The Firebird Deception

by Dermody, Cate

  “Not unless you hit the femoral artery.”

  “What?” Alisha turned her head back toward Brandon, eyebrows drawn down.

  “He’s not dead unless he bled out,” Brandon said.

  “You shot him.” The aftereffects of the gunshot rang in her ears again, making her close her eyes in remembered pain.

  “I shot the ceiling, Alisha.”

  “What?” Alisha pushed away from the balcony wall, staring at her erstwhile partner.

  “I shot the ceiling,” he repeated wearily, then muttered, “but I did not shoot the deputy,” before saying, “or Reichart, either,” aloud again. “I was trying to get everybody to stop fighting so we could get out of there. That’s all.”

  “But I saw—” Alisha put her hand out to the balcony railing, the muscles in her biceps protesting as she made use of them. No, she thought, she hadn’t seen. She’d heard. One gunshot. Had seen Reichart lying motionless on the floor. Had concluded, not known.

  Memory assailed her, the flavor of grit and aged stone drifting from the ceiling drying her tastebuds. Alisha put her hand over her mouth and, without the railing’s support, sank down into a crouch that pressed her thighs against the slice across her belly. Pain sparked through her, a real and honest feeling that made her shudder and let go a rough, shaking laugh behind her hand. Her eyes, wide-open and unfocused, burned with dryness that wanted to be tears. She could feel tremors starting in the core of her, and tried to force her hands to be still, though she knew she couldn’t betray any more relief if she tried. Exposed and vulnerable in front of someone she didn’t dare trust. Dangerous, Leesh, she warned herself, but her muscles wouldn’t respond when she tried to stand up again so she could compose herself.

  “Why?” She forced the word out from behind her fingers as she jerked her gaze up to Brandon.

  He sighed and pushed his hand through his hair again. “Don’t think I didn’t want to,” he muttered, then sighed again, more explosively. “I figured it was the one thing you’d never forgive me for.”

  “What?” She’d asked that question more times in a minute than she usually did in a week. Her mind felt as if someone had stirred it with rain-scented fog, making it thick and drowsy, unable to make connections with its usual alacrity.

  “The human heart can forgive a host of evils,” Brandon said with a faint smile. “I’m just not sure yours could go so far as to forgive someone for killing Frank Reichart.” He touched his throat, where even in the darkness bruises were visible. “Not that he didn’t deserve it,” he agreed.

  “He was trying to kill you,” Alisha said thinly.

  “Yeah. I noticed that.”

  “And you didn’t shoot him because of me?” The idea seemed ludicrous. Alisha touched her own throat in sympathy. Brandon let go a puff of laughter that had little humor in it.

  “Yeah,” he repeated. “Although right now, what with you spying on me, I’m not sure you deserved that courtesy.”

  Alisha drew her lower lip into her mouth, accepting the reprimand. Then she straightened, hands on her thighs. Her biceps and stomach protested as she moved, and Brandon hissed at her expression, stepping out onto the balcony. “You’re hurt.”

  “I’ll live. Brandon.” Alisha knotted one fist in the blanket she still had draped over her shoulders. “You shouldn’t have known I was there. I was going to use what you told me in comparison to what I heard to make certain you were trustworthy. I think you understand why.” It took effort to prevent herself from lifting a hand to touch the scar at the back of her neck. The act of stopping the movement telegraphed the desire to do it; Brandon curved his hand at the back of his own neck, lips pressed together tightly.

  “I don’t like it,” he said after a moment.

  “But you understand it.”

  “Yeah. Look.” He stared at her, expression intent without quite being a frown, then walked past her to lean heavily on the railing, looking down at the street below. “I don’t know where you came in, so I’m just going to start from the top. They want me to turn you over to them as proof of my loyalty.” He barked out another humorless laugh. “They did before you showed up and went medieval on their asses, anyway. I don’t know what the hell they’re going to think now.”

  “What were you going to do?” A time-wasting question, Alisha thought. A way to avoid the one she should really ask. Brandon gave her a sharp look.

