The Athena Protocol

by Shamim Sarif

  It’s funny but, of all of them, it’s Peggy I feel worst about letting down. Maybe because she’s the one who would be the most understanding. She’s just one of those kind, really decent people, who never judge without hearing you out. Peggy is American. East Coast, Ivy League, smart as a whip. I doubt there were many other African American women knocking around Harvard doing law degrees thirty years ago, but it’s not something she brags about. Always super well-turned-out, she looks like she spends half her life going to the opera and ballet, and the other half at high-end charity luncheons. She was the US ambassador in London for a few years—and she was also CIA in her time. One way or another, she seems to have contacts in every country. She met Li when they were both UN Goodwill ambassadors.

  Li grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China. She never mentions it, but she was taken from her family as a girl and forced to work for the government. Which is where I imagine the story gets interesting—the rumor is that Li became something big in Chinese Intelligence. More than that is a mystery. I know how to trawl online for obscure details as well as anybody, but you can’t find any information on Li anywhere, beyond the bland Fortune and Forbes magazine profiles.

  As for Kit—well, what do music stars do when they stop selling records and start panicking about getting older? In my mother’s case, she came out as a campaigner for women’s rights. To be fair, Kit was an activist and feminist from her teens, and, boy, did she like to tell me all about it when I wouldn’t come with her to a rally or sign yet another petition. She used to lecture me about being part of a lost generation of self-absorbed kids who didn’t care the world was going to hell. Most of those talks were held late in the evening when she was halfway through a bottle of vodka, which sort of reduced the impact. Then she spent a year traveling around Eastern Europe, Africa, and India, taking publicity shots for the UN with women and girls who were living in poverty or overcoming the odds. It definitely gave both Kit and the UN some good coverage in the press.

  Until what happened in Pakistan. Nobody saw that coming, and it changed all three of them. It was the start of Athena, which was something so unique, so off the charts, that I didn’t even hesitate to jump ship from the Program and be part of it. If you’d told me I would ever work for my mother, I’d have laughed in your face. But here I am.

  Thomas meets me as the lift door opens. He knows to expect me because Amber put an app on his phone that pings, or barks, or something, every time one of us scans in through the alley door.

  We turn left, toward the situation room and the founders’ offices. Those all sit behind another sealed door. To the right is a corridor leading to the operations room. Ops is a big space, filled with screens: those clear, floating screens that are kind of projected into a space. At various times, they hold headshots, heat maps, research, analysis patterns. A lot of boring online search stuff too. Caitlin, Hala, and I do a fair amount of background work ourselves on the missions that Athena is considering pursuing. Other than us, we have only a few analysts, and I’ve never met them. I guess they’re a small core of employees that Li feels she can trust—or maybe people she has something on. Who knows for sure? Li is really careful to silo people. If you’re in tech development, that’s all you work on. And when I need something from the tech team, there’s only one person I deal with—Amber. So I suppose that none of us really know the true extent of Athena.

  “You’re late,” says Thomas. “Did you oversleep?”

  He walks alongside me. In fact, just ahead of me, giving me the feeling that he’s escorting me on purpose.

  “I never oversleep,” I tell him.

  “You just chose to be late today of all days?”

  When I’m in trouble, he means.

  Thomas is about thirty and has worked with Li as some kind of über-assistant since he graduated from university. He shares Li’s obsession with perfect grooming. There are no unruly eyebrows or loosened neckties anywhere near Thomas, and no one ever shortens his name to Tom. He consults his smart watch compulsively. It seems to display a constant stream of instant messages from Li—except, I suppose, when she is busy meditating or doing yoga, both of which she swears by and tries to get all of us to do.

