She would fold the pages back later. Flipping back and forth to see the clues she’d folded under would be infuriating, and she was already annoyed. Reichart had come into their relationship with the crossword habit already, Alisha reminded herself. He couldn’t have chosen crosswords because she hated them. She sat down heavily, breaking the binding on the fat cheat book she’d bought along with the newspapers, and switched the lamp on. Yellow light made a weak flood over the papers.
There were patterns she remembered, numbers that Reichart was superstitious about. No, not necessarily superstitious; that had been her word. She’d teased him for only half filling out the crosswords, always starting with forty-two, whether it was down or across. “It’s the answer to everything,” he’d said once, with the rakish grin that got him both in and out of trouble with equal ease. There were numbers he liked because they carried cultural superstitions: thirteen, four, three; others because they were snippets of dates that were important to him. Nothing so obvious as his own birthday, but she’d watched him fill out three lines in a row more than once, the hexadecimal version of her own birthday. Another series of six numbers was, she thought, his mother’s birthday. That had delighted her, though she’d never teased him with mama’s boy, much as she’d wanted to. She scribbled letters into boxes for all the numbers she could remember, then went back and began again, using the cheat book to try to figure out the jokes and puns written into the puzzle.
Not until golden sunlight pierced the corner of her eye did she realize she hadn’t moved from the table in hours. Straightening made her spine protest, and a familiar childhood headache took up residence in the back of her neck, tendrils of pain reaching toward the top of her skull. Most of the squares were filled, though she’d written the atomic weight of boron down as being “fat” and no longer cared enough to try to correct it.
She sank into a yoga pose, twisting her torso and spreading her arms, feeling muscle stretch and loosen, then rolled onto her hands and knees to arch her back dramatically in a cat pose. The worst effects of the headache receded as she came to her feet again, stretching into a sun salutation. She’d begun the practice of yoga as a teenager, and now couldn’t imagine doing her job without having its ancient fundaments to strengthen and relax her body. She felt more centered, and even the idea of reapproaching the crossword puzzles didn’t annoy her as much. She returned to the desk, smiling wryly at herself as she began folding the crossword pages back. You should have done asana before starting, Leesh.
For a few seconds, the folded-back crosswords looked like nothing more than that, newspapers with bent pages. Alisha unfocused her eyes, studying them without real focus, and suddenly the pattern became visible. She switched the papers around, puzzlelike, until three sets of two fit together, folded-back pages making a string of letters that ran from one page to another, utter gibberish. She sat down again and began copying out the letters in a hurried scrawl, her mind still only half engaged with the task. Focusing too fixedly on what she was doing would lose her the ability to do so, like walking on a high wire. It required all of her concentration and none of it at the same time; a slip was too deadly to contemplate.
There was no sense to the letters she wrote out. Alisha’s mind floated as she looked down at them, a sure sign that blood sugar was low and she needed food. Gibberish; encoded. Or sheer nonsense, she warned herself, the thought feeling soft and distant. She might have made a mountain out of a molehill, seeing something in Reichart’s behavior that wasn’t there.
One letter replaced for another. It was a simple enough code, in view of such things; its cleverness was in breaking it up across multiple crosswords in multiple publications. Reichart’s newspaper habit was too thorough to easily pick out the ones that might be carrying instructions or notes for him. Signal hidden in the noise, Alisha thought. As much as she didn’t like crosswords, she knew people who enjoyed the wordplays enough to build them. The prospect of adding in hidden messages like these must have thrilled the faceless creators behind Reichart’s communications.
The usual way to break this code was to take the most ubiquitous letter and assume it was E and work from there. Alisha rewrote her lines of letters, substituting and notating until her fingers were tired and cramped from writing. The dim pool of yellow illumination over the desk was the only light in the room, the sun long since set. Alisha looked up once, cracking her neck as she glanced to the ceiling. There was no overhead light in the cheap room, and the darkness seemed oppressive. She needed food. Alisha sighed and sank down into her chair, pressing her fingertips against her eyes tiredly. The crosswords were still encoded, even if she had the letters right. “You’re out of your mind, Leesh.” Her voice croaked, warning that she hadn’t so much as had a drink of water in hours, and she got to her feet wearily, willing to trust the hotel water over being parched.
Leesh. The nickname hung in her mind, ringing hollowly as she turned back to the string of letters without having gotten her water. She counted out eight letters, writing the M she met there on a new piece of paper, and scratching it off the list. Five letters, twice each from the beginning as she scratched more out, netted her E E, and nineteen brought her a T. Another T at the eighth letter in. Alisha sat down again, beginning the count over and writing more quickly, her need for water forgotten.
Tyler. No fate. Les Deux Magots. Two seven ten three.
Alisha stared at the deciphered letters, thought and body both gone still and cold with surprise. The last snippet of conversation she’d held with the fat information broker came back to her, his words sounding as clearly in her mind as if he stood beside her, speaking them now.
“We do the things we do for fear, for money,” Jon had said, and then his voice had gone gentle. “But most of all, we do them for love. All stories are love stories, little bird.”
Alisha took the orders that her nickname broke and left the hotel room, dizzy with success and a desperate need for food.
