by Linda Nagata
She gets out. As the cab drives off, she starts walking. Not toward her hotel, not yet. She wants to know if he’s watching, if she’s being followed. She walks past expensive apartment complexes towards the ocean, waiting for him to call.
He doesn’t.
After a few minutes she calls him again.
No answer.
It’s very late. The streets are lined with parked cars but empty of traffic. She stops in front of the dark display in a clothing store’s window. Activating the MARC’s sky survey function, she turns in a slow circle, but the program picks up only a single municipal UAV. No private devices at all.
Too bad she’s gained the attention of someone on the ground. She takes off her visor, slipping it into her right pocket to obscure the shape of the pistol as a police car glides up beside her. The window goes down. The officer—she is a woman—leans over to speak out the window in stern and heavily accented English: “Are you well, ma’am? Have you lost your way?”
True answers in Arabic phrases: “Shokran, ana kewayisa.” Thank you, I am well. She shows the officer her passport and her hotel keycard. Tourists should be handled gently and left to their foreign ways whenever possible. So the officer bids her goodnight. True is sure, though, that she has become an object of interest for the municipal UAV on patrol overhead.
She reviews her choices:
Return to the hotel—where she’d be easy to find if anyone is looking. Or head for the airport and hope to get a flight out before she’s tied to tonight’s incident. By some calculations that would be the smart move. But she walked out on Alex when she came here, she broke the bond of trust between herself and Lincoln, and she wants something back for that.
She wants the truth from Shaw Walker. All of it.
In that context, the watchful eye of the municipal UAV is the least of her concerns. Until the local police can link her to the unwitnessed crime in the warehouse district, she is just another lonely middle-aged tourist.
She walks on, slowly, pondering the question of Li Guiying.
The robotics engineer used to be employed by Kai Yun but she left the technology company years ago. Six years ago? Seven? True is uncertain. It never mattered before. She considers calling Guiying, asking her straight up, What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing having me followed? What am I to you?
Before she can decide if this is a bold or a foolish move, her tablet buzzes with an alert. She pulls it out of her thigh pocket. Finds a message from the beetle left on watch back at her hotel. From its hidden perch on the hotel’s façade, it’s been recording everyone who’s gone in or out of the hotel tonight. And it’s finally found a set of familiar faces—faces that are absent from most public databases but that exist within the private collection True has compiled, and that are associated with a private military company.
She has just passed under a canopy at the front of a closed café. She backtracks until she’s in the canopy’s shadow again. She gets out her reading glasses, huddles over the tablet to hide the screen from the view of security cameras, and studies two images. Both were taken from an awkward angle, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to read the tags to identify the team filing in through the hotel’s front entrance. Lincoln’s face is the one she registers first, his scars enhanced by shadows. He’s looking up, almost directly at the camera, like he knows it’s there, or suspects.
What in hell is he doing here so soon?
He should have gone home, dealt with the aftermath of the bombing. But he didn’t go home. He couldn’t have. To reach Rabat only hours after her own arrival, he must have booked a seat during the trans-Pacific flight and flown straight out of Los Angeles.
Just to stop me from finding Shaw?
She casts her gaze across the rest of the team and thinks that his presence here could be vendetta, and not an official ReqOps mission. He’s brought Rohan with him, and Felice. That’s understandable. Both are skilled and aggressive—and single. But he’s got Khalid too—a respected soldier of course, but also ReqOps’ newest recruit. If Lincoln is planning an operation against Shaw Walker, Khalid should not be part of it, not without months of training.
The fifth face in the picture worries her even more. Miles Dushane. What is he doing here? He’s an ex-Ranger, sure, but he’s no part of ReqOps and he’s not to be trusted, not after what he’s been through as Hussam’s prisoner. True refuses to believe that Lincoln recruited him.
She blanks the screen, straightens up, takes off her glasses. At least there’s no indication that Alex came with them. Thank you, God, for that.
