“Hey, Speedy,” I said, as Mike and Atlas got acquainted.
The koala’s ears were flattened back. That’s…never good. At least they were at three-quarters mast. Half-mast or lower, and you might as well look around for a nice lead-lined fallout shelter.
He grunted at me. It was a typical koala greeting: whatever was bothering him must not have crossed over into his supergenius side.
(That’s a big problem with these altered types, if you ask me. Not just Speedy, but OACET, too. Sticking new smarts on top of old instincts sometimes means that the stupid-simple stuff has a hard time getting through.)
“Whatcha working on?” I asked.
Speedy looked up from the spreadsheets. “Tall, dark, and hormonal over there keeps detailed client lists. These are people or organizations who’ve approached him with items to sell.”
I glanced at the spreadsheets. There were organized by item and location, but the far left columns were blank. The clients’ names and contact information had been deleted; at least, on the version of the spreadsheets that Atlas had given to Speedy.
“Anything recovered from the bottom of the ocean?”
“Lots,” he replied. One of the claws on his right forepaw was tapping against the paper.
Speedy doesn’t twitch. Nervous activity is for animals—and humans—in captivity, and Speedy has plenty of outlets for any anxiety that might build up. I followed the tapping claw down to a small column that looked to be nothing but a line of dates.
Speedy watched me track his claws, and nodded. Something was on his mind besides whatever had flattened his ears. Something significant.
Ah. The spreadsheets weren’t just lists of queries. They also indicated if these particular clients had bought or sold items from Atlas in the past.
And the same client had bought multiple items around the same time, nearly six months ago.
I took the spreadsheets from Speedy and started flipping through the pages. Yup. Someone had walked this same road before we got here.
“Senator Richard Hanlon,” I said loudly.
Atlas Petrakis’ head whipped towards me so quickly that I didn’t need to ask the question.
I asked it anyhow, mainly for Mike’s benefit. “You performed this exact same search for Hanlon last year?”
“I won’t answer that,” he said. “I respect my clients’ privacy.”
I kicked the chair back and stood, fuming. “Figure out if we can still work with him,” I told Mike and Speedy. “I don’t trust my own judgment right now.”
I was three blocks away from the café before I realized I was scaring people. Whatever was written on my face must have been absolutely violent. I had the entire street to myself, as pedestrians and cars alike moved to get out of my path.
Hanlon.
I’m not a bad person. Really. But if you put a gun to my head and told me to choose the one person on earth who should die a prolonged, painful death, I’d pick Hanlon.
Eh, let’s be honest. You wouldn’t need the gun.
Hanlon.
The same guy who was responsible for putting my husband and the other members of OACET through five years of living hell.
The same guy who had hired a thief to break into the White House and steal a piece of the Antikythera Mechanism.
The same guy who had apparently been collecting pieces of the Mechanism using strategies that mirrored those we were using to track down Archimedes—
“Shit!” I swore, and ducked into an alley to call my husband.
Being married to a cyborg has its perks. I can’t remember the last time I had to set a digital clock, for one thing.
For another, our version of phone sex is pretty great.
Remember my ugly resin ring, the one Benjamin Franklin brought back from the future? [8] I activated it. A zillion (ish) miles away, Sparky felt it. He appeared in front of me in a flash of bright green, and smiled down at me.
“Hey, Sweetie,” he said.
He wasn’t really there. Well, his brain—consciousness, whatever—was, but his body was back home in Washington. Still, he looked as if he were standing in front of me, all fully fleshed and dressed in different shades of green, and when he reached for my hand, I almost expected to feel the warmth of his skin.
I didn’t; his hand passed through mine in a halo of neon light. My body vibrated ever so slightly where they blended together.
(I really don’t care if that delicious tingle is all psychological or whatnot, thank you. It’s real to the two of us, and that’s all that matters.)
Sparky pulled his hand from mine as he took in the setting. It was rather…
Ugh.
We were standing in an alley in a city undergoing a massive economic depression. We could count a dozen rats without even trying.
Phone sex would wait.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“Oh, you’ll love this,” I said. We snuggled up behind a dumpster, out of the way of prying eyes, and I briefed him on Atlas Petrakis. “So,” I finished, “I’ve got my doubts that a guy who worked for Hanlon would magically show up and want to work for me.”
He nodded. “Too much of a coincidence. Where is Petrakis now?”
“Mike and Speedy are with him in a café. Mike will stop him if he tries to pull a runner.”
“What are you going to do?”
I kicked a stray soda can at a rat who was getting awfully curious about my feet. The soda can sailed over the rat and clattered noisily into a pile of broken glass, and the rest of the pack scattered.
Sparky watched the rats as they ran for cover. “Thought so.”
“Yup. I have zero problems covering the same ground Hanlon did. Hell, he saved us some work,” I realized. “Atlas wouldn’t have been able to come up with that list so quickly if he hadn’t already done the same search for Hanlon. If Hanlon’s already bought additional pieces of the Mechanism, good for him. I just need to know where those pieces were discovered.”
“Think Petrakis will sell you the information?”
