The Cardinal Rule

by C. E. Murphy

  Cramps knotted Alisha's stomach, sending tension wrapping around to her spine and down through the tops of her thighs. "What's he got to do with this?" Everything, she couldn't help thinking, and nothing.

  "He got you involved in this business, Alisha. You really should think more carefully about where you put your trust."

  The stomach-knotting discomfort faded as amusement, badly out of place, washed through her. Alisha lifted her head to give Brandon a wry look. "No kidding. What's Greg's involvement in all of this?"

  Disappointment flashed through Brandon's expression. "Do you really think I'm going to answer that?"

  "You've answered a bunch of other things." Alisha tried to shrug and cramped the already-wrenched muscles between her shoulder-blades. "It was worth a shot." Actually, Brandon had answered very little, and she knew it. He wasn't a Bond villain to spill his grandiose plans in the moments while the convenient femme fatale found a way to throw Bond the bone that would allow him to escape.

  Besides, Alisha thought, weariness making her sag again. She was the femme fatale and Bond all wrapped up in one, which meant any rescue had to come from within. "You know I'd rather die than assassinate Boyer."

  Brandon reached forward, brushing her hair off her neck, and pressed his fingers against the top of her spine. Alisha felt a knot of pain there, a shape that didn't belong, perfectly square, digging into the muscle. "I know," Brandon murmured, "and that's exactly what will happen if you don't. Feel that?" He applied pressure again, a sharp flare of agony spiking through the base of her skull and down her spine. Alisha grunted, the only sound she could make that had more dignity than a whimper.

  "You've been out a while, Alisha," Brandon went on, voice as low and sweet as a lover's. "While you were sleeping, you had a little surgery to make you more compliant. I know it doesn't feel like much, but it produces a remarkable boom. Rafe?" He stepped back from Alisha, who swallowed thickly and stared at the floor.

  It might be a bluff, but she doubted it.. Whatever was lodged at the base of her skull didn't belong there, and Brandon had told her once already that she was expendable. She craned her head up, forced motion against the awkward position and the shard of pain that seemed more evident now. Rafe Denison stood looking down at her, lip curled in a sneer.

  "I liked you," he said, the graceful accent gone flat with anger. "I even liked you after Brandon told me you were CIA."

  "I take it we've had a parting of ways since then," Alisha said, voice hoarse. There was only one person behind her now, the woman. Too bad she hadn't known it was Rafe behind her. She might've tried taking on the three of them after all. "Something about a gun to your head, maybe?"

  Rafe's sneer flashed to a snarl, the expression wiped away almost as soon as it came. He held up a tiny chip, barely a centimeter square. "One of my best pieces," he said. "Bit of a riff on the storage capacity gig, I like to think. A very small device with a great deal of explosive power. You won't believe idle threats."

  "Occupational hazard," Alisha agreed. Her throat was dry, tasting of old copper, and her answers kept coming out snidely. Not the best survival technique, under the circumstances.

  "Bring him in." There was an unexpected note of command in Rafe's voice, more confidence than she'd expected from the slender Englishman. A door behind her opened and two men entered, dragging a third between them. Alisha heard quick, light footsteps: the woman leaving, she thought. Twisting her whole body around granted her nothing more than a glimpse of pale hair before Brandon grabbed her chin and brought her gaze forward again. Pain lanced through Alisha's face, the new bruise on the cheekbone protesting the rough handling as much as the muscles of her spine did.

  The man they'd brought in was drugged, she thought, looking as hazy as she'd felt a few minutes earlier. He was a stranger, pale-cheeked and confused, gaze dilated as he looked from face to face. Rafe held up the chip again, and bile flooded Alisha's stomach.

  "Jesus, no, what are you doing? Rafe! Rafe, Jesus—!" Alisha slammed her shoulder down, using all the force and concentration she could muster. A sick pop sounded, the bile that'd soured her stomach rising into her throat as her right shoulder dislocated. Her vision tightened to pinpricks, blackness and the frightened prisoner's face all she could see. Her feet slipped free of the chair legs, the extra inches provided by the dislocation enough to begin working her way free.

