Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  “We cannot let you fly any closer to the capital. Follow my instructions, or we’ll be forced to shoot you down.”

  The Potomac was approaching fast. There was the Arlington Memorial Bridge. On the far side would be the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool behind it. To the right was West Potomac Park, where she’d smoked a joint with Kendrick and explained watcher, sleeper, and dreamer dikes. That meant—

  “Oh, come on, Lisa, you don’t want to get pushed in front of a tribunal to explain why you shot the messenger during a national emergency, do you?” There was the Washington Monument, the needle polished silver in the moonlight. “It won’t be just a reprimand. You’ll be court-martialed.”

  “Divert your course immediately, or we will fire.”

  “They won’t let you fly all the nice, shiny toys anymore.” Keep talking, even hardened pros rarely shot people midsentence. “It would be such a shame, a flygirl with your skills never getting to go up again.” The right engine died. “They’ll throw you away to rot in some military prison.” She was over the water, gliding now. “On the other hand, all you need to do is pull up and you’re a hero.” There. Just past the Lincoln Memorial was the JFK Hockey Fields, a long stretch of empty grass running parallel to the Reflecting Pool. “See that stretch of open grass? That’s where I’m headed. I’m out of fuel. No way I can even go—”

  “Do it now, or we will—”

  “I mean, you already have quite a story to tell given that you’re the one they sent up in an antique when the feed went down.” She was coming in low, tree branches almost brushing the belly of the P-38. “And this’ll make the story that much better. You can tell your grandkids you met Valerie fucking Daniels.” Her knuckles were white on the yoke. She was going too fast, had too little control. “Totally worth it, if you ask me. Then again, I’m biased. I really—”

  Impact.

  It was all Diana could do to keep the yoke from leaping out of her hands. Sparklers exploded in her vision. The P-38 leapt and jolted and squealed as it plowed across the field. It was going to flip. She was going to die. At least it would all be over. And then the plane slowed and slowed and slowed and came to a sudden stop. She was alive. The P-38 wasn’t at the bottom of the Potomac. Nell wouldn’t hate her forever. Probably.

  The F-16s screamed overhead.

  “Lisa,” Diana called into the radio as she popped open the canopy. “You’re a goddamn saint.”

  Blood pounding in her ears, Diana grabbed the briefcase, pushed herself out onto the wing, and dropped to the ground. Her legs turned to jelly when she landed, and she collapsed onto the grass. The world spun. Taking a deep breath, she stood, knees trembling, and stumbled toward the squad of marines jogging up from Independence Avenue.

  “Oy,” she called. “A little help over here, please?”

  CHAPTER 40

  Diana had practice bluffing her way through complex bureaucratic hierarchies. An agent who couldn’t talk her way out of an arrest wasn’t much of a spy at all. There was the time she had got into the VIP soiree at the World Economic Forum without a ticket and made it all the way to a UN undersecretary’s suite. Once she had to cross from Malaysia to Singapore without papers and with a refrigerated pack of wildly illegal biosamples. Cadence was important. Bureaucracy had a certain rhythm to it, a steady drone punctuated by authoritative emphases not unlike a didgeridoo. Body language was another piece of it. She had to emote confidence that everything was guaranteed to work out in her favor and that she was happy to wait as long as necessary for it to do so. Social dominance was key. No matter what their rank, they were lucky to be helping her. But the real trick was empathy. Being the agent of a massive bureaucracy was tough. The organization behind you gave you power, but it could also crush you for the smallest of mistakes. If you wanted folks to do something, you needed to offer them a path forward that appeared to minimize their chances of backlash from their bosses. If their ass was covered, they’d help you out.

  The marines were easy. Diana was used to operating in foreign countries where she might not know the intricacies of rank, internal organizational dynamics, and social cues. But this was America, and she’d known enough marines to know how to talk to them. Soon they were all jogging up Seventeenth Street, saving her from harassment by the other street patrols who had effectively put this part of the capital under martial law.

