Brandon blanched so badly Alisha thought he might pass out, his gaze openly shocked and accusing, though Alisha couldn’t tell who the accusation was for. “Dead? How? What happened?”
“A car bomb this morning,” Reichart said. “In downtown Paris. We’re looking into who knew he’d be here.”
Narrowness flitted across Simone’s eyes and disappeared again. “The Agency will find the responsible parties and deal with them, Mr. Reichart. You have no business here.”
Reichart’s tone went cool and clipped as he regarded the older woman. “I’ll decide what is and isn’t my business.” There were undercurrents to his words, telling of more emotional ties to the dead CIA director than Alisha would have imagined he’d permit himself in mixed company.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Brandon said in a thin voice. “This isn’t how it was supposed to go.”
Sudden fury shot through Alisha, making her face hot and her hands tingle with anger. “Is it some kind of surprise to you, Brandon? After you used me to draw Boyer out fifteen months ago?” The anger was compounded by embarrassment, a link that Alisha herself hadn’t seen clearly until she spoke. “The Sicarii have been gunning for him for years. Is that why you let us go? You knew I’d end up in contact with him somehow.” And she had, despite her best attempts not to. Send no one, she’d told Erika, but Erika’s protestation had been valid: how could she have stopped Boyer, her superior, from doing what he wanted? Alisha stalked forward, ready to take any kind of action that would relieve the rage that burned through her. “You son of a bitch.”
“Alisha, I never wanted—”
Alisha threw a punch that Reichart would have blocked, smashing her leather-wrapped fist into Brandon’s teeth. He coughed and gagged, staggering backward with a hand cupped over his mouth, face full of wounded acceptance of her censure. His sheer pathos only served to infuriate Alisha further. It was Reichart’s touch on her shoulder that stopped her from acting on her anger again, and he did block the second frustrated, furious punch she threw. “Leesh,” he said, so quietly she thought no one else could hear. She closed her eyes briefly and inhaled a sharp breath, then lifted her chin in a reversed nod.
“I’m all right. I’m fine.” Not even she believed the words, but they gave her a semblance of control.
“She’s your problem now, Parker,” Simone muttered in the distance. “You deal with her. I don’t care how much self-righteous fury she’s riding. I don’t want a loose cannon like that in operation on my field.”
“She’s had a shock, Susan,” Greg answered. Alisha looked their way, staring at the two of them as Greg passed a hand through his hair in a gesture of weary unhappiness. “We all have. Alisha.” He turned toward her, fingers spread in appeasement. “You’re sure he’s dead?”
Alisha wet her lips, taking a moment before she was confident of her voice’s steadiness. Her elbow pressed against the black box’s weight in her coat’s inner pocket, and she nodded. “He had the—”
The double doors at the far end of the warehouse hummed and rolled open, rumbling and drowning out Alisha’s explanation about the box. She turned, squinting against bright sunlight to watch half a dozen forms slowly detach themselves from the brilliance and become discernible.
Most were easy: the nauseatingly smooth gait of the Attengee drones came forward, flanking a human figure and bringing up the figure’s rear. Above them, a few seconds later, came two Firebirds, hovering at a walking pace—so slowly Alisha could hardly believe they maintained altitude. The human, a woman from the size of her frame, walked comfortably among the drones.
“Who the hell,” she breathed. Brandon, closest to her, lifted his chin.
“Phoenix.”
The doors began rumbling closed, pinching off daylight behind the woman and the prototypes. Alisha passed a hand over her eyes, brushing away tears from looking into the brightness. Clarity of vision returned as she dropped her hand, still squinting toward the approaching parade.
Pale blond hair, soft and bright in the sunlight that spilled through high warehouse windows. The veiled woman from the cathedral, Alisha thought, though she no longer wore a veil. Slender, taller than Alisha by several inches, her strides long and purposeful. Heels clipped on concrete in a cadence that lifted hairs on Alisha’s arms. Footsteps, she thought, were not the kind of thing she expected to recognize.
Especially when she hadn’t heard that particular stride in eight years.
Especially when the woman making them was supposed to be dead.
