by Cate Dermody
“As soon as you can get it, and call me back at this number.”
“This isn’t your official phone, is it?”
“It’s a throwaway. I bought it with cash.”
Erika sounded intrigued. “You’re gonna have to give me the dirt someday, Ali.”
“Someday,” Alisha promised. “Call as soon as you can?”
“Yup,” Erika agreed. “Bye.”
Alisha folded her phone closed, dropping her face into the pillow again. The temptation to call Erika back and argue over Reichart was embarrassing in its strength. And telling, Alisha thought, making a wry face into the pillow. She sat up, smearing her fingers across her eyes, then winced and studied them. Mascara and eyeliner, what little she usually wore, now colored her fingertips. She blew out an exasperated breath and stood, going into the bathroom without turning on the light.
Her reflection looked bruised, dark brown smudges across her eyelid an ill-made black eye. It stirred memory and a quiet laugh as she dropped her gaze, turning the water on to splash it over her face.
“Lovely shiner.” The first thing Reichart’d ever said to her, a droll opening salvo. She was only twenty-one, an agent for just two years, and the bar fight that had destroyed her outfit had been a distraction. Start a fight, she’d been ordered. Your contact will know the one who starts the fight is his target.
His target. His cargo. Alisha had been prepped for a mission deep inside Afghanistan, and a mercenary agent had been hired to bring her into the dangerous territory. He’d followed her into the unisex European bathroom like he’d been supposed to, but he wasn’t what she’d expected. His voice was deep enough to rumble, and carried an American accent. Alisha remembered the word very specifically: lovely. One of the first times she’d heard an American male use it seriously; even now she thought of it as slightly effeminate, a Britishism slowly working its way across the pond.
There had been nothing effeminate about the man leaning in the door behind her. Black hair buzzed a quarter inch from bald, eyes dark enough to be as black as his hair, in some light. Not then: they were dark brown then, clear and depthless as water. He was tanned, not from a booth, but a genuine tan that left faint white smile wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, his hands stained dark from the sun, enough that he might have been a woodworker too familiar with his own varnishes.
His hands were too refined for that, though. Thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, his fingernails were clean and pale, neatly trimmed. Alisha remembered looking through her fingers at his reflection, then at her own bruised knuckles and broken nails. At the damp spikes of black hair—not her own, but a punk-cut wig she was particularly fond of—trailing over her swollen eye. At the cut lip and the ankh earring and the plastic choker around her throat, and then back at Reichart’s reflection.
He ought, she remembered thinking, to have been wearing a fedora. It didn’t fit the biker jacket or the white T-shirt—some combination of leather and denim was always Reichart’s uniform du jour, when he had a choice—but it fit the Colin Farrell smirk and the easy confidence.
And back to her own bedraggled black bodice, visible in the mirror. It had been ripped off at the rib cage, an intentional alteration meant to show off her slender midriff. Now it barely stayed on one shoulder, the straps that had held it snapped in the fight that had garnered her the black eye. The wig she liked so much looked like a sad mop dog-flopped on her head.
Then Reichart’s reflection grinned, and Alisha thought, Oh, you are in so much trouble, Leesh.
She remembered writing the chronicle for the Afghanistan mission, so full of fresh new love and enthusiasm that it made her blush even now. Everything had gone right with that mission, from spiriting out the defecting FSB agent that was her primary objective to the intense blossoming relationship with Reichart. It had started so well, she thought wryly, and lifted her head, pushing away memory as surely as she blinked away water, the remains of her makeup cleaned from her face.
The woman looking back at her was almost eight years older than the girl who’d recognized trouble when she saw it in Frank Reichart’s leggy reflection. Her own hair, colored dark by the night and highlighted with paleness from streetlights, fell in loose curls and braids around a face that was exactly what she needed it to be: unremarkably pretty, with the ability to be transformed into beauty or plainness with the right makeup and attitude. Any natural color was leeched from her skin by the light coming in the hotel window from the street, but years hadn’t yet added fine wrinkles around almond-shaped eyes.
