Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  The real-life Stonehenge was different from the miniature Mrs. Molony had uncovered in only one regard: Mrs. Molony’s featured an extra stone.

  And if archeologists could see what Salem was looking at now, they’d have no question what Stonehenge was built for.

  But that’s not why Salem’s heart was pounding at the cage of her chest.

  No, what had her suddenly feeling like a hunted animal were the five tiny letters carved on that added piece, their edges dull yet still legible.

  mercy

  The same plea found on the locket worn by Bel’s mother the night she was murdered.

  Salem grabbed Agent Curson’s arm for support.

  Her tongue thick, she pointed a shaking finger toward the ancient code and turned to him. Can’t you see it? Something that all modern

  archeologists have missed, the truth that their training has taught them to overlook? It’s a feminine explanation for Stonehenge!

  Her blood had bubbled with the awareness.

  But she couldn’t speak, not with Agent Curson sneering at her like she was a silly girl.

  Not with Mrs. Molony cutting her with those sharp-again eyes.

  So she closed her mouth and released Curson’s arm. She shoved her kneejerk Stonehenge hypothesis down deep where she stored all her stupid ideas. It was her mother’s fault the crazy thought had even entered her mind. It was Vida who viewed the world as a conspiracy against women, not Salem. It was Vida who belonged to the Underground, a centuries-old organization created to protect women from the men of the Hermitage. Salem’s mother had wanted to induct her into the Underground, to teach her its history and purpose, had in fact secretly molded her to become the Underground’s codebreaker.

  Salem had zero interest.

  She intended to live a life in plain sight, an existence where she knew the expectations. She would crack codes, but she would work for an above-board agency. Conspiracies, ancient organizations, and hidden trails that led to even more clandestine histories had driven her anxiety to an unbearable level and cost Bel her ability to walk. Salem planned to remain in the orderly world of mathematics and computers, truth and logic, a place where the rules were clear and incontrovertible.

  Nothing would drop her back into the shadowy world her mother had exposed her to.

  Nothing.

  2

  Rome

  Former FBI agent Clancy Johnson sat across the table from the informant, surrounded by the hot-blooded clamor of Rome. He’d been on the move since he’d bungled the assassination of then-Senator Gina Hayes last November. He was tired of running. That made it okay that they’d tracked him down.

  “It’s got to happen in London,” Clancy said. “During the Climate Change Summit.”

  The informant’s brow furrowed. His face was so potato-bland that Clancy suspected the man could blend in anywhere. Definitely an asset in this line of work. “The president’s security detail will be even tighter at such a high-profile event.”

  “Yes and no.” Clancy patted his rumpled shirt and tugged out a pack of Camel Straights. He’d quit six years earlier but had recently decided that, as a dead man walking, he deserved to smoke.

  “More security, less certainty,” he continued. “It’ll be chaos at the summit. Protestors. Media. Hayes has the world on fire. Everyone will be watching her. Plus, we have someone the president trusts on our side.”

  “Who?”

  Clancy grabbed the sleeve of a passing waiter. “Light?”

  The waiter scowled but flicked a matchbook out of his pocket. The good thing about Rome was that everyone smoked. That, and the pepper cheese pasta served in every corner bistro. Clancy could bathe in the stuff, it was that good. He inhaled deeply on the soothing fingers of smoke, letting them stroke his lungs. “Before I give up that information, I’m going to need verification you’re with the Hermitage.”

  Across the table, the man’s potato-face started twitching. Clancy at first thought the informant was going to laugh. When that didn’t happen, he decided the guy was hiking the north side of a seizure. That’d be a damn shame because it would mean he’d need to dress up and sell this plan to someone else. Before Clancy could muster a reasonable response, the man’s twitches rode deeper, and a sound like wishbones snapping popped off his face.

  Clancy wondered if he was on some bizarre hidden-camera show.

  Or maybe he was asleep, the past year a single dream, his wife of forty years lying next to him in bed, his reputation intact?

  Turned out to be neither of the above.

  With a jerk, the man’s face completed its metamorphosis. Suddenly, he was so beautiful it hurt to look at him.

  If Clancy’d had any food in his body, he’d have shit himself.

  The man spoke, his eyes watering from pain, his face an angel’s. “In Europe, we don’t call ourselves the Hermitage. Here, we’re the Order.”

  Wednesday

  September 20

  3

  The Campus, London

  By the time Salem returned to London, she had reclaimed the safety of rational thought. There was no global plot to suppress a feminine explanation for Stonehenge. There was only a lonely lady who’d created a kitschy model and used it to garner attention, exactly as Agent Curson had argued on the drive back. Once he’d dryly observed that mercy was neither Gaelic nor Proto-Indo-European—the current Irish language and the language of the UK at the time of Stonehenge’s construction, respectively—she’d had to agree with his take on the whole day.

  She typed the report as soon as she’d returned.

  A waste of time, it essentially said.

  Her first FBI field experience, and it was a bust.

  Clearly, she belonged behind a desk. She’d been a no-name master’s candidate two years earlier when global security agencies had begun wooing her. They were all interested in the quantum computer theory she’d developed while writing her thesis. If translated into a functioning program, her theory would revolutionize cyber security. Whichever nation developed the program first would possess the equivalent of a nuclear bomb in a butter knife war.

