Without A Trace

by Sandra Moore

  Nikki blinked. Teddy bear?

  “We need Diviner’s equipment,” Delphi said. “That satellite signal must be his connection to the outside world.”

  “He paid for his passage on the SHA ship with some kind of information. Is that his angle?” Nikki guessed.

  “Maybe.” Delphi slowed, sounding thoughtful. “A good cracker can work from anywhere. He’d have to have an entire network of proxy servers to hide behind and zombie computers he can use to break in to anything.”

  “If he had all that set up, he’d just need a satellite connection to do it.”

  “Right.”

  “Problem is, I didn’t see anything on any of those containers that even resembled a dish.”

  “Maybe he’s using a new technology.”

  “You think he’s that advanced?”

  “We can’t rule out that possibility.”

  Nikki parted the blinds on the east-facing window. No sign of daylight yet. Her body was wide awake but she could feel the fatigue lingering in her bones. Still, she wouldn’t stop.

  “I won’t quit,” Nikki said more to herself than to Delphi.

  “His equipment may be more valuable than him,” Delphi’s flat voice replied. “Bring back what you can, if you can.”

  Nikki’s head came up. If. Her brothers had taunted her unmercifully with the word. If you have the stomach for it. If you can do it. If you’re smart enough. If you’re strong enough. If you’re fast enough.

  She’d always proven it to them but they’d never quite accepted it. Even Jaime, Jr., closest to her in age and affection, didn’t always believe she could do what she set out to do.

  Nikki knew intellectually that wasn’t what Delphi meant, but old habits die hard and the anger rising within her was an old friend.

  “I’ll get this hijo de puta. Don’t worry.”

  Delphi clicked off.

  Johnny regarded her from the futon where he sat fiddling with one of his guns. “Trouble at home?”

  “Just reporting in to my boss.” Nikki dropped the phone into her own gear bag. The bustier was starting to pinch.

  “I have to get this damned thing off,” she muttered and stalked into Johnny’s tiny bathroom, where her clothes lay neatly folded on the floor.

  Tempted by the shower, she took one, then slid into her comfortable, demure workout clothes. Much better. She finger-combed her hair’s damp ends and took a deep breath.

  “You should calm down,” Johnny observed when she emerged. “You’ll wear yourself out being tense like that.”

  “I’m tense for a reason,” she retorted. “Where were you when I was standing up to a warlord?”

  Johnny chuckled, a deep, rich sound lower than his normal speaking voice as he rose from the futon. “He was no warlord. More an administrator.”

  “He was ready to kill you and sell me to the highest bidder.”

  “He was a big fish in a very big pond. He enjoyed the game.” Johnny gripped her shoulders from behind and squeezed gently. “As I did.”

  “Which part?” Her throat, she decided, was still sore from the opium smoke. That was why she sounded so hoarse. “The part where I almost passed out or the part where I lost control of my brain and told a thug I’d blow up his boat?”

  “All of it,” he murmured near her ear. He squeezed again and released her. “We must leave here. We’ve been followed.” He turned her around and cast a critical eye over her clothing. “You can’t wear that. You should change.”

  “If you’re thinking I can pretend to be a tourist, I’m pretty sure my cover’s blown.”

  “Where we are going is not for the mission. You need rest and food and to relax.”

  Nikki scowled. She knew she needed the food and rest, but how could she relax? Diviner was stumping around somewhere in the Hong Kong shipping terminal, hiding in one of about fifty thousand metal boxes.

  “My contact will help us later today.” Johnny opened the closet she was beginning to think of as the Closet of Fashion Horrors. “Here.” He started to toss a flimsy pale green something at her but stopped. “Bad color for you. Try these.” He flung her a pair of jeans.

  She glared at the denim where it lay draped over her arm. “Wouldn’t it be easier to go back to my hotel and get my own clothes?”

  “Perhaps. But we may need a safe place later, and why waste it when these might fit you?” He threw a royal-blue shirt at her. “Go change. We have to hurry.”

