Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  That was why, even though every cell in her body screamed to rush straight to Dag’s aid, Diana had returned to the Bay Area to make a few hurried arrangements. Kendrick, attending a conference in San Francisco, had visited her this morning to tacitly confirm a few pesky financial odds and ends that would make the false evidence appear legitimate. When he returned to DC, Helen might have someone confirm the nature of his conversation with Diana, and he would report that things were as they should be. Sofia had arrived shortly after his departure, but confident that Helen wouldn’t interfere directly with an agent so sensitive, Diana had simply treated her to lunch. If Helen had Sofia under any kind of surveillance, her visit would imply Diana’s continued loyalty.

  On her flight back from Idaho, Diana had scribbled fictional updates and added them to an automated queue for scheduled delivery to Helen. She had drafted similar messages to be sent to others, ordered materials delivered to her cottage, even accessed her still-active NSA permissions and created a host of false geotagged activity, digital chaff to throw off pursuers and delay Helen’s unavoidable discovery that her new conquest had gone rogue. When Diana became the signal, more noise meant more time.

  “Good afternoon.”

  Haruki called Diana back to the painful present.

  “Please, sit.”

  Virginia emerged from behind the bar to supply them fresh drinks, and they settled in.

  “Given that there’s nothing in the cache, I’m assuming whatever you’ve found on Rachel is so sensitive, you had to report back in person,” said Haruki, his eyes bright with suppressed anticipation. “I’ve spoken to our partners, and if the quality of your intel stays high, we’ll have plenty more work for you coming down the pipe. This industry report is only one of many projects we have in the works, and it’s tough to find reliable people.”

  Diana had to check herself. Haruki still knew nothing about what was really going on here. She needed his help, but it was going to be delicate. Her timing and delivery had to be perfect.

  “You were born just outside of Kamishihoro on Hokkaido,” she said, sprightly and playful. “After your older brother committed suicide, your family moved to Toronto, where you spent most of your childhood. When you were a sophomore in high school, you got Brittany Samson pregnant on a backpacking trip and made her promise not to tell anyone about the abortion. You suspect Zara favors you over Willis for the new associate-partner slot, which is why Zara gave you this assignment, but you’re also worried it might be a wild-goose chase to distract you while Willis solicits the required votes he needs for the promotion. You’ve always felt like an outsider, and usually you think that this is a strength that affords you special insight, but once in a while you agonize over whether others see this too and interpret it as arrogance. Oh, and when you’re not overworking to prove a zeal you no longer feel, you experiment aggressively with psychedelics and attend bedazzled sex parties. You’re a generous lover, and I’m guessing that scar you picked up playing lacrosse is a crowd pleaser. You’re a cutout, a fall guy, a disposable messenger with so many layers above you that your boss’s boss has no inkling of what this mission is really about or even who the real principals are.” Her voice took on a rhetorical, almost musical cadence. “But none of this, none of this, is a candle flame to the bonfire that is your desire to know how I know these things about you, how easy it is to peer inside your soul, and whether I am the person who can at last grant you access to that secret world that you’ve always suspected exists just beneath the surface of things, shaping politics, commerce, culture, and every other human endeavor as easily as a potter molds clay.”

  Microexpressions flitted across Haruki’s face like leaves before a gale. Surprise, anger, discomfort, embarrassment, shock, all of them cascading into that most dangerous of emotions.

  Curiosity.

  Diana leaned forward and ran the outside of an index finger along Haruki’s pale cheek.

  “I am that person,” she said, the knowledge that the secrets she held would make the world tremble on its foundations lending her words a composed certainty that could not be mistaken for bravado. “You get one shot. Don’t fuck it up.” She slid a folded slip of paper across the table to him. “Harrison, your pharma guy, fabs drugs outside of FDA restrictions if you act like it’s a normal order and pay him triple. Everything else on the list should be fairly straightforward. Deliver it to the drop point at nine fifty-four p.m. tonight. Tell anyone, anyone, about this and . . .” She pressed together her fingertips and then blew them apart like a dandelion.

