The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  Alisha slipped around the corner, avoiding floodlights as she unwrapped the piton rope, then followed the arc of light back, swinging her weighted cord. One chance in the dark and rain. Missing would spell disaster. Then don’t miss, Leesh.

  Rain spattered in her eyes as she let go the weight, claws soaring upward with a whistle of wind. The clank of landing sounded hideously loud in her ears, but one firm tug told her the claws had caught, and there was no time to investigate whether anyone else had heard. Between the rope and the pebbled gloves that helped her cling to the wall, Alisha scrambled up to the window in seconds, pulling the cord behind her. She pushed her sleeve back, cupping her hand over the watch on her wrist to check the seconds, though the numbers counted off at the back of her mind, steady as a metronome. Her heartbeat was even, as if she was on a stroll in the park, not scaling factory walls. Five seconds. She slipped a lock pick from inside her other sleeve at three seconds, and jimmied it beneath the window at zero. The lock itself was simple, and she would know within a handful of seconds whether Lilith had successfully disabled the alarm system.

  Seven seconds later Alisha slid inside, lowering herself to a metal catwalk as she closed the window behind her. Only then did her heart rate leap, part triumph and part relief. A trill of laughter lodged in her throat, silenced by a decade of training. There were two levels to explore; gloating over making it in safely was premature. Alisha cast a glance at a security camera in the nearest corner and hoped Lilith had been able to loop the tapes in her seven-second glitch as she predicted she would. Once more, Alisha would know soon enough if the AI had failed. Still on tip-toe, she darted through the nearest set of double doors, exploring the facilities.

  Lilith had fed back the tapes to one of the terminals at the London computing facility, finding almost nothing of interest. Almost: there was an extra twenty feet of building, four stories high, that didn’t show up anywhere on the security cameras. Reichart clearly wasn’t in any of the well-filmed areas of the factory, but that semi-secret stretch offered not only a chance he’d been abducted and held there, but flat-out piqued Alisha’s curiosity. Nosy, her mother had teased, when Alisha was a teen. Actively interested in the community around me, Alisha’d argued good-naturedly. Whatever name it was given, curiosity was a powerful tool and a good trait in a spy. It made her explore the possibilities beyond the outlines of her mission, and while that could get her in trouble, it also reaped benefits.

  Not anymore, she reminded herself. This “mission” was self-dictated, a totally freelance project for the first time in her adult life. The hall around her was dimly lit, windowed rooms reflecting her image, distorted and faint in the glass. She looked as she often did on a mission: slim, neither remarkably tall nor remarkably short, wrapped in black that helped gazes slide off her in the small hours of the night. But the woman so reflected wasn’t the same one she’d been a year ago. That one, mistrustful though she’d become, had still been holding on to her faith. This one, Alisha thought, was searching for a new way to believe. Or, at the very least, searching for Frank Reichart. Alisha slipped down the hall, keeping an eye open for the sweep of security cameras. Emma was below her, working her way up. They would meet in the middle, with or without success, and make their way out of the facility again.

  A woman’s laugh, quiet and unexpected, sent Alisha skittering down a hallway to press into a doorway that provided inadequate cover. “I’m glad to see everything’s going so well,” the woman said. Ice slid over Alisha’s skin, a cold denial of a voice she recognized. “I appreciate you arranging to see me on such short notice, as well. It’s a little unusual.”

  A man answered, deep and rich with amusement, “Not at all. I’m delighted to arrange things to suit the senator’s aide.”

  Footsteps reached the mouth of the hall Alisha hid in, affording her a bare glimpse of the woman as she put her hand on the man’s arm, an intimation of confidence and admiration, blue eyes bright as she looked up at him. “We appreciate it.”

  Alisha knew the gesture as well as the voice: with her wheat-blond hair and easy smile, Cristina Lamken relied on her ability to distract as an espionage agent. The bag of tricks hadn’t changed, though in truth, Alisha saw no reason why it should. Her own less-extraordinary features allowed her to blend, and she continued to use that as successfully as she had when she and Cristina had been partners. It had been part of why they’d worked well together: their strengths played to different arenas, complementing each other. Once, Alisha had trusted that partnership more than anything in the world.

