by C. E. Murphy
His hands were too refined for that, though. Thumbs hooked in his jeans pockets, his fingernails were clean and pale, neatly trimmed. Alisha remembered looking through her fingers at his reflection, then at her own bruised knuckles and broken nails. At the damp spikes of black hair—not her own, but a punk-cut wig she was particularly fond of—trailing over her swollen eye. At the cut lip and the ankh earring and the plastic choker around her throat, and then back at Reichart's reflection.
He ought, she remembered thinking, to have been wearing a fedora. It didn't fit the biker jacket or the white T-shirt—some combination of leather and denim was always Reichart's uniform du jour, when he had a choice—but it fit the noir smirk and the easy confidence. He made her own beaten-up self look that much more bedraggled. Her black bodice, deliberately ripped at the ribcage to show off her slender midriff, barely stayed on now, since the straps that had held it in place had snapped in the fight that had blackened her eye. And the wig she liked so much now looked like a sad mop dog-flopped on her head.
Then Reichart's reflection grinned, and Alisha knew she was in the best kind of trouble possible.
She remembered writing the chronicle for the Afghanistan mission, so full of fresh new love and enthusiasm that it made her blush even now. Everything had gone right with that mission, from spiriting out the defecting FSB agent that was her primary objective to the intense blossoming relationship with Reichart. It had started so well, she thought wryly, and lifted her head, pushing away memory as surely as she blinked away water, the remains of her makeup cleaned from her face.
The woman looking back at her was almost eight years older than the girl who'd recognized trouble when she saw it in Frank Reichart's leggy reflection. Her own hair, colored dark by the night and highlighted with paleness from streetlights, fell in loose curls and braids around a face that was exactly what she needed it to be: unremarkably pretty, with the ability to be transformed into beauty or plainness with the right makeup and attitude. Any natural color was leeched from her skin by the light coming in the hotel window from the street, but most of a decade hadn't yet added fine wrinkles around almond-shaped eyes.
She could see a greater ability to judge and calculate in those eyes now, and a certain cynicism around the corners of her mouth, but not enough to jade her. Not yet, at least. Not as long as she had it in her to let Frank Reichart walk free. Not as long as she could still extend the benefit of the doubt to Brandon Parker.
"Older," Alisha said to her reflection. "Not that much wiser."
The woman in the mirror gave her a one-sided smile and shrugged, as if to say we can live with that.
"You and I can," Alisha said wryly. "Let's not tell Greg, though, okay?" Then she laughed and pushed away from the counter, wandering back into the main room. Talking to herself in the mirror had to be a bad sign. Better to drop onto the couch and study her own memories and desires behind closed eyelids, without making it a conversation.
It'd begun as almost a dare. No, not a dare: a challenge. Taming the bad boy, of all the impossible tasks, for her; corrupting the good girl, for Reichart. He'd asked, early on, why she'd become a spy. The answer had been easy then. It'd been about idealism and apple pie, a response that, in retrospect, must have made him laugh at her. He'd answered, "Adventure," when she'd put the question back to him.
And it was only in retrospect that she understood how shallow the answer had been. Nothing opened him up: not alcohol, not sex—though both brought out a possessive streak that had been, like so much else, charming at first and increasingly irritating as Alisha outgrew girlishness and progressed into womanhood.
She supposed it was only a matter of course that CIA agents looked up their lovers in the records, official and unofficial alike. The wiser among them probably didn't then confront said lover with the scraps of detail, trying to wring more out of him, but hints hadn't been enough. Alisha wanted to know.
She half opened her eyes, looking at the gold light from the street bouncing against the ceiling. She wanted to know.
Which was the crux of the matter, every time. It was what made her let Brandon walk away when policy said otherwise. His Sicarii story might answer questions about him, but even more, it might answer questions about Frank Reichart.
Answers she might have forced, if she hadn't blown it.
Except she hadn't blown it. She'd opened her fingers and let it go, and Reichart had never known the difference.
