by Eliot Peper
“Can’t blame her. Manga’s the shit. I knew she had good taste.”
Nell harrumphed. “Want me to show you in?”
“Nah,” said Diana. “I can handle the disconnect.”
“Go on then, lovely.”
Diana slipped through the curtains and into the room beyond, savoring the rich texture of the fabric. Analog was enormous. Bow-tied bartenders tossed cocktail shakers behind a wide wooden bar that ran along the entire left wall, countless rare liquors filling the shelves that rose behind them. Booths lined the opposite wall, which was covered in medieval tapestries depicting epic battles, fabulous monsters, and scenes of royal grandeur. In a far corner, a jazz trio worked their way through the standards, the vocalist riffing up and down scales in a haunting series of nonsense syllables. It smelled of honey, leather, and paraffin, the latter emanating from the oil lamps hanging from the high ceiling on slender chains, filling the space with warm, flickering light.
Despite her nonchalance with Nell, Diana knew she needed to give herself a moment to adjust. No matter how many times she visited, it was still disorienting.
Silence.
Profound, disturbing silence that the music did nothing to dispel. No more photos of Haruki. No more neatly correlated logs. No more analytical overlays. Her entire dossier on the man, every digital breadcrumb of his personal history, had vanished.
But that was only the beginning.
Diana’s feed had disappeared. It was the umbilical cord linking her to the buzzing global hive mind, the forum for every strand of cultural conversation, the source of all knowledge, the venue for endless entertainment, the information infrastructure upon which the world was built. Gone. Gone so completely that it might never have existed. She couldn’t access the refractive index of her greenhouse panels, the contents of her secure caches, the Bulgarian folk playlist she’d assembled, the messages in her queue, or the local weather forecast. She was beyond the reach of the familiar cascade of updates and notifications. The steady hum of chatter that dissected every possible angle of any topic or story was abruptly cut off. The inevitable raging controversy over the twice-delayed release of Malignant Kernel’s new album was as inaccessible as the pundits sparring over President Lopez’s next move.
The world was both naked and obscure, shorn of the layers of metadata that made its mysteries legible. She was banished from the digital universe, its ever-present symphony of data reduced to a pervasive and unsettling quiet. The severed connection was a phantom limb, its absence leaving her aching for access.
Diana took a breath. Then another one, letting the jazz, muted laughter, and clinking of glasses wash over her. This respite from the feed was what Analog veterans treasured above all else, while virgins often needed Nell’s guiding hand on their arm just to make it to their seats.
Trying to embrace the information drought, Diana threaded through the tables that filled the space. As always, Analog was busy. Patrons ate, drank, and gabbed. She overheard an entrepreneur pitching a venture capitalist on a new synthetic biology pathway, a pair of old women arguing over a game of go, and a small group of stand-up comedians regaling each other with rough-cut jokes.
This was a place you came to get away from the public eye. That made it a magnet for the rich and powerful as well as those whose intentions were especially sensitive. Over the decades, the club’s reputation had acquired the sheen of mythology. Diana had heard through the grapevine that Ting-Ting Kuo, the legendary Taiwanese National Security Bureau chief of US operations, had run agents from here while sipping on rhum agricole, running FBI countersurveillance teams in circles. Gossip columnists claimed Lewis Parfit had announced his intention to divorce Sebastian Knight in one of these booths, setting off a socialite quake that had shaken celebrity culture to its foundations from Addis Ababa to Seoul. It was here that Huian Li had been struck with the inspiration to found Cumulus. William Gibson had spent three weeks holed up in a corner working on a novel, refusing to leave until he completed the rough draft of what would become the defining masterpiece of his literary career. Entrepreneurs, poets, technologists, politicians, scientists, builders, and dreamers flocked like starlings. The rumor mill never stopped churning. Famously, only a single person had ever made it in and out of Analog with an electronic recording device intact. Lynn Chevalier, the legendary investigative reporter, had used the incendiary audio to expose Vince Lepardis.