She considers going back to the hotel, confronting Lincoln—but dismisses the idea. Like Shaw said, she’s not Lincoln’s girl anymore. She has her own agenda and she’s in deep. Deeper, after tonight, and she’s not done yet.
She calls Shaw. Again he doesn’t answer. His nonresponse provokes her. She wonders: Am I being toyed with or betrayed?
Out of spiteful insistence she tries the call again, whispering, “Answer, damn you. We are not done.”
He doesn’t answer.
She texts: We have unfinished business. You promised not to disappear.
Nothing.
She reconsiders the address where the cab was meant to take her. She tells herself that in all likelihood it’s a random address. Still, it’s her only lead. She slips her glasses back on and uses the tablet to find it on a map.
From above, it’s a rectangular building, the roof open to a central courtyard. She shifts to street view. From this angle, she sees a private home in the Moroccan style, a riad, with its focus turned inward to the open court. Two enclosed stories are topped by a low-walled terrace on the roof, with no windows facing the street. The riad shares its side walls with the neighbors. All of the houses on the block are riads, looking exactly the same, which tells her this is a modern build. Cars on both sides of the street are parked so as not to block the large, arched doors of each residence.
Is this his home? she wonders. Or a random address?
Is he there?
She puts the tablet away, swapping it for her MARC.
It’s not the time to be thinking about free will, but she thinks about it anyway as she sets out on a path projected by her visor, a path she needs to follow. It’s not a choice, really. It’s the gravity of what happened in Nungsan that has locked her on this course, leaving the concept of free will as nothing more than an abstract academic exercise.
An Intervention
We’re already too late, Lincoln thinks.
It’s 0130 in Rabat. He’s standing in True’s empty hotel room in the company of a foreign liaison officer named Nadim Zaman, who ordered the hotel staff to issue him a key card after True failed to respond to a knock on the door.
“She was here,” Zaman proclaims, gesturing at empty air. “The towels and the toiletries have been used. But she has gone out. Perhaps she found another hotel guest with whom to pass the night.”
Rohan is in the doorway. He’s dressed like a civilian in khaki cargo pants and a brown silk shirt with rolled-up sleeves, but his arms are crossed, muscles showing, and he’s got a belligerent look. “That is not what happened,” he says.
Nadim’s eyes narrow. “When a woman disappears in the night, refusing to answer her phone, this is most often what is happening.”
Nadim has made it no secret that he resents their presence here, resents the Warrant of Capture and Rendition that provides legal authority for them to pursue and detain Jon Helm, and resents that he’s been assigned as their liaison. He insisted on a full inspection of their equipment and the leased vehicle they picked up at the airport—an exercise that took over an hour—before finally agreeing to look up the hotel name True had entered on her customs document.
Lincoln works to keep his voice low and his temper in check as he explains the obvious to Nadim. “Our concern is that she may be unable to answer her phone. She would have begun seeking leads on the location of Jon Helm the moment she arrived. It’s pos
sible she asked the wrong questions in the wrong place.”
The story he told Nadim was mostly correct. They’ve come seeking Jon Helm, True arrived before them, they expected to meet up with her. He did not mention that True came on her own or that she may not wish to be found. He did not mention that State granted the warrant only as a least-worst option, to avoid the accusation of prior knowledge of Jon Helm’s identity and the truth of what happened at Nungsan.
“You believe she has already encountered this Jon Helm?” Nadim asks.
“I don’t know,” Lincoln answers.
There’s too much that he doesn’t know; there’s been too little time to prepare.
Only forty-five minutes after they lifted off from Manila, Alex came down the aisle, grim-faced, to tell him what she’d done. There was no outlet for the fury that came boiling up in his throat, not in the packed cabin of a long-haul jet less than an hour into a trans-Pacific crossing, so he clamped his teeth together and he held it down like the worst meal he’d ever eaten. If she sank a knife in his chest, it would have hurt less.
But fuck, he earned it.
He’d learned early who Shaw Walker really was: a self-righteous man, a man of absolutes, a natural leader who possessed a dangerous charisma that made him easy to love and easy to forgive, even when you’d seen his dark side. Shaw demanded everything of his soldiers—but he would do anything for them, too.