  Now Cristina’s presence brought a throbbing pulse to Alisha’s temple, blood hot with the impulse to act rashly. She had questions for Cristina—whether there was a child, for one, though nothing in the woman’s form suggested it. Why she had chosen now to break nearly a year’s silence, re-entering the underground world of the Sicarii and war machines?

  “The senator wants to know when the first shipment will be made,” Cristina said. The words brought her and her escort past the hallway, leaving Alisha safe—relatively safe—in the dim shape of the door, but her heart leapt at the political reference. Director Boyer, before his death, had made it clear there were people above him involved with the Sicarii investigation, and that he hadn’t rated inclusion in the goings-on. A name might give her a place to begin digging. Before she’d thought about it, Alisha slipped out of the doorway and ran to the head of the hall, keeping her breathing slow and even so she could listen in on the conversation.

  And so she heard the hesitation in the factory manager’s voice. “That’s highly classified information, ma’am.”

  “Doesn’t my being here suggest I’ve got the clearance?” Few people, Alisha thought, would have heard the note of irritation beneath Cristina’s teasing question. Even she barely recognized it, and she had more intimate knowledge of the blond spy than most. “I could call the senator and have him speak with you personally,” Cristina offered, and even the factory man knew it for a threat.

  “That’s all right.” Poorly masked tension came through, underscored by a door clicking open, the sound echoing noisily in the corridor. Alisha gritted her teeth together, holding back a curse, and dared glance down the hall to catch a glimpse of where her quarry went. Cristina’s shoulders were held straight and proud, the stance of a woman who expected to be taken seriously. She had never learned to bow her head, Alisha remembered, the thought dancing through her mind irrelevantly. Cristina could only command attention, not avoid it. Appropriate, perhaps, for a woman who believed herself to be the descendent of royalty, but dangerous in a spy.

  “Today,” the manager was saying apologetically as he escorted Cristina through the door. “I’m afraid the first battalion left this morning.”

  Any further conversation was cut off as the door closed. The last Alisha saw of Cristina was her spine stiffening, unmuted anger vivid in her body language. For an instant Alisha felt badly on the plant manager’s behalf; Cristina’s furious tongue wasn’t a weapon anyone wanted to be on the receiving end of. But that sympathy slipped away again under a far more intense concern: Attengee drones had been shipped. The threat the semi-intelligent combat robots offered was finally, after two years, more than a danger waiting in the sidelines. Someone very soon would face an unanticipated foe in battle, and the structure of warfare would be changed for good.

  Alisha found herself moving again, thought left behind in the comfort of action. Stopping the clock was impossible: the drones would become a part of warfare in the near future. But the longer it could be put off—

  And Brandon had built the original drones, both the Alpha-Ten-G series that Alisha’d nicknamed the Attengees, and the elegant flying machines Brandon called the Firebirds. If anyone might have the skill and equipment to disable them, it would be the scientist held hostage with his AI. All Alisha needed to do was get herself and Brandon to the battalion before it reached its destination. Rerouting the machines elsewhere might work, though to succeed they wou
ld have to move fast: even if the drones’ existence was still clandestine, the U.S. government would not take well to their shiny new combat toys disappearing. She would need someone else to turn them over to a trustworthy third party.

  All of which was beautifully irrelevant if she couldn’t find the travel path and destination the drones were currently scheduled for. Her impulse was to go down, below not just the floor she’d infiltrated but beneath the ground, in search of secret bunkers and files that weren’t meant to be seen by prying eyes. But there was no time, and still the larger part of two floors to explore in hopes of finding Frank Reichart. Alisha swore under her breath, hardly more than a shaping of the words, then knotted her hands into fists.

