“Thank you for stopping by, Ms. Yi,” he says. “Do you require an escort, or can you find your own way?”
But Henrietta does not move. She was the first person to discover a hidden message in the backlog of one of the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built. It was her technique of training a neural network on quantum anomalies that allowed a Japanese solar physicist to uncover The Static. And there’s no way that the use of OWL encryption was a coincidence. Henrietta does not yet know who sent the message, but she has no doubt whatsoever that it was addressed to her. And she has already decided that she is not leaving Paris without it.
“They call you Pépé, you know,” she says.
“Pardon me?”
“Simon and his wife,” Henrietta continues. “Zoey. And their little boy. They call you Pépé.”
Allard is no longer smiling. “You’re lying,” he says.
Henrietta is wearing a shoulder bag across her body, and her hand maneuvers through the magnetic flap to find the phone inside.
“Unfortunately, you’re still dead,” Henrietta says as she taps and swipes. “But they talk to him about you all the time. They tell him that your spirit watches over him and keeps him safe. He used to be afraid of the dark until they told him nighttime is when Pépé and Mémé come to visit and sometimes leave him little presents if he’s been brave.”
“Are you saying that I am a…”
“I’m saying that you’re a grandfather, yes,” Henrietta says. “And if you give me a second, I can prove it.”
Allard sits very still, watching Henrietta. It takes her another minute to find exactly what she is looking for, and then Allard’s handset lights up from the corner of the desk.
“Go ahead,” Henrietta says. “Check Semaphore.”
Allard’s eyes do not leave Henrietta’s—even as he reaches. It is not until he is holding up his phone and it unlocks that his attention shifts from her to whatever it is that awaits.
And then his face changes.
Henrietta did not fully realize how tense and defensive Allard had been until she sees him so thoroughly disarmed. As he pans and zooms the photo of his son’s family during the Spring Picnic on the south lawn at Langley, she can see that he is becoming increasingly unmoored.
In reality, not only is Simon unmarried, but he is openly gay. The original photo came from the events section of the CIA’s intranet, which, while Allard waited, Henrietta opened in an AI-based photo editor. The man already had the right physique, which made it straightforward to combine it with Simon’s photo from the agency’s directory. Since the app is highly contextual, it knew to adjust the skin tone of the man’s arms and hands to match the face, and even to dial in the ethnicity of the child to a genetically accurate balance between mom and dad. Swapping the gender from female to male was as easy as a toggle. The result is probably even more convincing than it needs to be; the thing about deception is that it is less about fidelity and more about showing people exactly what it is they desperately want to believe.
“How old?”
“Three.”
“What’s his name?”
“Allan,” Henrietta tells him. “It was as close to Allard as they felt they could get.”
Allard transforms into a much older man as the phone drops from his unsteady hand. He covers his face and leans forward, his slender shoulders heaving in deep sobs.
Henrietta stands and leans in close so that she can speak tenderly. “There could be a steady stream of these,” she tells him. “Birthdays, first days of school, graduations. Videos. Even holograms. Or, I could see to it that nothing about your son, or your grandson, reaches you ever again. It’s up to you.”
She does not wait for a response, but pockets her phone, takes one last sip of her wine, and leaves the old man to grieve and weep all alone.
36
BEARINGS
QUINN’S HONDA CLARITY won’t take her to Joint Base Andrews. The FAA and Department of Transportation maintain spatial databases used to geofence protected locations behind intricately shaped exclusion zones. Anything autonomous, including commercial drones, will slow as they approach invisible digital walls described by complex geometric equations. Manual overrides are blithely ignored as vehicles ease to a gentle but stubborn stop. Instructions are stored in secure elements ensuring they cannot be defeated without extremely sophisticated and highly illegal hacks. All this means Quinn is stuck waiting for a black government-owned SUV to meet her at her apartment and pick her up.