  Secret Service stopped them at the gate.

  “I’m Special Agent Valerie Daniels, FBI,” she said. “I’ve got time-critical intel for POTUS about the feed disruption. Please let Kendrick LaGrange know I’m here. He should be with the president right now.” Without the feed they could neither vet her credentials nor contact the FBI for confirmation.

  “Ma’am, we have the whole area on lockdown. Nobody’s allowed in or out.”

  “This is a national security emergency, and I’ve just flown across the damn country to deliver a message. Work with me here.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, orders are orders.”

  She stepped right up to the man’s thick besuited chest, dialed up her intensity, and lowered her voice.

  “I’m not asking you to let me in, I’m asking you to send for LaGrange. Tell him it’s related to Operation Diana. Don’t worry, he’ll come running and relieve you of the need to make this call yourself.”

  The agent stared down at her for a moment and then raised a battered old walkie-talkie. Kendrick was there ten minutes later, shepherding her through the gate and waving off the escort. Tension suffused his large frame like static electricity. They set off across the South Lawn.

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the Secret Service agents, he hissed, “What the fuck, Diana? What’s going on? How are you here?”

  She squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll fill you in on all the details. For now the important thing is Helen’s raid failed. The feed will come back on in the morning. As long as I can speak to POTUS, everything should be okay. Or at least as okay as we can hope for. Can you get me in?”

  “To talk to Lopez? Jesus, Diana, you never stop.”

  “Kendrick, I need this. Can you get me in to see him?”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, I can manage it. But no promises as to whether he’ll listen.”

  “Let me handle that.”

  And then she looked away from Kendrick’s face to the building waiting across the grass. They must have managed to get a feedless generator working because lights were shining from the windows. The streets the marines had marched her through were dark, and the electric glow elevated the White House into a sacred hall where fickle gods might sit to bicker over the fate of humanity. Suddenly Diana was once again that veteran spook returning from Buenos Aires with a special delivery in a diplomatic pouch. She was an agent fresh off the Farm approaching the White House for the first time, trying to absorb some of the confidence that Helen exuded at her side. She was a little girl entering the first-grade classroom in Arlington, enduring the stares of the other kids and failing to understand a single word of this strange new language that nobody spoke in the home she had never wanted to leave in the first place. But she had paid the price, earned herself a place in this new reality, etched its principles into her identity, and lived to see them broken.

  Diana was a refugee from the state of being a refugee, and she was going to turn everything upside down.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Oval Office was crammed. The Joint Chiefs, the attorney general, Senator Watkins, the director of the NSA, and other key advisers Diana didn’t recognize. Hard faces. Then there was Sean representing a broad array of private-sector interests. He had flinched when she walked through the door at Kendrick’s side, and she remembered coconut water splashing across his kitchen floor. Lowell was there too, game face firmly in place as if he had been expecting Diana’s arrival. Lopez sat brooding behind his desk, leveling an unreadable gaze at Diana as she made her presentation.

  She explained Helen’s plans. The fabricated evidence. The subs
equent phases that would turn a simple raid into a global empire. As if reliving the scene earlier that same day, Diana opened the briefcase and passed around its contents. Then she moved on to why the feed was down and what Commonwealth would do when it came back on.

  There were questions, arguments and counterarguments, and a lot of profanity. Diana was surprised to find herself weathering it with the calm of someone who knew she’d already won. Warning Commonwealth about Helen had been a start. Convincing Rachel to transform Commonwealth into a new species of geopolitical player had been a victory. Against all odds, Diana had even beaten Helen to Lopez. This was the coup de grâce.

  Ragnarok. World peace. Rapture. Humans loved to dream of endgames. Nothing was more alluring than a decisive victory, a moment after which the world would be forever changed. Except the world was forever changing. Victory was always temporary. The only prize was the opportunity to fight another day. And that meant that this briefing couldn’t only be a coup de grâce. It must also be the preface to what came next.

