by Greg Rucka
“I’d guess so.”
“Then she’s gonna be linked, she’s going to have a ThroatLink.” Grimshaw used the edge of his bedstand to help himself to his feet, flopped down again in his desk chair. With one hand he pulled his monitor from where it hung against the wall, swinging it out on its arm, and with the other activated his IR keyboard. The screen lit up, showing a parade of dancing Candees gyrating in perpetual motion, and Steinberg had to bite back the urge to make a comment.
Grimshaw began tapping on the projected keys, hunting and pecking with a speed that would make Emily Partridge, in Carrington’s office, green with envy.
“Cracked Core-Mantis’s communication infrastructure about four, five weeks back,” Grimshaw told Steinberg without looking away from his work. “Just to see if I could do it and hey, waddya know, I could, so I did. Left myself a back door into the system, just in case I wanted to return.”
“Daniel know you did that? Or was this another one of your ‘hobby excursions,’ Grim?” Jon asked.
Grimshaw paused, a guilty look crossing his face. “Okay, so we both have secrets we need to keep from the Old Man. He catches me pleasure-hacking again, he’s going to have me debugging intranet code for a month.” His mouth curled in disgust. “In HTML.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” Steinberg struggled to keep the impatience out of his voice. “So you can just open up this back door, right?”
Grimshaw looked annoyed, like a teacher dealing with an unruly pupil who insisted on making rude noises in class. “You are such a grunt,” he muttered. “The real question is whether or not the CMO data-hounds sniffed out my intrusion and left some traps behind or plugged the leak.”
“And?”
Grimshaw’s fingers flew in another flurry, and he squinted up at his monitor, then nodded. “And … no counterintrusion code, no sniffers, no code bombs. We got lucky. Okay, we’re in. Spell ‘Carcareas,’ would you?”
Steinberg spelled it, and Grimshaw continued to type. “Carcareas … okay … okay … there’s no Carcareas listed here, Jon, she’s not in the database.”
“She has to be, she’s a confirmed CMO agent.”
“Then she’s super-black or a commando or something like that, because she’s not in here.”
“That’s their entire communications database?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Then she’s in there.”
Grimshaw threw up his hands, shoving his chair back. “You think you can find it, be my guest, soldier man.”
Steinberg ignored the offer, turning around the room, thinking. His eye caught on one of the Mai Hems, a variant figure, still in its packaging.
“It’s not her real name,” Steinberg said. “It’s her work name, not her real one. Is there a log of calls you can access?”
“Yeah, there is, but unless you know what we’re looking for, it’s going to be impossible to find what we want, man. CMO is kinda busy right now, what with the rape and pillage of Zentek and the impending same planned for Beck-Yama. Their network’s singing like … like a really, really big choir, man.”
The name, he thought. What was the name she said?
“Amosa,” Steinberg told Grimshaw. “Tashi … no, Tachi-Amosa.”
“Any idea how to spell that?”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Grim. Sound it out.”
“Touchy, touchy. So, who is he?”
“ ‘He’ is the woman Jo met with, the one who’s arranging the meeting with Carcareas. Colonel in charge of the region, something like that. She’ll be ThroatLinked, too, won’t she? We start checking her calls, maybe we can find Carcareas.”
“That’s a long shot.”
“It’s better than no shot at all,” Steinberg said. “Get to work.”
Grimshaw nodded slightly, turning his attention back to his keyboard. “You’re gonna stay here while I do this?”
“That was my plan, yeah.”
“Then make yourself useful.”
“How do I do that?”
“You can start by changing the sheets on my bed, asshole,” Grimshaw told him.
El Café de la Parróquia
Veracruz, Mexico
January 25th, 2021
Portia de Carcareas arrived five minutes late for her meeting with Joanna Dark, and Jo suspected that her tardiness wasn’t due to anything professional. It wasn’t, for instance, enough time to perform a complete sweep of the area surrounding the café, of the Plaza Lerdo, the marble-tiled heart of Veracruz with its enormous fountain at the center. It wasn’t even enough time to do an adequate walkthrough of the café itself, to secure an escape route or to spot potential backup that Jo might have brought with her.
