“Oh, no, you don’t.” He shook his hands out, loose and ready, an agent’s quick, graceful movement. “We’re going to go into the bathroom and get cleaned up. Then we’re getting fresh transport and blowing this town. Together, in case you still haven’t figured that out.”
Yes, she decided, the proper word was irritation. “This is not—”
“You want to end up on the floor again, sugar pop? Try me.” His hair wildly mussed, dried blood in his stubble and his eyes burning blue, he looked extremely irritated, as well.
Trinity could not blame him. Cold logic seemed to infuriate many people unfortunate enough to brush up against her. “Are you threatening me?”
His reply was a short negative that sounded remarkably obscene, and Trinity hurried for the bathroom. He had a valid point—rinsing off the blood was a necessary move. Then, she told herself, she would simply escape while he tended to his own hygiene.
Unfortunately, he kept the door open and merely washed the blood off, changed his shirt and was ready to go while she was still hurriedly repacking her upended bag. She had paused to scoop up the grease-spotted paper crane from the table.
The worst thing was, she began to suspect he was right and that her chances of survival were higher with his cooperation.
Until, that was, he found out about the Moritz operation.
* * *
Ninety minutes later, Cal shook the man’s hand and thanked him kindly while Trinity stood aside, her hair pulled back and a pair of large, cheap sunglasses tinting the entire world amber. Cal hooked an arm over her shoulders, casually, even though New Mexico heat bounced off pavement and used cars in every color crouching obediently around them. She could break away and start running, perhaps—but that would be incredibly inefficient.
She told the small niggling thought that perhaps she didn’t want to move to go away, and it went, quietly.
“A honeymoon car, huh?” The salesman, his wide greasy smile not reaching his cold-coffee eyes, scratched under his bleached, sweat-stained ten-gallon hat. “Road trip’s one way to do it. You picked a good ’un.”
“I sure did,” Cal said and bent to nuzzle her hair. Trinity blinked—the salesman had likely meant the car, but Cal was playing the part of a newly married man. Just stand there and look pretty, he’d told her. I’ll handle the rest.
So far, she had to admit he was doing admirably well. This would take them farther, with less chance of unwanted attention, than a stolen vehicle.
The salesman, his suit wilting fast, kept babbling, and Trinity stopped listening. She scanned for threats as Cal laughed easily, diverting suspicion, smoothing the waters. His file indicated a high degree of interpersonal ease and an uncanny knack for ingratiating himself.
It seemed both were functions of his tolerance for what they called “small talk.” Which was just another way of saying “the useless spending of breath and time hooting back and forth about nothing,” as far as she could see.
I never liked empty words. The thought jolted her, and she made a small restless movement, almost immediately controlled. Wait. I remember...
Any chance of stilling herself and turning inward to follow the thread into the mists of pre-induction was lost when Cal took her flinch for a signal. “Well, we’d better get going. Thanks, Tom.”
“Thank you, Brad!” The salesman was all too glad to get back into the air-conditioning and heaved himself away over the softening tarmac. Cal let out a soft breath and glanced down at her.
“Sleazy, isn’t he.” Pitched too low for the normal to hear, and he pulled Trinity along. “Get in, let’s get out of town.”
She let him pull her along toward the blue Chevy pickup he’d spent precious time bargaining for. “Why did you give him the extra money? It was not included in the—”
“Bribery, honey. Standard operating procedure when you can smell the greed on a fat slob.” He opened her door—less a gentlemanly gesture than a security one, Trinity thought—and glanced over the lot, still uneasy. “The other two we looked at were lemons. This one isn’t.”
“Ah. He’s selling substandard vehicles.” It was a pleasure to learn another complex skill, and negotiating through the buying of a used car certainly qualified.
“Shh.” He closed her in the truck. Even with the window down it was extremely warm, her skin prickling as her internal temperature regulated. When Cal slammed the driver’s door and turned the key, more heat roared from the dash. By the time he found the freeway, though, cold air poured through the vents, and the windows were rolled up, keeping the slipstream at bay. “Those shades make you look like a movie star.”
It was quiet. The enclosed space meant every breath was full of that tranquilizing smell. He turned the radio on very low, and something that had to be music came tiptoeing out. It was all about how a dog had left its master, with twanging guitars. The second verse was about how a woman had left the singer.
Was that more irritation, pushing her teeth together and leaving a bitter taste on the back of her tongue? It was. The singer’s voice grated, whining on and on, and she longed to reach for the buttons and force the radio to cough up something less trite and meaningless.
“You okay?” Cal glanced in her direction, and Trinity nodded, with what she hoped was a neutral expression. The idea of kicking out the window and escaping the noise was intensely tempting. Even the thought of likely damage ensuing from such a maneuver, since the vehicle had achieved freeway speed, wasn’t enough to completely rule out such a desperate course of action. She began to calculate speed, densities, the probabilities of different bones breaking with different angles of impact, and the pressure eased a bit.
Unfortunately, the next song was just as whining and ugly, and Trinity’s hands, lying obediently in her lap, tensed.
“Something’s bothering you.”
