The Firebird Deception

by Dermody, Cate

  “Shooting me won’t undo me giving you the slip in Zurich,” Alisha said, keeping her voice steady.

  “No, but it’ll make me feel better.”

  “Helen,” Reichart said, tired note of warning in his voice. Alisha looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Helen?” She looked back up at the woman, a little startled. “Sorry. I was expecting something like Young Lee Ha.”

  “This from the Hispanic girl with the Irish last name?” Helen demanded. “Get over yourself, sister.”

  “If I get the chance,” Alisha muttered, glancing back at Reichart. “You know, I always wanted to have the cavalry show up on the cliff top at the critical moment. It never occurred to me that I might not be the army when it did. She your girlfriend?”

  Reichart gave her such a flat look Alisha grinned as she walked to the canyon wall and spread her hands against the cold rock. “Fine. Just leave my backpack so I can get out of here without killing myself.”

  “Take it,” Helen said without missing a beat. Alisha tilted her head to stare up the rock wall at her.

  “What exactly did I do to you?” She suspected the answer was dated Frank Reichart, but Helen only glowered down the gully wall and didn’t answer.

  “We’ll leave it,” Reichart said drily. “First because there’s no reason for anyone to get killed here, and second because there’s probably a tracking device in the pack. Nice try, Alisha.”

  Alisha shrugged. “It was worth a shot.” She could see him out of the corner of her eye again, cutting the wires that held the glider’s black box in place. “At the risk of sounding like a bad movie, Reichart, you know this isn’t over.”

  Reichart straightened, box in hand, and gave her a rakish grin. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Hel, cover her until I’m out of the switchback.”

  “Then can I shoot her?”

  “Helen.”

  “All right, all right, fine.”

  “You know where to meet me,” Reichart said. Helen’s affirming huff of breath sounded beneath the slap of his footsteps against the stone. Alisha put her forehead against the wall and counted to ten, then looked up.

  “He’s fast,” she said brightly. “Probably out of the switchback by now. You should head on out.”

  “Shut up.”

  Alisha lifted her eyebrows and leaned her forehead against the rock again, grinning again despite everything. Her heart rate was quick, but didn’t have the sickening thud of fear to it. It was more the excitement of a chess game, jockeying for the best position on the board. She was in a terrible position at the moment, but things could change very quickly. For now it was about steadying her breathing, and most especially about focusing on what her senses could tell her in the silent dark night. She closed her eyes, fingertips spread against the stone as if it might whisper secrets to her. Nothing else, for the moment, mattered.

  It felt like a camera lens zooming in on something, Alisha always thought, the way her hearing kicked into overdrive when a situation went bad. Zoomed in and slow motion, each sound overly precise and warning her of things to come as if she had a sixth sense. There was nothing so esoteric about it; it was combat training and perhaps a little of her yoga practice, combining together to tell her—

  —that Helen had taken an almost-silent step back from the cliff edge. Then another, moving slowly to hide the sound of her movements. Alisha smiled against the stone, counting Helen’s steps until they faded. She waited another five interminable seconds before she shoved back from the wall and snatched up her backpack.

  The gun went into her waistband; she would need both hands to rappel down the cliff wall she’d scaled, but she wanted the weapon easily at hand. A grappling hook with a line already attached was all she needed to scramble up the shorter canyon wall. Everything else she left behind, trusting that she’d be able to come back for it later.

  The hook clattered with unholy loudness as she tossed it over the stone ridge and dragged it back until it caught. Alisha wrapped her hands around the rope, wincing even though silence was no longer critical.

  A gunshot, far louder than the grappling hook, rang through the mountains, stone shattering where the bullet hit. Alisha went absolutely still for a few seconds, then flashed a bright grin at the wall. Good. Let Helen think the noise was Alisha following her. It’d make her watch behind her, and Alisha intended to come out in front.

  She pulled herself up to the top of the ridge in a few long steps, the rope making her ascent much easier. Show-off, she couldn’t help thinking. It would have been faster and easier to scale the entire mountain using equipment in the first place, and that might have put her at the glider long before Reichart and his cohort arrived.