  Nikki’s first impulse was to throw the shirt back in his face, but decided that at twenty-four, she was really too old to get into a pissing contest.

  Besides, he was better equipped.

  That thought burning in her mind, she quickly shut herself in the bathroom and changed again. The jeans were a half size too small and the shirt was too big this time. A sense memory of Johnny’s hands moving over her hips rose, unbidden, in her mind.

  Chill, she ordered herself. The guy had cast-off clothes from about twenty different women and hands that roamed almost as much as his eyes. That turnoff seated firmly in her brain, she slid the door open.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she gathered up her gear bag.

  “First we lose our tail. Then we go to Kowloon, on the mainland. My grandfather has a dojo there.” Johnny paused to study her, then nodded his approval of the clothes he’d given her.

  She ignored his gesture—she didn’t care whether he approved or not—and slung her bag over her shoulder.

  “You still have the semiautomatic?” Johnny asked.

  “Within reach.”

  “Good. We must travel quickly.”

  Johnny snapped off the lights. He moved silently toward the door, tiger-striped by the city light slanting through the living room’s open blinds.

  For an instant, she could have sworn protective pine lifted through the air behind him, but decided it must be residue from earlier, a scent-memory caught in her nostrils and throat like a dream half-remembered at dawn.

  Nikki woke much, much later than dawn. From the sun’s position glimpsed through an open window, it was midmorning. She was lying on her stomach and she could tell she’d rolled over violently while she slept because the T-shirt she was wearing had corkscrewed around her waist.

  Why was she at Athena Academy in her old room? she wondered. And why were all these first-year students wearing pastel sweat suits and standing around her bed staring at her?

  “Munchkins,” Nikki groaned.

  Titters followed this remark, titters in the high-pitched voices of little girls. Yep, she was definitely at Athena.

  Athena.

  Nikki’s eyes snapped open. Not Athena. Nowhere close.

  She shook her head to clear it of too little sleep and coughed, still tasting opium smoke. A little girl, her hair cut to just below her chin, handed her a teacup and bowed.

  Nikki rolled over and stared. Beneath her unzipped sweat jacket, the girl was wearing the flimsy pale green top Johnny had declared wasn’t her color. Not girlfriend castoffs, Nikki thought, and felt a strange combination of troubled and relieved.

  She got one arm and hand out from beneath the thin blanket to take the cup. Paint thinner came immediately to mind at the first whiff, but the liquid was off-white and kind of watery.

  “Doh je,” she muttered in thanks.

  She sipped. Some kind of milk, warmed up and a little nasty. Still, she was thirsty and the next sip kind of grew on her.

  While she drank, she counted. Five little girls, all about eleven years old. One bed, narrow but surprisingly soft. One standard-issue ceiling fan, rocking in its frame over her head as it whirred gently. One folding panel behind which she remembered dropping her borrowed clothes. One small chest, beside which sat her gear bag, and which held a Sun Yee On soldier’s stolen firearm.

  The gun.

  She set the teacup on the floor with a clatter. The girls scattered at her sudden movement like a flock of spooked birds. She dug into the gear bag’s side pocket. Breathed a
sigh. It was still there, untouched. She dumped out the magazine and engaged the safety, then slid the gun beneath the mattress.

  If she’d known Johnny’s grandfather’s house would be swarming with little kids, she’d have dismantled the gun before crashing in the wee hours after an exhausting trip hither and yon through downtown Hong Kong to lose the Wo Shing Wo. On Johnny’s sport bike.

  She tried not to think too much about that.

  One of the girls, a beauty with long hair hanging in a shimmering cascade down her back, plopped down on the foot of the bed and smiled. “Hell-o,” she tried.

  Nikki couldn’t help answering both the word and the smile. “Hello.”

  More titters. The other girls regrouped and started inching forward.

  “How ah you?” the girl continued, pausing only briefly between each word.