Cristina Lamken stepped out of daylight’s glow and into shadow, smiling as her features were thrown into relief. “Hello, Alisha. It’s been a long time.”
Chapter 29
“That skirt you were wearing at the church must’ve been pencil-thin,” Alisha heard herself saying. “I didn’t recognize your footsteps then.” She marveled at the casualness of her own voice, throwaway words no more than meaningless sounds over the turmoil that churned her stomach. So many questions boiled over she couldn’t formulate any of them silently, much less aloud.
Cristina glanced down at the slacks she wore, and up again with another smile. Dazzling smile, Alisha thought; Cristina had always been pretty, but her smile lit her up from within. “I had to take very short steps,” she admitted. “I didn’t know you’d been there. Seeing you at the hotel was a shock.”
“Imagine how I felt,” Alisha said. She felt high flutiness trying to break through at the back of her throat, but her voice remained steady. There was pressure at the small of her back, one of the guns she carried suddenly feeling heavy there. The termination orders had never been rescinded. Alisha’s palms ached with the impulse to pull the weapon and shoot, even though she knew she would never do it. There would never be answers if she did, but for one brief, violent moment she reveled in the vicarious satisfaction of the idea. Vengeance for a decade of lies in a single shot: it wasn’t a pretty part of herself to acknowledge, but for a few seconds it consumed her. Rage, confusion, betrayal; too many emotions to name cramped her stomach, making her feel she could spit bile.
Worst, worst of all, were the expressions of those around her. Greg. Brandon. Even, most cruelly, Reichart. None of them were surprised. Unhappy, tired, tense, yes: those were all written on their faces. But not surprise, and for all their training, Alisha didn’t believe for an instant that a woman supposedly seven years dead wouldn’t at least garner widened eyes or lifted eyebrows. She knew her own voice was cool and steady, but it was a lie, a vocal facade meant to distract a watcher from the shocked color in her cheeks, the dilation of her pupils, the too-fast pulse in her throat.
They had known. They had all known. Reichart had known that her partner was alive, and hadn’t told her.
“Base jumping, then?” Alisha heard her own voice again without having consciously intended to speak. Casual question, trying to make sense of the night she’d stood on a mountainside ready to pull a trigger on her best friend. Trying to understand how the suicide jump Cristina had taken had somehow landed her here, in a Parisian warehouse, seven years later.
“I was freezing,” Cristina said. “All those mountaineering clothes were cover for the chute. Base jumping,” she agreed with a shrug. “You remember our cliff-diving vacation? With Erika’s suits?”
“Sure.” Alisha’s fingers tingled, as if blood had stopped flowing into them and was only now realizing its error. “It was a lot of fun.” The bulky base-jumping suits made them look like flying squirrels, webbed along every stretch where limb separated from torso. Free-falling, with just enough break to keep from reaching terminal velocity. Alisha and Cristina had screamed the whole way down, sheer glee that erupted into howls of laughter as they staggered back to do it again, full of life and vigor and enthusiasm for dangerous pursuits.
“I had one made in white,” Cristina said. Alisha closed her eyes briefly, remembering searching over the mountainside, staring in helpless anger and dismay at miles of moonlit snow.
&
nbsp; “Well done.” She opened her eyes again to find Cristina coming toward her, a broad, happy smile on her face, arms open for a hug.
There was no transition that Alisha could remember, no moment of thought or consideration. She slapped the gun from the small of her back and brought it up so quickly Cristina was still smiling and saying, “It’s so good to see you again,” when the weapon was pressed into the hollow of her throat.
“Alisha,” Greg said, low and warning. Cristina swallowed, moving the muzzle very slightly as she met Alisha’s eyes. Fearless, Alisha thought. Always fearless.
“Back up. I’m not really up for a tearful reunion just now, Cris. Back. The fuck. Up.”
Cristina spread her hands, no longer offering a hug, and took several judicious steps backward. No fear. No anger, either. No surprise, but maybe a trace of disappointment, Alisha thought. Too fucking bad. “So it was a setup from the start, was it?”
