leaving behind a familiar darkness. He indulged in several minutes’ worth of self-pity and bile as he slowly stood up.
He wasn’t sure whether he’d cracked his head on the ground, or whether she’d clipped him. The world tilted a little, and he gingerly felt around to see where the damage was. Right temple, he found. It throbbed when he touched it. How in the hell had she gotten the drop on him like that? She should have been weak and woozy herself. It was as though she’d been possessed…everything snapped back into focus.
“Shit.” He thought back to the last thing Maeve had said. How had she said it? She is no longer. Right after he’d said her name. He shook off the cobwebs and dug out his earpiece, jamming it into place. “Get me the colonel, now. I don’t care what he’s in the middle of, get him!”
۞
It was approximately the middle of the night. Everyone had remained in Mrs. Han’s library after raiding her kitchen one last time. They tried to sleep, with varying degrees of success. Worry and regret seemed to hang in the air; together, they chased away any real chance of rest. It seemed as though they’d been there for hours, if not days, when Mrs. Han opened the door and walked in. She turned and looked over her shoulder, waving at someone just outside. After a moment, Maeve walked in, and everyone sighed a tiny bit of relief. It was short-lived.
“Our mission is active.” Her face was unreadable. Wallace frowned in confusion. He stood to make himself known to her, only to see Leif frozen in pale dismay.
“What’s wrong?” He found himself whispering for no apparent reason.
“Depending on how you look at it, nothing and everything.” Cryptic as a cat, Leif continued to watch her closely. What else was new?
Wallace jumped nearly out of his skin. Maeve had materialized right next to him, looking at him both curiously and appraisingly.
“You were thought to be dead.”
“That was probably a relief to you.”
“Your statement is unsound emotionalism. I am merely stating what a functional theory was. It is irrelevant, in any case. Briefing and mobilization are primary.” She turned and faced the others. “Who has the briefing?”
“I do.” Julieta twisted herself out of the chair into which she’d been coiled. She sized Maeve up, wondering whether she’d misjudged the other woman. She seemed okay, and certainly sounded like she was ready to take command and lead them. “Over here.”
“Your tactical assessments are admirable. Who is the principal target?”
“This guy. Robert Warden.” Julieta shoved a tablet over to Maeve.
“There is no photo.”
“We won’t need it. We have somebody who can identify him.”
“Is this person on the ground with Warden?”
“Affirmative. He’ll stay with or near him as long as he can.”
“Where is Warden’s current location?”
“We think here. It’s his summer home, from what our source has told us.” Julieta brought a map up on a larger viewscreen. “You can also see the other locations we know of where he either has operations, or else what one might call safe houses.”
“He will be here.” Maeve had walked over to the map. She touched a section in the Mediterranean, enlarging it until a tiny Aegean island was centered.
“Why there? His summer place is in the French Alps, protected by high peaks…it’s like a fortress.”
“He wishes to be found. An island is easily defensible, but accessible. Ask your source what he knows about this place.”
“Whoa, wait. Why would you assume he wants us to hunt him down? He sent someone to kill us. That would indicate that he’d rather keep us away.”
“A killer with his own agenda is what this guy sent.” Antonio waved his own tablet at them.
“Are you hacking the station network?” Grace scrambled to peer over his shoulder.
“I think all bets are off right now. The colonel has a preliminary report on his desk, as it were, linking a murder onboard a tourist ship to what happened here. The ship happened to make a layover here on the Nimitz, on the day that the doctor…you know.” He made a whooshing noise, moving his hand quickly at the same time.
“Great. What kind of murder?”
“Well, Signorina Julieta, it’s a nasty little story. Victim was late thirties, female, strangled. Signs of sexual activity, but no confirmation on the nature of same.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“It means they don’t know when the activity took place yet.”
“But Jemi wasn’t strangled. Why did they link it to her?”
“A curious little thing. DNA found on scene, not belonging to the victim, not on file anywhere.”
“The invisible man.”
“Not invisible. Maeve saw him. You saw what he looked like, right?” She was silent.
“Maeve?”
“I must have informed the station authorities. It is their responsibility now. The only relevant fact from what took place and what Assunta has added is that a killer with an obvious weakness was sent. This indicates that his role may be to provide intelligence, more than to actually accomplish a set task.”
“You’re saying that he was sent to size us up?”
“It seems likely. He may even be a liability to this Warden, in spite of whatever skills he has. Warden may have posited that, if his assassin succeeded, we were never a true threat anyway. But now he knows that he should not underestimate us.”
“That would tend to imply that this Warden person is possibly a lot more dangerous than we’ve thought.”
“Perhaps you ought to pay attention to your source, who seems to have no trouble in escaping Warden’s watchful eye.” Julieta’s gaze traveled down to the briefing materials, which included a quick update on Boko’s movements. She glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Han. The old woman gave a nervous shrug, and quickly left the room.
