by Cate Dermody
One factory, above all the others, stood out in the afternoon glare. There was an inexplicable something to it: not the wearing paint or the sun-cracked windows. It was in the shoulders of the men she saw entering the building, if not in the bleached cars and bicycles that stood scattered in front of it. It was in the sharpness of the guards at the front gates, their uniforms pressed and crisp despite the midday heat. There were no white men immediately visible, no one to make an obvious and easy tie back to Brandon and his work, but there was new heavy machinery toward the enormous building’s back end. It had been scoured and chipped at, yellow paint deliberately dimmed, but no rust graced the unwieldy silver buckets and prongs.
Alisha sat down, hands still cupped around her eyes, to watch the distant factory and its people until the sun sank behind her, setting the district alight with gold and red fire.
There were half a dozen ways in, starting with the most obvious: the front gate. So obvious as to be unexpected, and therefore tempting. But more likely: open windows, just beneath the roofline, that were not closed when the sun set. Almost certainly left open to relieve some of the heat that built up inside; Alisha doubted there was air-conditioning in the building, and if there was, it was meant to cool machines, not workers.
The tractor bays toward the back provided another entrance, but it was the windows that brought Alisha’s gaze back to them. They made gaping black holes in the fading twilight, maws that she could slip into with a filament line and grapple. There were at least two buildings—almost certainly less secure—to scale and shoot from, neither more than a hundred feet away from her target. She could have all the equipment she needed by the next night.
Alisha cracked her knuckles and stood up for the first time in hours, stretching muscles that protested moving from the position they’d settled into. Tree pose, very simple, grounding herself and straightening to her fullest height. The muscles in the small of her back groaned as they tightened, then relaxed suddenly, the warmth of fresh blood flowing through them. Alisha twisted around, eliciting pops all the way up her spine, and repeated the motion to the other side, garnering another satisfying series of crackles.
Motion caught her eye as she came back to tree pose, her shoulders back and chin held high. No sound: it was too far for it to carry, especially over the noise of the city factories. Just a flash at the corner of her eye, a wrongness that made a thread of caution flutter in her belly. Looking directly didn’t work: darkness swallowed detail. Alisha curled a lip and looked away, finding a point on the skyline to study.
Again: motion. The faint wavering of a line stretching from one building to another, black against black. Alisha held her breath, pulse bumping high in her throat. She knew, with preternatural clarity, what would come into her line of vision, and just as fundamentally didn’t believe it.
There. A bulk too large to be hidden by the night or the eye’s blind spot, if she knew where to look. A man sliding hand over hand along a filament line, from a nearby building to the factory she’d scouted.
Outrage flooded her, so sharp and hot she nearly laughed with it. That was her factory! That was her plan! How dare someone else sneak into it before she did? Alisha darted forward, crossing to the edge of the rooftop she’d claimed, lifting her hands again, as if she might somehow make binoculars out of her cupped fingers.
No. She couldn’t see clearly, not at that distance, and not at night. He moved elegantly, despite being dangled upside down by a handful of wiring. Despite the sixty-foot drop beneath him; despite the black, close-fitting clothing that must have been too warm in the night’s heat. He moved with strength and grace, so quickly that in the moments that Alisha watched and thought, he approached the factory, then curled his hands around one of the window frames and folded himself inside. Disappearing from sight. He could have been anyone.
Could have.
Alisha’s outrage faded into a new certainty, then flared up again. She’d been followed, spied on, used! And she’d known better. She should have known better. Should have looked for a tail, for the man who wouldn’t have let her simply walk away.
She should have known that Frank Reichart would find a way to betray her again.
Chapter 16
The thing that separates us from the beasts, Alisha thought, is that we can apply intellect over instinct.
She’d reminded herself of that more times than she cared to think about in the last twenty-four hours. Every impulse had been to dash in after Reichart, helter-skelter, and to hell with good sense or preparation. He’d followed her, and worse, he’d beaten her, entering the production factory the way she’d intended to, but earlier.
