Persona (12 page)

Alex's mistake was the reason Kipa had been called up in the first place. She was too young by two or three years, but she was sweet, and her handler played up the idea she was preternaturally good-hearted. An editorial of her on the beach in a tutu, tee, and sneakers had sold a hundred thousand copies of
Atalanta
magazine last year.

Chordata didn't understand that Kipa would be useful only so long as she kept quiet about things the IA would rather not discuss. As soon as she spoke up, her clock would be ticking.

“Hey!” a bartender hissed beside her. “What is this? You on break?”

He sounded like he was winding up for a long go at the help. She slung the tray on her good shoulder, snapped in Spanish, “I'm going, I'm going!” and slid around the bar and out into the crowded club.

She scanned the dance floor as she walked. It was old habit to pick out Grace dancing alone where no strangers could reach her, Natalia and Satoshi parked near the bar, and Martine, holding her electronic cigarette out of the fray as she danced smack in the center of the crowd. (Ethan wasn't here. Very respectful of him.)

They all looked occupied—not even Martine seemed bored yet. There was time to reach Kipa and warn her, if she'd listen.

At the booth, she tried to set the tray down, but her arm shook and her wounded one was too slow to catch it, and amid the clatter and bang she took out two martini glasses. Shit, shit, too much attention.

“You all right?” Kipa asked. She was already looking past Suyana, reaching across the booth for napkins to mop up the spill. She was too nice for the IA.

“Had a twinge in my arm,” Suyana said.

Kipa froze. Slowly, she turned and registered Suyana; the color drained from her cheeks.

“Get that look off your face,” said Suyana, still kneeling, trying to look busy. “And keep your voice down.”

“But—” Kipa cleared her throat, tried to look casual. “You were shot. Kidnapped, they said. They think you're dead.” She sucked in a breath. “Magnus already burned you.”

“I heard.”

“I don't know anything,” Kipa said. “I'm sorry.”

Suyana frowned. “Why would you know?”

“Why else would you have come?”

Fair question, given how Faces were trained to look out for themselves, but still Suyana's heart sank. She shook her head. “Kipa, I've been with friends, and news is pretty bad. I came here to warn you. Until I know who shot me, you need to be careful.”

Kipa's face fell in. “Someone's after—your friends?”

Suyana looked Kipa in the eye. “There's a chance whoever shot me
is
our friends.”

As that sank in, Kipa's eyes got painfully wide, tears pooling at the corners. But after a few seconds she frowned and blinked and nodded, steeling herself, and looked fixedly out over the dance floor with her chin high. “Okay. Okay. All right. What about you?”

Control and compassion. It was encouraging. Kipa was young, but she'd been in the IA a year—the first year was always hardest—and Suyana hoped she'd come out the other side formidable.

“I'll handle myself,” Suyana said. “When you go back, get one of the plainclothes for your hall. Call your handler in as often as you can, never leave your apartment alone. Give me a word.”

Kipa frowned. “What?”

One song was winding into another. They'd be back from dancing any moment.

“A password, Kipa.” She could hear how frustrated she sounded. “So whoever I send can prove they're with me. You can't trust anyone until this is over. Don't use one you've given out already.”

Kipa stammered, “Violet.”

“All right.” The new song was grating, the drums a panicked heartbeat she was trying to ignore. She'd been here too long.

She glanced at Kipa as she piled the last of the mess on the tray. “Go home with the others. Don't be alone. Don't talk to anyone who doesn't give the word. Don't tell our friends I came to see you—they don't know, and it might be dangerous for you. I'll send word if I can.”

Kipa went green. “I don't like the sound of that.”

“Imagine being me.” Suyana half smiled, knelt to ease the tray back onto her shoulder. Her bad arm was throbbing. When she got somewhere safe, she'd have to look at the wounds. There was no way the hospital stitches would hold. “Be careful. Good luck.”

As she stood, there came the tiny thunderclaps of two pairs of heels, and in her periphery, Grace and Martine flashed by in bright spots—Martine white and blue, Grace brown and silver.

