The Valkyrie Project (21 page)

Unfortunately, that display asked Ana to scan her finger on the actual print reader just to the side of the power button. If she'd known she would need Scarface's fingerprint, she probably could have gotten it during their fight in the hospital. Of course, she would have
to have loaded it into the Agency database and then into a print simulator before coming here and she wasn't supposed to have the intel that had led her here in the first place. She'd just have to see what sort of anti-hacking ware Scarface had running.

Ana spun the display
, looking for signs of common open entry points. The easy holes were blocked, but when Ana tilted the display to the closest she could approximate thirty-eight degrees, a single black dot blinked near the bottom of the projection. The Thirty-Eight Special was a hole as hard to plug as to get through because of its proximity to the natural tilt point for the display at thirty-seven point five degrees. Ana had enough experience to keep the terminal balanced at the right angle, but was far less confident in her ability to work through any inner security while doing so. She'd done it before without an overwhelming amount of success. Her choices at this point narrowed to either break in or go home, so she took a deep breath and drew the tiny hole open.

The lack of biofeedback and resistance made Ana feel like she was trying to grab hold of a ghost. Her patience held, though, and she wrangled the ghost, wrapping it around
her like a sheet with awkward, ragged holes for eyes, using it to obfuscate her entrance into the terminal system.

The information inside was dense and highly encrypted. It didn't take Ana long to find it, but opening the treasure chest and sifting through it all would strain her ghost shell to the point of at best loss of connection
, at worst exposure to the system and any active security. Trying to lug the chest of information out through the tiny opening through which she'd come in would probably have similar outcomes. Ana began the painful process of breaking off pieces of the data bank and using the terminal’s own encryption routines to untangle the vines of the thorny briar plant that would be more than happy to burrow its way into her digital skin.

The first piece Ana decoded yielded nothing more than the location of the apartment, which she demonstrably already knew. The next few pieces appeared to be collections of distributions from various news outlets, scientific journals, and fi
nancial statements. Some of the internal groupings were linked by a common corporation or country, but the disparate collections carried no such common thread. It would have been nice to be able to offload the information for further analysis, but Ana continued to plow through to the newly decrypted sections, fearful of a shadowy reaper stalking her. She sensed the sentry that patrolled the terminal closing in on her spectral form.

Another few banks of data opened up before her to reveal something that looked more like mission documentation than had any of the previous information. Most of the files were tagged OVERWRITE AND MELT AFTER READING, but since Ana had accessed it, clearly that had not been done. The documents were as sparse as they could be in getting the point across. There seemed to be an outline of an information
-gathering assignment, calling for logs of people's locations as specific dates and times. Ana recognized some of the names from the Surgeon List. That did not surprise her until she happened to glance at the timestamp in the footer of one of the documents. The month and day were any old month and day, but the year was not the current year, and not one in the past.

It was 2142:
thirty-three years in the future.

Ana knew, somehow she knew, that it was not a mistake. She didn't need to do any math to check if somehow the terminal had flipped a bit and ended up with an incorrect timestamp.
The pieces clicked into place even as her head started to fuzz with implication.

She spun back to the small heaps of news and financial data she had
previously tossed aside. The timestamps matched. The publication dates on the news articles and scientific journals started several years past 2109. Everything in there was much more important than it had been just a minute before. Ana tried to calculate how much data from the future, encrypted and otherwise, she could dump through the opening before the digital sentinel uncovered her Trojan. The answer was: not much.

Ana's heart thumped
hard and fast in her chest, and her nerves, already straining to deal with mass amounts of adrenaline, kept trying to pull her mind away from its task. The Thirty-Eight Special tolerated very little in the way of deviation, and the idea of the Continuum somehow having information gathered from the future divided Ana's attention just enough that she lost focus for a split second. The mask of invisibility fell away. She regained it quickly, but not in time to prevent the protector of the digital fortress from spotting her. The program took the form of a large gladiator rushing toward her and even though she disappeared, it forced her from the terminal interface with a blow that might have cracked ribs had it been physical rather than virtual.

She drew her hand back, even though there was nothing left where the interface had been. The blank white wall stared listlessly back at her, a total lack of input. Yet she could almost hear the sirens wail from the alarm she knew she'd tripped. How long before
the man who would become Scarface in his future and her past would be headed back to see who was snooping around his apartment?

Then a new and unsuspecting thought crawled
like an insect into her veins: what if he already knew?

If he was from the future where the Continuum had figured out how to send people back
—and presumably forward—in time, then the Scarface in the future, the Scarface who was actually scarred after their encounter, would know that she had broken into his computer. What if he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, in the dark of the windowless stairwell, waiting for her to come back down?

And if he knew, the whole Continuum might know. They might have sent back an e
ntire army to take her down. No. She backed away from thinking too highly of herself. She was a Valkyrie, indeed, but she could not yet have climbed the ranks to become a worthy target in the eyes of time-traveling terrorists.

Nevertheless, she hustled back down the stairs and into the clean
, hot sun just starting its arc down toward the western skies. Being out of the tiny rooms representing a shell of a life, Ana felt less fearful and more confident. More like a Valkyrie should. She strode away from the house, down the block to her car, not caring who the remote security on the terminal might summon. She could take all comers and she would not back down.

