me.”

  “Unless they think they only need the notes and equipment, not your brain. Do you have a gun?” Alisha ran, crouched over, for her bedroom door. “A car nearby? Anything?” The bedroom door banged shut behind her as she yanked her key ring from her pocket, shaking loose the single key that would open her firearms safe.

  “My car’s a couple of blocks down. I thought it was far enough awa—Jesus, Alisha.” The last words came as she keyed open the safe, revealing two Glocks and a third six-shot pistol. Alisha tossed the last of them to Brandon, following it with a package of ammo.

  “Check the window. See if anybody’s out back.” She kept her head down, loading the weapons even as she listened for encroaching footsteps. Twenty seconds since the rounds had destroyed her kitchen. Ten more until invasion or explosion.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Brandon reported over the click of loading bullets. Alisha reached into the safe again, pulling a black envelope from where it was taped to the box’s ceiling. She stuffed the envelope down her shirt and came out of her crouch, still running doubled-over as she snatched up the cell phone from where it lay on the floor. She pulled a leather trenchcoat from beneath the bed, wrenching it on as she spoke.

  “I’ll cover you. Get out, get past the next row of houses, and run. Keep your head down. There’s a ravine about two hundred yards past the second row of houses. Floods in the winter, but it should be dry this time of year. I’ll be right behind you. Go.”

  “Alisha—”

  “Go!” Alisha shoved one gun into her belt and grabbed Brandon’s waistband, hefting him halfway out the window. He scrabbled, then fell, though she could tell from the sound that he rolled out of it. A moment later his footsteps were audible, thumping softly against the dry lawn.

  For an instant combat-trained hearing focused and went beyond the sounds of Brandon’s running steps. A crackle of static from somewhere nearby: a radio, less technologically advanced than Alisha might have expected, and then an order relayed: “He’s out. She’s still in. Blow it now.”

  Alisha swore and dove after Brandon.

  Fire, deafening in its arrival, plumed behind her. She flew, soaring on heat and concussive waves, and hit the ground in a dive that jarred her teeth. There was concrete and asphalt beneath her, not grass: she’d been thrown at least ten yards. Her ears rang from the blasts that burned her home, making her dizzy, but she was on her feet and running, searching for Brandon as frightened, horrified homeowners appeared in the streets. There was no sign of the man who’d relayed the order to kill her. He had to be somewhere close, close enough to hear, close enough to see Brandon’d made his escape while Alisha’d still been within the house. It was possible he was among the thronging suburbanites, watching her as closely as she sought him. If so, that was good: their assailants were less likely to fire into a crowd.

  There. Brandon was still on his feet, bolting between houses. Alisha followed his path as she ran, drawing her gun and casting a few quick glances back at the billowing remains of her house.

  Her hearing had returned, at least in part, by the time she slithered down the ravine wall behind Brandon. The sound of her own labored breathing was harsh in her ears, but Brandon sounded worse. Small stones scattered and bounced, pinging off one another sharply enough to make hair stand up on Alisha’s arms, even half-deafened. She slid the last few yards on her behind, coming to her feet before Brandon did.

  She didn’t remember how the Glock came to be resting against his forehead. Wasn’t sure when her finger had left the trigger guard to rest on the trigger itself. She watched his eyes widen and his hands spread, the pistol she’d handed him dropped from nerveless fingers. Dispassion, she thought. That might be the word for the feeling that held her by the throat, so cold she knew she could pull the trigger and never look back.

  Or maybe it was good old-fashioned rage. Rage so icy it held her hand steady, finger lightly squeezing the trigger. Just a hairbreadth from a bullet in the brain, she thought, and right then it sounded like a good idea.

  “My nephews,” Alisha said very softly into the sunsettinted darkness. “My sister. That could have been my family in there, Parker. Do you understand what you did? You put my family at risk. You led somebody willing to blow up suburban neighborhoods to my house, where three little boys were playing less than an hour ago.”

  “Alisha,” Brandon breathed.

  Alisha’s nostrils flared. “Shut up. You’re alive right now because you’re worth more as a bargaining tool than you are dead, do you understand that?” It took concentrated effort to move her finger off the trigger, and even then Alisha couldn’t force the larger muscles of her arm to contract and take the gun from Brandon’s forehead. “I spent my whole adult life doing a job I thought would make the world a safer place for those kids, Parker, and you just about got them killed. I will get you out of this country because it will remove you from contact with my family, and then I will by God call the Sicarii myself and give them your home address if I have to. Do you understand? From this moment on you are my prisoner. Do not think for an instant that I will be a gentle jailer. I will do whatever is necessary to protect my family. Do you understand?” Alisha’s heart hammered in her temples and throat, copper taste of fury spat out with the words. She felt rooted to the earth, as if all its strength poured into her, and God help the man who tried to move her or stand in her way.