  Brandon cracked both fists, knotted together into a sledgehammer, across her face again. Alisha toppled to the side, hitting the floor hard enough that her shoulder popped back into joint. She screamed, short aborted sound, and lurched forward, flinging her body weight as she tried to move the chair. Rafe put the chip into the drugged man's mouth, then stepped back, smiling down at Alisha as she struggled.

  "Don't! You don't have to—I'll do what you want!"

  "One man's life for the cost of another's? A stranger's life over a friend's? What a good person you are. Should we believe her, Brandon?"

  Alisha could hear the shrug in Brandon's voice. "CIA doesn't like unnecessary casualties."

  "If you kill him," Alisha grated, "you might as well kill me, too."

  Silence reigned a few seconds, before Brandon muttered, "Now that, I believe." He stepped forward to smack the prisoner on the back of the head. The man spat out the chip, coughing, and Rafe kicked it away. Alisha heard a faint click, and the corner of the room shattered into concrete dust and shards, more than enough explosive power to kill a man.

  "You're a very brave woman," Rafe murmured. "Stupid, but brave. Get him out of here. Now, Alisha." He crouched in front of her, reaching down to tilt her chin toward him. The muscles in her neck cried out with protest at the movement, but she set her teeth together and stared up at him. "That chip is embedded against your spine," he said. "It will go off in seventy-two hours, unless one of us activates the fail-safe code that will prevent detonation and make it safe to remove. Do you understand?"

  Alisha jerked her chin out of his grip and turned her head to stare at the fragments of concrete scattered over the floor. "I understand." She could hear the rage and helplessness in her voice. "What do you want me to do?"

  Chapter 25

  "Erika. Tell me you're as cool as I think you are. Tell me you're cooler than that." Barely an hour later, Alisha sat on the hood of a rented car, both hands bunched in her hair as she held the phone to her ear. The chip at the back of her neck felt larger than it was, itching like it was trying to escape her skin. Alisha tugged her hair rather than let herself poke at it; she was afraid prodding might set it off early, and she was already certain it would detonate when it was supposed to. She desperately needed to pull a new trick out of her hat. Rafe, Brandon—the Sicarii, she thought bitterly—had let her go with simple orders. Continue as you would have continued. Act as though nothing has changed. Draw Boyer out. His life or yours.

  Alisha preferred it be neither, though when it came down to the wire she had no intention of being the weapon used to kill Director Boyer. Suicide was preferable.

  "I'm at least three times cooler than you think I am," Erika said. "What do you need?"

  Alisha pressed her eyes shut, fingers tight in her hair. "You know my makeup case?"

  "I still think those golden-browns are good colors for you, Ali," Erika protested. "They really warm up your skin. I don't want to trade them out."

  Alisha choked a laugh. "You're right. They're great colors. I shouldn't have argued with you in the first place."

  One of Erika's silences filled the line. When her voice came across again, it was quiet with worry. "Something bad's going down, isn't it? Can you talk about it?"

  "Not really." Despite her best efforts, Alisha's fingers drifted to the chip beneath her skin. They'd only called it an explosive device. She had no idea if it had more properties than that: capabilities to track her movements, or listen in on her conversations. Better to be cautious.

  "Shit," Erika said. "All right. Makeup case, that's the GPS locator, right?" Alisha nodded,
forgetting for a moment that the other woman wouldn't be able to see her, then curled a lip.

  "Yeah. You'd talked about making some changes to it."

  "Yeah. Yeah. Oh!" Erika's chair creaked in the background, a sharp noise that told Alisha the techie had sat up very straight. "You mean the route tracing option. Yeah, I totally enabled that months ago, it's a satellite linkup. Basically once the tracker's turned on it'll record the trackee's path for forty-eight hours. Then it starts rewriting over the old data. Whether I can backtrack it further depends on how well erased the old data is. Why, you need more time?"

  Relief sagged Alisha's shoulders, making her want to curl up on the warm hood of the car and give in to a few exhausted sobs. "No." She could hear the roughness in her own voice as she moved her hand from the chip to press it against her eyes. "No, forty-eight hours is enough." She'd turned her tracker on after talking to Director Boyer in D.C.. Brandon had been in Zurich then, only thirty-six hours ago. "Can you send all the data to this phone's e-mail address?"

  "I can share it," Erika said dubiously. "It's gonna be too big for email. Can you access a secure FTP server?"

