Hidden Steel

by Doranna Durgin

  “That is thoughtful. But as long as you’re here, you can play clean-up. I’m sure you have the resources for that. Though you should know there’s help coming for the wounded.”

  The woman looked around in a mixture of disgust and frustration. “Dammit, did you have to be so messy?”

  “I like to think of them as the messy ones,” Mickey told her. “Though they cleaned up the mess at the gym pretty well. You know about that, right?”

  They exchanged a glance. “We suspected,” the man said finally. “Look, we really need you to come in and talk to us. We understand that something’s happened so you no longer trust us, but it’s obvious you’re not working for Irhaddan—”

  “You think?” Mickey said. “And I’d love to chat, but I’m busy.” Busy getting ready to take this fight back to Irhaddan. All the way back.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to insist,” the man said. Bold talk for someone who was still a third of the way up a steep bank, his gun nowhere near taking aim.

  And Steve said, “No, you’re not.” And when he stood behind Mickey, he already had the bow drawn.

  “Steve,” she said, alarmed.

  “Doesn’t look like I have much to lose,” he said. “And I’m damned tired of being someone’s playing piece.”

  “There’s always more to lose,” she told him sharply, aching to turn her gaze away from the two under her sights, and knowing she couldn’t. “If they’re really CIA, that’s a tangle you’ll never get out of.”

  “At least my paranoia would be real,” he said, his voice hard; it sounded as thought it came through clenched teeth.

  The woman interrupted their exchange with surprised annoyance. “Of course we’re CIA. You’re CIA, for God’s sake. What the hell—”

  “She doesn’t remember,” the man said, dawning realization offsetting his partner’s strong words. “That’s what that was all about outside CapAd. She doesn’t the hell remember.”

  “I don’t the hell remember,” Mickey agreed, but inside she felt as taut as the bowstring Steve had drawn. “And I don’t the hell know how you—or I—can be CIA and working on US turf.”

  “Oh, for—” The woman had lost none of her abrasive edge. “Foreign Services, Dreidler.”

  Mickey shook her head, a small gesture, and added a shrug. “Means nothing. Sorry. Like I said, we’ve got to go. And Steve’s had a really bad day. I’m not about to let you near him, and I don’t suggest you try to get near me. We’re going to take the bike, and—”

  “Foreign Services,” the man said. “We work here, but we target foreign citizens. Our assets. Lately you’ve been working someone new—we’ve figured out that much. And I can tell you we’ve pretty much guessed who, thanks to the Irhaddanian involvement.”

  Naia.

  Mickey hated that this was making sense. It meant she couldn’t just walk away … and it meant she had to. It meant she was one of the good guys … and it meant she’d somehow lured a naive young woman into spying on her own family and risking her life to do so, which in her newly unsullied mind also made her one of the bad guys.

  “Look,” the man said. “We don’t work in a vacuum. The FBI works closely with us, and they know there’s something going on. If they find you—if they take you into custody—they’re not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They’d just love to use you as proof that we’re as wildcard as they say we are. Don’t even talk about Homeland Security—”

  “Then I guess you’d better clean up this mess really well,” Mickey said. They couldn’t stay, not with sirens rising in the background, not even if it tore Steve apart to leave Mosquito alone. “You’d better make sure Mosquito gets the best of care.” She lifted her chin in a gesture Steve could barely see, but one he acted on. He withdrew, leaving a cold spot at her back in spite of the day’s warmth. In a moment, the bike started—and then discussion was impossible.

  Mickey didn’t need discussion to know that if they were telling the truth, they’d no more shoot her than they would tattoo CIA Officer on their foreheads. And if they weren’t …

  Best to know the truth now.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 18

  Steve knew the feeling.

