Blades of Winter (24 page)

I nod and give him a peck on the cheek. I pull down the window shades while he goes to the bed and pulls off the covers. He stands in front of the door to the room and holds the blanket up as high as he can while I open the door and slip out. The idea is to try to block the light from the hallway. It can tip people off that someone has entered, or in this case exited, the room.

I gently shut the door and sneak down the hallway. A
winding set of stairs wraps itself around the elevator shaft like an affectionate snake. I assume the stairs are being monitored, but it’s probably only below this floor. I silently move upstairs until I run out of building. I shove open the door to the roof. I’m hidden from my target’s view since this roof is three stories higher than the top of the offices across from my hotel room. I stay low, anyway. You never know who else is watching.

I move to the back side of the roof, away from the office building, and look over the edge. There’s a shorter structure over here; it’s a five-story drop. I jump down, land with a thud, and feel a sharp stabbing pain in both knees. I suck in my breath and stifle a curse.
Fuckin’ hell!
My neuroinjector sends in some Overkaine so I can stay mobile.

Rather than jump five more stories to the street and completely ruin my knees, I clamber down a fire escape. Then I circle two blocks around until can I approach the office building from the side opposite our hotel. I look up and notice an elaborate patio garden just below the roof with a cluster of tall plants and one good-size tree. I leap to the fire escape and climb up as quietly as possible. As I slither onto the patio, I check out the tree. The top of it is higher than the office building’s roof.

Oh, this is perfect
.

I scan the area with my infrared and night vision.

All clear
.

I scale the tree in a flash, sway back and forth for a moment, then leap to the roof of the office building and silently land on all fours. My infrared vision shows my target around the other side of a big air vent. I take a deep breath and sneak around the vent. There she is, pointing a microphone gun at our room across the street. It’s the chick Patrick spotted on Bleecker Street—dark hair, dark clothes, and giant-sunglasses-looking bug eyes.

I sneak up behind her, clamp my left hand over her mouth, and stab my upgraded right hand through her jacket, shirt, skin, and muscle. I wrap three fingers around one of her ribs and snarl, “One move and I rip your fucking spine out.”

She grunts into my hand, twitches in pain, and manages a quick nod.

I hiss in her ear, “Who sent you?”

She shakes her head under my left hand. I squeeze my right hand around her rib a little more and ask again. Same result. Then her body relaxes. I must have tripped a pain-numbing module. Dammit, now she’s useless.

“Say good night, shithead.”

I’m about to tear her skeleton apart when I hear Trick in my comm channel. “Scarlet, do not terminate that asset!”

I comm, “Asset, my butt. We won’t learn anything from this one.”

“Let me try. Bring her here.”

Fine, Trick, have it your way
. I slide my right hand out of the chick’s back and whack her in the neck to knock
her unconscious. I throw her body over my shoulders and carry her to the middle of the roof to give myself room for a running start. Then I sprint at the roof’s edge and leap across the street to the ledge outside our hotel room window.

Back in our room, we bind our captive hand and foot, then set her on a chair. I bandage her back while Trick attaches some electrodes to her skin and shoots her up with a chemical cocktail. After I tape up the wound on her back, he gives the girl one last injection and she regains consciousness. Her bug eyes retract into her brow when she wakes up.

Patrick takes her face in his hands and looks into her eyes. It’s almost tender how he does it, sort of like when we’re alone.

“You know what comes now,” he begins, “but we don’t have to do this. I can file an easily intercepted report that states you withstood hours of chemotorture before you talked.”

She spits in his face. I lunge toward her, but Trick holds up a hand to me. I can’t believe how calm he can be at times like this.

He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Okay, fine,” he says to the girl. “Let’s start with who sent you.”

“Let’s start with this, Xerox,” she snarls. “Your girlfriend’s father went rogue to buy himself a bottle of Thunderbird.”

Gun. Point. Bang!
Her right shoulder bursts open, and a jet of blood sprays out.

