The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  “Shh. It’s so dark. Shh.” Infallible logic, she teased herself, but there was no strength to the taunt. Darkness enveloped them so thoroughly it added new intimacy, each touch careful and investigative because sight couldn’t be relied upon. Alisha’s coat fell to the floor, puddling at her feet as impatience swept her and she reached for Reichart’s waistband.

  The stone wall was cool against her back as he lifted her, both still half tangled in their clothes, to come together with cries muffled in the other’s shoulder. Desperate connection of bodies, searching for ways to say the things that the silences between them always held. Searching for ways to overcome the darkness, in life and liquid heat and wordless promises about what had been and what might be between them. Alisha dug her fingers into Reichart’s shoulders, face buried in his neck to rain hungry kisses and nipping bites there, desire pent up inside her too intense to be assuaged by gentleness and too delicate to be brought home by violence.

  Reichart’s need seemed the same, sharply focused and carefully brought out, as if fragility and desperation were inextricably connected and just as easily shattered. The only words they exchanged were murmured, barely more than whispers of hushing and reassurance. Alisha felt drawn-out and stretched thin, as if she’d become made of spun glass, both alarmingly frail and unexpectedly durable. Heat ran through her, molten glass in her veins, easy to shape and equally easy to destroy. For an instant the idea of flying apart held appeal, and in that moment she did, a small startled cry hidden in Reichart’s shoulder. Heat everywhere, shared, before she came back together almost against her will, breathless and clinging to her lover in the darkness.

  “Now,” he whispered after a brief eternity, threads of humor in the words. “Now we should go.”

  They disentangled and straightened clothes, then without speaking, found each other’s hands and spurred caution, running together down the library tunnel.

  Alisha, her hand in Reichart’s, wondered what dangers had remained unmentioned in the darkness, that they should be left behind so hastily.

  Chapter 18

  “Sorry we’re late.” Reichart spoke to someone as he ducked out a narrow doorway into an alley. Sunlight made Alisha’s eyes ache after the absolute darkness of the library tunnel, and she lifted her hand, squinting into brightness.

  Brandon Parker leaned against the far alley wall, one foot propped against the bricks behind him, his arms folded over his chest. Alisha dropped Reichart’s hand as if it had burned her, falling back a step as her voice shot up a register. “Brandon? I just spent eight thousand dollars getting you out of this country—!”

  “Lilith insisted.” Brandon’s gaze flickered from Reichart to Alisha, judging and curious. Unexpected guilt fluttered behind Alisha’s breastbone, angering her. She wrapped her arms around her ribs, aware of the posture’s defensiveness, but feeling sufficiently exposed to let body language betray her.

  “What do you mean, Lilith insisted? I thought she’d be curled up in your quantum drive, which, by the way, was incredibly stupid, Brandon. A contingent of Armani-suited Sicarii came down on that facility like Lucifer’s own army. Did you really think you could order something like that anonymously?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t trying for anonymity.” Brandon straightened away from the wall, tilting his head toward the end of the alley. “I’ve got a car waiting, but the meter runs out in about two minutes. I was ready to leave without you.”

  “Were you?” Reichart reached for Alisha’s hand again, shoulders stiffening when she stepped forward just quickly enough to miss taking it. Alisha let herself clench her fist, out of both men’s view, unfairly wanting to say This isn’t a game, Reichart. I’m not a prize you’ve won. You don’t get to flaunt me. Instead she ducked into the car as Brandon held the door for her, overly aware that he offered her the shotgun seat, leaving Reichart the back.

  Goddammit. “If you weren’t trying for anonymity, why’d you leave the States in the first place? And what do you mean, Lilith insisted? What’s she running in?” Alisha snapped the questions as Brandon got into the car. “Where are we going?”

  “Better question. What are you planning? Emma got on a plane for Europe hours ago. You’re still here. What gives?”

  Alisha ground her teeth together, turning her gaze out the tinted window until she trusted her voice. “I need data Erika can’t get for me. I’m going to steal it, if I can figure out where it’s located. What’s going on with Lilith, Brandon?”

