The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  Reichart tugged her closer, putting his mouth against her forehead. “Just promise me one thing.”

  Alisha laughed, a sound more of fear than happiness, and put aside the watchful audience for a moment. “What?”

  Reichart stepped back, still holding her hands, dark eyes intense as he looked down at her. “If the Sicarii don’t manage to take me out, Leesh, promise you’ll marry me.”

  Chapter 19

  Astonishment in the form of dizziness swept through Alisha, bringing light-headedness that made her sway. Reichart’s hold on her hands kept her anchored, the single point of contact tethering to the earth. To the airplane floor, at least, she thought headily, since the earth itself was miles below her. “Reichart.” His name was a breathless, astounded whisper.

  “I mean it, Leesh. Say you’ll marry me.”

  Laughter, even threadier than before, escaped her. “That didn’t work out so well last time, Reichart. If I say yes, am I going to get shot again?”

  “Not by me,” he whispered intently. “Not if I have anything to do with it. You love me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” The answer came with a lopsided smile, color scalding Alisha’s cheeks again. The coldness of her hands had reversed somehow, until her fingers ached with their seeming thickness. “I do. I must be crazy, but I still do.”

  “Then say yes,” Reichart pleaded, hope bright in his eyes.

  Alisha closed her own eyes and leaned forward, putting her forehead against his chest. Conflicting desires ached in her body, tearing her one direction and another and leaving her without air to breathe. The prospect of an ordinary life with Reichart, buying a house on the street her sister lived on, children—the usual things a woman might want—struck her as laughable, if enticing in its own way.

  Brandon’s blue eyes, regretful and desperate, flashed through her vision. He, unlike Reichart, might be the key to eventually settling down. He didn’t share Reichart’s adventuresome streak.

  He didn’t share Alisha’s adventuresome streak.

  An ordinary life, Alisha thought, without rue or regret, might never have been in the cards for her. She wanted the tall, dark man whose arms she stood in, and there were prices she was willing to pay to make that happen.

  Alisha knotted her fingers in Reichart’s shirt, then stepped back, smiling, though she knew tears streaked her cheeks. “Tell you what,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Ask me again once we’ve survived all this, all right? Last time you shot me. I’m not going to let you get killed just to get out of a marriage proposal a second time.”

  “Alisha—”

  “No.” The word was soft but firm, and Alisha put her fingers over Reichart’s mouth again. “Don’t argue with me, Frank. You want to marry me, you’re going to have to stay alive to ask me again. It’ll help me be sure you’re not asking just because we’re about to die.” The teasing faded from the last words, leaving her pressing her lips together until they felt white. “Ask me again when this is over.”

  Reichart’s expression hardened and he scowled down the aisle toward where Brandon sat. Alisha reached up and caught his jaw, making him look down at her again. “This isn’t about him, Frank. It’s about you and me and bad timing. If you make it about him, you might give me a reason to make it about him. So don’t do that, all right? Not if you meant what you just asked. Keep it between us.”

  “How can I be sure?” he asked in a low voice. “How can I know it’s not about him?”

  “Because I said so,” Alisha said tartly, then sighed and leaned against the mess hall’s metal door frame. It was cold against her arm, and would leave a red mark if she stayed there too long. The idea made her straighten, rubbing her upper arm. A woman down the plane—one whose eyes she’d caught before—looked away again, making Alisha curl her fingers around her arm where she rubbed it. Part of her wanted to demand that people stop looking at her, though the best way to accomplish that was obviously to return to her seat. But the conversation she and Reichart were having couldn’t be done in front of Brandon, so Alisha was stuck trying not to stand out while standing up. “Because if it was about him I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to steal Lilith.”

  “What?” The surprise in Reichart’s voice bordered on gratifying. Alisha shivered, letting her focus soften as she looked down the aisle. One or two people watched her directly, more interested in the silent drama near the lavatories than the in-flight film that played. Others tried not to watch so openly, making Alisha’s skin itch again.

  “I owe someone a favor I can’t afford not to pay back.” Alisha forced an unamused laugh, folding her arms over her ribs. “Sort of like hiding state secrets under Parliament. Not quite that big. He wants a copy of the AI. And she’s right there, all functional and tidy, in Brandon’s laptop. Dammit.” Alisha thudded her head on the wall, eyes closed. “I don’t want to do it, Frank. It’s kidnapping. Slavery.” She heard herself echoing Brandon’s argument and twisted a smile.

  “What’s the alternative?”

  Alisha opened her eyes again, looking down the aisle, watching people without quite seeing them. “I can think of two. The best case would be this person would own me. The terms of our…agreement…were clear. I’d come through when he needed me, or—” She broke off, glancing at Reichart, then returned her gaze to the aisle, as if it could offer her neutrality of tone as she delivered the facts. The brazen woman met her eyes and offered a smile that Alisha returned briefly.

  “Or he’d expose certain things that could destroy a lot of people. Files that shouldn’t exist,” she said evasively. “My life being forfeit was almost secondary. He knew that’d bother me less than ruining careers and other people’s lives.”