Chapter 12
Alisha turned her phone on as she left the hotel room, grimacing as the display flooded with announcements of missed calls and messages. She ignored them and thumbed in a number, gaze focused down the street as she waited for the pickup.
After several rings a woman’s voice answered with a groan. “This better be good. I’m leaving work in two minutes, and I’ve got a hot date waiting.” The vowels were slightly stretched out, remnants of an Upper Michigan accent.
Alisha turned her wrist up before remembering she’d abandoned her watch along with the backpack of equipment Director Simone had provided for her, and grinned at the street. “It’s me, E. Hot date? You? I thought you were procreating strictly by way of Stanford’s sperm lab.”
“Procreating’s one thing. Sex is something else entirely. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’ll be in if I don’t report you calling me? Man, if you’re not dead, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Ali. Everybody’s in a froth.” Her voice dropped, sly confidentiality slipping into it. “You got something I could get in trouble for?”
“Only if you get caught,” Alisha promised, and the woman on the other end laughed.
“I never get caught. That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Tell me what’s going on, Ali. And seriously, if you don’t have a real good reason for me not to, I’m gonna have to report this call to Boyer. He’s been purple all day, and that’s not easy for a man of his complexion.”
“I swear to God I’m gonna call him as soon as I’m off the phone with you,” Alisha said.
“Promise?”
Alisha took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Do you have your fingers crossed behind your back?”
Alisha laughed. “No.” She looked down at her free hand to be sure, and repeated, “No. Look, E, I cracked a code and—”
“That’s my job!” Protest came through the line loud and clear, making Alisha pull the phone away from her ear a little. “What’re you doing, horning in on my territory?”
“As
if I possibly could, Erika. My brain is little and smooth compared to yours, and I know it.”
“Okay.” The technical geek sounded mollified, and Alisha grinned again. Erika had left high school at fourteen and finished a master’s in mathematics by twenty-one, with what she had once airily referred to as “a year or two of headspace,” between the degrees. She’d been recruited to the CIA even younger than Alisha herself, though Alisha had a year’s seniority on her. “Talk fast, Ali. The guy I’m meeting is hot, H-A-W-T hot. Like Feynman’s brain in Brad Pitt’s body.”
“I think I’ve figured out how to trace Frank Reichart’s activities over the last several years,” Alisha said.
“Shit,” Erika said after long seconds of dead silence. “Call me back in five minutes.”
The first message was from Boyer himself, his deep voice apologetic. “I’m sorry, Alisha. I can’t overrule the European director’s decision to move you out of her arena. This isn’t a hill to die on. We’ll expect you in the morning for debriefing, and you’ve got a 2:00 p.m. appointment with Dr. Reyes.”
Alisha pulled her hand over her mouth, eyes closed as she deleted the message and listened to the next one. Greg, this time, sounding somewhere between concerned and angry. As the messages went on, the concern disappeared, leaving only anger. The last one was from Boyer again, his voice so calm it bespoke far more danger than Greg’s increasingly infuriated tones. Alisha folded the phone shut for a few long moments, then lifted her chin and opened it again to place another call.
“You didn’t call him, did you.”
“They gave you the psychic powers to go with all the brain wrinkles?” Alisha asked. She’d stopped on a stretch of mostly deserted street, and now sank down against a cool building wall. Not the wisest action for a woman alone at two in the morning, she thought wearily, but if someone wanted to pick a fight, she wouldn’t mind the release. Her head felt heavy, the headache returning just enough to be faintly bothersome, and she propped an elbow on her knees, forehead planted against the heel of her hand. “No. I didn’t call him.” A few strands of curling hair fell through her fingers, and she rubbed her scalp, trying to worry the headache away.
“And you want me to not tell that you called me.”
Alisha snorted a faint laugh. “Don’t I always?”
“Yeah, you’re very consistent, you know?” The last words looped upward, trace Yooper accent returning.
“So are you,” Alisha said. “You just blew off an H-A-W-T date for me.”
“Don’t remind me. Tell me about Reichart instead.”
“You know how I used to bitch about his crosswords?”
“Yeah. Endlessly. I always thought if that was the worst thing you had to fight about, you guys would probably make it.” Alisha could hear Erika’s shrug. “’Course, then he shot you, so what do I know. What about them?”
Alisha thudded her head back against the wall, looking up at the autumn stars that glittered above the city. “I should’ve realized it wasn’t just a quirk.”
“Because you got the psychic powers to go along with the studly arms,” Erika said. “Spit it out, Ali.”
“It’s where he gets his orders from. At least some of them. The code’s a simple scramble, but it’s cut across, I don’t know, at least two papers at any given time. The one I broke was across six. The folds line up to make letter strings and then it’s a replacement followed by taking the twelfth, fifth, fifth, nineteenth and eighth letters in repeating sequence until you’ve got the orders.”
“And how the hell did you figure that out?” Erika sounded admiring, even envious. “What’d you get?”
“A weird phrase, no fate. I figure maybe run a crosscheck on our surveillance files, see if anything comes of it.”
“What else did you get?”
Alisha pulled a quick smile at the phone. “Nothing I’m telling you about.” A name, she answered silently. A date, and a place.