  Haruki’s lips moved, but no words came out.

  “Why are you still here?” Diana asked sharply.

  He blinked, jerked up straight, tried and failed to pull himself together. Finally he snatched the slip of paper off the table, slid out of the booth, and scurried toward the exit. A pang of guilt reverberated through Diana as the red satin curtains fell back into place behind him. Poor kid. He had no idea what he was getting into. Then again, Diana had been nothing but a poor kid once.

  She left the briefcase with Nell. Where Diana was going, each gram of luggage had to count.

  CHAPTER 22

  Every millimeter of Diana’s body thrummed in tune to the deep vibration of the helicopter’s roar. She imagined the view it must command, skimming above the sea that crowned the planet. Black waves churned below, flecked with foam and lashed by frigid wind. Container ships plied the Transpolar Passage, industrial leviathans enjoying a shipping lane newly freed from sea ice by accelerating climate change. Lowell’s once lucrative offshore oil platforms, abandoned since the carbon tax had made their operation unprofitable, were now rusting, deserted islands that northern seabirds were colonizing. The sun, pale and engorged, circled low around the horizon instead of arcing across the dome of the azure sky.

  Diana could see none of these things, could see nothing at all. The feed algorithms piloting the cargo chopper sated their appetite for data with sensor arrays that pocked the exterior of the bulky aircraft. But even if there had been windows, she could not have enjoyed the vista. She was in the fetal position, curled up around the scarce equipment she had been able to muster on short notice and stuffed into one of many crates scheduled for delivery that afternoon.

  Food, booze, medical supplies, fuel—on a rig this remote, everything had to be ferried out by helicopter. The oil reservoirs hidden beneath the undersea Lomonosov Ridge had once inspired a geopolitical race to claim the Arctic as melting sea ice loosened the planet’s grip on its petrochemical riches. Dag had helped Lowell win that race and then sabotaged the operation once his conscience caught up with him.

  Surrounded by cramped darkness and breathing from an oxygen canister, Diana fought off claustrophobia by reviewing her memories of Dag’s feed archive for the hundredth time. He had back-channeled between members of the Arctic Council, financed partisan scientific research, maneuvered through delicate negotiations, run undercover ops to silence opposition, and generally stacked the cards in Lowell’s favor. Later, when Lowell tried to solicit more of Dag’s aid, the older man had dragged him all the way up here to flaunt their conquest like some Gilded Age robber baron, hosting him in a lavish apartment built into one of the drilling platforms, courtesan included.

  Diana pushed away a stab of unexpected jealousy. That courtesan had provided a critical clue when Diana had unraveled Emily and Javier’s feed exploit. Knowing Dag’s proclivities, Lowell had selected a courtesan who resembled Emily, neither of them realizing his type had been manufactured via careful feed curation. Diana and two maths-guru colleagues had reverse engineered Dag’s feed, discovering indisputable evidence of unprecedented remote control.

  Helen was ignorant of that secret history. Using one of Lowell’s defunct Arctic platforms to hold Dag hostage would have seemed ideal to her. It was outside of US jurisdiction, controlled by a coconspirator, free from prying eyes, and already set up for habitation. All they needed to do was give their private security contractors access to
the facility and keep it stocked with supplies. No awkward paperwork, no favors to call in from the Pentagon, no risk of Lopez catching wind of the op before Helen delivered him Commonwealth and a global coup on a golden platter.

  Helen had no way to know that Diana had pored through every detail of Dag’s feed archive and had immediately recognized the room in which he was now imprisoned.

  The shriek of weaponized sound echoed in Diana’s memory, aggravating the claustrophobia she was trying to overcome. All new recruits had been subjected to sleep deprivation and every flavor of psychological torment at Langley’s disposal. It imbued respect for their methods and gave them practice resisting the opposition. Dag had no such training. The walls of the crate shrank around her as Diana remembered the tenuous, haunted expression on his face. Somewhere down there a professional inquisitor was putting Dag to the question. Interrogators had long since given up physical torture as an inconveniently roundabout way to flay a target’s mind. When you could send someone to hell at the press of a button, pulling out their fingernails was just messy.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Freaking out because she was stuck inside a box wouldn’t help Dag. Panic was useless. Panic was deadly. Panic was the enemy of operational success. Dag needed her, and for once Diana wasn’t going to let him down.