She could see a greater ability to judge and calculate in those eyes now, and a certain cynicism around the corners of her mouth, but not enough to jade her. Not yet, at least. Not as long as she had it in her to let Frank Reichart walk free. Not as long as she could still extend the benefit of the doubt to Brandon Parker.
“Older,” Alisha said to her reflection. “Not that much wiser.”
The woman in the mirror gave her a one-sided smile and shrugged, as if to say we can live with that.
“You and I can,” Alisha said wryly. “Let’s not tell Greg, though, okay?” Then she laughed and pushed away from the counter, wandering back into the main room. Talking to herself in the mirror had to be a bad sign. Better to drop onto the couch and study her own memories and desires behind closed eyelids, without making it a conversation.
It’d begun as almost a dare. No, not a dare: a challenge. Taming the bad boy, for her; corrupting the good girl, for Reichart. He’d asked, early on, why she did it. The answer had been easy then, Alisha thought with a tired smile. It’d been about idealism and apple pie, a response that, in retrospect, must have made him laugh at her. He’d answered, “Adventure,” when she’d put the question back to him.
And it was only in retrospect that she understood how shallow the answer had been. Nothing opened him up: not alcohol, not sex—though both brought out a possessive streak that had been, like so much else, charming at first and increasingly irritating as Alisha outgrew girlishness and progressed into womanhood.
She supposed it was only a matter of course that CIA agents looked up their lovers in the records, official and unofficial alike. The wiser among them probably didn’t then confront said lover with the scraps of detail, trying to wring more out of him, but hints hadn’t been enough. Alisha wanted to know.
She half opened her eyes, looking at the gold light from the street bouncing against the ceiling. She wanted to know.
Which was the crux of the matter, every time. It was what made her let Brandon walk away when policy said otherwise. His Sicarii story might answer questions about him, but even more, it might answer questions about Frank Reichart.
Answers, she reminded herself, that she might have forced, if she hadn’t blown it.
No. She hadn’t blown it. She’d opened her fingers and let it go, and Reichart had never known the difference.
London. A blustery afternoon; they usually were, when she was there. Alisha was almost certain it wasn’t personal. Besides, the weather suited her mood as she tromped through Trafalgar Square, a rarity in London: it was a square that was actually square. Small thoughts, was how she thought of things like that. Small thoughts, filling up her mind so she didn’t have to think about the larger things. A gray wool cap pulled down to her eyebrows, shoulders coated in a well-lined trench hunched up to her ears. Boots with tall square heels and blocky toes. Alisha felt like a Londoner in that outfit, one of a million costume changes that redefined her very self. Small thoughts.
A bus roared to a stop in front of her and she walked up to it without looking for its destination. Anywhere was warmer than the square with its host of pigeons and bird ladies. She dug into a pocket for a pound as she stepped up. Looked past the coin box, past the driver, through the fountain spray that added unnecessary water to the damp London afternoon.
Looked at Frank Reichart swinging a little girl up onto his hip, putting his hand into a pretty woman’s, and lifting the conjoined fingers to ha
il a popcorn seller, to the child’s delight.
A heartbeat of pain stabbed through her, just below the collarbone. Alisha stepped backward again, so gracefully it was the man behind her who apologized, as if he’d been in the wrong. The bus rumbled away, leaving Alisha with her hands in her pockets, staring across a hundred feet at the man who’d betrayed her.
She followed him. It was what spies did, and she was a spy whether she was on duty or not. Snooping, memory suddenly supplied. As a little girl she’d snuck around, hiding behind corners and under tables, snooping, as her mother called it. It came naturally, Alisha thought. An active interest in the community around her, she’d defended herself as a teen. Nosy, her mother had said. Alisha’d laughed and hugged her.
He had a life, her former fiancé. The man she hadn’t talked to in two years, not since the bullet had knocked her to the ground after she’d seen him with a gun in his hands. The little girl was called Mazie, and her mother was Emma. Mazie wasn’t Frank’s, which made Alisha’s heart contract with relief close to tears. They’d been dating eight months. Frank had a straight job as an accountant. An accountant, Alisha kept thinking. Of all things. An accountant.
