by Dana Haynes
Daria sat, straddling the bench. “I can’t contact Diego and John Broom.”
“True.”
“If it is her, if she’s there, you have to warn them.”
He sighed as well as a man with diminished lung capacity can. “Daria…”
“You have to warn them.” She turned to him. He kept his back to her. “At least Diego. He’s your friend. If he knows who he’s up against, if he’s prepared—”
Fredrik Olsson, the Viking, wheezed a laugh. He rarely laughed, and it caught Daria off guard.
“Prepared? What if the roles were reversed? What if Diego faced you? Would being prepared save his life?”
Daria didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
Fredrik looked back over his thin shoulder, hair bobbing in front of his lenses.
“You’re mirror opposites. Viorica is everything you would have been if you’d been a true freelance and not working for this government and that. Always limited yourself to the rules of the game. You are everything she would have been if she’d stayed in the espionage business.”
Daria stood. “Wait. Viorica was a spy? For whom?”
He studied her. She waited.
“I’m very fond of you,” the Viking whispered. “I always have been. I’ll not forgive myself if this ends badly. But I won’t take sides.”
“Warn Diego. Do it.”
Fredrik gripped his crutches and tucked them tight under his spindly arms.
“Do it!”
“Go with God.”
“Go to hell.”
He smiled without offense. “I’m not the one driving to Serbia.”
Twenty-Eight
John had this intrinsically American notion that you could drive from one Slavic capital to the next in a more or less straight line, à la the highways between, say, Sacramento and Salem.
Not so.
He and Diego filled the Cooper’s gas tank and wound slowly north from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. They inched along narrow roads, gained and lost elevation frequently, and eventually made it to the shabby, industrial city of Tuzla. The main entrance to the town was a crossroads literally shadowed by massive nuclear cooling towers. From there they hit the border between Bosnia and Croatia. A quick right-hand turn onto a four-lane highway and, less than a half hour later, they passed out of Croatia and into Serbia for the first time.
Since each border featured two guard stations—one on each side—they handed over their fake passports four times in thirty minutes. And each time, John’s heart raced. Especially entering Serbia.
But the guard in the blue Policja uniform waved them through with hardly a glance.
They were on a modern, well-paved highway now, and Belgrade loomed on the horizon far quicker than John had anticipated. Once in the city, past the vast banks of bland, Communist-era communal apartments and the hulking soccer stadium, John recommended finding a hotel in the triangle between the historic Stari Grad (or Old Town), Parliament, embassy row, and the historic train station, east of the Danube.
Diego spotted a hotel sign in English and pulled into the hilly central core of the city, which was aging and a little run-down. He said, “Figure she’ll find us?”
“Don’t know. But if we stay near the government offices, I guess we’ll be more likely to stumble on each other.”
Diego got out of the car and stared over the roof at John. His eyes were shaded by his hat. “Filling me with confidence.”
“Well, I advise the U.S. Congress. Pulling a plan out of my ass comes naturally.”
They checked in. After washing up, John headed to an Internet cafe on avenue Ozun Mirakova and bought sixty minutes of time on an aging, twelve-inch-deep computer monitor.
An e-mail awaited John at the address set up for him at the International Red Cross. It featured no letterhead and no signature: DG alive. Seen near Turin, Italy. Lost her again.
John just sat and breathed for a while. He realized he was grinning. He’d known deep in his heart that she was still alive. She had to be. This confirmation was a relief, though.
John found a second anonymous message on the IRC server: Drones—found 3 makers lenses (plastic) and 6 makers batteries (hybrids). Only 1 cross match: Am Citadel.
John thumped the table with his fist. American Citadel was a midrange member of the military-industrial complex headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. In and of itself, the fact that they invested in research into lightweight camera lenses and lightweight batteries wasn’t damning. But everybody in Washington knew that the company was facing crippling sanctions from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Federal Trade Commission for violation of trade embargoes with more than one war-torn country.
