by C. E. Murphy
"This is Cardinal," she said to the secretary who answered the phone. "Put me through to Director Boyer, please."
Chapter 26
"You're playing a dangerous game, Cardinal." Even over the telephone, Boyer's voice rumbled deeply enough to make Alisha shiver. Though it wasn't just his voice, she had to admit. It was talking to a man the Sicarii wanted her to kill.
"I don't have a lot of choice, sir." She was taking a terrible risk, counting on the chip in her neck not being bugged as well as explosive. She'd done what she could to check: a sweep had found no outgoing radio signal. Even so, she was walking the fine line of not telling her superior that she'd been compromised.
If she got out of this alive, she was going to be court-martialed.
Alisha exhaled, climbing to her re-bandaged feet so she could wincingly pace her little hostel room. The door was long since closed, an ancient black-and-white television's Swiss sitcom creating white noise that conflicted with music playing from her burner phoned. She'd drawn the drapes over the windows and tossed the heavier blanket from the bed over the curtain bar to add another level of muffling fabric between the glass and herself. Short of leaving the hostel and locking herself in a soundproofed booth, it was all she could do to make certain she wasn't overheard.
"I think offering the drone software on the open market will draw everybody involved into play," she said, almost as much to herself as to Boyer. "It's worth the risk. The problem, sir—"
"The problem?" Boyer asked drolly. "Singular problem? Your optimism astounds me."
Alisha huffed a quiet breath of laughter and wrapped her free hand around the back of her neck. The bump there felt larger, possibly because she kept prodding at it. "I'm putting myself in a rogue position here. If Greg comes, representing the CIA…" Hook, she thought.
"Then we have no one we can trust absolutely as our man on the inside," Boyer finished. "I'll see what can be done."
Alisha leaned on the dresser that doubled as a TV stand, chin dropped to her chest. "Thank you, sir. I wish I knew who to trust." Line.
"I assume we wouldn't be having this conversation if you didn't trust me."
Alisha closed her eyes. And sinker. It was no guarantee that Boyer himself would come—she'd be surprised if he did—but she intended to walk the tightrope as far as she could. If there was any movement out of Boyer, the Sicarii would take it as an act of good faith on her part.
Assuming they weren't listening in on the conversation right now. Alisha pushed the thought away, answering the director quietly. "I do trust you, sir, but it's a choice. You initiated the investigation into Brandon Parker, so I have to believe you have nothing to hide with regards to him or any operation he may be involved with. And if I'm wrong, sir, then frankly I'm so completely screwed that it doesn't matter anymore." That was perhaps a little more honest than politeness would dictate, she thought, but with her lifespan turned down to a number of countable hours, she no longer cared very much whether she was playing by society's rules of conduct.
And Boyer chuckled. "Eloquently spoken. Where do you intend to run this auction from?"
"There's an unused safe house in Moscow," Alisha said. "Half the people involved in this are former CIA. They should know it."
"I know it," Boyer agreed. "It's derelict. Are you certain that's where you want to go?"
Alisha nodded against the phone. "Yes, sir. It feels like neutral territory."
"All right. Go through Berlin. I'll have a visa waiting for you. Time frame?"
Alisha felt the bump at the back of her neck again. "Thirty-six hours."
#
Only half an hour later, she sat downstairs in the hostel at a computer barely old enough to function on the modern web, and paid almost thirty euro an hour for the privilege. Other denizens of the hostel kept giving her sympathetic, or baffled, glances, as if feeling sorry for somebody so old she couldn't even use her phone to go online. She couldn't blame them, but any phone she used would be tracked directly to her. Using the hostel's computer was risky enough, but she wanted to keep her head down, and leaving to find a more secure location to log on from also meant potential exposure. It was bad enough that part of her wanted to email Brandon and taunt him for having lost the drone software out of the Milan safety deposit box. Alisha didn't need to add any further complications or temptations, so she stuck to the hostel computer and message boards instead.
