by Cate Dermody
Reichart’s confession lingered in her ears as Alisha boarded a flight to Paris. Using him as a hostage suddenly made more sense: if the Infitialis were so decimated that the loss of even one more individual might break them, they might well agree to play by the Sicarii’s ugly rules in order to save themselves.
If the Infitialis were failing in numbers, they must find a way to replenish them. And the former CIA agent sinking into the soft airline seat might be a place to begin.
Is that who you are, Leesh? Is that who you’ve come down to being, at the end of it all? Not sworn to king and country after all, but to some esoteric high ideal that might never come to pass?
Yeah. Alisha turned her gaze to the airplane window. Yeah, I guess that’s who I am, at the heart of it. She could barely trace the journey that had brought her there, and at the same time every step of it was agonizingly clear. From the moment Gregory Parker had offered her an underwater-breathing kit the likes of which James Bond would envy, Alisha’s path had inexorably led her to a place where her duty lay beyond the needs of her country. It was not a destination at which she’d ever expected to find herself.
Greg. Thoughts of the small, dapper man still made her stomach tighten with unhappiness. Had he, she wondered, been with the Sicarii twelve years ago, when he’d brought a nineteen-year-old, adventuresome Alisha MacAleer into the CIA’s fold? Had he always intended to use her to further Sicarii ends, or had he been able to separate the Company agent from his Sicarii destiny? Alisha herself had resolutely held out against separating one part of her soul from another in such a manner. Somehow she doubted Greg had managed the separation, either. Lies and deception were part of the world they both existed in. Strange to find that so, too was hard-won idealism, and that it could stand fast in the face of the things she’d encountered. Reichart would laugh at her, she thought.
Then again, perhaps not. Not when the twists and turns of his own life were driven by the Infitialis belief that man forged his own destiny. Not when he worked silently in the background of society, even in the background of the espionage world, to do what he could to help people defy the fate that the Sicarii would otherwise stage for them. Frank Reichart might just be more idealistic than Alisha herself was.
And where did that leave a man like Brandon Parker? Alisha frowned, not wanting to pursue thoughts of the blond scientist. Still, she’d thought a dozen times that she knew where Gregory’s son stood. His genius with programming had driven him to create the Attengees and the Firebirds, lifetime goals achieved by the time he was in his early thirties. She’d thought he’d created them for the Sicarii, but as much as Greg had betrayed himself in Paris at the news of Boyer’s death, so, too had Brandon betrayed himself. He had worked in good faith, believing himself undercover for an American agency, his creations meant to take men out of warfare and leave it to machines. More than idealistic, it was naive, but that may have been the price of scholarship’s ivory tower.
Though, Alisha reminded herself, the scientists who had created the atomic bomb had known they were developing a deadly weapon. Brandon’s work, at least, didn’t carry the remote but accepted possibility that setting one off might ignite the planet’s atmosphere. And she’d seen real horror in his eyes when he’d realized his orders through Cristina, his handler, had come from Susan Simone, an agent of the Sicarii. Which left Brandon…where? Caught, in his own way, in the mess of his own creation, and searching for the best way out of it. Alisha’s anger over him endangering her family aside, she did reluctantly trust that Parker was doing what he thought best.
Machinations behind the scenes, she thought. One hidden group of madmen trying to rule the world, another trying to save it. She no longer believed Brandon Parker belonged to the former, and wondered if that made him, by default, one of the latter. If, like Alisha herself, he had been pushed and pulled and tugged into a position he had never meant to occupy, and if so, whether he was finding that he fitted there better than he might have imagined.
Sleep captured her, questions of belonging fading and stretching into much-needed rest. The flight to Paris was comparatively short. Answers, if they were to come at all, would be waiting on the other side of dreams.
Habit, carved from years of experience, sent her through the airport as swiftly as she could go without attracting attention, even half awake after the flight’s arrival. She kept her eyes downcast, obscuring the shape of her face as best she could from the omnipresent CCTV cameras. Bangs drawn over her forehead helped in that as well, though none of it was as thorough a disguise as she preferred. The passport she used, one of her extra, illegal dossiers, was a no-one-in-particular American, a woman from Iowa who had promised herself a trip to Europe a thousand times over the years and had finally taken it. Alisha wished she had more in common with the woman she pretended to be, though that desire faded quickly. Despite its harrowing moments, she’d enjoyed the life she’d chosen, and even when its price became personal missions such as this one, it was worth the years she’d spent in it. Without it, she’d never have met Frank Reichart.
Or Brandon Parker, she reminded herself, and found a rueful curve shaping her lips. Or Cristina, or Greg or innumerable others whose lives had changed hers irrevocably. Stop it, Leesh, she ordered herself without heat. Looking back on how things had come to be felt too much like an epilogue, and her life was far from over.
Her intent passage forward slowed at customs—a disadvantage of traveling on an American passport in Europe—and she kept her gaze on the floor, studying cracks in the tiling and scuff marks from millions of shoes. A baby whined nearby and its older brother sighed with the drama of a put-upon teenager. Voices murmured, no one wanting to draw attention to themselves at this last gate before the freedom of Parisian streets. A television whined on overhead and a CNN reporter began listing the news in France and abroad. Alisha listened with half an ear, inching forward as people ahead of her were approved and sent on.