It had been London, three years ago now. A blustery afternoon; they usually were, when she was there. Alisha was almost certain it wasn't personal. Besides, the weather suited her mood as she tromped through Trafalgar Square, a rare space in London, in that it was a square that was actually square. Small thoughts, was how she thought of things like that. Small thoughts, filling up her mind so she didn't have to think about the larger things. A gray wool cap pulled down to her eyebrows, shoulders coated in a well-lined trench hunched up to her ears. Boots with tall square heels and blocky toes. Alisha felt like a Londoner in that outfit, one of a million costume changes that redefined her very self. Small thoughts.
A bus roared to a stop in front of her and she walked up to it without looking for its destination. Anywhere was warmer than the square with its host of pigeons and bird ladies. She dug into a pocket for change as she stepped up. Looked past the coin box, past the driver, through the fountain spray that added unnecessary water to the damp London afternoon.
Looked at Frank Reichart swinging a little girl up onto his hip, putting his hand into a pretty woman's, and lifting the conjoined fingers to hail a popcorn seller, to the child's delight.
A heartbeat of pain stabbed through her, just below the collarbone. Alisha stepped backward again, so gracefully it was the man behind her who apologized, as if he'd been in the wrong. The bus rumbled away, leaving Alisha with her hands in her pockets, staring across a hundred feet at the man who'd betrayed her.
She followed him. It was what spies did, and she was a spy whether she was on duty or not. Snooping, memory supplied. As a little girl she'd snuck around, hiding behind corners and under tables, snooping, as her mother called it. It had come naturally to her. She'd called it an active interest in the community around her, as a teen. Nosy, her mother had said. Alisha'd laughed and hugged her.
He had a life, her former fiancé. The man she hadn't talked to in two years, not since the bullet had knocked her to the ground after she'd seen him with a gun in his hands. The little girl was called Mazie, and her mother was Emma. Mazie wasn't Frank's, which made Alisha's heart contract with relief close to tears. They'd been dating eight months. Frank had a straight job as an accountant. An accountant, Alisha kept thinking. Of all things. An accountant.
It had to be a cover.
She stood at his elbow once in the three days she followed him, a step behind him in a tea shop she'd chosen as her place to approach because it had no mirrors. She could change her mind and disappear without much chance of being noticed.
His mobile rang and he dug it out of an oversized pocket, thumbing it on while Alisha studied her feet and thought of the questions she'd like to ask. Hello, Frank, how've you been? Hello, Frank. What were you doing at the Vatican with a gun? Hello, Frank, did you think I'd survive? Did you ever love me? Was it a game I didn't understand?
"Emma," he said into the phone. A low softness that Alisha knew was audible in his voice. Softness that had once been reserved for her, a familiar purr of sensuality and love and desire, all wrapped up in a single word.
It had to be a cover.
By the time Frank Reichart turned to see who'd rung the bells on the tea shop door, there was nothing more to glimpse than a bit of scarf blown back by the London wind.
Chapter 15
Sleep had claimed her somewhere in the midst of memory, and morning came too early. Strains of Beethoven's Fifth startled Alisha awake, and she answered the phone without opening her eyes.
"God himself couldn't have made a thicker wall of red tape
," Erika said.
For all that she was flat on her back in bed, Alisha sagged, feeling as if she'd dropped another few inches through the mattress. She lifted her hand to press fingertips against her still-closed eyes and let out a long sigh. Legitimacy. A dead end of red tape was a kind of legitimacy for Brandon's story, and far beyond anything Alisha had thought she might fine. "Tell me more."
"Well, you know, the file follows him all over the place, meandering, after he left the Agency. Then a little more than three years ago—"
Energy surged through Alisha, propelling her out of bed and into motion. The Roman sunlight poured in as she yanked her hotel room curtains open, and she squinted into a view that caught a distant corner of the Colosseum. She pulled a camisole out of her suitcase, sliding it on as she held the phone to her ear with two fingers, listening avidly. "—it all turns red," Erika went on. "Everything on top of it says they lost him, that he went totally underground."