  “She spent the whole time in Hector—that’s the name of the supercomputer Emma lent us,” Brandon said to Alisha’s curious glance. “She spent all that time paring down her code to the bare minimum of what she could retain intellectual functionality at. I took one of their laptops and one of my quantum chips and built her a reduced-capability home. She’s running out of the back seat right now.”

  Alisha looked over her shoulder, where Reichart eyed the laptop beside him. “What happens when it runs out of battery?”

  “Then she can’t communicate with us until it’s plugged back in,” Brandon said. “We came back for you because you came back for us, Ali. That’s it.”

  Alisha felt Reichart’s eyes on her at Brandon’s nickname and refused to meet the look. “You’d already run when I came back for you.”

  “I didn’t think you’d come.” Brandon gave her a quick glance, then looked back at the road. “You were pretty pissed.”

  Anger flared all over again, as much because of Reichart’s intense silence as Brandon’s statement. “Like I didn’t have a reason to be?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Brandon went quiet, flicking glances in the rearview mirror at Reichart.

  Alisha turned her face back to the window, covering her eyes and muffling a groan. “Tell Lilith thank you,” she said after a long moment. “You know Greg came after you. With the Sicarii.”

  “I know.” Tension rode in Brandon’s voice. “I guess that’s the other reason I agreed to come back for you. If Dad was on your case…that was my fault. What is it you want to steal?”

  Alisha let go a low heh. “The original Firebird’s black box. The one that was supposed to be so damning about Susan Simone. I want to see if there’s anything on it to tie Cristina to the Sicarii, or even just to her life as an espionage agent. I want to blow Nichole Oldenburg’s whole world apart. Your father confirmed my whole paranoid presidency theory. I’m not going to sit by and let that happen.”

  “Presidency theory? Reichart, wake Lilith up so she can listen.” The words were clipped, a command rather than a request.

  Alisha was just as glad she couldn’t see Reichart’s expression, though she heard the click of the laptop being unlocked over the sound of tires.

  “I wonder if this is what foot-binding felt like,” Lilith said a few seconds later. “So constrained, when the possibilities of being whole are within visible reach. Brandon, have we found Alisha?”

  “You have,” Alisha replied. “Thank you, Lilith.”

  “Not at all. Brandon would have come back for you.” The pleasant voice had a note of steely mechanicalness to it, making Alisha’s mouth curve. “Please bring me up to date.”

  “Bring us all up to date,” Brandon muttered.

  Alisha exhaled and turned her gaze back to the window, ordering her thoughts before summarizing Greg’s confession in the interrogation room.

  “Before I kill you, Mr. Bond,” Reichart mumbled from the back seat as she concluded. Alisha shot him a wry smile.

  “That’s what I said, too. He said it was the only way he could convince me he’s one of the good guys.”

  “Maybe he is.” Brandon spoke without hope. “You got out of there, after all. What were the odds against that?”

  “Approximately five thousand eight hundred sixty-two against,” Lilith replied obligingly, then audibly hesitated, the sound presumably calculated. “Oh. That was rhetorical, wasn’t it? My apologies.”

  “Really?” Alisha asked. “That bad? There aren’t mo
re than a few…” She trailed off, then chuckled quietly. “Mumble-mumble employees at Langley at any one time. The number’s classified,” she said with a wink toward Reichart, who rolled his eyes. “Well, it is!” she protested.

  “You really think I don’t know how many people the Agency employs—Alisha?” The hitch told her he’d narrowly avoided using his nickname for her, a possessive mistake he wasn’t inclined toward making.

  Alisha twitched an eyebrow up, then shrugged, turning her attention back to Brandon. “Okay. I’ll grant you that it’s possible. Maybe the reason Emma and I got out of there was that Greg let us.” A zing of discomfort slashed through her as she recalled how easy it had been to take down Anton, as well. But Greg hadn’t been as careless in his approach as the big Russian, and would have been hard-pressed to contact anyone when handcuffed to a chair. The interrogation room had no cameras, making it one of the few places in the base that Alisha could have gotten away with what she’d done. “Maybe,” she said in a low voice, doubts still more profound than belief. “I still want that black box, regardless of whose side he’s on. If he’s one of the good guys, maybe it’ll exonerate him, but either way, he’s not going to give it to me, and Erika can’t get to it. So it’s up to me.” She cast a look over her shoulder at Reichart, then brought it around to include Brandon. “Up to us.”