It had to be a cover.
She stood at his elbow once in the three days she followed him, half a step behind him in a tea shop she’d chosen as her place to approach because it had no mirrors. She could change her mind and disappear without much chance of being noticed.
His mobile rang and he dug it out of an oversized pocket, thumbing it on while Alisha studied her feet and thought of the questions she’d like to ask. Hello, Frank, how’ve you been? Hello, Frank. What were you doing at the Vatican with a gun? Hello, Frank, did you think I’d survive? Did you ever love me? Was it a game I didn’t understand?
“Emma,” he said into the phone. A low softness that Alisha knew was audible in his voice. Softness that had been reserved for her, once upon a time: a near purr, sensuality and love and desire wrapped up in a single word.
It had to be a cover.
By the time Frank Reichart turned to see who’d rung the bells on the tea shop door, there was nothing more to glimpse than a bit of scarf blown back by the London wind.
Chapter 15
Strains of Beethoven’s Fifth awakened her, startling in the quiet of morning. Alisha beeped the phone on, a discordant note in the masterwork, and put it to her ear without opening her eyes.
“God himself couldn’t have made a thicker wall of red tape,” Erika said.
For all that she was flat on her back in bed, Alisha sagged, feeling as if she’d dropped another few inches through the mattress. She lifted her hand to press fingertips against her still-closed eyes and let out a long sigh. Legitimacy. A dead end of red tape was legitimacy for Brandon’s tale beyond anything Alisha’d thought she might obtain. “Tell me more.”
“Well, you know, the file follows him all over the place, meandering, after he left the Agency. Then a little more than three years ago—”
Energy surged through Alisha, propelling her out of bed and into motion. She pulled a camisole out of her suitcase, sliding it on as she held the phone to her ear with two fingers, listening avidly. “—it all turns red,” Erika went on. “Everything on top of it says they lost him, that he went totally underground.”
“Which is in keeping with what I know,” Alisha said. The satin was cool against her skin, soft brush of fabric making her breathe deeply to feel its caress. She dragged a pair of jeans out of the suitcase and went into the bathroom alcove to brush her teeth, phone pressed between shoulder and ear.
“So you sent me looking for stuff you already knew?” Erika let out a “hnf” of air, but Alisha could all but hear her follow-up shrug. “Anyway, scratch a lawyer, get a liar. There was a phrase in his paperwork that struck me as funny, I don’t remember what it was—”
“Baloney,” Alisha said around her toothbrush. “Maybe you can’t tell me what it was, but I don’t believe you don’t remember it.”
Erika laughed. “Whatever, Ali.” It was as good as a confession: Erika’s security clearance was different from Alisha’s, and Alisha had no doubt Erika was aware of key phrases and sentence structures that would tell her worlds of information that Alisha herself would never recognize. “The point is, beneath the dead end I found red tape.”
“And beneath the red tape?”
“I would never break into secured CIA agent files to find something called ‘prodfac one’ located in backwater Beijing,” Erika said, sounding hurt.
“Made in China.” Alisha leaned on the counter, head dropped. “Go figure. Who’s handling him?”
“There’re only a handful of reports buried under this tape, Alisha. Assuming your boy—”
“My boy,” Alisha protested. “You’re the ex.”
“I’m not the one digging up files on him.” Erika fell silent. “I mean, I am, but you know what I mean.”
Alisha grinned at the sink and pulled her jeans on as she put her toothbrush away. “Yeah. Anyway, my boy what?”
“Assuming he’s undercover, he’s so far undercover that he can’t even make reports regularly. I don’t even know who’s handling him. Couldn’t find it behind the dead ends. So watch yourself, okay? You don’t want to blow an op like that.”
“No kidding,” Alisha said. “You rock my world, Q. Thanks for the help.”
“I still think you oughta pounce him,” Erika said. “See if he’s improved that seven point eight I gave him.”
