by Eliot Peper
Diana sipped her Caesar, imagining barbarians massing at the gates of ancient Rome.
What Haruki didn’t know, what he didn’t have the experience or imagination to suspect, was that she’d spiked the report with a tracker.
CHAPTER 10
Diana arranged everything. She sought out Dag’s favorite art-supply shop in Berkeley, a strange hole-in-the-wall with matryoshka dolls in the window and an ancient feedless proprietor. After sharing a shot of his eye-watering homemade gin, he had offered to sell her something special, a set of premium drawing charcoal that he swore was peerless. From there, she’d greased the palm of one of the young waiters smoking a cigarette in the alley behind Dag’s favorite restaurant. Finally, she’d secured tickets to a hush-hush soft opening of a new gallery show that was hosting a painter whose work Dag adored.
Throughout it all, she followed the digital trail of the report she’d submitted to Haruki. She could see where it was sent, how it was opened, and a slew of other metadata. Making a move on her own initiative was rejuvenating.
She opened the cottage door, and Dag looked up from where he stood working on a sketch. He smiled and swept her up in an embrace.
“Look who decided to take a break from life in the shadows,” he said.
“The shadows are all well and good,” she said. “But I get frustrated without my boy toy.” She pinched his ass. “And you know what I’m like when I get frustrated.”
“The world trembles, the dead rise again, and far-off galaxies go supernova.”
“Exactly,” she said matter-of-factly. “And who wants that?”
“Very public-spirited of you to return.”
“I’m nothing if not beneficent. When you’re as supremely intelligent, inspiring, and humble as I am, there’s really no other option.”
“The rest of us live in awe of you, my love. You are a god among men. Or a goddess among women, or a deity among people. Whatever.”
“If only the other lowly humans did not deny the reality of my holiness, we could dance naked through the streets, open the gates to heaven, and enjoy peace on earth.”
She kissed him on the mouth.
“Hey,” he said, his expression softening. “I’ve missed you.”
“You too, babe,” she said, surprised to realize it was true. Over his shoulder, her eyes found the sketch mounted on the drafting table. “Wow, that’s incredible.”
Color touched his cheeks. “Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s nothing special. I’m just getting started.”
But it was special. La Jolla Cove spread out before her in all its apocalyptic glory. Warped steel beams and crumbling concrete reached up like bleached bones from where the town used to be. Asphalt appeared to froth and flow where it had solidified after the extreme heat had turned the streets into slow-motion rivers of hydrocarbon. Ash fell from the sky thick as snow, obscuring the horizon. These were the only remains left behind by the infamous fire that had consumed all of Southern California, the single most destructive natural disaster in American history. Thousands had died and millions had fled, flooding neighboring states and filling the vast new housing projects that Dag had once helped oil magnate Lowell Harding build as a part of the billionaire’s multipronged scheme to profit from the privations of climate change. As she moved closer to inspect it, she noticed a fantastical element that gave the piece the surreal aspect of magical realism. While the land held nothing but debris, fish leapt from the waves that lapped against the beach, and sea lions soaked up sun on the rocks.
Diana glanced sidelong at Dag, saw him regarding her, watching her reaction. She wasn’t the only one driven by guilt, haunted by misdeeds she’d rather forget. This was a man who had given up everything for a chance at redemption. That made him at once fascinating and somehow inaccessible to her, a combination that either drove her mad with lust or just plain mad. She reached out and touched the paper, feeling the grain. Even incomplete, the sketch had a raw power to it, an authenticity that their conversations often lacked.
“I brought you something,” she said.
Dag smiled in a way that said, Of course you did. He opened the box and inspected the charcoal. Holding up a single piece, he sniffed it, touched it to his tongue, and etched a sharp line across the ridge of Mount Soledad where it rose behind La Jolla.
Diana gasped. The movement had been quick and violent, the gash of darkness stark amid the slim and graceful pencil lines.
“It’s magnificent,” he said. “Thank you. I think I might be able to guess where you found it.”
“Can you guess where I’m taking you to dinner?”