For the past year or so, the rumor in D.C. was that American Citadel would get sold to one of the biggies—Boeing, maybe, or General Electric—then strip-mined of its component parts to be sold off. Doubling down on under-the-table arms sales might provide enough capital to keep the wolves at bay for a while.
John sent an e-mail back to his contact at the Red Cross: Where is R&D for Am Cit? Which state? Tell The Man.
The Man being Senator Singer Cavanaugh.
John didn’t know if this line of inquiry would help Daria. But it was a start.
Sandpoint, Idaho
Colonel Olivia Crace sat in the office she’d been allocated at the American Citadel R&D off-site facility and pulled a steel attaché case out from behind a large potted plant. She set the case on the desk and used the pads of both thumbs to dial the combination, then popped open the lid.
She pulled out a USB cable and plugged it into her cell phone. The attaché case’s encryption technology began scrambling the signal even before she reached General Howard Cathcart in his office in the basement of the Pentagon.
Cathcart didn’t bother with small talk. “We have her.”
Crace tolerated her superior officer’s penchant for ambiguity, but barely. “Which her, sir?”
“Major Arcana!” the gruff man barked, as if it should have been obvious to the junior officer. “She used an ATM with a security camera near the American embassy in Belgrade, Serbia. One hundred percent match, according to NSA.”
“Okay. Well, the Citadel technicians found, then lost, Gibron. She used the Tour de France to flummox the drones.”
Cathcart sounded incredulous. “The bike race?”
“Yes, sir. The drones are every bit as good as we hoped, but there was just too much signal-to-noise interference in the vicinity. I’m not happy that the American Citadel people lost her, but I think it speaks to her skills more than their ineptitude.”
“Hmm.”
“Gibron started in Italy. She’s in France, to the best of our knowledge,” she added.
“And Arcana’s in Serbia. We would ask Sneaky Pete to interdict, normally, but given the obvious…” He let the thought drift away. Sneaky Pete was military parlance for the CIA, and interdict was a Washington nicety for assassination.
Crace sat in the salesman’s chair, in the salesman’s office, and studied the potted plants. “The micro-drones, sir?”
Cathcart had been thinking along the same lines. “Another urban demonstration. I’ve spoken to … parties here. We are close to an agreement. One more demonstration ought to seal the deal.”
“I’ll alert the crews here. They can get the truck to Serbia in, I don’t know, a day, day and a half.”
“Do it,” Cathcart said. “We find this Major Arcana and handle her. Gibron is being hunted by every intelligence service in the West. She’ll be out of our hair soon.”
She heard him hang up. Crace disassembled the secure communication equipment, slid the steel case back behind the terra-cotta pot, and went to inform Bryan Snow and his pilots of the new target.
Twenty-Nine
Daria changed into a fresh T-shirt in the women’s bathroom of the French roadside rest stop. When she emerged, one of the Audis and her borrowed motorbike were gone. So were the Viking and hi
s bodyguard.
She checked the supplies in the other sedan, and headed north.
She ate cheese sandwiches and chips and drank bottled water as she curved east into Switzerland, past Bern and Zurich, along the E60.
She slept that night at a cheap motel outside Sanct, Switzerland.
In Hungary she began vectoring south, past Giyor, circumnavigating Budapest and catching the E75 toward Szeged. Along the way she stopped at border crossings and for gas, eating from vending machines and refrigerator cases in gas stations.
She stayed the night in Kistelek, Hungary. The hotel room was austere but clean, the bed linen taut and starched. She lay down fully clothed, an arm across her forehead, staring at the ceiling.
* * *
Girl, soldier. Bombs, blood. Pianist’s fingers, nails shredded and bloody, reaching for her. Debris crushing ribs. Diggers screaming for help. The taste of dirt and blood. The smell of charred flesh. A woman’s pitch-black eyes, the life in them fading. Lips moving, silent apologies.