  "I'll find a way," Alisha promised.

  "All right. Is there anything I can do to help, Ali?"

  Alisha shook her head. "This is it."

  #

  Do exactly as she would have done had she not been captured. A very nice idea, if the Sicarii were willing to hand over the drone software, which was what she needed, if she wanted to carry on as if she hadn't been captured. Since they weren't going to, on the surface, nothing had changed. Nothing, except her plan to copy Brandon's hard drive so she could search it for clues about the drone software's storage had been shot to hell, and she still had to find the files.

  She downloaded the files Erika sent, discarding everything since she'd met up with him in Rome. He'd traveled from Zurich to Milan before heading to Rome, lingering in the northern Italian city long enough that he'd clearly done something there. Alisha got a high-speed rail ticket from Rome up to Milan and fumed the whole way, unable to enjoy the countryside zooming by. The enraging thing was she'd put herself in this position by choosing—by wanting—to trust Brandon Parker. Everything happening now was her own fault, and unless she was damned clever, she'd pay for it with her life.

  Brandon hadn't lingered in Milan. The data entries were time stamped and he'd only visited one area outside the airport for more than a few minutes. Alisha pulled her hood up and took buses until her GPS nearly matched the coordinates Brandon had stopped at. She left the bus and walked down the street, slowing as she realized which building Brandon had gone to. Hundreds of years old, imposing, with columns and stone arches, upper windows lined by wrought iron barriers and numerous front doors set above broad, shallow steps, it made a declarative statement against the intensely blue sky.

  Alisha, genuinely offended, thought, wait, other people aren't supposed to hide things in banks! Banks were her purview, her own way of hiding her stories from the public eye. Somehow she had gradually settled into the idea that no one else would use a bank's security features, even though that was obviously ridiculous. But dammit, banks were her game, not anyone else's.

  Except, of course, they weren't. Brandon, with the same training she'd received, probably had one key for a safety deposit box on him. The idea of finding him and asking to borrow it shot through Alisha's mind, and she laughed shakily. Excuse me, honey, could I borrow that key? Thank you!. Brandon's reaction would be priceless.

  But no, she didn't have to do that. If he'd followed protocol, there was probably secondary key left somewhere near the original site, able to be picked up in a moment of desperation. Not in trash bags, but often in the receptacles themselves, a magnet ensuring the key would stay in one of the hidden crevasses of the bin's lid or underside.

  The bank had no outside trash cans, only streetlights with ornate casings older than Alisha herself. She glanced up and down the street, trying to imagine where she'd hide something if she were Brandon Parker. Her own first impulse would be the third streetlight to her left, if she'd been storing one of her journals in the Milan bank. Three was a lucky number and she was left-handed. Her choice, then, would be to do something else: use the right-hand side and the second or fourth streetlight. But Brandon was right-handed and would probably choose his own opposite. Contrariness in action, Alisha thought; that was practically a spy's job description.

  And there. Across the street on the left, five lights down, there was a trash bin. Alisha jogged down the bank steps and ran across the street, snapping her hand into the inner rim of the cone-shaped can top.

  Gum. She came away with a key coated in gum, the slimy, semi-dryness sticking to her fingers. It felt absurdly good to shake her hand and squeal, trying to get the sticky stuff off both her fingers and the key. Disgust was better than fear or anger, and helped lighten her mood for her as she approached the bank with its gleaming floors and tall, vaulted ceilings. She had better clothes for this kind of job, but not with her, and some days just being youthful and hopeful in a hoodie and sneakers was enough. Especially when the manager on duty was young, male, winsome.

  He'd been there the day before, too, when Brandon had made his deposit, and fell completely for Alisha's story as she sparkled a smile, shrugging outrageously and leaned forward to confide, "Is a game we play, no? It is hide and seek. He give me the key, I find the bank. Someday," she whispered, "I hope there is ring in box, no? Maybe today." Another delightful shrug and a hopeful smile. The manager, bright-eyed with the idea of helping romance along, escorted her to the marble-floored room where she was to wait for the box, and hovered in clear anticipation when it was brought to her. Alisha flapped her fingers at him, tsking.

