The Cardinal Rule

by Cate Dermody

  Brandon’s voice was as gentle as if he spoke to a frightened animal. “Well, right now you’ve got Rafe, and I’ve got your only way out of here. I think that might be a way to help one another.”

  Alisha barked laughter, aware that Rafe flinched at the sharp sound in his ear. “I didn’t think you were a hostage negotiator for the Agency, Parker.”

  “I wasn’t.” Brandon kept the calming tone to his voice. “But we’re all trained in it. You know that.”

  Alisha curled her lip into a snarl. “All I want is out of here.” Fourth objective, part of her mind whispered. Determine if Brandon Parker is a clear and present danger and be prepared to terminate. She could certainly fulfill that part of her mission right now.

  But it wouldn’t get her out of there alive. “I’m listening.”

  “We’ll take a jeep. All three of us.” Brandon’s voice was soothing. “Rafe will board the plane with you.”

  Rafe’s eyes flew open, shock making his body go rigid in Alisha’s grip. “It’s all right,” Brandon said to him. “She won’t hurt you unless she’s forced to. Unnecessary casualties don’t look good on CIA records.”

  “Then what makes you think she’ll shoot him now?” Reichart asked, faint amusement in his deep voice.

  It didn’t matter if he’d betrayed her or not, Alisha decided. She was tempted to shoot him on general principle.

  “I don’t,” Brandon said softly. “But she’s in a corner, and I’d rather not have Rafe’s brains splattered over the field if I’m wrong.”

  “You have a deal,” Alisha interrupted. “But one thing.” She nodded over Rafe’s shoulder, toward the distant drones. “Shut them all down and give me the remote.”

  Annoyed admiration flashed through Brandon’s eyes. “I hoped you wouldn’t remember them.”

  Alisha smirked. “Not likely.” She waggled the gun a centimeter or two, still keeping it against Rafe’s temple. “Turn them off. Give me the remote. And tie him up.” She nodded toward Reichart. “Then we go.”

  “Me?” Reichart’s voice rose. “What’d I do?”

  “As if you have to ask,” Alisha muttered. “For caution’s sake,” she said aloud. “I don’t know whose side you’re on, and I’d rather not have a squadron of soldiers waiting for me down at the airport.”

  Resignation crossed Reichart’s face. Alisha could all but hear him rumble, You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? although he didn’t speak. Brandon curled a lip in irritation, then followed Alisha’s orders. Rafe sagged against her, relief obvious in the lines of his body. He hadn’t been sure—Alisha hadn’t been sure—that Brandon would negotiate with what amounted to a terrorist.

  He started it, Alisha thought childishly. She heard him mutter, “Sorry,” to Reichart, who shrugged in resignation and sat down against a platform post so Brandon could lash him in place. He cut Alisha one sharp glance through dark eyelashes, and she dared to quirk a faint smile at him, in thanks for not causing the kind of trouble he was more than capable of. He lifted one shoulder in a minute shrug as Brandon turned away, and thunked his head against the post. Alisha half wished she could be there when Brandon returned, as she was almost certain Reichart would be gone.

  Don’t worry about Reichart, she chided herself. There were better things to be concerned about—like Brandon keeping his word.

  He offered her the remote; she nudged Rafe to take it. “You two first.” Her voice was rough, nerves stressing it. They filed down the ladder and she jumped down after them, absorbing the impact with her knees. Brandon tensed, precursor to action, and Alisha straightened, gun held low but threatening. “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”

  He managed a brief smile. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

  “Yes.” The word came out flat. “I can.” Her stomach twisted in a knot, dislike of the whole situation souring her belly. Too much had gone wrong, with too many ramifications to consider until she no longer had a Damascus sword hanging above her head. Alisha jerked the gun toward the distant jeep.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 10

  Alisha flung her MP3 player across the table, watching it spin and clatter before it bumped against a sheaf of papers a few inches from Greg’s hand and came to a stop. She threw herself into a chair with equal abandon, the violent motions more to soothe her own frustration than to accuse. Fingers over her face, she muttered, “It was a complete disaster, Greg. A total mess.”

