The Valkyrie Project (23 page)

So they exited the vehicle at the outer edge of the former capital. In the
fourteen years since the war, the only thing keeping the city alive was that the inhabitants were having children faster than they were dying. Even then, the population had barely stayed level. Without the seat of political power and all the extra people and money that it brought, there was not much to prop up the local economy. The monuments had been battered by protests and riots and war. The rich who lived in the suburbs had moved farther out or to another city entirely.

Fortunately, t
heir destination was not dead in the center of the slums that had formed as the city evolved. But even the borders between the DC neighborhoods were run-down and dangerous.

Ana and Jrue
both wore several weapons strapped beneath their civilian clothes, though civil tended to overstate the nature of the area. Ana's hands hovered near her guns, expecting to be jumped and robbed, or at least stopped and harassed by
just about
every thug they passed. Unfounded worries considering their group consisted of two trained USIA agents, and could take out
just about
anyone they might encounter on the street.

It would have been a straightforward mile to the doctor's alleged office, but Ana
's suspicions took them on a circuitous route to make sure they didn't see any of the same faces wandering around more than once. She felt confident that they hadn't been followed, and kind of silly for being so concerned.

The doctor's office was in one of the nicer buildings on the grimy litter-strewn street. That still wasn't saying much.
Jrue and Ana were buzzed into the building and headed up to the fifth floor.

The doctor had a waiting room, but no receptionist. He took handprint scans from both of them as soon as they entered. There were no other patients or customers in the cramped space.

The office suffered from a faint but persistent odor of chemical cleaners as though it had been scrubbed down with them often enough that walls leaked the stuff when it got humid.

Ana had given him the basics of the situation before even agreeing to come see him. The
doctor insisted that Jrue describe the symptoms himself. Jrue explained to the doctor and Ana filled in what she had found in the Agency's files without giving away any real information. At least nothing that the doctor would be able to use to blackmail them. Not that he seemed like that kind of guy. Ana was sure he had enough illicit information on his clients to retire on blackmail money if he wanted. But he convinced them that he really just wanted to help people who couldn't afford to go anywhere else. He was charming in that way, but it also made him come off as a bit holier-than-thou. For someone with an empty waiting room, his air of 'more important things to do' made Ana uncomfortable.

"So," he said, "
it sounds like we just need to reconnect some synapses that have been shorted out."

Ana nodded. They had to rely on his expertise, but Ana
's fears refused to slither back into the recesses of her mind. Those fears wrapped themselves in a tight coil in the pit of her stomach as the doctor led Jrue into the other room with Ana insisting she come along. She was not about to let him be alone with this man she wanted to, but couldn't, trust—even with his recommendation from Aerin. The doctor hooked Jrue up to monitoring devices to keep tabs on his bioinformation.

"You're going to scan his brain yourself before you do anything, right?"

"Yes, of course. The machine will give us an analysis prior to administering any recommended fixes."

He lowered the two tan panels of an imaging scanner to either side of Jrue's head and placed a support brace under his chin with another
at the top of his head to keep it in place. The dual panels spun up and then flipped around Jrue's head in a like the hands of a drugged-out dancer in an underground club. After a moment Ana figured out the pattern of up, around, down, crossing up, down, cross back, up, around, down. She let herself be mesmerized as the machine worked, watching Jrue with his eyes closed, and tried not to think about what would come after the initial scan finished.

When the panels slowed down from their dizzying dance and slid back to their original position, Ana looked expectantly
to the doctor. Jrue opened his eyes and gave the same sort of look, hoping for some reassurance. His vitals had remained steady through the examination, but the anxiety creased his brow and impatience raised his eyebrows.

The doctor ignored their looks as though he were on
a higher plane of existence as he examined the analysis that came up on the screen attached to the scanner. He leaned in close, gesturing to pan and zoom around the images the machine had created alongside a large number of charts and tables filled with letters and numbers.

Jrue was still too scared, or wo
rried, to say anything, but Ana's own impatience buzzed around her head like an angry insect.

"You see anything?"

"I see a lot of things."

"Anything out of the ordinary?"

He knew they had no choice but to wait for him. Ana set her jaw to keep her mouth shut. They had come too far to get kicked out for saying something stupid.

