“No ID tag,” Booker said. “No news coverage…” That wasn’t too surprising, given the location. Houston was in the Coastal Destabilized Zone, and there was so much looting in that place already…
He blinked. No news coverage. No bodies.
“Richard Álvarez and Kaipo Villeneuve are still alive.” That was why this job mattered, because it wasn’t finished yet, and so Álvarez and Villeneuve hadn’t yet needed to be erased.
Ethiopia. They were there, or were going to be. If Booker could catch up with them before their business was wrapped up and the killer moved in, then he could blow the whole thing open. He could redeem the ACT, save his career, make up for Jane.
He forced himself to take a step back, sit down on the sofa. He had to be careful. He had no idea what Álvarez or Villeneuve looked like; even if he did, Ethiopia wasn’t exactly small. Finding them wouldn’t be easy.
And even if he could find them -- then what? Even if he hadn’t been on suspension, his authority as an FBI agent wouldn’t extend across the Atlantic. Not without going through the proper channels.
I don’t need to arrest them, Booker thought. Just to talk. If he could convince them that they were in danger, that coming back to the States with him was their best shot at survival, then maybe his lack of a badge wouldn’t matter.
First, however, he needed to find them.
Booker checked the time. It was five to midnight. Officially, his suspension wouldn’t go into effect until tomorrow. That meant that anything he did in the next five minutes -- any resources he utilized -- would still be well within his rights as a Special Agent. Technically.
Quickly he leaned over his laptop, fingers dancing as he navigated to the FBI’s internal criminal database. He logged in with his credentials, half-expecting them not to work, then punched the two names into the search field. Jane Baum had managed to remain completely incognito, but these two had not. Richard Meztli Álvarez and Kaipo Villeneuve -- their criminal records weren’t long, composed mostly of a few petty thefts in their teenage years that normally wouldn’t warrant an entry in the Bureau’s systems. It was, instead, their origins that had landed them in the database: both men were listed as refugees from the CDZ. From Houston.
“So that’s why you were hired,” Booker said. “It was your old territory.”
It was a small break, but already he could feel the momentum building. Even better, only a few hours ago both men had been registered by TSA as leaving the country on a flight to Spain.
He couldn’t view their full itinerary, but it didn’t seem that large a leap to assume that Spain would be the first of several stops on their way to Ethiopia. Given their departure time, they were likely still somewhere in transit right now.
Booker began to shop for direct flights.
Thirteen
Radical Dynamics-France
Paris, France
Estelle returned to work the day after her father’s funeral. She knew it would raise eyebrows around the office, inspire concerned whispers over her wellbeing. But for her, it was a relief. The abrupt death of Martin Kingston had completely derailed her comfortable routine. Getting back to a predictable schedule, a familiar environment -- the routine was soothing. Safe. It gave her other things to think about.
On the other hand, one of the reasons she returned to Radical Dynamics so soon was to get her questions answered.
Manuel Rochard, self-described I.T. expert extraordinaire, had taken Estelle out dancing her first year in Paris. He was nice, kind of funny, charming when he wanted to be, but mostly she’d just been feeling homesick at the time and he had been available. It had never gone much further than that one night. Hopefully the memory of their brief time together was good enough to buy her a favor.
“Most people greatly overestimate the security of their devices,” he had told her, spinning in his chair in what he probably thought was a cool and self-confident way. “But nothing is ever lost forever. Not even after a complete reformat. This baby?” He waggled the hard drive at her. “Piece of cake, mon chéri. You could have at least given me a real challenge. Taken a magnet to it or something.”
“So you’ll be able to recover the data?” Estelle, standing before him with arms folded, was determined to maintain an air of professionalism.
Manuel shrugged. “Sure. No later than tomorrow afternoon. It’s just a waiting game, job this easy.”
That felt far too long for her liking. There was a ticking clock in the back of Estelle’s mind, and she couldn’t fully explain it. Whatever was going on with her father, she was anxious to have it unraveled. It was as if the answers to all this were written in sand, and a strong wind was rising.