  Brandon nodded, barely a motion against the barrel of her gun. Alisha folded her arm back, pointing the muzzle at the sky, suddenly no longer trusting herself with the weapon at Brandon’s head. “Alisha,” he said again, and her fingers tightened convulsively around the grip.

  “Don’t. You’ll speak when spoken to, Parker, and right now anything you say is going to make me want to watch you eat a bullet. Shut. Up.”

  “Alisha!” The word showed no concern for his own life. Alisha snapped the weapon around, twisting and firing without so much as taking a moment to bead. The gun’s muzzle flared bright in the ravine’s twilight, and a black-clad man fell with a gurgled shout. That had been the tip-off man, Alisha thought clinically. There would be more coming after him. She shoved the gun back into
her waistband, digging in her back pocket for the cell phone. Her gaze cold and hard on Brandon, she opened the phone and dialed the one man she hadn’t called before.

  “Reichart. I need you. London. The coffee shop you and Emma used to go to. Twenty-four hours from this message’s timestamp. This isn’t business, Frank.” After ten years as a covert operations agent, she should have been able to keep fury out of her voice. Alisha didn’t even try. “This is personal.”

  Leaving a country with absolute discretion required one of two things: a great deal of money or a great deal of discomfort. Very often the two went hand in hand. Not in this case, Alisha thought; not in this case.

  There’d barely been a moment’s respite, though the run down the arroyo was treacherous at night. Twice they’d gone to ground, once when Alisha’s hearing had picked up a chopper in the distance. Not until it had swept over the canyon and moved on did they come out of the shadows. Their pursuers, determined, came down the ravine behind them as well, trusting luck more than tracks: the stony ground, at least, couldn’t betray Alisha and Brandon’s direction. She’d let them pass and go well ahead, unwilling to risk being discovered by the pair on foot failing to call in for a routine check-in. Only when she was sure their footsteps wouldn’t carry as far as the searchers’ ears did she roust Brandon and begin again, leaving the canyon behind. They hit train tracks running south well before dawn, enabling them to pick up their pace.

  Alisha felt knots uncord in her shoulders when a remote station finally came into sight. Brandon moved off the tracks at her bidding, letting her go ahead to explore the station and make certain the Sicarii hadn’t arrived first. It was a matter of minutes’ work before Alisha whistled for Brandon and pointed at a waiting bench. Brandon slunk to it, asleep so fast his skull smacked against the bench’s metal arm.

  There was a locked toilet, but no security cameras. Alisha slid her trench off, heaving a breath as the night air became markedly cooler without its weight. It added an extra few pounds, enough to be debilitating over the course of hours of running, but what it carried was worth the weight.

  Lock picks in the hems. Two flat knives, sheathed, in the seams beneath the pockets. A garrote in the belt, though she’d never needed to use it, thank God. Nothing else, but those few items were priceless in their own way.

  Letting her pick the locks for the restrooms, for example, so she could wash grime and sweat away, and do at least general cosmetic repair to her clothing, meant that when they got on the first train of the morning, they wouldn’t stand out, particularly among sleepy-eyed commuters and tourists eager to get their start on the day. She woke Brandon when she heard the train in the distance, and he cleaned up as well. It was barely sunrise when they reached the Oakland station and found a bus to catch across the water to San Francisco.

  And that, finally, was when the first call came back. Alisha swore softly as she thumbed her phone on. She couldn’t afford to miss a call from potential help, but a crowded bus wasn’t a place to discuss particulars, either. Brandon, who looked the worse for wear already, broke into song unexpectedly, a tuneless rendition of lines from pop music that had never existed. Despite her anger with him, Alisha almost smiled as people took him in, expressions alternating between disgust and pity, and spoke into the phone beneath the ruckus he caused.

  “This is Cynthia Richelieu.” An easy code name, the CIA built into the first letters of the names, and a not-particularly subtle nod toward the Cardinal handle she’d used for years. There was no hesitation on the other end of the line, a melodically accented Indian woman’s voice responding, “Cyn. It’s been a long time.”

  Memory flashed so powerfully Alisha felt the strain in her body, as if she held another’s weight by one hand, both of them centimeters from falling. It had been Switzerland, one of those countries Americans weren’t supposed to spy on, in accordance with its neutrality. Brits weren’t supposed to spy there, either, which didn’t stop any of them.

  The job hadn’t even gone badly, at least not for Alisha. It had been the equivalent of a simple smash and grab, slipping in and out of a mountain chalet on a cold January night. Bank account numbers, she believed, that’d been the target. The accounts were tied to the Russian Mafia; more than that she couldn’t bring to mind right now.