  Odds of Reichart being trapped in the facility were low. High enough to have come searching for him, but far lower than the Attengee shipment’s destination being in the computers there. Weighing the choices came down in favor of following the drones, not searching for old lovers. “Sorry, Frank.”

  Alisha pushed the door open cautiously and ran down the hall after Cristina Lamken.

  The rendezvous time was seventeen minutes gone and climbing. Seconds ticked away, turning into minutes. One part of Alisha’s mind focused on that, wondering if Emma had cut her losses and run when Alisha hadn’t shown up on time. It’s what I would have done, Alisha told herself as she scanned through files, though she wasn’t sure it was true. It’s what Leesh would have done, but Leesh was only a part of her. Ali, more sentimental, made up an equal part of her psyche. Unless the danger was obvious and critical, concern for her partner would override the practical thing to do.

  There was no way of knowing whether Emma Dickens had an equally soft side. A man like Frank Reichart might’ve been more attracted to a woman who didn’t, a woman who, more like himself, might be capable of shooting her lover to save his life. That sort of woman would have left Alisha behind.

  Not that it mattered. Alisha had the security codes and as good a chance of escaping the factory unnoticed as anyone. The sensible thing for Emma to have done was gone ahead without her. It would be interesting to see whether she had or not, and the fact that Alisha fully expected to get out safely and make that discovery said it was better if Emma had gone on without her.

  There! Circular thinking and background questions fled, Alisha’s mind clearing as transportation rosters began to fill the screen in front of her. They were on an unsecured terminal, whether because someone had forgotten to log out or because delivery routes weren’t considered important enough to hide behind passwords and codes, Alisha didn’t know. She hadn’t exited the main screen she’d found, in case it was the former.

  Three truckloads had gone out that morning, all with destinations that made Alisha’s stomach clench with nerves. Afghanistan, still a center of unrest and filled with American troops; Serbia’s southern port border on the Adriatic Sea, where shipping to all over the Mediterranean was easily available; and one to Paris, where it would be loaded onto a plane and sent to Virginia. The senator Cristina had mentioned flashed into Alisha’s mind, making her wonder if there would soon be a man at one of the top levels of U.S. government with his own personal war machines. Alisha’d been reluctant to follow Cristina closely enough to pick up any more data on who she might’ve been speaking of; entering the computer room Cristina and the plant manager had exited seemed risky enough. It was very likely his password that allowed Alisha access to the transport files. A bad breach of security, not logging out again. Cristina would have noticed. The man might find himself without a job, come morning.

  Twenty-two minutes. Alisha closed her eyes, tracing the land routes the trucks were taking behind her eyelids. Once satisfied she knew them by heart, she stepped away from the terminal again, and turned her thoughts to getting out of the factory unseen. It was after midnight: any entry or exit would set off an alarm.

  Unless Cristina’s secretive visit had forced the Zurich security company to change the systems for the night. In which case, Alisha’s own escape was intimately bound up in Cristina’s departure. Grinning at the idea, Alisha slipped out of the office to find and shadow her former partner until an escape could be made good.

  A hand wrapped over her mouth, confident strength hauling her backward. Alisha drew in a sharp breath through her nostrils, making a fist and driving her elbow backward toward her assailant’s belly. A hint of scent stopped her before contact had been made: Emma’s faint perfume, washed off hours before the mission but still lingering on her skin. A dangerous frivolity for a spy, but enough to relax Alisha in the woman’s grip. After a few seconds Emma released her and Alisha took another deep breath. “You shouldn’t have waited.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Emma said as Alisha turned to face her. There was no humor in the British woman’s voice, nothing to indicate she spoke anything other than the absolute truth. “But he insisted.”

  “He—?” Hope caught a fist in Alisha’s stomach, knotting it so suddenly she felt dizzy.

  “Call me sentimental,” a man’s voice said out of the darkness. “But I knew you’d get out of there in one piece, even after I saw Cristina.” Frank Reichart came out of a hidden place beside the factory walls to pull an unresisting Alisha into his arms for a brief hug.

