Persona (8 page)

Her face was frozen for a second, recalibrating, trying to decide what his angle was. She was wide-awake, now, taking stock. There were shadows hanging under her eyes. He wondered if she'd ever been rested since the first time the IA got its claws in her.

He said, carefully, “Was that with your first handler?”

She nodded. “Hakan,” she said, her voice thick. She cleared her throat. “Magnus came after. An IA committee appointed him; I don't know if they talked to the UARC government first or just decided.”

Shit. Here we go, he thought. Draw her out. Get the scoop on Magnus. Build a story you can tell. (Some of this he'd never tell, because it was hers and he couldn't bring himself to, but he had to walk away with something, didn't he? Why had he protected her otherwise?)

He said, “There's a good sign.”

She made an exaggerated face. “Magnus is a good diplomat—he gets things done, he's fixed a lot of messes—but sometimes when you're a good diplomat . . .” She shrugged her good shoulder to show what she thought about the trustworthiness of statesmen.

“He looks sharp on TV,” Daniel said.

“That's half the reason he does so well.”

It was a professional assessment. No lingering feelings that could be mined for a relationship story. Interesting. “So how did the Chordata people first reach you?”

She looked up sharply. Something in it must have sounded too much like a reporter, or too eager—her expression was the face she'd given Magnus, not looking at him so much as watching him.

He felt, weirdly, like he was slipping away from something important.

Then there was a knock at the door, and the guy with the knife (Nattereri, he remembered) came in, holding a pizza box and water bottles.

“Don't suppose you have a nice red wine somewhere,” Daniel tried.

Nattereri didn't even spare him a glance as he set it all down and looked at Suyana, slouched against the wall.

“Do you need the medic?”

“No, thank you. I'll get him to check on me soon.” She frowned. “Is everything all right?”

Nattereri looked over at Daniel, which meant bad news that shouldn't be shared with strangers. Daniel bristled—who'd gotten her out of gunfire and broken her out of the hospital?—but maybe it was the sort of moral high ground he should avoid.

“Eat first,” Nattereri said. “There's time later.”

“There's time now.”

Daniel didn't know how she could say that. He was so hungry the smell of pizza was making him dizzy, and without meaning to, he said, “You sure?”

Her eyes slid to him without her head moving.

“Give us ten minutes,” she said to Nattereri.

When the door was closed again, she sat up and looked at Daniel full-on. “You might not want to question me again while we're here.”

It felt like she'd just advanced on him. He squared his shoulders. “Is that an order?”

She slid off the bed far enough to reach the pizza and put it on the bed between them. “When you know the stakes, you can give the orders.”

He thought about what she'd been through. He thought how odd and awful it was, that this was advice from experience. Whatever bad news was coming over the transom, he didn't want to ask what she suspected. (He worried he'd even survive long enough to find out.)

Instead he said, “All right,” and handed her the first slice.

They ate in silence, their eyes on the door, Daniel's mind working in tight circles about whatever would be coming down on them next.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Two slices later, she said, “I'm ready,” like she was talking to herself. As she stood, she reached for her hair with both hands—flinched, hissed.

Oh shit, he thought, her arm.

He reached for her braid. “I can help.”

“I have it,” she said through gritted teeth.

After a second, he dropped his hands.

She twisted it into a black rope one-handed and coiled it into a loose knot at her neck. Apparently she wanted to look elegant before the worst happened. Diplomat habits.

Daniel stood and brushed pizza crumbs off his coat. He debated taking it off—he'd look more as if he belonged—but there was something to be said for being ready to bolt if things turned sour.

Before he could make up his mind, she was pulling the door open and walking out as smoothly as she could for someone with only one good leg.

After a moment's hesitation, he followed. This was a story, and he couldn't let second-guessing get in his way.

(He thought how perfect her profile would look just like this, determined and grim, on the front page of the paper, and wished for his camera before he could help himself.)

Nattereri had taken up a new post. He was sitting in the hall, facing the door, his knife drawn.

Suyana was already standing beside one of the computer desks with Onca, looking over Ocyale the medic's shoulder at his screen—audio editing, it looked like.

Onca said, “It's Magnus. He gave another press conference about an hour after you left the hospital.”

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Daniel calculated—by then they had been in the courtyard at Troyes, or headed here. How much time had been spent looking for them, and how much of it had just been Magnus in his office in front of a piece of paper, wondering how to explain that his Face had vanished?

Ocyale pulled up a video window with a stuttering picture and a tinny version of a voice Daniel was already getting tired of hearing.

“—and I regret to report that, at this time, it appears that the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation Representative Face Suyana Sapaki has been abducted. She was last seen being taken from a medical facility, presumably under duress. At this time, the affiliation and identity of her captors remain unknown.”

Daniel tried to breathe, couldn't.

Magnus looked into the camera now: official, soulful. “It is with a heavy heart that, as a member of the UARC diplomatic team acting under protocol of the International Assembly regarding potential terrorist activity, I must officially sever all diplomatic ties with Suyana Sapaki.”

Ocyale stopped the video. For a second the room was so quiet that Daniel could hear his heartbeat in his ears.

Burned. The fucking International Assembly had publicly burned her.

The last time the IA had tried something like this, maybe a decade ago, the Face had actually been abducted—the kidnapping was on closed-circuit footage they looped on TV for days. He'd shown up later holding a newspaper, in a hostage video full of demands.

Daniel realized he couldn't remember what had happened to that Face. That wasn't comforting.

He glanced over his shoulder at the door, where Nattereri looked like he was wishing for a gun.

Then Suyana said, “But that's not everything.”

“No,” said Ocyale, sounding surprised she'd guessed. Strange that he hadn't given her much credit. Daniel already knew better.