  “To hell with the other people,” Reichart said. “You’re talking about your life, Alisha.”

  “Emma’s one of those other people, Frank. You are. Mazie is.” Alisha shook her head, remembering the shaking hand she’d written those chronicles with. Remembering betrayal and anger and beneath that, a hollow forgiveness that had taken years to recognize. I wanted you to be happy, she’d told Reichart. Those words were etched in a journal, unrealized acknowledgment of his exoneration for shooting her, safely hidden in a deposit box in a London bank.

  Not so safely, after all. “I don’t value my own life over a thirteen-year-old girl’s. I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “Shit. Shit, Alisha. What else?”

  “That’s not enough?” Alisha dismissed the question, lips pressed together again. “I’m more useful to him alive than dead. In Jon’s position—”

  “Jon?”

  Alisha shrugged. “I don’t know his real name. Carlos, Leo, Michael—you probably know him. The Italian fat man. The information broker.”

  “Paolo,” Reichart said after an instant, though he, too, lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “That’s the first name I knew him by, anyway. You owe—Leesh, how did you get in that far over your head with Paolo?”

  Alisha bit her tongue on the truth—I was tracking you— and returned to his earlier question. “In Jon’s position I’d collect the files to make sure I knew he could, and I’d keep me on a very short leash for the rest of my life. He’s got too many ins, Reichart. He could get to my family as easily as the Sicarii could. If I don’t turn Lilith over to him, I’m his.”

  “There’s got to be another option.”

  “Sure.” Alisha turned a crooked smile on the dark-haired man. “I could die.”

  “Not funny, Leesh,” Reichart growled. “Not funny at all.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” Alisha exhaled, her shoulders slumping. “But right now, believe it or not, I think we have another problem.”

  “How can we possibly have another problem?” The question bordered on rhetorical, everything in Reichart’s demeanor changing as he asked. Minute changes: muscles came into relief, twitches of motion and his eyes hooded, distrust coming down in them like a mask. From one breath to the next he changed, concerned lover left behind an
d deadly mercenary in its place.

  “There’s more than people staring,” Alisha murmured. “I count at least four actively casing us. Maybe five, if you include the blond in the third row checking you out.”

  Reichart glanced over his shoulder, then looked back down at Alisha with a frown. “There’s no blond in the third row.”

  Alisha grinned. “Yeah, there is. Second seat. He’s kind of cute, really.”

  Reichart did a double-take, then snorted. “Not my type.”

  “Too bad,” Alisha whispered. “He just lit up when you looked back at him. Maybe you should go be nice to him. He could be a useful cover when we get off the plane.”

  “You won’t risk a thirteen-year-old girl, but random strangers on the plane are fair game?”

  “Everybody’s got their line in the sand. Don’t look,” Alisha advised, “but there’s a pair two rows behind that, a brunette woman and her partner. The woman keeps meeting my eyes outright and the guy is fidgety. There’s another one on the far side of the bulkhead, near Brandon, and—”

  “I’ve got them,” Reichart interrupted in a low voice. “Dammit. Recognize any of them?”

  “No,” Alisha said just as quietly, “but I’m going to kill Brandon for coming back on the Sicarii radar, and then I’m going to bring him back and kill him again for coming back into the U.S. to get me. Every intelligence agency on the planet must know where he is by now.”

  Faint amusement creased Reichart’s mouth. “Maybe that’s who’s on the plane with us.”

  Laughter escaped Alisha in a quiet rush. “What, reps from every intelligence agency on the planet? That should be exciting when we get to Heathrow.”

  “How do we want to handle this?”

  “I don’t know.” Alisha shook her head. “But all three of us need to decide, not just you and me.”

  “C’mon.” Derisiveness came into Reichart’s voice. “Parker’s not a field agent.”

  “Technically, neither are we,” Alisha pointed out. “You’re a merc, Reichart. You work for the highest bidder, remember? And I’m retired.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  “All of us, Frank. All of us, or I’ll just go sit down next to Ms. Brazen Eyes over there and hand you two over.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Probably not.” Alisha pushed away from the wall and threaded her way back down the aisle, using chair backs to keep herself steady. “But you never can tell.”

  “I don’t have an American passport with me!” Brandon hissed the protestation, leaving Alisha staring at him in bemusement. “You got me Brazilian and British papers!”

  “Oh, for—the Brazilian ones, Brandon, use the papers from Brazil. The whole point is to make them wait.” Alisha tilted her head, a tiny motion, toward the quartet who shadowed them. They were discreet, scattered through the customs lines, all of them sour-faced and impatient. Given the general expressions of people shuffling through the long lines, they were part of the faceless majority.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Reichart shifted his duffel bag, the only luggage he’d brought, over his shoulder. “They’ve got biometric scanners for non-nationals. None of us are in the system under the names on these passports.”

  Alisha flashed a smile, nodding at a sign announcing Heathrow as a free wireless access site. “I think Lilith can take care of that little problem.”

  “You want me to expose her to possible detection in the middle of a security-ridden airport?” Brandon demanded.

