(“When someone actually manages to shoot me, make sure my replacement’s Brazilian,” she’d said. After a beat, he’d said, “They all are.”)
Two days in Lima. Eating at restaurants that had verandas or windows, taking pictures with tourists, visiting museums, attending an evening of the UARC Film Festival that was a last-minute addition. Suyana ended up in matte gold sequins that fell to mid-calf, and a black leather belt of Ethan’s that Oona knotted to look carefree. On the red carpet, Suyana and Ethan got more screams than the movie stars. “Home court advantage,” Ethan murmured, like it was news.
In Ipanema, she and Ethan went shopping at prearranged locally owned stores and bought local swimsuits to wear to the local beach, improving some invisible retail clout over foreign bathing suits. Suyana wore a long-sleeved cover-up that came to her knees, even in the water, because to wear just the bathing suit would invite speculation about her figure.
“Modesty implies self-awareness,” Magnus said just before they got out of the car at the first glittering swim boutique. “You should enforce that impression as much as possible.”
What he meant was, Don’t look so grateful to Ethan; people can see you.
On their way in, Ethan shot a grin at the photographers and waited until the doors closed behind them. Then he said, “Don’t let Magnus or anybody shame you out of anything. You’re amazing. If you want to just buy a two-piece, I would support that. I really would.”
She couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, you’re a saint,” she said, and he didn’t deny a thing, but they had twenty minutes to kill in the store before moving on and her things were already waiting with the cashier Oona had called a week ago, so she picked up four things off the first rack she came to, and then took Ethan’s hand and led him to the dressing rooms without a word.He wasn’t hard to please. He liked the smallest things, she’d barely had to learn how to keep him happy, whatever she tried seemed to work—but she made sure not to always wait for an overnight visit. Let him press her up against the wall of a dressing room, let him wrap his hand around her fingertips and slip away with her at a party. Everyone liked feeling like they were hard to resist; even a contract relationship should build on possibilities. It was a game he was good at—he never pushed, and he was good in bed. Generous. He was easy to want to please.
On the beach she wore the black cover-up but only loosely fastened, so when she walked the camera got a glimpse of her thick thighs, her soft stomach. The national press seemed slightly stumped, but tourists loved it, and they got looks all the way down the beach. Ethan grinned down at her, and she smiled and glanced around and cataloged faces.
They toured the Government Palace in Lima with the president, nodding solemnly at the portraiture and admiring the architectural detail, and spent an afternoon shaking hands with ministers and chairmen at a luncheon in the Peace Room as Ethan vacillated between a consummate statesman and a shy boyfriend meeting an extended family, depending on his audience. Across the room, with another set of strangers, she nodded solemnly and smiled politely and admired him for his ease. That alone seemed noteworthy. A warning of something.
Between passed hors d’oeuvres and being seated, Suyana pulled aside the administrator of the Amazon Forestry and Conservation Initiative to ask him about the new research station, in Spanish.
“It sounds very ambitious,” she said, as pristinely neutral as she’d ever managed. Hakan would have been proud.
“It certainly is,” the administrator agreed, far less neutral, “and I’m looking forward to all their preliminary reports and explanations about erosion prevention actually justifying their plans for expansion, as soon as their head office condescends to give it to us.”
Suyana had a dozen questions before he was done talking, but she couldn’t voice them—she wasn’t supposed to even know what to ask. So she smiled and said, “Well, I can’t wait to see the forest again, it’s been so long,” and let him murmur some polite nothing and wander away and think of her as an empty doll they dressed up and sent to Paris twice a year.
Outside, where the national press and the tourists were waiting, Suyana made eye contact anywhere she could—good photo etiquette—as she looked at face after face, noting whoever seemed less intent on their camera than on her.
The press couldn’t get enough of the visit, which, assassins or not, felt like the return of the prodigal daughter. Magnus’s press service sent him a preview scan of Global’s weekly Hot or Not list, in which Suyana was walking beside Ethan down the beach, cover-up flying.
