by Nels Wadycki
Heston—not his real name—picked up one of Ana's hands from his knee and brought it to his mouth, placing a light kiss on it, taking in her carefully measured hint of perfume as he did.
"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."
He continued to hold the hand as he rose and then held his arm out at an angle. Ana looped her arm through his, and they left the gaming floor.
Ana noted a few possible bodyguard types on the way to Mr. Heston's room, but none made any contact or showed even a sign of recognition. Certainly some of them were there for various other high-rollers; it was, after all, that kind of casino. They represented the best private security that money could buy. Ana wondered which of them she would be seeing later, but kept her outward attention—affection—focused on Heston.
The cover for the fingerprint reader slid open as they approached the door. The key fob must have been on his body somewhere, but Ana didn't much care. She did not plan on having to get into the room again later. Mr. Heston swiped his finger over the reader and the door clicked open. He pushed it open and allowed her to precede him into the opulent suite. The lights inside stirred to greet them, starting dim and growing to their full glow as though the sun were rising just outside the windows. Heavy drapes covered the windows, though, and Ana guessed they could stay there for days without once considering the position of the sun. With the amount of soft currency waiting for him in banks around the world, Heston probably thought staying there with Ana for days was a possibility.
Ana pawed one of the switches to reduce the illumination level back to sensual. Heston removed his comically large hat and placed it delicately on a side table, then shed his suit jacket and tossed it on a nearby chair while loosening his tie. Ana spotted a briefcase on the side table on the opposite side of the large couch in the middle of the sitting room.
"Do you need to freshen up?" he asked, swinging a hand toward the French doors that opened into the bedroom. There was a bathroom off the bedroom that housed a shower big enough for several people, but Ana did not plan to get in it with anyone.
"I'm feeling pretty fresh," she said, closing the distance between them. He backed away the tiniest bit. He could have stood his ground, but she had been in charge from the beginning and he liked it.
Ana pushed him down into a chair next to the side table that held the briefcase. If he wanted them somewhere else for this escapade, he didn't show it. Ana disconnected whatever fear or insecurity might have been plugged into his brain when she pulled a pair of fuzzy handcuffs from her red leather purse.
He sucked in a breath and barely managed to expel some words. "Take the dress off." His voice was very low.
"What's that?" she said. "You want to see what I have on underneath here?" She twirled the handcuffs on her index finger.
He gulped, attempted another deep breath and nodded.
"You sure? There's really not much to see. Not much of anything underneath"—she paused—"if you know what I mean."
Ana grabbed one of his wrists and slapped a cuff on it. Heston struggled, but only for a second. She pulled the arm behind the chair and he dropped his other arm so she could put the other cuff on.
"You're mine now."
"Oh noooooo," he said, forcing nonchalant sarcasm through his drawling accent. But Ana felt the blood pounding through his arms and hands.
She considered for a second that his racing pulse might trigger one of his biofeedback alarms. But his security detail had stood silently by as the newly minted couple made their way to the appointed love shack. If they held true to their appearance, they would know the difference between the data created by lust and that of panic or fear. Real fear.
Ana figured that gave her about sixty seconds. She walked from behind the chair to where Heston's computing terminal lay locked inside the shiny metal briefcase next to the gold and cream couch.
"What's the code for the briefcase?" The sultry heat of Ana's voice iced over with cold calculation.
"What?" A surprised splutter.
"I said, what is the combination for the briefcase? Come on, Mr. Heston, do I have to put two and two together for you?"
He still just stared in bewilderment. Yes, it had been that easy.
"You are rich, and I am robbing you."
"Raymond!" he yelled.
"Mr. Heston, we both know you asked for a room with the highest-level privacy filters. Do you think Raymond is going to hear you yelling for him?"
"Then we both should also know that I am hooked to a biofeed, which is probably about to reach some dangerous thresholds. Dangerous for you, little miss whoever-you-are."
"Now you're thinking like a criminal! So you probably also know that if you don't give me what I want, I'll just shoot you with a device that looks like an innocent, perhaps slightly embarrassing, sex toy, and then follow my pre-planned escape route. I won't have your money, but I'll still be alive. And money is not very useful when you're dead. Not for me, but not for you either."
The doors crashed open and two large men pushed their way into the sitting room of the suite. The guns held in their outstretched arms were trained on Ana.
"Whoa there!" she yelled. "What kind of girl do you think I am?"
The men seemed confused. At least a little bit. Ana placed her hands on the fabric clinging to her hips and glared at Heston.
"We've already got handcuffs going here. I would be fine if you wanted to smell my feet, and I've been known to enjoy a little spanking, but bringing in two other guys without warning? That's not gonna fly, buddy."
She snatched up her purse and hustled toward the door. Ana worried that the sudden movement might cause a premature ejaculation from one of the bodyguard's guns, but they held on and moved to block her exit.
--
"Hello, Ms. Anderson. Glad you finally decided to join us."
