by Cate Dermody
“Go. I tell you when I come out. But maybe it is something else private, no? We do not want to be embarrassed.” Not that she could think of anything that would embarrass an Italian man, but the pretense worked, and the manager, disappointed, took his leave as Alisha keyed the box open.
Not until the lock clicked did it occur to her that she might have been outplayed again. Then the thought that she might find nothing more than an empty box, or worse, a teasing note struck her, and for a few seconds she sat frozen, unwilling to open the box on Schrödinger’s principles. Then she flipped the top open, forcing herself to action: waiting wouldn’t help.
For a moment what lay in it refused to register, a part of her mind too focused on the idea that she might have been outmaneuvered. Then she gasped a laugh and scooped up the flash drive that lay in the bottom of the box. It looked like nothing at all, barely larger than a tube of lipstick, hardly big enough to contain the kind of information that she believed was on it. But remember, she told herself, Rafe had been working on quantum storage. A small drive developed by the Sicarii could conceivably hold vastly more information than a normal drive. Either way, it was hers now. Alisha curled her fingers around the drive in triumph.
Then she did her best girlish squeal, pulled a ring from her purse, and darted out of the bank’s security room to sparkle the diamond-cut glass at the manager.
Elisa Moon could afford to have her credit ruined. Alisha abandoned her rented car at the side of a road, leaving a note on the windshield: engine problems. Please tow to rental agency! Eagerness fluttered through her, finally beginning to replace the cold terror that had made her belly cramp and her thoughts cool and remote. Her fingertips trembled as she resisted the impulse to add kthxbai! to the note. There was the promise of action in the warm salty air, as if she’d been wound too tight and could only now see that she might be released from her tethers and allowed to fly free. She had reacted for far too long, tossed and turned and misdirected until her forward motion felt all but stopped.
Alisha slung her purse crosswise across her body, digging her elbow against the compartment she’d stored the tiny stolen drive in. She had her queening piece now, and if she didn’t control the board, she was at least in a much stronger position than she’d been in. Despite the chip in her neck, she thought. There would be no more reacting, she promised herself. That knowledge made her palms tingle, her heartbeat quicker than it should be as she ambled up the road, turning to stick a thumb out when vehicles whisked by.
She needed time to meditate, to stretch her muscles and push them to their limits in a hot room. It would cleanse her mind, cleanse her body, allow her to focus on the task at hand without the distracting thrums of fear and excitement jittering through her bones. That energy burned away too easily, left on the surface. Alisha wanted it settled inside her, a core of chi that she could access. She deliberately shortened her stride, wincing as doing so made her overly aware of her feet again, but ignored the throbs of discomfort and drew herself straighter, focusing on bringing her energy inside, rather than letting it bubble off under the Italian sun. It would be worth it later.
A Fiat convertible stopped and she climbed over the door, smiling. “Nord?”
“A Roma,” the driver agreed. “Parlate italiano?”
“Soltanto un piccolo,” Alisha lied. Only a little. “Sorry,” she added in English. The driver—in his fifties but slender-waisted and long-legged—gave an elaborate shrug with his fingers and launched into a cheerful lecture on local history, utterly unbothered by the fact that his passenger at least nominally couldn’t understand him. Alisha smiled often, letting his chatter flow around her as she leaned back in the seat and thought about her plans.
It took over a day to return to Switzerland, but the delay was worthwhile: hitching rides and walking put her wholly off anyone’s radar. The open borders between European Union countries were a blessing; hold up an EU passport and waltz through without any further inspection.
The hotel she checked into wasn’t CIA sanctioned. Not a safe house, not secure in any way, and not, Alisha thought, watched. It catered to American tourists, mostly young, many of them carrying their lives on their backs. Alisha twisted the front of her hair into braids and tucked the rest under a baseball cap, unwilling to shear its length to better fit in with the bohemian characters littering the lobby and hotel stairs.
