About fucking time.
I beat out a quick response and shoved the phone back in my pocket. “Could be. When we get out of here, I'll pull up a picture. I'm sure I have one on file—we'll see if you can ID him.”
“You're a good dancer.”
“I'm good at a lot of things,” I said, pleased.
“Just like James Bond. Are all spies good dancers?”
“They are if they regularly attend social functions. Jesus Christ, they had you completely doped, didn't they?”
“A whole soda bottle's worth,” she agreed. “Do you ever get the feeling that life is just one big conspiracy theory?”
“You're preaching gospel to the choir. I've believed that my whole life. Matter of fact, it's the only thing worth believing, in my opinion.”
She snorted. “Next you're going to tell me that you believe the moon landing wasn't real.”
“Oh no, it was real. Of course it was real. Where else would the bury the dead bodies of the aliens from Area Fifty-One?”
Christina made a face at me. “Was that supposed to be funny, or are you serious?”
“Gallows humor, darlin. Comes with the job. If you can't laugh at death, it'll drive you crazy.” I smiled at her. “Or maybe it already has. Who knows? Let me know if you see any guards.”
I was being extra cautious. The corridors were mostly empty; everyone had gone out to listen to that bastard's speech. We weren't exempt, either—his mic was wired into the intercom of the building for best possible effect.
As we walked through the dark halls, we could hear the megalomaniac's voice, full of more masturbatory egotism than usual. And that was saying something.
I tried to tune him out, but certain phrases kept jarring into my brain and staying there, like, “We have entered the dawn of a new era in the information industry—”
What the hell did that even mean? Gibberish.
“—infected with the fear virus—”
“What is a fear virus?” Christina whispered.
“I have no fucking clue. I'm pretty sure he's just making up words and phrases as he goes along.”
“Anonymity and unpredictability will become outdated terms. Technology will radicalize criminal profiling. Catastrophes, whether natural disasters or terrorist bombings, can be predicted within a very small margin of error. The world is made up of patterns. What we see as a chain of unrelated events is a result of myopic blindness. Most of us are not born with the scope of vision that enables us to see how these patterns fit into the greater whole.
“With this new merger, all that will change.”
“You making heads or tails of this, darlin?”
“It sounds like he wants to create some sort of high-power recognition software. It would store the images and profiles of the people in memory, and pull them up for future use.”
That was not good.
“—make use of every channel we have. TV, radio, paper, social media. With everything going digital, information has never been faster to transmit or receive.”
“Okay,” I said, “now it sounds like he's got herpes.”
Christina laughed nervously, scattering prisms of sound. Not a whole lot, but enough to be of concern.
“Keep it down.”
“Sorry. I'm—just scared.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “He sounds so insane.”
“He is.”
“How can they be applauding him?”
“People are idiots. They mistake insanity for genius, and vice-versa, all the time.”
Christina stared at the wall speaker and looked worried. “Is he asking for funding?”
“He doesn't have to. His investors are pouring everything they have into him. They're convinced he's the Midas incarnate. They're almost right, except what he touches doesn't exactly turn into gold.”
“Pain,” she mumbled. “Everything he touches turns into pain.”
“I was thinking shit,” I said, “but that works too.”
“We have to stop him.”
“Did I tell you how beautiful you look tonight?”
“How is that supposed to help?” she sounded a little amused, but panic was tightly coiled through her voice. Too much pressure, just a little more, and she might snap.
“Oh, it doesn't help. It doesn't help at all. How the hell am I supposed to survive, when I've been thinking all night about how much I want to rip that dress off with my teeth?”
She shivered. Not from fear, though. I could tell.
“Fabric looks thin.” I ran my finger beneath the strap. “I bet I could, too.”
“We have to get out of here first.”
“You think so, too?” I brushed my lips against hers. “Well. All the more incentive for me to get the two of us out of here alive, don't you think?”
She nodded.
“Let's go. Allons danser.”
I got a shadow of a smile. “Bailemos.”
“That's the spirit, darlin.”
Chapter Sixteen
Propaganda
Christina
Our luck continued to hold out. Most of the guards appeared to be in the viewing room watching Adrian's speech. The hallways were empty, at least so far.
“Lose the shoes,” Michael said.
I hadn't realized I was wearing the heels. No wonder my feet hurt. I kicked them off with gratitude.
“Not that way,” he said, grabbing me by the waist.
“Too late.”
We encountered one guard who was making routes. His eyes widened in surprise.
Michael gave him an uppercut to the throat before he even fully registered our presence. He collapsed like a bag of wet sand on the tiled floors. Michael frisked him, taking his gun, which he handed to me, and a clearance card.
I stared at the gun. “What do I do with this?”
“If we're lucky, nothing. I don't understand why a media corporation requires this level of security.” He shook himself. “We've stopped long enough. Keep moving.”