“If he’s not a plant? Yes,” I replied. “If Hanlon’s set him on us, he’ll balk on the sale and invent a reason to come with us while we travel.”
“Even if he knows you’re on to him?”
I muttered something and tried not to blush. I was already regretting my outburst at the café. I should have done what Speedy had done—play dumb and string Atlas along. Instead, I had jumped and roared.
Spy stuff? Not my strong suit.
Sparky grinned. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Is Petrakis dangerous?”
I laughed. “No,” I said. “Manipulative? Definitely. But he’s about as dangerous as a sexy kitten.”
“Sexy?” My husband’s eyebrows moved up a twitch, and then up a whole inch as he found Atlas Petrakis’ photograph in a database. “Wow.”
“Right?”
He groaned aloud. There was a world of emotion in it, ranging from regret all the way to jealousy that another man was roaming around a foreign country with his wife. I would have hugged him but, you know. No body. Instead, I reached out and touched the space where his shoulder appeared to be.
We steal our moments when we can, Sparky and me, so we stayed like that until I needed to head back to the café. He disappeared in another flash of green, with a promise to check back with me later that evening.
I turned down the street and wandered towards the café. I was walking slowly, pacing my way west in the early afternoon sunlight. Apparently, that’s all the opportunity that someone needed to try and pick my pocket.
I was having none of that nonsense.
The thief was good; she didn’t do that careless bump-and-shove that most pickpockets do. Instead, she waited until a car blew its horn as it passed me, and then used the moment in which I was distracted to drop her hand into the pocket of my shorts.
I slammed my hand down on top of hers and pinned her hand inside my pants (shut up), and then whipped my upper body forward. T
he would-be thief went tipping forward, her top half shooting straight over my shoulders.
Except for that one hand. I wasn’t about to give up control of that hand.
Hey, I was nice to her; I could have snapped her arm like a twig. Instead, I made sure to throw her in the same direction her shoulder rotated. I used our momentum to slam the two of us against the nearest building, using her torso as my personal air bag.
“Apologize,” I said, “and I’ll let you go.”
I couldn’t see her face, what with it dangling somewhere near my butt and all, but she squeaked out my name.
“I know who I am.”
“David sent me!” she said in English.
I’m not all that quick. I banged her against the wall again (shut up, shut up) before I remembered the passphrase that Mike had used in the knife shop.
I had just beaten up our black market contact.
Well.
I carried her into an alley as rat-infested as the last one, and tipped her gently onto her feet.
The woman was…um…
Let’s go with “plain”.
She appeared to be a local Greek woman a few years older than I was, and hadn’t had the advantage of modern orthodontic work. Or dermatology. Or tweezers. The part of my brain that hadn’t come along on my spring break from medical school diagnosed her with a moderate case of hirsutism.
She was also wearing one of the neatest jackets I had ever seen. It looked like a military make, just not any military that I was familiar with—greens and khakis were splashed across her arms and chest, the perfect hues to blend in with the landscape around the Parthenon.
It was long, too, and darker at its bottom than the top. She could squat down in the middle of a Greek field, pull the jacket’s hood over her head, and disappear into thin air.
Atlas Petrakis might be polished perfection, but this woman was real.
“Why’d you try to mug me?” I asked slowly.
“Heard you were good,” she said.
“And?”
She flipped her hand around so I could see her palm. I would have sworn it was empty, but no, there was my wallet.
“I’m better,” she said, grinning as she handed it back to me. “Call me Darling.”
I didn’t reply as I made a show of counting out my credit cards.
“I don’t steal from my clients,” she said, and did that empty-palm trick again. My Visa card appeared, and she held it out to me.
“You’re hired,” I said, and she dropped the Visa card into my hand. Followed by a second credit card…she had also snagged my Amex? Oy.
“Just like that?”
“Anyone who can rifle though my wallet while I’m smashing them upside down against a wall can get the job done.”
“Yes… Tell me,” Darling said as she made a show of rubbing her head. Her English was excellent, her accent and cadence similar to Atlas’. “How often will the beatings happen?”
“As often as you try to put one over on me.”
“Good,” she said, holding out her hand for me to shake. “I will not be doing that again.”
We talked shop as we walked the rest of the way to the café. Terms, wages, contracts (Darling laughed at that one), and legality. Especially legality.
“I don’t know how you usually operate,” I said to her. “When I’m paying you, law and order are your key words.”
Darling nodded. “I can do such things,” she said. “I have the proper paperwork.”
With that, I pushed open the door of the café.
Mike always kept a keen eye on his surroundings, so he spotted us the moment Darling and I walked in. It took Speedy and Atlas a few moments more, but when Atlas caught sight of Darling, he lunged to his feet, his chair banging against the stone floor as it toppled backwards. The gorgeous man began shouting angrily in Greek, and to go by Speedy’s impressed expression, he was nailing the profanities pretty hard.
None of that held a candle to what Darling had done the moment she had seen Atlas, which was lunge at him with an honest-to-God drawn gun!
As she leapt, she shouted: “You!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When it comes to guns, Mike doesn’t fuck around.
