The Project

by I C Cosmos

  Helen wondered whether the woman would look at Portoferraio at all. Or whether she even knew she was in Portoferraio. A place where Napoleon chose to retire.

  Helen sat on a bench on the quay, watching the action. A rogue signal had popped on her screen a few minutes ago, and she thought it possibly came from the Temptation. But nothing showed up anymore. Helen got into her little Fiat and drove along the bay to Villa Maria, a palatial hotel set in the middle of lush gardens above the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  The hotel offered a refined restaurant, two outdoor pools, and a poolside café and bar, but Helen set up shop on the balcony of her room. She enjoyed the sea view and the fresh air until the sun went down and the rapidly dropping temperature chased her inside. She ordered room service and kept working, not quite sure what to expect of this assignment. Her orders were vague to say the least: to follow a given route on the island and try to detect insurgents. No times or further information provided.

  A heavy knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. A thin, pimply guy, more a boy than a man, stood behind the door.

  “Your Mediterranean fish stew, signora,” he said with a smirk that sent shivers up Helen’s spine.

  ~~~

  Helen woke up with a headache, feeling as if her limbs were too heavy to move. She took a cold shower and went down to the breakfast room, hoping that strong coffee would chase her malady away. She couldn’t be sick. Helen had never taken a sick day in her life and certainly wouldn’t take one while on assignment.

  She crossed the island, trying to ignore the waves of chills and feverishness that kept washing over her with increasing frequency. The first stop on her itinerary was a village called Marina di Campo. Helen drove slowly through the center and along the beaches, covering the full crescent of the harbor.

  Her devices remained lifeless. No insurgents in sight. Flustered by the vagueness of her assignment, she moved on, mulling over what to do.

  Her next destination, San Piero in Campo, was reportedly one of the most beautiful places on Elba, but its charm was lost on Helen. She felt sicker and weaker by the minute, longing to park the car and go to sleep. She dragged herself to the piazza, ignoring the elderly men lounging around, smoking, chatting, and virtually stripping her with their eyes.

  No insurgents detected.

  Helen drove farther, fighting to keep her eyes open. It had to be food poisoning, she concluded. Probably a bad mussel. Merely thinking about the fish stew from last night made her sick. The image of the smirking waiter sent chills through her.

  She turned onto the road to Poggio. The traffic stopped a mile later. She heard helicopters approaching. One of them flew right in front of Helen, carrying an orange water bucket. Forest fires? The insurgents?

  Helen scanned all her devices but didn’t detect any activity. The traffic moved on, and she concentrated on the sharp hairpins, suppressing her nausea.

  A motorcyclist closed in on her, sitting on her bumper, revving his engine. Helen moved as far right as she could on the narrow road, giving him space to pass her. And then she caught his image in the mirror. Black helmet, black visor, black jacket, black gun in his right hand. Helen moved quickly back to the center of the road, temporarily blocking the motorcyclist as a truck passed in the opposite direction.

  Helen sped up, trying to distance herself from the biker, but soon realized her mistake. She couldn’t outrun him. She stepped on the brakes, nearly sending him flying, and drove on slowly, hoping that the traffic collecting behind them would render him ineffective.

  They rolled through several hairpins, the biker trying to pass her, but the ongoing traffic kept him in check. Then they entered a straight stretch of the road, and Helen slowed down even more. Angry honking resonated through the air. The biker took off, closely followed by a dark sedan and a few other cars. Shaken to her core, Helen kept her eyes on the road, ignoring the honking and the hand gestures of the passing motorists.

  Her stomach was flipping, but her mind was crystal clear.

  Someone tried to kill me.

  Strange calmness took over her. She eased into the flow of the traffic and rolled down her window, letting in wafts of pine and rosemary aromas, the incident occupying her mind. Who sent him? Maybe they are just trying to scare me…

  The traffic came to a stop again. Helen looked up but didn’t see or hear any helicopters. The cars inched around another hairpin, and a civilian directed them around a makeshift roadblock.

