The Project

by I C Cosmos

  Helen recalled Bobby telling her that he had a gaming site. Not a gamer, Helen hadn’t paid much attention to the details, but Bobby’s dedication had been genuine. He wasn’t a faker. Helen was sure of that. Bobby’s passion for the real stuff was what had attracted her to him in the first place.

  Still, Bobby was TP’s CEO. The idea that he possibly orchestrated a fraud of such proportions made Helen sick to her stomach. If he were involved, he couldn’t have done this on his own. The security measures on the Project were extraordinary. There must have been an insider who betrayed them.

  First the rogues and now this. Feeling nauseous, Helen walked outside and leaned on the glass railing of the terrace. Something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right from the very beginning of the Project, but she was too focused on her own tasks to question it.

  The cold rain washed away the veneer of normalcy that kept the Project together. The vague tension that had stewed deep down in Helen since she left Jakarta burst out like hot lava and highlighted the staggering difference between her job at the embassy and on the Project.

  Helen used to think it was the never-ending pressure of the Project that made her feel on edge and unhappy. She couldn’t have been more wrong. She rolled her lips in. Stress wasn’t the culprit. The embassy job wasn’t a walk through a rose garden either. Long hours, technological and cultural “crises” rolling in faster than the waves in the Java Sea. But she was proud to be on the team. Happy about their progress. Her work made sense.

  There was no team to speak of on the Project. No one to discuss strategies with. No feedback. No background information. She received digital orders from people she never met in person. She didn’t know who else worked on the Project and what they were doing. Crazy! Helen shook her head.

  The Project was a top-secret operation. Helen understood that. Still, secrecy wasn’t the same as security. The secretiveness with which the Consortium ran the Project opened doors to breaches. Helen saw that now.

  And she saw how narrow her life had become. She didn’t even read books anymore. She started several books while working on the Project but didn’t finish any. Somehow it didn’t feel right to spend time on fictional characters when real terrorists were looming around the corner.

  But was she working on fighting terrorists, or on fooling civilians into unknowingly spreading political BS?

  How could I be so stupid?

  Thinking she was doing the right thing, working on a project under the counterterrorism czar, approved by the president. Were they all frauds?

  Swirls of anger ripped through her like a hurricane. Bitter tears ran down her cheeks, mixing with the chilly rain.

  To add to her exasperation, something urgent was tugging at her mind, but she couldn’t grasp it.

  I need to get out of here, Helen decided. She needed a change of place and pace.

  There was no way she’d solve anything in this gloomy rain.

  Amsterdam

  Across the street

  Nic woke up on the couch, his apps buzzing on the coffee table. He checked the apps and rushed to the window. A taxi was waiting in front of Helen’s building. The elevator was going down, clearly visible in the glass facade. Helen walked out and got into the car.

  Where is she going? With one exception, she took a taxi only to the airport, but there wasn’t a trip scheduled. What did he miss? Nic was close to panicking. Luckily, the phone she used to keep the local cowboys off her back was on. He followed it going to the Vrijheidslaan and then to the A4. She was going to the Schiphol airport. Unless she was bluffing. Which was possible because she’d abandoned her regular routine.

  She didn’t go on her Saturday walk. Understandable, considering the weather. Nic missed following her around nonetheless. And then she stayed up into the early morning hours, the lights bright in her apartment. She hadn’t ever done that before. And now the unscheduled trip.

  Sweating, Nic dispatched his bots to fetch the lists of passengers on planes departing from Schiphol in two to four hours. Talk about a needle in a haystack. He fed his bots with the names she used to travel under, without success. He scrolled feverishly through destinations and passenger names, the tension building up, almost choking him.

  And then he spotted it. Singapore airlines to Denpasar, Bali, under her own name. Nic gasped. What’s going on? The Consortium hadn’t originated any travel orders to Bali, Indonesia. And if they had, she wouldn’t be traveling under her own name.

  Nic stared at the screen, flabbergasted. She was traveling under her own name, which meant on her own. Not on the job. She was on vacation! Nic laughed out loud. She was taking time off on Bali. The guts!

  How can she go on vacation when— Nic stopped himself. She doesn’t know… She just turned in a major program and took a break. That’s what normal people do. That’s what astonished Nic about Helen the most. She was so exceptional but behaved like normal people did.

  Which was one of her biggest strengths. No matter what she did, it looked like the most normal thing in the world. Like when she had walked out of the hotel in Nuoro on the day he had quit the Project…strolling to the car leisurely, taking a moment to admire the panorama like a carefree tourist.

  Nic had left their room before dawn, planning to take the hiking trail to Nuoro and leave Sardinia before the Consortium realized he was AWOL. But once he was out of the hotel, he couldn’t do it. He waited in the forest, hiding behind a pile of freshly chopped wood, making sure she was OK.

  And OK she was. Doing the normal thing. The same in Olbia. Strolling from the museum as if she’d had the most pleasant afternoon there, minutes after rendering the ferry bomber ineffective. And then going through fashion mags on the ferry to Civitavecchia, after that asshole Santini planted a bomb in the Mercedes. She must have known that the Consortium wanted her dead, but no one looking at her would ever detect anything out of the ordinary.