He was too far from Darling to control her gun. Instead? He kicked a chair straight up into the air, and then gave it a tap to launch it at her like a wicker missile.
This knocked Darling sideways and put her close enough for me to flip things around, and by things, I mean Darling. I snagged her free hand and flung her against the ground, wham bam boom.
By the time she was down, Mike was already standing on her gun hand.
“Don’t hurt her,” I told him. “She’s…uh. She’s David. You know?” I said glancing around the room. Fortunately, the café wasn’t crowded. Unfortunately, this was because most people had had the sense to start running for the door the moment the gun came out. The barista has disappeared, but I saw the coil of an old telephone cord jiggle as it ran from the wall to where she was hiding beneath the counter. “David?”
“Ah,” Mike said, and eased most of the weight of his foot from her wrist.
“She is also my cousin,” Atlas said darkly. “Who promised she would stop poaching my clients.”
“These are not your clients!” Darling replied. Her gun had disappeared; Mike’s jogging shorts hung a little low on his right-hand side. “They hired me!”
Atlas turned towards me, disbelief clear on his face. I nodded. “I’m pretty sure she’s never worked for Hanlon,” I said. “Gives her a nice head start on you in my opinion.”
“He was just another client!” Atlas insisted. “Hanlon hired most of the art brokers in the country to search for the Mechanism. I was no different.”
“Could be true,” Speedy said. “No reason for Hanlon to hire just one dude.”
And that was the moment when Darling realized the famous talking koala wasn’t a hoax or a gimmick or some other kind of ridiculous shenanigans.
It basically shut her down right there.
Put yourself in her place. Close your eyes and pretend Mr. Ed could actually talk. Everyone’s told you that he’s a real live talking horse. You’ve even seen him on television. Then, you’re walking in the park one day and you bump into this horse who wants to have a conversation with you.
It. Doesn’t. Happen.
Not in any semblance of real life you’ve experienced, that is.
I’ve seen this happen a billion times. Dumb people tend to find their balance within moments, needing nothing more than an Oh, right, I heard about this thing.
Smart people need to shut down and reboot.
Darling was one of the smart ones. She shoved Mike off of her hand and sat up, staring at the koala the entire time.
“You talk?” she whispered. “You are not a fake?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Speedy said, and jumped down from the table to find the nearest toilet. [9]
“He is not a fake,” Atlas said, a little too smugly. He settled back in his chair and rested his hands across his papers. “He has been helping me plan the next stage in our search.”
“Says the man who might be fired,” I said.
“May I suggest we resolve this before the police arrive?” Mike asked, as he helped Darling to stand and then made her sit across the table from her cousin. “If you can’t, leave now, and we’ll be in touch.
“Maybe,” he added, as he removed Darling’s gun from his pocket and broke it apart to peek inside. He shot me a Look: the woman had attacked her cousin with a loaded gun.
Not good. We should be glad she didn’t outright murder him the moment she saw him.
The Petrakis cousins glared at each other, poking around the boundaries of civility. I guess one of them blinked wrong or something, because just like that? It was on.
The stray thought that they were two strangers running a con on us evaporated when they set against each other in the kind of verbal battle that can only occur between family mem
bers. I didn’t understand the language, but I didn’t need to: there was enough waving and shouting to follow along. Both of them were in it to win it, and it was only a matter of time before one or both of them started throwing punches.
“Enough!”
I slammed my hands down on the marble tabletop, hard. From the direction of the barista’s counter came a little yipping noise, followed by more whispered Greek into the phone. “Guys?” I said. “This is getting too dramaculous for me. Go. Talk. Figure out who stays or who goes. At this point, I really don’t care, and I’ll happily stay an extra day or two in Athens to find your replacements if it means I don’t have to deal with your bullshit. Got it?”
They did.
The two of them went outside to have a really splendid whispered fight on the sidewalk. It was all waving hands and pointing, mostly towards us. The Petrakis cousins held their argument in Greek, of course. Speedy hopped back up on the table once he saw that Darling was gone, and us bipedal Americans pretended to be bored as he did a line-by-line translation.
I’ll give you the highlight reel: neither of them wanted to work for us. Atlas was doing so for the prestige of putting OACET and Hope Blackwell on his résumé. Darling needed the money. Atlas wasn’t about to give ground, and said that since he was here first, she could go [truly astonishing expletive, probably embellished via koala].
Then Darling dropped the bomb…her mom wasn’t doing well. Cancer.
That shut Atlas down.
It also shut Speedy down, as he lost interest when Atlas’ face fell and the drama washed away. That was fine—Mike and I didn’t need the rest of their fight translated. Atlas reached towards his cousin, who shook off his hands and stood there with the stoic expression of a woman who never, ever lets herself cry. Then, they pushed themselves into politeness, with the kind of awkward pauses that only exist in those conversations you have to have.
Listen, I sympathized with the Petrakis cousins, really. Some of my family members are human sewage, and don’t even get me started on Mike’s family. But I was not in Greece to make friends or play therapist.
It’d be nice if I could save the world without feeling guilty about it.
“How long before the police arrive?” I asked Speedy.
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