Nomad (19 page)

"This one," she whispered. "It's...fitting."

"Fitting?" Logan laughed. "Why?"

"It just is."

He kissed her neck, and she leaned back against him and closed her eyes. His hands moved up to her chest, dragging her shirt up with it.

"I have to wash more pictures..." she murmured.

He lifted her shirt away while turning her to face him. Logan kissed her, long and slow, his hands exploring her skin. She shuddered, feeling a disturbing mix of revulsion and desire. She didn't mind doing what was necessary for the mission, but she couldn't stand that some part of her actually wanted his touch.

She pushed him back against the sink and slid down along his legs until she knelt in front of him. She touched the hard shape bulging against his pants, and then she unbuckled his belt. She traced her fingers along the flexing muscle of his legs and kissed his tanned skin.

She took him in her hand, and then into her mouth, hating herself for doing this for him, and hating herself for being so eager to do it.

He gasped, and after only a minute, he pulled her to her feet and kissed her again. He unbuttoned her jeans, and then his fingers slipped down the front of her panties.

She shivered against him, loathing herself for liking it.

It's for the mission
, she told herself.
It's not for me.

* * *

Raven awoke early the next morning, before sunrise, to the sound of rummaging. She opened one heavy eyelid and saw Logan kneeling on her floor, poking around inside the little door to her crawlspace. She sat up, instantly awake.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Just checking out this crazy door. This house is like a puzzle."

"Don't check it out. I keep my laundry in there." She had piled some clothes around the small safe holding her plasma gun and data cube, but it wouldn't take much pawing for him to reach the safe.

"Oh, you're right. Look, there's some dirty socks...bra, panties..." He held up lacy scarlet underwear. "These are sexy. Want to put them on?"

"Get out of there, Logan!"

"Sorry, sorry." He tossed the panties back inside and closed the door. "That's pretty sweet. I wish I had a spot like that to stash my dirty clothes."

"Come back to bed."

"I like how those words sound when you say them." Logan sat down beside her and caressed her cheek with his fingertips while she lay there and tried not to enjoy it. He stared into her eyes. It unnerved her how he was always awake when she fell asleep, and then wide awake again by the time she opened her eyes. It was as though he never slept at all, ever. It would make him harder to control.

"What are you looking at?" she asked after a minute.

"You."

"Obviously."

"You're not like anyone I've ever met before," he said. "I guess that's something people say, but I mean it. I can't figure out exactly
how
you're different, though."

"I'm different in a good way," she said.

"Yeah. You just have this kind of presence...and your eyes. When you don't know I'm watching, you have this scary, distant look. Like you've seen Hell and survived. Something like that."

Raven felt disturbed by how accurate his words were, and she hurried to chase them away with a joke. "You're saying I have scary eyes?"

"I love your scary eyes."

"You have freakish eyes, too." She touched his face. "Glowing green eyes."

"We're both freaks," he said, then his glowing green eyes opened wide. "Oh, fuck!"

"What's wrong?"

"I have to write a paper for my gender studies class. I forgot it's due today. Fuck!" He hurried to dress himself and jump into his shoes.

"You're taking a gender studies class?" She sat up, smirking. "Which genders are you studying?"

"All I can tell you is that a course called 'Female Images and Sexuality' is
not
as good as it sounds," he said. "I have to go."

"Go," she said.

He hesitated by her bedroom door.

"You're staring at me again," she told him.

"I was just thinking...seriously..." He trailed off, still gazing at her.

"I didn't know you ever thought seriously," Raven said.

"Listen, this might be weird or too fast or something, but my Uncle Henry's in town this week. He's giving a lecture at a political think tank, something about organizational systems in government."

"It sounds long," Raven said.

"I'm not dragging you to that. I'm not dragging myself to it, either, but I'm supposed to have lunch with him tomorrow. I was thinking...would you want to come? I think he'd be really impressed with you if he just met you in person, you know? Even though...I mean, I think he would like you."

"Oh." Raven needed to buy a moment to think. "Are you close with your uncle?"

