by Cate Dermody
Jon beamed at her. “And will you break your word to me? Your life will become very difficult, I promise you. You have, after all, been stopped by security, and who knows what problems they might find in your papers.”
Of course, Alisha thought. Terminating her in the Paris airport would be messy. Much more effective to destroy her life, piece by piece, and when all hope was gone, call in the favors once again. She would be owned, body and soul, with no hope of escape.
“I will make it easier for you.” Jon’s voice softened and he leaned forward, inviting confidentiality. “I have the resources, Alisha, to help you stop that shipment of war drones.” The lavish accent faded from his voice, the offer he made more important than theatrics. “I will do this gratis, free of favor or expectation, to smooth your soul’s journey to betraying the handsome scientist.”
“Why?” Anger made the word blunt, the corner Alisha felt backed into one of her own creation.
“Because.” Jon sat back, spreading his hands expansively again. “I thrive on crime and information, little bird, it is true. But I believe war must be made between men, and as closely as possible, because to do less makes death far too easy. I am a large man, and doctors scold me for my habits. They tell me I court el morte, and they are correct. There are nights when death walks close by me, but at least when he does so I see him. Machines do not see death, Alisha. I wish the cost of war to be higher than that.”
Heat climbed to Alisha’s cheeks, slow surprise as she looked in astonishment at the corpulent man across from her. “Idealists all around me,” she finally whispered. “I had no idea, Signor Jon.”
“My business is a black and bloody one,” Jon said without apology. “But there are things even I will not do, and I will move to slow the world in doing them when I can. Everyone has the line they will not cross, little bird, just as everyone has a price. And your price,” he added, voice gone to velvet steel again, “is this creature called Lilith.”
“Why do you want her?” The question begged justification for the action Alisha was afraid she’d take. She’d made her choices, knowing the results might be unpalatable. Even with her heart hammering thick and heavy in her chest and a tightness in her throat, she saw no good way to avoid stealing Lilith and offering her up to Jon in payment for the favors she’d asked.
No, Leesh, she whispered to herself, unwilling to candy-coat that particular lie. You could sacrifice yourself instead. A sentient computer wasn’t enough to trade her own life to Jon for. Alisha wondered if a human life would be.
Something indecipherable glittered in Jon’s eyes. “Machines for making war are one thing, little bird. A machine with a soul, ah, no. That is something else again. Do we have a deal, Alisha? Lilith and your stories, and as a gift I give you help in breaking down the delivery of a dangerous toy?”
“Yes.” Cold ran over Alisha’s arms and she repressed a shiver. “We have a deal.”
Hijacking an airplane was not, even in Alisha’s line of work, an experience often repeated. Doing so on less than twenty-four hours’ notice was a task she would have claimed impossible to accomplish.
On the other hand, such a quick development and implementation of a plan made it nearly impossible for leaks to get out. There was simply no time. Jon’s contacts had made replacing the scheduled flight attendant with Alisha possible, though they kept her name and papers after the woman swore she hadn’t worked with the two pilots in the past, nor ever met the solitary traveler who would accompany the drones to America. The passenger was checked and double-checked against being someone Alisha knew, and the chance taken. They could afford nothing else; changing the pilot for someone in Jon’s employ would have been too great a deviation the day before the flight. The paranoid—and Alisha had no doubt the U.S. government counted as paranoid—would see it as a danger, and cancel the chartered plane.
So she had boarded the plane alone, a carry-on bag with extensive webbing compressing it her only baggage. The sole passenger—in his forties, big-boned and with a cunning intelligence to his broad features—had given the complicated-looking bag an amused look, and Alisha had blushed and dimpled at him. “It keeps ze bag from expanding, poof,” she said in her best English-learned French accent, and made a little explosive motion with her hands. “I am Monique Allistaire,” she’d offered then. “I will be your personal attendant for zis flight.”