Why hadn’t Boko known anything concrete about this assassin? And while his grandfather had predicted his return, she was bothered by the timing. Had he gone to see Kun because he felt threatened or in imminent danger, or was he playing both sides? She sighed and looked back at Maeve.
Even though she sounded reasonably rational and daresay, leaderly, there was something not quite right. It wasn’t Maeve herself giving the indication, though. Julieta had not known her well enough to know the difference there. It was plain on Wallace’s face, and Leif’s as well, that something was up.
“Mrs. Han said she’d have some food waiting for us in the kitchen. Leif, could you give me a hand?” He swiveled his head quickly, ready to voice dissent, until he caught Julieta’s exaggerated eyeball rolling toward the door.
“I guess.”
“We’ll be back in five minutes.” She waited until they were both in the hallway headed downstairs before pouncing. “Alright, Christensen. What is up?”
“Hard to say for sure.”
“Well, give it a try.”
“I think I mentioned that we weren’t really sure what kind of programming she’d been through. When they dumped her up at the listening post…I took it at face value. It wasn’t until later, when everyone else started showing up with orders that I really began to wonder.”
“Um, you lost me.”
“You’re not stupid. None of us is. All that crap we were told, about dodging some evil plan to turn us into super soldiers or whatever?”
“You think we were being trained instead of saved?”
“Maybe not by the same people who got to Maeve, but yes. Do you remember having a single dream at any point we were there? Do you?” He was stuck on this point. Part of him wished that someone would disagree. He didn’t want this to be their reality after all.
“You can’t expect me to remember that!”
“We’re ticking bombs, Jules. Maeve, on the other hand, is active.”
“What!? Crap on a cracker…what the hell are we doing, shouldn’t we stop her?”
“How? We don’t know what she was programme
d to do. And regardless of what you might think, hurting her is not an option.”
“She must have gotten triggered during that attack. Warden wouldn’t have done that intentionally…it doesn’t make sense. His intel must not be complete.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We’ve got to try and talk about this with the others, though. If I’m right about us having been programmed at some point, she may be the one to know our triggers.”
“Shit…there’s no fighting against that. What are we supposed to do?”
“Go along with it. Don’t fight her. Maybe she won’t initiate anything if she sees we’re fully cooperating.”
“Great. Then what do we do if she goes completely nuts?” She noted the faintly stricken look on his face. “Sorry, Leif, but this isn’t a frigging opera here. We have to think about it.”
“Somebody better be ready with a big dose of something to knock her out.”
۞
Boko had received news from his grandfather. Things were not going according to plan anymore. Something had happened, and the others were coming back much earlier, en masse, while his own role was being rewritten.
“I want you to come back here, Boko, before he gets the news that they have left the Nimitz. It will be much more difficult for you to move freely once they have. Seek out a holiday, or an assignment that will take you away from his reach.”
“But who will finish my end of things?”
“I will tell you that once you arrive. Please, just do as I ask.” So, he had. He was on his way out of Athens, carefully making sure that he was not being followed. There had been a convenient flight out of the city, to within five hundred miles of his grandfather. After that, he would make his way slowly, and cautiously.
It hadn’t been an easy thing to concoct a reason for leaving, either. He’d thought all night, and walked in to his office the next day without a single thought in mind. Providentially, or perhaps because Grandfather had realized what a task he’d set before his grandson, something had arrived just that morning.
A messenger was needed in the Americas, someone highly trusted, to carry back to Warden some documents and other materiel. It was not to be given over to anyone outside the organization. It couldn’t be trusted to the postal services with their invasive screening procedures. No, it had to be given over by hand. Naturally, Warden had looked immediately to his “good friend” and trusted colleague. He had chosen Boko so quickly, actually, that suspicion had arisen immediately in Boko’s breast.
There had been fear and anger in that man’s mind as he had readied for his trip back to Peru. He had analyzed and rethought every moment of the conversation between Warden and him. One thought was that Warden was testing him. Another was that, for all his black heart, Warden might actually be naïve.
Boko still walked with an eye permanently cast over his shoulder. He decided to make his way to the mountains over the space of four days. That would give the others enough time to make their way back planetside, while he could be completely sure to lose anyone who might be following.
He’d emptied his apartment of personal effects before leaving, making sure to give no hint of being permanently gone. Most of his clothes were still there, as well as food, and plants. All his photos and letters were with him, while souvenirs or other telling objects had been dumped anonymously at charities in the city. He traveled lightly, carrying only a fifty-pound pack. He would take public transportation as far as it could go, knowing that he would have to hike the rest of the route to the way station.
Once he got there, someone could call Grandfather, and he would finish the journey the way he had last time. Of course, last time, he’d hired locals to drive him to the way station, and paid them generously to forget him. This time, he couldn’t afford to part with money. He’d changed it all over to gold standard upon arriving in Peru. An extremely elderly man in a dingy storefront had accomplished this task,