Brandon’s warmth and easy smile flashed through Alisha’s mind, making her grin. “Sure, maybe. If I get the chance.”
“There’s a girl.” Erika hung up without further ado. Alisha put the phone against her mouth, studying her bare toes, then wiggled them and went to pack.
Backwater Beijing covered a lot of territory; that was the downside. The upside was that American dollars went a long way toward answers, and a few more bought discretion.
As much discretion as a tall American woman traveling alone could buy, at least. There was an odd homogenization to Beijing, when Alisha looked at its people with unfocused eyes. She was as tall as most of the men, taller than almost all of the women, for all that in an American or European city she was far from remarkable in height. Dark hair, dark eyes; there was a uniformity, a sameness to the people when she looked with no more than a glance.
Any more than a glance and individuality began to come out in face shapes and smiles, and in the way people met her eyes or glanced away. She wore a short black wig, the one nod to blending in that she could make, for any hair color besides black was startling in a major Asian city. Alisha’d once had a Japanese friend explain that the bright blues and pinks of anime hair color seemed no more unusual to her than blond or red. The bit of trivia had delighted her, and had been put to use more than once: anime punk was as good a way to go unnoticed as blending in was, sometimes.
But not today, and not in Beijing’s conservative clime. Prodfac one: production facility one. The abbreviation might have meant something else, but Alisha felt it in her bones, the assertion that she was right.
And just what do you plan to do when you find this place, Alisha?
Compromise the shit out of it, she answered herself, grinning openly. If Parker’s operation was legitimate, she’d have hell to pay, but she was still following orders. Second objective: destroy the prototypes. If Greg—and consequently Alisha—hadn’t been let in on a secret op, they could hardly be blamed for disrupting it. And no matter how good the intentions, Alisha thought, the combat drones Brandon had developed were only going to press war onto a new, nastier level. She didn’t believe for a minute that they’d reduce the human casualties: at best they’d make them more one-sided.
Your job is not to die for your country, she reminded herself, but if necessary, to make the other son of a bitch die for his. And that was the real strength of the robotic army: making the other guy die for his country. Alisha had enough idealism left to think it a bitter dredge,
if not enough naiveté to believe it could all be avoided.
All right, she admitted, it was possible she was carrying Greg’s orders a little too far, by searching for and—face it, Leesh, intending to destroy—the production facility that she suspected was building an army of Brandon’s drones. The CIA—the U.S.A.—didn’t really want them destroyed. They wanted to control them.
You’re going to get your ass busted so far down the ranks you’ll be lucky to break the chains that lock you to a desk for the rest of your career, Leesh.
So be it. Even in the most perfect of worlds—which this, Alisha thought with a snort, most assuredly was not—she knew it would be a setback in the drone development, not a moratorium. The CIA had the drone she’d disabled in Kazakhstan, and if Brandon was working undercover—
You do your part, Leesh, she told herself. Stop worrying about the rest.
The thoughts, the consideration of her path—metaphorically, if not physically—had taken her through half a dozen contacts and the streets of Beijing, into a warehouse district that looked bedraggled and smelled worse. Alisha bowed low to a young woman popping bubble gum and looking bored as Alisha pocketed her company ID. American dollars bought more than information.
There were no belowground tunnels here, the warehouses built without basements or subflooring. Alisha went up instead, brazen strides taking her through areas that menial workers were no doubt not allowed to traverse. Confidence in her actions gave her the aura of belonging, and within minutes she was beyond the warehouse gates and on the rooftops.
A dozen different addresses had been suggested as places to visit. Places that wealthy-looking young Americans came to to oversee the work; places that the men and women she’d spoken to were quietly certain were not clothing manufacturers, or toymakers.
Sun glared off corrugated roofs, ribbons of heat waving upward to blur Alisha’s vision. She boxed her hands around her eyes, cutting off brightness from both above and below. Within the shadows of her hands, the world seemed to leap into focus, a clarity sharper than her makeshift sunglasses ought to bring.
