Cage steps back, draws a hand down his face, his expression tired but curious.
Kat squats by the corpse. She shuts her eyes and puts her hand underneath his shirt. His body hair is coarse on her palm. She sweeps her fingers around, chest, crevices of the neck, groin, thighs; all warm but going cold.
She breathes in his body sweat, feels a retching deep in her throat, holds it down. She takes out her hand. She’s shivering, but she won’t stop now. Rushing. Rushed. Breathing, not thinking. Trying to breathe, not think.
She opens the dead man’s mouth, single index finger, probing, inner cheeks, roof of mouth, through the latex of the glove, feeling saliva cooling with death. Roof of the mouth. Worth a try. She’s hidden stuff there herself.
Nothing.
“Over here,” she says quietly, walking quickly around the front of the building, letting Cage follow. The body of the first man she shot has fallen headfirst down the steps, face upward, blood spilling from the mouth. This time Kat goes straight there, prying open the jaw, and finds it against the hard palate on the roof of his mouth, a tiny metallic object, wafer flat, protected by plastic wrap.
“Always good to learn what people give their lives for,” says Kat blankly, holding it up to show Cage, then slipping it into her pocket.
She peels off the glove. Blood smears onto her hand. She sees a rain puddle around a drain blocked with leaves and rinses her hand in the filthy water; street dirt’s better than corpse’s blood.
A black Lincoln Town Car comes around the corner. Kat walks in the opposite direction.
“Over here,” shouts Cage.
“Real discreet,” says Kat. She keeps walking.
Cage runs to her, takes her arm. The Lincoln stops next to them.
“Get in,” says Cage. Kat hesitates, then follows.
Doors closed, Cage says, “Kat—”
“Enough,” she cuts in. “I just killed two people, okay? Give me some space.”
A few blocks away, she hears a police siren. She peels off her dark wig, shakes her head, and runs her hand through her short blond hair.
TWO
Saturday, 3:06 a.m., EDT
The car leaves them outside Kat’s apartment on the corner of Olive and 29th Street in Georgetown.
It’s a ground-floor unit in an expensive neighborhood, bought with trust-fund money after her father’s death. The rooms are big, with high ceilings, and Kat’s draped the windows with translucent, colored fabrics. She’s divided the front room with a Korean partition screen. On one side, she hangs out on a low, white cotton–covered sofa with a TV, a sound system, and a pile of paperbacks. On the other, she keeps her workbench that stretches the length of the room, with a couple of desktops, a laptop, software manuals, and work gadgets.
Inside, Kat pulls two beers from the fridge and tosses one across the kitchen to Cage, who catches it.
“You know stuff I don’t,” she says, “so tell me.”
“I’m trying to piece it together.”
She rolls the wet, cold glass in her hands, feeling it slippery on her skin, then pries off the cap and drops it in the trash. The beer feels good.
“They’ll deal with it,” says Cage.
“Clean up our mess?” She’s drumming one finger on the kitchen counter, the other hand fingering the jump drive in her pocket.
Cage pushes himself off the wall, comes up to her, and takes the beer out of her hand. Like a reflex, her hand is on his. Cage is tall, with a thin face, and when the light catches it in a certain way, like now, she sees Asiatic features, a smoothness in the way he moves, some kind of inner peace that Kat hasn’t managed to find.
“Why don’t I make us some coffee?”
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll be a couple of minutes.”
The bathroom’s off the bedroom, from which French windows lead onto a patio, messy with summer’s growth and early-fallen leaves.
She runs the water to cover the sound of her movements.
She brings out the jump drive and lays it on the ledge, where her hair dryer is. She opens the back of her cell phone and takes out the SIM card. The phone’s Subscriber Identity Module is half the size of a postage stamp and, in truth, is a tiny computer that can store massive amounts of information.
Government agencies have ways to store data in even less space, in microdot clusters the size of pinheads. But Kat doesn’t like relying on anything. If she needs a SIM card, she doesn’t have to ask. She buys one.