  We’re almost at the situation room, where a meeting is just underway. Inside the glass panels I can see that Li has just arrived. Hala is munching on an apple, and she and Caitlin are listening to Peggy, who is sitting opposite them, alongside Kit. With a flick of his security card, Thomas activates the door of the situation room, which slides open for me to enter. The click of the door makes everyone look up, and I swallow, but not so that anyone would notice. I turn to glance back at Thomas, but his eyes have moved to Hala, with whom he exchanges a quick smile. Not for the first time, I wonder if he carries a torch for Hala—and yet, the two of them together just seems so unlikely. Behind me, the door slides shut, and Thomas walks away, leaving the room in silence. Caitlin and Peggy nod at me, Hala avoids any eye contact, and Li and Kit exchange looks. I sit off to one side, pour some coffee, and look up at the expansive, floating screen. On it is a headshot of a handsome man with flecks of gray at his temples.

  Moving past the interruption of my entrance, Peggy directs everyone’s eyes back to the screen, where, by all accounts, they are briefing the next assignment. We’ve all done some background prep on it before we went to Africa—especially me—so it’s familiar, but now that it’s time for the mission to be run, Peggy will be looking to do a recap and give everyone the concrete steps and timeline to execute it. I don’t want to get too comfortable, but I’m relieved. At least we’re moving on and not picking over the carcass of the old mission. And they let me in here. Maybe they’re not that fussed that Ahmed took a bullet after all.

  “You’re all familiar with Gregory Pavlic by now,” Peggy is saying. “He owns casinos and restaurants, but he makes his real money trafficking women out of Eastern Europe.”

  “Him and a hundred others,” says Hala through a mouthful of apple. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. Discreetly, kindly, Peggy hands Hala a tissue. Hala looks surprised. She puts it in her pocket, then uses her sleeve again, and I try not to smile. Really, I can’t imagine Thomas could actually go for Hala. I mean, she’s a nice person under that scowl, but her table manners are terrible, while he looks ready to take tea with the queen every day.

  “Yes. But if we get Gregory, a lot of the others go down with him,” Kit says, looking at everyone in turn—except for me.

  “Gregory plans long term,” Li says. “He’s spent years building relationships with scores of Eastern European politicians, showing them the high life. Between gambling, sex, and drugs, he has incriminating digital files on almost all of them.”

  I watch Li as she talks. She’s in a neat navy suit, and she’s wearing her digital glove. Li adores that glove, uses it to do things that she could easily manage with the click of a mouse. It does look good though, encasing her hand in a delicate mesh of fabric, shot through with copper-colored wires. With a flick of her index finger, Li switches the photograph of Gregory Pavlic on the screen with another. An elegant man with a wry smile, a little older than Pavlic. I notice Peggy’s eyes soften as she looks at the picture.

  “Aleks Yuchic, Serbia’s justice minister,” Peggy says. “One of the few politicians who’s stayed clean.”

  “How do we know?” Caitlin asks. She hasn’t seen the research on Aleks—she focused on studying Gregory.

  “Well—on a personal level, he and I were great friends when I was ambassador,” Peggy explains. “He knows all about Gregory’s business but has no way to close it down because so many high-ranking judges and officials are implicated in Gregory’s files. We’ll get him those files to prove Gregory’s blackmail tactics, along with hard evidence of what Gregory’s doing, and then he’ll find a long-term solution.”

  Once Peggy’s given us the cuddly, friendly version of why she trusts Aleks, it’s Li’s turn to chime in and confirm that every possible background check has be
en run on Aleks and there isn’t a bank account to be found in any offshore haven that could possibly connect to him.

  “Jessie did most of the work on him,” Peggy adds. “I thought it would be useful for her to brief us all on that.”

  A few eyes turn to look at me. It’s true, I’ve been working on Aleks, long before we left for Cameroon. We usually research one mission ahead. Peggy nods at me to elaborate. Typical of her to be kind, to try to include me. I clear my throat and explain.

  “I sent a virus to his computer and—”

  “How?” interrupts Hala. I shift in my seat. It’s not the kind of question that matters in a high-level briefing like this, but Hala’s clearly making a point to hit out at me.