  “Is anyone dead?” There was no humor at all in Greg’s question. Alisha spread her hand over her eyes, then dropped it and sighed, head rolled back as she stared at the hotel room ceiling.

  “No.”

  “Then it wasn’t a complete disaster.”

  “My cover got blown. Brandon knew who I was.” Alisha pulled her lips back from her teeth, as if baring them would frighten the next thing she had to say into submission. “Reichart was there.”

  Silence met her words. After a few seconds Alisha rotated her head down and cast Greg a wary look. His mouth was thin and pinched, weary resignation in his eyes. “I’ll take you off the case.”

  “What?!” Alisha jolted upright, bringing her palm down on the table with a crack. “Like hell you will!”

  “Alisha, it was a mistake to send you in the first place. You’re too close, by dint of being close to me. And if Frank Reichart’s involved, it’s—”

  “Not,” Alisha growled. “It’s not an emotional complication, Greg. Dammit, I’ve got too many questions. You can’t take me off this. You should have questions.” She straightened up, shoving a finger at the papers beneath Greg’s hand. “Have you read my preliminary report?” A wave of guilt stabbed through her. The report was barely more than one of her illegal journal entries, filled with unanswered questions and exclamation marks.

  “I’ve glanced at the first page or two. The fax only arrived a few minutes before you did.” Greg pursed his lips, tapping a finger on the papers before looking up at her. “It’s…”

  “Sketchy.” She doubted that was the word Greg had been going for. Emotional, more likely, or compromised. On an intellectual level, she knew he was right: she didn’t belong on this mission. But on a deeper level—an emotional one, she mocked herself—sticking with it felt important. “I don’t like turning in preliminary reports, Greg, you know that. I like presenting the whole picture. But this time I feel like I’m missing too much already. Like, who the hell is Sicarii?”

  The shadow of a frown passed over Greg’s face and he tapped the papers again, circling his fingertip against them. “The name doesn’t mean anything to me. Are you certain about this information, about Brandon working for the CIA?”

  Alisha sighed explosively, sinking down in her chair. “I’m not certain of anything right now. It’s what I overheard. I’m going to follow his old trail here and see if I can get as far as a dead end.” It was frequently what she couldn’t find that told her the most. An agent who’d genuinely gone rogue would have a current operation file as long as her arm. One who’d been buried in secret operations was far more likely to come up as a red flag and a warning not to pursue him any further.

  She wanted very much to find a dead end. For Greg, she told herself, and that was true. A son buried so deep in an undercover mission that even the father didn’t know about it was a better ending to their story than resentment between the two having driven Brandon away.

  But her own pride was tied up in it as well. She’d been compromised, whether by Reichart or by Brandon himself, and left with more questions than she’d begun with. It was a price of being a player in the spy game, she reminded herself: she wouldn’t always be able to see the whole picture. Usually she could accept that. But Brandon’s possible continuing involvement with the CIA, his contact, and the mention of the name Sicarii that had so quickly silenced his objections, all piqued her interest beyond the norm. There was a trail to be followed there, a significance that itched at the base of her skull, though the importance was still beyond her grasp.
Alisha pushed the thoughts away, focusing for the moment on the more concrete. “He’s got a prototype army of his AIs in that base, Greg. Half a dozen of the Attengee drones, way too much to take out. I didn’t know until it was too late that I should be looking for more. With any sort of luck—” she cast her gaze upward, supplication to the sky “—the virus will be uploaded to their main servers by now, as part of the daily backup, and all the schematics will be destroyed when the virus is triggered. But we need those prototypes. They could be reverse engineered. I’ve been in there. No one else has.”