“Duke Keane,” he’d replied, and shook her hand with a careful dignity that told her he was avoiding crushing her fingers. “I’ll try not to be too much of a burden to you, Mam’selle Allistaire.” In truth, he was a pleasant person to wait on for the first fifteen minutes of the flight. His drink of choice was ginger ale, sharp enough in flavor to disguise the faint acidic edge of the pill she dropped into it, and sleep overtook him before they were well on their way. Alisha waited an additional five minutes to be certain his breathing was steady and he showed no signs of stirring before returning to the carry-on and stripping it to its components.
In one way, it might have been easier to genuinely hijack the plane, disable the pilots and bring the jet in for a landing on an unknown airfield. Unfortunately, nothing in Alisha’s training had prepared her to fly a commercial aircraft, a lack she’d never felt before. The trigger-happy combat pilot part of her mind, the part she thought of as Leesh, made plans to remedy that shortcoming as soon as possible. The need to land a jet wasn’t likely to come up often, but if it happened once it could happen again.
The back two-thirds of the plane were locked off, making the passenger cabin unusually small. Alisha slid hard plastic picks out of the handles of her carry-on, glancing at the sleeping Keane. Any chartered flight with only one passenger didn’t need more than the first third of the plane to comfortably accommodate that passenger, and the cargo behind the locked doors was considerably dearer than the man escorting it.
Plastic picks were risky, but less complicated than metal when she’d undergone a thorough pat-down and X-ray. Alisha leaned against the carpeted door, eyes closed as she held her breath in concentration. Breaking the pick off would spell disaster. As it was, if she succeeded there would be no way to hide that she’d been there, but if she failed, a bit of plastic in the lock would tip Keane off to her shenanigans.
The first lock came undone with a click so muffled by the carpeted doors Alisha froze, uncertain if she’d really heard it. A cautious twist of the knob said she had, and the second lock came more easily. Governmental paranoia hadn’t extended to installing a time lock on the cargo-hold door, though Alisha expected that next time, it would. The idea made her smile as she stepped inside the hold and closed the door behind her.
The air quality changed inside the hold, cooler and less tinny. This airplane was used for a fair amount of cargo transportation, then, specially built to accommodate a few passengers and a great many goods.
And the goods that spread out before her were great indeed. Four Firebirds hung in heavy harnesses from the ceiling, a dozen Attengee drones and two of their many-legged cousins resting below them. A pang of regret sliced through Alisha’s heart, looking at the unmoving predators. Hijacking the plane would allow her to bring them back to Reichart and the Infitialis, but that was beyond her. The best she could do was ensure they not reach their destination.
Alisha leaned against the door, sliding the webbing off her carry-on and shaking it out with a grin. It did, as she’d claimed, keep luggage from poofing out all over the place, but its real purpose was the parachute harness it became. She tugged leggings out of the bag and pulled them on, then stepped into the harness, clipping it around her waist. Erika had designed the handy little carry-on, as much out of exasperation at her own ever-expanding luggage when she went on vacation as out of delight in making ordinary objects into technological wonders. She would, Alisha thought, be delighted to hear how it’d been used in the field.
Assuming Alisha got out in one piece to report back to her friend in Langley. The last time they’d spoken had been seconds
before Alisha’s home had been destroyed in the explosion. That event would have driven Erika to make certain Alisha’s family were safe, but would she think Alisha had died in the fire? If not, she’d be impatient and worried, wondering why Alisha hadn’t contacted her.
Alisha mouthed an apology to her distant friend, thankful, though, to believe Erika would take care of her worried family, and made sure the cargo-hold door was locked behind her. Once she opened the outer door, time would be very short before the copilot made his way back to the hold. It was a few minutes’ work to find the control pads she knew had to accompany the drones. Most went back into their packaging to be dumped with the drones, but Alisha stuffed one into the back of her harness, fighting off the urge to whistle while she worked. That impulse succeeded, though she found herself singing the proper lyrics to “Here Comes Santa Claus,” an unusual sign she felt things were going well. The words that normally came to mind with that tune were far from appropriate.