  Hindsight was twenty-twenty. Alisha pulled herself over the top ridge, lying low and giving her arms a quick shake, though there was nothing of the strain in her muscles that she’d felt coming up the longer ridge. She tugged her night goggles on, searching the ridge for a place to lodge the grappling hook, then wound the rope around her arm in quick tight loops.

  The cliff behind her fell farther down than she’d remembered. Alisha stared into darkness that extended beyond the goggles’ ability to enhance her vision, then inhaled a quick breath that was as good as a shrug. The rope would be long enough or it wouldn’t. She gave it one more good tug, making certain the grappling hook would stay in place, and dropped into the green-laced darkness.

  Each jolt of her weight hitting against the mountain wall made the rope tighten painfully around her arm. Making use of a shunt would have been more practical, but also more time-consuming to set up. Instead, Alisha paused between backward jumps, braced against the mountainside as she jerkily unwrapped enough rope for the next leap down, a primitive form of rappelling. It was exhilarating in its own way, even the uncomfortable feeling of blood caught in bulges between the rope wrapped around her arm. It made her right hand itch, pain burning along the ulnar nerve as it was pinched, until she wanted to stop and crack her knuckles, like doing so would release all the unaccustomed pressure in her arm.

  The rope ended before the cliff side did. Alisha glanced over her shoulder, surprised at the distance she’d traveled: climbing the wall had seemed shorter than the downward journey. At least the ground was in sight now, some twenty feet below. Too far to drop wholesale. She sought ledges and crevasses with fingers and toes, almost jumping from one brief edge to another. Her right arm, already abused from the rope, didn’t want to support weight, and her fingers tingled numbly as she forced them to use. Breathe, she reminded herself. All the hurrying in the world would do no good if she lost strength and slipped and fell to the waiting rocks below.

  The final jump to the flat surface sounded loud in her ears, though she knew the pebbled flats of her shoes absorbed most of the noise. She pushed out of the crouch she’d landed in, running on her toes before she’d quite recovered from the impact. If the sound of her landing had carried, she’d already lost the element of surprise. Alisha slipped behind the stone outcropping she’d sighted Reichart from, gun drawn and held in both hands as she waited.

  And waited, chin tilted up, gaze half focused on the green stars as she listened for the telling sound of footsteps. She would have to explore the switchback later, to see how far out of the way it took her before coming back around to the canyon.

  Either that, she thought, or she’d missed Helen entirely. The idea made her curl her lip with irritation, fingers tightening around the gun’s butt.

  There! Finally, the soft pad of shoes against stone. Alisha waited for them to pass, then stepped out of the outcropping’s shadow, gun leveled. “Let’s try this again.”

  “How the—?” Helen lifted hands knotted into angry fists even as she let go the outburst.

  “I’m just that good,” Alisha said. “Where are you supposed to meet Reichart?”

  “You’ll have to shoot me.”

  “Don’t tempt me. Where are you meeting him?” Alisha edged forward, gun still held ready
. “You can tell me now or you can come back to Langley with me and tell lots of different people while you’re under the influence of a truth serum.”

  Helen barked a laugh. “You expect me to believe you’re not going to drag me back there anyway?”

  “No,” Alisha said, “but that’s not the point.” She hesitated out of Helen’s reach, unwilling to close the distance until she was certain of what she had to do. “Last chance, Helen.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Alisha shrugged and reversed the .45 in her hand, taking a swift step toward Helen with the weapon raised as a bludgeon.

  A gun cocked, loud as Gabriel’s horn, and with the sound came Reichart’s voice. “Don’t do it, Alisha.”

  The muscles in Alisha’s arm yowled protest as she halted the downward swing with the pistol’s grip, her shoulder wrenching with the effort. Reichart spoke again, his voice coming from above the stone outcropping Alisha had hidden behind. The words were tinged with regret and old weariness. “You shouldn’t have told me how you got to the canyon first.”

  Helen’s fist connected with her jaw like a pile driver.

