by C. E. Murphy
"After dinner," Alisha repeated. Brandon nodded. Alisha sighed, lowering the wine bottle further, knowing she was looking for excuses not to arrest—apprehend—Greg Parker's son. "You're really determined to make this a date, aren't you?"
Brandon finally brought his hands back together to rub at the reddened spot on his arm where the bottle had bruised him. "Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because it'd be nice to bring a girl I already know he'd approve of home to Dad?"
"You're not using me to smooth the waters with your father, Parker." She was already going too far down that road herself, hesitating when she should act, in hopes of finding a reason to clear the man.
It wasn't just that. Largely, perhaps, but not entirely. There was the question of the Sicarii, as well. If Brandon was right, if Frank worked for such an organization—it didn't excuse, Alisha thought, but it might explain.
Brandon's smile fell away. "I liked it better when you called me Brandon."
"I liked it better when you hadn't blown my cover in the middle of an op. All right, fine. Dinner, the Vatican, and you can tell me who the hell you're working for, in the meantime."
Brandon's shoulders dropped and he turned back to the stove, his good humor gone. "Fix the table, would you? Somebody set it on fire."
"Sorry," Alisha said without a hint of genuine contriteness. "Talk."
"I had to blow your cover. Anything else would have blown mine, and I've been on this case a long time. The roux's burned."
"You shouldn't have tried fighting me. How long?"
Brandon frowned over his shoulder, scraping the bottom of the saucepan with the whisk. "I was approached three years ago by a covert agent, deep undercover. I'd been gone from the Agency for years at that point, no contact at all. With my programming background I was a good candidate for insinuation into the Sicarii as a double agent. I'd just finished the work on the quantum chip and wanted to move into developing my drones, and they were looking for a technological advantage in a war they had no other chance of winning. The situation was ideal for everyone."
"And the cover?"
"My CIA contact warned me a Sicarii representative was coming in. When it turned out to be Reichart, I knew I was being tested. They had to know it was you there for the CIA. If I hadn't made you, they'd have believed I was covering for you."
"That's a lot of supposition, Parker."
"Yeah," he agreed, "but you were expendable."
A knot tied and loosened in Alisha's stomach. "Honesty. How refreshing. You know I'm going to check you on all of this."
"That's why I'm telling the truth." Brandon put the saucepan on a back burner, checking a second pot to see if it was boiling before pouring fettuccine in. "You'll run into red tape. I doubt you've got the clearance to get the details."
"Then I'll find someone who does." Alisha pushed the table back into place, mopping up some of the spilled oil with a piece of bread. "Do you have a lighter?"
Brandon frowned over his shoulder. "For the candles," Alisha said patiently.
"Oh." He dug into his pocket. "I didn't think you smoked."
"Only after sex," Alisha muttered.
"Then you're doing something terribly wrong." Brandon handed her the lighter, smiling hopefully. Alisha curved a reluctant smile in return as she bumped the flame into life and lit the candles.
"That's a high school joke, Parker." She ran her thumb over a raised emblem in the lighter's smooth silver casing, turning it toward the candles to investigate the shape—a crown—before handing it back. "I didn't think you smoked either."
"But you smiled. I'll take it. And I don't. Dad gave me this when he quit and I've kept it." Brandon pocketed the lighter again. "I'll even stay here through tomorrow evening if you want to check up on me. This is for real, Alisha. It's been my life for the past three years. It would be nice to have someone I could actually talk to about it once in a while."
"We'll see," Alisha said, pushing sympathy aside. It was one of the prices paid for the life she'd chosen: intimacy, real intimacy, was a rare thing, to be treasured when it could be shared. "Dinner first. The Vatican, research and possible handcuffs come later."
Brandon's grin turned into a slow leer. "I've never had a better offer."
"You'll never get one, either. Dinner first," Alisha repeated.