“Alisha.” Warning came into Erika’s voice. “Why not?”
“Because you’d have to report it to Boyer,” Alisha said with a shrug. “And this one’s mine, E.”
“You know you’re insane,” Erika said. Alisha let go another half-snorted laugh.
“Is that Dr. Reyes’s professional opinion, or just your two cents?”
“Sweetheart, I don’t need a shrink to tell me that you field agents are nuts. But when it comes to Reichart, you might just have a short circuit somewhere.”
“I can live with that,” Alisha said.
“Can you?”
“I’m going to have to.” Because she’d promised herself that she would once and for all understand the secrets that Frank Reichart and the Sicarii shared. Alisha had let that promise go for too long, falling back into habit over the past fifteen months. Now she felt she was paying for her slack, caught up a second time in a layer of espionage that no one else wanted her to pursue. “Are you going to do this for me, E?”
“Dude, I just blew off a god among men because you said a couple magic words. Do you really think I’m gonna say no now?”
Alisha gave the phone a weak smile. “Thanks, Erika.”
“Call me back in…what time is it? Ten. Six hours. Most of the crew’s gone home, I’ve got all the processing power I need. I should have your boy’s activities tied up with a red bow by four. And, hey, Alisha?”
“Yeah?”
“When I get fired, I’m coming to live in your apartment.”
“That’s okay.” Alisha climbed to her feet, watching the street. “I’m never there anyway.” She hung up the phone, wishing briefly that there was more activity in this small hour of the morning. Anything that would give her the opportunity to move instead of think. A gang fight would be nice, she thought wryly. As long as there weren’t more than five or so of them, it’d be just the exercise she wanted.
And it would no doubt attract official attention, which she couldn’t afford. Alisha turned the phone off and dropped it in a garbage can, then hailed a cab to take her away from the silent Roman streets.
Even in the small hours there were people filtering through the train station, heads ducked and shoulders lifted as they each focused on their own thoughts and destinations. Alisha paid for a ticket to Paris in cash, idly tucking a curl beneath the bandanna she’d folded over her head. A few hours and she would be—what? she wondered. Free? Untraced, at least, and in her world the two were as close to one another as they could be.
The man behind her in line was jostled forward by a tired-looking fat woman whose luggage seemed to have a mind of its own. The man caught Alisha’s sleeve to regain his balance, then murmured, “Erika says sorry,” in English.
Alisha heard her heartbeats counting off as she waited for the words to make sense. Then alarm contracted in her belly, shooting adrenaline through her system and sending a shard of pain through the cut.
The man gave her an apologetic smile. “There’s no point in making a fuss,” he said softly, still in English. Alisha’s thighs clenched, preparation for a break, but there were other casual passengers standing around her. Casual to an untrained eye, at least: to Alisha’s gaze there was a painfully recognizable readiness to their stances. They busied themselves with reading newspapers and searching train times, but they were all attuned to her presence and actions.
Six, no, eight of them, the closest five men, to counteract the superior upper-body strength she had. The outer three were women, taller and leaner than Alisha herself; runners, she thought distantly. In case she made it past the muscle. It was flattering, in a peculiar way, though she knew it wouldn’t take eight agents to bring her down. It only took that many to assure she came quietly.
Alisha looked down at her train ticket and gave a tight smile. “I guess I wanted a vacation anyway.”
“So what are you thinking about? I’m sure my diplomas can’t have you that enthralled.” Peggy Reyes spoke from the door, where she’d stood for over a minute, watching the unmoving Alisha. Ninety-three seconds
, to be exact, Alisha’s internal chronometer supplied silently. She’d heard the doctor come into the room and close the door, the latch clicking even though there’d been no sound of the door settling into its frame. Alisha hadn’t intended to play a game of waiting it out, but wasn’t eager to begin a conversation, either. She turned her head slightly when Reyes spoke, resenting the action even as she made it. She didn’t want to give the psychoanalyst anything, not even so much as an acknowledgment.
Nor was she interested in drawing this out, though. The flight back to the States had been a quiet one, most of the agents dispersed once Alisha was safely on the plane. She might have disabled the pilot and stolen the plane, or simply gotten a parachute and jumped for her life, but the fire was gone from her belly. She didn’t sleep, only sat at a window and watched the clouds or the flat gray ocean five miles below, thought nothing more than a distant companion. She’d played her hand and lost; it was how the game went. There was no call to be rude or violent with the agent sent to bring her back. Passive-aggressiveness was an ugly trait, and Alisha had no desire to indulge in it.
Planning, though, she whispered in the very core of her, and then put the thought away so she could respond to Reyes without distraction.
“Cristina Lamken.” Alisha let her shoulders rise and fall as she spoke the name, and heard Reyes’s sound of surprise as the doctor went to sit down.
“Your old partner. That’s not what I expected you to say. What brings her to mind?”
“My best friend turning me in, I expect,” Alisha said with another shrug. There was a high-gloss reflection of herself in the glass covering Reyes’s diplomas. Too much light washed out her features, turning her into a faceless ghost that moved fluidly without giving anything of herself away.
The Firebird Deception Page 10