“Ah, the doctors,” he said with a liquid shrug that showed the same grace as offering up the napkin had. “They think my heart is strained, my knees are bad, and they make me eat only fish and vegetables. They take the joy out of life, little bird. Do not go visit the doctors.”
Alisha laughed, then grimaced as her injuries protested. “Only when I have no choice,” she promised. Jon’s expression went wise, though his smile never faded.
“Perhaps last night you had no choice, hmm? There are terrorist bombings in my city, and the next morning my little bird arrives at the roost to speak with me. I think it is not a coincidence, hmm?”
“You think correctly,” Alisha admitted.
“You want to know who sets explosives off in hotels?”
“I think I know.” Alisha hesitated, eyebrows lifted. “If you have evidence to the contrary I’d be glad to hear it.”
Mirth spilled through Jon’s eyes. “A businessman does not offer up such information for free, little bird. And if it is not what you come seeking, perhaps it is not what you wish to pay the price for. If not this, then why are you here?”
Alisha drummed her fingers on the table twice, then looked up. “I need to know where Frank Reichart is staying.”
“You would not like it if I told Frank Reichart where you were staying,” Jon said, mock-severely. “This is no lovers’ spat, hmm?” His eyes narrowed, smile becoming sly. “Ah, little bird, you seek to fly beyond your cage bars, I see it now. This is why I have the pleasure of your company, and not some other fortunate fellow. Mere money will not do in this case, Alisha.”
Alisha’s chin came up, as much in surprise at the use of her real name as in preparation for negotiations. “You’re right. I’m walking a thin line.” She glanced over her shoulder at her backpack, half guilty. It was well past an hour since she’d spoken to Greg, but she’d turned the phone off, making it impossible for him to reach her. Jon saw the glance and his smile grew ever more sly.
“I think perhaps you are off the line and searching for it again, little bird.”
“No.” Alisha slid down a few inches in her chair, then winced and straightened again. There was no part of her that didn’t ache, except the ones that actively hurt. “I know exactly where it is.”
“Out of reach?”
“No,” Alisha said again. “But let’s say I’m not stretching for it, either.”
Some of Jon’s smile faded away, leaving crinkles at the corners of his eyes that could have been joy or concern. “Things have changed since last we talked, I see.”
“They have.” Alisha shifted in her seat, aware the small movement betrayed discomfort. She was oddly unconcerned about that. What she knew of Jon tied him directly to Europe’s underworld, where he traded in information like it was cash. Sometimes it proved to be. He was a wealthy man, known for trafficking on both sides of the law, and willing to take money from either. That he survived playing the game was testimony to his skill.
And, no doubt, testimony to blackmail files on anyone who might conceivably damage him. But she trusted him enough to be fond of the nickname he’d given her, and to be unworried about showing small weaknesses in front of him. It was partly because he never lied about what he was or what he did. It was also that she had no doubt he could ferret out any secrets she wanted to keep hidden, anyway, and so playing her hand close to her chest seemed like a waste of energy around the enormous information broker.
“You will tell me how things have changed,” Jon said abruptly, breaking up her thoughts. She frowned at him and he waved a hand, graceful large movement. “Not now. I see that it weighs too heavily on you now to speak of it. But someday, little bird, I will ask and you will tell me. You will tell me everything. And for this, I will find your former lover for you. Do we have an agreement, little bird?”
“I’m in a hurry, Jon.”
He fluttered his fingers again, reminiscent of the little bird that he called her. “By noon, pushy child. Three hours and you will have your lover. If we have an agreement.”
“Why do you want to know?” The question was purely curiosity. Jon tilted his head, almost a bow of reverence.
“Because, little bird, information is priceless.” The answer meant nothing, but from this man, it might also mean everything. Alisha held her breath a moment, then nodded her head in return.
“We have a deal.”