  “I embedded it in a take-away menu from his favorite restaurant. When he opened the email, I had access to his entire hard drive. Then I used Li’s celltrax software to get into his phone, and, since you’re so concerned—”

  “We’ve been watching everything he emails, texts, and receives ever since,” says Peggy, lightly, stepping in to calm my rising indignation at Hala. “He’s clean.”

  A wave of Li’s glove brings up a 3D plan of Gregory’s home that zooms in and around the room where they have found the digital files are being kept in a safe. I lean forward. How we get into Gregory’s home and his safe is the part that Athena has been working on round the clock—and the part we agents haven’t heard about yet.

  “I guess we can’t just walk in the front door,” Caitlin says.

  “Actually, we can,” says Kit. “Turns out Gregory’s a fan of mine, and I told my managers I want some cash from a private gig. So they got the word out, and now Gregory thinks it was his idea to pay me a fortune to come out of retirement and play his fiftieth birthday party next week. That’s why we moved the date of this mission forward.”

  I sputter into my coffee. Not entirely by accident. Finally, everyone looks at me—except Hala.

  “How is that a safe plan?” I ask. Seriously, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My mother, who hasn’t played a gig in ages, is planning to stroll into the home of one of the worst human traffickers on the planet and sing for him while we steal data from his safe? I stare at Kit in disbelief. Her eyes move down, and that tiny muscle in her jaw flickers—a sure sign that she’s angry. I wait for her to say something, to defend this daft plan, but Caitlin steps in.

  “We’re trained to do this job, Kit.” Even she thinks it’s a mad idea. But she’s more polite about it than me.

  “Yeah, but you can’t sing my greatest hits,” Kit returns. “You need me to get into Gregory’s estate.” My mother is looking mainly at me, exerting a bit of authority. I sniff and look away.

  “It’s unusual,” Peggy says, “but overall, our analysis is that it’s far safer to have Kit there with Caitlin as her bodyguard—as Gregory’s guests—than to risk trying to break in. His security is impressive.”

  With an elegant wave of the glove, Li turns off the screen and instructs Caitlin and Hala to go down to the tech cave to see Amber for further preparation. They get up and move to the door, and so do the others. I shift.

  “What am I doing?”

  I hadn’t meant to ask that. It sounds childish and indignant. But actually being ignored by my team terrifies me. To my surprise, out of all the women in the room, it is Hala who responds.

  “Good question,” she says. “What are you doing? Except disobeying orders?”

  I liked it better when she was ignoring me. But I let her have it.

  “I’m thinking about what we do here. What did you think Ahmed’s soldiers were going to do when they woke up? Start a feminist group?”

  Hala throws me a superior look.

  “You’re not paid to think,” she says. “Just do your job. For a change.”

  What? I fly at Hala before I realize what I’m doing. She’s surprised but dodges and lashes back. We’re in it now, hand-to-hand, fast and hard, hits, kicks, blocks . . . but then my legs give from under me and I’m on the floor. Caitlin stares down at me, appalled, and I realize she’s swept at my legs with her feet and brought me down. Now, she grabs Hala’s shoulder and steers her toward the door.

  “I vouched for you when you needed asylum and everyone thought you were a terrorist,” I call after Hala.

  She doesn’t answer, but Caitlin gives me a look to shut up, and I do. I dust myself off as the Athena leaders exchange glances, glances that feel long and meaningful and which Kit answers with a nod. None of that silent interaction thrills me. But I’m upset with Hala. I know she’s a stickler and she’s upset I broke the rules, but when she was locked up in a UK detention center, it was me who helped get her asylum application through. Not to mention brought her on board with Athena. A little gratitude would be nice.

  I take a breath as Peggy walks out, and then Li. Only Kit stays back, and I wait for her to leave, but she doesn’t. Instead, she indicates the chair next to her own.