Kat swaps the SIM card for a blank one, links it to the jump drive with an infrared connection, sets the phone to take in the data, and covers everything with a towel.
Every time she does a break-in job, she does the same to protect herself against Cage.
Three years before, on the eve of her 21st birthday, Kat was arrested for illegal Internet hacking. But the government, spotting her talents, offered Kat a deal.
For five years, she would work under Bill Cage for a department in Homeland Security called the Federal Containment Agency. If she stayed the course, she could leave with a clean record. If she backslid or failed to follow orders, she would go to prison.
Kat agreed, and Cage trained her to crack into the databases of foreign embassies, sometimes even to break into the buildings themselves. Every operation Kat does, she copies the stolen information to use as insurance, in case Cage or his superiors ever go against her.
She has her jump drive and the SIM card from the dead man’s mouth. She suspects that both contain the same data. He copied it first, but didn’t know how to erase the file from the computer. Then Kat turned up and copied it, too. Or some of it.
Eyes closed, she splashes water on her face, lets it run down, drip off her chin, and wet her clothes. She flushes the toilet to keep up the flow of bathroom noises.
When a tiny red light tells her the transfer is done, she repeats the process with the dead man’s SIM card. Once that’s done, she checks the data on the cell phone screen, letting the pictures run through of the woman with the pistol and the dead man on the ground. She repeats it with the other copy. The data is exactly the same.
She has two originals for Cage and two copies for herself. She wraps each in kitchen plastic wrap, then in self-adhesive, waterproof polyethylene. She tapes one to the small of her back, slips the other into her pants pocket.
She smells coffee. Cage is sitting on a kitchen stool, legs crossed, waiting for her.
“You should’ve taken a shower,” he says, glancing at her dry hair and same clothes. “Coffee? Another beer?”
She stretches past him and turns off the coffee machine. “You need to go home, Bill. And I need to be alone.”
He moves back, giving her space. “You sure?”
“Been a tough evening.” She smiles quickly. “You know little Kat. Not much good at sharing emotions. Tough for you, too, nearly getting your head blown off and everything.”
He hesitates. “I think I should stay. You being alone isn’t good.”
“Alone’s what I need,” she says, steel in her voice. From her shirt pocket she produces the jump drive and the SIM card.
She drops them in Cage’s hand.
“You did well,” he says. “I owe you. We all owe you.”
Instead of responding, Kat escorts Cage to the door. As he walks out, she calls his name. He stops and turns.
“Bill,” she says, “are you okay? I mean, can you call Sally or anyone? Someone to talk to?”
His hand’s on the edge of the door. “Sally’s in Egypt. Paul’s with her for a couple of weeks. But thanks for the thought.”
Kat walks over to him, stretches up, kisses him on the cheek. “But you’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine, and you’ll be fine. It’s how we’re made. Call me when you feel like that coffee.”
She sees the Lincoln Town Car waiting for him, sees men watching the street. He gets in the car and waves, like he’s dropped her off after going to the movies.
THREE
Saturda
y, 4:32 a.m., EDT
One side of Washington, where Kat was raised, is wealth, fine wines, and power; the other side, where Kat’s going, is violence, drugs, and poverty.
She gets out of the cab by a dirty, white Baptist church with a broken window. Across the street, outside a shut-down liquor store, five, maybe six guys share their gaze between Kat and the taillights of the cab. One lights a cigarette, flicks a match into the air. No one else is around; no cars, either.
Two guys break off from the group and walk to the edge of the sidewalk. A sudden breeze carries the smell of sweet dope.
“What’ya doin’ on Dix Street?”
Kat says nothing.
“Answer me, girl. Show a brother a little respect.”
Kat keeps walking along the road. They watch her, see where she’s heading, and drop away.
Anywhere else, the low-rise houses with fenced gardens could have been plucked from the American Dream. But it’s never worked here; no one ever thought it would.
Ten houses along, she lets herself through a garden gate. The front window’s cracked and taped. The door’s padlocked. Beer cans, cigarette packs, and candy wrappers lie on the front grass. Kat taps on a window, then goes around the side.