Ana swept dust from her mind, trying to bring back an iota of the gleam that would allow it to shine like a polished gem. She still wore the skimpy red dress that had flitted around her during her Vegas promenade. Durosteel handcuffs chafed her wrists; red abrasions dotted them where she must have struggled against captivity while still unconscious.
"I'm almost suspicious of how you walked into the belly of the beast. So careless for someone with such a long history of superficially legal activity."
"It's not the first time I've been pulled aside by someone's private security."
"Oh, Ms. Anderson," the woman started, mimicking a motherly condescension.
"You can call me Julia," Ana interrupted.
"Because I'm sure that's your real name, isn't it?"
The woman looked taller than her real height because Ana sat before her in a small black metal chair. The woman's black hair hung to either side of her face like raven's wings and her death-black eyes and the point of her nose completed the likeness.
The room the two women occupied weighed down the opposite end of the scale from what Ana expected. The only similarity with the bare durocrete walls Jasper Jonze had described might be the lack of windows, but the large, elegant crystal chandeliers in the room more than made up for any need for natural light. A soft purple carpet covered the floor and massaged Ana's bare feet. The pale purple that covered the walls was actually quite pleasant up to the point where it threw Ms. Raven in her tight black dress into stark relief.
"Whoever you are, your con-woman coolness has gotten you in a bit over your head. We are not one of the rinky-dink private security companies you are used to coming across on your little capers."
Ana let her attention move from the ornate scrollwork of the furniture throughout the room back to the woman in front of her. Forced to decide between swallowing hard and continuing her sassy charade, it was always easier to fake apathy than pretend to care.
"But you're not above taking money from a single, lonely Southerner."
"But I am above taking snide remarks from you." The Slavic accent in the Raven's voice became more pronounced as it filled with anger. "S
o do you want to listen to what I have to say, or do you want to try being sarcastic by yourself in a little room with one hundred percent less comfort than this one?" She sped up as she went, the pronunciation of the vowels changing slightly, but her grammar remained flawless as she fired the words like perfectly enunciated little bullets.
"Listen to you or be free of your screeching arrogant condescension? Well, I wouldn't want my wit to wither. I'll weather your words."
"I appreciate your clever consonance, so I'll try to speak in a vernacular you can understand. By that, I mean money and punishment. We are willing to give you the first and if you do what we want, you won't have to worry about the second."
"My vernacular probably would have used former and latter instead of first and second, but you said something about giving me money, so I will let it go."
Ana watched the anger fighting for release just beneath the woman's calm exterior. She blinked hard a few times, clenched her firsts, took a deep breath, and relaxed her hands again.
"Yes, well, that small grammatical contention aside, I'm sure my point was made,"
"I'm not trying to say I'm looking for a new job, but, I mean, sure, I could use the money."
"Listen. I know you're not stupid. I am also not stupid and I know that no threat of mine will make you drop the misanthropic misfit routine. But when I say that we can expose you on every subsequent attempt to get more money, I know that you'll hear me. Even when playing the game is more of a prize for you than the money, we will ruin that for you too."
Ana swallowed hard, knowing that, as Julia, the game she was supposed to be playing meant more to her than the money she might have gained from Heston.
"Well, I'm not sure why such a high-quality organization as yours would want to employ someone captured so easily, but it would seem that I owe you one."
--
Ana and her new "partner" Etienne—a young lady several generations removed from her French ancestry—left their New York City hotel in outfits Ana presumed the Continuum thought said "belle of the ball" but which Ana equated more to "high-class prostitute." Or maybe the Continuum wardrobe staff knew and just didn't care.
Their two pairs of towering heels clacked down the sidewalk, barely audible over the noise of the busy city. The trip to their destination spanned all of a block but in that time they managed to catch the attention of two groups of young men, still decked in conservative suits and ties from work, and had to fend off persistent requests to join them at one local bar or another, or another, whatever would please them. Guppies compared to the sharks in the tank into which the two women were about to swim. Upstream past the rocky gray shorelines of massive buildings smashed in so close that one might have grown from its neighbor like a benign architectural tumor.
In the middle of the jutting dingy masses, Ana spotted the gleaming curved glass of the shark tank, known to the world as Triton Laboratories. Part of Ana hoped it was a front for a Continuum training ground, merely a test for her meticulously crafted con artist persona, Julie Anderson. Most of her, though, wanted it to be real, to expose a piece of the Continuum agenda. Even if it gave her only a bullet point on a memo, any step forward brought the Agency a step closer to bringing down a threat, and Ana a step closer to finding out why her brother showed up in the Agency's Continuum files. If the Agency wanted to send her to find answers for it while keeping the answers it already had a secret, then she would just have to find out what they knew in the process of finding out what they didn't.
The political games always came across as far too 'meta' which led Ana to avoid them where possible. But the Agency forced her to forget about possible when they concealed information about her enemies and her brother.
The thoughts about Memo and mind games distracted Ana enough that she almost walked right by the fanciful facade that served as the entrance to Triton. The faint tinkling of cocktail music through the thick panes found its way to an appropriate synapse in her brain just in time for her to make a smooth turn and follow Etienne's protruding posterior into the lavish launch party.