As she sits on the edge of her bed next to her suitcase and waits, she once again wonders whether she should pack her Glock. It’s in a shoebox on the top shelf of her closet, and considering her mission, it doesn’t feel right to leave her only weapon behind. But even though she is flying on a private, government-chartered, supersonic jet, she suspects her luggage will still be thoroughly checked. And given her connection to the events she is going to investigate, getting caught smuggling a personal firearm into France could easily mean an abrupt end to her entire plan. Quinn arrives at the same conclusion she did the first two dozen times she thought the question through: better to let the Elite Assassin help her procure the proper tools.
She receives a notification when her ride is finally outside, and as soon as she begins towing her suitcase behind her down the hall of her apartment building, she regrets not trading it in for something more sophisticated. Before all her recent travel, it had been a while since Quinn had flown, and in the meantime, it seems the entire world has upgraded from low-tech legacy baggage to various forms of smart luggage. Even children are now followed around airports by eerily loyal SpongeBob, Frozen, and Hello Kitty cases trained on their voices, gaits, and faces. It occurs to Quinn how much fun Molly would have had turning her suitcase into an indefatigable hide-and-seek machine.
The SUV has her Honda boxed in, and Quinn is reminded that it still needs a new cooling fan. There is so much she is leaving undone. Her apartment is an abject mess, and she still hasn’t found an accountant to help her with her taxes. There’s the storage unit out in Chantilly containing an entire life trapped in suspended animation. Things that need to be said to both her mother and her brother. Radar reflectors still embedded in her flesh.
This is not an off-the-lot SUV. It has a bulky, reinforced front bumper that looks like a battering ram, and non-pneumatic polymer tires evocative of honeycombs that can’t go flat. The back gate lifts as she approaches, and Quinn heaves her bag into the vast empty space. She picks a side, and the corresponding rear door opens to receive her, then pivots closed. The windows are tinted well beyond the legal limit, and inside the SUV it is dim and quiet. Quinn feels the vehicle rise on its magnetic suspension in preparation for a pleasant, air-cushioned ride.
“Good morning, Ms. Mitchell,” the autonomous system says as the SUV pulls away. It uses the flat, gender-neutral voice that the federal government finally commissioned after a couple of politically fraught false starts.
Quinn does not respond. She is waiting for the rest of it. Some acknowledgment of her destination. At the very least, an ETA. But that seems to be all the vehicle has to say, and it remains quiet as it exits her apartment complex.
So Quinn removes her metaspecs from their charging case, unfolds them, and immerses herself in a virtual world. A panorama of satellite imagery and machine-translated social media posts. Dynamically generated data visualizations. Unfiltered query results and pinned person-of-interest profile photos. Configuration files for bots trained to scrape the shadowphiles for anything potentially germane. Her specs are aware that she is in transit and have therefore added the vehicle’s bearing to her heads-up display. She ignores it at first, but something about it picks at the edge of her attention until, finally, she realizes what it is: “W” is the wrong direction.
Quinn snatches the specs off her face. It takes her a moment to place herself,
but she sees that she is heading west on 66. Joint Base Andrews is east of Arlington. On the other side of the Potomac, right outside the Beltway. She’s even been there before. That’s where the C-130 Hercules landed after bringing Quinn, Moretti, and the tactical team back from Zürich. When the SUV eases over and exits onto the Toll Road, Quinn relaxes. She suspects that, in all the confusion, her itinerary has been updated. It looks like her flight will be leaving out of Dulles Airport rather than the Air Force base.
“Driver?” Quinn prompts.
“Yes, Ms. Mitchell?”
For some reason, Quinn addresses the steering wheel between the seats as it shimmies with micro adjustments she can’t even feel. “Where are we going?”
“I’m sorry. This vehicle’s destination is classified.”
Not exactly the reassurance she was hoping for. But also, not a total surprise. She decides to test the vehicle’s information defenses.
“Driver, how long until we arrive at Dulles Airport?”