They took a car into Oakland, and Diana led the way down the short flight of stairs. When she opened the unmarked wooden door, the smells of pork, garlic, and onion enveloped them. The beaded curtain chittered as they passed into the low-ceilinged ramen bar filled with noise, steam, and smoke. The walls were covered in detailed murals of ancient mythical beasts invading modern cityscapes. It was hot and crowded, but Diana’s waiter waved them over to a table tucked into a nook, winking at her as they sat. He returned a few minutes later with huge steaming bowls of tonkotsu ramen and pints of cold beer.
They slurped the thick broth, relishing the handmade noodles and slow-cooked pork. It reminded Diana of operations in Tokyo, slumming with yakuza informants and liaising with Naichō, the Japanese intelligence agency. That made her think of Akira, which made her think of Nell, which made her think of Haruki, and then, even as they finished their bowls and ordered another round of beers, Diana put the conversation on autopilot and summoned her feed.
The report had been sent through San Francisco to Singapore and then Washington, DC, ping-ponging up the hierarchy of Hoffman and Associates, Haruki’s employer. She flagged the accounts of each individual the report passed through, pulling up their profiles and cross-referencing against Hoffman’s track record of private investigations. A few opened the file and perused it at length. Others simply forwarded it along.
Diana’s tracker was a tiny sliver in the vast and overwhelming Commonwealth security apparatus that protected the feed, only possible through a combination of favors from a brilliant Austrian coder who owed her his freedom and Cynthia over at NSA, who had conveniently “forgotten” to wipe Diana’s official log-in credentials.
Whatever small ways Diana managed to subvert the feed paled in comparison to Emily and Javier’s unprecedented hack. Diana remembered her abject shock as she had plumbed the depths of Dag’s feed archive to discover that someone had root access to Commonwealth’s systems. It was the exploit to end all exploits. It cracked the entire feed open like a ripe fruit, laying bare every log, every connected system, every life on earth. It was an exceptional, terrifying masterpiece, an extravagance of riches for any secret-hoarder.
Was it possible that was the dirt Haruki’s masters were after? Had they smelled something rotten? No. There were too few people who knew that anything had occurred, let alone what had really happened. And every single one of those people had every incentive to keep their mouths shut, including Diana and Dag.
More impressive than Javier’s exploit was how Emily had used it. With her team of hacker psychologists, she had burrowed into the feeds of key decision makers and manipulated every detail of their lives for years until they saw the world the way she wanted them to. She had done that to Dag. Had even implanted within him a fascination with her own visage, slowly turning herself into an object of sexual obsession long before he’d even known she existed.
Something quickened inside Diana. Emily was a genius and a snake. Diana had tracked her down based on little more than Dag’s lovingly rendered sketches of Emily’s remembered face. How eager he’d been, how full of burgeoning desire. And yet Emily had inspired him to trade cynicism for hope, to do what he thought was right even as she carefully curated the substrate that fueled his motivations. Could Diana honestly say that she was bringing out the best in Dag, or he in her? Instead of encouraging each other’s best quali
ties, was their relationship eroding the very things that made them special? Or maybe her own delusions were reflecting back on each other. Diana was living her love life in deep cover, refusing to extend trust even as she relished receiving it. But despite herself, details shone through the fissures of daily life, details she never planned to disclose, details that kindled the thrill of shared intimacy even as they tarnished the sacred rules of tradecraft. The whole thing made Diana sick to her stomach. It made her despise Dag for being a puppet and pity him for being taken advantage of. She wanted to sever Emily’s reins and take him all for herself. But at the same time, she wanted to rid herself of the shameful desire to possess him, to excise the shadows from her heart.
“Forget the gallery,” she said with sudden intensity. The meal was over, but a different kind of hunger rose within her. “Let’s go home. My frustration’s getting out of hand.”
Even though it took what felt like an eternity to get back to their bedroom, they started slow. She slipped out of her dress, letting it fall around her ankles as she unbuttoned his shirt and stripped him naked before pushing him down onto the bed. His skin was hot under hers, his barely restrained desire enflaming her own. They kept their touch light, all lips and fingertips and feathery sensation. Then his hand was between her legs, and a small whimper escaped her. She found him, relished his hardness, but even as they played with each other, whispering nonsense, the anticipation became too great to bear.