"Yes
," he said finally, looking up from the machine, "there have been some definite changes to the basal ganglia and probably the cerebellum and right parietal cortex."

"Definite changes? What does that mean?"

"Looks like some cauterization, scarring, maybe even a bit of rerouting."

Ana looked at Jrue, and her heart sank seeing the confusion
twisting his handsome face. The truth that someone had been inside his head finally hit home. Ana wasn't surprised—she had inoculated herself against the knowledge of what her government was capable of doing. She would have been surprised if they
hadn't
found evidence that someone had messed with Jrue's mind. She was no safe harbor for illusions.

"Professional job
too," the doctor continued. "Even with the scanner I've got here, which, by the way, is not a generic brand knockoff, the work barely shows up. Brain imaging technology doesn't come cheap, even the off-the-shelf machines, so you're lucky I've got high-quality hardware here. Something lower-res might not have shown the bits of scarring in the old gray matter there."

Ana tried to be patient, but she hadn't flown out to DC to talk about brain
-scanning machinery. She had come for answers. And fixes.

"Good thing," she said. "So, what functions do those parts of the brain control?"

"If I had to say, I'd say the commonality looks to be that they're areas associated with the perception of time."

Answers indeed. Ana fixed Jrue with a knowing look. The doctor noticed the very obvious stare, but didn't have enough information to know what it
meant.

"Do you think you can fix it?"

"I did tell you the part about how the alteration is almost imperceptible, right?"

"Yes, I believe I heard that. I also get the impression that you are a very high
-caliber doctor and have dedicated yourself to helping people who have nowhere else to go."

Ana placed heavy emphasis on the 'nowhere else to go' without pleading and, she hoped, without threatening. Finally the doctor smiled. He pointed a finger at Ana and bounced it up and down
as he admonished her.

"For you, I shouldn't do anything. I can tell. I can tell that you should be somewhere else."

To Ana's right, Jrue tried to jump from his chair. He had clearly grown sick of the man's patronizing act and was ready to stand up for himself and his brain. The machine made clanking noises as he bumped and struggled against the restraints.

"But," the doctor said, holding out a hand to stay Jrue's anger, "I know that if you could be somewhere else, you would. So I will do what I can."

He moved back to the machine's controls, and Ana took a seat in a flimsy plastic chair by the wall. She pulled it closer to Jrue and he lifted his arm from the chair and extended it toward her. She reached out and held his hand.

"I'm afraid you can't touch him while this is going on. I'll need to attach some electrodes and it's important that I'm able to know where the impulses are going."

Ana let go and Jrue put his arm back on its rest. He continued to look at her. She couldn't know if the reality of it would ever sink in for him. Perhaps the doctor would be able to fix him now, before he had a chance to fulfill his role as a time-traveling soldier. Or maybe he was already part of another failed experiment. Whatever the case, Ana just hoped that he could be cured of any further insomnia-driven hallucinatory episodes. She watched in silence as the doctor worked.

--

Jrue slept the entire ride back to his apartment in Chicago. The doctor had done what he called 'his best,' but warned that it might not be possible to undo all of what had been done. Hopefully it was better than nothing. But even that was still up in the air.

Twenty-four hours from when she'd stood in front of Scarface's
four-flat in the suburbs, Ana carried Jrue into his apartment, as ready to collapse into his bed as he was. Her comm dashed that dream with an insistent buzzing. Malcolm's face appeared and fear rushed through her before Ana could think of anything else. Before the dread swept her away, though, she grabbed a jagged piece of hope and pulled herself back to reality. Maybe he wanted to throw the doors open on the Continuum and let the Valkyrie Project in. That though allowed her to overcome the apprehension that slowed her hand as it moved to answer the call.

"Ana," Malcolm said
. "We have a new assignment for you. When can you come in?"

He asked. It wasn't a demand.
Ana knew somehow that he knew what she was doing. Not her exact actions, but the general idea. He wanted to make sure she finished her personal mission before coming back, and not just because he thought she'd be distracted. She'd known him long enough to know he wanted to regain her trust. It hurt her a little when she thought about how she'd reacted in the darkroom. Malcolm did the best he could inside a broken system, and they both knew that even with its cracks and flaws, the foundation they stood on was stronger than that of other organizations around the world. Sometimes learning or seeing or hearing certain truths made it harder to accept, but they remained better off than those outside. They had to hope they could raise the tide for all the fleets.