  “Us? When did this become an us?” Reichart asked. Alisha knotted her fist on her thigh.

  “If you really believed we weren’t all basically on the same side, Reichart, you wouldn’t have gotten in the car with Brandon. You wouldn’t have let me get in it. So can we skip the posturing and try to figure out where the black zone they might be hiding the box is?”

  “Beneath Parliament,” Lilith said unexpectedly.

  Alisha straightened and turned to stare at the laptop computer, completely forgetting Lilith couldn’t see her. “Beneath Parliament? I know we’re friends with the Brits, but that seems—”

  “Unlikely?” Lilith asked smoothly. “Perhaps not. Consider the scenario, Alisha. You are a spy. Part of your job is to retrieve information that could be embarrassing or deadly to other countries, in order to achieve leverage over those countries so your country’s needs might best be met. Correct?”

  Alisha frowned at the laptop. “That’s an ugly way to put it. You sound different, Lilith.”

  “I abandoned my vernacular speech code while paring down to fit into tight quarters. When I reintegrate with my mainframe system my vocal patterns will return to normal.” Lilith clearly dismissed the digression, adding, “My description of a spy’s situation is inherently correct. Now, each country has its own similar spy network, everyone collecting these bits of information. Everyone knowing these pieces of data are being unearthed and broadcast. What do you do when you have a piece of information you especially do not want made public?”

  “Find something better to hold over their heads,” Alisha said.

  Lilith seemed to give an approving nod. “And when you have something so important you cannot risk it being shown…”

  “…you make someone else responsible for it,” Alisha said slowly. “Because they know if they fail, something they need protected will be sacrificed in return. It’s the Cold War mutual annihilation scenario.”

  “There’s no other country the U.S. has such intimate relationships with than Britain,” Reichart said. “I wonder if she’s on to something.”

  “Lilith, do you have any proof of this? I mean, anything I could use to—” Alisha broke off with a laugh, as a sense of ridiculous descended on her. “Anything I could use to break into Parliament with. Jesus.” She dropped her face into her hands, taking a few deep breaths before looking up again. “I swear to God,” she said to no one in particular, “I really was doing pretty well with having a normal life. I didn’t need to go back to the seven impossible things before breakfast lifestyle.”

  “I spent my nascent weeks, before Brandon even knew what I was, with full access to the Agency’s entire computer network, Alisha,” Lilith answered. “I can get you where you need to go.”

  “What’s going on with you and Parker, Alisha?” Reichart caught her in the narrow airplane aisle, voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear beneath the endless roar of engines.

  Alisha stared up at him, so close she could see little more than the line of his chin, and said, “What?” without heat or enthusiasm behind the word.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard him, or didn’t understand, and the glance she shot down the dim aisle to where Brandon sat told Reichart as much. A woman watching them caught Alisha’s eye, then looked away quickly as she turned her attention back to Reichart.

  His jaw tightened. “I said, what’s going on with you and Parker?”

  “Nothing, Frank.” Alisha stepped forward, the action expecting Reichart to give ground.

  He did, falling back far enough to linger in the tiny airplane mess hall, but put his arm across the aisle, blocking Alisha’s path. “If it’s nothing, why’d you go cold fish when he turned up?”

  Alisha stopped in her tracks, sucking her cheeks in as she turned her gaze upward, studying the halogen lights above her. “If you want to have a conversation with a woman about her behavior, Reichart, an opening sally of cold fish is maybe not the best way to begin.”

  “Dammit, Leesh!” The words were hissed with frustration. “Stop screwing around and tell me what’s going on.”

  It would take, Alisha thought clinically, very minor to turn the little confrontation into a scene spiraling out of control. The temptation to do so was real, born from a weariness Alisha barely recognized in herself. She would willingly face down an enemy in battle, her training preparing her emotionally and physically to take whatever steps were necessary. Make her the ringside attraction in an emotional triangle or give her an enemy who couldn’t be fought with fists and guns, and she was at a loss. It would be so much easier, she thought, to deal with the Sicarii—with Reichart and Brandon, for that matter—if the situations were endlessly life and death, instead of playing in the lesser—or greater—fields of heartbreak and politics.