  Mickey had a stunned look on her face. Now that they had handily escaped the CIA officers and no one else currently had sights on them, Steve supposed she could finally afford to have that stunned look on her face. “CIA,” she said, having slipped off the motorcycle as Steve killed the engine outside the Internet café, twisting tail-shaking miles later. One more email check before they proceeded—and from the look on Mickey’s face, she planned to proceed with vigor. “CIA. Hell of it is, I still don’t know if that makes me one of the bad guys or one of the good guys.” And her bright eyes darkened with pain, the way they did every time she thought of the woman Naia.

  Yeah, Steve knew the feeling.

  He’d always thought of himself as a good guy. As one of the problem solvers, not the problem starters.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “I need to wash my hands,” he said grimly. “And you should wash that …”

  “Hard to say bullet wound with a straight face, isn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose. “Flesh wound, maybe?”

  “No John Wayne impressions,” he said, but she’d gotten him to smile. It didn’t last long. Not with Mosquito’s blood still on his hands and clothes.

  Sorry, Zander. I’m not doing so well by your friends.

  Not that Mickey had meant any harm, giving supplies directly to the underpass occupants; she’d certainly known better than to give them the mugger harvest directly. Missy would have OD’d on meth largesse, Jake would have finished destroying his liver, and Mosquito …

  Mosquito would have given his share to Missy and Jake.

  If he’d thought it was a bad idea, he’d have stopped Mickey. Maybe he should have thought it was a bad idea. Maybe he should have thought about it harder. He just hadn’t expected the Irhaddanians to come after them in broad daylight.

  Then again, neither had Mickey. And for the CIA to follow—

  “Hey,” he said, turning back to her as he tucked his helmet over a handlebar and took hers to do the same. “How the hell did they find us?”

  “They hit paydirt with Anthony,” Mickey said, nonplussed by the obvious. “Thought they’d try again. Not bad thinking, as it turned out.”

  “I mean the CIA,” Steve said, trying to keep the impatience from his voice. It wasn’t her fault; she’d been as surprised as he had. And she was the reason they’d gotten away.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hey, they’re CIA. Who the hell knows how—” But she stopped, confusion on her face, and looked away. Shame, he might have said. She said, “I guess I should know. I guess I’m CIA, too. Them are us.”

  “Not at the moment,” he said, not expecting his own ferocity. And then his mind’s eye flashed back to the underpass, where in a heartbeat she’d gone from cheerful and laughing to deadly. She hadn’t faltered; she hadn’t needed time to plan her strategy. And when she’d taken action she’d been swift and unhesitating, and on this day she’d killed at least one man herself. She’d been deadly with the blade in her hand, with the blade thrown, or even with her hands empty. …

  And now she stood beside his bike, watching him with worried eyes, an ugly, ugly gouge across her neck just where it made him think of what might have been. His hand reached out of its own volition, touching her neck beside the wound, and then moving to trace the line of her jaw. And then quite suddenly he’d closed the distance, giving her only enough time to widen her eyes before he kissed her—hard and thorough, driven by something greedy that didn’t seem as though it could ever be slaked. But she met his need with her own, and he drank from her—

  Until he broke away so abruptly that they both gasped, and he thought she might pull him right back in. Breathing heavily, staring at each other like a befuddled Romeo and Juliet—until someone across the street applauded, a sardonic soundi
ng and well-spaced clap … clap … clap.

  Mickey, being Mickey, turned around and took a bow. A bow with a flourish.

  Steve had no such capacity. But he took several deep breaths. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and he pretended she didn’t strike him anew when she turned back with her cheeks flushed and her lips just-kissed. “Right,” she said, and if she looked longingly at his mouth, she didn’t let it stop her from squaring her shoulders, reaching into the saddlebags for his backpack, and straightening with purpose. “Time to wash up.”

  * * * * *

  They ducked through the café, and Mickey hoped that those inside were so immersed in their Internet activity that she and Steve wouldn’t be worth looking at—because if they were, they’d be worth a second look, too. She only had that point confirmed when she made it into the bathroom and discovered the splash of blood at the neckline of her t-shirt, drying to dark around the edges but still bright in the middle. And soaked through, so turning the thing inside out would do no good at all. And taking it off meant exposing the knife harness at her shoulder.