Ana had done what she could for Jrue. He needed to recover, and while she wanted to stay with him,
and away from the Agency, doing so might draw unwanted attention from the higher-ups giving the marching orders.

"I'll be there soon."

--

Aerin sat a few seats over from the center of the semi-circular table in the briefing room. Ana took a seat next to him, though she had a choice of any of the others, save for the one
occupied by Malcolm.

"Aerin is here because the Agency felt that his intelligence and problem-solving would be valuable to the ongoing Continuum investigation."

"So he knows everything?" Ana asked.

"He knows everything
you know," Malcolm hedged. "This way, he will also be able to help you most efficiently on your next mission without going through layers of security, classification, et cetera."

"Help me do what?"

"The Agency sees the Continuum as a growing threat and they are working to free more resources to investigate and counteract. They want more eyes and ears out there, but they—and this is my personal opinion—foolishly want to contain the information and keep as much of it classified as possible. Since you already know much of what there is to know, you are going to be another set of eyes and ears. This work will be coded under the Valkyrie Project, but do not misunderstand, this is not White Ops. The Agency wants you to infiltrate the Continuum."

Ana strode into the entry foyer, wishing for a bit of protection from the glittering, pulsing cacophony of light that assaulted her. Outside the casino in the midday Vegas sun, the sky lit up as if the sun had exploded, but inside, twenty-four-hour midnight lost itself amongst the thousands of stars going nova over and over on the ceiling, walls, old and new money-thieving machines, and even the sculpted bosoms of the entertainers who wandered about like a perky species of zombie-robot hybrid.

Her eyes fought the urge to contract in confusion, because it had still been brighter out on the
Strip than it could be inside even if the entire place were paneled in the same cheap mirror that served as walls for the cluster of booths occupied by exotic dancers off to one side. Close enough to the entrance to provide the kind of quick and easy access that served as a crank for the machine-feeding impulse spending, but far enough that they didn't scare away the people who wanted a clean—or at least cleaner—Vegas vacation.

The large open room just beyond the grand gaping maw of the foyer held every kind of target or mark conceivable. Most
of them had enough smarts to only let the casino dip into their life savings and to firewall the grifters and con artists. Ana, though, was no ordinary con artist. She had been professionally trained in the kinds of personality analysis and mind games that most cons had to learn from trial and error and tough breaks.

The
idea of playing mind games turned Ana's thoughts to the hulking Continuum agent who had reduced her to a lead-brained imbecile in a run-down hotel room. She shuddered inwardly, but continued her confident stride past the garish vagaries preying on human hope and weakness. Into the main arena where hundreds, if not thousands, engaged in individual combat with machines, decks of cards, black and red wheels, and pairs of six-sided die in fruitless attempts to walk out with more money than they’d brought in. Ana was impressed by the analog nature of the games, which had endured for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The money the players threw away, though, consisted of only ones and zeroes locked away in digital vaults.

The soft currency she was allegedly after would be in a vault resembling the strongest of fortresses that used to house gold reserves
—only the guards, locks, video equipment, and thick layers of stone and metal had been replaced by one-input-per-account firewall boxes, one-way salted passwords, and encryption that challenged its designers to reach for infinite bit length and laughed when they hung their heads and said it was impossible. That secure currency belonged to a man more at home in the Greater States, who had found himself exiled a few years ago for daring to claim that they might need a stronger central government. Each of the Greater States held its own fair share of rich white men and none of them wanted to keep around an extra one who complained about their way of doing things.

T
he heads of several old men rotated like swiveling turrets as she walked by, their eyes pointing like the barrels of mounted cannons or laser weapons.

She steeled h
erself for an onslaught of pick-up lines and lewd comments fired from mouths that had long since lost their safeties, but the closest the men came to attacking her was the bulge of their eyes—and perhaps the other bulge where their bodies folded into the smooth plastic seat in front of their machines. The bright red jersey dress tended to have that effect on the opposite sex as it clung to her chest and hips in ways that made one think twice about the existence of gravity.