  So Diana left things out. She never mentioned Kendrick’s clandestine involvement. She didn’t name Sean or Apex. And she painted Lowell as an unwitting ally of Helen rather than the man who had inspired the entire scheme. The lies of omission began to pay off even as she spun them. Kendrick bolstered her position, pointing out how Helen had misrepresented his team’s financial analyses. Sean stayed silent. And Lowell. Oh, Lowell. Diana remembered the burgeoning resentment in his eyes when Helen had dismissed him and Freja at the Ranch. The firebrand opportunist struck again, feigning shock at the suggestion that Helen’s evidence might be fake, backpedaling with all his might even as he searched for an orthogonal strategy to latch on to. So much for loyalty. He was a man in perennial search of the next game, and Diana had just handed him a ticket.

  Helen could still undo much of the damage. She was a master of spinning up counternarratives and applying just the right kind of personal and political pressure. But in order to save herself, she’d need to apply all her time, effort, and focus to defense. She couldn’t build an empire if her coalitions crumbled, her reputation tarnished, and her influence waned. And her influence over one man in particular was crucial to Helen’s grasp on the reins of power.

  “Mr. President,” said Diana. “There is a related matter that I think you ought to know about.”

  “You’ve gone this far,” he said in that famous gravelly baritone. “Why stop now?”

  “This is extremely sensitive.”

  He raised his hands, and Diana noticed calluses on his thick fingers.

  “More sensitive than what you’ve just described?”

  “Mr. President, I think you’ll want us to be alone to discuss this particular item.”

  “Oh, come on,” said the attorney general in disbelief.

  Lopez silenced her with a gesture. “These are my most trusted advisers. All of them have the highest level of security clearance. Anything you want to say to me, you can say to them.”

  Diana looked at him for a long moment. The craggy face, the thick black mustache, the dark-brown eyes that made you wish he was your grandfather. He was a fair, thoughtful, optimistic leader. A far better president than Freeman had ever been. The United States had thrived under Lopez’s split administrations, and his patient, diplomatic style had run counter to the divisiveness that had suffused American politics.

  “May I?” She leaned over his desk, plucked a pen from its case, tore off a strip of paper from the pad, and wrote a short note. Then she folded it and handed it to Lopez. He opened it, frowning, and then descended into some kind of fugue state as he read. He just sat there, staring down at the slip of paper in his hands.

  Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty.

  “Sir?” asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Lopez emerged, looking up at them as if through the veils of a higher dimension obscured by the vicissitudes of space-time.

  “Out,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. “All of you.”

  Without his retinue and robbed of his composure, Lopez was suddenly just a person. The weight of office still rested on his shoulders, but Diana saw only the earnest, tired, haunted man beneath.

  “What is this?” he asked, beseeching her to make it all go away as easily as the note he crumpled and slammed onto the desk.

  But Diana didn’t make it all go away. Like a banker leading a prized client to the most secure vault, she reached inside herself and unlocked the darkest secret ferreted away in her psyche. She told him about how Helen had recruited her, trained her, cultivated her refugee’s overdeveloped patriotism, made Diana her protégé, dispatched her on missions of increasing importance until she became the most trusted of lieutenants. And then there had been that most sensitive of mandates, orders straight from this very office, so delicate that nobody else at the agency could know. The jacarandas had been so beautiful, turning Buenos Aires into a whimsical paradise of fluffy purple and green. But Diana had eyes only for her black market biochemist. With his concoction safely stowed in her diplomatic pouch and after running a twelve-hour surveillance-detection route through fallen flowers, she had retraced her steps to Washington, to this very building.

  “I saw you that day,” she said. “We passed each other in the hall. You were in a gray suit and seemed upset about something. You’d have no reason to remember it, though.”

  But remembering fleeting faces and names was a critical skill for a politician like Lopez. He was constantly forcing himself to recall this or that donor and the niece or nephew of whichever congressperson was holding up his latest initiative. With an archaeologist’s care, he excavated the memory, and she saw the flash of recognition in his eyes.