  She peeked to her right and gasped. A motorcycle lay flat on the ground, its rider next to it, looking small. Black helmet with a black visor, black pants and jacket, head at an unnatural angle to the body, lifeless fingers touching a black gun.

  Helen slowly passed the accident scene, the contents of her stomach surging up. She drove to Poggio with her hand in front of her mouth, hoping she wouldn’t be sick in the Fiat. She pulled into the first parking lot she saw, jumped out of the car, and vomited in the bushes behind the curb.

  “Disgustosa…turista ubriaca,” a passing woman dressed all in black spat out.

  Disgusting drunk tourist.

  Villa Maria, Portoferraio

  Helen slowly opened the door to her room, heart thumping in her chest as she checked that no one was hiding inside. She unpacked the water and instant coffee she bought in a small shop on the way from Poggio, not trusting any food provided by the hotel.

  She filled the electric kettle and turned it on but had to rush to the bathroom, sick again. When she came back, the water hissed and Helen’s devices on the antique table were lit up like the sky on the Fourth of July. But this was no picnic.

  Her screen was cluttered with hundreds of nonsensical messages. None of them had an official ID. The rogues. Helen sighed. She switched the kettle off and went to work, shaky, feverish, eyes watering.

  She engaged an app she had designed specifically to handle the rogues and watched it manage the chaos automatically. Her mouth dry and sticky, she quickly reached for a bottle of mineral water and twisted it open, not taking her eyes off the screen, not wanting to miss anything substantial popping up from the junk.

  After about half an hour, Helen rubbed her eyes and stood up. She stretched, fighting the drowsiness that had been hampering her the whole day. The rogues kept generating noise like it was going out of style, dulling her focus. Could it be that they were playing silly games? Taking her attention from something else?

  The tension was building up, the uncertainty getting the better of Helen. She inhaled, counted to four, and let the air slowly leave her lungs as Jon had instructed her. She was too hyper to complete the exercise properly at first, the air gushing out of her lungs too quickly, underscoring the thumping in her chest. But then she got into the rhythm and managed to keep the tension at bay.

  Jon would be happy to hear this. After their unexpected visit to Sotheby’s, they had seen three more art exhibitions in Amsterdam and ended up having a delightful dinner together each time. And each time, Jon had asked whether Helen tried his stress-reduction strategies and looked disappointed when she hadn’t. And then he’d bring up her job.

  “Why don’t you quit?” he’d say, his blue eyes focused on Helen, his surfer mess of blondish hair making her smile. “You could do anything you want. You are a PhD, at the top of your business, whatever it is, but you look so unhappy when I ask about your job.”

  “That’s because I don’t want to mix the job with our time together,” Helen would say truthfully, and Jon would pull a face and switch the subject.

  Jon was right, Helen thought. The Project didn’t make her happy. But quitting? Impossible. The Project was far from finished, and the idea of deserting it like Nic had was unthinkable. Still, Helen caught herself entertaining the possibility several times since Jon mentioned it.

  Living a normal life, having a partner. Helen sensed Jon wanted to get more serious…

  She sighed. The rogues were still spewing chaos.

  What are they after?

  The answer c
ame more than an hour and a half later. A new line of conversation opened up, involving several rogue units. Santini took charge, staging not one but multiple attacks around the island. Giving orders to blow up an old factory, two unused storage places, and a couple of mines that were closed years ago.

  Besides material damage, such a chain of attacks would trigger unrest at the beginning of the tourist season and possibly start brush fires. Helen had to stop them. She felt a wave of nausea rising again and quickly started to dispatch her superintelligent bots.

  She had worked on these bots for months, and this was the first time she was going to use them in hot action. Talk about trial by fire.

  Head pounding, Helen worked on, racing against time to connect her bots with Santini’s units. Focus on one step at a time, she heard Jon saying. Nothing else exists, just this one step.