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  The gaggle giggled. The beauty beamed and bowed a little. “Fine.” One of the girls pushed the beauty’s shoulder and said something. The beauty frowned and snapped something back.

  Then she sighed, struggled, and finally said, “Than koo.”

  “Thank you, too,” Nikki replied with a grin.

  For whatever reason she couldn’t imagine, Nikki suddenly became more accessible and the other four girls piled onto the bed. One grabbed her hand to study an in-the-line-of-duty scar on her forearm. Another pushed her hands through Nikki’s curly and sleep-crunched hair. The others chattered amongst themselves while they poked through her bag.

  “Hey!” she said, grabbing for her gear.

  One of them laughed and dashed out of the room, holding the bag over her head. The others took off after her, shouting.

  “Little brats!” Nikki called after them, then chuckled.

  This is what it would have been like to grow up with sisters. Always in your stuff. Not respecting your privacy. Getting in your way. Not letting you sleep.

  Nikki smiled to herself. She would have loved it.

  Her time at Athena Academy was the closest she’d ever come to having sisters. Her friendship with Jess especially. Nikki didn’t regret her brothers. Not Rey, who’d dared her into more feats of stupidity than she cared to remember, nor Rico, who’d convinced her that the ballet lessons wouldn’t be that bad if they’d improve her balance. And certainly not Jaime, who’d seconded her in every playground fistfight she’d ever gotten into.

  But there were times when she’d wanted to stay up late on a Saturday night and have a heart-to-heart with someone who knew what it was like to be, well, a girl. And her own age. To have a sister who’d sprawl on the bed with her and talk about dreams and what she wanted to be when she grew up.

  Someone who knew what it was like to have the kinds of feelings and worries and hopes she had. Jess had been that sister for her at Athena. Maybe it was they suspected there was something just a little different about them both. Whatever it was that had drawn them together, the kinship remained strong, as if invisible threads had braided a cord that tied them to each other, no matter how far apart they were.

  She wondered where Jess was, and hoped she was okay.

  Nikki imagined a sister would look at her the way Jess always had, the way the little girl was looking at her now from where she sat, unmoved, on the bed’s edge.

  “So you’re hanging with me instead of your friends, huh?” Nikki asked her.

  The girl smiled. A hint of vanilla soap wafted from her when she fidgeted shyly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ming-shu,” the girl said, but whether that was her name or Cantonese for, “What the heck are you saying?” Nikki didn’t know.

  “Well, kiddo,” she said, throwing back the covers, “let’s get going.”

  Nikki slipped behind the panel. “I can’t stay long,” she told the girl as she stuck her foot into the black pants she wore for training. “I’ve stayed too long as it is. Your brother—I assume Johnny’s your brother—has been helping me out, but we gotta get outta here. Fight the bad guys, save the world.” Nikki tied the drawstring on the pants. “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”

  The girl said something, then stopped. Get on with it, Nikki imagined her saying.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she continued aloud and stripped off the oversize T-shirt she’d slept in. “Have you ever really loved a place because it gave you everything you needed? That’s my school. It’s being threatened. I think.” Nikki paused as she wriggled into her sports bra. “It was the first place in the world I felt like I really belonged. That’s what you get when you grow up with nothing but brothers. They want you to be a boy, even when you’re not.”

  The girl was silent.

  “But I’m not a boy.”

  She stepped out from behind the panel, still buttoning last night’s royal-blue blouse, and came face-to-face with Johnny Zhao, who caught her at the waist and cast an admiring glance at her bare throat, then her collarbone, then lower.

  “Yes, I know,” Johnny said, his handsome face sliding into a devilish grin. “And I’m very glad.”

  Chapter 8

  “Y eah, it would have been a little embarrassing if you’d been groping a guy last night,” Nikki said smoothly and jerked her shirt closed. She sidestepped him and quickly finished buttoning up.

  “My tactics against the Wo Shing Wo would have been very different,” Johnny admitted. “I would have let him protect himself.”

