Prodigal (22 page)

“You want to speak freely, Nathan?” she asked. “Permission granted.”

“The Directorate went to a lot of trouble to bury the Mons disaster. I just don’t see them being this anxious to dig it up after all these years.”

“What’s your point?”

“It seems like everybody would be better off if the people in those cryotubes stayed dead. We take our orders from the Directorate—but the Directorate takes
their
orders straight from the Collective. We might not be playing for the same team.”

Farina thought about it quietly, long enough for Nathan to know she took him seriously. “You think Special Services has their own agenda?”

“Or the Council, or even the Assembly. I know how those people operate, Lauren, and I can promise you—they do
not
have the same priorities. If somebody
is
running a game, we’d be the last to know.”

She closed her eyes, shaking her head wearily. “There are times when I really hate this job,” she seethed. “With everything going on, the last thing I need is to become the go-to gal in some corporate power play.” She turned to him again. “Any chance you can use our resources here to confirm your theory?”

“That depends on what you need.”

“I need a hammerjack, Nathan. I’m asking if you’re up to the task.”

He was stunned. The idea
had
occurred to him, but Nathan never expected Farina to sign off on it. “I have a crawler at my disposal,” he said. “That’s more than enough to string out whatever ice the Directorate has shielding their systems.”

“Can you do it without being detected?”

“Probably.”

“That doesn’t sound like very good odds.”

“I’m a lousy gambler.”

Farina took in a deep breath and folded her arms in front of her chest. Unlike Nathan, she was an excellent gambler and had built an entire career out of knowing when to bluff, when to fold—and when to move in for the kill.

“Very well,” she decided. “See what you can find out, then report directly back to me.” Farina paused for a long moment before adding, “I don’t want to know how you’re going to do this, do I?”

“Probably not.”

“I was afraid of that,” Farina said. She touched Nathan’s arm and gave him a brief and gentle squeeze. “I don’t need to tell you what will happen if we get caught. Violating corporate systems carries an automatic charge of information trafficking. That’s the big time.”

“Big as it gets,” Nathan said. “But if you’re gonna play, you might as well make it high stakes.”

“I thought you didn’t like to gamble.”

“I learn fast.”

Farina gave him a nod of approval.

“You certainly do,” she said. “Who knows? If we’re lucky, when this is over they might even let us share a cell together.”

The memory Lea had of her team—at least what was left of it—had taken on the shades of a fever dream since Chernobyl, gaps in logic fueled by a speedtec crash. She had vague impressions of their watching as she hobbled, bloodied and beaten, into the combat transport. Those stares had been a crazy contortion of sympathy and recrimination: loyalty to the commander who emerged from that apartment building under her own power, undercut by grief for those who had to be carried out. Nobody knew how to approach Lea after that. They were too invested in the legend to accept that she could ever fail. Eric Tiernan had tried, but in the end there had simply been nothing to say. Lea was the walking wounded. She needed to work it out on her own.

She remained that way during the entire flight home, huddled in her own corner of the CIC, trying to hide the symptoms of withdrawal as she crawled out of a tec-induced fugue. Even now, coming back to Corporate Special Services, she found that nothing much had changed. Adrenal-opiates still bent her perceptions, the decaying rush reinvigorated by her time with Vortex—and people still looked at her the same way, their guarded silence cover for what their body language couldn’t hide. Chernobyl had
marked
her. Lea Prism was no longer invulnerable.

As she entered the docking port on the roof, she sensed the proof of it immediately. A group of immaculately tailored lawyers gathered there, chatting each other up while they waited for the next transport. When Lea walked in, however, their attentions shifted in her direction. Keenly aware of their predatory interest as she brushed past, Lea suspected their reactions had less to do with hormones and more to do with smelling her blood in the water. They just circled, as instinct dictated, to see how badly she was bleeding.

Lea didn’t feed their speculation. Instead, she made a point of pulling her jacket aside, briefly revealing the small pistol she had strapped to her belt. The ones crowding her space got the message and backed off. CSS lawyers liked to fancy themselves killers, but show them a real gun, and they usually ran the other way. Murder by proxy was their preferred method, the kind spooks like Lea facilitated. Up close and personal was different—as Lea conveyed with a frigid glance and a turn of her head, making sure they knew how inconsequential they really were.

Leaving the crowd behind, she headed straight for the magnetic lift. After she flashed her credentials and provided a retinal scan, the automated sentry allowed her inside. She punched the button for JTOC—the Joint Technical Operations Command, headquarters for T-Branch and home for the Special Projects division. Outside of the Works, the eight floors that comprised JTOC housed the most sophisticated technology available to the Collective—all of it geared toward keeping the various corporate factions in line, while striking terror among enemies of the state. Only after she started working here did Lea realize how precarious that balance really was. A tilt one way or the other could easily bring the whole thing down; that it hadn’t happened was a testament to the brutal efficiency of the place.