Alisha pulled the cell phone out of her hip pocket, flipping it open without turning it on again. The backpack Simone’s people had given her was abandoned in the café under the reluctant gaze of the owner, whose preference was to fail to see Jon and his business associates. A handful of euros had purchased new clothes when the shops opened, from a do-rag to tuck her hair beneath to cheap tennies that she could run in, which was all that mattered. The T-shirt was larger and more shapeless than she liked them, but it didn’t brush the slice on her stomach, which had begun to throb and itch. It took conscious effort not to scratch at it, and so the jeans she bought were low-cut enough to barely stay on her hips, which kept them from scraping at the lower end of the cut.
The clothes she’d been given were stuffed into the unlocked trunk of a rental car, one that Alisha hoped would drive out of the city. She hadn’t found a surveillance device anywhere in the clothing, but it wasn’t paranoia if they were really out to get you.
So long as the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, she was in the clear. Turning the phone on, finding whatever message had been left, would compromise that freedom. Might compromise it, she corrected herself. Boyer might give her the go-ahead to continue the mission.
Might. Alisha folded the phone closed again, and slipped into a bakery to get another cup of coffee and a biscotti. The baker’s wife clucked at her, said she was too skinny, and double-dipped the biscotti in chocolate before handing it over. Alisha grinned her thanks and retreated to a table in a dim corner of the bakery to eat and think.
Her hand itched for a fountain pen and the thick parchment paper she used to write her journals on. There was no point in hunting the materials down; she never wrote the chronicles until after a mission was complete. Still, the impulse was there as a way to clear her thoughts.
After a mission was complete. Alisha stirred the biscotti into the coffee, watching the wall opposite her without seeing it. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it, Leesh? She wasn’t sure it made much difference what the phone message said. A message from Shrödinger’s cat, she thought with a quick smile. It neither confirmed nor denied her permission to complete the mission until it was listened to.
Going renegade was an ugly thought. She’d made a play at it a year earlier, to draw the Sicarii into an auction for the Attengee drones. A surprising number of people, even her own handler, had believed it was possible she’d really done so. Alisha shook her head, still watching the wall.
Her own self-perception was that she was a rule follower. In a decade of working for the Company, she’d been largely content to not always understand the bigger picture. It wasn’t her preference, but she’d long since accepted that working for the greater good often had to be done on a need-to-know basis. She was pleased when she did know what the bigger picture was, and able to trust that her superiors were making the right choices when she didn’t know.
Discovering the Sicarii and both Greg and Brandon Parker’s involvement with them, no matter how whitewashed it now appeared, had shattered much of that trust. Not necessarily because of the Parkers themselves, Alisha realized, though that was unquestionably a part of it. More, though, was that the existence of the Sicarii put a spin on the clandestine world that went outside the boundaries of what she’d known. Governments, in her experience, were involved in the world of espionage. Even known organizations like the Mafia were easy to grasp in that picture. But a group as silent as the Sicarii, whose purpose was to yank the world back into an era of god-kings and divine right, threw what she knew out of perspective. Profiteering was one thing. World domi
nation was something else, and it unsettled her. If Frank Reichart was working toward that end, she needed to do more than just accept that. For her own sense of well-being, she had to find a way to stop it. Even if it meant going against direct orders.
The chocolate had all melted off the biscotti. Alisha took a bite of the coffee-laden bread, catching a drip before it fell to stain her new T-shirt. It didn’t matter what Boyer had decided. She was going after Reichart.
Chapter 11
“The hotel security is pssht.” A graceful wave of Jon’s big hand dismissed it. “He is like you, little bird. Only when it is necessary does he step into the bright lights of expensive surroundings. He does not wish to be noticed or admired, hmm? Only forgotten. Like you,” the enormous man repeated. Alisha shook her head.
“If he’s like me it’s because we’re in the same business, Jon. Nothing more.”
“Mmph.” Jon’s black-eyed gaze was calculating, though he dismissed the conversation again with another wave of his fingers. “There is his own surveillance in his room. A sound recorder, not visual. Very sensitive.”