Diana thought about Chevalier every time she visited Analog. How had the woman done it? Even with the benefit of hindsight, nobody could figure it out. Journalism and espionage were sister professions. The only difference was that when they got their hands on something juicy, reporters ran wild like exhibitionists at the Folsom Street Fair while spies filed it away as leverage. When had appealing to the public interest really changed anything? Diana held pros like Chevalier in the highest esteem, right up to the point of publication.
Finally Diana reached the far side of the long hall where a magnificent fire roared in a hearth the size of an ox. She took care not to look too deeply into the heart of the dancing flames. They could conjure dark memories far too easily. Instead, she knelt to greet the three vizslas curled up on the thick Persian rug. The regal dogs lifted their heads, their golden eyes clear and intense.
“Hey, guys, it’s been a while.”
Waves of heat poured over her as she took turns scratching the dogs behind the ears. Up close she could see the strands of gray in their copper coats. One lifted a leg so she could rub his soft pink belly.
“I brought you something.”
They perked up with surprisingly human expressions of anticipation as she slid three pieces of bison jerky from a pocket.
“Don’t tell anyone, okay?” she stage-whispered as she fed them.
They responded with rough licks and wagging tails, which she took as confirmation.
“All right, fellas, enjoy your fire.”
Rising, she made her way to her favorite booth. It was the last one against the wall in the corner closest to the fire. From here she could see the entire club and keep an eye on anyone coming in or out.
No surprises.
An enormous scarlet cocktail topped with a mountain of garnishes sat sweating in the middle of the table. A Caesar. Diana blew a kiss to Virginia, who saluted her from behind the bar. Sliding in, she took a sip and savored the powerful mix of house-distilled gin and Clamato. There were hints of basil and even a touch of passion fruit.
That was the beauty of disconnection. Without the feed, everything was more sensual, more real. Analog should rent rooms by the hour. Sex here would be better than even the best pharmaceutically enhanced orgy.
But Diana wasn’t here for fun.
Across the club, the red satin curtains parted, and Nell led in a newcomer by the arm. The pair paused, giving the man time to adjust. Nell shot Diana a look, telling her what she already knew.
Haruki.
It was time to find out what this job was really about.
CHAPTER 3
“We need you to look into Commonwealth,” said Haruki, dark eyes intent.
With his tailored suit, intelligent face, coiffed hair, and air of supreme confidence, there was something about Haruki that reminded Diana of Dag. Or Dag before his initiation at commando camp in Namibia. Before she and the other instructors ground him and his fellow participants down until their egos fell away like chaff from wheat.
Dag. All of a sudden, she realized she hadn’t spared him so much as a thought since getting called to this meeting. Instead, she’d spent the intervening two days tracking down the anonymous sender who’d posted to her cache. Dag was probably consumed in one of his epic illustration sessions right now, totally immersed in the act of conjuring new worlds with nothing but graphite and paper. A fresh sense of affection surfaced within her. The avocado sapling in the front yard had benefited from a certain amount of benign neglect. Fussing over it too much yielded nothing but wilting foliage. Only when she left it alone for a while
had it perked up. Maybe relationships could be the same way.
Speaking of relationships, she needed to make sense of Haruki.
“Okay,” she said.
He looked nonplussed, then rallied.
“Yes, well,” he said, “we need to dig deeper than the public data that analysts have access to. What’s really going on inside the boardroom? What initiatives are they considering that haven’t been announced yet? What’s the political hierarchy within the executive team? How are they going to respond to President Lopez’s comments? Do they have plans to make additional changes to their terms of service? Why are they doing what they’re doing, and what are they going to do next? That kind of thing.”
Her ploy had worked. Like so many elite strivers, he was the kind of person who wanted to fill silence. Diana loved people like that.
“I see,” she said, keeping her expression neutral.
He tried not to squirm.
“So that’s why we’re here, you know?” he said, raising his chin to indicate Analog. “Outside the feed. Off-grid.”