  Pain, bright and piercing, slid through Alisha’s eyes and into the back of her brain, taking up residence there with what felt like an eye toward permanency. Alisha groaned, lifting a hand to her head, and found the night goggles still in place. She fumbled them off and the pain receded, purity of light no longer blazing its way into her skull. She flopped her hand to the side, goggles clattering against stone, and for a few long moments lay without moving, face crushed into a wrinkled frown.

  Her jaw hurt, the taste of blood lingering thick and sweet at the back of her throat and pooled in the hollows of her cheeks. Beyond that there was the usual pleasant ache of well-exercised muscles and the considerable stiffness of a body left to lie on hard rock for several hours.

  Alisha opened her eyes again, staring at the white ball of sunlight overhead. Too high for morning, especially on this side of the mountains. She walked her hand back over her chest, finding the neck of her close-fitting shirt unzipped a few inches. Beneath the opened fabric lay a bump, sensitive to touch. She winced and relaxed again, grunting under her breath as doing so made her more aware of the shape of rocks beneath her back.

  If there was a silver lining, she thought, it was in that it had taken a drug to keep her unconscious for hours, rather than Helen’s punch being that powerful. Alisha sat up with another groan, then rolled over onto her knees, stretching forward in an asana to pull some of the kinks out of her back. Forehead resting against the stone, she inhaled a careful breath, then let it out in a sigh. Second silver lining: Reichart and Helen had left her in the mountains, instead of taking her comatose body back to whoever was employing them.

  Alisha set her teeth together and finally turned her radio back on, muttering, “Cardinal reporting in. Anybody there?”

  “Christ, Cardinal.” Greg’s voice came through instantly, sounding exhausted. “Where the hell’ve you been? I didn’t approve you going radio silent!”

  “Had a little situation,” Alisha said. “Lost the box. And the aircraft is largely intact,” she continued, deliberately talking over Greg’s sharp inhalation, hoping to cut off the questions she knew were coming. “I can babysit, but I can’t pack it out of here.”

  Silence met her comment, before Greg inhaled again. She could all but see him nod, pushing away the questions he wanted to ask in favor of dealing in the moment. “Damn it. We expected the glider to be destroyed. We thought only the box would survive. All right. We’ll send in somebody on what looks like a search and rescue. You’ll have to get off the chopper in a leg cast, all bruised up, probably.”

  Alisha touched her throbbing jaw. “Won’t be a problem.”

  “What happened, Cardinal?”

  Alisha pressed out of her asana, holding herself in downward-facing dog for a few long moments before she walked her hands in to her feet, bent her knees and straightened to a tree pose, hoping it would give her the strength to answer. It seemed to. Her voice was composed, if tired, as she said, “Reichart happened. Again. Of course.”

  Another long silence echoed in her earpiece, before Greg’s voice came through, flat and displeased. “We’ll talk about this when you come home. A chopper’s being sent to your position. Kremlin out.”

  Alisha winced and dropped her chin to her chest. Once upon a time the code names they shared, Cardinal and Kremlin, had been a joke, a way of signing off that always left her feeling part of a close-knit secret family. Now Greg’s clipped sign-off made Alisha think of the heartless Cold War that the Clancy novel had been written during.

  Alisha, weary, stiff and thoroughly chastised long before the official admonishment would come down, slunk up the switchback to await extraction.

  Chapter 4

  “I’m recommending you for psychological evaluation, Alisha.” Director Richard Boyer’s deep voice was gentle, but the words fell like an assault against Alisha’s skin. A blush fought to burn her cheeks and she took a deliberate long breath through flared nostrils, dragging more oxygen into her bloodstream and slowing her heartbeat. She didn’t dare move her hands from where they lay relaxed against the leather armchair in Boyer’s office; in stillness she could retain the pose of tranquility, but her hands would betray tension if she allowed them to move.

  “Sir, I really don’t think that’s necessary,” she began, then stopped the words at Boyer’s brief, tolerant smile.