  She’d turned all the agencies down.

  She’d planned on staying in the safety and comfort of her Minneapolis home as she developed Gaea, the program she’d sketched in her thesis. But forces beyond her control had shoved her out of her comfortable routine. In that new state of mind, she’d accepted the FBI’s offer to join. That they’d promised she could continue her work on Gaea was a deciding factor.

  They hadn’t exactly delivered on that promise, though.

  She’d been allotted little development time at the Campus, the nickname for the Marylebone building where Black Chamber analysts lived and worked while in London. The Campus was a 1960s block of an apartment building currently registered as an American diplomatic base. That claim wasn’t too far off the reality. The analysts housed inside did interact with foreign representatives, they worked on behalf of the United States’ citizens, and they wrote a lot of reports.

  The key difference?

  At the Black Chamber, the “diplomats” never left their chairs. They toiled in an enormous room, what had been the communal gathering space back when the building had housed apartments. There were no walls between their workstations. The openness was designed to encourage collaboration among the dozen analysts employed at the Campus.

  They started each day with a typed task list. No one knew better than cryptanalysts how easily most computer programs could be hacked. If FBI agents needed to keep something secret, they used a typewriter and hand-delivered it. The task lists were shredded and then burned at the end of the day.

  Not that they normally contained high secrets.

  Based on their proficiency in a specific foreign language, each analyst at the Campus was assigned servers to track and clean. Cleaning involved running their assig
ned server’s data through ECHELON, their codebreaking software, and manually decrypting any code that ECHELON couldn’t crack or had red-flagged. On particularly long days, Salem saw them as factory workers sorting through nuts and bolts, looking for defects in the assembly line of information.

  Thanks to her mom, Salem spoke Persian, which meant that her job was to decrypt all Persian messages originating in European servers. She had to finish her assigned code cleaning before she was allowed to work on Gaea. Her quantum program would exploit the fact that all existing computers could only process in one direction, meaning they could only be made faster or stronger. Once it became a reality, Salem’s theory would allow designated computers to also process sideways, backward, and into themselves without breaking a sweat. That meant that a line of code could be encrypted and decrypted on multiple levels.

  In short, Gaea would make ECHELON look like a cereal box decoder ring. She would protect the United States, starting with shoring up private records, voting systems, government data, weapons algorithms, and individual citizen privacy. There was not a code the quantum computing program couldn’t crack or a codebreaker she couldn’t repel.

  However, the FBI, for all its strengths, was still a bureaucracy, one which assigned value based on measurable outcomes rather than more speculative activities, like theory testing. With Salem cleaning code and now working in the field, that left only five hours a week for Gaea. Salem’s boss, Assistant Director Robert Bench, hadn’t been convinced by her multiple pleas to be assigned more development time.

  She’d resorted to sacrificing sleep to work on Gaea.

  Tonight was no exception. She’d finished the Blessington field report around midnight, grabbed her laptop, and padded to the study hall, a retrofitted storage room that housed a couch, three swaybacked recliners, mismatched tables, and a television. It was one of a handful of afterthought rooms tucked around the Campus.

  Salem figured she’d be less likely to fall asleep if she couldn’t see her bed.

  She set her steaming mug of peppermint tea on the table and dropped into the sofa. If she balanced her laptop on crossed legs, her neck hardly hurt at all. It didn’t take long for her to fall into the rhythm and security of programming, playing numbers like notes, writing a quantum symphony one line at a time.

  The clock ticked away the minutes and then hours. She was exhausted. The couch was so comfortable and the work was mesmerizing, lulling her into a dozy trance. She didn’t hear the door open behind her.

  “London treating you well?”

  Lucan Stone’s low rumble startled Salem out of her seat. She yelped as she flew to her feet, nearly tumbling her laptop. “What are you doing here?”

  He chuckled. Had she ever seen him laugh before? She did not know the FBI agent well. He’d saved her and Bel’s lives almost a year ago, but it felt further in her past, occupying that murky dreamscape when Salem and Bel had been on the run, chased by the Hermitage and the law, racing to save their own mothers. She hadn’t known back then if she could trust Agent Stone.

  She still didn’t.

  He crossed his arms languidly as she collected herself. He wore a well-cut suit, hair shaved close, his skin so dark it reflected purple in the dim light. He exuded calm power. “The president is coming to town for the summit. I’m on her advance team.”

  Salem sat back down on the couch, only partially facing him. Agent Stone made her nervous.

  Nearly everything but computers made her nervous.

  “Oh,” Salem said. Something didn’t line up, but she wasn’t sure what. “I see.”

  “What are you working on now?”

  Salem glanced at her laptop. This was the first conversation between her and Stone that could be considered personal. She still couldn’t believe he was here, at the Campus. Non-crypto FBI weren’t supposed to know the Black Chamber existed, and Stone wasn’t a code breaker. He was a straight-up G Man. She didn’t think he had clearance to hear about Gaea, so she lied.

  “A new social media filter that tags unsourced news. That way you know if you’re getting your information from a legit source or some Eastern bloc computer rat.”

