“You can’t quit!” Tengermann yelled, her crumpled vest at his feet, but she was already at the end of the aisle. Eddie stood by the dairy case at the very back of the store, slack mouthed with wonder—another fish of a man, she debated telling him that his longing for a female partner would have a 38 instead of 3 percent chance of being satisfied if he would wash his clothes a bit more thoroughly and stop eating microwaved meals. “You can’t quit. Who will do this aisle? Alice! Aliiiiice!”
I am not Alice. No, she decided, Eddie likely would not take her advice, however solidly phrased, with anything resembling disinterested calm. The doors to the back swung as she pushed them, and the crusher was dark and silent. She paused to gaze at it for a moment, perhaps saying goodbye, and continued over ground-smooth and shiny concrete with no fiction of customer-friendly linoleum over it. Drains set in the floors were marvelous places for insects to hide, and sprinkled liberally with poisons every week by the silent, squat women Tengermann called Janitorial, as if they were a country unto themselves.
Trinity realized she was running just as she hit the back door at a third of the speed she was capable of, judging the impact needed to throw it wide. Her stride lengthened as she blurred across the back parking lot, empty except for locked Dumpsters since the produce delivery wouldn’t show up for another hour. A hop and a leap, a breathless jolting down a slight declivity sprayed with herbicide and other poisonous substances every few months, and she was in the fields beyond, the hot night a bandage against her eyes before her pupils flared, adapting much more quickly than a normal’s.
Why did I do that? It was a departure from her careful cover. She had planned to simply not show up after she carried out her second run on the installation.
This altered her situation somewhat. Her hands shook, even as she forced her body to carry her smoothly, quickly, over hard-packed dirt, through scrubby stands of yellow waist-high grass and thorny trash bushes. Not because of the deconstruction.
No. For a moment she had considered stepping forward, striking Tengermann in the solar plexus, and then, as shocked lungs struggled to function, a quick knuckle-strike to his larynx, crushing it. Standing over him as he choked to death, as the Muzak blurred and tinkled through the empty aisles.
This is not deconstruction. It is something worse.
Trinity put her head down and ran faster.
* * *
It was amazing what you could get away with when you carried a clipboard and wore a lanyard with a laminated card. There was also camouflage to be considered—business casual only went so far, and most places you couldn’t wear a shoulder holster if you expected to slide through unnoticed.
A midsize police station was one of the exceptions. Wear the right beaten-down shirt, slightly yellowed under the arms, the loosened tie with its artful ketchup stain, the ill-fitting suit jacket just barely matching the pants, and good brogans, polished but not too carefully and worn enough to say I’ve chased a couple dickheads down, yes, I have—do that, and you could slide through almost as if you were invisible.
The real trick here, just like anywhere, was to move as if you belonged. With a weapons-grade virus messing around with your mitochondrial DNA and giving you incredible control over your autonomics, you could even smell right. Not that any of the normals around you would notice on anything except a subconscious level. Most people operated straight from the subconscious anyway. The greater proportion of a normal’s calories were expended on not thinking, numbing themselves or working to earn a paycheck that would go toward further mindlessness.
Normal. You even remember what that feels like, Cal?
He’d been working the small towns within striking distance of major centers around military installations, especially the big black hole of Cranston and its satellite, Pocula Flats. This particular chicken-fried burg, Felicitas, was large enough that the cop shop wasn’t a tight-knit family affair, which was all to the good. The clipboard and laminated ID got him in; keeping his head down and moving like a cop did the rest. His rumpled suit was detective-worthy, even if his hair was a bit on the long side. A couple of the uniforms glanced at him, glanced again and marked him as “one of those Vice idiots”—especially as he was in much better shape than most—and kept going.
The midmorning rush worked in his favor, too.
