by Jay Brandon
“It’s all right, Jack,” she said softly, still with that little smile.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that—forgiving me in advance for whatever I might do, as if it’s no big thing. Let me tell you something about myself, Arden, especially since we haven’t had much conversation. I’ve never lost a friend except to death. Well, that’s not true, but certainly not over sex. I’m still friends with everyone I ever liked who liked me.”
“Are you telling me you and I will always be friends?”
“If we ever get to be.”
Her smile broadened. “Like you and Rachel?”
Jack tilted his head, reprimanding her. “I don’t betray my friends’ trust, either.”
Her smile lost its power for an instant. He thought she was jealous. “I guess that tells me the answer.”
He shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. Maybe Rachel or I, or both of us, wouldn’t want people to think we didn’t ever make love. Maybe one of us is gay, or both of us, and we’re the only people who know it about each other. Maybe there was a lost—” He faltered. “—time, or—I’m not going to explore all the possibilities with you, that’s the point. Why don’t we talk about you and me instead?”
“Okay.” But she leaned back from him and took her hand from his. This was page one, chapter one of the body language textbook. Why didn’t Arden want to talk? Did she not want to talk about herself, or about him? Interesting…
His game beeped. Jack glanced at the screen, which now said, “WANNA PLAY?”
He tapped a Y in reply. What time was it in America?
Arden sighed. Without glancing at her, Jack said, “You didn’t want to talk anyway. And this is important, I’m sorry.”
She was silenced for a moment, an extraordinary event, not knowing which of his statements to answer. Then she leaned against his shoulder as he tapped keys. Want to play Level 5? he asked his unseen opponent.
“How can this be important? Is it the championship?”
Jack laughed quietly. At some point thick white mugs of coffee had appeared in front of them. He hoped it hadn’t been while he was revealing world secrets. Jack took a quick sip and liked the cup. Heavy, substantial, no flimsy Starbucks plastic or paper. The cup was better than the coffee, in fact.
The answer to his question appeared on his screen: There is no Level 5.
Jack grinned. I have the European edition, he typed. Follow me.
It was almost as if he had his opponent by the hand as they jumped to the level they’d already been playing, and the other character followed Jack’s assassin-with-no-loyalties character to a secret door behind the refrigerator in a run-down café. Not unlike the one in which Jack and Arden sat, as a matter of fact.
Jack had designed Level 5 himself, very hastily, partly in his mind while he was alone in jail, then on the train while Arden slept. So it was a hazy level, not very well filled-in. But ’twas enough, ’twould serve.
There was a pause while his opponent read the rules of this level. What was important at this part of the game was that the two characters would be separated. Each would have a home base, which he could take as much time as he wanted to explore and even alter to some extent, before venturing out in search of his adversary.
While his opponent read, Jack turned to Arden again. “I don’t get it,” she said.
He shrugged. “Not much to it. I really don’t know what to do next in Salzburg, and this relaxes me, helps me think.”
“I could relax you, I think.”
It was funny the way she said that, trying to be sexy and trying not to sound as if she were trying. Jack smiled at her, not trying to convey an erotic response at all himself. Arden shrugged, looking more girlish, and smiled at herself. “That would be wonderful,” he said, but in a way that sounded even to himself kind of dismissive.
Arden stood up. “I’ll go look around. How long will you be?”
Jack glanced at his screen, where his opponent was tiptoeing through his own territory. Even on-screen, Jack could see his wariness. He grinned. “Half an hour, tops.”
Rachel Green liked being part of a team. It had been a long time. Being a Circle member on foreign assignment—or a foreign member of the Circle, she was never sure which; it had led her into philosophical discussions in her own mind, which she had never resolved, such as Was the Circle a country unto itself?—was inherently lonely. Anyone who might act friendly to you could be a foe. Most of the time when you tried to make friends with someone, it was for a reason, which meant the ensuing “friendship” was an artificial construct, even if she genuinely liked the person. You never have friendships again like in school days. At least that was Rachel’s experience. As for lovers—well, it was like she imagined being a spy in the Cold War days. Give yourself to someone wholeheartedly, but with a knife under the pillow and an escape plan.
The way some men were naturally, she chuckled to herself.
Her second in command, Captain Bernard Lowenstein, raised an eyebrow at her, asking her to share the joke. “Nervous chuckle,” she whispered.
He nodded understandingly. “I get gas from nervousness.”
“Great time to tell me.” Because they were walking through a concrete culvert, a very large pipe, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast.
“It’s why I always have new partners,” Captain Bernard Lowenstein said, and they both laughed.
To say Bernie was her second in command was misleading. Rachel had an honorary rank of Colonel, but no place in the chain of command. Her title was Consultant. Not Security Consultant or any other specification. Bernie had pointed this out and assumed it meant Rachel was an expert on everything. “There’s this girl I like who works in a flower shop. What should I take her if I ask her out on a first date? Chocolates?”
“Flowers,” Rachel had answered. “You know she likes them.”
“But then what if she asks me where I got them and I have to say I bought them from a rival so I could surprise her? Don’t you think that would make her mad?”