  The whine of the whirling blades changed pitch, and Diana’s stomach rose into her throat as the chopper descended.

  This wasn’t how missions were supposed to go. To do this right, she’d need three weeks of prep, an unlimited budget, and a SEAL team. Instead it was just Diana, wrapped up like a rejected Christmas present being returned to Santa’s Arctic workshop. She’d collected her meager kit and supplemented it with Haruki’s goodies. Her old colleagues would have been horrified by the lack of appropriate resources, but Diana would have to improvise.

  The chopper landed with a jolt, sending a flicker of pain up Diana’s shins. Muffled voices and footfalls penetrated the confines of her box. Dag’s wardens were less than a meter away. She imagined their faces shrouded by the hoods of their parkas, the assault rifles hanging from straps on their shoulders, the frost on their eyelashes. Kidnapping and hostage retention were just another day at the office for private security contractors. They were probably bitching about being assigned to cargo duty.

  Inside her camouflaged womb, Diana became hyperaware of every heartbeat. The box was shielded, appearing to be nothing more than the spare parts the label reported. But shielding and sensor technology were in a never-ending arms race with each other, and you never knew when an opponent might pull out a new gadget that rendered your protection obsolete.

  The box could burst open at any moment, Diana would collapse out of it, blinded by the weak sun, limbs aching, breath snatched from her by the cutting wind, only to face a circle of gun barrels, the sneering faces behind them an exclamation point in Helen’s long line of curveball victories. Perhaps they would throw Diana into the cell next to Dag’s and subject her to the same soul-killing regime until she gave up every asset, every source, every angle. They would pillage her stockpile of secrets, diminishing her to nothing more than a series of broken walls, another body to be tossed out of a helicopter to sink, frozen and forgotten, into the uncaring sea, following the once mighty polar bears into extinction.

  Without warning, her box was hoisted up, jostled against adjacent crates, and jerked into motion. She was tilted at an angle, then the angle flattened out. Pulling up a recent satellite image in her feed, she pictured an overloaded trolley trundling down the ramp from the cargo hatch and then out across the helipad. Then everything stopped abruptly, and she felt the momentary weightlessness of the cargo elevator plunging down its shaft.

  Diana reined in a surge of adrenalized elation. She’d been betting that on a platform this remote, their screening protocols would be lax. The guards would assume that nobody could know they were here except Helen and Lowell and would worry about Dag getting out, not a stowaway sneaking in. If they were moving her to storage, her gamble had paid off.

  The elevator came to a stop. More motion, then stillness. Bangs and clicks and distant swearing trickled in. After a few minutes, silence fell. Diana let her heart rate return to baseline, slowed her breathing, and willed circulation into numb extremities. She gave them half an hour, made all the more excruciating by the knowledge that she had arrived, that despite everything, she was here.

  Summoning her feed, she reviewed the extraction plan for what felt like the thousandth time. She had to brand every detail, every step into her subconscious. That was the only way to free enough mental bandwidth to deal with the inevitable moment when the plan fell apart, when some unanticipated factor threw careful choreography into disarray.

  The half-hour mark took an eternity to arrive. In the business of subterfuge, patience was the greater part of professionalism. Finally the time came. Diana cinched tight her shemaugh, detached her catheter from the urine pouch, and released the latch.

  A brilliant crack formed in the top of the box, a fault line in the geology of her disguise, dazzling light pouring in as it widened to release her like crafty Odysseus into the heart of Troy.

  CHAPTER 23

  Diana climbed out of the crate and into the fluorescent brightness of the platform’s cargo bay. Boxes and equipment were stacked around her haphazardly, the new containers that had come in on her cargo chopper shiny in the midst of the forgotten detritus left over from this facility’s days as a producing offshore oil platform.