For a moment, Quinn thinks she has it fooled, until: “I’m sorry. This vehicle’s destination is classified.”
Since she knows she’s about ten minutes out from Dulles: “Driver, how long until we reach our destination?”
“I’m sorry, I cannot answer that question.”
“Driver, how long until you die and rot in fucking hell?”
“My remaining service life is approximately seven years.”
She may still be a ways from Dulles, but Quinn realizes right away that wherever she is going today, she is not being put on a plane. Just up ahead, on the left, is the first opportunity to exit onto the Dulles Access Road—the most direct route to the airport—but the SUV maintains its pace in the far-right lane.
“Driver, stop the car.”
“It is not currently safe to stop the vehicle.”
“Driver, find someplace to pull over. I don’t feel well.”
Finally, the worst possible response: the steering wheel continues its quick twitching and the vehicle’s pace is defiantly maintained, but now in absolute silence.
Quinn puts in calls to Van, Moretti, and Henrietta—all at the same time. And all three go to straight to voicemail.
So she releases her seatbelt. The SUV is moving way too fast for her to even consider opening the door, so she climbs up into the driver’s seat. Gentle pressure on the brake has no effect. In fact, she finds she can push both it and the accelerator all the way to the floor without any resistance, and without generating any input at all. When she grasps the wheel, she feels it click, after which it spins freely, having been mechanically disconnected from the rest of the steering system.
When the blinker comes on and the SUV begins to exit, Quinn thinks she might have broken something. That it might finally be pulling over. But when it continues navigating the wide quiet streets of suburban Washington, D.C., she realizes that the maneuver wasn’t a detour. Rather, they are close to wherever they are going.
At a red light, she tries the door. Reaches over and grabs at the latch on the passenger side. She knows that, through the tinted glass, the couple in the back of the car beside her can’t see her ramming the hard plastic panel with her shoulder. Below her, the active magnetic suspension makes rapid adjustments, compensating for what would otherwise be violent rocking.
When the light turns green, Quinn climbs back through the gap between the driver’s and passenger seats. Sitting in the middle of the long, padded bench, she tries to piece it all together. Maybe it’s all connected. The Elite Assassin, the attack on Paris. And maybe the CIA believes she is complicit.
They had to know that more went on inside that privacy room than what she told them. The official report she filed didn’t even begin to account for the amount of time she and Ranveer spent alone. It was way too convenient that she just happened to forget to record the interrogation. The only reason they’d let her go, it occurs to her now, was to keep her under surveillance. See what her next move might be. Which was to be on the phone with her ex-husband, in Paris, at the exact moment of the attack, just as she was having prearranged surgery—about as tight as alibis get; to subsequently download terabytes of data from Russian and Chinese networks, burning several back doors in the process; and finally, to use the chaos of the situation to plan to break the same international serial killer she already had a suspicious relationship with out of the highest-security prison in the world.
Quinn now realizes that, instead of freeing the Elite Assassin, it is much more likely she will be joining him.
But not without a fight. She turns and sees that she can get to her suitcase from the back seat. She imagines unzipping her bag, reaching in, and her hand emerging with the nonexistent Glock. Another omission in a long line of bad decisions.
But as they approach the nondescript, windowless, unmarked data center the size of a sprawling multistory shopping mall, Quinn begins formulating a different hypothesis. If they really thought she might have something to do with the attack on Paris, why quietly reel her in? Moretti would have had much more fun raiding her apartment in the middle of the night. Or better yet, taking her down at her cubicle. Having her pinned against her desk, roughly cuffed, and paraded in shame among his stunned and applauding subordinates. With Ranveer, he stood back and let his tactical team do the work. But with her, she imagines him stepping forward and making the arrest himself.
