Blades of Winter (37 page)

I don’t wake up in heaven, but it’s not hell, either. I’m in a bed. It’s quiet. I turn my head to look around. Cleo is asleep in a chair to my left. A huge stack of books, magazines, and dossiers from the ExOps Archives sits on a table next to her. I use my visual enhancements to zoom in on my mom’s watch. It’s 23:45. Since when does she keep her watch on military time?

She stirs and half opens her eyes. When she sees that I’m awake, her eyes pop open completely and she springs out of her chair like a mom-in-the-box.

“Oh, baby, you’re awake!” She takes my left hand in hers. “Oh, thank God.”

“Mom, what happened? Are you dead, too?”

She freezes for a moment, then laughs. A big long laugh, like she’s held it in for a while. “No, Alixandra, we’re okay. I’m not dead, and neither are you.” She runs her hand through my hair and lays her palm against my cheek.

I sit up. “Where are we?”

“We’re in Washington, honey. At the hotel.”

It’s not the same room as last time. “Again?”

“Yes,” she answers, her face darkening. “Again.”

“Oh.” I look down at myself. All the usual lumps are under the covers. Legs, feet, nothing’s missing. I hold up my artificial right hand. It looks fine. You’d never know that I scorched the hell out of my plastic palm sliding down that rope in Zurich.

“How long have I been here?”

“You’ve been unconscious for almost a week.”

No wonder I’m mostly healed. While I was out, they must have taken care of everything and gotten me all fixed up … 
Oh, shit, they’ve taken care of everything!

“Where’s Patrick?”

She’s very brave and tells me that they wanted to wait for me to wake up. After a few days the Med-Techs admitted that they didn’t know how long I’d be out, so they cremated him and held his memorial service. I look at the ceiling as tears spring from my eyes and run down my cheeks.

Oh, my God, Trick!

Cleo’s eyes well up, too. “We had to have his service in the main auditorium, so many people came. Cyrus told me Patrick’s family was there, but I didn’t get a chance to meet them. I’m so sorry you missed it, Angel. I know how much he meant to you.”

A big sob escapes my throat. I cover my mouth with my hand to hold the next one in. Tears run across my fingers. “Mom, it’s my fault. I got him killed! I was supposed to leave him once he got caught.”

Extreme Operations’ policy is that a Level will do whatever is necessary to remain at large, even if it means abandoning his or her Info Operator to capture. Arrested IOs don’t usually suffer much abuse. All the sensitive data on Trick’s Bio-Drive would have erased itself, and everybody in our business knows that IOs are hardwired to expire if you torture them. They’re so useful for prisoner exchanges that they almost never get executed. He’d have spent some time in a stinky prison being interrogated, but he’d still be alive and we’d get him back eventually.

Levels, in contrast, are almost never exchanged. Once a Level gets snatched, he or she is gone forever. Mods and Enhances are worth their weight in gold, plus they provide excellent intel about how the other side works. The captive is given the opportunity to switch sides. If a Level remains loyal, it’s torture time. Exactly what this torture is supposed to achieve has never been clear to me. Sometimes I think people just like to hurt things.

This doesn’t come up very often, since we’re rarely apprehended in the first place. We win, escape, or fight to the death. Levels are tough to snatch. Those goon clones in Zurich didn’t kill me when they found me in the broom closet because I must have looked like easy pickings.

Cleo hands me a box of tissues from beside her chair. I take one and blow my nose. I toss the tissue in the wastebasket next to the bed. I notice that there’s already a pile of tissues in it. Between that and the books, I figure my mom has camped out in my hospital room again.

My crying slows down. I wave my hand at the pile of books and her chair. “Did you camp out with Dad, too?”

She takes a second to figure out what I mean. “Oh, when he was hurt? Yes, I did—until we had you. Then I stayed home.”

“Doesn’t it make you crazy to wait here?”

“Not as crazy as waiting at home.”

We’re quiet for a few moments. Then I lie back and ask, “How did Dad wind up in ExOps?”

She turns her head with a far-off look in her eyes. She moves from her chair to the bed next to me. “Your father was in Army Intelligence when we met twenty-two years ago. He’d had successful missions in Germany and Southeast Asia but was being transferred to an administrative post. ‘Goddamn desk job’ he called it.” She tells me he lasted only a month before he began to ask around about assignments with more excitement. Someone
mentioned a new agency called Extreme Operations, and that caught his interest.

He applied to be a field agent, and because of his reputation they signed him without even interviewing him. He didn’t tell my mom until the day he was accepted. This was not good news to my mother. She’d been around Washington and knew enough about covert work to know what kind of life they were in for: long separations, too many secrets, and the strain of dangerous work hanging over their relationship like a sword on a thread. Even if an agent survived the missions, the marriage almost never did.