“Alisha,” Greg said again. He took one step closer, and Alisha dipped her right hand into the breast of her jacket, coming out with a second gun that she held on her handler as steadily as she held Cristina in her sights.
“This is a bad time for it, Greg. If someone doesn’t start explaining very quickly, I’m going to go through with my termination orders on this woman.”
“I’m your boss,” Greg said, putting steel in his voice. “Those orders are rescinded, Alisha.”
“Right now, Greg, nobody’s going to walk out of here alive to tell on me, so forgive me if I don’t really give a shit what you think my orders are. Cristina. Start talking.” Alisha had never believed she had it in her to be a stone-cold killer. What a surprise, she thought without any humor at all. Enough training and enough betrayal, and it turns out the last person you really know is yourself, Leesh.
“It was a setup,” Cristina said softly. “I’d been a triple agent since I was fifteen, Alisha. The FSB finally caught on to me. The only way to get them well and truly off my trail was for me to die.”
“And I was the patsy who got to hunt you down and execute the order. You couldn’t have told me, Greg?” Alisha didn’t take her eyes off Cristina, fully trusting her peripheral vision to warn her if Greg Parker moved. No one else had. She could see rage on Susan Simone’s face, and carefully held neutrality on Brandon’s, as if he feared the slightest expression now would condemn his father. Reichart watched her with a mix of admiration and sorrow.
“We needed your responses to be flawless.” Greg kept his voice soothing and calm. “Alisha, put the guns down. We have a lot to talk about.”
“You know, I’m comfortable having this conversation just like this. Cristina. Keep talking.” Alisha’s arms ached, not from holding the weapons, but from keeping herself from squeezing the triggers. She would regret it if she did, she kept telling herself. It wouldn’t be worth the momentary satisfaction of revenge.
If she told herself that enough times, she might start to believe it.
“I went to work deep undercover,” Cristina said. “Being dead let me do that. I infiltrated the Sicarii, Ali. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last seven years.”
“You’re royalty?” Alisha sneered. Cristina flickered a smile.
“You’d hardly believe me if I told you. I’ve been trying to ferret out the highest-ranking Sicarii in the CIA.” She sighed a small, tired sound. “That’s why the Firebird’s black box is so important. We believe it has footage verifying a connection between the CIA and the Sicarii. Brandon, were you able to play back the tape?” Cristina glanced at him very quickly, eyebrows rising. He flinched, then stared at her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The box never got to me. Alisha didn’t deliver it. Reichart had it.”
Cristina’s mouth tightened. “Reichart gave it to me. I handed it over to Helen two nights ago. She was supposed to give it to you.”
“Helen’s dead,” Reichart growled.
White surprise washed over Cristina’s face and she shot a look at Brandon. “She never gave me anything, Phoenix,” he insisted, sounding weary. “The box wasn’t on her body.”
Alisha’s heartbeat rang so loudly, hit against her breastbone with such hard crashes, that it seemed a wonder that no one else heard it. She kept her breathing steady through effort, feeling the black box’s weight in one of her coat’s inner pockets. Sickness churned her belly, fighting to get out. Alisha set her teeth together and kept her eyes on Cristina.
Cristina. Alive. There wasn’t even a single spark of joy hidden within the turmoil of emotions. No relief. Only cold, sickening anger. Alisha had imagined what it might be like to see Cristina again, one final time, and there had always been a sense of gratitude almost as nauseating as the rage she felt now, in those imagined scenarios. Seven years of clinging to a romantic idea that there might have been a good explanation were shattered: faced with one, Alisha could not bring herself to believe a word of it. “Who do you think is on the tape?”
“I know who’s on the tape,” Cristina said quietly. “I just need it as proof positive, so I can arrest Director Simone.”
Silence rang in Alisha’s ears, louder than gunshots. Not true silence: she could hear Simone’s distorted shriek of outrage, the words coming too slowly to be properly heard. It was the silence of the pin being pulled from the grenade, warning that the irrevocable had been done and the only way forward was through sudden remorseless violence.
A thousand countable things changed in that silence. Brandon inhaled sharply, color draining from his face, and Alisha thought, he’s been taking orders from her for years.