Finding an empty office with a working terminal was the difficulty. He frowned at the clipboard, his skin alive with the consciousness of being in enemy territory. Just enough adrenaline and cortisol to keep him sharp, control over autonomics keeping him from sweating too much. All the same, he had to let a little moisture out—blending in was the name of the game, and too dry was worse than too damp. Cal caught himself wishing he was more like Reese—that dark-haired linebacker-shaped bastard could plan. He probably would have a smarter way to catch the girl, instead of the fishing Cal was doing, following the hunters to find the prey.
Reese and his girl, Holly, were in Mexico, last Cal had seen, and this particular mission was all his. He tended to just pick a beat and dance to it, and most of the time it worked out pretty well.
He was hoping this was one of those times.
Two plainclothes guys in a hurry burst from a locked door at Cal’s ten o’clock; his instincts tingled and he moved, catching the heavy reinforced metal before it could swing shut. He was through in half a second, letting it close behind him, and his nose caught the pepper musk of adrenaline. Excitement riding the drafts of air-conditioning, a mental image of dogs straining at a fraying leash.
Interesting. What’s this?
At the end of the hall was a hurriedly constructed fishbowl, desks pushed together and cubicle walls hastily erected to give some idea of organization, not privacy. An expectant hum—people working the phones and hunched over keyboards, and precious few of them looked like cops.
Especially the two goons in front of a leaderboard display, one with his hands clasped behind his back and the other...
Cal paused, his pulse spiking before he clamped down hard, his pores slamming shut. It was close and muggy in here, despite the AC. Sweat, burned coffee, several smokers behind on their scheduled puffs, a couple that had skipped showers. A rich simmering stew full of information both usable and otherwise, but there was too much pepper in it.
Normal people smelled washed-out, faint olfactory shadows. It was only other agents who hit you in the nose and the back of the throat like good curry or better whiskey. You could mask your scent a little bit, ameliorate it, if you kept yourself buttoned all the way down, but it was difficult and often not worth the energy.
This was the one time it was worth it, and he was a little out of practice.
To top it off, Cal realized he was horribly exposed, standing there like a dumbass. He looked back down at the clipboard—different shades of pink and yellow paper covered with meaningless squiggles, stolen from a copy shop’s recycling bin, just like the broken clipboard itself. He kept moving to the side, hoping he wouldn’t cut across a current of air that would alert the other agent.
Which one is it?
“Hey!” a bespectacled girl with a pile of messy chestnut hair called. “I’ve got her!” That hair, kept in place with a couple pens thrust through its sloppily coiled mass, looked as if it was about to eat her head whole. She was so pale she probably bathed in sunscreen, and her wire-rimmed glasses twinkled cheerfully.
All eyes fastened on her, which was just fine by Cal. Because all of a sudden, a picture flashed onto the board, the digital projector humming, and the blonde woman haunting Cal’s head these days stared over the fishbowl, her hair slicked down and darkened on either side of her gaunt, pretty face, as if she’d just bathed. She was even thinner, and that mute pain in her gaze was deadened by the poor quality of the image.
“How did you override the projector?” one of the idiots looking at the board began to protest. “A
nd how did you—”
“Simple. I went digging.” Spectacles Girl beamed. She had a cute little heart-shaped face, and Cal decided conscious effort had been made to tie her wildly curling hair into some sort of elaborate shape. It had failed dreadfully, though, and she smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in a couple days, a rich brown intoxicating scent that was nowhere near agent-strong but still a little pleasant.
Except it wasn’t what he wanted to smell, that blueberry pie and sweetness he’d only managed to get a single lungful of before they escaped the installation in Utah.
Huh. Cal kept going, finding an unused desk and dropping down, spreading his papers out and assuming the tired, beaten posture of an office grunt. Don’t look at me. Let’s just see what’s happening here.
“See,” the girl continued as the two men from the front of the room bore down on her. “If she’s been in the area for a few weeks, she needs money, right? Everyone’s gotta eat. So I went looking around new hires and turned up a list of SSNs that had just been pushed through for W9s. Lo and behold, look!”
One of the men, a lean blond spit-shined number with dark eyes, whose entire bearing shouted military, firmed his mouth up and leaned over the girl’s shoulder. “What the hell’s that?” He pointed, but quick as a snake, she slapped his hand away.