True sensed that. She knew Shaw as the last man to stand by Diego, the man who begged to stand in Diego’s place. He was a bridge to her son, and maybe she saw some ghost of Diego within him.
Lincoln failed to respect that, blinded by his own sense of responsibility for what he knew Shaw had done since—his alliance with Al-Furat, the atrocities Miles had witnessed, Renata’s murder. He allowed those things to happen when he’d failed to make a full report on their last action in Kunar Province. Add True’s defection to that list of harmful consequences—but it stops now.
Lincoln engineered this mission, assembling his equipment and his team, from the cramped seats of commercial airliners as he worked his way to North Africa. Chris fought him on the action in a rapid-fire exchange of emails bounced off of satellites.
Chris:
We cannot undertake another mission now. We don’t have the funds, we don’t have the staff, and you are needed here. The FBI is here. They’re waiting to interview you.
Lincoln:
You can handle things there. My obligation is to bring Shaw home.
Chris:
You are not supposed to be operating in the field. By the standards you set for this company, you are not physically qualified.
Lincoln:
A one-time exception. Shaw is my problem. This is my task.
Chris:
What’s the real goal here? To take down Shaw? Or are you after True?
Lincoln:
I need to find both of them.
Chris:
Why don’t you give her time to work? She’s got her own goal, she can handle herself, and she hasn’t asked you to come rescue her.
Lincoln:
It’s not a rescue. It’s an intervention. She’s never been able to reconcile with what was done to Diego. She wants Shaw to tell her a different story, spin some new meaning out of it. She’s ready to risk her life for that. We already lost Renata. I am not going to stand aside and lose True too.
Chris:
You actually believe she’s going to find him. That’s why you’re in such a hurry. You think he’ll talk to her. Why? Why would he do that? Just because she’s Diego’s mother?
Lincoln:
Yes. Because she’s Diego’s mother. And because he knew her. He respected her. He cared about his men. If he’s going to talk to anybody, it’ll be her.
Chris:
So you’re using her as bait.
Lincoln:
I didn’t set it up. I didn’t send her after him. But the situation exists, so I will exploit it. I need to be there if she finds him. I need to ensure Shaw comes home, because there needs to be an accounting. It’s as simple as that.
Tamara gave them a place to begin their search when she reported the results of her dust and pollen analysis. Lincoln knew True would head to Morocco. When his phone logged a missed call from Dove Barhoum—almost ten hours ago now—he took it as confirmation that she was in Rabat.
He called Dove after that—several times—but Dove never picked up, never called back, never tried to contact him again in all the hours since.
One more thing to worry about.
Now he turns his head slightly so that Nadim Zaman appears within the full range of color perceived by his natural eye, and says, “If you could feed her profile to the network of municipal cameras, we could backtrack, find out where she went after she left the hotel.”
“No.” The liaison officer says this in a tone that allows no possibility of negotiation. “I have helped you locate her hotel room as a gesture of good will but I can go no farther. She is present in this country legally and she is not named in your warrant. I have no cause to investigate her activities.”
“She may have information material to our search for Jon Helm,” Lincoln says.
Nadim turns his hands palm up. “She is a professional soldier, yes? She is on your team. Give her time. If she is passing the night in pleasure, she will be here again in the morning. And if she is hunting this Jon Helm, she will contact you when she has a lead. Until then, I suggest you get some sleep.”
~~~
The wafer shape of a surveillance beetle clings to the frame of the hotel room window, its camera eye watching the street below and the sky overhead—although at this late hour the city is quiet and no one’s about.
Miles watches the street too, even though he knows ReqOps’ impromptu surveillance network will issue an alert when True shows up.
If she shows up.
He’s here to witness what he hopes will be the last action in the book he’s writing. He wants the narrative to end with Shaw Walker being taken down—but True is missing and he worries he’ll have to describe one more atrocity before he gets to the end.