Manuel was snapping his fingers in the air to get her attention. She frowned, annoyed. “What?”
“I said, is there anything I should be looking out for?” An eyebrow raised slyly. “Or…not looking out for?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t know.” She wasn’t sure what might be on her father’s hard drive, but she couldn’t imagine it would mean anything to Manuel. “Just save everything you find.”
“Sure.” He was watching her, less flirty now. A line of concern creased his brow and instantly irritated her. “Is everything –?”
“Oui, Manuel. Thank you. I need to get back to work. Please let me know as soon as you’re done?”
Estelle turned on her heel while he was still stammering out a reply. She ignored the looks from Manuel’s colleagues as she marched from the office, and only let herself relax once the elevator doors had closed.
It was a brief respite. As the elevator doors dinged open and Estelle returned to her desk, she felt as if she were crossing a brightly-lit stage, wearing nothing at all. The office had been designed to be as open as possible, which meant next to no barriers. Strips of diffuse light delineated the personal space of each workstation and did nothing to hide Estelle from the concern of her co-workers. Their eyes tracked her even if their heads didn’t move, and the normal energetic buzz of the office softened when she entered. It made her want to scream.
That damned look, of soft, puppy-dog concern. She was seeing it everywhere: from Isa, her team members, everyone on her floor. Even the cafeteria workers seemed to be tip-toeing around her, as if afraid she might shatter if not handled gently. It was to be expected, and she was already sick of it. Why couldn’t they just treat her normally? That was what she needed right now, for everything to just go back to as close to normal as was possible.
It spoke to her self-destructive tendencies, then, that she was continuing to dig into her father’s secrets, the one sure-fire way to keep any sense of normalcy at bay.
A wall of potted ferns, air plants, succulents, and mossy terrariums marched along the perimeter of her desk, providing Estelle with the relative solitude of her own private greenhouse. They’d moved with her from the Detroit office, and for about a month she’d been given the good-natured moniker of “Jungle Girl.” Her desire for a bit of solitude still puzzled her Parisian colleagues.
Emails filled her vision as she synced her glasses with her terminal. The bulk of them were some variation of condolences. Estelle immediately deleted all of those. The few messages that remained mostly pertained to Phase 2 of the fusion package. It still needed to be completed, and her team was already behind schedule, thanks to her time off. Isa would extend the deadline, and of course nobody would hold it against Estelle, but it still bothered her, like a blemish on an otherwise-flawless painting.
She scanned the remaining emails, then moved them to the appropriate folders. Her inbox said empty, and she frowned at it. Uncle Francis hadn’t responded to any of her messages; all she’d gotten was a canned message letting her know he was away, whatever that meant. It was supremely unfair, to drop a load of cryptic bullshit into her lap and then vanish into thin air. She refused to believe he knew nothing about Ethiopia, and had reached out to him demanding an explanation, even as she was planning her own path forward.
&
nbsp; Find your own way.
Well, she would. Part of her was even loathe to accept any explanation he might give her. Mostly she just wanted to let him know how annoyed she was.
Estelle took a deep breath, then popped in her earbuds and played one of her more aggressive, chaotic jazz mixes. The musical discord fueled the fires of her own impatience with herself and the world. By the time she had gotten through the backlog of work, Estelle was feeling more like herself.
It would all pass. That much she knew for certain. She’d been through it all when her mother had died. Granted, she hadn’t been quite so alone then, and there had been no skeletons popping out of closets, as there were now. No mysteries or riddles nagging from beyond the grave. But still. A death was a death. The trick was to stay busy. Don’t let your mind wander, because there were plenty of dark places for it to get lost in. But she would not let it.
It would all pass.
