Persona (21 page)

She said a few words—her voice was diplomat-low, and didn't carry, but from the looks on their faces she was extremely displeased and was explaining exactly what she expected from him, and what he'd be in for if he didn't provide swift and satisfactory customer service.

Bo moved in behind her—far enough back in the crowd that it attracted no attention, but closer than Daniel would have dared. Daniel watched her moving and thought about Kate calling Margot “big game.” It seemed an inadequate phrase.

When she was finished, she turned her back without ceremony and walked the bridge back to the north side. Her pace was as calm as when she'd been walking along the quay. She never looked behind her.

Amazing, Daniel thought. Under different circumstances he'd shake her hand.

The stranger stood where he was for a moment, as if gathering his courage. Then he headed in the opposite direction and melted into the crowd. As he turned, his dark hair fell in front of the last sliver of his face.

And—Daniel felt like he'd been cracked across the face—he knew where he'd seen him before.

Daniel had seen the man just for an instant, while half dragging Suyana toward the avenue, as the man vanished in the chaos after the shooting. He'd been coming around the corner a block from the hotel, heading for Suyana, carrying a thin, dark case across his back.

A case you'd keep a rifle in.

Even though she varied her pace, and even stopped to buy a crepe from a sidewalk stand, Suyana made it to the Chordata house in much less time than she'd managed it the day before.

Partly, that was because her wounds were rested and it was slightly less torturous to walk. Partly, it was because she didn't have someone with her whom she was trying to confuse.

She delayed it as long as she could, repeating vocabulary exercises, cycling through languages (she knew six, depending on how much attention she was paying).

The Face has a further comment. The Face wishes to object. The Face accepts the decision of the Assembly. The Face is grateful to the Committee.

She was coming back for the sake of a duty she hated but couldn't shirk, with information they needed. If anyone felt like killing her, they were welcome to take their chances. It would save Chordata the trouble of shooting her when they found out she'd let in a snap.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

“Some people you can't trust,” Hakan had said. “Some you can. It has nothing to do with what they say here. You learn the difference, with skill and time.”

She was sixteen, her first year as the Face of the UARC, watching how politics functioned and trying not to flame out.

(“Noqakuna,” Hakan told her a lot her first years, tucked into a long sentence in Quechua she understood less and less of. “We,” it meant; the version of the pronoun meant to exclude. A sign they were being lied to.)

She could do it, she thought sometimes, as she spoke earnestly to this or that handler who had something she needed; she could do this and thrive. Other times she watched Martine cross the floor like a white bear as the countries around her cringed in their seats, and despaired.

“I think you're just trying to keep me from disappearing,” she said.

“Probably,” he said, and smiled.

His hair had gone gray at the temples by then. She'd looked at him and wondered what would happen to her when he gave up his chair at last, and went home.

She'd never found out.

The year Chordata blew up the American offices was a diplomatic disaster: calls no one took and favors that vanished when you called them in, and no answers from home about what they could offer allies.

There were rumors in chambers that no one could have known that outpost was American-owned unless there was a mole in the IA.

Suyana struggled against sanctions, and made impassioned speeches in committee meetings, and finally she'd agreed to make an apologetic PSA as proof the UARC was sorry.

And to make sure the UARC was sorry, someone had made sure Hakan disappeared.

There was nothing said about it, by anyone. She walked into the office one morning and Magnus was waiting, tall and blond, with a face that would always look a little like a stranger's.

He'd been perched on the edge of the desk with a dossier open in his hands, falsely casual, and when he looked up his lips thinned before he said, “Lovely. You must be Suyana.”

She'd stood where she was without speaking until he closed the file and said, “I'm Magnus,” as if he was giving in by telling her.

He was giving in. She was in shock and in mourning, but she knew how to keep quiet until someone broke.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

She rang the Morse pattern on the front bell; when they buzzed her in, she took the stairs deliberately, so Nattereri wouldn't get edgy with whatever weapon he'd brought into the hallway.

He seemed mildly surprised to see her, but she kept her hands visible, and by the time she reached the landing he'd stepped aside to let her through.

Onca slid into sight from the doorway to the bedroom, one arm straight down at her side, holding something Suyana couldn't see—but that wasn't hard to guess.

“I'm alone,” Suyana said.

Onca stepped back out of sight for a moment; when she came into the hallway, her hands were empty.

“We're glad you're safe. Where's your friend?”

“He wasn't my friend.” The words turned her throat to dust.

Onca looked at her. “Why don't we speak alone,” she said finally.

When the bedroom door was closed, Onca turned to her. Suyana noticed she'd toed off her heels, the better to quietly kill an intruder. Onca's eyes were blunt and steady.

“How bad is the news, Lachesis?”

The name was an honorific. It was a pillar that Suyana could stand against. She was grateful. With the name, it was easier to remember all she had done that might be worthy.

If Chordata killed her now, she'd still have given them what they needed to blow up the American foothold at the edge of the forest. She would still have engineered the “surprise” US port inspection that revealed tankers of waste bound for dumping in the Pacific, where the current would have carried it to their shores. (The IA had passed censure, the first against America in fifty years.)

There would be some things that lived because of her, even if she died. That was good. That was enough. She took a breath.

“He was a snap.”

Onca's face sank, the muscles around her mouth going limp, her eyes unfocused as if unable to contemplate the extent of the dangers.

“I didn't know,” Suyana said. “I would never have brought him if I had known.”

If I had known, she thought, I'd have run the other way as soon as the shooting started, and bled to death first, if that's what it came to.

Onca managed, “How did you find out?”

“I saw the pictures he'd taken of my assassination attempt.”