Ana stepped past puddles of drool and passed down two more ai
sles littered with leering men and festively plumed magpie women. The latter's screeching gossip joined a cacophonous orchestra as a mere woodwind instrument alongside the melodious laughter of young couples who spent money as though it were an act of foreplay. Ana filtered the background noise automatically as she went, and when she came to the end of the third aisle, she spotted her man.

A crisp white cowboy h
at topped his head like a whitecap cresting on a wave. His navy blue suit completed the wave as it rolled over his stout frame.

"Hi
." She leaned close, speaking in a stage whisper to make sure she was heard over the clanking, buzzing, and bleating of the machines. "I'm Kelly. I know you wanted a redhead, but I wore this red dress, does that make up for it at all?"

The man turned a bit to scowl at her.

"I'm sorry, little lady. I think you must have me mistaken for someone else." He still retained the drawl and gentlemanly kindness from his days in the Greater States—a bit surprising for a man of such purportedly high business acumen. Fourteen years after the Second Civil War there was no trust left to lose between the Northern and the Greater States. There were places in the original United States where a person with an accent like his might be refused service. Of course, Las Vegas was not one of those places. As long as you weren't cheating—at the games—Vegas wouldn't turn down anyone's money.

"I don't see another man in here with a gleaming virginal white cowboy hat." Ana t
wined as much lust and indecency as she could around the word virginal, hoping to turn it into an armor-piercing round that would hit the ventral tegmental area deep in his brain and cause an explosion of dopamine, dulling his fear and increasing motivation. Not that she really needed any special weaponry besides willingness and the tight red dress.

Whether
she needed the extra theatrics or not, it worked.

"Virginal white, you say?" He turned another few degrees on the leather seat of his stool and faced her.

"Mr. Heston, we both know this isn't either of our first time at the rodeo." Ana leaned in to him, placing her hands on his knees, her straight arms pressing her breasts into a tight line that rose from the plunging neckline of her dress to meet his widening eyes. "I assure you, I can ride a wild stallion without being thrown."

Heston
—not his real name—picked up one of Ana's hands from his knee and brought it to his mouth, placing a light kiss on it, taking in her carefully measured hint of perfume as he did.

"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

He continued to hold the hand as he rose and then held his arm out at an angle. Ana looped her arm through his, and they left the gaming floor.

Ana noted a few possible bodyguard types on the way to Mr. Heston's room, but none made any contact or showed even a sign of recognition. Certainly some of them were there for various other high
-rollers; it was, after all, that kind of casino. They represented the best private security that money could buy. Ana wondered which of them she would be seeing later, but kept her outward attention—affection—focused on Heston.

The cover for the fingerprint reader slid open as they approached the door. The key fob must have been on his body somewhere, but Ana didn't much care. She did not plan on having to get into the room again later. Mr. Heston swiped his finger over the reader and the door clicked open. He pushed it open and allowed her to precede him into the opulent suite. The lights inside stirred to greet them, starting dim and growing to their full glow as though the sun were rising just outside the windows. Heavy drapes covered the windows, though, and Ana guessed they could stay there for
days without once considering the position of the sun. With the amount of soft currency waiting for him in banks around the world, Heston probably thought staying there with Ana for days was a possibility.

Ana pawed one of the switches to reduce the illumination level back to sensual. Heston removed his comically large hat and placed it delicately on a side table, then shed his suit jacket and tossed it on a nearby chair while loosening his tie. Ana spotted a briefcase on the side table on the opposite side of the large couch in the middle of the sitting room.

"Do you need to freshen up?" he asked, swinging a hand toward the French doors that opened into the bedroom. There was a bathroom off the bedroom that housed a shower big enough for several people, but Ana did not plan to get in it with anyone.

"I'm feeling pretty fresh," she said, closing the distance between them. He backed away the tiniest bit. He could have stood his ground, but she had been in charge from the beginning and he liked it.

Ana pushed him down into a chair next to the side table that held the briefcase. If he wanted them somewhere else for this escapade, he didn't show it. Ana disconnected whatever fear or insecurity might have been plugged into his brain when she pulled a pair of fuzzy handcuffs from her red leather purse.