“They’re coming back,” Felice announces. “They just stepped off the elevator.”
She’s sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, a tablet balanced on her lap as she idly monitors the surveillance feeds. Khalid has been lying beside her, hands behind his head, but he gets up now and goes to the door.
Lincoln booked the team into adjoining rooms with a door open between them, but the three of them gravitated to one side to wait together.
Khalid opens the door, stepping back as Lincoln comes in with Rohan right behind him.
“That Nadim is a real prick,” Lincoln announces.
Rohan affirms this with a fervent “A-men.”
“Did you find anything?” Miles wants to know.
“Nothing in her room,” Rohan says, looking worried. “Not even a toothbrush. I don’t think she’s planning to come back.”
“We can’t know that,” Lincoln counters, irritated. “All she was carrying when she took off was a daypack with a few toys inside. If she went out for any reason, she would have taken that with her. Doesn’t mean she’s not coming back.”
“You want me to launch the copters?” Khalid asks. “Start looking for her?”
They brought four starburst copters with them. Lincoln nods his approval of this suggestion. “Put up two, unarmed, cameras only. Hold the second pair in reserve.”
“Hey,” Felice says, “looks like our friend Nadim wasn’t satisfied with his first inspection of our truck.”
Miles sits down beside her so he can look over her shoulder at the tablet. A video feed shows Nadim crouching beside the rear bumper of their leased SUV—a rugged off-road model, desert tan in color. His hand disappears underneath the bumper. Then he walks swiftly to his own vehicle. “Tracking device,” Felice says. “Got to be.”
“Prick,” Rohan mutters.
“He’s got a j
ob to do,” Miles says. “And you can’t expect him to be happy about a bunch of foreign assholes showing up in his hometown with a special writ of kickass.”
Felice snorts, but Lincoln is somber when he says, “Let’s just hope our pal Nadim is not on Jon Helm’s payroll.”
“Fuck Jon Helm,” Rohan says with feeling. “I don’t give a shit about Jon Helm. We’re not even getting a bounty on him. What I want to know is, where is True?”
It’s almost 0200. Too late at night for pleasant assumptions and comforting excuses. “She’s with him,” Miles says. “Or she’s on her way to him. But she’s found him. Otherwise she’d be here.”
Lincoln’s lip curls. It’s not what he wants to hear. “Help Khalid get the copters up,” he tells Rohan irritably. “And leave the tracker in place for now. We’ll get rid of it when we need to go stealth.”
Time Enough
There are no sidewalks in this district, so True walks in the streets alongside parked cars tucked up against the buildings. She is cautious as she approaches the address, pausing at the corner to study the block where the riad is located, and to listen.
The neighborhood is quiet.
The street rises uphill, but other than that it’s similar to the streets she’s just passed—hemmed in by parked cars and high white windowless walls. The conjoined residences can be counted by the number of arched double doors, each pair wide enough to drive a small car through, although all of them are closed. There are four sets of doors on each side of the street. Friendly amber lights illuminate the door of the farthest riad on the left. More lights glow on two of the rooftop terraces on the right-hand side of the street. But the residence True seeks is the second on the left, and like most of its neighbors, it’s dark.
She does not want to stay in one place too long so she walks on past the foot of the street to the next block. She lets her MARC run the sky survey and again it detects only city UAVs and private network relays. No unidentified devices. No devices following her.
She walks up the next block, and as she does, she digs a small case out of her daypack. Inside is a soldier from the origami army. Tamara calls it a sparrow though it doesn’t look like one. Its dark-brown avian wings are powered by button batteries packed into an oblong body with a shape that reminds True of a fishing lure, the sort with eyes painted on to make it resemble a fish. A triangular tail serves as a stabilizing third wing. It has a wide-angle camera and radio-frequency sensors, along with software to interpret what it finds, and it’s agile enough to fly in tight spaces or securely perch in a hidden niche—so it’s useful, despite a limited battery life. She syncs it to the MARC’s display and when she reaches the top of the target block, she launches it into the air.