“…Arthur Devane has announced today that he’ll be stepping down from his position as U.S. senator from Delaware at the end of the month, due to ill health.”
Alisha glanced up, drawn by the story, and watched a hale, solemn-looking man in his sixties speaking at a podium, his words muted so the announcer could continue.
“Rumors abound as to who the Delaware senator will appoint as his successor in a position that has been all but hereditary over the last seventy years. Senator Devane has no children, so the senatorial seat is up for grabs, though we’re told the current favorite is this woman, Nichole Oldenburg, whose record in public service is exemplary.”
A slim woman with aristocratic features and an arresting smile waved at the camera, her wheat-blond hair almost white in the sunlight. She looked trustworthy, competent, young enough to appeal to the youthful demographic and old enough—perhaps just thirty-five—for an older generation to feel they weren’t being taken in by a child. She was, as always, impossibly photogenic, her unbowed head and blue eyes confident, challenging and lovely all at once. The name was a persona, someone created to have papers that were as impressive as her physical presence. Alisha knew without having to search that they would be impeccable.
No one would find the missing links that turned Cristina Lamken into Nichole Oldenburg.
The senator wants to know when the first shipment will be made whispered through Alisha’s mind as she stared at the screen. By the time the American shipment of drones arrived in Virginia, Cristina Lamken would be enthroned as the new senator from Delaware. The demonstration of the Attengee warfare technology would settle her in place as the Pentagon’s darling, the military industry’s spokeswoman, and brand her unmistakably as being one hundred percent patriotic and pro-America. As clearly as if she stood within the walls of a Sicarii stronghold amongst men and women discussing the topic, Alisha could see how their plan—how Cristina’s career—unfolded on a national political scale. Devane had to retire now, just after the elections, so Cristina could be safely in her job for a f
ull six years and expected to run and win again. She would be too junior, in that election, to make a bid for a grander seat.
But six years after that, a woman like Cristina Lamken, with brains, beauty and an organization dedicated to her cause behind her, could very easily be a genuine contender for the presidency of the United States of America.
Alisha, gaping at the screen, thought she had not expected the answers she sought to be quite so literally waiting on the other side of dreams.
Chapter 10
“Mademoiselle?” The polite French query snapped Alisha out of watching the TV screen, though the sound bite on Senator Devane was long over. She looked up with a nervous, “Oui?” Judging her persona’s grasp of French to be high-school level, no better.
The man at her elbow was uniformed and officious-looking, Gallic nose long beneath deep-set eyes and beetled eyebrows. “If you could come this way, mademoiselle. Random security checks, I’m afraid.” He’d switched to English in deference of her shaky American-accented response, though he kept his voice low and polite, as if not to disturb others in the customs line.
“But—I thought—doesn’t this usually happen on the airplanes?” Alisha’s voice came out thin and worried, masterfully hiding the spike of genuine alarm and frustration she felt. It was certainly possible she’d been recognized by the airport’s biometric recognition software, and she had no CIA-sanctioned reason for traveling under false papers. The midwesterner whose part she played would never dream of arguing with airport officials, but she certainly trembled with distress as the long-nosed officer led her to the side. He hadn’t, she noticed, bothered to explain why the intrusion took place at customs instead of at the terminal. All the more reason to suspect she’d been recognized.
Dammit! There was no easy or good way to escape airport customs; the entire point was to delay and investigate. Getting through wouldn’t be a trial if she hadn’t been recognized, if it genuinely was a random search, but she’d passed through this airport innumerable times as Alisha MacAleer. Bluffing through being recognized weren’t odds she liked to take.
Still, it was as Tammy Jones that she stepped through the marked door, escort at her elbow. “Is something wrong?” she asked in her best nervous French, wincing at her own accent. “I’m sorry, my French isn’t very good, but I’ve been practicing. I’m sure that whatever this is can be cleared up wi—oh.” The last word, for all that it was no more than a vowel sound, was definitely in English.
A cordial, enormous man sat behind a standard-issue office desk, its size dwarfed by his own. The chair he sat in was decidedly not standard, but of rich polished leather, and broad enough to fit a man of his width. “I don’t know the rules for this version of the game,” Alisha said a little sourly, in English. Bluffing was one thing. Denying her identity to a man who knew her personally was simply foolish. “Do I say arrivederci, and, Hello, Jon?”
“Jon,” the big man said with a smile. “Who is this Jon that you call me? No,” he said, suddenly dismissive. “Jon will do. Alisha, my little bird. How far from the cage you have flown.”
“You have no idea.” Alisha turned her sour look on the airport official, who probably did work there; it was far easier for a man such as Jon to make use of the pieces already in play than to arrange new players himself. Jon was a jovial cutthroat, master of an underworld crime ring that brokered in information, and in the years Alisha had known him, he had never failed to come through when she needed him. She owed him debt after debt, all accrued ten months earlier when the Firebird mission had gone so badly sideways.