  What had gone badly was the exit. The chalet’s least accessible side was built to match a sheer mountain face. The two things, one made by nature and the other by man, blended so beautifully it was only when the eye reached soaring, turreted roofs that it realized that the mountain had been made into a stronghold. Alisha’d come up the mountain face and intended to leave over the rooftops, making her way down to the driveway and main roads by dawn. There was ski equipment waiting for her, so she could race sunrise to the foot of the mountains.

  But someone else came in the way she wanted to go out, at just the same time. Alisha reached for the roof from a high-up, narrow window, gripping the gutter with an underhand curl of both hands. For a few horribly exciting moments she dangled over a precipice thousands of feet deep, then crunched up, trusting extraordinary upper body strength to hold herself long enough to flip her legs and hips onto the roof above.

  The flip had smashed her into another woman, whose grip on frost-slick slate slipped. She plummeted, so disciplined that no sound of fear broke free, just as Alisha’s weight caught a fraction of balance on the rooftop.

  Alisha had not thought, only snapped a hand out to grip the other woman’s forearm, jolting them both. Slate grated beneath Alisha’s weight, sending her sliding forward a few precarious inches she couldn’t afford, not even with only her own weight. Her hips were barely on the roof, upper body thrust out over the chasm with her unburdened arm locked beneath her, hand in the gutter. She felt like the figurehead on some massive ship, only a breath away from crashing to her death on the rocks below.

  The woman dangling from her grasp did not squirm or twist; did nothing to endanger the delicate balance. That in itself was almost unbelievable: the discipline required to hold still was unnatural. Alisha had admired that control even as her eyes burned with sweat. Muscles in her arms, in her whole body, trembled with the effort of not sliding farther on the roof while she tried to figure out how to pull the other woman to safety. It was her own weight keeping her from falling, in a way, braced so solidly against the gutter there was no way to move without losing everything.

  No. There was one way to move. Alisha said, “The window,” through gritted teeth, and the other woman’s gaze flitted down for an instant. She barely nodded, hardly any motion to show she agreed or understood, and Alisha swung her.

  It was a tiny motion at first, stirring the woman she held by only a few centimeters. The next swing had more strength to it, and the third was the last. Anything more and she herself would come unbalanced, sending them both to their deaths.

  The woman moved with the final swing, adding her own momentum to the attempt to save both their lives, and Alisha—flipped her weight forward again, pivoting on her braced arm until her elbow and shoulder squealed with protest. She jerked heavily, swinging through the better part of a full circle, bearing the other woman’s weight and yanking it up and forward, so she might clear the narrow window. Alisha scraped through it, fingers so tight around the gutter she could hardly make her grip loosen in time to scrape through the window herself, rather than dangle from the backswing. The two of them landed in a pile on the floor, muffling grunts at the impact.

  After a very long moment, the other woman whispered, “Nice reflexes,” in such a deadpan tone they both dissolved into laughter, holding on to one another and muffling the sounds in each other’s shoulders. Much later, after an escape had been made and a great deal of beer had been drunk, the woman, whose name was Kala, had handed her a business card, a phone number penned on the back. “Call this number if you ever need to get pulled out of a fire.”

  That had been four years earlier. Alisha had not seen Kala since, and closed her eyes with a breath
of laughter at the woman’s deadpan observation. “I know. As it happens, I’m coming by your part of town, and I was hoping I might get you to pick me up at the airport.” Innocuous words, a perfectly normal conversation whose undertones said, I need to leave the States and I’ve got to do it without being noticed.

  “I stopped playing taxi years ago, Cyn. You should know that.” I’m out of the spy business. Don’t ask me this.

  “I’d heard, but I’m in a bind. I’ve got a birthday present to deliver, but I don’t want my family to know I’m in town.” I have a package that can’t be intercepted.

  “You can’t get somebody else to help?”

  “I haven’t heard from anybody else I’ve tried.” Those words, at least, were the truth. Alisha put her head back against the bus seat, waiting for Kala’s silence to break.

  “All right. Anything specific you wanted to do in town?”

  “I thought I’d go sailing,” Alisha said with relief.

  “Ah,” Kala said. “Good choice. I’ll get it set up for you.”

  “Thank you.” Alisha put touristy delight into the words, but she meant them profoundly.

  “No problem,” Kala said, sincerely enough that Alisha was tempted to believe her. “Nobody uses this number anymore, by the way. I’ll get the new one to you.” We’re even now. Don’t call again.

  Alisha’s mouth curled. “Thanks,” she said again, then folded the phone closed in her palm and elbowed Brandon, whose singing had grown increasingly raucous. “Shut up,” she said, “or you’ll never get laid again.”

  He silenced himself to the applause of the other passengers. Alisha smirked and slid deep in the bus seat, waiting out the rest of the drive.