“Are you concerned about feed infosec? Do you have reason to suspect Commonwealth might be tapping our communications?”
“No, no, no.” He shook his head. “Of course not. We just want to do things right. I’m sure you understand.”
“Why?” she asked.
“What?”
“Why? Why are you trying to get inside info on Commonwealth? Are you a competitor?”
Some of the confidence returned, and he smiled tightly.
“Look,” he said conspiratorially. “Obviously this is sensitive stuff, and we’d like to keep everything confidential. The less you know, the better, right?”
Diana slid out of the booth and stood.
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Abe,” she said, reaching down to slug the dregs of her Caesar. “Actually it’s been rather dull. But you can’t win ’em all, right? I’d say see you around, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Wait.” He looked around, incredulous. “What are you doing? Are you leaving?”
“Mr. Abe.” Diana splayed both palms on the table and leaned down so that her nose was inches away from his. “I flew over from an op in Nay Pyi Taw specifically for this meeting.” She hadn’t, of course, but he didn’t know that. “I did that because Jorge apparently thinks highly enough of you to direct you to one of my caches and let you drop his name. Based on this meeting, I plan to delete that particular cache and stop taking referrals from Jorge.” With these hot-shit types, you needed to put them in their place. If you didn’t, they’d get cranky later. Client work was all about up-management. When she left the CIA, Diana had hoped that the private sector would live up to its rhetoric of relentless efficiency and innovative leadership. It turned out to simply favor a perkier flavor of bullcrap. “I ought to thank you. You wasted my time, but you’re simplifying my life.”
“Stop. Look, I’m sorry.” The words were tumbling out. “Just sit back down, okay? I’ll give you all the background you want, all right? Listen.”
She could see the gears turning in his head, could imagine the boss who was going to harangue him for dropping the ball, the bonus that suddenly looked a lot less like a sure thing. People could be so predictable.
She straightened up, not breaking eye contact.
“We’ll double your fee,” he said, quieter this time, almost plaintive.
“I’m a professional,” she said. “And professionals need better reasons than money.”
“Okay, I get it,” he said. “We’ll triple the fee. Not to sweeten the pot, just to pay it forward. Lay the groundwork for a constructive working relationship. And I’ll explain our reasons. Just sit. Please.”
He still hadn’t noticed that she’d dropped his last name, which he hadn’t used when introducing himself. She glanced over at the dogs. They’d noticed when he joined her in the booth but had returned to intermittent napping immediately. It was hard to beat canine judgment for first impressions. Another reason she always took the table nearest the fire.
Enough. She slid back into the booth.
“You ordered a martini.” She nodded at his glass. “A martini. This isn’t an old-timey James Bond movie. That kind of shit makes you look like a fool.”
At least he had the decency to blush. Not a bad kid, just a little overexcited. Well, she had her answer as to why they were here. Aspirational espionage. She could imagine Helen’s sneer. Maybe Diana should have brought an explosive pen just to spice things up.
“Now,” she said, “explain.”
“Okay, listen,” he said. “I work for Hoffman and Associates. We’re a global private-investigation firm. We worked a corruption case down in Colombia a while back. That’s how I know Jorge.”
All of which she already knew, of course. But it was good to hear him say it. The easiest way to catch someone cheating was by knowing what cards they held. The fact that he worked for Hoffman fit. Folks who joined PI firms often had bad cases of spy-envy, especially when they discovered that asset tracing, litigation, and due diligence often consisted of little more than doing other people’s homework for them.
At least her little scene had greased the wheels on this conversation.
She spun an index finger in the air.
“Go on,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
Blood pounded in Diana’s ears as she ducked under a low-hanging manzanita branch to follow Sofia’s bouncing ponytail up the trail. Blinking away sweat, Diana tried to ignore the steady burn in her thighs and focused on regulating her breath. Apparently she wasn’t in as good shape as she had thought she was. On the other hand, Sofia was a maniac, running marathon after marathon in her spare time as if being a rockstar network engineer wasn’t enough. No wonder Diana was struggling to keep up.