“I didn’t ask for this much detail, Jon,” Alisha said warily. “Only where he was staying.”
Secrets came into the smile that rarely faded from the big man’s face. “But someday you will give me many details,” he replied. “I do not like to be beholden to.”
Alisha shook her head again. “I don’t understand why you’re interested.”
“Because, little bird. There are no greater stories than love stories.”
“This isn’t a love story,” Alisha said, and repeated it now, under her breath, as she slid a pick into the lock on Reichart’s door and heard the tumblers fall open. She pushed the door open, lifting a tape recorder from which the maid’s voice called, “Room service,” in Italian. The recording had taken only a moment to make, and the maid hadn’t yet come through Reichart’s room. She wasn’t meant to at all; his room was marked on her hotel map as one that wasn’t to be cleaned until the guest had checked out. The woman would probably get in trouble, for which Alisha felt badly.
But not badly enough to cease operations. Alisha crossed the room to the window in a few quick steps, dropping a white-noise generator there. It sounded surprisingly like a vacuum cleaner, and would reverberate off the glass panes, making any sound that might cut through it that much harder to distinguish. Early-afternoon sunlight bounced off the fire escape outside the window, making Alisha blink as she turned away.
There was no chance the black box she wanted would be in Reichart’s room. It would be stored somewhere safe, off-site, assuming he hadn’t yet made the drop that would deliver it to whoever was paying him.
And that, above all, was what Alisha wanted to know. Cut off the snake’s head, she thought with grim determination, and crouched beside the bedside table, rifling through newspapers there with a quick, light touch. Different American papers, in order of printing thickness. It was one of Reichart’s quirks, borderline obsessive-compulsive behavior. He would keep them for weeks, turning them to the crossword pages and folding back the corners until a full quarter of the page was hidden. The habit had driven Alisha crazy. Folding the pages back usually hid half the clues, and sometimes half the puzzle, as well. She, every bit as obsessively, would fold the pages back the way they belonged in a game of endless one-upmanship.
It was as well they’d broken up. They’d be divorced by now, or one of them would’ve killed the other. Alisha overrode the impulse to rub the surgically hidden scar beneath her collarbone, and took a too deep breath, pushing away the memory of a bullet knocking her askew. Breaking up was such an innocuous phrase, disguising a world of truths.
A pair of gray sleeping shorts Alisha was certain Reichart had never worn lay tucked neatly beneath the pillow. The man was a furnace, throwing off covers until only in the coldest nights did he sleep beneath more than a sheet. Alisha had woken up from overheated nightmares more than once, buried under an entire bed’s worth of blankets. But keeping a pair of shorts on hand meant that even in the worst circumstances, he’d be able to grab at least one article of clothing before bailing out the window. At night, a gun would sleep there, as well; Alisha’s trained eye could see faint impressions of the weapon in the cotton fabric of the shorts, though most people would never recognize it.
Several changes of clothes hung in the closet, denim and silk, a pair or two of good slacks and some highly polished leather shoes. The very picture of a metrosexual man’s wardrobe, Alisha thought, though the soft thigh-length black leather jacket that Reichart favored wasn’t there. She cast a brief grin at his belongings. To her, the tidy hanging and the neat row of socks in the dresser drawer drew a picture of a man who wanted certain assumptions to be drawn. And the picture drawn wasn’t necessarily an inaccurate one. Reichart was a clotheshorse, as vain about his appearance as any woman Alisha had ever known. But the very materials his clothes were made of suggested a softness about the man that was dangerously deceptive. Like pitching a panther as a house pet on its sleek black fur and rumbling purr, without mentioning the hidden tooth and claw.
Alisha finished her circuit of the room and came to lean against a small desk opposite the bed. Nothing more in the room than he might want to be found. Of course not. It would be too easy if there was a computer with an open file saying, “Here be dragons, please come visit.” She smiled faintly at her own whimsy, gaze returning to the tidy stack of newspapers. It was a peculiar habit for Reichart to allow himself to keep, seeming like a single admission of neuroses that a mercenary in the spy game couldn’t afford.