And his accosting her at the Paris airport could only mean those debts were about to be called in. The Frenchman stepped outside, leaving Alisha alone in the room with the gigantic information broker. His love for life was as large as his girth, as if he deliberately played into the stereotype of cheerful fat people, but his eyes were often cold and calculating even as he smiled and offered friendship. She had always known that, but ten months ago Jon had reminded her of it pointedly. Her Strongbox Chronicles, the journals of her life in the CIA, were meant to be secret from everyone, and until then she’d thought they were. But Jon had made it clear he knew of them, and that anything she’d touched over the last decade could be exposed at his whim. More, he knew her real name and rarely bothered to dissemble about it, though he called her by the nickname he’d given her, little bird, as often as not. That, too, told her how well he knew her: the code name, Cardinal, she’d used for years had come after Jon’s nickname, but now there was a slyness in his gaze when he used it, making it clear that, too, was a piece of information in his tally book.
Every one of those was a reason to distrust and even fear the big man, but instead, Alisha was tremendously fond of him. There was a certain freedom in knowing everything was for sale, everything had a price, and that any discussion was simply a negotiation of those details.
“Sit,” Jon invited with an expansive sweep of his hand. Out of four chairs in the room, three were metal folding chairs. The fourth, an office chair, had very likely been behind the desk Jon now sat behind. Alisha took that one, settling in as comfortably as she could. “You have a problem,” Jon announced once she’d sat.
Alisha’s eyebrows rose. “It’s the human condition, Jon. What problem do I have that interests you?”
“A shipment of very sophisticated war machines is about to leave Paris for Virginia,” Jon said. “You wish to stop it, but lack the resources.”
Wariness slid down Alisha’s spine, making her want to straighten and take a defensive position. She maintained the casual one she held, more for her own benefit than Jon’s: he would see the caution that had come into her body language even as she tried to hide it. “You made it very clear that I was not to come to you again when my resources were low. The shipment is my problem, not yours.”
“Ah!” Jon leaned forward, steepling thick fingers, then pointing them at her. “But I choose to make it my problem.” His accent was outrageously Italian, and the city he most often worked out of was Rome, but Alisha was uncertain if either were native to him. “This is very sad,” he added with a cluck of his tongue. “We should discuss good food, good wine, all the things that make life worth living, before we talk about the ugly business of—” his fingers flicked up again, splaying wide as if he tossed the words to the air. “—business.”
“Usually we would,” Alisha agreed carefully. “But this is unusual, Jon. You’ve never come to me before.”
Avarice glittered in the big man’s eyes. “You have never had something I wanted so badly before.”
“And that is?”
“Her name,” Jon purred, “is Lilith.”
A secret known to six people, Alisha thought, is not a secret at all. The words rang clear in her mind, but did nothing to hide the surprise she felt cross her face.
Jon laughed, a heavy sound of pure delight, and clapped his meaty hands together. “You did not expect that. So much so that you fail even to tell me lies with your expression, little bird. You are slipping.”
“Or I think there’s no point in lying to you,” Alisha muttered. There was a grain of truth to that, but Jon was right; he’d taken her completely off guard. “How did you know?”
“I have a great deal of money, Alisha. With so much money, it is easy to control people who should not be controlled, buy people who cannot be bought. You, of all people, should understand that. You owe me this, Alisha.” Jon’s beaming smile was heartfelt, his eyes cool as diamonds, and the warmth of his voice layering steel. “You cannot say no.”
Would he, Alisha wondered, with clinical detachment, would Jon in fact have her eliminated, if she failed to comply with his request? Chances came down against her, she thought; he might hold that favor out, let her know that her very life was held in the balance. That she, in essence, belonged to him.
Or he might make his point by having her terminated.
The language she chose made her breathe a laugh and close her eyes.
Distancing herself from feeling the implications of the action; that was what words like terminate and eliminate accomplished. A target could be eliminated without repercussion; her life could end without emotional involvement. It wasn’t a topic she thought she ought to be clinical about. “Jon,” she said aloud, eyes still closed, and all but heard the heavy shake of his head.
“Three favors, little bird. You have taken wing and flown, but there are chains binding you to earth. There is a love story I would hear, and the reasons why you have slipped free from your cage, and there is a computer who thinks for herself that I wish to have in my possession. The chains are strong, little bird, and your wings are weaker than you think.”
“Don’t threaten me, Jon.” Alisha opened her eyes again, the words quiet. “There’s no need. I understood what I was getting myself into.” A faint smile darted across her face. “A love story and the reasons why I’ve done what I’ve done. Maybe I could be like Scheherezade,” she suggested, and amusement creased the folds around Jon’s eyes.
“The princess had not made the promise to the prince, little bird, as you have done. He had made the promise to himself. That is perhaps a safer promise to break, than the one a liege gives his lord.”
“You’re not my lord,” Alisha said, suddenly acerbic, “and I think you know by now if I’ve made that promise to a lord,” or to king and country, she amended silently, “I’ve learned I can break it, too.”