Ahead, Sofia cleared a root and emerged onto a wider section of trail. The view opened up too, meadows falling away toward the Pacific Ocean on their left. Purple needlegrass, Idaho fescue, blue wild rye, and numerous other perennial grasses carpeted slopes that were scattered with glassy green outcrops of serpentine.
Diana loved it here. The greenhouse was a way for her to capture and cultivate a tiny sliver of wilderness, bring nature into her home, into her life. But these hills inspired an altogether different sense of wonder. There weren’t many areas left with the deep root systems necessary to support these wide swaths of native grasslands. The onslaught of climate change, farming, development, and invasive species had taken its toll. But with its diverse microclimates and decades of careful stewardship, Mount Tam was a bastion of biodiversity in what sometimes felt like a dying world.
Diana accelerated so they could run abreast.
“It’s been a while since we ran together,” said Sofia. Her Italian accent immediately marked her as a refugee, but Diana thought that the long vowels and singsong rhythm of her words turned English into a husky lullaby.
Diana puffed up her cheeks and opened her eyes wide in exaggerated distress. “And it’ll be even longer until the next time, if I manage to survive this Navy SEAL attrition exercise. Are you joining the Olympic team or something?”
Sofia’s laugh started as a bark and ended as a tinkle. “Not quite,” she said. “But I’m signed up for an ultra up in British Columbia later this year.”
“You’re a masochist! Is there a zombie apocalypse coming that you haven’t told me about? What on earth are you running from?”
Sofia shot her a look. She was smirking, but there were shadows behind her large eyes. Reflected in them, Diana could see the streets of Rome burning, the infamous sacking of the Vatican, and the shattered families of her hometown near the French border. Sofia would never again taste the white truffles, hazelnuts, and Barbaresco once consumed in such quantities at the annual Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d’Alba. Today Alba was just another line item in the curriculum of high school history classes, one of thousands of towns destroyed in the slow-motion collapse of the European Union.
It reminded Diana of her own grandmother’s potent silences, stand-ins for untold atrocities and acts of desperate heroism. Diana’s confused, disturbing memories from early childhood were little better than a cheap kaleidoscope. Looking up at the crumbling stone walls of the ancient Tsarevets fortress, the sweet-and-sour taste of kiselo mlyako, the incomprehensible but palpable fear shimmering off the adults around her as they boarded a smuggler’s boat in the early hours of the morning. Bulgaria had fallen years before Italy, but the tragedies of war were universal.
It was that hard kernel of loss that had kept Diana and Sofia connected over the years since they first met in a dusty, crowded refugee camp outside of Marseille. That shared sense of being uprooted, of yearning for something fading into the mists of time, of needing to escape the inescapable.
What was Sofia running from? The same thing Diana was.
The trail turned in toward the mountain, adjacent ridges wrapping them in a tight embrace. Majestic redwoods stood guard over the creek that had carved out this wash. As Sofia and Diana crossed into the shade, the temperature dropped ten degrees. It was as if they had been transported into a new world. Rare Methuselah’s beard lichen hung from branches in wispy, ghostlike tufts. The rough auburn bark and soft forest floor muffled the sounds of their footfalls. This was a place where spirits might reside, where secrets could be confided.
Neither the grove nor the timing of Diana’s seemingly innocuous question had been accidents. In the quest for human intelligence, anything and everything could be a tool.
“So how are things at work?” asked Diana.
“Oh, I’m sure you can guess,” said Sofia. “It’s crazy, as always. Herding cats.”
“Yeah? What’s the current flavor of crisis? They seem to have you moving from one to the next.”
And because Sofia was smart and had the honed instincts of a survivor, she shot Diana another, sharper, look.
“You know what Commonwealth is like,” said Sofia. “Ironclad NDAs and all that. My lips are sealed with the nastiest draconian terms our lawyers can dream up. Slipups earn an eternity of fire and brimstone. They’re worse than the pope. It’s irritating not being able to talk about projects with people. But what can I do?”