  “I was going to drug you again and see if they managed to blow your head off this time. I don’t know, Alisha.” Sharpness filled his tone, replacing the sarcasm. “Using me as bait was your plan. I don’t know what I would have done if I had to use you as the price of admission. Used you,” he admitted, “and trusted you to get out of it. Just like I did last time.”

  “I still don’t know if I believe that’s what you really thought last time,” Alisha said quietly, then shook her head. That argument was as fruitless as the question she’d asked. She lifted her chin, watching Brandon’s profile. “Do you have any idea what Reichart was doing there?”

  Brandon glanced at her. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Will I like it less than being used as a trading piece to get you back into the Sicarii?” Alisha tilted her head at the hotel suite, watching her reflection bounce off the glass doors. She looked ghostlike, the tangle of tight curls unrestrained, and making a shadow of her face. “Let’s talk in there. It’s secure.”

  “A lot less.” Brandon followed her into the suite, pulling the doors closed and the drapes over them before he went on. “Reichart was one of my interviewers, Alisha. He’s working for them.”

  Alisha stopped at the end of the couch, arms folded into the blanket as she wet her lips, then swallowed. “One of your interviewers.” Of the scenarios she’d run through in her mind, that hadn’t been one of them. She closed her eyes, holding herself still while the idea and its ramifications sank into her. “You’re sure?” Another useless question. Maybe Greg and Boyer were right. Maybe she genuinely couldn’t see clearly when it came to Reichart. If that was the case, she didn’t belong on this assignment and she needed the time with Dr. Reyes a lot more than she would ever be happy admitting. Alisha wet her lips again, then walked carefully into the suite’s bedroom to replace the folded comforter at the foot of the bed before returning to the living room.

  “He came in after me,” she said then, just barely trusting her voice. “How could he have been one of your interviewers?”

  “Interviewer is a little strong,” Brandon admitted. “He was the one standing around looking bored while they strip-searched me.” He leaned against the suite’s bar, watching the microwave count down as a cup rotated inside it. A package of instant decaffeinated coffee lay behind his hip where he leaned on the counter. More for the warmth than the awakening properties, Alisha thought. She wasn’t tired, either, for all that the small hours of the night were growing larger.

  “Strip-searched,” she said drily. “How about we skip the details of that. I’ll just have to imagine it.” A thread of humor had worked its way into the words, like life returning to her veins. Reichart wasn’t dead. Alisha went into the bedroom, an excuse to move so that her expression couldn’t be seen, and came back with a blouse she shrugged on over her shoulders. It bulged around her biceps where the bandage was knotted, and she didn’t button it, but instead traced her fingers over the cut on her stomach.

  Brandon arched an eyebrow at her, then reached out to pop the microwave open before it beeped. “I want you to know that walking into a Sicarii stronghold with a price on my head isn’t something I’m eager to repeat.”

  “Too bad,” Alisha murmured, but Brandon went on without hearing her, stirring crystals into his hot water.

  “There’re a half-dozen strongholds I know about. I chose the one in Rome because it’s where a woman they call Phoenix works out of most often.” Brandon glanced at her. “She’s an American agent, Alisha. I figured if I could see her, I might walk out of there alive.”

&n
bsp; The words thudded into Alisha’s heart like cannonballs. An American agent. That could explain the itching familiarity the woman’s voice had triggered in Alisha’s mind. A chance encounter, or a meeting once upon a time. “Do you have independent verification of her loyalties?”

  “Through Director Simone, yes. I told Phoenix as much of the truth as I could. That I’d been at Langley, that I was working with you. I’m sorry about that, but it was something they’d be able to verify, and starting out lying seemed like a bad idea.”

  Alisha shook her head minutely. “It doesn’t matter.” It did matter, but she agreed: it was a choice that he’d needed to make. Alisha might well have made the same choice herself. “I understand. Go on.”

  Brandon bent his head over the cup of hot coffee, inhaling the sweet scent without drinking. His hands were wrapped around it, leeching heat into fingers pale with cold. “I don’t know if you’ve been back to the Vatican,” he said after a few long seconds. “To examine other Sicarii records.”