* * *
The day progressed in a frenzied blur. By the end Estelle found herself trudging home with her mind shrouded in a numb fog. She curled up with Toulouse on the sofa, removed her bra without taking her shirt off, opened a bottle of cheap wine, and ordered some Indian takeout. She was firmly set on filling the emptiness inside her with as much food and alcohol as it would take to make the pain go away.
Several hours and a whole tub of tikka masala later, and she was teetering on the precipice of a black and dreamless sleep. She collapsed blearily into bed, a sloppy mess of disconnected thoughts stumbling through her head. Her last cogent thought, bizarrely, was that she should call Booker, let him know dad had died. He’d probably want to know…
She woke at dawn to a throbbing headache. The ride to work was viewed through squinted eyes and the darkened lenses of her glasses. Estelle spent most of it sucking down water and praying her stomach didn’t decide to empty itself all over the Metro. By the time she arrived at the office Estelle was resisting the urge to turn right around and go back to bed.
She had completely forgotten about Manuel Rochard, so it took a few seconds of bleary blinking to recognize the name attached to the email. Then her mission burst back to the forefront of her brain, and a thrill of nervous excitement momentarily drowned out her hangover.
She opened the email:
We should talk. Lunch?
Estelle frowned, her headache returning in full force. Manuel’s ploy was embarrassingly transparent, leaving her little choice but to engage in what could be liberally interpreted as some sort of date before getting the goods. Or so he thought – Estelle considered firing off a reply and demanding that, no, they couldn’t get lunch, he could just march up to her office right now and hand over the recovered data.
But then she gave the email a second look. It had been sent early that morning, when she was still drooling on her pillow. We should talk. What did that mean? Nothing, most likely, just part of Manuel’s stratagem – but she couldn’t ignore its ominous edge. Not with all the strangeness she had encountered since her father’s death.
She sent her reply: Sure. 12:30?
Manuel’s response came back almost at once, agreeing to the time and setting a place. Estelle struggled mightily to focus on her work, but only ended up re-reading the same charts and paragraphs over and over. It was a relief when 12:30 finally came around, even if it meant she would have to spend most of her time rebuffing Manuel’s flirtations.
The Northeast Tower of the Radical Dynamics-France campus had set aside the first three floors for an exotic arboretum. The walls were composed of thick glass panels, allowing sunlight to filter down on the trees that towered within. Some, like the jacarandas, were contained only to a single floor, while others, like the California redwoods, soared through all three levels. Bamboo pathways and suspension bridges twisted through the bottled forest, and the vegetation was so thick in places that, although there was almost always someone in the arboretum, it was easy to feel lost and alone in the wilderness – at least until one looked off towards a glass wall and saw the Paris skyline shining behind the trunk of a rainbow eucalyptus.
Estelle took a cart over to the Northeast Tower, grabbed a water from the dispenser on the bottom level of the arboretum, and made her way to a copse of relatively mundane firs, following Manuel’s directions. They were off the beaten path and grew closely together, making the spot quite secluded. There was a small round table and two chairs, set amidst the trees as if waiting for her. Probably what Manuel considered to be romantic. He hadn’t arrived yet, so Estelle didn’t feel too self-conscious about lying down in the grass and pressing the cool bottle of water to her brow. From the branches above came an almost-mechanical chirping, and she spied a feathered, green-and-purple lizard perched overhead, a little larger than a pigeon.
Archaeopteryx. Or rather, archaeopteryx neos. The Late Jurassic feathered saurian had been one of the first of Radical Dynamics’ prehistoric revivals. In truth, it wasn’t a clone or even a real archaeopteryx, but a hybrid of several modern birds, their DNA dialed back until the phenotypes of their ancient ancestors were replicated as closely as possible. It was good enough for counting, and the little guys up in the trees could now be found in zoos and exotic pet stores around the world.
He was soon joined by two more, and she enjoyed watching them hop from branch to branch, vaguely wondering if they knew how out of time they were. All too soon, a loud crashing through the underbrush announced Manuel’s arrival. Estelle quickly got to her feet, swallowing the wave of nausea the motion caused, and sat at the table, just as he emerged from the forest.