"Which is in keeping with what I know," Alisha said. The satin was cool against her skin, soft brush of fabric making her breathe deeply to feel its caress. She dragged a pair of jeans out of the suitcase and went into the bathroom alcove to brush her teeth, phone pressed awkwardly between shoulder and ear.
"So you sent me looking for stuff you already knew?" Erika let out a "hnf" of air, and Alisha all but heard her follow-up shrug. "Anyway, scratch a lawyer, get a liar. There was a phrase in his paperwork that struck me as funny, I don't remember what it was—"
"Baloney," Alisha said around her toothbrush. "Maybe you can't tell me what it was, but I don't believe you don't remember it."
Erika laughed. "Whatever, Ali." It was as good as a confession: Erika's security clearance was different from Alisha's, and Alisha had no doubt Erika was aware of key phrases and sentence structures that would tell her worlds of information that Alisha herself would never recognize. "The point is, beneath the dead end I found red tape."
"And beneath the red tape?"
"I would never break into secured CIA agent files to find something called ‘prodfac one' located in backwater Beijing," Erika said, sounding hurt, innocent, and totally culpable all at once.
"Made in China." Alisha leaned on the counter, head dropped. "Go figure. Who's handling him?"
"There are only a handful of reports buried under this tape, Alisha. Assuming your boy—"
"My boy," Alisha protested. "You're the ex."
"I'm not the one digging up files on him." Erika fell silent. "I mean, I am, but you know what I mean."
Alisha grinned at the sink and pulled her jeans on as she put her toothbrush away. "Yeah. Anyway, my boy what?"
"Assuming he's undercover, he's so far undercover that he can't even make reports regularly. I don't even know who's handling him. Couldn't find it behind the dead ends. So watch yourself, okay? You don't want to blow an op like that."
"No kidding. Okay. You rock my world, Q. Thanks for the help."
"I still think you oughta pounce him," Erika said. "See if he's improved that seven point eight I gave him."
Brandon's warmth and easy smile flashed through Alisha's mind and she smiled. "Sure, maybe. If I get the chance."
"There's a girl." Erika hung up without further ado. Alisha put the phone against her mouth, studying her bare toes, then wiggled them and went to pack for a trip to China.
#
Backwater Beijing covered a lot of territory; that was the downside. The upside was that a few euros went a long way toward answers, and a few more bought discretion.
As much discretion as a tallish American woman traveling alone could buy, at least. She wore a short black wig, since any hair color besides black stood out in a major Asian city, and her own rough tawny curls would draw attention. She didn't want that today, as she searched for 'prodfac one', Production Facility One. The abbreviation might have meant something else, but Alisha knew in her bones that she was right.
And when she found the place, she was gonna compromise the shit out of it. If Parker's operation was legitimate, she'd have hell to pay, but she was still following orders. Second objective: destroy the drone schematics. If Greg—and consequently Alisha—hadn't been let in on a secret op, they could hardly be blamed for disrupting it. And no matter how pure his intentions, the combat drones Brandon had developed were only going to press war on to a new, nastier level. She didn't believe for a minute that they'd reduce the human casualties. At best they'd make them more one-sided.
Your job is not to die for your country, but if necessary, to make the other son of a bitch die for his. That was the real strength of the robotic army: making the other guy die for his country. Alisha had enough idealism left to think it a bitter dreg, if not enough naiveté to believe it could all be avoided.
It was possible she was carrying Greg's orders a little too far, by searching for and—face it, intending to destroy—the production facility that she suspected was building an army of Brandon's drones. The CIA—the U.S.A.—didn't really want them destroyed. They wanted to control them. She was going to get her ass busted so far down the ranks she'd be lucky to break the chains locking her to a desk for the rest of her career.