  Alisha spread her hand across the couch cushions, feeling not the nubbly fabric, but instead ancient embossed leather. The memory of scent overwhelmed the richness of coffee for a moment, replacing it with musty pages and dry, dusty halls.

  Below the Vatican’s secret library were other, older, more carefully guarded vaults of treasures. Alisha had only been privy to a single room, where handwritten records kept by second sons consigned to the church traced royal genealogies more thoroughly than any public records had ever imagined. Bastard children, many of them by-blows their royal fathers never dreamed existed, were traced down through generations, father to son and mother to daughter. Some were marked off decades or centuries past, annotations beside the names admitting mistakes in the lineage. Others came down through a thousand years of history, until a single parent had begotten thirty or fifty direct-line descendents. They seemed, for the most part, to concentrate on the oldest child born to the line; anything else, Alisha thought, would soon be overwhelming. Almost all of them were sons of kings or princes. Almost, but not all. Verifying a bastard child carried by a wedded queen was more difficult, but not impossible, and the church was thorough.

  Frank Reichart’s name had been one of the last in a line tracing back to Henry VIII’s youth. It had been his records that Brandon had bribed Alisha’s way into the Sicarii vault in the Vatican to see, his intent to make Reichart’s loyalties clear. Alisha could still feel the parchment beneath her fingertips, tracing out a history that the Sicarii believed meant the divine right to rule still lay in the blood of ordinary men.

  Alisha pulled in a sharp breath, lifting her head. “I tried,” she said. “I didn’t have the pull to get in there again. I didn’t know where to begin.”

  Brandon nodded over his coffee cup, still not drinking. “My family is in there, Alisha. Descended from William of Orange.”

  Alisha smiled faintly. “So why aren’t you king?”

  Brandon returned the smile just as thinly. “Because he died childless, according to any official records. It doesn’t matter. I thought it’d be enough to start with, actually being of Sicarii descent. Wanting to be remembered as more than a computer programmer. Ambition makes it easy to deceive.”

  “Are you really that ambitious?”

  Brandon looked over at her, putting his coffee cup aside, though he kept his fingers looped through the handle. “What if your name was in there, Alisha? Can you tell me the temptation to play God—or at least queen—wouldn’t be there?”

  Alisha snorted. “Me, the royal descendent of what, Brandon? A Greek-Hispanic-Irish-Hawaiian princess? I don’t think they made them that much of a grab bag.”

  “But each one of those cultures had its own royalty,” Brandon pointed out. “And at least two of them have enough ties to the Catholic Church that if there’s royalty in your genes, the Sicarii will have records of it.”

  Alisha shook her head. “Even if they do, so what? Sure, some days I think I could do a better job of ruling the world than most people, but I don’t think any individual’s capable of it, and any situation where you put the government above the laws of men can only benefit the government. I don’t believe in divine right. I can’t believe you do, either.”

  “Mmm. Not as such. I don’t think God intends for certain people to rule above others. But if you have the education, the intelligence, the compassion to rule well, does it matter if you’re put there by a group of madmen?”

  “Yes.” Alisha heard the hard note in her voice and did nothing to try to temper it. “Because you owe them, and you’ll either die defying them—rendering your stance moot—or you’ll be forced to destroy them, which almost certainly makes you no better than they are.” She drew in another sharp breath through flared nostrils and lifted a hand to stop Brandon’s argument. “Not that it’s not a fascinating discussion, but you’re not done with your report. What happened with Reichart?” Double-crossing, scheming, bastardly Reichart. Calling him names didn’t hide her relief that he was still alive. There was still a chance to get answers out of him.

  Not that she’d ever had much luck with that in the past.

  “He told me,” Brandon said over the rage of her internal monologue, “that he hadn’t known he was a Tudor until you told him, during the Attengee mission.”

  “He volunteered that?”

  Brandon frowned at her. “I didn’t have anything else to do while they were stripping me naked and probing me. I asked him what the hell he was doing there.”