“Godammit, Scarlet!” Trick shouts while he dives into his bag of tricks for a pressure bandage. “It’s a dodge. She
wants
you to kill her before we get any intel out of her!” The bitch falls off the chair and thumps onto the floor. Her dark lenses slide down and hide her eyes. Her shoulder pulses red liquid all over the chair, the floor, and Trick. Looks like I hit an artery. Trick tries to stick a bandage on her before she bleeds to death while her blood splashes all over his white sneakers. She
twists and turns so he can’t patch her up until her blood flow slows and she stops moving.

“Fuck! Damn it, damn it!” Trick yells as he gives up on saving her. He reaches into his bag and pulls out two long needles with red handles connected by springy red wires to a brick-sized battery pack. For some reason, it occurs to me that the wires are the same color as my family’s old telephone from when I was a kid.

He stabs one needle into her lower back and the other through her left lens and eyeball. This interrogation technique is called the Thackery Procedure. My training has taught me to stand back because this stunt sprays biojuice all over the place. Patrick won’t try to keep her alive anymore. He’ll extract what info he can in the next few seconds before she croaks on us. He flips a switch on one of the needle handles, and she comes off the floor and wails like a banshee. Only now does it occur to me to worry about the neighbors.

The Thackery bypasses every possible pain inhibitor and cooks the brain’s cortex. It’s very effective in the short term, but it’s always lethal. I knew I should have done this chick on the roof. I’m not sure if I can actually tear someone’s spine out, and I really wanted to give it a shot.

“Give me a name!” Patrick shouts at the girl to drown out her howls. “WHO SENT YOU? A name and I let you go!”

She stops bawling long enough to hiss at us, either “Sss” or “Fff” or “Shh.” It’s hard to tell. Then she’s silent and her body falls slack. She’s gone. We don’t use the Thackery Procedure very often, mostly because it’s so fucking gross. The smell is especially nasty.

The company that makes this device claims that if you don’t procure the intel you want, it absolutely means the subject didn’t know. In practice, the results are a little less predictable. Except the lethal part. That’s always the same.

Trick quickly packs up his bag, bloody bits and all. I
shovel my clothes back into my backpack, and we’re outta there. One quick look around and all I see is blood, a dead smoking girl, and more blood. Mr. and Mrs. Chowder will not be welcome at this hotel again, that’s for sure.

If Miss Deadbitch has any friends around here, they’re probably down in the lobby or out in the street. We run up the hall, away from the elevator and stairs. The hallway turns left onto another side of the hotel. I use my infrared vision to scan the rooms for warm bodies. When we find one that reads cold, Trick picks the lock. We enter, close the door behind us, and listen for a moment.

The elevator doors grind open, and loud footsteps echo in the hallway. Then we hear curses and shrieked commands. “Move, dammit! Fan out. Find them!” Whoever it is has an American accent.

Patrick has already opened the window. He waves me over to him and points at a fire escape across the alley. It’s only a couple yards away. The alley isn’t even wide enough for a car. I climb out the window and jump to the fire escape as silently as possible. Trick jumps next, and I half catch him to help him land quietly. We scuttle down the fire escape and walk out into the street. Down the block we find a parking garage. I hot-wire a small pickup truck with Jersey plates, and we’re a block away when we hear the first sirens.

Later that night, Trick and I are in Chelsea, on the terrace outside one of our safe house apartments. We quietly drink beer. I can tell he’s frustrated with me, and I take a guess that talking might help. Sometimes that seems to work.

“Sorry about earlier …” I begin.

Trick exhales very slowly, looks out at the city, and mutters, “It’s my fault. I should have had you leave the room.”

“I just didn’t think. She made me so mad. It was like my gun leaped into my hand all by itself.”

“I know, Alix, I know.” I can tell I screwed up because
Trick is so quiet about it, which makes me feel worse. He continues. “But that’s the problem: you don’t think. Sometimes it makes it hard to work with you.”

Whoah. Code Red
. “What does that mean? Hard to work with? You want a new partner?” This sounds stupid even as I say it, but I can’t stop myself. “And how do you know I didn’t think?”