Is it obvious? She shook her head slightly, hoping he would pay attention to the road.
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk.”
“I do not recall requesting your help.” In fact, I seem to remember not wanting it at all.
He nodded slightly, as if she’d said something profound. “You seriously expect me to just let you go back there and commit suicide? Really?”
If you knew what I’ve done, you would probably try to hurry my demise along in whatever way you could. Her teeth refused to unclench. The singer this time was female, warbling what she no doubt thought were heartfelt and empowering words about a cheating ex.
Cal leaned forward and snapped the radio off. Trinity almost sagged with relief at the ensuing silence.
Then, five minutes of blessed peace and quiet later, he flicked it back on again.
Trinity’s hands curled into fists.
“Let’s see what else is on, shall we?” He punched the scan button. An advertisement for a furniture store. A wailing of ranchero music that wasn’t half-bad, but the accordion was out of tune. A pop anthem. A religious station—something about the blood of the lamb. Trinity outright shuddered, a small, betraying movement.
Then, like a gift, liquid solace flowed from the speakers, and Trinity relaxed all at once. It was that best of sounds—Bach’s Goldberg Variations, each note precisely measured, a soothing mathematical tapestry, every single tone in the right place. She let out a soft breath, tucking her hair behind her ear, and Cal’s hand moved slightly, stopped.
“I think we’ll just listen to this,” he said. “Hard to get classical out in the sticks. Mostly it’s country.”
Was he engaging in small talk with her, too? “I noticed.”
“Yeah, well. Next time actually open your mouth and say something, okay?”
“What?”
“Guys aren’t good at that small-detail stuff.”
She reviewed the past few moments of her mental footage and decided she
still didn’t understand. “At...classical music?”
“No, honey. At figuring out why a woman’s gone all stiff and smells like anger.”
“I apologize.” Was that what he wanted? He didn’t sound accusatory, but most males preferred a female to be constantly apologetic. Bronson, and later interactions with civilians, had taught her that much.
He kept his eyes on the road. “Don’t. It’s kind of cute. Definitely like a movie star.”
What? Trinity decided silence was called for and stared out the window at the gently rolling taupe that passed for landscape. Tough green blots of sage dotted at random intervals, and she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she had no urge to calculate the availability of water and precipitation patterns from them.
She was also smiling.
* * *
Alexandria Fraser considered herself an easygoing person. Most people in the world were just doing their jobs, even when their jobs involved silly things, like Agent Sartino’s. The FBI could be tracking down terrorists or something, instead of making life hard for a girl who just had some very specific talents she used to keep herself fed and clothed.
The talents weren’t strictly legal, but so much of legality was just convenience for the Powers That Be, and Fray treated them as such. She hadn’t hacked the account numbers and PINs to use them for nefarious purposes, she’d just been bored. It was sort of ironic that she’d been caught for that instead of anything else, and further ironic that Sartino had offered her a plea in return for helping catch someone. A slippery customer, he’d said. Don’t screw this up, Fray. I want to help you.
The question of why a straitlaced FBI agent would go out of his way to help her was solved when Fray took a look at his personnel file and found out he had an estranged daughter. Also, some digging had turned up memos from Sartino’s boss, telling him Fray was now the military’s problem and not mentioning her escape from Felicitas’s biggest police station.
Seems as if she’d pissed that blond bastard off. Served him right for being so smarmy, resting a hand on her shoulder, staring at her breasts and generally acting like every sexual-harassment cliché rolled into a single human male. Plus, he’d been dodgy about why they were looking for the woman with the strange eyes.
Fray took a sip of her nonfat cinnamon latte and glanced over the coffee shop’s interior. She had a good view of the parking lot, too, simmering under a southwest sun. Cuartova had been within driving distance, large enough she could find some tech, and she could strike for the border if things got seriously hazy. There was money and a new identity waiting for her in Mexico City, but why use it before she had to? She’d been moving steadily ever since escaping the station; now she didn’t want to chance a border crossing without cogitating things through a bit.
The first step was getting plugged in. Finding Wi-Fi wasn’t difficult in any urban area; it was a pity she couldn’t return to some of her old haunts. She missed real bagels and even caught herself missing the subway’s rumble and grind. Driving everywhere was a wasteful drag.
The fresh new laptop, without any of the mods that made her old one so useful—if she wasn’t keying in the codes on a regular basis, it would scramble and lead any investigator down a merry tangle of arcane electronic paths—sat glowing innocently at her. Fray’s fingers itched to get back into her old stores, download some useful software and get cracking. But she had to think about things before she leaped this time.
Point one: blond Major Caldwell and his black-haired goon. The goon obeyed his orders robotically, unquestioningly, and Caldwell obviously had a whole hell of a lot of pull not just with anything military but with local and national law enforcement. Not like there was much difference, with the military giving surplus out to John Q Riot Control, but still.
Point two: Alice Wharton, the blonde woman with the strange eyes, had used a social security number that obeyed the algorithm; she’d been working at a crappy little grocery store; and she was a matter of national security. Her flat, indifferent stare had bothered Fray until she realized why—it was the same as the black-haired goon’s look.