She made her way up to the room she’d been given. It was old-style European with a sink and toilet available, but the showers were communal, down the hall where any of the hotel’s denizens could access them. Alisha left the room door open as she dropped her own backpack and purse onto the bed, toeing off her shoes to sit and inspect her soles. They were reddened and tender to the touch, a little swollen, but nearly healed. She winced her way to the basin, turning cool water on and dragging the room’s solitary chair away from its desk to set it next to the sink. A few seconds of contortion later, she had her feet dunked in the slowly filling basin. Virtual luxury, she thought as she reached for her company-issued cell phone for the first time in days. She’d gone to ground as best she could. It was time to start pulling in the players.
“This is Cardinal,” she said to the secretary who answered the phone. “Put me through to Director Boyer, please.”
Chapter 26
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Cardinal.” Even over the telephone, Boyer’s voice rumbled deeply enough to make Alisha shiver. Though it wasn’t just his voice, she had to admit. It was simply talking to a man the Sicarii wanted her to kill.
“I don’t have a lot of choice, sir.” She was taking a terrible risk, counting on the chip in her neck not being bugged as well as explosive. She’d done what she could to check: a sweep had found no outgoing radio signal. Even so, she was walking the fine line of not telling her superior that she’d been compromised.
If she got out of this alive, she was going to be court-martialed.
Alisha exhaled, climbing to her feet so she could wincingly pace her little hotel room. The door was long since closed, an ancient black-and-white television’s Swiss soap operas creating white noise that conflicted with MP3s playing from her computer. She’d drawn the drapes over the windows, even tossed the heavier blanket from the bed over the curtain bar to add another level of muffling fabric between the glass and herself. Short of leaving the hotel and locking herself in a soundproofed booth, it was all she could do to make certain she wasn’t overheard.
“I think offering the drone software on the open market will draw everybody involved into play,” she said, almost as much to herself as to Boyer. “It’s worth the risk. The problem, sir—”
“The problem?” Boyer asked drolly. “Singular problem? Your optimism astounds me.”
Alisha huffed a quiet breath of laughter and wrapped her free hand around the back of her neck. The bump there felt larger, though if it was, it was because it’d swollen from her prodding at it so much. “I’m putting myself in a rogue position here. If Greg comes, representing the CIA…” Hook, she thought.
“Then we have no one we can trust absolutely as our man on the inside,” Boyer finished. “I’ll see what can be done.”
Alisha leaned on the dresser that doubled as a TV stand, chin dropped to her chest. “Thank you, sir. I wish I knew who to trust.” Line.
“I assume we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you didn’t trust me.”
Alisha closed her eyes. And sinker. It was no guarantee that Boyer himself would come—she’d be surprised if he did—but she intended to walk the tightrope as far as she could. If there was any movement out of Boyer, the Sicarii would take it as an act of good faith on her part.
Assuming they weren’t listening in on the conversation right now. Alisha pushed the thought away, answering the director quietly.
“It’s a conscious choice, sir. You initiated the investigation into Brandon Parker, so I have to believe you have nothing to hide with regards to him or any operation he may be involved with.
And if I’m wrong, sir, then frankly I’m so completely screwed that it doesn’t matter anymore.” That was perhaps a little more honest than politeness would dictate, she thought, but with her lifespan turned down to a number of countable hours, she no longer cared very much whether she was playing by society’s rules of conduct.
And Boyer chuckled. “Eloquently spoken. Where do you intend to run this auction from?”
“There’s an unused safe house in Moscow,” Alisha said. “Half the people involved in this are former CIA. They should know it.”
“I know it,” Boyer agreed. “It’s derelict. Are you certain that’s where you want to go?”
Alisha nodded against the phone. “Yes, sir. It feels like neutral territory.”
“All right. Go ahead, then. Time frame?”
Alisha felt the bump at the back of her neck again. “Thirty-six hours.”