Fuck. If they recognized her, she was doomed. They'd rat her out in a second to their handlers or the police, and she'd be disappeared as soon as Magnus could call up someone to finish the job.

Please, she thought, please never have looked me in the eye. Martine might not have. Martine never looked at anyone if she could help it. But Grace had seen her, she'd spoken to Grace, Grace would know who she was.

She held her breath, kept her head down and her shoulders hunched under the tray as she turned to leave. Grace was still moving through the exit path; there was a glimmer of purple that Suyana could tell was pretty pricey jewelry for an incognito night out.

(Daniel still had a necklace in his pocket worth a hundred grand. If the bouncers searched him and realized who'd borrowed it, he'd be going to jail for kidnapping.

She'd wanted him to be a distraction. She didn't want him gone.

Her hands started to shake.)

Suyana kept her head down, slid one step while trying not to crack Grace in the skull with the tray.

Behind her, Martine's electronic cigarette flared with a prerecorded crackle.

“Looks like you've been barbacking, Kipa,” Martine said, voice like glass. “You should be dancing. There's a new taxi dancer, if you're not too chicken. Not quite handsome, but I'd love to know where he stole his coat.”

Daniel. Suyana didn't even have to look up.

I'll be damned, she thought. He came in after me. She ignored the flicker of warmth at the back of her neck. This was their last stop; she couldn't bring him any farther. She took another step, another. She was past Grace—she was free.

“We won't make you,” Martine was saying. “Real friends don't. I hope you didn't let the Amazonian put you up to anything.”

Suyana froze. She had to move, she had to make a run for it, they'd raise the alarm any second—but though her heart was in her throat, dread held her fast.

She'd seen it before, when Martine got her hooks in and pulled; the panic on someone's face when they realized their number had been called at last.

Grace turned in slow motion, her attention torn between Kipa (eyes like saucers) and Martine, but still she put out an arm to prevent Suyana from bolting.

Suyana turned her head, gazed sidelong through the veil of glassware. Martine's face was in shadow, but her smile was sharp and ruthless in the false cinders of her smoke, and when she spoke, the little glow-light hardly moved.

“Evening, Suyana.”

How to get into a club so exclusive it doesn't have a sign: walk in without looking left or right, stop in front of the bouncers, let out the sigh of the infinitely patient. Say, “My friend didn't tell me what ID you want, since she didn't know. You've never asked her for any.”

When they ask, “What's your friend's name?” picture Martine Hargaad walking past them for years, let the image sink in so they can see you thinking about it.

Say, “She told me you'd know better than to ask.”

When the first bouncer says, “I don't suppose this friend could ID you from your picture,” say, “Given what I'm here for, I doubt she'd ID me to my face.”

Slide your hands in your pockets. Shrug like a guy who makes his living taxi dancing on the verge of another long night, a guy who doesn't care what hidden camera's taking his picture.

“You're kidding,” one of them will say.

Show them a tangle of platinum and gems. (Think about Suyana giving it to you, about your fingertips on her warm neck.)

Say, “I'm supposed to return this to her. She's pissed she forgot it.”

Give them just long enough to realize it's genuine; slide it back in your pocket, out of sight of the cameras. Say, more earnestly than you mean to, “I don't think she needs it to turn heads, but I guess other people do.”

(Remember you're supposed to mean Martine Hargaad, not Suyana. Refocus. Prepare to talk as long as it takes.)

Watch without saying anything as the bouncers start to make up their minds.

[
ID 40291, Frame 86: Daniel Park entering Terrain, carrying no visible cargo. Access ploy unknown.
]

When Daniel was twenty, he applied for an apprenticeship with the Korean International Diplomatic Press Corps.

He got the job. A few months later, Hae Soo-jin's handler, Madam Kim Hyun Jae, noticed him in the press pit, and invited him to join the team that shot the official candids of Soo-jin's private life.

He must have been an idiot, he thinks, when he can bring himself to think about it.

It took him two days to realize nothing about Hae Soo-jin was candid. She was never alone. Even her pajamas were selected by her stylist.