No, Portia de Carcareas arrived five minutes late, Jo was certain, simply because she could afford to keep her waiting.
But she did arrive, entering the café with the easy grace of a woman who not only knew she was capable and smart and beautiful but who also knew that she was exceptionally dangerous. Watching Carcareas as she entered, Jo couldn’t help but marvel at the woman’s poise. To Jo, who knew herself as capable and smart and also exceptionally dangerous, Carcareas’s self-assurance was almost enviable. The fact that it still hurt to take deep breaths didn’t help, either.
The woman veered right as soon as she entered, clearing the doorway and subtly placing her back to a wall, before removing her sunglasses and surveying the early morning crowd. She looked, at least to Jo, exactly the same as she had the last time she’d seen her, the only changes being to her wardrobe. The last time Jo had seen her had been in New York, at the Money Pit, a trendy Manhattan club-slash-restaurant that catered to hypercorp executives and the people who wished desperately to be like them. Carcareas had worn professional attire then, appropriate to a businesswoman on the go, silk blouse and tailored trousers and perfectly applied makeup.
This time Carcareas had gone more casual but no less fashionable. She was wearing professionally faded and torn blue jeans that tucked into calf-high black leather boots, a washed-out black T-shirt that looked like it was cotton but was probably silk, and a loose-fitting coat that fell away from her shoulders with enough drape to hide any weapon on her hip that she might have brought to their meeting. A thin rope of pearls glowed against her skin, and the ring finger of each hand was adorned with simple bands, one of them a black-and-gold model ring-ring, the other an apparently plain circle of titanium.
Jo, on the other hand, was still in the same clothes she’d worn upon leaving the Institute. Her sand-colored cargo pants and her red Chuck Taylor All-Stars, the same ratty brown T-shirt with the red five-pointed star at its center that she’d had since she was sixteen. Looking at Carcareas, she had the sudden sense that, somehow, she’d managed to arrive for their meeting underdressed. No, not underdressed, exactly; that she’d dressed wrong. A café in the early morning in Veracruz, and looking at Portia de Carcareas, now approaching Jo’s table with a smile and a wave as if they were old friends, Jo realized why she felt the way she did.
Portia de Carcareas, without having said a word, made Jo feel immature. Made her feel like she was a girl and Carcareas was a woman, and that Jo had a very long way to go to cover the distance between them.
“Joanna?” Carcareas stood a couple feet off from the table, the smile warm, her manner cautious. “May I join you?”
“Free country.”
“There’s no such thing.” Portia de Carcareas flashed a smile of perfectly white teeth, taking the offered seat. “But some of them are more affordable than others.”
Jo shifted in her chair, glancing past the other woman, to the door and the view onto the plaza. Unlike Carcareas, Jo had swept the area before taking a table at the café. The sweep hadn’t revealed anything more than the standard governmental surveillance, but Jo had planned egress routes just the same, as her father had taught her.
Carcareas peered at her with barely concealed curiosity.
“You seem to have been through quite the wringer o
f late.”
Jo fought the urge to put a hand to her face, to check the scratches and lacerations still healing on her skin.
“Yeah,” she said. “Someone made a point of telling me how I looked.”
Carcareas chuckled, a breathless sound, then half-turned in her seat and motioned for the nearest server. “I’m going to have a coffee, I think. Should I order two?”
“I don’t do caffeine.”
“You poor dear, how do you manage to function this early in the morning?”
“I’m stubborn,” Jo told her.
Carcareas ordered, waited for the server to depart, and then gave Jo another smile, appraising her without any attempt to conceal the fact that she was doing so. Jo sat through it with as much patience as she could muster. Carcareas’s eyes were green, lustrous, and as Jo met them they seemed to shine even brighter.
“Knock it off,” Jo said.
“Knock what off, exactly?”
“CMO got plenty of footage of me at the office in Mexico City. You don’t need to add to it.”
Carcareas’s full lips parted in a smile, and then she closed her eyes for perhaps a half-second longer than one would if they were blinking before opening them again. Her eyes had changed color to brown, and the peculiar luster had gone.