At the back, a floodlight snaps on. A basketball hoop hangs off the wall. A mattress, soaked with rainwater, slumps next to a side fence. Kat steps into the lamp’s light.
A tall black man opens the door, a towel around his waist, big shoulders, no shirt, his eyes wide with surprise. A black woman, rake-thin, rumpled hair hanging past the shoulders, her body draped with a sheet, steps across behind him. Her eyes meet Kat’s to let her know that she won’t be leaving, but she won’t interfere.
“How are you, M?” says Kat softly.
“I’m good,” he says. He kisses her full on the mouth, his huge hands encircling her head. His mouth tastes spicy with hashish. His skin has another woman’s smell.
They used to be lovers, and Kat made the house on Dix Street her home. Then, just as quickly as she arrived, she left, and hasn’t seen Mercedes Vendetta since.
“You one bad girl, Kat,” he says, breaking off, leading her into the house. “You disappear like that, even I get worried.”
“Yeah, well . . .” The room hasn’t changed, sheets rumpled, damp in the ceiling corner, mirrors on the closet and bathroom doors.
Vendetta stoops down, picks up the other woman’s jeans, panties, and top from the floor. The towel rides up his leg, and Kat sees the scar from the gunshot wound on his right thigh.
“After you gone, one morning, two guys come, asked questions about you. Government men.”
“What did they ask?”
“Whether you’d been here. Showed me your picture. Took a look around.”
He lays the clothes on a chair.
“Long time ago,” says Kat. “You missed me?”
“You were good for my life.”
Kat goes onto tiptoe, kisses him, then touches the knife scar on his face just under his left eye. “Thank you, M, for being here.”
Kat’s never known Vendetta’s real name. He calls himself Mercedes because he likes the car and doesn’t give a damn that it’s the name of a Spanish woman. Vendetta is a message that he won’t forget anyone who crosses him.
Vendetta Mercedes runs petty-crime rackets. His dad shot his mom, then turned the gun on himself. When it comes to dead relatives, he and Kat have common ground.
Kat pulls the copied SIM card from her pocket. “I need your help,” she says, holding it out.
“You got it.”
“Put this somewhere no one will find it.”
Vendetta looks hard at Kat’s face, runs his knuckle down her cheek.
“You okay?”
“Anyone comes here again and you don’t hear from me, give it to my sister, Suzy.”
“She back? I thought she run out on you.”
Kat brings out a card with two phone numbers on it. “That’s my number at the top and Suzy’s underneath. Suzy’s in England. Okay?”
The day Suzy left for England was the day Kat walked ten miles from Georgetown to Dix Street and found Vendetta. It was four years ago, just after she’d turned nineteen. Their father had just died in a plane crash. Their mother reacted by taking her own life. Both Suzy and Kat went crazy in their own ways.
Ten years older, Suzy is a role model whom Kat fears she’ll never match. Kat’s impetuous; Suzy is quiet. Kat’s raw; Suzy is self-composed. Suzy is elegant; Kat’s a street fighter.
It took Kat a long time to forgive Suzy for going to England, and while trying, she lived on Dix Street, a rich white girl in a black gangster’s bed, in a place where everyone had dead and runaway relatives. It was good. No one expected anything from her.
Her cell phone vibrates. Vendetta stops her from answering it.
“They’ve got people listening in on everything I do.”
Kat nods as if she should have known. Silence drops between them, business done too quickly, too much else to say. Kat reads the phone screen, but there’s no caller’s number.
She sits on his bed, and he sits next to her. She takes his hand. “You killed people, right, M?”
Vendetta looks straight at her, their faces an inch apart. “Long time ago.”
“What’d it feel like?”
“Depend on the killing. Once it was for cruelty. That still eats me. Other times, for self-defense. It still don’t feel good. Better it didn’t happen.”
“I just did it.”
“First time, yeah? Someone trying to kill you?”
“Me and a guy.”
He squeezes her hand. “Don’t go battling guilt, and you’ll be fine.”