  Stone leaned over for a look. “Still protecting the world, even during your downtime?”

  She tried to close her laptop so he couldn’t see, but he smelled so good. Freshly showered. His breath reached her neck, the slight caress of air like a finger trailing from her ear to her shoulder blade. He was heat and smooth darkness, safety and danger and so close. A thrill burned along Salem’s skin.

  She told herself to be calm.

  They were professionals.

  Colleagues, apparently.

  “Saving time, not the world.” Salem’s voice cracked. “People are too busy to check all the news they read.”

  She risked a glance at him, swiveling her head until their eyes locked. Amazingly, her neck no longer hurt. But she shouldn’t have turned toward him. He was too much, his lips a magnet. She set her computer on the table, unwilling to fight the pull.

  She exhaled softly as she leaned toward him.

  Her pulse throbbed at her wrists.

  Their lips met, his soft and then more passionate.

  This had been a long time coming.

  She grabbed the front of his shirt and helped him over the back of the couch and onto her. The weight and hardness of him was electric. His edges melted into her curves. She wanted to touch every inch of him, her skin naked to his.

  She ground her hips upward. Her sexual courage embarrassed her, but her body was insistent.

  He drew back, pushing her curls out of her face. When he saw his desire enthusiastically reflected in her, he kissed her deeply, tipping his weight so he could touch her, lingering on her neck before brushing over her right nipple, causing a shiver the length of her. His hand moved slowly and deliberately across her hip before sliding between her legs.

  The pleasure was building inside of her, a spark that flickered and then caught, growing, consuming her with heat. She moaned, swung out her arm, and knocked her computer off the table.

  Crash.

  She blinked, disoriented, woken by the sound of her laptop clattering to the ground. She was in the study hall, alone. The calm repetition of programming had put her to sleep as she’d been typing. The crash of her computer had been real, everything else a dream. The delicious heat and weight of Lucan Stone was gone, but the echoes of her orgasm remained. She blushed in the quiet of the room. It had been awhile since she’d had a clutch dream; she hoped she hadn’t been so … expressive during the previous ones. What if someone had been walking by?

  Agent Stone.

  She sighed. It’d been months since she’d thought of him. Last she’d heard, he was on another of President Hayes’ secret projects, much like the Black Chamber. He likely lived and worked in DC. Bel would know, if Salem dared mention his name. She sat up, stretched, and asked her phone the time.

  “Five forty-five AM. Would you like to hear the weather?”

  Nope. She would be strapped to her computer today and for the foreseeable future, unless another field job came her way. She doubted Agent Curson would request her help if it did. She’d behaved like the greenhorn she was, with a dash of hysteria thrown in for good measure.

  She rolled her eyes at herself before standing to make her way to her room, grateful that everyone else seemed to be asleep as she walked down the hall. Her X-rated dream was surely playing over her head on a movie screen, visible to anyone she met.

  She slipped inside her room with a plan. She didn’t need to be at her work computer until eight, and her dream had made clear she had some juice to work off. She changed into sweats. At Quantico, she’d discovered muscles she didn’t know she had, plus an affinity for weight lifting. She wanted to keep both. The designers of the Campus had knocked out walls and removed kitchens and bathrooms to make dormitory-styl
e bedrooms for the analysts, keeping the original apartment building’s pool, steam room, and weight room surrounded by an elevated track.

  She leaned over for her running shoes and knocked the blue-

  flowered sachet off the bedside table. It smelled of sage. Mrs. Molony. A familiar hot rush of shame flooded her cheeks. Should she have said something about her Stonehenge hunch after all?

  She picked the sachet off the floor and was inhaling deeply of its spice when her phone rang. She glanced over.

  Bel’s image winked at her from the brightly lit phone.

  Salem’s guts jerked.

  It was midnight in Minneapolis. This would not be good news.

  4

  The Campus, London

  “Everything is okay, don’t worry.”

  Isabel Odegaard’s smiling face filled Salem’s screen before the room behind Bel shifted. She was in the kitchen of Salem’s childhood home, filling a glass with water from the refrigerator dispenser. She’d pimped out her wheelchair so it held a phone, a laptop, and a table for taking notes, all hands-free. Until last year, her life had been built around her physical prowess. Bel had been a Chicago police officer, best shot in her class, a self-defense instructor.

  The assassination attempt had changed that.

  The first bullet had passed overhead, missing its target.

  The second bullet had paralyzed Bel from the waist down.

  Both shots had been meant for Gina Hayes. Bel had used her body as a shield. Publicly, she was hailed as a hero. Privately, she struggled with excruciating physical therapy and even more painful depression as she traded power and policework for something different. Throughout, she’d made it clear that Salem should not feel sorry for her, and better not stay in Minneapolis to care for her. To this day, Salem wasn’t sure if she’d ultimately joined the Black Chamber to keep Bel from worrying she’d not joined because of her.

  “Yes,” Bel said, answering Salem’s question before she had a chance to ask it, “it is midnight here. But that means it’s six AM there. I wanted to catch you before you went to work. It seems like all we do anymore is text. I wanted a real conversation.”