  “That was the day,” she said. She told him how she’d delivered the package to Helen. How shocked and appalled Diana had been at the announcement of Freeman’s death. How suspicion had curdled into certainty as she obsessively matched every detail she could gather from the autopsy with the symptoms of the engineered poison she had clandestinely delivered. Diana had left no stone unturned looking for an exculpatory explanation, something that could leave her conscience, her sanity, her loyalty to Helen intact. But when she returned to Buenos Aires, the biochemist had vanished like a Borgesian knife fighter, his lab stripped, every detail of his existence corroded away. So it was with every other lead. The operation had been so tightly planned, so perfectly executed, that its very competence confirmed Helen’s guilt. Then Diana’s years in exile, the painful silence borne in the knowledge that revelation would do more harm than good to her beloved adoptive country.

  By the end they were both crying.

  “I still have the files from my personal investigation in a secure cache,” said Diana, swiping away tears. “I’ll forward you them as soon as the feed comes back on, and you can corroborate them with whatever you have access to that I don’t.”

  “All vice presidents dream that they might step up to take the president’s place in a time of crisis,” said Lopez, blowing his nose into a tissue. “But it turned out to be a nightmare. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want it. That’s why it took me so long to run for a second term.”

  “Helen didn’t care about what you wanted,” said Diana. “She couldn’t have Freeman locking her out. He hated her, never could stand women in positions of power, from what I heard. Sexist asshole. Helen knew you’d be a better president, even if you didn’t want it. The best leaders are unwilling.”

  “This can’t come out,” said Lopez. “Not now. Not with everything else.”

  “I know,” said Diana. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told about any of this.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  Diana shrugged. “Just be yourself. I didn’t fly all the way out here to tell you what to do. I did it because you’re an honorable, decent man and the kind of president this country deserves. You need to know about Helen, about Freeman, about Commonwealth. Now you do. It’s up to you to decide what to do about
it.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’m Commonwealth’s new chief intelligence officer.” The thought occurred to Diana as she formed the words. The only way to stay safe was to stay powerful. Anyway, Rachel wouldn’t have much of a choice. “I’m going to build them an independent security service. Can’t play the game without messing around in the shadows.”

  “You know I have to fight it,” said Lopez. “We can’t have a private firm challenging American sovereignty.”

  “Of course you do,” said Diana. “I’m not asking you not to fight it. But whatever you do, make it slow and deliberate. With Hsu in hand, we’ll have provisional backing from Taiwan and the UN. The faster the US gets behind it, the better provisions you’ll be able to negotiate for Americans. So denounce it at a press conference, let the SEC and DOJ file their suits, but use that as leverage to get the deal you want instead of trying to undermine a process you won’t be able to stop anyway. Don’t waste billions building shitty parallel infrastructure. We’re happy to paint Helen a rogue, give you a chance to save face and make nice. If you play your cards right, you’ll keep a lot of Commonwealth jobs and benefits onshore and get access intransigent countries won’t. That alone will secure a substantial American advantage for at least the next decade. A better legacy than sour grapes and a recession.”

  “Hijo de puta.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  Lopez narrowed his eyes.

  “Anything comes up,” he said, voice regaining some of its steel, “I want to deal with you. Directly. No proxies. No bullshit.”

  “Mr. President,” said Diana, extending a hand. “It would be my honor.”

  Diana wasn’t just loosening Helen’s leash by opening Lopez’s eyes to her conspiracies. In confiding in him, Diana had begun to forge a new bond. Secrets shared could be more valuable than secrets held.

  CHAPTER 42

  Her message delivered, the storm of White House politics passed Diana by. Lopez was back with his advisers, struggling to work out a way forward and get ready for the inevitable moment when the feed came back and they would have no choice but to make a move. Diana wandered the halls, hands buried in the pockets of her flight jacket, half-formed thoughts and emotions she couldn’t name surging through her. She needed space. She needed to get out of this suffocating building.