  Nikki fetched her phone off the floor where it had fallen when the girls hijacked her bag. “I needed protecting?”

  Speaking of pushy men. Cop a feel and tickle her tonsils because he thought she couldn’t take care of herself? What a jerk. Dead sexy jerk, dressed all in black as he was, but still a jerk.

  Johnny waited until she glared at him to say evenly, “It could easily have gone another way.”

  She felt a flash of annoyance followed quickly by one of shame. She couldn’t fault him for doing what he believed would be best. She was in his territory, among his people. They’d managed to get some of the information that Delphi needed, and had a lead on Diviner. Mission partially accomplished.

  Okay, so he’d mugged down on her a bit. They were both adults in a potentially dangerous situation. It couldn’t be helped.

  And he was scentless. Again.

  Emotions were curious things. Ulterior motives—the ones sitting behind lies or exaggerations or jokes or some stories—broadcast a beacon of scent. If someone had something at stake, she could usually pick up on that, too.

  Facts, like those dispensed endlessly by Dr. Riggings in her senior year Modern European History class, smelled of exactly nothing.

  Johnny was a fact-based kind of guy.

  She examined that fact and found herself satisfied. Mostly. He occasionally got on her nerves, but his neutrality could be a benefit. If he walked around smelling like an incense factory she would either be distracted because he found her attractive or nursing a migraine from the overload.

  It was much better this way.

  “You might be right,” she said.

  “Good.” Johnny’s dark eyes sparked with anticipation. “Now you meet my grandfather.”

  Master Wong teetered on the brink of many things: overhospitality, overpoliteness, poverty. In his sixties, Johnny had told her, and he showed no signs of slowing down.

  Nikki thought it wasn’t slowing down that was his problem. He moved at a stately pace in all he did, from rustling up a traditional breakfast of congee—rice porridge with mushrooms and green onions thrown in—to rounding up the seven little girls who lived with him to drinking his single cup of soybean milk at the low breakfast table.

  Today was Master Wong’s fasting day.

  “When can we get going?” Nikki asked Johnny when they had finished the congee. Most of the girls had already had their morning meal and were spread out in the adjacent room that served as Master Wong’s dojo. Only Mingxia and her younger sister, Yanmei, remained in the kitchen.

/>   “I’ve got a friend tracking down the container we’re looking for,” Johnny replied casually, setting Yanmei out of his lap, where she’d sat contentedly through the meal clutching the teddy bear he’d given her. “She’ll call me when she knows its location and next destination.”

  “This man you look for is dangerous?” Master Wong asked.

  “Possibly. We think he might be a computer cracker.” Johnny poured a post-breakfast cup of green tea for Nikki and himself.

  Master Wong simply nodded. “Money. Power.”

  “El dinero mueve montañas,” Nikki said. “Money moves mountains.”

  “And yet—” the old man tapped his forehead “—there is no mountain.”

  Nikki kept her face still. Confucius in the flesh, huh? There is no spoon, she thought, remembering The Matrix.

  “He means that the only mountains that exist are the ones we create,” Johnny translated. “The only reason I have a problem is because I want something out there—” and he waved his hand at the world “—to be other than it is.”

  “So I’m supposed to sit back and watch Diviner do his dirty deeds and not care?” Nikki asked. Screw that.

  “Not at all.” Master Wong smiled beatifically. “We do the work that lies before us.”

  “We do what we do because we want to,” Johnny continued, “not because we’re driven by guilt or a need for validation.”

  She supposed it made sense, sort of. She could see where Johnny would consider his part of this mission to be just “doing the work before him,” which was why he wasn’t invested in it—and therefore not spewing a cascade of copper pennies or wet-dog fur in her direction because he was angry or anxious.

  And yet he was invested a little. On two occasions he’d felt regret over Regina Woo’s death, and once she’d made him angry enough to exude a penny scent. He’d told her it was a matter of honor to continue the mission.

  And yet…There was nothing there.