Daria woke up under the bed, drenched in sweat, having dragged the covers and pillows down with her. It was 3:00 A.M.
It was the same dream that had dogged her since her youth. But the blast at the hotel in Florence had added fresh menace to it.
It was most annoying. Daria had survived blown-up buildings before. Daria had blown up buildings before. Why the nightmares were escalating, she could not say. She’d learned over the years that one of the only ways to stave them off was to sleep with someone—although that didn’t always work. Daria didn’t know anyone on the outskirts of Kistelek, so she woke up the proprietress and ordered a pot of strong black coffee, tipping her thrice the cost of the coffee to apologize for waking her. She sat up and drained the pot until dawn broke.
As the sun rose, she was sitting on the carpet in her panties, legs straight and spread wide, 160 degrees, in a dancer’s stretch, feet arched and toes pointing, feeling the tension from the long road trip. She laid out a towel between her thighs and field stripped the Glock she’d stolen back in Florence. She made sure it was unloaded by removing the magazine and locking back the slide to check the barrel. She dry-fired the gun just to be sure.
As she cleaned the weapon she thought about the American she’d taken it from. Owen Cain Thorson, according to his wallet.
And it came to her: the second motorcycle rider, the man with the gun in the Tour de France. It was the American: Thorson.
She pictured the man in the livery building in Florence. He remained maddeningly familiar. For some reason, thinking of his face made Daria think of John Broom. She didn’t know why, but it suggested that Thorson might have been involved in the battle in Milan. Or during her convalescence at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Those were the only two places she had ever met Broom face-to-face. Daria had been delirious during parts of those days. Wide swaths of her recovery remained only vague and splintered memories.
It was funny. She thought of Broom as her friend. But in truth, he was a stranger. A stranger who had shelved protocol, had risked his career and even his own skin to help her, both in Milan and Ramstein. Daria didn’t trust that many souls. It was odd that a man she’d met only briefly, at the height of her illness, ended up being one of them.
Diego she had known for years, on and off. She’d known him in battle. He’d earned her trust the hard way.
Now those two men likely were in Belgrade, Serbia, awaiting her. Somewhere.
Then there was the tall blonde. Viorica.
In the espionage, gunrunning, and criminal circles of Europe, Daria had heard stories of the lovely blond polyglot with frost-blue eyes. She was a mercenary, a thief, and a killer. She had a reputation of success as crystalline as her eyes. Or so Daria had heard.
She had never given much thought to meeting this Viorica. But now here they were. Coming together over a situation Daria couldn’t hope to pretend she understood. Fighting to stop something from happening, just because she’d made promises to people she hadn’t kept.
She’d be in Belgrade later that morning. In just a few hours.
It was time to find out what this was all about.
Thirty
General Howard Cathcart returned from lunch to find mail waiting for him on the credenza outside his office, a soulless, anonymous little space in a subbasement of the Pentagon.
He froze, his eyes on the cheap, white, number ten envelope on the credenza.
In seven years assigned to black-budget weapons procurement, seven years in his tight little office buried deep in the deniability zone, General Cathcart had never, ever received any snail mail. E-mails, yes. Encrypted printouts from SigInt, yes. Summons from the three- and four-star gods of the building, always on their embossed stationery. Sure.
But a letter?
Cathcart picked it up. The address typed on a sticky label included Cathcart’s name and rank and the room number of his office, a fact not wildly in circulation. He could see the rectangular card inside the cheap, almost transparent envelope. He ripped off a short end and shook the card out into his palm. In a flowery and distinctly feminine hand was the phrase, GREETINGS FROM WHITE CITY!
Below that was a URL. The http, the colon and slashes, and the www were followed by a seemingly random cluster of letters and numbers. The addressed ended in .cm, not .com.
Cathcart swiped his keycard to enter his office. He sat at his desk and glowered at the card. He looked at the back side. It was blank.