She wanted to call it what it was, to make it clear what she had lived through. Shootings happened when someone had a grudge against you. Assassinations happened when someone needed you out of the way because of what you knew.

If Chordata was going to kill her now for letting Daniel in, she wanted to have everything properly named.

“Were there pictures of us?”

“No. None of this. This wasn't his interest.”

“But he knows,” said Onca. “Snaps have no honor—he'll tell them everything!”

Suyana thought about how hard he'd gripped her elbow in the moment before he kissed her, his face the expression of a man who doesn't know how to atone for what he's done. His hand was shaking. (She'd known he'd betrayed her, just from that, before the pictures ever came.)

“I came to warn you. You'll need to move this safe house, just in case. And I'll need another contact.” Her voice broke, just for a second, as she said, “It's not safe for Zenaida.”

Onca's expression was unreadable.

“With respect, Lachesis, this is not a decision I can make. I'll have to discuss this with my commander.”

Suyana took a leveling breath.

“Your commander is going to tell you to kill me,” she said. “You and I both know.”

Onca flinched, but didn't deny it.

“I can't tell you how sorry I am,” Suyana said, her stomach twisting as she spoke. “I've brought this on you, and I know that, but there are greater dangers to both of us than one man who wanted to make a little money on my dating gossip.”

She took a step closer to Onca, looked her straight in the eye. “Either the Americans or the International Assembly ordered it, but one or the other wants me dead. Don't do their work for them.”

Onca pursed her mouth, cheated one shoulder as if she would turn for the door any second.

“I know what they'll tell you, when you ask,” Suyana said. Tears pricked the backs of her eyes, but her voice was steady. “I came here to warn you, knowing what might happen. I want to get back what was taken from me, and if I get it back then I want to do what I believe in, for my country and for you, wherever I can help you. Someone's going to tell you what I've done for you is worthless in light of what's happened. I won't understand it. I want to live. I'd rather fight.”

She stopped, took a ragged breath.

Onca looked behind her, running a hand across her mouth and pulling on her bottom lip. It was the gesture of someone trying to make an impossible decision. If Onca reported this, Chordata's response would be clear; she was a liability twice over, and had to be eliminated.

Chordata's tenets were to preserve life no matter their plans—their war was with a system, not security guards—but the ideal and the reality often ran up against each other. There was no benevolent Chordata central through which sanctions were filtered. They were people; if they thought themselves betrayed, sometimes their mercy faltered.

Suyana focused on breathing in and out.

I could die, she thought, the concept hitting her in a way she hadn't let herself consider on the long walk over as dusk fell. (How could you consider it, and still make that walk?)

In Terrain, there had been the awful danger of discovery, the danger that Martine would get it under her skin to turn Suyana over to the IA and laugh at her foolishness. But a risk wasn't a certainty, and Suyana's cause had been needful, and her allies had outnumbered her enemies. Here, she had no one.

Her hands flexed, and she remembered the moment in Terrain she'd looked at Martine and wondered if the tray she was holding could snap Martine's neck.

(Hakan had always been surprised her diplomacy seemed to come a beat late when she was up against an enemy.

“You're clever enough for this work,” he'd say sometimes, at the end of his patience. “The first moment of a confrontation is crucial, and you're always two seconds too late. What are you thinking?”

Suyana had never been able to tell him, “How to get them out of the way.”)

Onca looked at the floor, at the ceiling, at the gun that was sitting on the dresser beside the door. Suyana held perfectly still. There was still a water mark on the desk, where Daniel had set his bottle down.

“What will you do if I let you go?” Onca was looking at her now, eye to eye.

Suyana didn't hesitate. “Find him, and settle accounts.”

It must have been answer enough. A moment later, Onca opened the door and motioned Suyana through it.

“I have a few hours of work,” she said. “I won't have time to worry about this until the morning. I'll get my proof it's been taken care of by then.”

Suyana nodded, too relieved to think of what to say. She was already in the doorway before she remembered her good-byes. “I owe you,” she said. “I won't forget it.”

Onca said, “Good luck, Lachesis.”

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

On the street it was almost night; streetlights were flickering on, storefronts pulling their shutters, brasseries like lanterns.

She struck out south. Daniel would have put himself in the center of the action, so the closer she got to the IA, the better chance she had of running into him.

(Something else told her that, whether he hated her or not, he would be making it his business to know where she was as soon as he could.)

If Magnus had reached his man, he'd be on the move too, trying to reach her.

Whichever one of them reached her first, there would be work to do. If she was going to stand a chance of outmaneuvering the Committee and being reinstated, Suyana needed a corpse.

She was going to get one.

Daniel was panicking.

The man was walking in the wrong direction, they were parting ways; Bo would follow Margot wherever she was going, and Daniel would lose the stranger—the stranger he knew, he
knew
, had just been told to finish what he'd started with Suyana.

It was the IA who'd tried to kill her.

Bo had lingered in the crowd to watch Margot cross the bridge. Now he was coming back, nearly at Daniel's side already. Any second, they'd be setting off to watch Margot meet some lesser diplomats and cover her tracks at some restaurant no one sane could afford, and go read quietly at home, waiting for news that this stranger had found Suyana and done the job.

Daniel couldn't breathe. When he turned to keep the stranger in sight, his vision swam.

He spun through his options.

He couldn't take Bo in a fight. He could barely look Bo in the eye; Bo was closing in on six and a half feet in a frame like a cement block.

Daniel could try to slip into the crowd, but the camera would give him away wherever he went, and it would be easy for Dev and Kate to have some field team intercept him. If he broke the camera, there was a chance—

“Park, you awake?”

Daniel blinked at Bo. “Just absorbed in the majesty of the church. Where are we heading?”