  Reluctantly, I sit, and the chair is very close—too close. For a long moment, Kit says nothing; she just shuffles papers. Probably giving me a minute to settle down after the drama with Hala. I sit quietly, and—without wanting to—I catch that smell that is only Kit’s: a combination of skin, hair, and perfume that slams me back into the past. For a moment, I’m seven years old again and being carried upstairs to bed after falling asleep on the couch while my mother and her friends talked and played the guitar until late. The same scent that touches me now, I had known then, my face buried in Kit’s hair, my legs wrapped tight around her waist.

  “I know you managed to follow orders in the Program,” Kit says.

  With a blink, I snap back to this room, and it’s as if the short distance between us on the chairs has suddenly become a gulf that I don’t know how to cross. I edge my chair away a little, as if I’m trying to get more comfortable, but, really, I want to put some space between me and that scent, and those memories.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “You followed orders in the Program,” repeats Kit. She stresses the word Program with something like sarcasm.

  I finished school early, when I was fifteen. And I mean finished, like, ready to go to university. I was always good with math and physics and stuff. I like the order and logic of those subjects.

  But I was too young to start college. And another private school got in touch, saying they focused on gifted kids. When I started there, it turned out that it wasn’t just academics but also physical stuff, like target practice and three-hour runs—which should have given us a clue they were up to something more. That school turned out to be a feeder for the Program—this elite training regime, meant to create a modern “army” to fight cybercrime and all that by contracting out their employees to the government and big corporations.

  Part of me liked it. Being in a place where there were rules and boundaries and a place you always had to be. There were no rules in our house growing up. I could stay up late, eat what I felt like. Kit didn’t want to stifle my creativity, but I didn’t notice that hers got any better when she was blind drunk and awake half the night. On the surface, my childhood sounds like what every teenager would want, but when you’ve had it all your life, you just want someone to care enough to tell you to go to bed, or eat an apple, or whatever. By the time I was fifteen, I felt as if I was floating the whole time. In limbo. And the Program felt like the opposite. Plus, after basic training, I got to specialize in electronics and bomb defusing, and all the things that I came to love.

  “Athena isn’t the government,” I say. “I quit the Program because I hated having my hands tied.”

  “You’re right about Athena,” Kit says. “We’re not elected, and we’re not legal. If we’re exposed, we all go to jail. We were on the morning news, Jessie.”

  I nod, because I know that’s true, and I feel terrible about it. Kit looks down.

  “Jessie—you’re fired.”

  I just stare at her for a moment. I actually feel my mouth open and close, like a fis
h.

  “You—you mean suspended?” I stammer, at last.

  But Kit shakes her head. “We’ve talked about it, and your work with Athena is over. You’ll need to brief the others on what you know about Aleks and this mission before we all leave for Belgrade. But that’s it.”

  Then she stands up and stretches out her hand. I look at the palm blankly, at the familiar silver rings on Kit’s middle fingers. What is she doing?

  “I need your pass,” says Kit.

  She doesn’t meet my gaze, which is good, because the lack of trust hurts more than I want to let her see. I reach into the back pocket of my jeans and pull out the small electronic card that gives me access to these offices. I place it into Kit’s palm, and as her fingers close over it, I feel my frustration forcing its way out, bursting through cracks.

  “You never wanted me in the field,” I say, and to my annoyance, Kit nods in agreement.

  “That’s true. You’re my child, Jess. But I thought at least at Athena, I could keep an eye on you.”

  “So you want me tied to some desk job somewhere? Why? You never gave a toss about me when you were on tour my whole life.”

  Kit glares at me. “This is about what you did to Ahmed.”

  I just want my job back. And I also just want Ahmed’s face not to be there every time I close my eyes. I wish I hadn’t done what I did. Deep down, I know this is how it should be, that it’s even fair—but I can’t make myself admit it to my mother. Kit clears her throat. I look up, hoping for reprieve.

  “A team is only as strong as each person on it,” she says seriously.