Kat gets up, straightens her top. “Can I, like, call you? Drop around sometime?”
“I’m always here.”
She points at the SIM card in his hand. “Keep that safe. Okay?”
He stays sitting on the bed. Kat lets herself out.
FOUR
Saturday, 5:58 a.m., EDT
A haze of dawn summer light hangs over Dix Street. Kat walks up to the intersection. The guys by the liquor shop have gone. Across from the Baptist church is a private parking lot protected by an iron gate sagging on its hinges. A man’s undoing the padlock, looks up, sees Kat, and points back at half a dozen cabs inside. Kat nods. Six o’clock in the morning on Dix Street is when the cab shift starts.
The vehicle that comes for her has a cracked windshield and smells of whiskey.
She tells the driver where she wants to go, then checks her cell phone and finds a new message.
“Kat, it’s Charlotte. Call me. I’ve sent you an e-mail. Okay? Love you.” It’s Suzy, except ever since she went to England, she’s called herself Charlotte; Charlotte Elizabeth Thomas to be precise, with credit cards and ID to go with it, as if, ever since their parents’ tragedy, Suzy wants to pretend she isn’t who she is.
Kat’s cell is programmed like a racehorse: streaming video, credit card payments, Internet access, fingerprint recognition. But the signal makes it slow to decrypt Suzy’s e-mail. By the time Kat reads it, they’re close to Georgetown, driving down Massachusetts Avenue.
Kat, call me, please. It’s about Project Peace. I need your help. You’re always on my mind when I’m staying incrementally one step ahead. These past four years, about Mom and Dad. Remember Dad saying they claim to defend us by creating tyrannies. It’s all connected. Tonight will be lajb lslhnc
Moist beads gather on Kat’s forehead. Suzy’s message seems out of character. Kat’s lips move silently, reading it again, repeating the sentences. What does she mean by “incrementally ahead”?
What’s up, Suzy? You’re not one to be confused.
Project Peace has been all over the media. It’s the slogan used for an agreement being negotiated called the Coalition for Peace and Security, or CPS. It’s aimed at securing energy supplies, with the United States, China, and Russia as the big players. A lot of Kat’s embassy break-ins have had
to do with CPS.
The cab’s on M Street, about to cross Rock Creek into Georgetown. She tells it to stop, gets out, starts walking toward her apartment, dials Suzy’s number, and gets an answering machine.
“It’s Kat,” she says. “Just after six in the morning, Washington time.”
Back in her apartment, she tries again. Three rings and it picks up, a man’s voice. Kat says, “I’m sorry, I got the wrong number.”
“Maybe you haven’t. That you, Kat?”
“Yeah, who’s . . . ?” Then she recognizes the voice. “Nate?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Nate Sayer used to work for her father. After her father died, Nate got himself a job with the State Department and ended up in the U.S. embassy in London. She and Suzy have never liked him.
“What are you doing with Suzy’s cell?”
“I’m taking care of it. It was ringing and—”
“No, stop. Where’s my sister?”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“Suzy . . . There’s been an accident, Kat. Your sister . . . she’s dead.”
“Accident? What sort of accident?” Kat’s looking at a picture by her bed of the four of them, Mom, Dad, Suzy, and little Kat. Nate’s telling her she’s the only one left alive.
“We’re still trying to find out—”
“No, Nate. Tell me everything. What sort of accident?”
“We’ve only just heard ourselves. I’m sorry, Kat, I really am.”
“Please, Nate,” says Kat, trying to temper her voice. “Just tell me.”
“Nancy and I are here for you,” he says. “We feel for you, Kat. Believe me, we do.”
Kat breathes out slowly. “Just tell me—”
“Are you at your landline?” Sayer cuts in. “We’ll call as soon as we—”
“Was she hit by a car? Was it a drive-by shooting? How did it happen? Young, healthy women don’t just die.”
“We don’t know.” His voice hardens. “We didn’t even know she was in London. She was living under a false name.”
“But you have her phone?”
The History Book Page 2