  “How much of this is loyalty to king and country, and how much is revenge for being discovered, Alisha?” It was the second time Greg had used her full name; that alone indicated how serious he was. Alisha straightened in her seat, leaning across the table with her hands clasped together, a gesture of earnestness.

  “Some of it’s revenge,” she admitted freely. “I’m—” She wrinkled her nose, jerking her shoulders in a tight shrug. “Embarrassed. Angry. To have been betrayed.” A curious choice of words, she thought, even as she went on with a quick shake of her head.

  “But as far as returning to the base is concerned, I genuinely believe it’s vital, sir. The Attengee droids are highly effective combat machines. I believe it’s critical for a trustworthy organization to hold all copies of that design—” Alisha broke off at the glitter of amusement in Greg’s eyes, giving him a lopsided smile in return. “Let’s not go there,” she said, as much teasing as she dared offer. Greg brushed away his own malarkey with a wave of his fingers, encouraging her to continue.

  Alisha stood, crossing to the room’s balcony. Her flight had brought her to Istanbul, the meeting with Greg arranged before she’d gone into Kazakhstan. She’d left Rafe in Syria, perhaps not the most friendly drop-off point, but far enough away from his immediate resources not to cause her trouble as she departed the overheated airport to make her meeting with Greg.

  The rickety hotel they’d met in was too small to offer either a view of the city or to escape the scent of heat-stained bodies in the streets. Voices chattered up, musical Turkish language rising in an undistinguishable cacophony. If there was time, Alisha thought wistfully, she’d go out and lose herself in the press of bodies and the noise of the marketplace, singing scraps of Western songs to herself.

  “I don’t doubt for an instant that Reichart will be reporting back to the FSB and they’ll try something similar. We need to not waste time.” It was too precious a commodity to be spent forgotten in the narrow streets among the vendors. Alisha touched the flaking red paint of the window frame with a modicum of regret.

  “And what about Reichart himself?”

  “Permission to kick his ass requested, sir.”

  Greg laughed aloud, an unexpected sound of genuine delight. Alisha turned from the window, grinning crookedly and pleased with herself. “Permission granted,” Greg said, “if you can find him. All right, Alisha. You’ve got a go on this thing. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The base was deserted.

  Alisha hadn’t been the only one to sense the wrongness as they’d approached, helicopters dropping them just on the other side of the valley’s mountaintops. She’d seen the exchanged glances, the wordless warnings, as they’d come down the mountainside into the silent and dark valley. No one liked it: it had the feel of a place rigged to blow. An undefinable quality, Alisha thought, but anyone she knew with combat experience understood it. It was as if the walls were holding their breath, listening for the countdown that would rupture them and blow the world asunder. It was more than the silence of emptiness: it had purpose to it, and in the heart of enemy territory, purpose could be deadly.

  She found the first bomb herself, a block of C4 as big as her two fists. She lifted a black-covered hand, shrilling a soft whistle as the numbers worked their way backward toward zero. Thirty-nine minutes until detonation. She uncovered her watch—no longer the delicate fashion piece she so often wore, but instead a heavy black-banded thing with dim numbers—and synchronized its alarm with the countdown as she spoke. “The prototypes aren’t going to be here.”

  “You want us to check anyway?” The squadron leader eyed the timer before turning his attention to Alisha. She pressed her lips together, then nodded once.

  “I’ll bring two men down. The rest of you see if there’re any surface-to-air-defenses. If not we can just call the choppers in and get out of here before the whole place goes to kingdom come.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The sergeant flicked a salute and motioned to his men, splitting two of the eight off to join Alisha. Overriding the elevator protocols took seconds, and despite the bombs counting down overhead, Alisha grinned as they took the shaft down. Much easier than sneaking through air ducts.