Everything was quiet except for the hum of the fluorescent track lighting overhead. There were only one or two doors per corridor, and most were locked and bolted the old-fashioned way. When we came across one with a key card, Michael pulled out the one he'd taken from the guard and said, “I wonder…”
He slid the card through the slot and the doors slid open, revealing a computer lab not unlike the one where I'd spent so many hours working under Mr. Chou. Itatchi Watanabe. I was going to have to get used to that.
All of the computer monitors were dark. I looked at Michael but his expression was carefully blank. I sat down at one of the terminals, and jiggled the mouse to wake the computer from its hibernation.
Michael jolted from his contemplative trance. “What the fuck are you doing? You're going to leave fingerprints.”
“Aren't you curious to see what he's up to? We can always wipe the keyboard and the mouse once I'm done.”
“I'm going to have to drag you out of here.”
“Probably,” I agreed, a little more cheerfully now that I was in my element. The computer had a password but I used one of the keylogging strokes my father had taught me to retroactively retrieve it.
“I thought you said you couldn't hack.”
“No,” I corrected him. “I said I didn't like hacking. And I don't, it goes against my principles.”
I hit 'enter.' The computer began to load from the last session, while I watched, pleased.
“And we're in.”
I sounded smug and did not care in the slightest.
“Impressive.” Michael closed his hands over the back of the chair, his knuckles brushing the bare skin of my back. “Where did you learn that?”
“A hacker never reveals her secrets.”
“I thought that was magicians.”
“Same thing,” I said.
“Don't get too cocky.” His breath tickled my ear. “I haven't seen any magic yet. And what about going against your principles?”
�
�Adrian goes against my principles. In this case, I think two wrongs do, in fact, make a right.”
I clicked the computer icon, doing my best to ignore the distraction behind me, and opened up the list of recently accessed programs. They were all word processing documents, and were labeled by date and what appeared to be the last name of the document's creator.
How convenient.
I clicked one, only to find that it, too, had a password. I used the same one that had unlocked the computer. People were lazy. They tended to use the same password for all things. If you had one, you had them all.
I, personally, had about twenty passwords I used in rotation, with various grades of security.
The document took a while to load. That was because it had images. “It's a news article.” I skimmed through it. “This one's about the economic book in China.” I turned to Michael. “Kind of sounds like they're selling something.”
“Probably because Callaghan recently acquired several manufacturing companies there. The bastard likes to toot his own horn.”
“Japan…”
“Those would be the software companies.”
I didn't bother asking how he knew that. “Canada, Mexico, Europe.”
“News media outlets.”
“What is he up to?”
“Nothing good is my guess.”
I shook my head, and something snagged my eye. “Hey, this is odd. This article's dated two days from now.”
“Open it,” Michael said.
I did, and gasped when I saw the headline leaping out at me. EX-SECRET AGENT FOUND MURDERED IN HOTEL ROOM SUITE.
“Jesús, María y José.” I crossed myself.
Michael was frowning. “I haven't heard anything about that.”
I had been scanning the tail end of the article when my throat went dry. “You wouldn't.” I turned the computer monitor towards him, so he could see. “It's about you.”
Michael
Something about seeing your own obituary really takes all the punch out of the evening.
“'His body was found with multiple entry wounds.'” Christina was reading the article aloud. “'Police have no leads pending investigation.' Oh my God, he's going to have you killed.”
“Like that's news. I bet he typed that with one fucking hand. Jesus, he's a sick motherfucker.” I leaned closer. “What does it say about you?”
“It doesn't mention me. At least, not in this article.”
She started clicking through the others before I could stop her.
“These ones are set in the future, too.”
Her word choice triggered some sort of alarm. “What are they about?”
“Things that haven't happened yet.” She laughed nervously. “My God, it's almost like—”
“Like what?”
“It's silly. Just a movie I saw once with my dad.”
“People say that on TV too, and it usually turns out to be exactly fucking like whatever it is they're dismissing.”
“Life isn't like the movies.”
“Stop clowning around and tell me,” I growled.
Christina shrugged. “It just reminds me of this James Bond movie. I saw it a long time ago. It must have come out in the nineties.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “Like I said, it's stupid.”
“What about it reminded you of this?”
“Well, the villain of the movie was also a media mogul. And one of the major plot points was that he also printed future headlines way in advance.”
“By?”
“Creating the catastrophes himself.”
She started to type something else. I grabbed her hands, stilling them a couple millimeters over the keyboard. Footsteps echoed from the hallway right outside the door.
“Do you think it's the guard who—”
“Turn off the monitor.”
With a shaking hand, she did.
I waited for her to get to her feet. I swiped keyboard and mouse quickly with the sleeve of my suit, then gathered her up against me. “Take out your gun.”
“But—”
“Remove the safety.”
The footsteps paused outside the door.
I could hear Christina's heartbeat knocking against her breastbone. The silence stretched, then broke. The footsteps continued down the hall. I let out my breath slowly.
“Jesus that was close. Too close. Let's get out of here before someone sees.” I shooed her out the door and carefully closed it behind us.