Point three: Fray’s own escape hadn’t provoked an APB; neither had the hunt for Alice Wharton—which was obviously a fake name. They didn’t want the public to know they were searching for her, and Fray herself could easily end up vanishing if she wasn’t careful. Agent Sartino had been told to forget the whole thing—it was in other hands now.
It all added up to something very dodgy indeed going on. That made Fray’s nose tingle and her fingers itch. She adjusted the black bandanna over her wildly curling hair, crossed her booted ankles and fidgeted a little bit before stilling, staring at the new laptop’s screen. It darkened—in power-saving mode, even though it was plugged in.
She’d been thinking about this for too long.
Was curiosity a good enough reason to get further involved? Or was she already in too deep as a result of Major Caldwell, the Sexual Harassment Wonder?
Because point four on Fray’s list was the fact that she could find Caldwell’s birthplace, some of his transcripts and a paper he’d written in college, but nothing else. He’d been scrubbed pretty efficiently, and so had the Wharton woman. Not only that, but the scrubbing was protected by some weapons-grade firewalls. Caldwell pretty much vanished electronically as soon as he entered the Army, which was not normal and had to be recently retroactive.
Something big, something huge and something centering on a lone woman working in a supermarket. They wanted to pick Alice Wharton up and make her vanish, and Fray knew enough about governments to tell that was not a good position for a lone woman to be in.
Fray sighed. She was already in it too deep; she wasn’t going to risk the border just yet. She took another sip of her latte, savoring the tongue-burn of extra cinnamon syrup, and cracked her knuckles, one at a time, relishing the ritual.
The first step was to get better software loaded onto this virgin laptop.
The next was to begin digging harder.
Fray got to work.
* * *
The sense of danger receded with the Cuartova skyline. In a big old-fashioned gas-guzzling piece of rolling iron shaped like a pickup, they were as anonymous as barbecue or dust. A thin, pretty woman with large sunglasses distrustfully perched on one side of the bench seat, a good old boy with just the right faded jeans and chambray work shirt driving on the other. The only thing wrong was the classical music filling the cab—or maybe not, maybe there was a poet-cowboy out here somewhere.
And, of course, there was the dusty, battered backpack the pretty woman hugged as if it was a flotation device.
The radio burbled, a tinkling cascade of piano music coming to a halt, and Cal squinted. He had a lot to chew on and not much mouth to put it in. Her scent, rich gold and blue, was filling up every corner of his head, and a few corners that had nothing to do with rational thought.
What had he expected? A grateful, doe-eyed version of Tracy?
Except it had been easy to move Tracy from place to place. She’d been normal and predictable.
Stop thinking about that. Jesus. He shifted a little on the bench seat. This woman was smart, strong and determined. He hadn’t thought about what he’d do when he found her, and he especially hadn’t thought about the fact that she might have her own very definite ideas about what she wanted and where she was going.
It didn’t help that she was so goddamn fragile, and powering through regardless. That was bravery, and it turned his guts cold to think of where it would end up. Especially if she figured out all she had to do was stand close and ask him nicely, and he’d be powerfully tempted to go along on whatever fool idea she’d concocted.
Think about something else. Get her talking. “Hey.”
She didn’t reply, staring out the window. He was pretty sure she wasn’t ignoring him, though. Her silence h
ad a sort of listening sense to it.
“I’ve been wondering.” That was true—he’d been wondering a lot of things. “Why are you all set on going back to that base? You were in the area for a while, got a job and a good hide. What’s in there that you would stick around so long?”
No reply. She hugged the backpack a little more tightly, that was all.
“Must be something that requires a little time to extract. Something you can’t just dive in and grab.”
That earned him a single, extraordinary glance, those dark eyes open and vulnerable for a fraction of a second. Outside her window, the sere, thirsty landscape flew by. The truck had good tires, and the engine was in better shape than anything else on the lot—which was why he’d settled on it. Better to buy and pay cash, use yet another disposable identity for the paperwork and change the plates later if he had to. Finding the right dealership was half the problem—you wanted sketchy enough, but not too sketchy, and respectable enough not to be the first place a questioner would nose around.
She didn’t bite, so he added a few more words. “And if it’s something you’re so interested in, it probably has to do with the agent program. Which means it’s likely something I’d be interested in, and Reese, too.”
That got a response. “Agent Six.” She really did have a very nice voice. A little husky, and not nearly as flat and toneless as he’d first thought. Like warm honey, smooth and sweet. “He had very low emotional noise, until he met her. Ms. Candless.”
I’ll bet. “Holly. Yeah, I can relate.” Seeing the two of them together was enough to make you gag or say awwwww, and Cal was never sure which. Reese didn’t show it as much as Holly did, but just the way he stood when she was in the room spoke volumes. There was nothing Reese wouldn’t do for that woman, and if he was feeling anything like the way Cal was, well, he had a helluva poker face.
“And you met...Mrs. Moritz. During her divorce.”
Hearing her say that was interesting and chilling at the same time, sort of like something walking over his grave. The fire, the screaming, bullets chewing every cabinet, blood on his hands when they brought him in. “She was a good friend.”