BOMBSHELL IT, they’d slapped across the photo, under HOT. Show just enough—then leave him wanting more—with a hot suit and a barely-there cover-up.
The boutique sold out of the suit and cover-up in fifteen minutes, Magnus told her on the way home from a dinner appointment. They were already taking orders for next year.
“I’m so glad,” she said, and ticked off three places on the shopping map that were Quechua-owned. “The PR’s paying off,” she told Magnus as she pushed it back toward him. “Hakan always said a little Quechua pride would be good for me.”
Magnus glanced up but said nothing, which was a mercy. The three shops appeared in her itinerary, one after the other.
“I hope you’re getting something for yourself out of this trip,” he said. “The PR is necessary, but I know you don’t often make it home.”
“We should go dolphin watching on the river,” she said after a while.
× × × × × × ×
There wasn’t time to book a private boat, but by the time the tiny plane had taken them from Lima inland, the security team had frisked the tour group and had the police do a sweep for weapons, so they had the all clear, and the tourists were nice enough to come up and ask for pictures instead of pretending to take pictures of the water in their direction.
As a trio of American backpackers were bonding with Ethan about a shared homesickness for burgers and fries, Suyana handled a line of young women and teenage girls who held maps or crumpled receipts for her to sign, talking about how lovely the river was and making jokes about how she needed high heels just to be able to see Ethan.
One of the girls stepped up and offered a map of inland Peru, and said, “For Sotalia.”
Suyana kept her eyes on the paper until she was done writing the name, and then she glanced up only as would be expected. “Is this your first time seeing the dolphins?” she asked, as she circled a coffee shop that had a view of the staff entrance of their hotel in Iquitos (Sotalia had dark eyes, hair that she’d put in a ponytail to make her look younger than she was). “That sounds lovely, what a nice trip,” Suyana said in response to whatever Sotalia had told her, as she wrote Enjoy your three days in beautiful Lima! Best wishes, and, “It’s so nice to meet you,” Suyana said as she handed the map back, and Sotalia glanced it at and nodded once before she clutched it to her chest and thanked Suyana and shuffled away to take photos of the water.
Three days. Time enough for a visit to the site, and then a meeting with Sotalia at the hotel, to tell them whatever had to be done.
Suyana took photos alongside everyone. The dolphins eventually found the boat, and everyone cooed and laughed and took pictures as the dolphins quacked up at them, but Suyana aimed her camera at the wide, shimmering line of the river, at the canopy of trees, at so many shades of green her eyes hurt.
The last time she’d had someone teach her something that wasn’t IA business had been so long ago she was still learning statecraft from Hakan. (They’d passed the apartment he’d rented, on the drive from one place to another. Only she knew he’d ever lived there.)
On one of her final lessons—someone was packing up her apartment during the session and sending her clothes to Paris, it was so close to the end—the science tutor taught her about the eye as a fossil record. The human eye, she said, sees so many shades of green because humans had evolved from prey animals and needed to be able to distinguish safe places; people were born knowing they’d be hunte
d, and had to take advantage.
7
The first stop on any ecological tour of Norway, it turned out, was Bergen, where Martine and Margot walked around the historic pier for the benefit of the press, security guards nowhere in sight, looking like a side-by-side time-lapse photo of Norwegian nobility.
This far from the Central Committee, Margot ditched the suits for nice trousers and sweaters that probably cost what Daniel made in a month. Martine wore scarves so voluminous they’d have swallowed the bottom half of her head except that her stylists folded down the front so her purple lipstick always showed. Neither of them bothered smiling, though cameras lined the streets every time they left the hotel. They were doing Norway a favor just by showing up.
“You must be loving this,” Daniel said from behind a map of Bergen. “The two meanest women in the world come home to celebrate.”
Over the comm in his ear, Bo said, “It’s a nice town. Busier than I expected. So far no trouble keeping them in sight.”