  In the end she took it off, feeling exposed in the sport top. She removed the harness as well, and wrapped it within the shirt. She’d damn well better hope to avoid any new encounters until she rearmed herself.

  I was trying to help. To turn dirty money to good use. And to take the sting out of using it for her own purposes, if she was brutally honest with herself. If she’d thought about it, she’d have known she was bringing trouble down on those vulnerable people.

  Yeah, right. She stared at herself in the mirror, as though she could find some secret, hidden knowledge in the bright blue eyes that stared back at her. Choppy hair, blood staining her neck in a thin, uneven pattern, the hollows of her face and collarbones already filling in since her first arrival at the gym. She had to have been out for several days in the aftermath of that chemical knock-out drug to have lost that weight. They hadn’t had the facilities to do more than keep her hydrated—or possibly even the desire.

  Mickey grabbed a rough brown paper towel and wetted it under the faucet, scrubbing roughly at the sensitive skin on her neck. There’d be no answers in the mirror. No answers in her own mind. Just as she’d failed to anticipate what had happened to Anthony and Mosquito, she would continue to fail in this operation. She was working off her gut and her instinct, and it had gotten her a long way … but it couldn’t do everything. The longer this kept up, the more chance she had of walking them right into trouble again.

  Her neck stung; she eased up her ministrations, re-soaking the towel to dab at the edges of the wound. It was already crusty. They’d have to pick up some triple antibiotic on the way back to the warehouse.

  And oh, yeah, some .45mm ammo for the two Glock 36s they’d acquired.

  Because Mickey didn’t intend to wait around for someone else to take the next step. The longer this dragged on, the stronger the chances that she’d stumble into a situation she couldn’t get out of—or that she’d expose other people to that situation.

  Other people. Steve.

  She dried her neck, patting down the sport top where the water had run down on it. When another woman entered the bathroom and stopped short at the sight of her, Mickey gave her a rueful shrug. “Wicked nail file accident,” she said, and breezed back out of the bathroom.

  She discovered Steve at a computer station, his hair wet in a finger-combed way that turned the curls wickedly ruffled. His face had the same scrubbed-clean flush as her own, and his hands, stilled at the keyboard, no longer spoke of Mosquito’s questionable fate. He’d turned his t-shirt inside-out, and though he now looked as though he needed his mother to dress him, the blood didn’t show. He glanced up at her arrival and nodded at the screen. “Some interesting headlines about some crazy person who seems to be taking down muggers. The police are calling it vigilantism and making stern noises. That’s just the teaser headline of the day, though. Check this out.”

  But Mickey’s thoughts were latched onto action, and the immediate future. She said, “We need to stop at a sporting goods store. And I need to borrow your bike. This has gone far—”

  “Mickey.” He looked away from the screen long enough to raise his brow and truly get her attention. She didn’t want to listen; she didn’t want to lose the least bit of the internal momentum she’d built up. Go. Do something. Fix it. Stop what’s happening.

  But she stopped in mid-word, her fingers tightening on the shirt and knife bundle until she could feel the details of leather and metal through the cotton. He was in this as much as she; his efforts here deserved respect. As soon as saw that he had her attention, he leaned back in his chair, ignoring the screen much as she had. “You know, Irhaddan has a unique position in this country, relative to those countries around it. It’s the one country in that region that isn’t under constant scrutiny when it comes to weapons. The president makes no bones about it—they’re small, and they’re relatively homogenous in population. They have little internal strife, no religious wars, and they want no part of the violent heritage of everyone around them.”

  In spite of herself, Mickey smiled. “Homogenous,” she said. “No one uses that word in casual conversation.”