The drones were heavier than they looked. Alisha felt she should have known that, having wrestled more than one of them, but they’d seemed alive then, writhing with their own energy. Asleep, they were only so much metal and wiring.
The door itself was marked clearly: Twist handle counterclockwise in an emergency. Do not open while aircraft is in flight. Like the warnings on passenger airline windows, it made Alisha want to succumb to the imp of the perverse. Surely, that imp whispered in her ear, she would be all right as the cabin depressurized and chaos broke loose around her. She wrapped her arm around packing straps dangling from the hold walls to lodge herself in place, then reached out to learn whether the imp was right or not.
The dozen Attengees and their spider-like cousins went first, a sudden easy burst once the outside cargo door was ripped from its hinges. Wind screamed and howled into the hold, pressure changing and icy cold gripping her, bringing tears to Alisha’s eyes and tearing gasps of laughter from her throat. All right, she decided, was worlds different from fantastic. Clinging to the hold and kicking priceless equipment out the door was clearly not all right, despite what the imp told her, but it was unbeatable as far as sheer adrenalized experiences went.
Three of the four Firebirds screamed out into the darkness, falling five miles toward the ocean below. The fourth, Alisha slung the loops of her parachute harness over, clipping it on top of the glider as the door to the main cabin burst open and gunshots fired into the howling wind. Alisha ducked, using the forward momentum to dive belly-first onto the Firebird. Her weight sent it pitching forward, and for one glorious moment she surfed the jet stream on its cold metal curves.
Then she and it were plunging into the darkness. Alisha scrambled for the control pad on her belt, thumbing on it with intense concentration even as freezing air ripped tears from her eyes and froze them on her cheeks. Rockets flared, Alisha’s harness long enough to avoid burns as the Firebird righted itself, though she felt heat as she swung around and into tow beneath it. Seconds later she programmed the glider’s destination, then threw back her head and shouted with the sheer joy of being alive as the Firebird careened in a subsonic flight toward England’s shores.
Chapter 11
Flying across a couple of hundred miles of the Atlantic had been fun for a few minutes. Then the chill factor set in, and Alisha spent most of the flight regretting there hadn’t been time to pick up some of Erika’s paper-thin, subarctic weather gear before embarking on that particular adventure. She ought to be on her way to London, not huddling in a hotel bathtub with steam beading on her cheeks and making her nose run. All that was missing was Reichart waltzing in so they could dance around whatever topic was at hand.
Alisha found herself eyeing the bathroom door warily, as if the thought might conjure the man. Only after long seconds passed without his appearance did she chuckle and sink farther into the steaming water, her nose bumping its surface when she breathed. Shivers still wracked her body, severely enough that she feared driving. A few hours’ delay in which to thaw would still see her back in London within the forty-eight hours she’d wrung from a reluctant Brandon.
Her clothes lay in a huddled, wet lump beside the tub. Alisha slid an arm out of the hot water to root through the cold fabric without looking, fingers eventually finding the replacement cell phone she’d bought. Shivering anew, she drew as much of herself back into the water as she could and still manipulate the keys.
The woman on the other end was, for once, groggy as she picked up. “This better be good, eh? It’s three in the morning.” Vowels stretched long with sleepiness, remnants of a Michigan Upper Peninsula accent coming through. Alisha managed a smile and sank chin-deep into the tub.
“It’s me, E. It’s Alisha.”
“Jesus God. Alisha?” Erika woke up entirely, voice suddenly so intense Alisha could imagine her clutching the phone. “Where’ve you been, woman? It’s been days. Your house blew up, Alisha. I thought you might be dead. I’ve got people all over your sister and her family. They’re all in shock. They’re okay, nobody’s bothering them, but Jesus God, Ali. Have you talked to them? Do they know you’re alive? What’s going on? And do you know what that program Brandon built is? I mean, I don’t see how it’s possible, but the leaps of logic—there was intuition going on there, Ali. It evaded my watchdog programs like a human hacker, but not even I’m that fast. The only reasonable answer I can come up with is sentience, Alisha. Do you know what that means? A self-aware computer? It’s a new life form. It’s like being there when the first fish crawled out of the ocean to take a look around. Mythologically, it’s Zeus’s daughter. I’ve got to meet it, Alisha. Where’s Brandon?”