  "Go. I tell you when I come out. But maybe it is something else private, no? We do not want to be embarrassed." Not that she could think of anything that would embarrass an Italian man, but the pretense worked, and the manager, disappointed, took his leave as Alisha keyed the box open.

  Not until the lock clicked did it occur to her that she might have been outplayed again. Then the thought that she might find nothing more than an empty box, or worse, a teasing note struck her, and for a few seconds she sat frozen, staring at the box like it might contain Schrödinger's cat. But waiting wouldn't help, and there was almost certainly not a cat, dead or alive, in the strongbox, so she flipped the top open in one swift motion.

  A flash drive lay in the bottom of the box. For a moment she was so convinced she had somehow been out-maneuvered that she couldn't understand what it was, but then a gasp of relief escaped her and she scooped the drive up. It looked like nothing at all, barely larger than a tube of lipstick, hardly big enough to contain the kind of information that she believed was on it. But Rafe had been working on quantum storage, and a small quantum drive could conceivably hold untold amounts of data. Either way, it was hers now. Alisha curled her fingers around the drive in triumph.

  Then she did her best girlish squeal, pulled a ring from her purse, and darted out of the bank's security room to sparkle the diamond-cut glass at the manager.

  #

  Alisha slung her purse crosswise across her body, digging her elbow against the compartment she'd stored the tiny stolen drive in. She had her queening piece now, and if she didn't control the board, she was at least in a much stronger position than she'd been in. Despite the chip in her neck, she thought. There would be no more reacting, she promised herself. That knowledge made her palms tingle, her heartbeat quicker than it should be as she ambled up the road, turning to stick a thumb out when vehicles whisked by.

  She needed time to meditate, to stretch her muscles and push them to their limits in a hot room. It would cleanse her mind, cleanse her body, allow her to focus on the task at hand without the distracting thrums of fear and excitement jittering through her bones. Alisha wanted it settled inside her, a core of chi that she could access. She shortened her stride, wincing as doing so made her aware of her feet again, b
ut ignored the throbs of discomfort and drew herself straighter, focusing on bringing her energy inside, rather than letting it bubble off under the Italian sun. It would be worth it later.

  A Fiat convertible stopped and she climbed over the door, smiling. "Nord?"

  "A Como," the driver agreed. "Parlate italiano?"

  "Soltanto un piccolo," Alisha lied. Only a little. "Sorry," she added in English. The driver—in his fifties, graying, and cheerful—gave an elaborate shrug with his fingers and launched into a cheerful lecture on local history, utterly unbothered by the fact that his passenger at least nominally couldn't understand him. Alisha smiled often, letting his chatter flow around her as she leaned back in the seat and thought about her plans.

  #

  The cheerful Fiat driver left her in Como, just over an hour's walk from the Swiss border, and Alisha picked up a backpack, hiking boots, and cargo pants to cross the border in. Her feet objected mildly to the hike, but the open borders between European Union countries were a blessing; even Switzerland, which didn't belong to the EU, largely allowed visitors to cross in with an EU passport and no further inspection, especially as a hiker. She caught a bus on the Swiss side of the border and reached Zurich after a few hours of watching glorious scenery slide by.

  The hostel she checked into wasn't CIA sanctioned. Not a safe house, not secure in any way, and not, Alisha thought, watched. It catered to mostly-young backpackers, many of them carrying their whole lives in carefully-filled packs. Alisha twisted the front of her hair into braids and tucked the rest under a baseball cap, the better to fit in with the bohemian characters littering the lobby and hotel stairs as she went to check in. An indifferent young woman glanced at her passport, took her money, and gave her a key.

  Alisha took the first steps up two at a time, then, hissing, went more sedately on her sore feet to find her small, single room. It was old-style European with a sink and mirror, but the toilets and showers were communal, down the hall where any of the hotel's denizens could access them. Alisha left the room door open as she dropped her own backpack and purse onto the bed, toeing off her shoes to sit and inspect her soles. They were reddened and tender to the touch, still swollen, but nearly healed. She winced her way to the basin, turning cool water on and dragging the room's solitary chair away from its desk to set it next to the sink. A few seconds of contortion later, she had her feet dunked in the slowly filling basin: total luxury. She found her company-issued cell phone deep in her backpack and put its battery back into place for the first time in days. She'd gone to ground as best she could. It was time to start pulling in the players.