She wanted to kick his ass.
But following him in unprepared would have been the moral equivalent of signing her own death warrant. Worse, if he’d been compromised while inside, the entrance he’d used would have been discovered and she’d be walking into a trap.
And Alisha had yet to see him come out.
True, she hadn’t watched the place for the whole twenty-four hours. Despite her burgeoning anger, she’d still had preparations to make. Things to buy, and a difficult phone call to put through to Langley.
She could still hear Greg’s voice, the strain in it echoing louder in her memory than it had when they’d actually spoken. “Carry on,” he’d said. “I’ll contact you if I can find any verification on this. Complete your mission objectives.” That was when his voice had almost broken, that sign of weakness sending a chill through Alisha that she felt again now, even in the close heat of the Beijing night.
Brandon had asked her not to involve his father. A fine idea, Alisha thought, but unlikely. First, she had the sense that Greg deserved to know the truth: Brandon’s departure from the CIA had cut him deeply, and Alisha thought the truth—if it was the truth—would help Greg rest better. But moreover, she wasn’t quite reckless enough, regardless of the temptation, to charge into what Brandon claimed was a deep undercover op without some kind of backup from home base.
An almost silent hiss of fire sprang from the tip of the soldering iron she held. Chain link glowed and melted, an arch cut into the bottom of the fence just large enough for Alisha to wriggle through. The sky route was too dangerous now: Reichart had already used it, and if he hadn’t made it out—
—then I’ll get a chance to kick his ass after all! Alisha thought brightly. She thrust the idea away, even as it brought the ghost of a smile to her lips, and tugged her backpack—so compact she probably could have fit through the arch wearing it—through after her.
Evidence was stacking up against her ex-fiancé. Not that she’d been inclined to trust him anyway, but his sunset entrance into the factory had only seemed to prove Brandon’s story had merit. Still, she cautioned herself. Talk first. Hit second. Assuming you see him again. It was hard, remembering that stories usually had two sides. Her job precluded that, by and large: there was one side that was important, and that was the CIA’s side. Her side.
So why’d you let him go, Leesh?
She pushed the thought away. The answers were there, clear enough, but it wasn’t the time to go into them. One of the mock-aged bulldozers loomed in front of her and she sidled along it, watching the darkness for shadows of motion. The tractor bays were the best option, after the skylights that Reichart had rendered unusable. She hadn’t tried buying another ID off a factory worker, trusting that whatever funding went into this place to keep the guards attentive and sharp was enough to pay workers well enough that it wasn’t worth selling out for a few hundred American dollars.
Alisha pressed into a shadow beside the tractor bay doors, glove-clad fingers popping the bottom out of the keypad there and clipping rerouting wiring into place. Dim numbers appeared on the code breaker display, changing faster than she could read. They spilled through, slowly settling on a series, and she slashed a blank key card through the narrow gap. There was a hesitation in which she held her breath, and then the door rolled up, surprisingly quiet for all i
ts size. She rolled through as soon as there was room, pausing only long enough to pull a block of C4 from her backpack and press it into the darkness next to the door.
It was already late, nearing midnight. The factory was almost empty; a fire alarm should alert the rest of the workers, emptying the building before she detonated the bombs. A temporary solution to the drone army question, but it would do. It would provide time to regroup and consider, before Brandon’s life’s work rolled out onto the market.
Greg’s voice filtered through her memory again, stressed and tight. “I don’t know what this Sicarii thing is, Alisha. I’ve never heard of it, or them. I can follow Brandon’s trail beyond what you can, but for now the mission is a go. I’ll be in contact with you as soon as I learn anything.”
She touched a fingertip to her ear, checking to be certain the bud was still there. The radio was on so Greg could make that contact if necessary, but she had no intention of broadcasting on it. It still lay snug against her skin, almost invisible, barely there even to the touch.