  All bots engaged, Helen sat back and took a deep breath. And sat up with a start. One of Santini’s units still flashed on the screen, free as a bird. Hm…did a new unit show up? Helen didn’t think so. Hands shaking, she scrutinized her records, not understanding what was going on. And then she saw it. She had coupled one rogue unit with two of her bots by mistake.

  She corrected it quickly, but the damage was done already. If the two bots clashed and caused a malfunction that alarmed the rogues, she was done. Her stealth destroyed, her mission compromised. By my own stupidity. Helen finished the job in a haze, shaken up.

  She’d never made such a sloppy mistake before; still, she was furious with herself for not putting more preventive measures in place to catch slips like this.

  Nauseous and overwhelmed by guilt, she slouched in the chair, spent. She slowly tipped her head left and right and forced herself to watch the action. Mercifully, the bots seemed to work without hiccups.

  Helen couldn’t wait to review the recording of the mistake and see how bad it was but decided to wait until the operation was over, not wanting to risk more errors. An urgent stomach surge lifted her off the chair and she made it to the bathroom just in time, retching violently.

  Whatever poisoned her seemed to have come out this time, and the drowsiness lifted off almost immediately. Helen splashed cold water on her face, brushed her teeth, and went back to work.

  Santini’s goons were blaming each other for the miscommunication, their operations in shambles. Helen stopped her bots and fetched the recording of their activities. She went directly to the mistake and studied the data. Hm… She bit her lip and consulted her notes, making sure that she had the right bots and scrutinized the data again.

  The record showed nothing. As if the error never happened.

  Helen let out a sigh of relief and fell on the bed, tears flooding her cheeks. Then her brain kicked in. This is NOT possible. She had dispatched the second bot fully activated. It should have been working at least a minute or two, but the data showed that it had never engaged in action.

  Someone deactivated the bot.

  And she wasn’t that someone. Someone saved her ass. Someone who infiltrated her operation.

  Who?

  Dallas, Texas

  Six days later

  Collin got off the phone, barely managing his fury. He wanted Santini brought in and Frank off the case. There were limits to what you sacrificed for national security. Washington disagreed.

  They had a point, Collin admitted to himself grudgingly.

  He had no evidence that Santini started the fires that killed several key workers from the factory in Guangzhou, China. Although the fires coincided with Santini’s visit of the factory.

  And Collin had no evidence that Frank had anything to do with the incident. Leaving Santini on the loose is bad enough, Collin fumed. Frank was putting people at risk.

  Hard evidence was critical, Collin agreed. But a pattern of coincidences was just as telling, and there were too many coincidences involving Santini. Where Paul showed up, trouble followed. In Guangzhou, Sardinia, the Azores, Elba.

  Elba. Collin shrugged, not willing to contemplate what would have happened if he and his team hadn’t been right behind Helen on that country road and hadn’t interfered with the gun-wielding biker. If the fact that the would-be assassin had been arrested with the rest of Santini’s team on the Azores wasn’t hard evidence, Collin didn’t know what was.

  OK, the arrest had been brief and the charges mysteriously dismissed, but the incident only added weight to the “coincidences.”

  Which brought Collin to the very uncomfortable coincidence that Helen had been in all these places as well.

  Except China.

  Santini had flown to Guangzhou immediately after Elba, while Helen went back to Amsterdam.

  Collin leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and put his hands behind his head.

  Yes! China was the pattern interrupt. In all the places Helen went to, crimes had been prevented. Not so in China. The fires went on and killed.

  Collin straightened up in his chair. That Helen was in danger was an understatement. He had to speak with her.

  He had plenty of unused vacation days. His sister had been nagging him for weeks to visit her in Amsterdam. This was the perfect time to go.

  Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  A week later

  Helen spotted him right away. He was sitting in front of De Ysbreeker café, sipping his morning coffee, legs stretched all the way to the path running along the Amstel River. Looking like a local.