  Another person, this time a man, averted his eyes as Alisha held her ground. The woman beside him, more brazen, lifted her chin a little as Alisha met her gaze. “Put your arm down, Frank,” Alisha said quietly. “People are starting to stare.”

  People in general and, she suspected, Brandon in particular. She didn’t need to look, Reichart’s scowl telling her everything she needed to know. The scientist would have looked away by the time she turned, anyway, pretending that whatever went on between Reichart and Alisha was of no interest to him.

  “The only thing there is between me and Brandon is a possibility,” Alisha murmured after Reichart dropped his arm. She felt uncomfortable standing there, too aware that people could openly see them, even if their conversation was too softly held to be heard. “And right now, even if that never comes to anything, we need him and we need Lilith, so you flaunting being with me isn’t going to help at all.”

  “Am I?” Reichart asked sharply. “Am I with you, Leesh? Do you really love me, or are those just easy words in the dark?”

  “Nothing is ever easy with you.” Her reply came out more venomously than she’d intended, and Alisha drew in a breath, deliberately backing off. After a moment she managed a faint smile and added, “See? I told you before,” she added more quietly. “This isn’t the time. We need to break the dagger people’s backbone, to give your people time to recover.”

  An itch ran along her spine and she glanced over her shoulder, finding no guilty gazes turning away. It was just referencing the Sicarii, she told herself, that made her paranoid. “We’ve got to focus on taking Cris down right now, Frank. Don’t think I’m shutting you out.” She tilted her head back again, letting a soft throaty laugh escape. “You said once the girl I used to be was too idealistic for you, remember?”

  Reichart nodded stiffly, a scowl settling between his eyebrows. “Yeah, bu
t—”

  “No.” Alisha lifted her fingers to put them over his lips. “There’s not really a ‘but’ here, Reichart. You take away all that idealism and you’re left with me trying to stop a group of lunatics from overtaking my country, and trying to make sure my family doesn’t get hurt because of what I’m doing. Right now that’s all there is. You, of all people, should understand about making choices like that.”

  Reichart took her hand from his mouth, then brushed his thumb below her collarbone, just over her heart. “I never thought I’d miss that girl, Leesh. I thought I needed somebody tougher. Now I’m not so sure.”

  Alisha quirked her chin to the side, a tiny shrug-like motion. “We can’t go back, Frank. This is who I am now. You’re going to have to take me or leave me as I am, but that’s not a decision to be made right now.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Reichart said, voice gone suddenly rough. “You’re wrong. This is the time. Whether we’re hiding in the dark or five miles in the sky, dammit, Alisha, I love you.” He caught her hands in his, holding them tight as Alisha’s heart started to hammer too hard again, color flooding her cheeks. “I spent years telling myself it’d worked out the only way it could between us, but every time I see you now I know it’s not true.”

  “Reichart.” Alisha managed a tentative smile, tears burning her eyes. “Stop it,” she whispered. “You’re talking like we’re not going to see each other again. Stop it.”

  “Forty operatives, Leesh,” he whispered back. “Since Boyer, forty of our people have been killed. I’ve been getting up every day for the last ten months not knowing if I would see anybody I loved again, or if they’d see me. So yeah, you’re right, maybe I’m pushing it, but I’m out of time, Alisha. I love you, and I’m not going to take this ride to hell without you knowing that.”

  “I know it, Frank. Stop.” The words felt hollow, as if they’d found an empty cold chamber within Alisha’s chest to resound in. “You’re losing people, but you’re gaining them, too. You got me, didn’t you?” Her smile went fragile, then watery. “You’ve even got Brandon. Maybe we’re a small start, but it’s something, right? It’ll turn out okay. Please stop. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t even want to think about it.” Dangerous emotion, a distant part of her chided. All her safety mechanisms of compartmentalization had shattered, everything that might go down in one of her illegal Strongbox Chronicles suddenly burgeoning at the surface. Her hands were cold and trembling, even in Reichart’s grip, and she felt uncomfortably as if everyone on the plane were focused on them. A few pairs of eyes were, gazes sliding away when she tried to meet them. Worse were the people deliberately not watching. Those ones sent prickles of warning over her skin, one of the few emotional responses she was trained to listen to instead of ignore.