She’d studied the plant’s layout through the walls in the small hours of the morning, infrared goggles obtained illegally. Legano, illegano, she thought. Is gray area. The contact she’d used had been a viable CIA asset, which didn’t make it any less illegal. Just sanctioned. Only a few bodies had moved through the factory at that hour, warm water pipes blazing the walls and providing her with the mental map she required. There was no sign of Reichart.
He had to have gotten out, she told herself, but didn’t believe it. Maybe. Maybe he’d left while she hadn’t been watching, but there were underground structures to this factory. Unlike its neighbors, it had a foundation, possibly more, beneath it. The earth had blocked her ability to see with the goggles, though now, as she pulled them over her eyes, the building lit up again, heat spots blossoming all around her. An itch between her shoulder blades told her to explore the factory’s main floor, but the same prodding feeling told her it was belowground that she would find her quarry.
Which was what? she wondered. The drone production facility, or Frank Reichart?
Another block of C4 by the front entrance, obscuring to some degree the way she’d come in. A rapid exploration of the main floor, with no narrow escapes; the guards were timely in their rounds, and Alisha slipped behind them without fuss or furor. She saved the bulk of the plastic explosives she’d brought in her backpack for the lower levels of the factory.
Which, on the surface, produced stuffed toys with soft glossy looped fur: red bears and blue rabbits, the kind she’d seen in the vending machines whose claws were rarely strong enough to lift and hold the weight of the toys they were meant to fetch. Alisha felt a stab of dismay at the livelihoods that would be lost, for the honest workers who supervised and maintained this plant and its cover story. At least, with a late-night explosion, their lives would be spared.
And if Greg got back to her, the electric current that would set off the C4 would never be discharged. Alisha cast a brief glance upward, as if to say Are you listening, God? and went on.
There. A private door in the midst of the factory, marked Keep Out, with a lock and keypad. Alisha shot a look over her shoulder, searching for guards, then retrieved the descrambler from her backpack and put it to work. The seconds of flashing numbers seemed interminable, though her watch said it was no more than fourteen. Then Alisha was through the door, standing in a well-lit stairway down. It was semifinished, the ceiling open, pipes exposed and so close to the top of her head Alisha felt the impulse to duck. A camera above her whirred and she took in its angle with one glance, then flexed her fingers and leaped.
For a brief moment the potential humor of catastrophe hit her. If the pipes wouldn’t bear her weight, or if they proved too hot for the rubber-pebbled gloves she wore to handle she envisioned herself tumbling, pipes breaking and hissing all around her, to the bottom of the stairs. Steam billowed in this scenario, the clang and tear of metal loud enough to wake the dead.
But the pipe she grabbed held, and Alisha crunched upward, folding herself into the black and silver metal above the lights. She spread her weight across them, spiderlike, angled precariously down.
And none too soon. Voices—neither speaking English—preceded two men, their footsteps clacking rapidly down a hall Alisha couldn’t yet see. She froze, heartbeat accelerated for the first time, preferring to maintain silence and stealth than to see who might be coming. At the best, they’d continue on; at the worst they’d pass directly below her.
A curl of hair escaped the hood she wore, tickling the corner of her eye. Exasperation and amusement flooded Alisha as she winked against it, the only move she dared make to alleviate the itch. Then the tickle was swept away into a coldness that seemed to come from her bones as the men came jogging up the stairs, one after the other.
The younger man, in the lead, was almost no surprise. Sandy blond hair and good shoulders, even viewed from above. Brandon Parker took the steps up two at a time, an assured jaunt in his step that suggested pure confidence.
Behind him, following his son’s long-legged steps but using the stair railing to help make the stairs in equally good time, came Greg Parker.
This is your local spy network radio station, said a sonorous voice inside Alisha’s head. Welcome to today’s broadcast on KFQD, where you are FQD day in and day out.