Rachel had spread her hands, indicating the discussion had gotten too silly for her. But Bernie had persisted, shrugging and quoting. “If you have two Jews, you’ll have five opinions. You owe me at least one more opinion, consultant.”
That was what Rachel missed about being part of a team: banter; easy camaraderie. The unspoken, unthought belief that they were all on the same team. Your colleague had your back, and vice versa. This feeling grew from talk as silly as flowers and first dates.
Now such a feeling was important, as she and Captain Bernie went slowly through the conduit, which was getting smaller. This drainage line, according to Salzburg city diagrams, eventually turned and went under the public square where the chief executives of eight nations would be meeting in the only public forum of this conference. Surely someone had checked it out, but Rachel wanted to be sure.
The concrete tube got shorter and narrower, until the two of them couldn’t go side by side. “Which of us will go in front?” Captain Lowenstein asked.
“Which do you think, farter?”
While Bernie laughed again, Rachel got down on hands and knees and crawled ahead. She hated this part. Anyone who didn’t wouldn’t be human, in her opinion. She began to have fantasies that she was crawling back into the womb, or the heart of the earth. Behind her, Lowenstein was just grunting, his head occasionally bumping her feet.
Then she stopped dead. There were sounds ahead. When she stopped the sounds persisted for a second or two, then also stopped. Rachel started slowly forward, and the sounds started slowly up again. Must be echoes. But she didn’t believe it. This echo had an odor.
She turned on a flashlight just as someone else did. The two beams clashed like light sabers, revealing nothing but the lights. Rachel lowered hers, so that it would illumine her face. That took as much courage as anything she had ever done. In this confined space, her partner couldn’t provide her any cover, and she couldn’t see to defend herself.
&nb
sp; “Israeli?” came a male voice from only a few feet ahead of her.
Rachel nodded. The voice laughed. Then the man turned his own light on himself, revealing craggy but youthful features, curly dark hair, and very dark eyes. “Syrian,” he said with an odd sort of sneer, then added, “Ill met by flashlight.”
The tunnel seemed to shrink even more. Their two countries had been bombing each other two months ago. At the moment— as of ten minutes ago, that is—a very fragile cease-fire prevailed, which militants on both sides were trying to destroy. This was one of the primary reasons for the peace summit. But few people believed there would ever be peace between these countries. Certainly there would never be any trust between their armed forces.
Rachel heard guns being eased out of holsters. She left her own in place. This was a situation for a voice. But her throat had gone completely dry. Behind her, she could hear Bernie trying to wriggle forward, but her body blocked his. When the Syrians shot her, maybe Bernie could use her as a shield, to fire back.
“What’s back down that way?” she asked in a hoarse voice, stalling for time.
“Nothing,” said the Syrian. Then after a pause, “Do you believe me?”
Something was wrong here. Rachel’s mind raced. Then she realized what was so odd. They were both speaking English. And his “ill-met” remark had a very English source: Shakespeare.
She turned her flashlight back on her own face. “Princeton,” she said distinctly.
There was a moment of silence, as if she had said something incomprehensible. Then there was an explosive laugh from the darkness in front of her. The Syrian pointed his flashlight at his own face. “Columbia,” he laughed.
They crawled forward, almost face to face, and shook hands in the old student-power way. It was hard to study each other’s faces in the moving shadows, but she thought he looked familiar. He may have thought the same thing. “Hassan,” he said, and Rachel told him not only her name but her year of graduation. Very briefly they reminisced. “What do you miss most?” Rachel asked, and Hassan sighed. “New York. Central Park. Chinatown.” “The Museum of Modern Art,” Rachel said, and he nodded. Then Hassan looked up, at the culvert barely overhead. “Sleeping through the night,” he murmured.
Rachel nodded too. Then she spoke in a businesslike way. “Both our Presidents are going to be on that platform. Does this culvert go directly under it?”
“Close enough, if the bomb is powerful enough.”
After a moment she sighed. “I have to go through. Make sure you didn’t leave anything.”
“And I have to do the same.”
“We are carrying only sidearms,” Rachel pointed out.
“As are we. Do you want to frisk me?”
“I suppose there’s no other choice. How far is the other end?”
“Perhaps eighty meters. Thirty meters past the closest point to the stage.”
Rachel pointed back the way she’d come with a gesture of her head. “The other exit’s about fifty meters back. You’ve got the better deal.”
The Syrian grinned. “I don’t know about that. Ready?”
“Meet you up top,” Rachel said, and began moving forward very slowly.
By shifting to the side, they could pass each other with their bodies sliding along each other. Hassan took the opportunity to feel her all over, including spots where she could not possibly have been carrying a bomb big enough. But Rachel did the same. Sure, they’d made nice in the tunnel, but how could she completely trust someone who’d gone to Columbia?
The four got past each other nervously, and in the case of the men who frisked each other, with great embarrassment. By contrast, slithering the rest of the way down the drainage tunnel was simple. Rachel and Captain Bernie kept their flashlights on and did their jobs, checking the tunnel thoroughly. Rachel had equipment, some of it of her own design, that would supposedly detect explosives even if they were made of plastic. They found nothing.