Almost since the inception of Usenet and other online bulletin board systems, the paranoid had believed clandestine agencies used the tremendous noise-to-signal—nonsense versus worthy content—ratio on the internet to send and hide messages to one another. Those less inclined toward conspiracy theories tended to mock them, but, Alisha thought, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
It took several messages, linked to a new throwaway phone's e-mail address, to seed specific boards with a dribble of information here, a drabble there. One popular home gardening board carried a lot of messages from one agency to another, as if they were keeping the house in order. Then she linked to a financial advisor's site, and ultimately to travel boards discussing Russia. A few comments, nothing that would be noticed or understood by civilians, but to the right eyes her messages announced an auction for black market weapons technology designed by quantum chip inventor Brandon Parker. The location was to be Moscow, the time 1800 hours local, the specific place to be announced six hours prior to the auction.
Alisha turned her wrist over, glancing at her watch. There was time to nap before she left for Russia. Enjoy it, she whispered to herself. It might just be the last sleep she'd ever get.
#
Hours later she awoke with every muscle in her stomach clenched, an instinctive "freeze" response while she waited to understand what had wakened her. A second tap at the door answered the question, and she glanced at the clock. Four in the morning. No one tracking her with intent to harm would announce himself with a knock on the door at that hour.
God damn it. She should have known better than to stay in the hostel after using its computer to leave her trail of breadcrumbs. She whisked her gun from beneath the pillow and pressed herself against the wall beside the door, unwilling to risk a glance through the peephole. The tap sounded again, less patiently, and a familiar voice said, "Ms. Moon?" through the door.
Alisha curled her fingers around the door's lock and eased it open, teeth set together and bared at the impossibly loud click it gave. "Elisa," the voice said with growing impatience. Alisha slid her hand to the knob, inching it open, then yanked the door open with such force it banged against the desk and canted slightly on its hinges. Alisha whipped to face the visitor, and found herself looking down the barrel of her gun at a wholly exasperated, gum-popping Erika.
Erika blew an enormous pink bubble, put her finger on the gun's muzzle, and pointed it away from herself gingerly. "What?" she demanded, as Alisha fell back a step, staring. "You think somebody stole one of my voice modulators and was passing themselves off as me?" She closed the door behind her, unloaded a massive backpack onto the bed, and turned around in the dim room, eyebrows lifted in challenge. "Earth to Alisha. Hello? You can put the gun down now."
Alisha brought the gun up to beside her face, pointed at the ceiling as she held it in both hands, trigger finger resting on the trigger guard. "Erika?"
"In the bodacious flesh." Erika spread her arms and gave an all-over jiggle that would've worked better if she hadn't been wearing a sports bra under her jeans jacket. Even she noticed, looking down at the compressing fabric with a shrug. "So maybe not so bodacious. Turn the lights on, babe." She popped another bubble and sat down on Alisha's bed, one hiking-booted foot folded up beneath her.
"What are you doing here?" Alisha moved for the lights, putting one hand on the switch without turning it on.
"Dude." Erika lifted a dark eyebrow at her. "Boyer sent me to make backups." She unzipped the backpack's main compartment and dumped what appeared to be forty pounds
of computer innards onto the bed. A flack jacket fell out after the parts and Erika tossed it to her. "Boyer sent this, too. Said it came out of Kazakhstan. Guess it's your souvenir."
Alisha caught the jacket, surprised at its weight, then peeled back a section of cloth to examine the matte black material beneath. Not Kevlar, she thought, or at least not standard issue. That phrase triggered a memory and she closed her hands on the jacket. "Thanks. I'll treasure it always."
"You should. So I hear you're lugging around the Granddaddy of all software programs. What were you gonna do, save it to a flash drive and FedEx it home?"
"I—"
"And even if you had," Erika went on blithely, "you might be good with the kicking of ass, but you need my brilliance to alter a complex program enough to make it dysfunctional without being obviously tampered with. Face it, babe. You missed me. Are you going to turn the lights on, or what?"