He sucked in a breath and barely managed to expel some words
. "Take the dress off." His voice was very low.

"What's that?" she said
. "You want to see what I have on underneath here?" She twirled the handcuffs on her index finger.

He gulped, attempted another deep breath and nodded.

"You sure? There's really not much to see. Not much of anything underneath"—she paused—"if you know what I mean."

Ana grabbed one of his wrists and slapped
a cuff on it. Heston struggled, but only for a second. She pulled the arm behind the chair and he dropped his other arm so she could put the other cuff on.

"You're mine now."

"Oh noooooo," he said, forcing nonchalant sarcasm through his drawling accent. But Ana felt the blood pounding through his arms and hands.

She considered for a second that his racing pulse might trigger one of his biofeedback alarms. But his security detail had stood silently by as the newly minted couple made their way to the appointed love shack. If they held true to their appearance, they would know the dif
ference between the data created by lust and that of panic or fear. Real fear.

Ana figured that gave her about sixty seconds. She walked from behind the chair to where Heston's computing terminal lay locked inside the shiny metal briefcase next to the gold and cream couch.

"What's the code for the briefcase?" The sultry heat of Ana's voice iced over with cold calculation.

"What?" A surprised splutter.

"I said, what is the combination for the briefcase? Come on, Mr. Heston, do I have to put two and two together for you?"

He still just stared in bewilderment. Yes, it had been that easy.

"You are rich, and I am robbing you."

"Raymond!" he yelled.

"Mr. Heston, we both know you asked for a room with the highest-level privacy filters. Do you think Raymond is going to hear you yelling for him?"

"Then we both should also know that I am hooked to a biofeed, which is probably about to reach some dangerous thresholds. Dangerous for you, little miss whoever
-you-are."

"Now you're thinking like a criminal! So you probably also know that if you don't give me what I want, I'll just shoot you with a device that
looks like an innocent, perhaps slightly embarrassing, sex toy, and then follow my pre-planned escape route. I won't have your money, but I'll still be alive. And money is not very useful when you're dead. Not for me, but not for you either."

The doors crashed open and two large men pushed their way into
the sitting room of the suite. The guns held in their outstretched arms were trained on Ana.

"Whoa there!" she yelled
. "What kind of girl do you think I am?"

The men seemed confused. At least a little bit. Ana placed her hands on the fabric clinging to her hips
and glared at Heston.

"We've already got handcuffs going here. I would be fine if you wanted to smell my feet, and I've been known to enjoy a little spanking, but bringing in two other guys without warning? That's not gonna fly, buddy."

She snatched up her purse and hustled toward the door. Ana worried that the sudden movement might cause a premature ejaculation from one of the bodyguard's guns, but they held on and moved to block her exit.

--

"Hello, Ms. Anderson. Glad you finally decided to join us."

Ana
swept dust from her mind, trying to bring back an iota of the gleam that would allow it to shine like a polished gem. She still wore the skimpy red dress that had flitted around her during her Vegas promenade. Durosteel handcuffs chafed her wrists; red abrasions dotted them where she must have struggled against captivity while still unconscious.

"I'm almost susp
icious of how you walked into the belly of the beast. So careless for someone with such a long history of superficially legal activity."

"It's not the first time I've been pulled aside by someone's private security."

"Oh, Ms. Anderson," the woman started, mimicking a motherly condescension.

"You can call me Julia
," Ana interrupted.

"Because I'm sure that's your real name, isn't it?"

The woman looked taller than her real height because Ana sat before her in a small black metal chair. The woman's black hair hung to either side of her face like raven's wings and her death-black eyes and the point of her nose completed the likeness.

The room the two women occupied
weighed down the opposite end of the scale from what Ana expected. The only similarity with the bare durocrete walls Jasper Jonze had described might be the lack of windows, but the large, elegant crystal chandeliers in the room more than made up for any need for natural light. A soft purple carpet covered the floor and massaged Ana's bare feet. The pale purple that covered the walls was actually quite pleasant up to the point where it threw Ms. Raven in her tight black dress into stark relief.