  As she walked past him, their eyes briefly met, and an unexpected familiarity tempted her to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she chided herself while walking on. Saturdays were her free days, but free didn’t include socializing with strangers. Not in her line of business. Still, since Jon had suggested she could quit the Project, she couldn’t help but fantasize about living a normal life…like sitting in a café without constantly worrying about making a tiny mistake that could ruin thousands of lives…

  At least she’d have dinner with Jon in the evening. Cook for them in his place. Helen was looking forward to it. Who knows? If the evening went well…

  Helen reached the Carré theater, paused briefly, pretending to study their program, and scanned the sidewalk behind her. There he was, the guy from De Ysbreeker, not far away. He was easy to spot, being taller than even the notably tall Dutch. He had to be at least six foot eight. Athletic, dark hair, chiseled features. Who sent him? Why? The local boys knew where she was…

  She checked that the simple phone she used to encourage the local surveillance crew to track her without breathing down her neck was engaged. It was.

  Alarmed, Helen sped up and turned on the Rokin instead of following her regular route through the floating flower market on the Singel Canal.

  Would he kill me in the middle of Amsterdam?

  He could. And no matter where she went, if he opened fire, innocent people would be hit because the city was bursting with tourists. It would go down like another senseless shooting. Shivers ran up Helen’s spine.

  Maybe it’s all a coincidence. Maybe she should retire because she was getting too paranoid. No, she wasn’t. Yes, she was more tense than usual, still reeling from the events on Elba. Yet there were too many incidents for this to be a coincidence. Someone tried to kill her. And someone saved her ass when she made a stupid mistake. And someone warned her on the Azores.

  Helen sneaked a peek behind her. He followed her without trying to hide it. Who is he? Did he help her out on Elba? Or was he hired to kill her in broad daylight? The idea of being on someone’s hit list was as novel to Helen as it was shocking. Surreal. Her stomach flipped every time it crossed her mind.

  Queasy, Helen entered De Bijenkorf, a popular Dutch department store. She lingered in the perfume section, taking her time sampling scents she didn’t intend to buy. The store was crowded, and no one paid attention to her. Except him. Although he feigned interest in the overpriced handbags.

  Helen left De Bijenkorf, crossed the Dam, and fol
lowed the Prinsengracht to the Noordermarkt farmers’ market. She bought flowers and walked over to the artisan bread stall. And there he was again, right behind her in the line. The moment of truth.

  “I know who tried to kill you on Elba,” he said quietly. Deep, pleasant voice.

  Helen slowly turned to face him.

  “I am a friend,” he said and held out his hand.

  Helen held his smoky-gray eyes. Trustworthy. Just as his strong handshake. She caught herself hoping that he was a friend. She needed one. Longed for one. But that didn’t mean that she should fall for anyone friendly, she reminded herself.

  “Friends are precious,” Helen said, detecting some sadness in the deep grays. She wanted to take it away. “So, what’s your favorite bread here?”

  “I love the sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella, and pesto swirl.”

  Hm, so he has been here before. “That’s my favorite too,” Helen said truthfully, then ordered two of the delicious breads and gave him one.

  “For you. As in breaking bread and all that.” She smiled, noticing his eyes lit up. She wanted to ask him what his name was, but names meant nothing in their business. Besides, they had been talking too long already.

  “Thank you. Talk to me when you need to.” He took the bread and quickly pressed a folded perfume-testing strip into her hand.

  Helen moved toward the handmade pasta stall, watching him leave the market. The perfume strip burned in her fingers. Unable to resist any longer, she faked a cough and lifted her hand to her mouth. A faint whiff of her favorite perfume caressed her nostrils.

  Coincidence?

  Amsterdam

  Helen put on skinny white jeans and the softest, palest blue top. She touched up her makeup and completed her outfit with raw aquamarine earrings and a matching ring. She had a collection of highly polished and highly cherished jewelry pieces, but the free-spirited chunkiness of the natural stones touched her soul and put a smile on her face. She rechecked her appearance in the mirror, but her thoughts were still at the Noordermarkt.