And if that happened, so be it. Even in the most perfect of worlds—which this most assuredly was not—she knew it would be a setback in the drone development, not a moratorium. The CIA had the drone she'd disabled in Kazakhstan, and if Brandon was working undercover—
You do your part, Leesh. Stop worrying about the rest.
The thoughts, the consideration of her path—metaphorically, if not physically—had taken her through half a dozen contacts and the streets of Beijing, into a warehouse district that looked bad and smelled worse. Alisha bowed low to a bored young woman popping bubble gum, showed the girl a well-faked company ID, and passed through the factory doors. Euros bought more than information.
There were no underground structures to these warehouses, all of them built without basements or sub-flooring. Alisha went up instead, brazen strides taking her through areas that menial workers weren't allowed to go. But confidence gave her the aura of belonging, and within minutes she was beyond the warehouse gates, through the building, and onto its rooftop.
Her contacts had suggested easily a dozen different addresses to investigate as the possible production facility. Factories where wealthy-looking Americans oversaw the work; places that the men and women she'd spoken to were quietly certain were not clothing manufacturers, or toymakers.
Sun glared off corrugated roofs, ribbons of heat waving upward to blur Alisha's vision. She boxed her hands around her eyes, cutting off brightness from both above and below. Within the shadows of her hands, the world leaped into focus.
One factory stood out in the afternoon glare. There was an inexplicable something to it, although not in its fading paint or sun-cracked windows. Instead the ineffable something was in the shoulders of the men she saw entering the building, and in the sharpness of the guards at the front gates, whose uniforms were pressed and crisp despite the midday heat. There were no white men immediately visible, no one to make an obvious and easy tie back to Brandon and his work, but there was new heavy machinery toward the enormous building's back end. It had been scoured and chipped at, yellow paint deliberately dimmed, but no rust graced the unwieldy silver buckets and prongs.
Alisha sat down, hands still cupped around her eyes, to watch the distant factory and its people until the sun sank behind her, setting the district alight with gold and red fire.
There were half a dozen ways in, starting with the most obvious: the front gate, which was so obvious as to be unexpected, and therefore tempting. But the open windows just beneath the roofline were more likely. They hadn't been closed at sunset, probably to relieve some of the heat that built up inside the building. If there was air conditioning in there, it was for the benefit of overheating machines, not the people who ran them. The tractor bays toward the back offered another entrance, but Alisha's gaze returned to the windows. They were gaping black ho
les in the fading twilight, maws that she could slip into with a filament line and grapple. There were at least two buildings nearby, on different campuses and almost certainly less secure than the one she felt housed the Attengee production facility. She could come in from either of them; scale the exterior and shoot a grapple gun the hundred feet or so to her target. It would take a few hours in the morning to acquire the equipment she needed, and she could go in when sunset came again.
Alisha cracked her knuckles and stood up for the first time in hours, stretching muscles that protested moving from the position they'd settled into. Tree pose, very simple, grounding herself and straightening to her fullest height. The muscles in the small of her back groaned as they tightened, then relaxed suddenly, the warmth of fresh blood flowing through them. Alisha twisted around, eliciting pops all the way up her spine, and repeated the motion to the other side, earning another satisfying series of crackles.
Motion caught her eye as she came back to tree pose, her shoulders back and chin held high. No sound: it was too far for it to carry, especially over the noise of the city factories. Just a flash at the corner of her eye, a wrongness that made a thread of caution tighten in her belly. Looking directly didn't work: darkness swallowed detail. Alisha curled a lip and looked away, finding a point on the skyline to study.
Again: motion. The faint wavering of a line stretching from one building to another, black against black. Alisha held her breath, pulse bumping high in her throat. She knew, with terrible certainty, what would come into her line of vision, and just as fundamentally didn't believe it.
There. A bulk too large to be hidden by the night or the eye's blind spot, if she knew where to look. A man sliding hand over hand along a filament line, from a nearby building to the factory she'd scouted.