Trick sips from his beer bottle and replies, “Because
I
didn’t have time to think, which means neither did you.”

“Oh, you’re so fucking smart now?”

Trick turns to me and finally raises his voice, “Yes, Alix, I
am
so fucking smart! That’s why we’re partners. I’m the brains, and you’re the … you’re …” He sputters, grasping for words.

“What? I’m what?”

He thinks. For someone who’s so fucking smart, he takes a long time to think of something obvious like “fabulous,” or “awesome,” or “amazing.”

“You’re the hotheaded ass kicker who saves our butts all the time.”

Well, it’s not “fabulous,” but I’ll take it—especially the ass kicker part. “That’s right!” I say as I throw my arm around his shoulders and clink my beer bottle into his. We watch a homeless guy stagger up the street and into a subway station. I think about what the girl said. My dad never drank Thunderbird, but she knew way more about me and him than she should have.

I rest my head on my partner’s shoulder. “Trick, who the hell
were
those people at the hotel?”

My partner swigs his beer. “Considering what we were doing, the most likely explanation is that they were CIA.”

Patrick must be kidding. I slide my arm from around his shoulders and turn to face him. He’s not kidding.

Oh, man, did we just torture and kill an agent from a sister U.S. agency?

“How could they possibly have known we were there?”

“I’d say Grey tripped a silent alarm, except that we
were being followed before he was anywhere near the place.”

I lower my face into my hand and rub my temples. All this thinking hurts my head despite the four beers I’ve had.

Trick continues, “Harbaugh commed me half an hour ago, while you were at the liquor store. After we left for New York this morning, he picked up a familiar-looking burst of encrypted comm chatter in D.C. I told him about the girl on Bleecker Street, how you apprehended her, that she knew about your father, and how we evaded her backup team.” Patrick pauses, then says, “He thinks it might be XSUS One again.”

My eyes bug out. “XSUS One is CIA?”

“Harbaugh said ‘might.’ The encryption on these new comms was an order of magnitude more secure than the last batch, so it may not be possible to crack them. The depth of the encryption is what first caught his eye. Then, hours later, you and I have another adventure in Manhattan. We’d say it was the Blades of Persia again, but our competitors at the hotel all had American accents. That doesn’t fit what we know about the Blades.” Patrick runs his hand through his hair.

I lean against him, and he puts his arm around my shoulder. I ask, “Why would the CIA follow us?”

“Well,
if
they were CIA people, it’d be because we sneak around behind their backs, break into their offices, and steal their shit.”

“Yeah,
now
we’re doing that.” I wave my hand in a circle. “But what about the Hector job?”

“That damn Hector job …” Patrick mutters. He regards the dark city’s skyline. “Harbaugh and I talked about that. What happened on that job was so out of nowhere that it keeps breaking our theories.” Trick’s boss is certain that our investigation into my father’s last mission is clearly the right course. The deeper we dig, the wilder it gets. Harbaugh says the degree of interference we’ve met indicates that our XSUS One is way up the food chain somewhere.

Flash! Corruption in high offices of government. Dozens stunned, film at eleven
.

What nobody has figured out is the obvious security breach at ExOps. Keeping our activities out of CORE should seal them within our small circle. So far, though, we might as well be publishing our mission briefs in the
Washington Post
classifieds. Chanez, Cyrus, and Harbaugh are all sniffing around the agency, looking for a mole. They’ve carefully reviewed the CORE files about my dad’s last mission. They appear to be legit except for the fact that they don’t jibe at all with what my father thought he was doing.

I sigh. “Have you talked to Cyrus about this?”

“I left him a message while you drove us here. He and Chanez are in their monthly Executive Meeting.”

Executive Meeting means President Reagan. Cyrus will be stuck there for hours. He always grumbles about how much our current president likes to talk. Cyrus refers to him as “our current president” because after all those years with Nixon, he likes to imply that this country’s highest elected official is some kind of temp.

My partner tilts his bottle up and finishes his beer. “We need more intel. Whatever happened to your dad is out there, no matter how mysterious it seems right now.”