The lift stopped at the Operations level. Doors opened into a flurry of activity, mostly civilian staffers and junior officers darting through a maze of cubicles. An array of holoscreens pointed down on the action, pouring reams of information into the volatile mix. The pace was always like this, the chaotic atmosphere concealing a very deliberate function. T-Branch ran at least a dozen operations on any given day, all of which were tracked down to the last detail and coordinated by the support staff. They monitored everything from communications to troop positions, clearing orders through JTOC and providing tactical support for people in the field. The screens displayed mission status—satellite sweeps and thermographs relaying images in real time, covering so many nations that it seemed as though they had the entire world under scrutiny. A notable exception was northern Ukraine, which remained on one of the screens, a bright heat plume obscuring the entirety of Chernobyl. The area was still under surveillance, on the off chance that some
Inru
stragglers might still be there—but the blind spot only reminded Lea of how little she had known going in. All these resources, and they hadn’t mattered one damned bit.

Neither did your instincts,
she thought.
Or Vortex, for that matter.

One of the staffers noticed Lea as she stepped off the lift, and from there awareness of her presence spread like a ripple throughout the room. Ops personnel usually treated their field counterparts with awe, but today they took special pains to avoid Lea as she made her way past their desks. The command structure still had her after-action reports under review, and at this point nobody knew where the inquiry would lead. Until that got sorted out, it was better to keep a safe distance. Lea supposed the brass could make an example out of her, but she doubted that would happen. She was a spook first, and spooks were rarely prosecuted. If anything, the civilian bureaucracy would just make her disappear—but even
that
was a remote possibility. Trevor Bostic had invested too much in her to let that happen. Their fates were intertwined, whether or not Lea wanted it that way.

For now, she put that thought out of her mind. She had too many other things to worry about—such as finding some concrete evidence on Avalon’s latest atrocity. Didi Novak sounded pretty confident about that over the burst comm, though her cagey tone gave Lea plenty of cause for concern. At best, she expected to hear that Avalon had somehow resurrected Ascension-grade flash; at worst, it meant the
Inru
were working on something new—something more dangerous than Lea had imagined. If the
Inru
possessed capabilities she had missed, then Vortex had missed them as well—and
that
pointed to a fallibility Lea had never even considered.

And why not?
she asked herself.
If he was wrong about Chernobyl, he could have been wrong about this as well. Or maybe it’s just Lyssa running interference, trying to throw him off by mixing lies in with the truth. Whatever the cause, Vortex isn’t perfect.

He isn’t Cray Alden.

Lea resisted an urge to hurry through the place, pacing herself as she stopped at a few workstations along the way, putting in a token appearance before moving on. Toward the rear of the gigantic room, she came across a set of glass doors that separated Operations from Special Projects, the area where Lea kept her offices. Beyond the door lay a plain concrete hallway, featureless except for the severe glare of decontamination lights and the two guards who stood watch outside. They were huge men, products of a synthetic steroid regimen that conditioned strict obedience at the expense of independent thought. Their hands dropped to their weapons when Lea approached, even though their faces didn’t react. Lea had to admire the purity of it.

“Hello, gentlemen,” she greeted them. As she stepped into the security sphere, an electric tingle touched her skin, followed by the soft whine of a particle microturret charging overhead. The thing followed Lea’s every move, its beady electric eye glowering down at her from atop the doorway. “Nice to see you again.”

“Identification,” one of them spoke, as automated as the sentry above their heads.

Lea produced her creds again, making sure that both guards saw them. For good measure, she waved the card in front of the microturret as well. The last thing she wanted was to get sliced and diced because of a clerical error.

The hulks stood aside, allowing Lea to breeze past them. She slid her card through the code key next to the door. It flashed green and bypassed the lock, which opened with a heavy click.

A persistent current of air pushed the door shut behind her, a melancholy wail that traveled the length of the corridor. Negative pressure fans kept the flow going at all times, away from the other levels and into a powerful bank of filters that scrubbed the atmosphere clean. The lights, meanwhile, acted on the microbes in her clothes and on her skin—the second time she had been through decon today. The microscopic genocide always unsettled her, and Lea rushed through the tunnel until she reached a polished vault at the end of the corridor. Posted on the titanium surface was the reason for all the precautions, etched in bright red letters so nobody could miss it:

And beneath that, in ornate script on a piece of tacked-up cardboard, a sample of Didi Novak’s black humor:

ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

Lea spared a wry grin for her GME, looking into the camera next to the vault.

“Knock knock,” she said.

“Who goes there?” Novak answered. “Friend or foe or just here to deliver my biscuits?”