“You’re the world’s most boring person,” Daniel said, “and when I find out how you ever got into killing people for a living, I’m going to die of shock,” and muted the connection for the next five minutes just so he didn’t have to hear whatever Bo was yelling at him.
After Martine and Margot had spent the requisite amount of time gracing local boutiques, they got into a single car to go to dinner, and Daniel went back to the room he and Bo were sharing undercover as a couple so he could crash before the late shift.
The trade-off happened just shy of midnight, as Daniel took up his post at the outdoor café opposite the glass-walled bar where Margot and Martine were deep in conversation.
“What are they plotting, do we know?”
From inside the bar, Bo glanced casually at his phone, wrote back, Sounds like Martine’s in line for Central Committee thanks to this, and took a sip of wine that Daniel resented him for having. Bo was going to trail Margot home soon and get in bed and sleep the sleep of the just, and Daniel was going to be stuck out in the chilly night for however long it took Martine to finish her mandatory clubbing and go to bed.
It took three espressos on his end, and he lost track of how much wine on Martine’s, before anything happened. When Margot seemed satisfied and left, Bo did his magic trick of disappearing in plain sight, and Daniel was left following Martine and her hired muscle wherever she was headed next.
He fell in line behind her and let the tide carry him. He’d pinpointed the six most exclusive clubs in Bergen, but it was dangerous to try to overthink your target. Daniel just haunted them down the streets, between the couples on dates and the groups of young people, until they reached Sessrúmnir. It had been third on his list by rank of probability; he needed to work harder.
That was the problem of stepping in on someone else’s beat cold—you had to start up the hill all over again. He could tell without thinking when Suyana had wound up too tight under the cameras and was planning to slide out the kitchen door and meet with Chordata just to pretend she still had a reason to keep going. That pattern he had nailed down to the day.
At the door, Martine whispered something to her hired man, and after some hesitation he nodded and went inside. As soon as she was alone, she yanked her fake cigarette out of her jeans, shook it awake, and sucked in a pull so deep he heard her breath from down the block. The lights outside the club were blue, and she looked like an ice statue with her chin tilted up toward the dark.
Still staring at the sky, she held a hand and crooked a finger toward him.
Goddammit. He thought about vanishing, but there was no point, once you’d been made. At least if Martine had him murdered, Li Zhao would have to admit he’d been right about Martine having bad blood.
He approached slowly, not wanting to put himself between Martine and the bodyguard inside, but she waited until he was within arm’s reach without looking over, and even then she exhaled another lungful of vapor before she said, “A little far afield for a taxi dancer, isn’t it?”
“I go where the dancing is.”
She pulled a face. “Jesus, that’s terrible. I was debating whether to disappear you, but you might have just made up my mind.”
“Can it wait two weeks?” he asked, when the air had come back to his lungs. “I’m expecting news from someone.”
She frowned. Then she said, “So why aren’t you with her?”
It had somehow never occurred to him that Suyana must have explained him away enough to avoid disaster. It should have—there was obviously a reason Martine hadn’t gone to the national press with an exposé on snaps sneaking into the Faces’ inner sanctums, and her goodwill toward the press wasn’t it—but he couldn’t picture Suyana and Martine having a civil conversation for long enough. Good for them, he thought vaguely, above the drum of his pulse.
He said, “Couldn’t resist a chance to see you in your element, I guess.”
Martine shot him a look that made him feel like the false ashes from her cigarette—that hatred that came right before someone admitted something, and before he could think, he brushed his hair down over the camera to obscure her.
It took Martine all of two seconds to figure everything out, and she lit up as soon as she realized it, positively delighted in her disdain. “Wait. What the fuck do you all think I’m going to be doing up here that’s more important than the show she’s putting on down there?”
He needed to run—he needed to get out of here before she got bored with him or before he told her anything he couldn’t justify—but he couldn’t afford to make her angry, and he was too stung to lie. “Nothing, apparently. You smile and pretend you can stand Margot, and I watch you and worry about somebody else.”