“Happy?” Carcareas asked.
“Not hardly, but it’s a start.”
“Have you been having some bad days, Joanna?”
“More than you can count. But bad as they’ve been, the people responsible, they’ve had worse.”
Carcareas made a clucking noise, shaking her head slightly. “So hostile. I’d have thought you’d be a little more … deferential if you were looking for shelter.”
“I’m not looking for shelter,” Jo said. “I’m not looking to defect.”
“I know.” Carcareas smiled with self-satisfaction, but held her silence as the server returned to deposit her café con leche. Then she added, “Though, if you’ll pardon the unsolicited advice, you should certainly consider it.”
“CMO’s like all the rest.” Jo knew she was veering off-topic, taking the conversation from where Carcareas wanted it to go down another path simply by saying that much. “You guys tart yourselves up nice on the outside, but you’re no better than dataDyne or Beck-Yama at heart.”
“Or Carrington?” Carcareas turned her cup of coffee in its saucer with a light touch, letting her fingernails click against the porcelain. Her nails were polished the color of old blood.
“Carrington’s different.”
Carcareas shrugged, bringing her cup to her lips, blowing on the coffee before taking a sip. “How so? Because he takes care of you? We can take care of you, Joanna. We’d very much like to take care of you, in fact.”
“We’re not talking about this,” Jo said, growing all the more frustrated with Carcareas because she was now frustrated with herself. “I didn’t want to meet with you to talk about this.”
“You’re the one who brought it up,” Carcareas said mildly as she set her cup back in its saucer. “But I’m happy to let the subject drop for now, if it makes you uncomfortable. If you’re not interested in hearing what Core-Mantis OmniGlobal can offer you, what would you like to talk about instead?”
“I think you know. And I think you can figure that I’m pretty pissed off about it.”
“You’re telling me that you didn’t kill Bricker or Matsuo, is that it?”
“I think you know,” Jo said again.
Carcareas moved her cup in its saucer, turning it slowly so the handle was parallel with the edge of the table, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips. Her now-brown eyes focused past Jo, into the middle distance, and Jo tried to suppress both her impatience and her frown. It was clear the other woman had lapsed into thought, that Jo had given her information Carcareas had been lacking, and that now she was trying to understand its significance.
For Jo, the conclusion was obvious. Whoever was out there impersonating her, either they weren’t a CMO agent as she had suspected, or they were a CMO agent that Carcareas knew nothing about. Her instinct said it was the former, not the latter: Carcareas was clearly a high-level player for Core-Mantis—the difficulty in contacting her, the delay in arranging their meeting, proved that. Jo had the sneaking suspicion that the reason Colonel Tachi-Amosa had been unable to arrange her meeting with Carcareas any earlier than this morning was because, along with CMO’s “senior management,” Carcareas had been in Crete.
If that was the case, then Jo felt that there was very little going on at Core-Mantis OmniGlobal that Portia de Carcareas didn’t know about.
“That’s interesting,” Carcareas said, finally. “So it wasn’t you, and that means it wasn’t Carrington helping us along.”
“CMO didn’t do it?”
Carcareas focused on her again, smiling softly. “Joanna, until you walked into our offices off Zona Rosa yesterday, Core-Mantis OmniGlobal had very little information about you.”
“You had a mole in the Los Angeles office, Portia.”
“And she gave us only the most basic information about you. And we must assume that what she had was sanitized by Carrington before you landed in LA.”
“That could have been enough.”
“Do you think so? Perhaps, given enough time. With Matsuo, maybe. But not with Bricker. It wasn’t us, Joanna.”
She said it softly, but there was conviction in it.
“You know who it was, though,” Jo said. “Don’t you?”
“I have a very strong suspicion, yes.”
“Tell me.”
“The Continuity.”
“The Who?”