  “Hey, I read a lot,” he said, pretending offense. It didn’t last long; neither of them were up to any real banter. “I saw it in an article this morning. Point is, it’s a pretty quiet little place. Their hardships come from the spotty use of modern conveniences and medicine and education, and that’s partly thanks to the shifting population around their borders—they’re getting crowded by refugees from their neighbors. People who want to raise their families without getting involved in suicide bombings and random automatic gunfire. So Irhaddan … it’s really not a weapons of mass destruction kind of place. The president is clear about that.”

  “I don’t follow you.” And she didn’t. She was too focused on the here and now. San Jose. Today. Stopping this. She thought she could cause a pretty big ruckus at CapAd.Com. She thought she might just march on down to the Irhaddan embassy and make a public demand to speak to Naia. She wasn’t sure either of those things was the least bit wise, but it was all overridden by that overwhelming need to—

  Fix it. Stop it. Make it better.

  “So if you wanted to hide some nice WMDs, where would you do it? In the place where you have to dodge inspections and constant spy eyes, or in a place no one worries about?”

  “I can’t believe Mejjati would—” Mickey stopped herself. So she had an opinion about that, did she?

  Steve noted it, glancing sharply at her, but let it pass. “What if the president doesn’t know?” He lowered his voice, going from casual conversation fodder to something more pointed. “What if you really are with Foreign Services, and what if you’ve talked a young woman with unique access into keeping her eyes open for you because the CIA is beginning to suspect what the president doesn’t know?”

  Mickey felt an odd rush of relief. “Then I wouldn’t have talked her into spying on her own father. In a way … she would be working for him. Protecting him.”

  Steve shrugged, offering enough reservation so Mickey knew he didn’t buy any hint of altruism on the CIA’s part. “Look,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of information. We know who you are. I know you couldn’t trust those two at the underpass, but they didn’t shoot us, right? Kinda backs up their story. Don’t you think we should somehow call—-”

  “No,” Mickey said, more sharply than she’d meant to. “They’d lock us away in isolated rooms until they could be sure we were playing things straight. They’d do what they think is best for the States, not for Naia. We don’t go to the authorities—any authorities—until Naia is safe.”

  Steve gave her an even look. “I don’t know if that’s truly in her best interest,” he said. “I can’t argue with you … they’ll snatch us up and throw us under bright lamps until they’re happy they’ve gotten all the answers. But if Naia still has information, surely they’d—”


  “No,” Mickey said, simply enough. “Agency turf wars, bad communications, international pressure … those things will all come before Naia. Especially if they think they can get their intel another way, now that they’re alert for it.”

  He absently touched his shirt, there in the spot where it must have felt damp against his skin; the dark stain almost showed through. “I guess …” he said, his thoughts taking him inward, “I guess even if they responded, they wouldn’t do it in time.” And then he indicated the monitor again. She leaned over his shoulder and tapped the shift key to disengage the screensaver and read the email on display there.

  Dear A:

  Thank you for your interest. I am indisposed but well. I still love working on my pottery and will come as soon as I have the opportunity. I am pleased that my piece is being fired tonight.

  Naia

  And Mickey felt an instant jolt of fear. “They’ve got to be monitoring her email. She’s got to know—”

  “She does,” he said. “Look at what she’s written. She’s trying to make them think she’s putting A. off. And I think she’ll try to meet you tonight. Meet us.”

  She frowned at him, wanted to tell him there’d be no us about it, not if they were getting into the thick of it. But rather than get off track just then, she said, “It can’t work. They’ve got to realize—”

  “It might,” he said. “Look—what is it they want to know? What Naia’s told you. They aren’t sure of her one way or another. They need irrefutable proof before they act. They may not even believe it themselves. She’s an isolated young woman from a culture that keeps its women behind closed doors. What if they don’t suspect her of active involvement—what if they think it’s all your doing, that you’ve siphoned information from her? They won’t expect active spy games from her.”

  The frown deepened into a scowl. “That’s an awful lot of iffing. With too much riding on it.”