I know something you don’t know! The chorus caroled through her mind, singsong, as Alisha sat at one of the hotel’s Internet terminals. Childish satisfaction brought on the impulse to e-mail Brandon specifically, to taunt him with having taken the drone software out from under his nose. Alisha quashed the desire, tempting as it was, and kept to message boards instead.
Almost since the inception of Usenet and other online bulletin board systems, the paranoid had believed clandestine agencies used the tremendous noise-to-signal—nonsense versus worthy content—ratio on the Internet to send and hide messages to one another. Those less inclined toward conspiracy theories tended to mock them, but, Alisha thought again, grinning, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
It took several messages, linked to her throwaway cell phone’s e-mail address, to seed the boards, a dribble of information here, a drabble there. Specific boards: a popular one on home gardening tended to carry messages from one agency to another. Keeping the house in order, Alisha thought, grinning at the screen. From there she linked to a financial advisor’s site, and ultimately to travel boards discussing Russia. A few comments, nothing that would be noticed or understood by civilians, but to the right eyes her messages would announce an auction for black market weapons technology designed by quantum chip inventor Brandon Parker. The location was to be Moscow, the time 1800 hours local, the specific place to be announced six hours prior to the auction.
Alisha turned her wrist over, glancing at her watch. There was time to sleep before she left for Russia. Enjoy it, she whispered to herself. It might just be the last sleep she’d ever get.
Alisha came awake with every muscle in her stomach clenched, an instinctive “freeze” response while she waited to understand what had wakened her. A second tap at the door answered the question, and she glanced at the clock. Four in the morning. No one tracking her with intent to harm would announce himself with a knock on the door at that hour.
Idiot, she chided herself as she rolled out of bed. The hotel’s Internet connection would have a traceable IP; staying to sleep had been a mistake. She whisked her gun from beneath the pillow and pressed herself against the wall beside the door, unwilling to risk a glance through the peephole. The tap sounded again, less patiently, and a startlingly familiar voice said, “Ms. Moon?” through the door.
Alisha curled her fingers around the door’s lock and eased it open, teeth set together and bared at the impossibly loud click it gave. “Elisa,” the voice said with growing impatience. Alisha slid her hand to the knob, inching it open, then yanked the door open with such force it banged against the desk and canted slightly on its hinges. Alisha whipped to face the visitor, and found herself looking down the barrel of her gun at a wholly exasperated, gum-popping Erika.
Erika blew an enormous pink bubble, put her finger on the gun’s muzzle, and pointed it away from herself gingerly. “What?” she demanded, as Alisha fell back a step, staring. “You think somebody stole one of my voice modulators and was passing themselves off as me?” She closed the door behind her, unloaded a massive backpack onto the bed, and turned around in the semidark room, eyebrows lifted in challenge. “Earth to Alisha. Hello? You can put the gun down now.”
Alisha brought the gun up to beside her face, pointed at the ceiling as she held it in both hands, trigger finger resting on the trigger guard. “Erika?”
“In the bodacious flesh.” Erika spread her arms and gave an all-over jiggle that would’ve worked better if she hadn’t been wearing a sports bra under her jeans jacket. Even she noticed, looking down at the compressing fabric with a shrug. “So maybe not so bodacious. Turn the lights on, babe.” She popped another bubble and sat down on Alisha’s bed, one hiking-booted foot folded up beneath her.
“What are you doing here?” Alisha moved for the lights, putting one hand on the switch without turning it on.
“Dude.” Erika lifted a dark eyebrow at her. “Boyer sent me to make backups.” She unzipped the backpack’s main compartment and dumped what appeared to be forty pounds of computer innards onto the bed. A flack jacket fell out after the parts and Erika tossed it to her. “Boyer sent this, too. Said it came out of Kazakhstan. Guess it’s your souvenir.”
Alisha caught the jacket, surprised at its weight, then peeled back a section of cloth to examine the matte black material beneath. Not Kevlar, she thought, or at least not standard issue. The phrase triggered memory and she closed her hands on the jacket. “Thanks. I’ll treasure it always.”