  Although there was brief shock on her face when his face popped up on the TV as the suspected bomber. She didn’t expect that. Neither did he, actually. But he had been safe at that moment because no one would have connected the face on the TV with the priest limping behind Helen, bent over his cane.

  But there was a problem with being normal. She hadn’t expected that her programs would be misused in the worst way. Nic snorted. The program she had submitted a few days ago looked brilliant from what he had glimpsed. The Consortium didn’t deserve being handed such a jewel.

  Nic wished he could be in Bali with Helen, but it wasn’t in the stars. He hacked into her flight booking, thinking about their morning swim in Sant’Antioco. He smiled. She’d be back in a week.

  He grabbed his elbow. OK, Helen’s vacation was unexpected, but it was a good opportunity to create several new covers and get corresponding passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards. The Consortium was on a crash course, and Nic had a feeling things would escalate soon. This was his time to get ready.

  Destroying the Consortium beyond repair was his highest priority, and he had to stay on top of the game. Timing was everything.

  Attacking too early would give them a chance to recover and destroy him. Waiting too long went hand in hand with the risk that the Consortium would get too powerful to destroy.

  Nic needed to decimate them with a lethal blow at the right time. And he needed Helen on the inside to achieve this. And on his side.

  Can I trust her?

  Bali, Indonesia

  Helen shifted in the private plunge pool in front of her room. The soothing water didn’t soothe her. The relaxing deep tissue massage she had received under the pergola next to the pool didn’t relax her. The aromatic oils that wafted through the air didn’t calm her. She barely noticed the spectacular view of the ocean. The frangipani blossoms floating in the water brought tears to her eyes, their purity in sharp contrast to TP’s depravity.

  Maybe she should have stayed in rainy Amsterdam. The serenity of the resort couldn’t cleanse the disgust flooding her. Tears streamed
over Helen’s cheeks. How did she ever become part of this?

  Uncle Andreas. Helen sighed. I should have never allowed him in my life. It had been Andreas who wouldn’t let go until she signed up for the Project. She had gotten in, excited, bursting with a sense of meaning. Ready to prevent terrorism and avenge her family.

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Helen submerged deeper in the water.

  Going back further, it had been Andreas who had convinced her to abandon her literary aspirations and study cyber communications at Georgetown. Playing on her grief and guilt.

  “You must do the right thing, Helen,” he’d said the day after they’d returned from Syria. “You owe it to your parents.”

  “I want to do the right thing,” Helen replied. She’d cried nonstop during the flight from Damascus to Geneva, inconsolable, unable to come to terms with never ever seeing them again, never hugging them, never laughing with them.

  But as the plane taxied to the gate, something snapped in her and dried her tears. As if something powerful lifted her up and showed her that crying wouldn’t bring them back. That she had to move forward. The sooner the better.

  So Helen was all ears when Andreas talked about doing the right thing.

  “You mustn’t waste your talents,” he said. “And frankly, how could you ever study literature after what happened?”

  Helen held her breath.

  “If you hadn’t attended the workshop…” Andreas didn’t finish the sentence.

  He hadn’t had to. Helen had known what he implied.

  She still struggled with it. Another conversation came to her mind.

  “Was it planned? That Andreas would be in Damascus?” Nic had asked.

  “No.”

  “So he just showed up…and you trust he wasn’t involved in the incident?”

  Helen cringed. The possibility that Andreas had something to do with killing Josh and her parents was as shocking now as when Nic had brought it up. But it was a possibility, and Helen no longer rejected it on the grounds that Andreas was her mom’s brother. Andreas can’t be trusted.

  Nonetheless, since Damascus, Andreas had been prominently on the stage during pivotal moments in her life. Always showing up, one way or another. Never failing to mention the bomb attack. Playing on her guilt…intimidating her.

  Was that the point of giving Jon the Keirincx? To remind her of her guilt every time she entered Jon’s study?

  Helen had run the images of Jon’s and Mom’s paintings through several comparison apps, and they all came back with a nearly perfect match. The chance that Jon would get the painting Andreas stole without Andreas’s “help” was as good as zero.

  Was Andreas telling her that he could take whatever he wanted without any repercussions? That he controlled everyone? Helen closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Snippets of scenes were replaying in her mind.

  “My dad is a fraud…he became one of them…abandoned our mission…goes after power and money.”

  “You two are such a lovely couple…are you on TP?”

  Nic sitting on the ferry to Olbia, looking aghast.

  That! Helen opened her eyes. That was it, the thing that had been playing hide-and-seek with her since she discovered the fraud. It kept slipping away from her, but she grasped it now.

  I’ve connected the dots the wrong way, she realized. She had assumed that Nic looked so shocked on the ferry because of seeing Santini. But what if he had been shocked because the woman mentioned Total Protection?

  Helen’s heart thumped in her chest, telling her she was on to something.

  Did Nic know about TP? Was it the reason why he quit the Project? And what was the connection between TP/DEI and the Consortium? How did Frank fit in? Why didn’t Nic tell her about it? Because, being Andreas’s niece, she wasn’t to be trusted?