Alisha, starting to smile, clicked the light on. Erika squinted against the light, then nodded in satisfaction and started rooting through her hardware. "Better. So I've been thinking. I'm considering readjusting the scorecard, kind of like they did with the Richter scale. Scoring people eights and nines is giving 'em a lot of credit, don't you think? I mean, seriously, how many sexual encounters genuinely rate a ten?"
"I thought they slid the Richter scale up, not down," Alisha said, blinking. "Why are you so awake?"
"Been up on the plane all night. Besides, it's only eleven, my time. Where's this hard drive? Dude," she added, genuinely impressed as Alisha dug the tiny drive out of her purse. "That's it? And they say size doesn't matter."
"I think it's using a new kind of storage," Alisha said. "Quantum storage."
Erika eyed her. "I've heard of quantum processing. So this is the new and improved memory stick, huh?" She lifted the card up, peering at it as if she could see the information stored on its molecules. "Anyway, so it all kind of depends on how you look at it, eh? The Good Friday quake up in Alaska was an eight point six when it occurred, got bumped up to a nine point three when they readjusted. So I'm thinking that if a nine point three is one of the worst—or best—in human memory, that a guy rating a seven point eight like I gave Brandon, that's really pretty good." She sat down on the bed, one leg folded under herself as she rooted through the pile of hardware she'd upended on the quilt.
"This is what you were thinking about on the plane?" Alisha asked, fighting back a grin.
"Doesn't everybody? So if we're working on a sliding scale, and I reevaluate at seven tenths of a percent lower, you end up with a baseline—my experience—as a six point eight, which seems generous enough for a college sophomore. Then let's say a guy improves by a whole percentage point over the next decade. That'd be something, wouldn't it?"
"Are you taking these by orders of magnitude?" Alisha asked faintly. She felt laughter bubbling inside, finding herself unwilling to let it break free for fear of ruining the beautiful absurdity of the moment. "I mean, isn't that how earthquakes work?"
Erika stopped hooking ports to one another and gave Alisha a look of dubious politeness. "If you find a guy who is that kind of order of magnitude better in bed than the others, either you've totally been sleeping with the wrong people, or he's got, like, a serious allergy to Kryptonite."
An image of Frank Reichart, bruised and wearing a towel wrapped low around his hips, flashed through Alisha's mind. She pressed her lips together, put the safety on her weapon and laid it down on the desk with careful, deliberate movements. She inhaled, deep and slow, pushing the image away, then fixed a smile on her face and spread her hands. "I hate to change the topic, but is there anything I can do to help?"
"Absolutely." Erika looked up eagerly. "There's a completely luscious German guy downstairs in the lobby. Go find out his room number for me."
Alisha gaped, then laughed. "Are you serious?"
"Totally. Go on, won't you? Please?"
"I, uh. Sure. I…" Alisha blinked and smiled, then turned for the door with a shrug. And stopped, her hand on the knob. "Um. Look, E, I don't mean to sound paranoid…"
"Yes you do."
"What?" Alisha looked back over her shoulder.
"You totally mean to sound paranoid. You are paranoid. It's what you do for a living. You really think you're going to understand what I'm doing any better if you sit here and watch me? Like you're going to see me make some kind of mission-critical mistake? You won't. You can't. That's why there are people like me and people like you."
Alisha leaned heavily on the doorknob, putting her forehead against the frame. "People like me?"
"Adrenaline addicts, or whatever it is that makes you tick. Hero complex. The whole, ‘If I'm not right here right now doing this job the world as we know it cannot go on' thing. Don't get me wrong." Erika clacked at a keyboard, typing out functions even as she spoke. "Obviously the world needs people like you, but thank God I'm just the support structure. And since you can reap the benefits of my support without understanding what I'm doing, how about I reap the benefits of yours and you go get that guy's room number?"
"What, saving the world as we know it isn't enough?"