"Yeah, he's always been around. He bought me my first model train set, which I totally destroyed. I kept finding new ways to make the train crash. Uncle Henry is really my family's political strategist. If we were the mob, he'd be our
consigliere
."

"So you want me to meet your family? That's what you're saying?" Raven raised her eyebrows at him.

"I'm saying he always picks a five-star restaurant, and he always pays, so you should definitely come."

"Okay."

"Okay?" He moved toward her. "Great. He'll think you're great, I'll make sure, don't worry." He kissed her hand, then his lips moved up to her shoulder and neck.

"I wasn't worried. Don't forget about your female sexual images paper."

"Fuck! I'll see you later. Sorry."

Raven followed and locked the front door behind him. Audra leaned out of her room, her eyes barely open.

"Why are we up so early?" Audra yawned.

"Logan's always up early."

"I hate early risers." Audra closed her door, and Raven hurried back to her room and locked herself inside.

She opened the safe inside her crawlspace, then activated the data cube and called up its detailed records of Logan's life.

Logan had four uncles. One was an attorney at a Wall Street firm. Another was a prison-industry lobbyist. Another was CEO of a company that manufactured voting machines. The fourth was an unemployed alcoholic living in a trailer outside Jasper, Indiana. None of them were named Henry.

She shuffled through the biographies of key people in the Secretary-General's life, and she soon identified Henry Sheffield, described as a strategist or adviser to Logan Carraway during his future political career. Sheffield had been a Yale undergraduate, then earned a doctorate in Comparative Politics from Cornell. He'd worked at the State Department for a time before attaching himself to the rising political fortunes of the Carraway family.

In 2013, Sheffield was sixty-three years old, a graying, balding, paunchy man whose face made her think of a frog. He currently worked as an unofficial adviser to Senator Carraway, Logan's grandfather, while heading a small lobbying firm on K Street. He had also been the architect of Logan's father's victorious campaign for Governor of Indiana.

In Raven's own time, he was one hundred and fourteen years old and kept alive artificially by cybernetics. His liver-spotted skin had shriveled against his skull, black video eyes looked out from his eye sockets, and his hairless scalp was studded with gleaming silicon implants that expanded his memory and accelerated his brain. He was the global security advisor to Secretary-General Carraway, one of the top people in the dictator's administration. Raven watched a recorded hologram of a news program, in which the elderly cyborg gave a heated argument for escalating the prolonged petroleum war in the Central Asian countries surrounding the Caspian Sea.

"Nice to meet you, Uncle Henry," Raven said.

Chapter Twenty-Two

They met at a downtown restaurant furnished with dark wood and white tablecloths, lit by dim wall sconces. Henry Sheffield occupied a table at the back, drinking a martini, and he raised a finger at Logan.

"There he is," Logan whispered. "Drinking an early lunch."

"I wouldn't mind one of those," Raven whispered back.

Henry Sheffield looked even more frog-like in person, with wide, thin lips and eyes that never seemed to blink behind his gold-wire glasses. He wore a conservative blue suit and polished black loafers. He stood as they approached, shaking Logan's hand and clapping him on the shoulder.

"Quite a golf season this year," Henry said. His voice was low and had a strange, almost rubbery texture.

"We ended in fifth place," Logan said.

"That's what I meant," Henry said. "Quite an embarrassing season."

"I had the best scores on our team, though. Totally pissed off the upperclassmen."

"It doesn't matter. If your team fails, you fail." Henry smiled at Raven, but his dark blue eyes showed no warmth as they examined her. "This is the young lady you've brought to beautify our lunch table?"

"Riley, this is Dr. Henry Sheffield. Uncle Henry, this is Riley, the cutest, smartest girl in the world."

"I won't argue with you." Henry shook her hand, then glanced at the shape of her breasts under her sweater as he sat down.

Logan pulled out a chair and stood behind it, and a long, awkward moment passed before Raven realized he meant for her to take it. He gave her an amused look as he sat down beside her.