Illegal orders. That understanding came down over Brandon’s expression like a curtain falling, and he gave one jerk of his head, staring at the combat drones that still hovered and stood behind Cristina. They were humming now, as if Cristina’s accusation had triggered a fight reflex in their artificial intelligences even when Alisha pulling a gun on Cristina had not. Maybe they had. Maybe they were programmed to recognize the denunciation and to show a dominant hand as a way of preventing bloodshed. Their weapons compartments had clicked open in a precursor to battle.
Four guns, Alisha thought very precisely. She had four guns tucked into her clothes, and half a dozen knives. Reichart had at least that many, and the others were almost certainly armed.
The drones would obliterate them all if it came to weapons being fired.
Reichart. Reichart was rarely surprised, and showed little of it now, even as Cristina’s accusation lingered on the air. He hadn’t yet moved, taking in the situation in the split second of stillness, just as Alisha did.
No wonder, Alisha thought. No wonder Simone had wanted her out of Europe. She had been playing much too close to Brandon, too close to an agent being used for the wrong ends.
If that was what had happened, a warning whispered inside Alisha’s ear. If. Don’t assume anything yet, Leesh. If.
Greg. Alisha dared one brief look down the barrel of her second weapon, ascertaining Greg’s expression. Like Reichart, he showed no surprise. No, Alisha thought: less than no surprise. A thread of satisfaction tightened the lines around his eyes and mouth, the same look she’d seen a thousand times when a job had gone well.
Who had done well, and to what end?
“—double-crossing whore!” Time resumed something like its normal speed with the end of Simone’s outburst. There were guns suddenly, guns everywhere, in everyone’s hands. Details still flashed through Alisha’s mind, single points of importance that together made up the picture of catastrophe on the brink of erupting.
She didn’t recognize Brandon’s weapon, a bulky thing that looked more like a club than a gun. His face was still white, head bent over the gun, fingers darting over a pad on its side, too fast for Alisha to understand what he was doing.
And Greg. Greg, outside of the loop, somehow. Two guns, like so many of them now held, pointed steadily at Alisha and at Reichart. When did we become the bad guys? Alisha wondered, though the answer when you started pul
ling guns, Leesh, seemed blindingly obvious.
Only Reichart still looked cool, his targets curiously the same as Alisha’s: Cristina. Greg. An odd wave of solidarity and relief swept through Alisha. The possibility of not leaving the warehouse alive loomed very large, but there was unexpected comfort in believing she wouldn’t go down fighting alone.
Simone catapulted into Alisha’s shoulder, less deliberate tackle than rage fueling a blind charge forward. For the space of a breath Alisha’s aim was knocked askew, and in that instant Cristina moved.
Even now a spark of admiration flew in Alisha’s breast. Cristina was a creature made for running, long limbs and slender muscle built for endurance races across enormous distances. Her actions flowed with the grace and bunching of a gazelle pushing away from the earth. Seven years of distance had taken the edge off Alisha’s memory of Cristina’s beauty in combat, but it came home again with the blond woman’s deadly pounce and strike. Alisha was knocked to the side, Simone crumpling backward as Cristina’s weight hit her. They tumbled together, Cristina coming out on top with a hand raised, fingers stiff for a killing blow.
Alisha fired, bullet whining so close to Cristina’s head she thought she could see the other woman’s hair stir with the metal’s speed. “Stop!” Whether she shouted before or after the shot was fired, she was uncertain, but Cristina froze, hand still lifted.
A dozen clicks and whines lifted the hairs on Alisha’s neck, the too-familiar sound of the drones targeting. She imagined she could feel the heat of the lasers already, scoring her back, burning skin and muscle down to bone. “They’re programmed to protect me, Ali,” Cristina said in a low, tense voice. “With a shot fired, I can’t turn them off. Put your guns down.”
“Let Simone go. Murder isn’t justice.” Much as the temptation had held Alisha herself only moments before, she knew the truth of what she said. “She needs to be taken in and questioned, not killed.”
The Firebird Deception Page 24