Rachel could count on the fingers of one hand such relief as she’d felt when she emerged from the other end of that tunnel. The relief was physical, composed of the nerve endings in her skin exhilarating with freedom, the smell of fresh air, even her scraped elbows feeling good at no longer grinding along concrete. But there was more to the relief than that. She had been afraid this end of the tunnel would be blocked, that they would have to crawl back the way they’d come, and by the time they got there the Syrian would have blocked the only other exit, too.
But they were free, they had done their jobs, and she felt confident that this path, at least, was closed to terrorists.
“Stay here,” she said to Bernie. Then she walked back across the square. In another day and a half this area would be filled with people, watching eight world leaders appear onstage together, some of whom had never been that close together before. Tonight the place was just crawling with security people. That was the problem. There were uniforms from nearly a dozen countries, some of those countries nearly at war with each other, others mistrustful. Too much security was worse than too little. They all had to keep checking, then checking what the other security teams had checked.
She thought she recognized the body of the man walking to meet her. She had known it intimately, but only in the dark and for a minute or so. But he smiled as he drew closer, and she knew he’d been thinking the same thing. Hassan swept off his cap and bowed. He was unshaven, dark, wearing an olive uniform that didn’t tell her much. Rachel was thinking how bad she must look, and possibly smell.
“Hello, Princeton,” he said. “Now what?”
“Seal those two exits, right now, while we know the tunnel’s safe. I left my captain back there. You left your man at the other end?”
“Of course.”
Rachel looked around. The place looked strangely like a military compound, but one put together by a boy who didn’t have enough soldiers of the same uniform to make a full army, so he had mixed them all together. “Let’s get two people from two other security forces to accompany us, and go and seal them now.”
“That’s three countries per end?” Hassan nodded. “Sounds about right. I pick French.”
“All right. I pick British.”
“Ah, you’re just trying to throw me off. You were sure I thought you would say American.”
Rachel smiled up at him. “You and I are the Americans, Hassan.”
He chuckled, but made no move to walk away. “What?” Rachel said.
“It was hard to see down there,” the Syrian said quietly, studying her. Rachel, who had an unfortunate tendency to blush in such moments, tried to control her skin. “I was afraid we would get up top and I would be embarrassed at having been so close to someone who—you know, I wouldn’t want to be seen with in public.”
“God, you must have women crawling all over you back home. Mr. Smooth. Look, I just slithered a hundred and thirty meters through a drainage tunnel. I’m not—”
He must have thought she was apologizing for her appearance, which was not at all where she was going with the sentence. “Oh no,” Hassan said, reaching out to touch her arm. “I just wanted to say that you are someone I would be happy to grope even not in the line of duty.”
“Catch me if I swoon.” Then Rachel chuckled in spite of herself. “Okay, Columbia. After we get the tunnel spiked, you want to get a beer?”
After all, it was part of her lifelong job to make contacts, wherever she could. Rachel had her limits, but having a beer with an enemy who might be a potential friend was well within those limits.
Hassan smiled at her. “Boola boola,” he said.
Rachel kept her eyes on him. “I think that’s Yale.”
He grinned. “I was giving you a test. I was checking you out.”
“I think you did that already, about twenty feet below where we’re standing.”
He saluted her with another grin, and they went off to find other soldiers.
“You wouldn’t believe the problem I’m having,” Stevie said.
“It’s too easy?” Alicia Mortenson guessed.
Stevie stared at his computer screen. At this distance there was a lag time of a second or two. He waited to see Mrs. Mortenson’s smirk. When her face hadn’t changed its expression of polite interest—slightly raised eyebrows, slightly cocked head, slightly smiling lips—he concluded she actually hadn’t changed expressions. “All right, I guess you can believe it,” he said grumpily.
“I’m sorry, Stevie. I’ve just been at this a bit longer than you have. And I hope I understand the world a little bit.”
But I’m here on the scene and you’re not, Stevie thought. Oh well. “Yes, it’s a little too easy. I’m finding a lot more pro-American sentiment here in Poland than I thought. The same as in Prague. There are more people than you’d think—well, than most people would think—who remember Communism, and think America put an end to it. I’m trying just to put a lid on it, because Jack said to wait until I—”
“Stevie?” Alicia interrupted. Her face shimmered on his MacBook screen. He might be about to lose his connection. “Take the lid off,” she said.
“Oh. Really? Is Jack—”
“It will be okay. I promise.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’d say day after tomorrow. Maybe Friday. Some people want to wait for the weekend to riot, you know.”
“That will work fine. Good work, young man.”
“Thank you. Mrs. Mortenson?”
She raised that one eyebrow a tad higher. It occurred to Stevie that Alicia Mortenson read people so well, and had been doing it for so long, that she must have turned down the volume of her own expressions and body language. She expected her listener—at least, a listener like Stevie—to read her well.
“Where’s Jack?” Stevie finished. “I haven’t heard from him since he was here. He’s okay, isn’t he?”
“Oh yes. I just talked to him.”
But for a moment he had seen something flicker across her face. A blink, a pause. The lowered eyelids of anxiety. Maybe it was just a trick of the time lag. Because if someone like Alicia Mortenson was scared, it was time to panic.