#
Dinner hadn't led to handcuffs, and the Vatican wasn't looking promising, either. Alisha cracked her neck, pushing a tome half the size of her torso a few inches away. It slid across the mahogany desk with a whisper, musty scent receding, and Alisha put her hand—covered in thin cotton gloves—between the pages she'd been reading, marking her place as she closed the cover to stare at the embossing. It was a veritable work of art, circles of swords with blades nearly as long as her hand pointed inward worked into the heavy leather.
Maybe not swords, Alisha thought. Maybe daggers. Her eyes stung from reading black ink, faded with the years to brown, on page after yellowed page of cramped writing. The image of the daggers swam, her tired eyes looking for depth perception where it didn't exist. A pattern formed at the center of the daggers, where their points came together, then blurred away again before she could resolve it into any kind of imagery. Alisha sat back, raising a shoulder so she could wipe her eyes without dampening the archival gloves and risking damage to the ancient parchment.
The antiquity of the Vatican records was convincing, at least. Written painstakingly in Latin, they recorded centuries' worth of what Alisha presumed were legitimate, minute details of royal lives, from birth on. The records were the stuff of legend: Alisha wasn't sure how Brandon had gotten them into the nearly mythical Vatican archives, reputedly the heir to the lost Library at Alexandria, and it killed something inside of her to know these records existed but weren't public. But victors wrote the histories, and the Church had enough invested in the world's history being written as it was to make no mention of their own extensive and possibly contradictory records.
Or maybe there was more truth to the Sicarii story than she wanted to believe. The Sicarii were never mentioned in the archives, unless she was to take the passing reference of "we" as the—Alisha's impulse was to call it the Brotherhood, which sounded so affected the whole concept was clearly getting to her. But if a secret organization devoted to the divine right of rulers existed, the Church quietly supporting it made a certain amount of sense. If the Sicarii were ever to regain the power they felt they'd once had, the Church itself might end up with secular power unlike anything it had had for centuries.
"God." Alisha flopped the book open again, wincing as the heavy cover smacked against the desk and reverberated through the archival halls. Brandon, drowsing in a tall-backed chair a few tables away, flinched awake, looking guilty.
"Find what you were looking for?" he asked.
"I don't know." She was finding enough to at least entertain the possibility that this could be real. And the pages in front of her detailed a line of descent that, against all probability, began with Henry Tudor and ended with Frank Reichart.
Reichart was hardly the only bastard descendant of royalty; his ancestor alone had spawned literally hundreds of descendants in the centuries since his death. Genghis Khan, Alisha remembered reading somewhere, was a direct ancestor of something like sixteen million present-day males: Henry the Eighth of England had been conservative, by those standards. The only real hitch in the line was the very first one: there was no way to be absolutely certain the barmaid's child was fathered by the young Prince Henry.
But there were other places where the chroniclers had found conclusive enough evidence to strike through the names of children they'd once believed to be bastard sons and daughters. Reichart's line had no such mark-through. Alisha, staring at the pages, wondered if there was any Tudor DNA that could be used to determine the absolute truth of the matter, now, five centuries after the fact. A lock of hair tangled in a comb or kept safe in a locket. Exhuming royal bones was probably not an option.
Brandon appeared at her shoulder, looking down at the page with her. "Well?"
"I don't see how you could've faked any of this," Alisha said grudgingly. "How'd you get us in here?"
"I called in a favor." Brandon took a deep breath. "A favor that will probably come back to haunt me, since this is a lot bigger than what I was owed. Getting permission to come down here usually comes from the Pope."
"Gosh," Alisha muttered. "I hope they didn't bother him on my behalf." She brushed her fingers over the page again, tracing names down through the centuries until she reached Reichart's, then sighed, closing the book. "All right. I'm done."
"You believe me?"
"No," Alisha said, "but you've earned some reasonable doubt." She stood, standing close enough to Brandon that it gave her an excuse to slide her fingers through his belt loops for balance. Pindrop pressure, nothing more. "I need to verify everything you've told me through the Agency."
Brandon tilted his head down to meet her eyes. "Maybe you could get started in the morning," he suggested in a low voice.