The door at the head of the stairs banged shut, leaving Alisha numb and alone, tangled in the open pipes. It was not possible. She’d spoken to Greg only a few hours earlier, nowhere near enough time to get from D.C. to China—but he hadn’t been in D.C. But it wasn’t as though phones couldn’t be forwarded, and it explained the stress in her handler’s voice.
Alisha began moving again, self-preservation overtaking the white shock that rained silence in her mind. Combat pilot, she thought gratefully: the part of her that didn’t need thought to proceed forced her to move forward regardless of the situation.
Compromised. Somehow, she’d been compromised. Whether Greg had known about Brandon’s assignment and hadn’t told her, or whether she’d been entirely sold out. Whether there was something so real to the Sicarii Brotherhood that Greg couldn’t allow her to know about it. Whether—
She stopped again, this time deliberately, spidered over the pipes. One deep breath, then two, cleansing, sending strength into muscles that felt watery. Sending the clarity of breath through her mind. That was the center of yoga: breathing. Giving herself the ability to shake off the cares and worries of the world, and to focus on one singular thing. It could help her feel more deeply, or it could remove her entirely, taking her a step away from any situation so she might see it more clearly and make her choices more wisely.
It was the ability that had let her assess and determine that Brandon Parker needed arresting, in Rome. It was the ability she’d deliberately shaken off then, needing to be reminded of her own humanity by accepting her own strong emotions. But now she embraced it, desperate for the clarity that removal brought. Ironic, she thought, to spend so much time trying to walk the side of feeling, only to willingly banish it now.
She had an assignment. Until the orders were counter-manded by the man she’d just watched leave, she would continue. That was her job. It was one of the prices of doing the job she did: she wouldn’t always understand the larger picture.
But this time she would. Determination colored the thought. This time she would find a way to see all the pieces and understand. One way or another.
Alisha closed her eyes momentarily, then nodded, the promise to herself burned into her mind. Then she crept forward, sliding over pipes to take in the factory layout.
Small vindication, she thought moments later. The belowground floors of the factory contained what she feared they would: assembly lines that gleamed a purposeful silver in the scattered overhead lighting, diagrams and schematics littering the walls. The stairwell was the best-lit part of the floor; everywhere else the lighting was periodic, turned down for the evening. Even
in the dim lighting, the breadth of the hall was enormous, stretching well beyond the confines of the building above.
Alisha scampered forward across the pipes, moving with surprising efficiency, until she could drop into one of the darker spaces on the assembly-line floor. Cameras were visible here and there, but between her black clothing and the lighting, she thought she could go undetected.
Not that it mattered tremendously, if Greg had any intention of turning her in. He had to know she was in the building by now. The question was, had he encouraged Brandon to leave in order to give Alisha the time she needed to set the explosives, or was he simply acting out of forewarning and self-preservation?
Alisha sighed out a breath that verged on laughter, more frustrated than humorous. She’d know soon enough if she’d been betrayed.
Voices cut through the air again, sending her diving beneath one of the burnished metal machines. She held herself still beneath it through force of will, suddenly more concerned with what might happen if the assembly line was turned on than with being caught. Too many movies, Leesh, she told herself, and despite the quick rate of her heart, she grinned. There was nothing appealing about being crushed to death in an assembly line except for the sheer cliché of it, but the idea was enough to lighten her mood, however briefly.
The voices were closer now, lilting Chinese faster than she was accustomed to hearing it. She lay on her belly, trying to catch a glimpse of the speakers: two more men, these ones—thankfully—unknown to her. Discussing saboteurs belowground, a comment that made Alisha’s belly cramp with panic. She drew in a slow breath through deliberately flared nostrils, forcing herself to listen instead of run.
The laowai—Alisha felt a grin warm some of the nervousness in her belly; the word meant foreigner, with less than flattering connotations—wanted the saboteur kept alive. The speaker was not inclined to oblige: one of his men had already suffered a broken kneecap at the devil’s hands.