Alisha’s laughter bubbled beneath Erika’s enthusiastic rush of words, relief pounding up through her until her eyes stung with it. Her family was all right, under protection and untargeted, it seemed, by the Sicarii. Very little else mattered to her. She wiped her hand across her eyes, letting herself pretend it was only water and not tears that ran down her cheeks. “Zeus’s daughter, or Jehovah’s creation, anyway,” she croaked, then swallowed hard and strengthened her voice. “Where he is isn’t important right now, E.A hell of a lot’s been going on. First, thank you.” The ache in her throat came through in the words. “Thanks for looking out for Teresa and the boys.”
“It’s what friends are for. You’ve got to let them know you’re okay, Ali.”
“I did. I called Teresa right after the explosion and let her know I was okay, but not to tell anybody. I’ll call her again as soon as I get a chance, but Erika, did you see the news about Senator Deva—”
“And Cristina,” Erika said with heavy finality. “I did. Can you believe it? I’m going to spend seven years dead to the world, if that means I come out of it a U.S. senator. Do you think you get a tax break for being dead?”
“I think I’ve pulled at least some of the wind from her sails.” A shard of triumph knifed through the words as Alisha summarized the hijacking of the Attengee drones. “I wish I could’ve saved them all, but I’ve got the one Firebird stored in a garage in Dorchester. It was the best I could do. It’ll at least keep Cristina from stepping up to the plate with the drones as her bat.”
“That was you?” Erika said after a long silence. “It came through on the security updates about four hours ago. Not my department, so I went back to sleep, but…that was you? Good grief. How’d you pull that one off, Ali?”
“That’d be telling.” Alisha allowed the infuriating note of smugness to linger in her voice, then laughed it off, trying not to hear forcedness of emotion in her amusement. Trading Lilith for what she knew intellectually to be a stopgap measure—but every time they were able to prevent the drones from disseminating for even a few days gave them that much more time to build an appropriate response.
They, Alisha thought, we. Not so long ago the we she had belonged to was the Central Intelligence Agency. Now the people she aligned herself with were a far more nebulous and hard-to-define group, and yet she found herself thinking in term
s of us and them far too easily. She had never imagined her beloved Agency might become the party she worked against.
It wasn’t, she told herself fiercely. It was the Sicarii she stood against, and only the CIA as far as Sicarii corruption went in it. The two masters she served weren’t so very different from one another.
And that, too, was something she might start to believe, if she told herself the lie often enough. “I’ve got to go pick Brandon up,” she said, hoping the hesitation between her teasing answer and what she now said was small enough to go unnoticed. “Reichart’s intercepting another shipment, and we’ve got a woman on Cristina.”
“We?” Erika asked, bemused. “You and Reichart are a ‘we’ now? And should you really be telling me that you’re busy hijacking shipments of U.S. government property, Alisha?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to tell on me?” Erika had turned her in once before, for considerably less significant transgressions than the ones she’d just confessed to. Oddly enough, it was that previous betrayal that left Alisha certain it wouldn’t happen again.
Erika sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t tell me this kind of huge, get-in-real-trouble thing. At least not if I don’t get to help.”
Alisha laughed, sending ripples across the tub water. “You only like knowing about the illegal stuff when you’re involved?”
“Doesn’t everybody? All right.” She sighed again, dramatically. “You don’t call at three in the morning unless you want something more than to tell me a little detail like you’re still alive. So what’s up?”
“I was calling to tell you I was alive,” Alisha said defensively, then let go a quiet laugh. “But you’re right. I do need something. A copy of the original Firebird black box.”