  Helen shook her head.

  The questions kept attacking her like a swarm of nasty mosquitoes. She climbed out of the pool, restless. She couldn’t stay in Bali another minute. Soaking in an infinity pool and doing nothing wasn’t going to solve her problems. She needed to go back and do some serious research.

  Helen fetched her laptop and scrolled through outbound flights from Denpasar. She found a seat on a flight to Paris and booked it. Perfect! Helen loved Paris. But that wasn’t why she was going there. She had business to take care of in Paris that had been on her to-do list for a long time.

  She removed a frangipani flower from her ankle and put it gently back into the plunge pool, determined to set things straight.

  ~~~

  Helen strolled along Boulevard Haussmann, inhaling the unique Parisian air, not thinking about anything in particular. She was close to her destination and, looking up to check the house numbers, nearly collided with a tall guy in a dark blue blazer who rushed out of the building in front of her.

  “Désolée,” she said automatically, and froze.

  It was Nic.

  For a second they were suspended amid Parisians rushing past them, their eyes locked. Then Nic turned around and disappeared in the crowd.

  The fear in his eyes glued Helen to the spot.

  Dallas, Texas

  The next day

  “We lost her.”

  “What?!” Collin bolted up in his bed. It was 4:16 in the morning, and this wasn’t the message he wanted to hear at this time. Or anytime.

  “Well, technically we still have her. But it’s only her phone.”

  “Are you saying she slipped away from the resort in Bali and left her phone behind?”

  “Yes. The resort’s security cameras didn’t record her leaving, but we know that she flew from Denpasar to Paris. Under her own name. The French confirmed she landed at Charles de Gaulle at six thirty this morning. Their time, which makes it almost five hours ago. They are now searching their surveillance videos to confirm it was her.”

  “And that’s the last place she was spotted?” Collin asked, although he knew the answer already.

  “Correct.”

  “Damn!” Five hours! She could be anywhere. Frank would go apeshit. He had been impossible to deal with since Elba, demanding updates on Helen’s whereabouts several times per day. If this wouldn’t put him over the edge, Collin didn’t know what would.

  “Yeah. But this isn’t our fault.”

  “Sure. Tell it to the judge.” Collin got up, his brain in overdrive. They had four hours at the most before Frank started breathing down their necks. “Tell me everything you have.”

  “She had a massage in her suite at eleven in the morning. Bali time. The masseuse left at noon. We have a video confirming it. At two forty-five she ordered two bottles of champagne. Delivered at two fifty-six. Then she ordered a large meal at three ten. Delivered at three thirty-five. A video shows her opening the door and raising a glass of champagne with a huge smile. That’s all we have from the resort. The rest is from her phone. Switching between Kindle and CNN until ten thirty in the evening. And then again from eight thirty in the morning. It’s still going on now, almost ten hours later. It’s late afternoon there now.”

  “And a Do Not Disturb sign hangs on her door, I guess,” Collin said, suppressing a chuckle. A classic diversion. Simple and effective. It would give him a good laugh if he weren’t so worried about Helen.

  “Yes. A Do Not Disturb sign is on since the food delivery.”

  “What time was her flight?”

  “Seven-oh-five last night…local.”

  “What made you check out the flights?” Collin asked. “People binge read, you know.”

  “She didn’t order any food. And the maid knocked on the door twice. Let’s see at—”

  “Got it.” In a flash, Collin saw a way out. “Great job. And you are right. This isn’t our fault. I’ll take care of it.”

  A good offense is the best defense, Collin decided. He’d wake Frank up and raise hell because Frank hadn’t informed them about Helen’s travel plans. He’d demand more boots on the ground. Frank couldn’t expect
Collin’s team to walk on water. Certainly not when they were kept in the dark.

  That should take care of the immediate job trouble. But not of Helen.

  Undoubtedly, she wanted to buy herself some time to fly to Paris without a tail. But why did she go to Bali in the first place? If she wanted to slip to Paris unnoticed, she could have pulled the same trick on them from Amsterdam. Leave the phone behind in her condo and spend a couple of days in Paris without anyone noticing.

  Maybe she changed her plans. Maybe she flew to Bali planning to take some time off, but then something happened and she cut her vacation short. After all, she wasn’t hiding. Flew under her own name and carried the you-can-follow-me-now phone with her. And then left it behind.

  Collin sighed. What happened? And why Paris? Was it just a coincidence or a targeted destination? And what if they really lost her? Collin’s heart was beating uncontrollably.

  The idea of Helen disappearing forever was unbearable.

  Washington, DC

  The library

  “We have everything we need.” Moira’s lit-up torso dominated the dim library. “Helen’s newest AI program is in. She tweaked a few things after Elba, and it’s ready to go.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Let’s rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “Let’s don’t forget about Nic.”

  “Eliminating him is a top priority.”

  “Yes. He came close to killing her on Elba.”

  “How do we know it was Nic?”

  “Not Nic personally. He hired someone to assassinate her.”

  “Good. He can take care of her for us, and then we take care of him.”

  “We need her to protect us from him.”

  “We don’t need her. She isn’t the only talent around.”

  “But she is extremely effective.”