The thought hung in her mind, almost visible words, the rest of the world detaching from the idea. Alisha inhaled and held it, studying the concept sideways, afraid if she put too much direct thought behind it, it would evaporate. Frank Reichart was not a man to allow himself follies like the collection of old newspapers for their crossword puzzles.
Alisha crossed the room without knowing she’d done it, going through the papers again, memorizing the dates, editions and periodical titles. These ones scattered back only a week, a drop compared to some of the collections she’d seen him keep. Two copies of the Seattle Times, one from the previous Monday and one from the day before. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minneapolis Star Tribune; Sacramento, Boston. Alisha restacked the papers, straightening the edges, and reached for her white noise generator.
The silence as it shut down hit the small bones of her ears, raising hairs on her arms and making her overly aware of the city sounds beneath her and voices in the hotel’s hallway. Greetings exchanged, the maid’s thin, polite voice rising and falling with what Alisha imagined was a nod that bordered on a curtsey, and then a man’s response, little more than an acknowledging grunt.
There wasn’t enough clarity to be certain of the male voice, but alarm shot through Alisha’s body, turning her fingertips cold and raising more goose bumps. The window locked from the inside; there was nothing she could do to fix that in the moments she had. She turned the noise generator back on, feeling static wash over her as it began to hiss, and popped the lock open. The window opened with more ease than she’d expected, for which she was grateful as she rolled out onto the fire escape and slid the pane shut behind her. The scent of rusty, sun-heated metal filled her nose as she ran a dozen steps to the nearest ladder and scrambled up, pulling a face at herself. It drove her crazy when the fleeing heroes in movies ran for the rooftops instead of the streets, but it was human nature to look down first. If it’d been Reichart approaching his room, the extra seconds might be all she needed to escape unnoticed.
She pulled herself over the edge of the roof moments later, the punctured muscle in her right biceps protesting. Alisha held her stomach taut, trying not to drag it over the building’s edge, then rolled onto her back, heedless of smearing dirt on her new T-shirt and jeans. She could feel blood gathering beneath the bandage on her arm, though the shallow slice on her belly didn’t seem to have reopened. “Yo
u know how to have a good time, Leesh,” she muttered.
A cautious peek over the building’s edge assured her that the rust on the fire escape hadn’t been disturbed by her passing. She drew back a few centimeters, still watching as a window banged open beneath her and Reichart poked his head out. Alisha retreated, certain he hadn’t seen her, and ran on tiptoe to the building-access door on the roof. The lock was older than she was and came open with an easy click. A moment later the door shut quietly behind her, leaving no trace of her passage across the building top.
Less than an hour later, Alisha elbowed her way into her own small hotel room and dumped newspapers and a thick, squat book onto its desk. The room was paid for in cash and the clerk was discreet enough that he hadn’t required identification, exactly what she wanted. She’d paid for a full night, and taken the clerk’s faint smile as acknowledgment that like most of the business’s patrons, it would be pretended she actually required the room for more than an hour or two’s service. Assuming no undue pressure, she had a reasonable alibi for the next twenty-four hours.
The cell phone had fallen out of the bag of papers and lay next to her elbow, accusingly silent. Alisha pressed her lips together, then pushed it aside, letting it thud back into the canvas tote. It wasn’t breaking rules until she knew what the decision had been, she reminded herself. She would call in soon. As soon as she’d gone through the papers. It was a promise to herself, but Alisha didn’t know if she would keep it.
She pushed a small lamp to the back of the desk so she could open the papers to the puzzle pages. Black-and-white squares and cryptic clues looked up at her, making her lift her shoulders and put her teeth together. Muscle knotted in her neck, bringing with it the memory of grumpy headaches in elementary and junior high school whenever “fun” extra credit like crosswords was handed out. Even now, twenty years later, the prospect of struggling with wordplays and inside jokes made her grind her teeth with preemptive frustration.
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