"Not with shoulders like he's got. Go on. I've got a file to corrupt."
Alisha, bemused, went.
#
There was no longer a hot German guy in the lobby, nor, in fact, any male of any ethnicity, hot or not. Two sleepily cheerful Nordic women nodded at Alisha as they passed through, one of them stopping to take her heels off and groaning in mingled agony and pleasure as she stepped on bare feet. Alisha smiled in return and poked around the lobby, resisting the impulse to go back upstairs. She rarely had to work with someone physically looking over her shoulder, and found it moderately annoying when it was necessary. Erika probably felt the same way, and besides, she was right: Alisha wouldn't be of any help.
Which left her with nothing to do. Alisha chuckled and avoided the TV, fully aware that anything on at four in the morning wouldn't be worth watching. Instead she pushed one of the lobby chairs out of the corner, inspecting the floor for accumulated dirt. It was carpeted and meant to hide filth, but there was no build-up of grime along the trim, so she turned her back to the corner and settled into a meditation pose, her feet crossed onto her calves.
Time drifted, leaving her alone with slow thoughts. As soon as Erika was done with her work, Alisha would pack up and leave. She ought to have done it earlier; that Erika was there at all was proof that the CIA had leaped on the chance to track her phone once she'd put the battery back in, and the posting she'd made to the discussion boards could be traced by IP. There were certainly factions that would be more interested in acquiring the drone's software for free rather than paying auction block prices. She heard a door open, but people came in and out of the hostel all the time, and she didn't think anything of it until Brandon Parker murmured, "I don't suppose you'd believe it was all a show?"
Alisha's stomach knotted around a sharp spike of caution as she opened her eyes. Brandon sat on the corner of a coffee table a few feet away, his hands dangling between his knees. He looked relaxed and casual: deceptively so, like a cat. There might have been regret in his voice, but if there was, she didn't trust it. Watching him, all she could think was that every minute she kept him talking was another minute for Erika to finish her work.
"No," she said, just as quietly. "I wouldn't. Is that your story?"
"It's the price of being a double, Alisha." His voice was barely pitched to carry; no one farther away than she was would have heard him. "If you don't trust me, you probably won't kill me. If they don't, they will. You saw what they wanted to do to that poor bastard."
"Did they?" Alisha asked, ice in her voice. "Once I was gone, did they kill him?"
His gaze skittered away, answer enough. Alisha curled a lip. "You could have saved him."
"At what cost?" He looked back at her, sharply. "Alisha, I'm begging you to trust me. Give me the software back."
"Like hell," she said mildly
. "You're fucked, aren't you? I corrupted your backups and stole your originals. You must be pretty high on the Sicarii hit list right now. Why'd you bother stopping to talk?" She touched the back of her neck again, eyebrows rising a little. "Although I ought to say thanks, I guess. You wouldn't have if this thing was bugged."
Alarm creased Brandon's face for one brief instant, gone so fast Alisha almost laughed. "Or you didn't think about it."
Brandon curled a lip, shaking his head. "It's not. And I stopped to talk because I hoped we might resolve this thing with words. At the least, I wanted to say I'm sorry."
"Resolved it," Alisha said in disbelief. "Did you not put an explosive under my brain?"
"I can disable it."
"I," Alisha said with all the precision she could muster, "don't believe you."
Anger and tension flashed through Brandon's eyes. It was the warning Alisha needed: she could almost see the motion beginning in the clench of his jaw and speeding its way through his nervous system, bunching his muscles for action.
They bolted for the hostel stairs at the same moment, Brandon's advantage of a head start negated by Alisha's facing the right direction. He grabbed her pajama waistband as she gained a step on him, hauling her back several inches and surging ahead as they reached the stairs. Alisha tackled his ankle, bringing him down, and put her full weight in the middle of his back, hoping to knock his breath away as she scrambled over him. He grunted and she surged forward, feeling the warmth of his fingers just missing her ankle as she took the stairs two and three at a time.