  Alisha smiled more broadly, feeling the expression growing pointed. “You want to risk having her taken away from you entirely when your American identification comes up at odds with your Brazilian passport?”

  Outrage faltered in Brandon’s blue eyes, his shoulders slumping. “They don’t like people running laptops on this side of security.”

  “So be subtle, Brandon.” You’re a Company agent, Alisha wanted to add. Subtle is supposed to be part of the job. As if he’d heard the reprimand, Brandon frowned, but slipped his carry-on open to wake Lilith from sleep mode. Alisha made a fuss over aching feet, pulling the men aside to sit down while the line shifted and moved forward. The brazen-gazed woman gave her a dirty look that Alisha returned with a grin and a wave.

  “I thought we were being subtle,” Reichart said.

  Alisha transferred the smile to him. “Only with regards to customs. My bold friend over there already knows we’re on to her. They all do.” An uplifting sense of cheer buoyed Alisha, the small pleasure of inconveniencing those who followed them greater than it had any right to be. Tiny things going right, she thought, could make a day much more pleasant. “Might as well enjoy annoying them. There’ll be trouble enough later.”

  “This would be a hell of a lot easier if Lilith had all her processing power available,” Brandon muttered.

  Alisha nodded, but shrugged. “She doesn’t, so we’ll have to make do. Besides, don’t tell me you didn’t upgrade that laptop with quantum chips. It might not be as spacious as your development servers, but I bet she’s got room to breathe.”

  Brandon gave her a look similar to the one the woman had, then turned his attention to the computer. Alisha sat back, pulling a foot into her lap to massage it, and smiled at anyone who would meet her eye. An armed security guard glanced their way, smiled briefly, and looked away again before his gaze came back to them, watching and considering. “Soon would be good,” Alisha announced quietly.

  “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “It’s just a bonus side effect.” Alisha winced, seeing Reichart’s expression turn smug. Watch it, Leesh, she warned herself. Brandon’s sins aside, they needed him and the AI to get out of the airport safely. “Sorry,” she added, putting genuine emotion into the apology. “Maybe I’m a little more tense than I thought.”

  Brandon frowned at her, then Reichart, and hunched his shoulders. “Yeah. Maybe we all are. Just a couple more minutes. These aren’t exactly easy servers to waltz through.”

  “I hope not. I’d hate to think everybody was pulling this sort of thing off.”

  Brandon chuckled quietly. “Me, too.” A few minutes later he looked up with a stretch, clipping the carry-on shut again. “You ready? How’re your feet?”

  “Better. I hate flying. I swell up.” Alisha got up gingerly, making a face as she tested her weight. Reichart offered an elbow and she took it, mincing along. The security guard approached, nodding at Brandon’s laptop case.

  “What were you doing there, sir?”

  “Faxing our hotel.” Brandon’s accent went heavy and his voice polite, a foreign national whose first language wasn’t English and who understood caution was wise while traveling in the current political climate. “I was to notify them when we arrived, so they could send a car. Is everything all right?”

  The guard shot another look at the case. “Why didn’t you take the laptop all the way out of the bag?”

  Brandon flushed, taking a small step closer to the guard and dropping his voice as he cast a quick glance toward Alisha and Reichart. “The pictures I have on my desktop. Ms. Buckner and I…well.” Stiffness and accusation filled both his posture and his words. “He is with her now. I did not want him to see.”

  The guard tossed a sly, delighted look toward Reichart and nodded. “Be careful with that, sir. You’ll have all sorts of trouble, you will.”

  Brandon nodded, still stiffly, then rejoined Alisha and Reichart as the guard dismissed him, the three of them holding back laughter until they were safely through customs.

  Chapter 20

  “Our escort is waiting for us,” Alisha breathed. It was inevitable that people from the airplane would be at the Heathrow Express terminal, but Alisha and the men had lingered long enough that those who could had moved on. The brazen-gazed brunette, however, slouched in a chair with her feet thrust out and ankles crossed, watching the escalators openly while her partner idled, walking up and down the length of the terminal. Three others—incl
uding the slight blond man who’d admired Reichart—stood around, arms folded or reading newspapers whose pages they didn’t turn. “Your friend’s here,” Alisha whispered to Reichart. “Coincidence, or conspiracy?”

  “I’ll go with conspiracy until proven wrong.” Reichart stepped off the escalator in front of her, Brandon taking up the rear. “I count seven.”

  “I only have five,” Alisha said. “Guess we’ll see how many people get on the train with us.” She’d lost track of time during the transatlantic flight, but the shift forward had to put it somewhere around eleven at night, not long before the last train left to go into London. Not many people dallied in airports at that hour, usually eager to finish their travel and get some sleep. Whatever form confrontation took, it would be as little-observed as it could be given the enormous amount of traffic Heathrow saw.

  Too many people, in other words.

  Chimes and a pleasant British voice announced the arrival of the train, asking people to stand back. “We could’ve saved ourselves a lot of trouble by taking a cab,” Brandon observed.

  Alisha blinked at him, then grinned as she entered the train. “They’ve got to have people watching the cab lanes, too. This way we at least recognize our enemies.”