  First things first. She stretched, coaxing blood through cramped muscles and doing her best to regain mobility after spending so many hours stuffed inside a box. Joints popping and toes tingling with pins and needles, she removed the rest of her gear from her crate and closed the top.

  As she moved, she felt her mind settling into flow. The moment she had been preparing for had finally arrived, and with it came a sense of mental clarity, like a windshield wiped clean of condensation. The world might be teetering on the edge of disaster, but right here, right now, she knew what she had to do.

  Laying a bulky case on the steel floor, she unpacked the drone, slotted components into one another, booted up the processor, ran diagnostics, and double-checked the performance parameters. She tilted it side to side, inspecting it from different angles. It wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but the company logo, scratched paint, and dented chassis might convince a casual observer that this was a piece of old equipment gone haywire now that the platform’s power and water had been switched back on. Satisfied, she attached the slender cylinders of pressurized paint into their housings and let her bird fly.

  It buzzed up and over to the far corner of the cargo area, reoriented, and then opened its nozzles and covered everything in the vicinity with a thin layer of reflective paint that transformed every surface into a mirror.

  Diana waited long enough to confirm that it was operating as expected, then summoned her feed and superimposed blueprints of the facility across her vision, a line highlighting her route through the maze. Next she triggered a scripted series of errors in the cargo chopper. By now it was empty and refueled, ready to fly back to the mainland. But just as the blades were starting to spin up, they’d slow back down. That would draw the attention of the guards, whose efforts at troubleshooting the problem would prove worthless as they prompted further technical errors. Gear was always glitchy in extreme environments like this, and veteran security contractors would be painfully familiar with automated equipment failing on them. The incident would keep the chopper grounded until she needed it while distracting anyone who might be paying particularly close attention to Dag.

  Drawing her sidearm, she made her way to the door. The hallway beyond was empty, and she set off along it with quick, sure steps that made almost no sound on the rubberized floor. The drone followed at some distance behind her, like an obedient but wary dog. It would make its own way through the facility, playing Picasso until its paint ran out.

&nbs
p; At the end of the hallway, she entered the stairwell and froze. Footsteps filtered down from above. Diana needed to ascend three flights, and she didn’t have time to waste. Then, gauging her gait to match the echoes, she tightened her grip on the gun and began to climb the diamond-grip steel stairs, keeping her ears pricked. It was a single pattern of footsteps, so only one person, but they were descending toward her, the echoes getting progressively louder. Diana pivoted to cover the line of fire at every landing, finger light on the trigger, adrenaline pumping.

  She hadn’t killed in years. It never got easier, but eventually she had acclimatized to it, learning to swallow the strange mixture of abhorrence and bloodlust that was so intoxicating and disorienting, compressing the adverse feelings into a hermetic emotional keg. Only later, once it had fermented, would she let the potent brew drain, one drop at a time, drawing out the process to make it manageable, to keep her beyond the reach of angry ghosts.

  That would all come later. For now she wouldn’t hesitate to double-tap a motherfucker in the face. Her target would see nothing but the open barrel of the gun, the strange black spot hovering like fate’s pupil against the slightly warped iris that was her stealth jumpsuit’s almost-but-not-quite-perfect projection of the wall behind her.

  He was two flights up, the movement of his shadow visible through the diamond kaleidoscope of the stairs above. Diana’s palms were wet and her mouth was dry, but her finger was steady on the trigger. She would kill them all if she had to, pay the blood price for Dag’s freedom.

  With just one flight to go, Diana nestled into the corner of the landing. Just as she raised the gun, the footsteps slowed. Shit. Could he know she was here? Was it possible that she had been found out, that she was walking into a trap instead of laying one? Had she lost the shell game of countersurveillance? Was this another one of Helen’s twisted charades? Perhaps she was waiting in what Diana had assumed was Dag’s cell to eviscerate her twice-prodigal protégé? But then a metallic squeal sounded from above, unoiled hinges protesting long disuse. He wasn’t aware of her presence. He too had been heading to this floor, Dag’s floor.