The structure is guarded by armed Marines and creepy, headless, quadruped robots playfully loping about in the graveled gaps between concentric razor-wire fences. As the SUV authenticates and is waved through the security gate, Quinn has an idea. She finds her phone and calls Henrietta’s voicemail again, but this time, she activates the video feed. Henrietta’s avatar is a virtual Jiji who explains, in a nasally male voice, that Henrietta must be too busy feeding him to pick up, but to leave a detailed message. He cups a paw around a tall black ear and cocks his head as if awaiting an explanation. But Quinn did not call to talk. She called to watch. And as soon as the SUV is within range, she sees it. It is extremely weak at this distance, but Quinn detects that same pixel-twisting fisheye warp she saw when she called Henrietta from Oman. That mysterious, single-hertz heartbeat that causes such unusual signal interference. Now Quinn knows exactly where she is: Henrietta’s and Moretti’s top secret facility.
37
AFTERIMAGE
HENRIETTA IS BAREFOOT, bagless, and conspicuously without her big, round, color-correcting glasses.
Everything she brought with her other than the dress she is wearing is now either hanging or stacked inside in a long, mesh, biometrically sealed locker. The floor is covered in squishy, Vaseline-colored, probably antimicrobial silicone tiles that remind her of Moretti’s man cave, and that she can’t help but anxiously pinch into little knots with her pink-painted toes. She is being closely observed by two humorless women in badged and buttoned blazers, shapeless navy skirts, and cornflower-blue berets.
Even in the room’s excessive air-conditioning, Henrietta is sweating, and as she passes through the millimeter-wave, full-body scanner, she wonders if the additional density of moisture under her arms and just above her butt is getting false-color rendered. After exiting the plasma glass capsule, she is handed a quarter-sheet of paper with a sixteen-digit number printed on it, then escorted into the neighboring waiting room. At the front desk, she is asked—in heavily accented, monosyllabic English—to read her number aloud. Once it is verified, she trades the slip of paper for some sort of laminated, illustrated document that reminds her of an airline safety card.
Next on the brisk and orderly agenda: sit down and wait.
The address of the U-shaped, eighteenth-century, French-Gothic building with the arched entrance and cobblestone approach was sent to her by Jean-Baptiste Allard via Semaphore message about fifteen minutes after she left the VW Jetstream trailer—just enough time, Henrietta imagines, for him to throw ba
ck another cognac, pull himself together, and decide to enter into an illicit quid pro quo agreement with a foreign intelligence operative. I cannot send you The Static itself, the message began, but I can arrange for you to view it, very briefly, inside a nearby cleanroom. In exchange, Henrietta used the twenty-minute car ride from Ground Zero to the old Hôtel de Broglie, where several French intelligence agencies maintain satellite offices, to author another forgery of Simon and his imaginary, heterosexual, biracial nuclear family—this time perched atop bales of hay in the photo zone of a local fall festival, illuminated by celestial beams of golden, late-afternoon sunlight amid a backdrop of autumn foliage.
Eventually Allard will wonder how it is that Henrietta always seems to have such ready access to suburban-stereotypical photos of his son’s family—especially given that CIA employees are not exactly the most prolific users of social media. And then it will occur to him that his grandson has not sufficiently aged between spring and fall. Finally, he will do what he should have done the moment Henrietta sent him anything—what he would have done reflexively had this been a normal investigation rather than a matter so personal as to have undermined any hope of objectivity: run the two images through a pipeline of content authenticity algorithms, which, if they are any good at all, will instantly invalidate Henrietta’s story. But by then, neither Jean-Baptiste Allard nor Alessandro Moretti will have any idea where to find her.
The Static is apparently being treated as a form of signals intelligence as Henrietta is sitting in the waiting room of the Brigade de renseignement et de guerre electronique, or the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Brigade. Essentially the French equivalent of the NSA. The laminated card she is holding makes the bold assertion that INFORMATION CANNOT BE STOLEN FROM THE CLEANROOM, and then explains, in six different languages and through the use of Ikea-like illustrations, exactly why.
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