She tapped the cigarette off; it became a shivering ember between her fingers, an aftereffect of her grin. “Oh, friend, that Amazon’s going to eat you alive.”
Daniel had no argument to make. He’d been doing the math on that for a year.
“Tomorrow we’re taking separate cars to Dovrefjell,” she said, so casually it sounded at first like she was making travel plans with him. “There’s a photo op outside. Then Margot tours the site, and I go right to the Kongsvold Hotel and drink myself stupid overnight. Then I go to Oslo and party for a week and pretend I care about ecology for an hour or two a day during meetings. My laziness about it all will get me a place in the Central Committee, once Spain gets off his ass and retires as press liaison. Who knows from there?”
She slid the cigarette back into her pocket, kept two fingers on the tip like it was a homing beacon. “And I don’t care about anything she’s asked me to do. I’d agree to worse things than ignorance. But if she wants me out of the way for that site visit, and I’m the one she trusts, then I don’t know what that means for the other site.”
When she turned to look at him, her irises vanished into the wash of blue light above her. She looked blank-eyed and distant and helpless as a ghost. He wished he’d left the camera clear; he was missing a beautiful shot.
“I’m going to be here for a few hours,” she said. “You can try to follow me if you want, but you won’t get in. This place has standards. Have a good night watching for me and worrying.”
The door closed behind her. If the bodyguard came out to clean up, Daniel didn’t stick around to see it.
8
Oona dressed her in white and blue for the visit.
“You should look like the evening sky coming down to bless whatever cement block they’re taking you to,” she said as she plaited Suyana’s hair into a single complicated knot at the back of her neck.
“It’s an ecological research facility.”
“God, we’d better get you some jewelry, then. And a jacket.”
From the dining table of the suite, Magnus smiled down at his paperwork.
She ended up in a navy-blue silk jumpsuit that looked like a sleeveless mockery of a scientist’s smock, and a white linen jacket that only made it worse, and Magnus looked her over skeptically
as they waited in the lobby.
“It’s the best of bad options,” she said. “I wanted the work boots and jeans, but she begged me to look like I cared.” She tried a smile. “I’ll end up in a cocktail dress if she keeps going.”
Magnus looked as though he wasn’t sure it could be worse, but he just smoothed his own lapel and said, “It will do. We’ll leave the jacket in the car. It will be more . . . subtle.”
She nearly laughed before she caught it, and Magnus glanced at her, surprised, just as the car pulled up and Ethan and Stevens got out.
“Morning, Samuelsson,” said Stevens, mostly to his tablet. “Morning, Suyana. Ethan, be back here by four, please. You have the dinner scheduled.”
“Roger that,” said Ethan, scooping Suyana gently by the elbow, and she must have made a face she couldn’t help, because he said, “Don’t worry, it’s fine. I’ll get you back in one piece.”
Suyana’s stomach lurched, and without thinking she leaned back to make herself heavier. “But Magnus—” she began, and looked behind her, where Magnus was beginning to move in her direction, though Stevens was stepping in front of him and saying something about security clearance that didn’t come through.
“I’m not going either,” Stevens pointed out in the tone handlers used when they knew they were talking about people they’d outlive.
“This is unacceptable,” Magnus was saying as Ethan helped her into the car, as it pulled away from the curb, and when she looked out the window as they turned the corner. Magnus was staring after her, one fist held tight to his side and his phone already to his ear.
Too late, she thought, the queasy feeling settling and sliding into something else that felt far away. She calculated, briefly, the chances the Americans had arranged for something to happen to her on-site, and was comforted by the low number. She was less comforted by the chances that Margot had arranged for something to happen, but she concentrated on how unlikely it was that Margot would get rid of a perfectly biddable American Face in the bargain—because for Margot to keep clear of a disaster, they’d both of them have to go.
Icon Page 5