  Alisha pulled her mouth long in a fair enough moue and gestured for him to continue. Brandon frowned a moment longer before letting it go and shrugging. “He said he always goes where the money is. I get the impression that’s true.”

  “Heh.” Alisha nodded. “If he’s got one predictability, that’s it.”

  “Yeah. So a mercenary with royal lineage thinks the Sicarii are a sure thing. Is it that much of a surprise, Alisha?”

  “No,” Alisha said quietly. Not a surprise. Just a disappointment.

  “You expect him to be better than he is, don’t you?” Brandon’s question followed her own thought so closely Alisha pulled her shoulders back to keep them from hunching defensively.

  “Hope springs eternal,” she answered. “Even after all these years it’s hard to accept I was so completely wrong about him.” She turned a faint smile on Brandon. “After all, I’m supposed to be a good judge of character.”

  “So how do you judge mine?” Brandon’s voice lowered, his gaze both intent and shy; after only a few seconds it skittered away, as if he was uncertain about hearing Alisha’s appraisal.

  “Poorly,” Alisha said. “I trusted you when I shouldn’t have because I wanted you to be something you weren’t. I wanted to protect your father from what you could be, and that was a mistake. If you earn my trust, Brandon, then you’ll deserve it, but I’m not going to make that mistake with you again.”

  “You make it repeatedly with Reichart.”

  Alisha felt the cords in her neck stand out and waited long seconds before she was able to force a smile. “Everyone has a fatal weakness.”

  “The soft spot in the dragon’s hide,” Brandon half asked. Alisha’s smile softened a little.

  “I’m not Smaug, Brandon. And you’re not Bard, so don’t get any bright ideas.”

  “Bard killed the dragon, Alisha. That’s not what I’m after.” Brandon’s expression shadowed and he picked up his coffee cup, leaving the counter behind to approach the couch. “Alisha…”

  “Whatever you’re going to say, Brandon, don’t,” Alisha said, tone flat. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Brandon gave her a very thin smile and spoke sotto voce. “There’s someone on the balcony.”

  The windows exploded inward.

  Chapter 9

  Concussive force slammed into Alisha’s back, knocking her off the couch and sending her flying across the living room floor. Shattered glass rained down, the thick drapes torn and shredded with the force
of the blast. There was nothing in her ears but ringing pressure, no way to pinpoint anyone’s location. Brandon had disappeared from her line of sight. There were wood splinters in her palms and hot coffee cooled rapidly as it dripped down her face. Her vision had gone wrong, unable to pick out details in the aftermath of the explosion. Alisha lifted her head, feeling the muscles of her neck protest with pain and stiffness that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

  One glass panel in the curving hotel bar in front of her was still intact. It reflected the suite behind her in shambles, furniture and scraps scattered everywhere. A smoldering, stinking fire rose from the arm of the couch, making one thing evident: there was nothing wrong with her vision. The lights had been blown out, leaving the tiny fires scattered around the room and the rain-dampened streetlights from below as the only source of lighting in the darkness.

  Alisha turned her head very slowly, looking over her shoulder toward what had once been the balcony doors. There was no longer a balcony, wind whipping the remains of the drapes in silent snaps. No one, as yet, had entered through the gaping hole in the building’s side. Seven seconds since the explosion. She didn’t remember beginning the count, the first numbers lost to her unconscious mind, but more than a decade of training told her to trust the internal chronometer. If the blast itself was meant to kill, there might not be a follow-up team to make sure the job was done. Nine seconds.

  Alisha planted her hands against the floor, drew herself into a somersault and rolled behind the bar at the tenth second.

  The snap of glass breaking came through the ringing in her ears, a single warning sound. The follow-up team. Ten seconds after detonation. It was when she would have come in, had it been her gig. Alisha felt the small of her back, as if the gun she knew lay in the bedroom might somehow have materialized there. Her shirt was torn beyond recognition, and without thinking Alisha stripped it off, winding it around one fist as she considered her options. Time was slow, the seconds counting off in her head seeming very far apart.