Of course, now she would have to face Malcolm, and p
robably members of the Agency higher up to tell them what she had found. How could the Agency fight a battle—let alone a war—against an enemy who could learn what they would do and then go back in time to counter?

Ana shoved the thought
aside, it and many others that tried to invade her mind, and pulled her hovercar up into traffic to head back to the Agency.

--

"How much do you know about the Continuum?" Ana asked as the door to Malcolm's office hissed shut.

"What do you mean
, Ana? I know what you know."

Ana shook her head.

"I'm sorry, I can't honestly convince myself of that."

"Ana, what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the shit that's down a few floors in this building. I'm talking about the agents with access to that information who know the Continuum has been around for over a decade!"

"Ana
." His voice rose a few notes, but Ana cut him off.

"If you need a scrambler or a darkroom, let's do it. I need to know what else there is to know, because I've done some digging and I think I
have something that no one else does."

Malcolm raised his eyebrows.
"Sounds like a lot to keep track of."

"You're goddamn right it is. But I'm not the only one tracking it. I
know there is more that I haven't been told."

His voice s
ank back to its normal pitch. "Ana, there are always things we don't know. Things we can't know."

"Don't patronize me with bogus fatherly advice nonsense." Ana's throat tightened around her vocal cords and she could feel warm saline trying to find its way around her eyes. "I'm supposed to trust you
, Malcolm. And there are not a lot of people I can say that about."

Her words hurt Malcolm as much as they did her. And he knew it. His rock
-hard eyes crumbled. Not all at once, but as the silence drew out between them, little pieces of rubble fell away, skittering into a ravine.

"Meet me in Useless in five." He used a
s little breath as possible in issuing the command.

The
darkrooms on the floor that ran the Valkyrie Project derived their names from adjectives that described pretty much the opposite of sort of information that could be shared within them: Useless, Nameless, Quietude, Discontinuation—Ana nicknamed the latter 'Discon' because she felt it was inefficient to refer to it by its whole five-syllable name. And while the so-called White Ops unit never used them for the types of interrogation that one might reasonably assume occurred within the confines of the four windowless walls devoid of any monitoring or recording equipment, the need for private or classified or off-the-record conversations still existed.

Her tension stretched the five
-minute wait at her desk like a rubber band, and when Aerin interrupted Ana almost snapped.

"
Hey," he said, "you wanted to talk to me about something? Your message was pretty cryptic."

"Yeah, I,
well, I'm not sure if… ah, well… I need to know if you know any good brain doctors." Then she added, "Under-the-radar brain doctors." She tried not to wink.

"Are you okay?"

"Me? Yeah, I'm fine. It's for a friend."

"Ana, really, if you think you need
—"

"No, seriously, Aerin. It's for a friend."

"What kind of brain stuff are we talking about?"

"I'm not quite sure, but some sort of alteration of brain patterns and shunting of brain activity that results in insomnia and delusions."

Aerin was clearly trying not to look taken aback. He did a decent job for someone with his transparent, heart-on-sleeve personality.

Then he said in an overly conspiratorial tone, "Sure, I'll look into something like what you have suggested. That's a good lead."

If Ana hadn't known about his tendency to lapse into nonsense to cover his nervousness she might have asked him what the hell he meant. Instead she just nodded and he walked away. Then she resumed her countdown of the time until she could follow up on what was really important with Malcolm.

--

Ana entered the Darkroom, which despite the name was actually well lit, and waited for the door to shut before taking the seat opposite Malcolm. He sighed, grim, reluctant.

"It's not all untruths," he began, and Ana was surprised that he did not begin by asking what she knew. "They did come out of no
where. No one—that we know of at least—has been able to determine how or where they formed."

Ana waited for the "but" that would contradict what the Valkyries had been told.
There was always a "but."

"But their
instantaneous appearance did not happen as recently as you've been told."

Ana nodded and waited, her arms crossed, the look of reproach carefully programmed onto her face.

"We first became aware of their presence fourteen years ago during the war. They had some impressive technology and made a few significant forays into the realm of international espionage. But their efforts fell off after that and while the name still popped up every once in a while, it was only in connection with minor events. They barely registered on the Agency's radar. Now, it seems that we should have paid closer attention. As you've seen, their tech and weapons development has outpaced ours and there are now groups in the Agency who are going over the records to see if they can figure out what happened."

Malcolm
was finished. Ana tried to stifle the raise of her eyebrows but did not succeed.
That's it?
her expression said. She knew he could read her well enough to know she was underwhelmed. She waited another few moments, letting the silence settle on them like a fog.

"That's it?" Ana verbalized the question
after he didn't respond, so there was no possibility of miscommunication. "That's so top secret we had to come in here?"

"I've tried to get the information declassified. I would like for this department to be able to work on the data
-mining. But the people who control the access haven't been willing to do that."

"But you're telling me now."

"I'm not stupid, Ana. I can tell when you're bluffing and when you have a legitimate concern. We're in this room so there's plausible deniability about how you learned what you learned."