  Black acrid smoke rolled over them as the elevator doors swept open. Lights dimmed and brightened, sparking out with hisses and splatters. Alisha muffled a cough in the back of her hand, then pulled her turtleneck up over her nose and mouth, eyes watering. Her two guards stepped forward, one with infrared glasses pulled down over his eyes. They checked the hall, then one nodded. Alisha pointed to her eyes, then down the hall; the man on her left nodded again and she darted through the wispy smoke.

  It was inconceivable that Brandon would have destroyed the prototypes. Alisha was almost relieved to punch the pass code—unbelievably, it still worked—into the computer lab pad and find that it was the computers that had been destroyed. “We’re clear,” she said into her radio a moment later, voice hoarse from the smoke. “They let out the magic black smoke.”

  A chuckle answered her as she hurried through the smoking computer remains, searching for any hard disks that might have gone unscathed. There were none; Brandon, or Hashikov and his men, had been thorough. Alisha muttered, “Shit,” under her breath, rather philosophically. It would have surprised her more to find something salvageable.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Two minutes and we’re out of here.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said, sounding considerably more cheerful. Alisha crawled over the row of desks against the viewing windows, peering down into the hub room. It was clear of the smoke that roiled through the other levels, its ventilation system cut off from the rest of the bunker. Alisha coughed again, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. There was a single piece of paper in the middle of the hub room floor.

  “Conspiracy, or coincidence?” She tested the windows, finding them sealed, and crawled off the desks to run for the steel stairway. Bits of debris and wiring littered the floor, a few hot spots glowing as if determined to hang on just a little longer.

  The control room above was as smoky, but less damaged, than the computer lab. Alisha gulped air and yanked the window open, taking the wall-cut rungs down with abandon. She jumped the last few feet, landing in a roll that brought her to the sheet of paper.

  A cardinal on an ornate dome, drawn in black ink on heavy parchment paper, dominated the page. Written in small block letters at the bottom of the page was a Latin phrase: cave retro. Alisha stared at the dome, something itching at the back of her mind. It was familiar, the ink lines edging a memory into place before fading into blackness. She shook her head, unable to grasp it, then frowned at the letters, searching for what little Latin she knew. The phrase was neither carpe diem nor illigitemi non corundum, but it took several seconds to get those translations, especially don’t let the bastards grind you down, out of her head. Alisha shook herself, wiping the phrases from her mind, and studied the paper again. Retro was behind. Cave—beware. In modern English—

  Look behind you.

  Alisha’s shoulders went rigid as a tendril of cold slithered around her spine and stiffened her posture. In direct contrast, heat filled her belly, blood rushing from her core to her limbs, making her hands and feet itch and burn. Every impulse told her to run, even without knowing what she was running from. Alisha clamped down on the urge, swallowing thickly
.

  Don’t run. The order, spoken silently, felt slow and stupid, words a barrier against a million years of instinct. Don’t run. Look first, Leesh. Don’t run.

  The tiny muscles in her neck bunched, vertebrae creaking as she turned her head so carefully she couldn’t tell at first that she was moving. The steadying breath she took felt cold against the heat of adrenaline spilling through her body in preparation for action.

  An Attengee drone crouched in the shadow of the back wall, its blaster compartments already open. She could see the shimmer of guidance dots against her shoulder, red on black. The soft whir of the weapons training on her told her the initial assessment—threat or not—had already been performed, and she had been found wanting.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 11

  “Ma’am?” The question came through the radio, so incongruous with the lasers aimed at her that Alisha nearly laughed. The impulse was aborted as she clutched the cardinal drawing in her fist and flung herself into a roll, desperate for cover.

  Laser fire smashed after her, bursts of heat that sent the concrete floor into smoking striations. Alisha jolted backward, twisting her hip so hard it popped. Heat seared the air above her head as the drone overshot. Evasive action maneuvers. She heard the words spoken in Jean-Luc Picard’s voice inside her mind as she hit the floor on her back, rolling again. It was almost impossible for a human to make truly random choices, and the droid’s AI would likely recognize the pattern in random choices before she herself would.