by Greg Rucka
“Can she do it?”
Steinberg considered, leaning back against the hull of the VTOL dropship. They were in the hangar bay, or the “motor pool,” as Carrington insisted upon calling it. Inside the ship, Calvin Rogers was busying himself with preflight checks.
“Can she do it, Jon?” Carrington asked again, more insistently.
“I don’t know,” he answered finally. “You saw what she did in Africa, you know what she’s capable of in combat. She’s remarkably skilled, her raw talent is … it’s almost supernatural. I’ve seen Special Forces operators with years of training under their belts at work, and even now, fresh as she is, she could give them a run for their money.”
“She has remarkable abilities, I agree.”
“But she doesn’t have experience, Daniel. What she did in Africa, she did it alone, she wasn’t trying to protect anyone else. And we don’t know what shape Able’s going to be in. If he’s wounded or doped, it’ll slow her down. It could slow her down a lot.”
“I understood the objective was to get Agent Able out without the situation turning hot.”
“You can con her, don’t try to con me,” Steinberg said, annoyed. “Jo’s a good actress and a pretty face, and if she keeps her wits about her and bats her eyelashes, the infil won’t be a problem. But you know as well as I do that as soon as she pops the locks on Able’s cell, every alarm in the building’s going to go off. And we’re sending her in unarmed.”
“She’ll have the drugspy,” Carrington pointed out.
“Which won’t do her a damn bit of good in the middle of a firefight.”
Carrington scratched at his beard, staring off into the middle distance, lost in his own thoughts for a moment and giving Steinberg a chance to be with his. Steinberg had a bad feeling about the op; he’d had it from the moment Carrington had suggested it late the previous night. It was the same gut-churning doubt he used to get in his Army days, while prowling on search-and-destroy missions in the Northwest Frontier Province between Afghanistan and Pakistan, when he’d been a Ranger and not Daniel Carrington’s top operative. The same instinct that said the situation was off, that it was wrong, and that someone’s life would be the extracted penalty.
Of course the overt assault was a bad idea. It had never been truly considered. Carrington and Steinberg had both quickly agreed that a covert infil was the only possible means of rescuing Able, though each of them had done so for different reasons. For Steinberg, it was about their obligation to their agent, about winning Able his freedom. For Carrington, it was about information. Whatever Grimshaw had managed to decode from the panic burst had the old man energized. Whatever it was that Able had discovered, Daniel Carrington had liked the taste and wanted more.
It had been Carrington’s idea to put the scenario in front of Jo, to see if she’d bite. Steinberg hadn’t liked it then, and he’d liked it even less when Jo had overheard their “argument.” Not because he didn’t trust the plan—though God knew it was as risky as any mission he’d personally undertaken since joining the Institute—but because he disliked the manipulation.
Carrington brought his focus back from wherever he’d been staring, smiled slightly at Steinberg. “You want to call it off?”
Again, Steinberg considered. “No.”
“I’m mildly surprised.”
“We owe it to Able to try to get him out.”
“And I believe Joanna is our best chance of accomplishing that objective.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just approach her directly, I don’t understand the need to manipulate her like this.”
“Manipulation implies that I knew how she’d react,” Carrington said. “I didn’t. Think of it as my way of taking the measure of the woman.”
Steinberg shook his head, annoyed. “If we were talking about Core-Mantis, I’d accept that. But you know how she reacts when she hears the word ‘dataDyne.’ It was a foregone conclusion.”
“So who would you send instead of her?”
“Callie Kincaid,” Steinberg said immediately. “She’s tasked to the campus in Seattle, she could match the cover for Amanda Thiesen with only minor alterations.”
“Callie Kincaid barely passed your agent training program, Jon.” Carrington paused, his thick eyebrows knitting together for a moment as he surveyed Steinberg. “You’ve got a thing for our Miss Dark, don’t you?”
Steinberg fought the urge to grind his molars. “I have a thing about sending kids into combat.”
“She’d knock your teeth in, she heard you calling her a kid.”
“She’s a kid.”
“She’s a kid who’s seen a lot of combat.”
“Not like this. We shouldn’t drag her into this.”
“She was dragged into this long, long ago, Jon.” Carrington paused, frowning at him, then leaned forward, lowering his voice. “We’re at war. Never forget that. War knows no innocents.”
For the third time that morning, Steinberg started a response, only to stop himself before the words had reached his lips. Past Carrington’s shoulder, he could see Jo and Potts entering the hangar bay from the elevators. Jo was now in “costume,” wearing a white silk blouse, its high collar concealing the small star-shaped tattoo on her neck, and a long black skirt. A black messenger bag slung across her shoulder completed the disguise. She caught his eyes, flashed him a smile. Beside her, Potts had abandoned his briefcases, carrying only his trademark dour expression firmly in place.
Carrington followed Steinberg’s gaze, pivoting to watch their approach. Steinberg took a moment to pound on the hull of the dropship, and Calvin Rogers stuck his head out the portside pilot’s door.
“Yes, sir?”
“Get ready for lift off,” Steinberg told him.
“Roger, boss. All aboard.”
He turned back just as Jo and Potts reached them.