"Vincent Palmisano tells me you've not applied to the School of International Studies, nor have you so much as called on him since you arrived in New Haven," Henry said to Logan.

"So what's good here?" Logan held up the menu as though he could hide behind it.

"Logan," Henry said.

"Yeah, okay," Logan sighed. "I keep meaning to do that. I don't have to declare a major this year, though."

"The sooner you decide, the easier it will be to select appropriate courses. Waste less time with these film studies and female gender studies and however else you're squandering your days."

"I'm not squandering." Logan didn't raise his eyes from the menu. The waitress arrived with another martini for Henry and water for Raven and Logan.

"Have you decided?" the waitress asked.

"Have you?" Henry asked Logan.

"Steak, super-rare, thanks," Logan said.

Raven glanced down at the menu and picked out a yellowfin tuna with black rice, a fish that was extinct in her own time. The menu listed a number of extinct fish. She wondered whether these species were still alive in 2013, or whether the fish entrees were synthetic.

"Henry wants me to major in International Studies," Logan explained when the waitress left. "The security concentration. They have a development concentration and a security concentration, depending on whether you want to help poor countries or control them, right?"

"You know that is a sarcastic simplification," Henry said. "Order is necessary. Human beings are wild animals. Absent a powerful authority, they would kill each other in the streets."

"These people?" Logan looked around at the lawyers, professors, and businesspeople quietly eating salads and fish. "You think they'd be ripping each other apart?"

"Of course, if a strong system of law and order were not in place. Power uses violence to create peace, Logan."

Logan sat quietly. He looked as though he were thinking over the man's words.

"Why do you want Logan to go for that degree?" Raven asked.

"Providence Security," Henry replied, and Raven shuddered at the words. "The company is expanding beyond domestic contracts, into international work. Embassies. Military bases."

"Why would military bases need private security guards?" Logan asked. "Aren't they full of soldiers?"

"An excellent question," Henry said. "It frees up the soldiers to focus on their core mission. More and more military and intelligence functions are now outsourced to private companies. International expansion will be worth billions of dollars in new contracts for Providence. Your grandfather and I have already laid the groundwork with our friends in Washington. This empire will be yours to inherit, Logan. I suggest you learn to rule it."

Raven watched Logan as he nodded, absorbing the older man's words again.

"Now, let's stop boring this poor girl as though she were a potential investor," Henry said in a much friendlier tone. "Miss Falcourt, what do you intend to study at Yale?"

"Oh," Raven said. She cleared her throat and paused as the waitress arrived with a third drink for Henry. She hoped the subject would change, but Henry never took his eyes off her. Under the table, Logan took her hand.

"I'm majoring in history, I think," she said.

"An excellent foundation, but you'll need an additional degree to gain the value from it."

"She's going to law school after that," Logan told him. "She's going to make the world a better place."

Henry laughed. "I hope you've gained more from your experiences than Logan has up to this point. Yale offers so many opportunities, even to women now..."

"I'm not actually at Yale. I'm at Albertus Magnus."

"Oh?" Henry's eyes narrowed, and he cast a questioning look at Logan. "What does your father do, Miss Falcourt?"

Raven quickly gave her story about growing up in foster homes. This did not elicit sympathy and warmth as it had with Macey. Henry looked annoyed and shook his head.

"She's very smart," Logan said.

"I don't know how smart I am..." Raven mumbled. She could feel the temperature dropping in the room.

"I'm sure you're bright," Henry said. "Logan dates so many lovely girls, and I do enjoy watching them come and go. Like butterflies in the garden." His smile was malicious. He drank more--he would probably need a cybernetic liver in the future to match his robotic eyes and arms.

Henry did not speak to her again for the rest of the meal, despite Logan's attempts to draw her back into the conversation. Henry kept the topics light and shallow, sports and political gossip. He'd sized her up, found her lacking, and frozen her out.

By the time they left the restaurant, she felt shaken. She'd been unable to make a good impression on Henry, and she worried how it might affect her relationship with Logan, who seemed to take the man's opinion seriously. She decided to try to make it a dead subject as quickly as possible.