Alisha couldn't tell if the sound she made was a laugh or a groan. Whatever she thought she was doing, it was clearly a bad idea. She didn't know what was going on here.
No. She didn't know which side Brandon was on. She knew very well what was going on there, and wanted to revel in the quickness of her heartbeat and the awareness of Brandon's warmth so close to her. He smelled good, the lingering scent of pasta in white sauce mixed up with simple masculinity. She sighed. "I'd love to," and took half a step back.
Brandon's body heat dissipated as she moved away. "Can't blame a guy for trying."
"Try," Alisha said, with a little emphasis on the word, "not to get in trouble while I cross-check your story. You come up straight and maybe we can pick up this conversation later." She gave him a brief smile, then brushed past him, leaving the archives.
Chapter 14
"Come on." Alisha paced her hotel room, tugging a curl out of her ponytail, then fixing it again. The phone rang a fourth time and Alisha snapped at the air with her teeth, hanging up and dialing again. "Come on, Q, pick up the phone, I know you're there." She bent double, hair brushing the floor as she stretched into downward, then three-legged, dog. Her muscles loosened and a vertebrae popped, making her grunt with contentment. "Eeeerika."
"Ali?" Surprise but no weariness filled the warm alto voice that answered the phone. "Thought you were on no contact. Oh, you are, aren't you, which is why you're calling my personal phone and not leaving messages when the voice mail picks up." Erika became cheerier with each passing word, until she sounded as exuberant as a kid at a circus. "Which means you want me to do something I'll get in trouble for. What's up?"
"I thought you were supposed to be on vacation," Alisha said with a grin. She heard an exasperated snort and the rush of wheels across a plastic mat.
"This is vacation. You should see what I came up with last ni—"
"It's eleven at night, Erika."
A pause. "So?"
"So people on vacation aren't usually at work at eleven at night."
"Oh." Another pause; Erika's speech was littered with them, as if much of what she heard was being assimilated and examined for veracity before she responded. "Are you sure? Everybody I know is."
"How many people are in the office, Erika?"
"Well, just me, but—oh, I see what you mean. But this one's really cool, Ali. With enough of a sample it'll do real-time voice distortion. Want to sound like Princess Di?"
"Erika!"
"No, no, you're right, she's dead, no one would believe it. Okay, choose your favorite smoking hot bisexual leading lady. You could nail anybody you wanted."
"Erika!" Alisha laughed. "I need your help."
"Oh! Right. The thing I could get in trouble for."
"Only if you get caught."
Offended pride filled Erika's voice. "I never get caught."
"Then I'd say you won't get in trouble for it. Did you know Brandon Parker?"
"Oh jeez," Erika said, a Yooper Michigan accent suddenly coming through strong. "I don't do recon on exes, Ali."
Alisha stopped mid-stretch, pulling the phone away from her ear to gaze at it in astonishment. "You dated him?"
"Oh yah." The accent stayed in place: Alisha had startled the hell out of the CIA tech geek. Erika had worked hard to eradicate the telltale long vowels, and was always sensitive about teasing for a few days after she came home from visiting family. "In college, you know?" That time she heard her own idiomatic slip. Alisha could all but see her stiffening her spine and watching her enunciation. "We broke up after I beat him in a collegiate math competition."
Alisha rolled out of her pose onto her back, laughing. "So he's a little competitive?"
"No," Erika said, surprised again. "I figured, who wants to make babies with somebody you can trounce that easily?"
Alisha blinked at the dark ceiling. "If all the guys you know take that attitude, you might never get a chance."
Erika made a dismissive sound. "You sound like my mother. I keep telling her, that's what the Stanford artificial insemination program is for."
"You haven't got a romantic bone in your body, Erika."
"No, but I've got one of the world's greatest brains. So what's the deal? You sleeping with him?"
Alisha laughed out loud a second time. She'd meant to call her technical consultant for help, not an unexpected dose of good cheer. She'd needed it, though. She was still mentally struggling with the records Brandon had shown her, trying to arrange their meaning in the greater scheme. A simple girl-gossip phone call was going a long way toward helping her stop worrying so much. "No, I'm not sleeping with him!"