“You should. So I hear you’re lugging around the Granddaddy of all software programs. What were you gonna do, save it to a flash drive and FedEx it home?”
“I—”
“And even if you had,” Erika went on blithely, “you might be good with the kicking of ass, but you need my brilliance to alter a complex program enough to make it dysfunctional without being obviously tampered with. Face it, babe. You missed me. Are you going to turn the lights on, or what?”
Alisha clicked the light on, grinning slowly. Erika squinted against the light, then nodded in satisfaction and started rooting through her hardware. “Better. So I’ve been thinking. I’m considering readjusting the scorecard, kind of like they did with the Richter scale. Scoring people eights and nines is giving ’em a lot of credit, don’t you think? I mean, seriously, how many sexual encounters genuinely rate a ten?”
“I thought they slid the Richter scale up, not down,” Alisha said, blinking. “Why are you so awake?”
“Been up on the plane all night. Besides, it’s only eleven, my time. Where’s this hard drive? Dude,” she added, genuinely impressed as Alisha dug the tiny drive out of her purse. “That’s it? And they say size doesn’t matter.”
“I think it’s using a new kind of storage,” Alisha said. “Quantum storage.”
Erika eyed her. “I’ve heard of quantum processing. So this is the new and improved memory stick, huh?” She lifted the card up, peering at it as if she could see the information stored on its molecules. “Anyway, so it all kind of depends on how you look at it, eh? The Good Friday quake up in Alaska was an eight point six when it occurred, got bumped up to a nine point three when they readjusted. So I’m thinking that if a nine point three is one of the worst—or best—in human memory, that a guy rating a seven point eight like I gave Brandon, that’s really pretty good.” She sat down on the bed, one leg folded under herself as she rooted through the pile of hardware she’d upended on the quilt.
“This is what you were thinking about on the plane?” Alisha asked, fighting back a grin.
“Doesn’t everybody? So if we’re working on a sliding scale, and I reevaluate at seven tenths of a percent lower, you end up with a baseline—my experience—as a six point eight, which seems generous enough for a college sophomore. Then let’s say a guy improves by a whole percentage point over the next decade. That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”
“Are you taking these by orders of magnitude?” Alisha asked faintly. She felt laughter bubbling inside, finding herself unwilling to let it break free for fear of ruining the beautiful absurdity of t
he moment. “I mean, isn’t that how earthquakes work?”
Erika stopped hooking ports to one another and gave Alisha a look of dubious politeness. “If you find a guy who is that kind of order of magnitude better in bed than the others, either you’ve totally been sleeping with the wrong people, or he’s got, like, a serious allergy to Kryptonite.”
An image of Frank Reichart, bruised and wearing a towel wrapped low around his hips, flashed through Alisha’s mind. She pressed her lips together, put the safety on her weapon and laid it down on the desk with careful, deliberate movements. She inhaled, deep and slow, pushing the image away, then fixed a smile on her face and spread her hands. “I hate to change the topic, but is there anything I can do to help?”
“Absolutely.” Erika looked up eagerly. “There’s a completely luscious German guy downstairs in the lobby. Go find out his room number for me.”
Alisha gaped, then laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Totally. Go on, won’t you? Please?”
“I, uh. Sure. I…” Alisha blinked and smiled, then turned for the door with a shrug. And stopped, her hand on the knob. “Um. Look, E, I don’t mean to sound paranoid…”
“Yes you do.”
“What?” Alisha looked back over her shoulder.
“You totally mean to sound paranoid. You are paranoid. It’s what you do for a living. You really think you’re going to understand what I’m doing any better if you sit here and watch me? Like you’re going to see me make some kind of mission critical error or change? You won’t. You can’t. That’s why there are people like me and people like you.”
Alisha leaned heavily on the doorknob, putting her forehead against the frame. “People like me?”