Callaghan was still talking.
That was a good sign. It meant nobody had registered that anything was wrong yet.
Yet.
I checked my cellphone again, then turned to Christina. “I need you to do something for me. Look for a fire alarm.”
She made a face, but nodded. A short while later she tugged at my sleeve. She pointed at a little red box mounted on the wall. “Perfect.”
I grabbed the switch, pulled up, then down. Just like fucking. Callaghan stopped spewing his poison as the alarm cut him off mid-monologue. I could make out stirs of anxiety among the crowd carried over the mic.
“What are they going to do?” Christina wondered.
“What, his audience? Evacuate. Quite gratefully, I imagine, after listening to that load of bull for an hour.”
“I meant with us.”
The gunshots that rang out through the hall saved me the trouble. I lolled my head towards her. “Does that answer your question?”
It looked like someone had noticed our absence.
I yanked her around the corner, pressing her against the wall.
The fire alarm was making it difficult for them to hear their superior's orders. That was bad for them. Adrian used an iron fist on his underlings. Bad for us, too. Fear of Adrian would quickly cause them to recalibrate. We had to be out of here before they managed to rally the troops.
“We're trapped,” Christina yelped.
I fired my gun in the direction she indicated. “Not anymore we're not. This way—” I grabbed her by the wrist, and we ducked into the adjoining corridor.
My phone buzzed. Another text for Suraya. Ready, it said. Awaiting command. Fucking perfect. I tapped out the response, cursing these tiny keypads.
“Michael!”
“What?”
Then I heard her scream.
I whipped my head towards her, and saw her eyes wide with fear. Then something slammed into my back, and the hallway went rushing up into darkness.
Christina
One moment he was there running beside me, just like always. The next, I was horribly alone.
“Michael?”
Immediately, my worst fears bubbled to mind. Nothing like imminent tragedy to turn you into a pessimist.
“Michael—”
Then I spotted him, and my heart plummeted into the bottom of my stomach as I realized that, for once, my very worst fears had been realized.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, no, no. Please, no, Michael. No.” I shook him by the shoulders and then lowered my hands immediately when I felt the sticky wetness on his clothes.
I did not like the sight of blood. I liked the feel of it even less. Wet, but oily and thick. And the smell, like corroded old pennies—
I unbuttoned his jacket, breathing through my mouth so I wouldn't be sick, and bit down on the knuckle of my hand to keep from crying aloud when I saw the scarlet flowers blooming on his white dress shirt.
Maybe it isn't so bad, maybe it isn't as bad as it looks, just a clip, surface wounds can bleed a lot sometimes, and white always makes stains look worse than they are.
I tore open his shirt, and shoved the fabric aside along with the last of my fragile reassurances.
It hadn't grazed him; it had been a full-on shot.
Just like the article.
I slid my fingers under his chin and held my breath, waiting. There was a pulse there, throbbing as delicately as a butterfly's wings against my fingertips.
He was alive.
For now.
“Get up,” I said, “…please?”
Closing my eyes, I kissed him gently on the mouth. As if hoping, out of some vestigial sense of childhood enchantment, that my kiss would break the evil spell of death. It did nothing but make me cry.
I ran my fingers down the scar on his face.
“Now this is a touching scene.”
Isn't it strange, how something as simple as the sound of a voice can fill you with such blind fear and rage? My grip on Michael tightened when I heard that familiar Irish brogue and sure enough, when I looked up I saw Adrian Callaghan standing there in a three-piece suit.
The temptation was to launch myself at him in the hopes of striking something soft, but the man had a core of diamond beneath his skin and it was comprised of all sharp edges. Then I remembered the gun. I fumbled for the one Michael had given me from the guard, and managed to remove the safety. “Stay back.”
“Don't be a fool.”
One thing they don't tell you in movies is that it's difficult to aim a gun, especially when the target is standing quite a ways away. Especially if you don't have training. I fired the gun at him—and missed.
He clicked his tongue. “You missed.”
“That was a warning shot.”
“Even if that were the case, which I'm sure it is not, I'm wearing a bulletproof vest, Christina Parker.” He pulled out his own gun. “Can you say the same?”
Shit.
“Be a good lass, put the gun down.”
I lowered it slowly, unwilling to relinquish the one weapon I had.
“Now kick it over here—” he cocked the gun “—or I'll give the boy a matching set of bullets, in his brain and his spine.”
“You're insane,” I hissed, sliding the gun across the floor. “You're fucking insane.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, Christina.” He shoved his gun back into his jacket. “Nowhere. Although as it just so happens, I'm here to offer you a job.”
“I'll work for you in hell, you bastard!”
“Oh, but hell, like many things, exists on earth. It's only a matter of finding the right path to get there, and believe me, Christina, I know the way. I can take you there. No question.
“Your parents, perhaps. We have been keeping tabs on them all this time. I could have them killed. I could have the boy killed. Or tortured, while you watch. The strongest men tend to scream the loudest.”
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