Inside the foyer somewhere, among the throngs of scientists who weren't used to drinking any more than they already had, lurked not just the exponentially increasing possibility of hormone-driven responses, but a man who would give the Continuum details about Androkal. The word stood out from the briefing document because Ana hadn't ever seen it written out before. She masked her confusion as that of Julie having never seen a real brief before. Now she knew how to spell it, but it still gave her no clue as to what it really did, and the briefing doc provided no further context. Ana remembered Allen Poole's random blubbering at the hands of the Valkyries and the word stuck out like a bayonet from the end of a gun, pointed recklessly at something or other, threatening based solely on its appearance, regardless of who wielded it.
They scanned the crowd with what Ana realized probably looked a search for the highest net worth and easiest prey. Of course, they were playing the sex card and would continue throwing it out there until it stopped working. If that ever happened, though, it would mean the male half of the human race had ceased to exist. And even then, there were circumstances in which it would still work.
Etienne nudged Ana to the side and they began to work their way through the crowded room of revelers.
Ana's new handlers hadn't told her much about her colleague. Her pale skin and combination of middle Euro and north African features narrowed down her ancestry, but the name tipped her hand. A couple of generations of American living had worn away any trace of an accent, and Etienne spoke in a clear, bright voice, natural and unrehearsed.
Neither Ana nor her new friend knew anyone at the party, but their cover as the wives of a couple of investors gave them a spot on the guest list—if anyone bothered to ask—and a little leeway to look around, ostensibly in search of their much older, already heavily intoxicated husbands. Would anyone really consider tossing two women in dresses that fit like plastic wrap and covered barely more than a towel would? Only the wives on the arms of the men ogling them.
Ana hoped there wouldn't be any fighting in the jealousy-inducing garment, but she'd done it before, and in one made of a material even less structured for combat.
The instructions were to meet the target at the makeshift bar set back at the opposite end of the foyer from the entrance. The elevators were conveniently located in a hall just off to the left. Ana panned the length of the bar as the duo worked their way through the crowd, bounced and buffeted on waves of liquor. She doubted they would spot him before he saw them, but her hope for something close to simultaneous discovery was dashed on the rocks that lined the bottoms of the glasses in the many hands of the guests, none of which were attached to the target.
They approached the bar, Ana hoping they wouldn't be left waiting long. She wanted to be noticeable, but not noticed. The former would provide access, the latter would alert security.
Ana and Etienne waited, taking judicious sips from glasses of champagne obtained from the bar. Ana continued to worry, knowing that the longer they stood there, the further they went along the spectrum from noticeable to noticed. She hoped she looked as posh and unruffled as her running mate. She also considered finishing off the champagne to calm her increasingly restless nerves. It wouldn't be the most unprofessional thing she could do, and she was playing the part of a con woman and not an experienced field agent. But after thinking about it, what she really wanted was to figure out why she, as the experienced field agent, could not relax the muscles that clenched in her stomach or the ones that pulled her shoulders toward her neck as though attached to puppet strings. Ana expected to be nervous: years of experience, yet no work as a true double agent. Usually when she donned an artificial persona, there was a predefined time when the mask would come off. Working for the Continuum required a much longer-term view. She would not just reveal herself when this mission ended. She probably would not even get to go home.
A small movement from the hallway
leading to the elevators caught Ana's eye. Etienne had turned away to talk to one of the many gentlemen in suits. Ana hadn't noticed, but knew she could not afford to lose herself in thought like that again. She tapped Etienne on the shoulder.
"That champagne just ran right through me! I am going to see if there is a ladies' room down that hallway."
She turned before the man could point out the large sign indicating the direction of the women's facilities back by the entrance.
"Hold on, I'll go with you," Etienne said before Ana had even taken a step. "Excuse me, William. Good to meet you. I'm sure I'll see you around."
Ana couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for poor William. He had to recognize the reality of the situation. She did let a momentary thought circle the back of her mind, appreciating the irony that while Etienne's artificial pretense covered a deeper level of false identity like some sort of meta lie, the structure behind Ana's façade reached a level deeper than that: a lie within a lie within a lie. If she wasn't careful she might forget who she even was and end up in some sort of split-personality limbo.
The pair turned the corner and almost ran straight into their target. The round red birthmark just ahead of his retreating hairline served as the bulls-eye. Ana and Etienne aimed crosshairs at it from up on their high-heeled perches. They would have been taller than the man in front of them even without the extra height, but it just made them seem more powerful from his point of view. And it made the costume more believable, not to mention fun to wear. Until Justin had come to the Valkyrie Project, fighting in heels had been a standard part of the training. They joked that he should have had to go through it just as the Valkyries before him. Sexist? Sure, but also necessary. The blisters had burned and stung for days, and the rolled ankles had lingered longer, but youth had quickly rescued Ana and returned her to top form. She wasn't sure how well she'd hold up to that these days. Hopefully she wouldn't have to find out.