"Why not?"
Alisha found herself blinking at the ceiling again, then grinning. "I dunno. It gets complicated. Is he worth it?"
"I think I gave him a seven point eight. But he was only nineteen," Erika added generously.
"You actually scored him?"
Considering pause. Alisha wondered how she could tell the difference between a regular hesitation and one that seemed more thoughtful than usual. "Isn't that why it's called scoring?" Erika asked eventually. Alisha laughed again.
"Sometimes I'm not sure you're for real, E. Anyway, look, no, I'm not sleeping with him, although I could've been if I hadn't wanted to come call you and get you to do recon on him. So how solid is that rule?"
"Ooh," Erika said, Yooper coming through again, "not so solid. More a matter of principle. To be discarded as soon as someone asks me to. Alisha, honey, if you passed up a pretty face like that for talking to me, I mean, I'm flattered and all, but you need to straighten out your priorities. You don't get out enough."
"This from the woman whose idea of a romantic evening is looking over a file folder of sperm-bank donors?"
"We're talking about you, not me," Erika pointed out. "Brandon'd be good for you. He's blond."
Alisha's eyebrows went up. "So?"
"Nothing!" Erika protested. "I'm just saying. A change of pace'd be good for you."
"And a blond is a change of pace?" Alisha squinted one eye, making a face at the ceiling. She didn't like to admit it, but—
"Yup," Erika said, finishing Alisha's own thought. "The whole tall, dark and dangerous thing leaves you moody."
"I am not," Alisha said, "hung up on Frank Reichart."
"Did I say that? I didn't say that."
Alisha groaned and rolled over onto her stomach, burying her face in the hotel pillow for a moment. Then she lifted her head enough to be able to speak. "So are you going to discard your principles and follow Brandon's files until you hit red tape or a wall or whatever?"
"You're changing the subject," Erika accused. Alisha wobbled her head at the pillow in silent agreement. "Arright," Erika said. "How soon you want it?"
"As soon as you can get it, and call me back at this number."
"This isn't your official phone, is it?"
"It's a throwawa
y. I bought it with cash."
Erika sounded intrigued. "You're gonna have to give me the dirt someday, Ali."
"Someday," Alisha promised. "Call as soon as you can?"
"Yup," Erika agreed. "Bye."
Alisha folded her phone closed, dropping her face into the pillow again. The temptation to call Erika back and argue over Reichart was embarrassing in its strength, and telling. Alisha made a face into the pillow, then sat up, smearing her fingers across her eyes before wincing and studying them. Mascara and eyeliner, what little she usually wore, now colored her fingertips. She blew out an exasperated breath and stood, going into the bathroom without turning on the light.
Her reflection looked bruised, dark brown smudges across her eyelid an ill-made black eye. It stirred memory and a quiet laugh as she dropped her gaze, turning the water on to splash it over her face.
#
"Lovely shiner." The first thing Reichart'd ever said to her, a droll opening salvo. She was only twenty-one, an agent for just two years, and the bar fight that had destroyed her outfit had been a distraction. Start a fight, she'd been ordered. Your contact will know the one who starts the fight is his cargo.
His cargo. Alisha had been prepped for a mission deep inside Afghanistan, and a mercenary agent had been hired to bring her into the dangerous territory. He'd followed her into the unisex European bathroom like he'd been supposed to, but he wasn't what she'd expected. His voice was deep enough to rumble, and carried an American accent. Alisha remembered the word very specifically: lovely. One of the first times she'd heard an American man use it seriously, back when she still found it startling, even effeminate, coming from a man.
There had been nothing effeminate about the man leaning in the door behind her though. Black hair buzzed a quarter inch from bald, eyes dark enough to be as black as his hair, in some light. Not then: they were dark brown then, clear and depthless as water. He was tanned, not from a booth, but a genuine tan that left faint white smile wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, his hands stained dark from the sun, enough that he might have been a woodworker too familiar with his own varnishes.