  “Hello, Leesh,” he murmured into her hair, then stepped back, grin turning crooked. “Guess this one’s Emma’s rescue.”

  Chapter 8

  Speechless was not a term Alisha often assigned to herself, but as she turned in the pre-dawn darkness to Emma, it was the only word that applied. Emma shrugged, dismissing the rescue with studied blasé. “What kept you?”

  “Not that I don’t share Em’s curiosity,” Reichart murmured, “but this might not be the best place to discuss it. You did have a plan, didn’t you, Alisha? Something beyond getting me outside these walls? Or is the rest of it up to me?”

  Alisha shot him a look, irritation tempered by relief and a betraying desire to laugh. “I thought we’d done enough. Your turn now.” Ignoring her own reply, she crooked two fingers in invitation and darted away from the factory walls, leading Reichart and Emma through the darkness. Emma might as easily have led, but she hung back, keeping pace with an unusually slow Reichart. Emotion Alisha refused to categorize as jealousy swept her, coupled with concern: she hadn’t stopped to check Reichart’s health before their headlong run into the night. Emma obviously had.

  Bitch, Alisha thought, completely unreasonably, and tried to find a smile to tease herself with. It barely succeeded, and left her more inclined to concentrate on the route to their pickup point than to examine her feelings about Emma being along on the mission.

  Be glad she was, Leesh. Without her you’d have left Reichart in there. That cold truth didn’t help her state of mind at all.

  A car waited for them, the driver an asset of Emma’s, not Alisha’s. He’d been instructed to wait until an hour before dawn; if they weren’t back by then, there was no point in risking himself to questioning about waiting idly too near a U.S. government facility for coincidence.

  The vehicle’s lights were off, its engine killed just as they’d agreed it would be. Nothing logical brought Alisha to a halt, one hand lifted in warning. Emma and Reichart drew up behind her, the latter breathing harder than the run through the woods should have made him. Alisha put it out of her mind: there were other things to be concerned with. So long as Reichart didn’t actively request a stop, he was fit enough to continue. Alisha had to trust that. Did trust it, more than she trusted almost anything. After everything, she still believed in the man behind her.

  “What is it?” Emma’s soft English accent sounded in Alisha’s ear. Alisha shook her head, hand still uplifted.

  “I don’t know,” she breathed back. “Something’s not right.” The shape of the driver, only a shadow in shadows, looked wrong. Slumped, as if in sleep, though a cool certainty flowing through her told Alisha it was more than sleep that held him captive. She pointed behind herself, edging backward. Emma
and Reichart took the cue, slipping back into the woods as silently as they’d come. “I don’t like it,” Alisha whispered once they’d retreated several hundred feet. “I just don’t like it.”

  “We can’t leave him there,” Emma protested sharply, but Reichart cut her off with a gesture even as Alisha spoke.

  “If he’s all right, he’ll leave in another twenty minutes. If he’s already dead, there’s nothing we can do except not take the bait. We have a flight from Belgrade at eight-thirty,” Alisha said to Reichart. “The plan was to rendezvous with Brandon—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Reichart silenced himself with the glare Alisha gave him, nodding for her to continue.

  “But even if we can make the flight, things have changed. The Attengees have shipped. I’ve got the manifests and destinations. Did the—” It was Alisha’s turn to break off, eyeing Emma uncertainly. “How much does she know?”

  “All of it,” Reichart said. “She knows all of it.”

  A pang of surprise and loneliness shot through Alisha’s heart, leaving her stinging with the cold discovery of being an outsider. Questions demanded to be asked: Why does she know everything? Did you tell her, when you wouldn’t tell me? Does she mean that much more to you than I did? Long seconds passed before Alisha trusted her voice enough to say, “Did the Infitialis ever manage a successful copy of the drones?” There was nothing to betray herself, no hurt or anger, no pain or accusation in the words. Reichart’s gaze lingered on her face, even in the darkness, and Alisha wondered if the very steadiness of the question had betrayed her, after all.