“Don’t touch the monitor. Anyway, I ran the SSNs and I found one that hasn’t even been issued yet, just obeys the algorithm so it didn’t trigger any flags. It’s attached to a supermarket out on Fresney Highway and Saltarello. Right on the edge, a whole lotta nothing, and—”
“The picture’s from a grocery store surveillance camera.” The other head honcho, dark haired and ramrod-straight, spaced the words out evenly, almost robotic. His affect was incredibly flat, but Cal had a sudden sinking sensation. “How did you access it?”
“I have my ways,” Spectacles Girl intoned mysteriously and glanced at the blond, who had to be the decision maker. “Say, what’s she done, anyway?”
“Weren’t you listening? Better for us not to know,” a bearded twentysomething male at the desk to her right piped up. “Dude, how did you string into an intranet?”
“You never worked in a grocery store, did you, Mike.” It wasn’t a question. Spectacles rolled her eyes and stretched, pushing her chair back. It must have rolled over the blond’s foot, because he yelped and hitched backward, and Cal took in all the information on the screen in two swift sipping glances. It was arranged like a PowerPoint presentation, for God’s sake. Spectacles Girl was an overachiever. “They’re easy to crack. I thought this was going to be challenging.”
Cal stayed where he was. His pulse kept trying to spike. He stared at the leaderboard, a thin, beautiful woman’s face in pitiless detail, not a flaw or blemish to be seen. Right next to it, a map of Felicitas’s western side, a shiny little arrow over a grocery store. It blinked between street map and terrain display—even the ass-end of New Mexico was sat-scanned by the private sector these days.
“Miss Frasier.” The blond winced as he put weight back on his foot, and his hand fell on her shoulder as she started to rocket out of her seat. “Where are you going?”
Her mobile, expressive little face twisted up in disgust. “To the little girls’. You’ve been on us all morning, I haven’t taken a single break, and unless you want me to find a corner and drop trou, you know? Besides, Sartino said that if I found this one for you, I’d get a plea.”
“Ah. Yes.” The blond let her go, but Cal didn’t like the flicker of expression crossing his face.
Not my problem. Worry about your mission, Eight.
The other agent was almost certainly the black-haired guy next to Blondie. That dark head had come up, nostrils flaring, and what were the odds this was the figure he’d seen in Dallas, moving through the scurrying of independently contracted security goons like a shark through a flock of minnows? Lazy and graceful, for all his rigidity.
Cal’s throat had gone dry. His peripheral vision registered a flicker of motion—Spectacles getting up, bumping her chair so it spun neatly between her and Blondie. Cal stared at the woman on the screen, willing his heartbeat back to a reasonable pace, keeping his respiration nice and just-shallow-enough. It was her.
It was Three. Trinity. She’d bumped into Cal in the corridor, all of them fighting for their lives, and everything inside him had turned over hard. If this was how it had been for Reese, no wonder he’d gone to hell and back for his girl, Holly. They were pretty disgustingly blissful, the two of them, and it was Trinity who’d sprung Holly from Bronson’s clutches not too long ago.
Since then Cal had been on her trail, and now he had a clear shot. It looked as if she’d need his help, too.
He still couldn’t look away.
“Peace out!” Spectacles Girl called cheerily and stamped down the hall Cal had slipped through.
Blondie glanced at the black-haired agent, who immediately glided in her wake. The rest of the workers were either busily tapping at their own keyboards or watching Blondie for their marching orders.
“All right,” Blondie said. “We have a direction. Blue Team, pick that up and shake it. Let’s see what falls out. Red, you guys keep turning over the other rocks. This might be a dead end.”
Not goddamn likely. Spectacles Girl, if Cal was any judge, was way smarter than Blondie.
“Mr. Caldwell, sir?” This from a lean, harried-looking guy with two days’ worth of stubble on him and sunken dark eyes. “There’s a call on the, um. This line.”
Blondie-Caldwell stalked across the room and hooked the receiver up. “What?”