He took a thousand pictures of her having cell phone calls with no one on the other line, for use whenever news broke: smiling, frowning, tears that stood in her eyes but never fell. He took pictures of her with Murat Eren, the Turkish Face, whom she was dating on a short-term contract for some electronics-industry exchange that escaped him. They walked in and out of a movie theater arm in arm as he took pictures from behind a bush, so the blurry leaves in the foreground would make it look more spur of the moment.

He couldn't shake the feeling that maybe nothing about Soo-jin was candid because there wasn't much to her. She didn't have much to say to Murat that wasn't small talk, and being around her for any length of time was like mainlining a TV drama where no one deviates from the sheet in the writers' office. A hologram, he thought sometimes, when he was being mean, or when he felt sorry for her.

It was numbing work, and paid almost nothing, and he spent most of his time being lied to about what she was actually doing and coming home to a studio apartment so small he could touch both walls if he lay down and stretched his arms over his head. After a year, something about the combination of bad pay and bad information started to grate.

He'd only ever gotten one really candid shot of her, ducking into a coffee shop and chatting with an older man in line. There wasn't much to go on, but something about her (serious, suddenly, in a way she never was when she knew the lens was on her) sparked him to take the picture.

He used his phone for the next picture, and got a face ID on the guy. He was Global Trade Organization; they weren't supposed to be meeting Faces without official documentation and supervision.

There was only one snap agency he knew, thanks to a guy in the photo pit at one of the IA photo-calls. It took ten minutes to track down the phone number (their cover was a greengrocer) and tell them what he had to sell.

It took less than twenty minutes for Madam Kim to call him into her office and tell him that, as it was technically Korean state equipment, his camera sent her a copy of every picture he took.

“What did you think of that?” she said, eyebrows up, as if they were chatting over tea. “That was some catch.”

And he'd been young and stupid and couldn't hold on to a lie any better than “I don't know what you mean.”

Her face got more menacing by degrees as she spoke. These things were routine, she said. Hae Soo-jin was merely being polite to an official she happened to run into. Nothing was discussed.

(His official camera had a microphone. Soo-jin had talked about what it would take to decrease mandatory import percentages on rice, in the hope of bolstering domestic distribution. It hadn't been bribery, but they were getting there. It was the most he'd ever seen her care about anything. It was a story.)

“Nothing must happen to Hae Soo-jin's reputation,” Madam Kim said, with a smile that came a second too late.

Daniel had been with this team long enough to know what happened to people who got that smile. “Of course,” he said. “We all want the best for her.”

There hadn't been time to copy the high-quality picture onto a disk, but Madam Kim probably would have seen that if he'd tried it; he sold the photo on his phone for cash, to a woman in a yellow raincoat who was waiting outside the DVD bang the man on the phone had named. It was enough money to run with.

Daniel picked up false papers from his uncle and was in the air by nightfall.

If he spent half the flight with a sour stomach, worried about what would happen to Soo-jin and trying to talk himself out of it, that was a first-timer problem. This was why nation affiliation killed journalism, he reminded himself a hundred times; once people were your friends you couldn't do what had to be done.

The IA hadn't sent her home, but she'd been taken off two committees and was on a six-month relationship freeze that the magazines trumpeted with the finality of death. He hadn't even been able to determine if Soo-jin made it to this session, or if she was just a ghost, waiting out a ticking clock back home.

He'd made a good escape, though. Clean. No one from home had followed him. He had a new camera, new target, new prospects, no attachments. He could recover from a shock. His life was a straight line.

That was before Suyana.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Inside, the nightclub looked like every dream of new money and every discretion of old money. The thing now, at clubs back home, was to have high ceilings and black marble floors and acrylic furniture. One of them (too scandalous for Hae Soo-jin) had art projected live on the walls by artists who you could instruct to make anything you wanted, usually tacky, often disturbing. He'd gone twice, but since he didn't have enough cash to make an artist draw something that would get gasps, there wasn't much appeal.