Swinging her leg up and over, she mounted him. They found a deliberate, unhurried cadence, stepping to the edge of ecstasy before reeling themselves back in. Their breaths, their hearts, matched the tempo measure for measure, until everything was a single interlocking pattern. Every inch of Diana’s skin was electric, and a light kindled deep inside her. With each salvo, the light pulsed bigger and brighter. Their hold on self-control began to loosen, and time lost its constancy. The smell of sex and sweat, the desperate panting, the pyrotechnics of a million nerve endings, the guilt and lust and raw compassion, all bled into each other until they were everything and nothing. And then the light spread and swelled and burst within her, pouring from her eyes, her mouth, her heart, her mind, transforming her into a Valkyrie of pure energy that illuminated the entire universe and was illuminated by every star, every galaxy, and she was in a house of a thousand mirrors where every reflection amplified the power of the light, and she was riding the crest of a wave a hundred miles high, and she was shining, shining, shining until she wasn’t and it was fading and it was done.
Diana collapsed onto the bed. As the echoes of infinity receded, she coasted back from oblivion into self-awareness, self-possession. Dag’s breath was ragged beside her, his body slick with sweat, the bed soaked. The air was close and humid, goose bumps rising on her naked skin as the heat of their union dissipated.
Buoyed by trailing jolts of pleasure, Diana summoned her feed from the periphery. Orgasm had wiped her mind clean, laying bare a simmering anxiety. Why had she been tasked with collecting a full take on Rachel? Who stood to benefit from that information? What could they possibly want to use it for? Diana had built many such profiles in the past, but only in advance of a specops mission. Assassination, kidnapping, countersurveillance, all of them required rigorous physical surveillance. But an industry “white paper” or betting against a stock? Hardly.
The report had finally left Hoffman’s orbit, pinging through a few different servers before arriving in Manhattan. She cross-referenced the recipient. A managing director at Leviathan. Bingo.
That confirmed her initial hypothesis. Haruki was a Leviathan cutout. But it didn’t clarify the issue at hand. Was she overthinking this? Could this simply be amateurs asking the wrong questions, Haruki letting his spy-envy get the better of him? Or was Leviathan working some other angle, looking to find an excuse to oust Rachel rather than short the stock? Maybe Diana was just a washed-up ex-agent so desperate for a taste of the old game that she’d chase her own tail into psychosis, let her life crumble around her as she tilted at windmills.
And then the managing director sent on the report, and Diana’s breath caught in her throat. He used a secure connection, routing it through Kathmandu, Seoul, La Paz, Calgary, Amsterdam, and a hundred other locations. The encryption did a decent job of protecting the transmission from prying eyes but did nothing to her tracker hiding safely inside the Trojan horse that was the report itself. And then it arrived at its destination.
Washington, DC, area. More specifically, McLean, Fairfax County, Virginia. McLean was an exclusive Beltway suburb populated by the capital’s political elite. Shuffling data in her feed, she zeroed in on the identity of the recipient.
Sean Bancroft.
A ripple of disorientation swept through her. Sean was Dag’s mentor. Just as Helen had trained Diana to be a top intelligence operative, Sean had helped Dag become a rising star at Apex, the preeminent political lobbying firm. Even after Dag had left the firm three years ago, Diana knew he had stayed in touch with Sean. Sean and Diana knew each other, or at least knew of each other, because of the freelance missions she’d run for Dag when he was still at Apex. If Sean was commissioning this project, why had he used cutouts instead of reaching out to her directly? What was he hiding? Or, more likely, whom was he hiding?
Dag knew Sean better than anyone. Should she ask Dag what his old boss might be planning? Perhaps he could provide some much-needed insight. But that would require her to brief him on the situation, and that was a bridge too far. Dag was already here, in her home, in her bedroom, in her heart. He had already slipped through too many layers of the armor with which she protected herself. Already a liability, the risk of further contamination was too great.