The first thing Estelle noticed, as he sat opposite her, was the fact that he wasn’t smiling. Manuel almost always had a smile on when around her, but right now he looked very somber. Nervous, even. He also had no food with him. Estelle had only gotten the water because it seemed the limit of what her stomach could take right now, but she had expected Manuel to eat something.
“Bonjour,” she said uncertainly. Manuel glanced behind him before replying, then simply nodded. “Is everything alright?”
“Oui,” he said distractedly. “Listen, Estelle -- what was on that hard drive?”
“I -- why?”
His eyes widened slightly. “Because security confiscated it less than fifteen minutes after I logged in this morning.”
Estelle stared at him, the archaeopteryxes chittering into the silence. “What are you talking about?”
“I connected it to my terminal and started the recovery, and then --” He clapped his hands sharply. “These two - two bruiser types show up out of nowhere and tell me the system’s flagged something above my clearance. Before I can even ask what the hell that means, they’ve snatched the drive and disappeared.”
“Bruiser-types?”
“Yeah, you know, big --” He held out his arms and puffed up his face in a stony expression. “Looked like bouncers more than RD security.”
Estelle was trying to keep up, but her lingering hangover only complicated things. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why would the hard drive be flagged?”
“You tell me.” Manuel stared at her pointedly. “What was on it? Where did it come from?”
“It…it was my dad’s.”
“Oh.” He sat back, caught off-guard. But then he frowned. “Wait, wasn’t your dad, like, a writer or something? What did he do for Radical Dynamics?”
“Nothing. He was a historian, he wrote huge books that nobody ever read about the Crusades and the Council of Nicea and stuff.”
“What’s that got to do with Radical Dynamics?”
“Nothing,” Estelle repeated, exasperated. “There must have been some kind of mistake. Maybe the system flagged what it thought was classified data, but was actually just -- just corrupted or something…” She trailed off as Manuel’s eyes narrowed. “Can that happen?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” he said skeptically. “Plus, since when did the company start enforcing stuff like security clearance?”
“Well, th
at’s not so unusual. We all had to sign NDAs when we joined up, right?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t see these guys, Estelle. They were…they almost looked paramilitary.”
She laughed; which, judging by the look Manuel gave her, was the wrong thing to do. But she couldn’t help it. She had just realized why he’d chosen such a secluded spot to meet, and why he kept glancing over his shoulder. “Are you afraid of them? What, you think we’re being watched or something?”
Manuel responded with a look of something close to pity. “You don’t?”
“This is Radical Dynamics --”
“Only the most powerful corporation in the entire world --”
“Yes, so why are you so shocked that they would want to protect what they thought was sensitive information?” Estelle stood, brushing a few pine needles from her lap. “Look, I’ll just go talk to security, alright? I’m friendly with the CSO. I’ll explain what happened and get the drive back.”
Manuel rose too. He didn’t look convinced. “Do that if you want.”
She frowned at him. “You’ll still recover the data, won’t you?”
“I don’t know, Estelle…”
“Manuel, come on. If they give it back to me, then it was clearly just a mixup. There’s no reason not to continue, right?”
“Sure. Just…yeah, we’ll see. I’ve got a few projects keeping me busy, so I might not be able to clear my schedule, but…but I’ll let you know.”
He gave her a nod and a smile that looked slightly nauseous, then turned to go. Estelle stared after him, completely flummoxed. Manuel had always been a bit eccentric, but this was bordering on paranoia. Could he really have been shaken that much by a stupid little bout of miscommunication?
Bruiser-types. She snorted to herself. Manuel lived in one of Tour d’Eden’s luxury apartments, with a full home automation system and a shopping mall five floors below him. He’d never so much as caught a whiff of a “rough” neighborhood. He probably thought a pomeranian qualified as an attack dog.
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