“You’re ready?” Carrington asked her.
“I am.”
“When you reach Able, I want you to ask him something for me,” Carrington said. “Very simple, but I want it to be the first thing you ask him.”
She raised an eyebrow, and Steinberg saw the suspicion in her expression, the wariness of Carrington and all he represented to her returning.
“I’ll try,” Jo said.
“The year of the Rose,” Carrington told her. “That’s what I want to know. Ask him the year of the Rose.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“No.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and Steinberg was certain he saw Jo stiffen slightly. Even if Carrington didn’t see it, it was clear he’d felt it as well, and let the touch slip away. “Good luck.”
Jo nodded, barely, then looked at Steinberg. “Shall we?”
“Let’s do it,” he told her.
She climbed into the dropship and Steinberg followed, stepping up into the main compartment and then turning to slide the door closed. Carrington began to back away, Potts mirroring his movement.
“The year of the Rose, Jo,” Carrington called before the door slammed closed. “What was the year of the Rose?”
If he said anything else after that, it was lost in the rising whine of the engines.
CHAPTER 7
dataDyne low-orbit executive transport, DragonFly II—46,000 Feet, descending September 27th, 2020
Laurent Hayes started crashing just after liftoff, and it ached enough that the irony of the situation entirely escaped him. Here he was, strapped into the acceleration couch for liftoff and a forty-six minute flight from Hawaii to Vancouver, and he was coming down harder and faster than the plane itself would. Even if he had been loaded, the irony would still have escaped him. Irony had never been Hayes’s strong suit.
So he spent the first eighteen minutes of the flight biting his tongue, feeling waves of prickly heat swarming his body as if he were being eaten alive by fire ants. By the time the transport approached the apex of its parabola, by the time the pilots finally released the locks on the passenger
restraints, he was fiending something fierce. Then Hayes heard the click of the restraints unlocking, saw the seat-belt light flicker off, and he was out of his chair, half-floating and halfleaping across the aisle to his father. Outside the porthole, the sky was turning from blue to black, and stars were coming into view as the ship skimmed into the upper atmosphere.
Doctor Friedrich Murray glanced up from the PDA in his hand, peering over the top of his glasses at Hayes.
“Yes, son?”
Hayes wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, and even that simple action was excruciating, made him wince. Stubble on his chin bit into his flesh, moisture from his lips seemed to slosh over his skin, each sensation exaggerated. Hayes stole an apprehensive glance past his father, down the aisle, thankful that most of the seats on the executive transport were empty. The Royce-Chamberlain/Bowman Motors CEO, Paul Sexton, was seated seven rows back, beside his secretary-slash-mistress, and there were two flight attendants working in the galley at the rear of the plane. That was all.
“Need a patch.” His mouth was dry, and when he spoke, Hayes’s words came out as little more than a whisper.
His father regarded him without a change in expression. “I know.”
Hayes reached up and around to the nape of his neck, where the used dermal was stuck to his skin, concealed beneath his long hair. He tore it free, biting his lip to keep from crying out as the patch’s adhesive pulled away from his flesh. It felt like he was flaying himself alive, like the patch was the size of a throw rug and not only a centimeter and a half square. He offered the used patch to his father.
Doctor Murray sighed, then set his PDA on the armrest to his left before gingerly taking the used dermal from his son. He folded it precisely in half, then tucked it into an outside coat pocket before reaching into an interior one to produce the thin black case that held the fresh doses. Murray snapped the case open, offering the contents to Hayes, and Hayes pulled a fresh patch greedily, pressing it between his palms for a moment to activate the adhesive before placing it almost exactly where the previous one had been, at the back of his neck.
The sweetness of the chemical rush sank into his skin, throbbed through Hayes in time with his pulse. His senses dulled, then expanded. He could feel the minute variations in the engine thrum rumbling through the fuselage, could smell the tang of Paul Sexton’s last cigar, at least six hours old. He tasted the flavor of metal in the reprocessed air. He closed his eyes and saw the blood flowing through the capillaries in his eyelids.
He pressed his forehead against his father’s knee and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re a good boy, Laurent.” He felt his father’s hand rest for a moment atop his head.
Hayes nodded, eyes still closed, wrapped in the warmth and comfort of his sated addiction, and thinking that, when people talked about love, this was what they meant.
“Do we know who he was working for?” his father asked him quietly.
“Not yet.”
Doctor Murray looked at him, mild surprise on his face. “What are they waiting for? Why haven’t they interrogated him yet?”
“They’ve been questioning him for the last twenty-four hours, Father.”
“Then I don’t understand. Haven’t they dosed him?”
“They’ve had to wait,” Hayes explained. “It took three hits from the Tranq to bring him down.”
Murray’s expression smoothed into understanding. “Ah, yes, they’re contraindicated, Laurent, you see? The sedative used to bring him down and the compounds used in the talking cocktail, they’re at odds. They have to wait until the first is entirely out of his system before moving on to the second.”
Hayes nodded, not truly understanding, and not much caring that he didn’t.
“Of course, they could forgo the drugs altogether and proceed to physically encouraged interrogation.”
“They’re waiting for me.”