He pinched the envelope to open it further and squinted into it. It was otherwise empty.
His mood darkened. He made sure his door was shut, then wheeled his chair over to the computer workstation to the left of his desk. He held the card in one hand and gingerly typed in the alien URL. He checked it twice before he hit Return.
A prompt appeared, with the gray scale, woodcut image of the five-sided behemoth and the words The Pentagon, Washington D.C. The online launch page also warned him that he was about to enter an unsecured site and asking if he wanted to proceed.
He hit yes.
The screen changed. It showed a horizontal black rectangle. Beneath that was a button. Cathcart moved his cursor to the button and clicked it.
The screen lit up.
The image was the top of the tall blonde’s head.
She was looking down but glanced up when her screen came alive. She wore reading glasses. Cathcart caught a reverse image of his own face reflected in her glasses, and he cursed himself for not thinking to deactivate his computer camera first.
“Oh! Hi! There you are!” She removed the glasses.
Cathcart felt his blood boil over. “What in Christ’s name—”
“Please don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, you goddamned peasant.”
Cathcart flinched back. But the blonde smiled and winked to take some of the vinegar out of her words.
“How did you get this address? What do you want?”
“First, you have a reputation as a historian, General. So I assumed you’d know ‘Belgrade’ translates as ‘White City.’ I also knew I couldn’t easily hack into your computer but that you could dial out to any site you desired.”
Cathcart floundered for an acerbic reply, but he was begrudgingly impressed by her tactic.
The tall blonde removed her reading glasses, and the general caught a glimpse of a hardback book under her monitor as she marked her page and closed it. She’d been online, waiting for him to make contact.
“Look. A few days ago, I swiped sixty seconds off your mini-drones in Florence to prove to my buyers that I could. I did it once. I can do it again.”
Cathcart kept frowning but his mind raced: Was there a way to trace this signal?
“I am selling this technology to the Serbs,” she said, and her quicksilver eyes sparkled. “Thing is: I’m an American. Oh, not a good one, mind you. I’m a cutthroat mercenary. I’d sell sunscreen to vampires.”
“Scum like you—”
The tall blonde said, “Yes, yes. Got that
out of your system? Good. I’m not the ingenue in this story, but I’m not the mustache-twirling villain, either. I don’t particularly want these bloodthirsty grudge jockeys to have state-of-the-art weaponry. For the same reason I wouldn’t give my sister’s toddler a cocked auto. You know?”
“What do you want?”
“Well!” The blonde smiled brightly and seemed to settle into her chair. “In a word: money. In two words: more money!”
The general gnashed his teeth.
“I don’t go back on my word, General. I told the Serbs I’d sell them the backdoor access to the American Citadel drones, and I will. But!” She paused for dramatic effect. “I’ll sell it to you, too! Armed with this knowledge you can buy the Citadel drones and reengineer the software breach that let me take command of them. I get my paydays and you get your top-secret weapons. God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world!”
Cathcart’s mind revved up into the red zone. The Mercutio and Hotspur drones were the best mobile weapons platforms he had ever seen. And there was no question that this blond bitch had taken command of them. He needed to know how she’d done that.
He nodded. “Go on.”
“Come to Belgrade. You, personally. I’ll give you the intercept technology. You pay me … oh, let’s say six million dollars, American.”
“Six million.”
“Pentagon black-budget weapons procurements? You can find six million in your vending machines, General. And we both know it. A cool six mil gets you complete access to the greatest covert weapons system on earth.”
She waited for him to catch up.
“You have three options. You pay nothing and get nothing. You pay those ass-wipes at Citadel and get access to a tech that the thugocracy in Belgrade has, too. And you think that won’t come back to bite you in the butt? Please. I have video of you at Citadel, remember? Or, you could go for what’s behind door number three: pay Citadel, pay me, fuck the Serbs, and secure the peace for America and for Democracy. Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