Dad’s decision made Mom furious, and they had a huge argument. I wasn’t around yet, but I’ve heard about this particular fight many times. I hadn’t known what caused it until now. Between the two of them, most of the stuff in the house got trashed. Neighbors called the cops, and that cooled them both off. They both had government jobs, and if you’re busted, you’re fired. The government is supposedly about preserving the peace, not disturbing it.

“He couldn’t stand to be bored,” Mom grumbles. “He’d get all antsy, and he’d start with his drinking.” She sits quietly for a minute, then she reaches out and takes my hand. “That’s why I’m so anxious about your work, Alix. I’ve seen what it does to people.”

I almost say that Patrick will keep an eye on me. Instead I respond, “Don’t worry, Mom. Cyrus will keep me in line.”

She sighs. As if on cue, someone knocks on the door.

Mom calls out, “Come in.” Not loud enough. Nothing happens.

I shout, “Come I-I-I-NNN!”

The door opens. Speak of the devil; it’s Cyrus. He wears a dark suit and carries a big file folder.

“I heard she was awake.” Of course he knows I’m awake. This hotel is one giant listening device. “How is
she?” he asks my mom as he sets the folder on the floor by my bed.

Cleo gives a little laugh, “Cyrus, she hasn’t lost her power of speech. You can ask her. I’m going to take a shower and lie down for a while.” She leans over and kisses my forehead. She gives Cyrus a hug on the way out. Cyrus watches the door close behind her, then turns to me.

The polite, encouraging smile drops off Cyrus’s face like a sparrow bouncing off a plate-glass window. He sets his jaw, frowns, and pulls at his chin. He takes a deep breath and says, “Winter has found a way to end the world.”

This must be red hot. My boss is never that dramatic.

Cyrus sits down. “Scarlet, I’ve never seen a single mission harvest so much intel so quickly. I’m very proud of you.” A glimmer of affection peeks through the anxiety in his face. “Fredericks, Winter, the Blades, the Darius Covenant, those schematics you brought us, what happened to your father—all of it has come together because of what you and your partner retrieved in Riyadh and Zurich.”

Cyrus opens his file folder and pulls out a sheaf of reports from the Info Department. He reads sections of them out loud and unloads so much processed analysis on me that it makes my head spin.

The Carbon Program’s success with its Gen-2 research had two important consequences. The first was that Winter now had access to a critical piece of technology for his Darius Covenant: rapid-growth cloning. The schematics Patrick found at White Stone Research are indeed plans for a briefcase-size bacteria factory. This device will combine Gen-2’s rapid-growth cloning with White Stone’s special strain of oil-eating, no-oxygen bacteria. Cyrus tells me this bacteria is called
Geobacillus thermodenirificans
. When delivered into a petroleum deposit, the device will flood the reservoir with anaerobic
Geobacillus thermodenirificans
and transform the oil into the useless glop I pushed Patrick into at White Stone. ExOps has taken to calling the device a “petron bomb” and estimates that one of these suckers can devour an oil reservoir the size of Lake Ontario in a single
day. The White House did not receive this news with equanimity.

The second consequence of Gen-2’s success was that the notoriously dead Big Bertha appeared in Carbon’s inventory as a Gen-3 test subject. Winter obviously felt that Fredericks should know about it, and he had Kazim Nazari dispatch Hector to bring a message to Fredericks without leaving a comm trace. My appearance at his Protector’s meeting with Hector panicked Fredericks into making his ill-advised comm call to Kazim.

Combined with the falsified Job Number, this comm call implicates Jakob Fredericks in a conspiracy to abandon my father to capture by a foreign government and an attempt to block the investigation into my father’s fate with a second conspiracy to have me murdered. Cyrus says that Chanez has reported this to the Justice Department, which is seriously considering opening a case about it.

“Considering?” I bark. “Cyrus, it’s
treason
!”

“True,” he replies, “but Justice has a case against Chanez, too. ExOps isn’t supposed to pull missions without telling anyone, and Chanez has had us off the books for months. The Executive Intelligence Chairman is furious. So is the White House and the Covert Affairs Committee. Justice needs to confirm that Chanez isn’t trying to distract them from what ExOps has been doing.”

My Almighty comm call from Zurich triggered the CIA Office of Security probe our Director tried so hard to avoid. A lot of bureaushit is flying around, and the Justice Department wants to resolve this situation with ExOps before it looks into our evidence against Fredericks.

“Don’t even tell me,” I growl, “that Fredericks might get away with this.”

My boss shakes his head and frowns gravely. “He won’t.” He points his scowl at the ceiling and rubs his chin. “I should have seen it,” he whispers. “Philip and Jakob shouldn’t have been working together anymore.
Their relationship went down the toilet after that failed rescue. But my God, I never thought Fredericks would terminate his best agent and cover it up with an entirely fictional Job Number.” He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against his fingertips. “The security people are going to lose their minds.”