“Here. This went out on a secure channel, about the same time as the press conference.”

A stranger's voice came over the line. “To all field agents: Suyana Sapaki upgraded to alpha priority. Expend all necessary effort to locate. Do not engage under any circumstances. Report directly to Douglas and await further instruction.”

“I don't know a Douglas,” Suyana said immediately, never taking her eyes off the computer.

Onca closed her lips around the question.

The Shadow Assembly Comes for the Queen of the Amazon
, the headline would read. Daniel saw it rolling out on every channel. Maybe it would keep her safe, he thought. Publicity would make her harder to disappear.

He liked that. It made him feel a little less queasy about having pizza with someone whose cover he'd been trying to blow.

After a little quiet, Onca cleared her throat. “We understand this is no fault of yours, but the situation has changed.”

Suyana ran her teeth across her bottom lip, a flash of white no one but Daniel could see. “I would hope,” she said, as if from far away, “that Chordata realized something like this was always possible, as I did—this could happen under any number of circumstances unrelated to any discovery of my involvement.”

It sounded like she was disappointed in a family. Maybe she was.

“Of course,” said Ocyale, more sympathetically than Daniel would have expected.

What was their arrangement, exactly? What was Suyana to Chordata? Informant? Lieutenant? You didn't do all this for some everyday mole. She had an investment here.

How much of this did Magnus know?

“But things are dangerous,” Onca said. “It's not just that they've cut you. They're still looking for you. What if they find you?”

“Find us” hung unsaid.

Suyana closed her eyes a beat too long, like she was looking out for a far-off ship and had gotten tired. “Give me a minute. I need to decide what to do. Please don't trouble yourselves in the meantime; I won't ask for your support until I'm sure I'll need it.”

There was just enough condemnation in the words that Daniel flinched.

Nattereri asked, “And your friend?”

Daniel held his breath.

“He's with me,” she said.

His chest went tight for a second. He tried not to let it mean anything. Didn't work.

He didn't dare speak—she'd been clear—but she had to know he'd offer his help the minute she asked. His stomach was going sour. Help was still help even if he wanted something from it; she still needed him; it wasn't as though she was thick on friends.

“Wait for me,” she said to him as she passed him. “I won't be long.”

It was her diplomatic voice, smooth and distant and impenetrable, trying to stave off the worst.

As he closed the bedroom door, she was standing in the galley kitchen across the way, silhouetted in the yellow light from the street below, looking like a tower of ash left behind from where disaster had struck.

She deserves better, he thought suddenly, fiercely. Better than me, better than all of this.

Then his phone buzzed.

Suyana leaned against the kitchen counter, propped on her arms (ignored the throb of the wound), gripped it until the edges stung her palms.

It was stuffy—she needed fresh air, she needed to
breathe
—but she fought the urge to go to the window. No use in getting spotted like that after all this trouble. She'd be back in the line of fire soon enough.

The street was silent. She felt so lonely her eyelids ached.

The information fanned out in front of her, a fractal of choice. The biggest threat was Chordata's potential unwillingness to shelter her if her information had dried up and she was nothing but a target. Those branches were short, and their ends blunt. It made her so angry she had to take a breath because her lungs were going tight. Hadn't she been everything they'd asked? Hadn't they acted like a family?

But her loyalties weren't anyone else's loyalties. She had to remember that or this was all over. She brushed those options aside. It would do no good to press them from a place of no advantage; she'd have to think of some other card to play.

But trees could overwhelm if you tried to see through them too much. There was what the Americans would do to the UARC if it was shaken and vulnerable. There was the stranger in her room now, who had helped her and was lying to her. There was the question of whose words Magnus was reading on television; there were questions about the subterranean search team that may or may not be his.

There was the question of the shooting.

It seemed almost nostalgic, given what had happened since. When she thought about the moments before the first shot, standing in the shadows of a contract while Magnus looked her over as though she'd been born to worry him, the moment had the sepia quiet of an old photograph.

Had it been Magnus?

Below her, someone on the street was calling out—a woman answered, laughing, and two sets of footsteps moved under the kitchen window and into the night.

No, Suyana thought. She could picture Magnus writing the message that had gone out on the underground line—lightly, so there would be no traces on the blotter. He wouldn't have trusted a verbal message. Some things were too important. She could picture Magnus meeting Margot and the IA Central Committee, and calmly accepting their ruling that she had to be cut loose. She could even, if she was being honest, imagine Magnus suggesting to Margot that trying to retrieve Suyana would be effort for nothing, and it would be easier if she just disappeared. Magnus knew how to stay a step ahead of complications.

She could not, as much as she tried, imagine Magnus meeting someone in an alley, handing them her headshot, and saying, “We'll be there at half past two. Make sure you don't shoot me once you open fire.”

She was almost sure he had grabbed her elbow just after the first shot, before she fell, as if to pull her out of the way.

(If he'd grabbed her elbow before the shot because he'd known it was coming, then she'd have a word with him after this was over.)

There were quieter ways to get rid of her. They could have sent her on a home tour, paid out her contract, and brought in the next Face in line. They could even have brought her home and killed her there; Faces were forcibly retired sometimes, when they'd outlived their usefulness, and nothing came of it. A Face dying on home soil was nobody else's business.

Magnus wouldn't turn her into a martyr bleeding out on the streets of Paris. That was just bad marketing. He was quieter than that, and he picked only the best for the job. If he'd set it up, she'd already be dead.

It was more surprising that she'd been publicly declared kidnapped. That angle showed somebody desperate to close the deal. The Chordata agents had no way of knowing how strange it was, but IA internal protocol assumed three days' leeway before kidnapping was officially considered. Sometimes Faces got tired of the game and dropped off the map; it happened often enough that they gave you seventy-two hours to wear yourself out and come home again.