  “Obviously not, Alisha. That’s why other people do the recommending. Alisha, you’re a good agent, but this Reichart thing has gone too far. I know you were close once—”

  “We were engaged, sir,” Alisha said. If she was going to be hung out to dry, she wanted the whys to be explicitly clear. Boyer’s eyelashes flickered.

  “Engaged,” he said after a pause. “I was trying to be delicate.”

  “That isn’t necessary, sir.” Alisha tried to dredge the ice from her tone, leaving calm neutrality in its place. Based on the second tolerant smile Boyer graced her with, the attempt failed. Alisha put her tongue between her teeth to keep from grinding them.

  Boyer sighed and sat back in his chair, spreading his hands in a gesture of openness. “Very well. You were engaged and he shot you, a situation which I now believe has never fully been resolved in your mind, Alisha.”

  “I saw a psychiatrist for three months after that incident, sir,” Alisha said, working to keep her voice steady instead of allowing it to give in to angry desperation. “Time off was recommended and I took it. I was given a clean bill of mental health after the break.”

  “And the situation has changed since then,” Boyer said patiently. “Alisha, I’m willing to allow you to continue working while you attend therapy sessions, but I have no problem with suspending you if it’s the only way to get beyond this recalcitrance.”

  Alisha stared across the desk at him, then pressed her lips together as she glanced away. “Well.” She looked back, eyebrows raised. “That puts it in perspective, doesn’t it.”

  “I thought it might. Now, I realize that the nature of your job may well prevent you from daily therapy sessions, but I want you to understand that I fully expect you to attend regular meetings with Dr. Reyes whenever you’re available to do so. Starting this afternoon.”

  “This—!”

  “Or I put someone else on the Firebird mission,” Boyer said, overriding her without having to lift his voice. “And you’ve been specifically requested, so I’d rather not do that.”

  “Firebird? Requested? By who?”

  The air pressure in the room changed as she fired off her questions, a cool breeze stirring the hairs at the back of her neck.

  “By me.” The voice was wry and familiar, but wholly out of place. Alisha stood, turning toward the door with a frown.

  Brandon Parker, in rolled-up shirtsleeves and with his hands in the pockets of khaki pants, gave her a pleasantly apologetic shrug. “H’lo, Alisha. It’s been a long time.”


  Men kept saying that to her. For a few long seconds, that was the only clear thought in Alisha’s mind. Brandon was still talking, the words registering distantly; she would be able to look back at the moment and hear every word he said, as clearly as if she was paying full attention now.

  The fifteen months since she’d last seen Brandon had treated him well. Maybe it was hard for them not to have: the last she’d seen of him was his unconscious and bleeding body being carried out of a safe house on a stretcher. There was no sign of that trauma now, his broad shoulders lifting and falling as he said something self-deprecating and looked at her in hopes of earning a laugh. Alisha managed a brief, meaningless smile that took some of the pleasure from Brandon’s blue eyes, though he forged ahead with his speech.

  He would never have Reichart’s edge, the here comes trouble look that was so appealing—and unfortunately accurate—in the other man. Brandon was corn-fed Iowa, blond hair showing a tendency to fall in his eyes even when tidily cut, as it was now. He never looked less than comfortable in the clothes he wore, or more than a slightly rumpled professional. Sporty, Alisha thought, even in a white-collar dress shirt. Brandon had none of Reichart’s polished bad-boy look or his slightly dramatic fashion sense.

  Which was part of his attraction.

  But if his surface reflected brightness, it did so to hide the darkness beneath.

  “The glider’s your work,” Alisha said, too loudly and too abruptly, cutting off Brandon’s cheerful stream of talk. His eyebrows shot up and he gave her a crooked grin, spreading his hands.

  “The Firebird? Of course. Did you ever have any doubt?”

  Alisha shook her head. “A little. Not really.” Not really: there was one of the keys. She had an inherent impulse to believe in Brandon Parker, to believe in her own hunches when it came to him. That those hunches and beliefs had turned out very badly once already made her spine itch with discomfort. “I didn’t know you were working again.”