Cal scraped together the papers, tapped them together on the clipboard and rose like a ghost, heading for the hall.
“Sir.” Caldwell’s tone changed abruptly. “Yes, sir. Sir.”
Getting a chewing-out, boy? What are you doing using local resources this openly? That’s against protocols, as far as I know. Too much information dispersal, too much entropy introduced into mission operations. It was a puzzle, and one he didn’t like the look of. They shouldn’t have been this hot after her after months, not with the rest of the program going down in flames and Bronson dead.
Unless she’d done something to pop up on the radar again. Or if she was valuable enough to warrant this kind of outlay.
The black-haired gent was indeed the other agent. His smell overlaid Spectacle Girl’s, and something about the two made Cal’s nose tingle. They were almost complementary. A slight acridity marred the other agent’s trail, a burning like electrodes, concrete and pain. Why did Blondie have him on the girl? The virus on Black Hair would perk up and notice her big-time, and she probably smelled mouthwatering to him. It was a recipe for trouble.
Don’t worry about it. Get the hell out of here.
“Hey.” A whisper-yell. “Hey, who’s that guy?”
Uh-oh. Cal made it to the door, hoping it wasn’t a two-way lock. It opened, and he was out in the other corridor, strangely deserted. There were shouts in the distance, running feet, and he hesitated on the verge of breaking cover before his ears told him they were going the other way.
“Stop her!” someone bellowed, and then a female voice rose, a cry of effort that turned into, of all things, a phrase Cal recognized from childhood.
“Kowabunga, dudes!” Spectacles Girl screamed, laughing, and glass shattered.
What the hell? Cal shrugged internally, turned the other way and got going. If she wanted to provide a distraction, he wouldn’t complain.
He felt the sudden need for a little grocery shopping.
* * *
The urge to curse, reined in, still tingled in Noah Caldwell’s throat, just like Control’s displeasure had scorched his ears. He did his best to swallow both and regarded the single best asset he had with a level glare. “Well, Bay?”
The black-haired man, ta
ll and broad shouldered, had a very deep voice, but none of the words carried more stress than the others. “Miss Frasier has escaped, sir.”
For the love of... “Great. Well, the cops can grab her. We can’t be bothered. We have an address for the target.”
Caldwell’s neck ached, and Bay didn’t ask for instructions. That meant either he had a question, or he considered moving after Agent Three to be a stupid move.
Bronson hadn’t listened to Three, which was probably why she’d escaped. He’d treated the most exciting advance in intelligence history like his own personal secretary, even sending her to fetch his cheeseburgers from the intake desk.
Bronson, in short, had been an idiot, and Caldwell did not want to follow in his footsteps. All the same, he sighed heavily before shaking the tension in his fingers out. “What?”
“Miss Frasier is an asset. We were to retain her.” Agent Bay didn’t fold his arms or shift his weight.
The hacker girl was only an irritant, and one easily swept under the rug. “The cops caught her once, they can catch her again. Don’t tell me you’re fond of her.” The Gibraltar II virus was supposed to be stable, without the mutability that turned the first iteration into the Gemini virus and caused this entire headache in the first place. The first round of Gibraltar males had sooner or later showed increasing emotional noise and finally ended up hitching themselves to “complementary” women—the geminas.
Thirty percent of the Gibraltar II males survived the induction process meant to strip emotional noise from them, and if they could get their hands on Three as well, they could figure out why. At least, the civilian eggheads could. Male and female agents with greater strength, smarts and endurance, high mission fidelity, and absolute loyalty to America and apple pie were the goal.
The current problems were just roadblocks. Obstacles.
“Sir?” Bay looked mildly puzzled. Of course, he didn’t have a clue about the others.
Caldwell restrained himself for the umpteenth time that day. The Frasier bitch had almost broken his foot, running her chair over it. “Never mind. Look, get that printed out. I’ve got to scramble more resources. I hate working in halfass little burgs like this. Do up a capture plan for her and for our primary. We need the primary for study. We’ll tie off Frasier if we have to.”