Uncertainty compounded into nausea. Could Dag know about this? Was he the reason Sean was taking so many precautions? Was her and Dag’s relationship nothing more than a stratagem in some larger game? Were the secrets they sought not Rachel’s but her own? Unlike Haruki, a childhood spent shuffling between foster homes, years of high-level lobbying, and his specops course in Namibia had made Dag an expert social hacker. He could lie as well as anyone and was as much of a survivor as Sofia or Diana.
Dispelling her feed, she appraised the man beside her.
Dag was propped up on an elbow, staring at her.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m right here,” she said, hating the defensiveness that infected her words.
He paused, tried again.
“I know your body’s here,” he said. “But you are somewhere else. In your feed, in your thoughts, in the clouds, somewhere else. Take me there.”
“It’s nothing,” said Diana. The last thing she wanted was to invite him into her head. “I was just daydreaming.”
“Daydreaming’s not nothing,” he said. “Daydreaming is the bulk of the work of any artist. What were you daydreaming about?”
That just like Haruki, I’m the pawn in someone else’s game. That I can’t escape my past. That you’re not really my boyfriend. Suddenly she just wanted to get out. The fresh-baked-bread scent of cum, the sticky sheets, his demanding gaze, her tainted home, her broken self, everything disgusted her.
She sat up.
“What was I daydreaming about? I was daydreaming about having the freedom to do whatever I want, of being able to come home and just relax and have time alone, of you not besieging every aspect of my goddamn life like it’s one of the fucking medieval castles you love reading about so much. Can’t I even have my own thoughts? Jesus.”
There were moments when you regretted words even as you said them but couldn’t swallow them any more than you could turn back time.
He lay there, looking stunned.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out all wrong.”
He shook his head.
“You’re not sorry,” he said. “You’re being honest. You think I’m some kind of leech. Well, how do you think I feel? Sitting around here waiting for you to come home. You never tell me wher
e you’re going, what you’re doing, when you’re going to be back. We’ve been living together for three years, and I’ve never met a single one of your friends, never heard a single thing about your family. I get it, your work is important to you. Your privacy is important to you. But come on. You have more borders and treaties and NDAs in your head than the fucking United Nations. It’s like you’re a shadow of a person. You know what I think about when I’m working on a piece? I think about all the ways you might die out there, all the horrible things that could be happening to you, what I would do if you just never came home. It’s like some sick fascination. I can’t get it out of my head. It drives me nuts. And then you just appear out of nowhere and try to win me over with gifts, favors, and a good fuck. So if I’m a leech, you’re a . . . a . . . a ghost.”
Diana saw her regret mirrored in his eyes and needed to escape it.
“I’ve gotta go,” she said, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt.
“Of course you do,” he said. But his voice was more sad than venomous. “Whenever there’s a chance to get real, you run for your life. I guess it must be easier to cling to God and country or whatever it is that makes spies tick.”
“Why don’t you go draw a picture or something?” she said, grabbing her go-bag from under the bed. “I’ve got actual work to do.”
CHAPTER 11
The problem with hiding in a pantry was that there was nothing to distract Diana from hating herself, except the feed. So she binged, drowning heartache in a tidal wave of information. She responded to every outstanding message. She followed up with contacts she hadn’t touched base with for a while. She watched slow-motion highlight reels of the World Cup qualifiers, the latest critically acclaimed immersive short from Sundance, and a video of a goat skydiving. She devoured news like a famine survivor at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Commonwealth had announced yet another acquisition. The next day, Javier had penned an op-ed outlining a radical plan to make the tech giant more accountable to its users, and pundits were at each other’s throats. An international scientific commission was reporting that although carbon emissions were down, the impacts of climate change would continue to shape the world for centuries. The superstorm bearing down on Europe underscored their projections. Rumors circulated about why Alexis Hamid was dropping out of the world BASE jumping championships. The New York Times had profiled President Lopez, recalling how he’d taken the reins after President Freeman’s tragic heart attack and then returned years later to win a nonconsecutive second term. Diana thought it was a good story, even though it missed the only truly crucial detail. Through it all, her feed played Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin and other Bulgarian folk classics in the background, and Diana dreamed of the empty space between the stars.