“The Continuity, Joanna,” reaching for her coffee once more. Then she stopped, her hand almost touching the cup, and barely canted her head to the right. Jo had seen the gesture before, or at least, ones like it, and she knew what it meant. Carcareas had a ThroatLink, the Core-Mantis answer to the ubiquitous dataDyne “Second Ear” series of radios. Both were worn subcutaneously, but the ThroatLink was the more invasive, and in many ways, better product, with its mike implanted in the throat of the wearer and two leads that threaded along the base of the skull to transmit received sound via the bone to the inner ear.
Carcareas’s eyes darted to Jo as she listened to whatever communication was being sent, then went back to her cup just as quickly.
Uh-oh, Jo thought, and she straightened in her seat and took a second look around the café as casually as she could manage it. The patrons seated at their tables had hardly changed since she had arrived, only three of them now gone, replaced by four men in their late sixties. Jo gave them an appraisal and didn’t see anything that made her think she was missing something. She scanned the room in its entirety again and still didn’t see anything to alarm her.
Then she noted that outside, in the plaza, the morning pedestrian traffic seemed to have altered its pattern. Her view through the windows was to the north, and since she had arrived, people had crossed the plaza from every direction constantly. Now, however, they seemed to be avoiding the western side.
Carcareas was whispering to her ThroatLink, speaking so softly that, even sitting opposite her, Jo couldn’t overhear it. Jo shifted, wincing as if in more pain from her ribs than before, leaning back slightly. As she did, she freed the P9P from her waistband, keeping it hidden from view beneath the table.
“We should go,” Carcareas told Jo abruptly. “We can finish this conversation elsewhere.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Jo said, and she saw Carcareas stiffen slightly, knew that the woman had guessed what was going on quite literally under the table. “You can have Colonel Tachi and all of Xiphos Brigade out there for all I care, I’m still not going anywhere with you.”
“Colonel Tachi-Amosa and Xiphos aren’t outside, Joanna, but they are en route. Colonel Tachi-Amosa and Xiphos aren’t your problem, or for that matter, mine.”
“My problem is you,” Jo said. “Your problem is that I
’ve got a pistol pointed right at your Christmas basket.”
“No, Joanna,” Carcareas said, and her voice had taken on an edge as sharp as any knife. “Your problem is that there’s a dataDyne hit squad setting up on the western side of the Plaza Lerdo right now.”
Son of a bitch, Jo thought.
“What I am,” Portia de Carcareas added, “is the solution.”
dataDyne Executive Safehouse
37km ENE of Nelson, New Zealand
January 25th, 2021
Velez didn’t want Cassandra to watch the live feed coming into the command post of the operation in Veracruz, saying, “It is not something with which you should burden yourself.”
“But I am burdened with it, Anita,” Cassandra said. “I’ve authorized the taking of a life. I’ve authorized a murder. I should witness it.”
“A life taken in self-defense is never a murder, Madame Director.”
“This isn’t self-defense,” Cassandra said. “It’s expedience.”
The command post was buried fifty meters or so into the mountainside, and by the time Cassandra reached it with Velez, it seemed they had left New Zealand for another world entirely. She had expected a darkened room, ominous and even uncomfortable, but when the Shock Troopers had finished snapping to attention, had pulled back the reinforced steel door to allow her entry, what she stepped into felt familiar, and disconcertingly comfortable. It was like stepping into a computer lab, with dataDyne CORPSEC in the place of programmers, with Shock Troopers in the place of technicians.
When she stepped into the room, everyone present, even those clearly performing one task or another, stopped whatever they were doing and came to attention. She half-expected salutes to follow, though none did.
“As you were,” Cassandra said, hoping desperately that the words didn’t sound as awkward to them as they did to her.
As quickly as it had stopped, the activity resumed.
Velez guided her to a position near the center of the room, where they were joined by two men, each in CORPSEC uniform. Cassandra recognized the older of the two as Curtis Mack, the CORPSEC director of counterintelligence operations, one of Velez’s immediate lieutenants. Her dealings with him since becoming CEO had been few, and never in person, limited to only three briefings delivered via video conference. He was in his late forties, perhaps, balding and clean shaven, and he wore glasses, and in every instance he had been polite and professional. As a result, Cassandra had no sense of him as a person whatsoever.