“Again, wise.” Murray patted Hayes’s forearm with paternal pride. “You’re better at it than any of them are. And they recovered all the data?”
Hayes hesitated.
“Laurent?” Doctor Murray asked.
“Wu says he managed to make a partial transmission before they brought him down.”
He heard Doctor Murray inhale sharply.
“I know,” Hayes murmured.
“You said he’d been into my personal files. Are you telling me he sent my personal files to whoever it is he is working for, Laurent? Is that what you are telling me?”
“Wu says it was only a partial transmission, that she shut it down before it could complete—”
“How much is ‘partial’?”
“About half.”
His father looked away abruptly, clearly displeased, then checked over his shoulder, glancing back to Paul Sexton, still seated beside his mistress. He put his gaze back on Hayes, and the displeasure had turned into anger. With his right hand, he took hold of Hayes by the back of the neck, digging his index finger beneath the edge of the dermal. Hayes grimaced, fought his immediate urge to whimper. He was stronger than his father—with the dermal in place much stronger in fact—but he didn’t even consider struggling against the hold.
“You and Wu assured me that you’d stop the spy in time. That there was no danger of anything critical being compromised,” Doctor Murray hissed. “Imagine my surprise when I learned that not only had he gotten through all your security traps, but he’d also managed to get so deep into the system that he found my personal files as well. And then try and comprehend my anger, Laurent.”
“I know, Father.”
The grip tightened, the finger beginning to peel the patch from Hayes’s skin. The freshly exposed skin felt as if it were turning to liquid, beginning to leak down his neck.
“Do you know what was in those files, Laurent?” Doctor Murray demanded. “Do you?”
“Personal information, letters, those things, please, Father—”
“Rose.” The grip tightened further, and Murray forced his son to look into his eyes. “All of the payments, all of them.”
Hayes didn’t speak, trying to put the apology, the need for forgiveness, into his expression, all of his sorrow and shame at his failure. There was nothing in his father’s look even approaching sympathy, and the grip stayed tight on Hayes’s neck.
Then he let him go, falling back against his seat once more before craning his head around to check again on Sexton. Hayes put his hand quickly beneath his hair, smoothing the edge of the dermal back into place.
Without looking at him, his father said, “The first thing you will do when we get to Vancouver is begin interrogating this spy. You will find out who he works for, and you will find out who he transmitted the data to.”
“Yes, Father.”
“I want Zhang Li’s chair, Laurent. I want his throne, and right now the biggest single obstacle I face isn’t Paul Sexton and his glad-handing of the Board, and it’s not Sato and his mincing little political two-step. It’s not Waterberg and her profits, and it’s not that whore DeVries and her arrogance.
“It’s you, my boy, and your incompetence in dealing with this petty, little spy.”
Hayes nodded. Pressure was rising behind his eyes, ballooning up out of the shame he could feel welling in his chest.
“I’ll make it right, Father,” he said. “I’ll make him talk, I’ll make it right.”
Doctor Friedrich Murray, the man who both legally and emotionally could call himself Laurent Hayes’s father, didn’t bother to look at him. Instead, he simply tapped at his coat where his heart should be, and where the thin black metal case rested in its inside pocket.
“Yes,” his father said. “You damn well will.”
CHAPTER 8
pharmaDyne Corporate Headquarters—Cormox Street, Vancouver, British Columbia September 28th, 2020
Jo stood with a cluster of seven other young men and women, all of them dressed in the best professional attire they could afford, in an impersonal and undec
orated conference room. Fluorescent lights flickered above, bouncing off the black table and the ivory walls. All of the temps had been through two security screenings already, once in the lobby and once outside of the Human Resources Division. This, Jo suspected, was the third, and designed to be performed without their noticing—scanners hidden in the ceiling, most likely, and fiber optic cameras peering at them from microscopic pinholes the walls.
Somewhere above—at least, if Steinberg’s maps had been correct—in the central security office, members of pharmaDyne CORPSEC were watching them, taking captures of their faces in full and in profile, running them through their database. Weapon and transmission detectors were beaming into the room, through their clothes and their bodies and their backpacks and their purses, searching for telltale signs of impending treachery.
Not one of her fellow temps, at least as far as Jo could tell, even had the first idea it was happening. They all simply waited in uncomfortable silence, and she waited with them, her messenger bag on her shoulder, occasionally shifting her weight from one foot to another in what Jo hoped was an adequate display of nervous anticipation. The bag had been hand-searched twice already, and each time passed inspection without trouble, because there was no trouble within it to be found. The contents were all innocent-looking enough: a copy of the latest issue of some celebrity gossip rag, a compact, a lipstick, a travel pack of tissues, a half-emptied pack of breath mints. There was a PDA, too, and that had warranted a closer inspection during each search, but the PDA was six years old, almost obscenely bulky and under-powered by today’s standards. A semi-bruised orange, to serve as a mid-morning snack, rounded out the collection.
One of the doors into the room opened, and a middle-aged black woman entered, wearing a business suit, followed by a younger man, Caucasian, holding a thick stack of papers with a box of pens balanced atop them. The woman took up a position standing at the head of the table, and the man began handing out the papers and pens.
