Persona (4 page)

Something moved in the corner of her eye.

Tourists, three of them, holding up their phones and taking pictures of the skyline. Harmless, but she couldn't be seen in pictures. She turned away, walked faster. Her head really was swimming—as she squinted up at the street sign, the letters ran together—but she couldn't risk slowing down.

There were footsteps closer behind, moving quickly. She couldn't look behind her—no windows with a good enough reflection. Out of nowhere the thought slammed into her: the stranger's here to finish me off. But it felt hollow, like there wasn't enough blood left for her to really panic.

That's probably for the best, she thought.

Then she passed out.

Daniel knew she'd run. He moved fast, carefully not looking at the magazine rack—some Faces had gone to Milan for Fashion Week to support their national designers, and
Closer
had a snap of Philippe Arnaud walking hand in hand with a model. (It was a small picture, and the caption hadn't even bothered to identify the model. Guys usually got away with flings outside the IA—if he wasn't under contract with someone, there wasn't much story there.)

He'd been gone only a couple of minutes, but he wasn't surprised when he turned the corner to an empty bench. She wasn't the type to wait around and debate her options. Still, his throat went tight. The reflex of losing a story, probably. Her necklace was in his pocket, heavy, still warm from her neck.

But he pulled himself together. She couldn't go far in the state she was in. He scanned the thin early-evening crowd for anyone struggling to stay upright.

He saw something move—fall?—and vanish from sight just as two tourists jumped down from the stairs right in front of him, gasping and clutching at each other for balance as they held up their phones to record what they'd descended.

As they passed him (he was edging around them, head down and turned away from the cameras), he saw a pair of shadows kneeling over someone, too far away to distinguish.

There were people still in the streets, he thought—nothing could happen to her, not in front of so many people.

But then one of them was on the phone relaying details, and whatever carrion birds he'd imagined hovering over her became just another pair of tourists calling an ambulance for a stranger.

They reached down (Daniel started moving, they couldn't just start jostling her, something could be broken), but he was too far away and one of them was already holding up Suyana's wrist, saying something to his friend, who repeated it into the phone. Her hand was limp, he could see it even from here. Out cold. Did they know who she was? Had the news gone out about her?

If Daniel had an ounce of sense he'd turn around now, take what he had to the black market, and try to catch the eye of an agency. A frame of a Face getting shot was enough to go on. He'd get plenty of offers. He closed his hand around the necklace until the stones bit.

Still, it would be a shame not to follow her. The more complete your story, the better the money was. He needed the money; he needed enough to buy himself out of trouble. She would understand, if she knew. She hadn't been home in a long time either.

She hadn't wanted to be taken to a hospital. He could guess why.

The hardest thing was staying out of the way until the ambulance came—those tourists hovered, and they didn't take pictures of themselves with an unconscious woman, but it came close. (Daniel was nearly on top of them by the time the first guy talked the second guy out of it. He vanished around a corner for a little while just in case they'd noticed.)

After the authorities had her it was easier. He was no stranger to tailing someone, and traffic was bad enough that it was no trouble keeping the red van in sight all the way to the hospital.

Daniel stood outside the emergency-room doors as night crept over him, wondering what the hell was happening, and how he was ever going to get to her.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

Even if they required a little more groundwork first, Daniel found that the best lies always came in pairs, so they could rest on each other.

For the first round he feigned flower delivery, walking up and down the halls with the ugliest lilies he'd ever seen, peering at room numbers and marking exits for fifteen minutes, until he overheard one of the nurses mention needing blood for “Mlle Dupont” as she passed an orderly.

He couldn't tell if they'd recognized her yet. They'd have called the police, so he'd have that to worry about, but if they knew she was IA, no flower-delivery act was going to cut it. He could rule out sneaking in with a lab coat, too—wherever she was, that floor would be locked.

He glanced at the emergency boards. She was already in a recovery room, so whatever had been necessary to patch her up wasn't serious. Good. Bones splintered under bullets, sometimes. She'd been lucky.

Now he had to get in with her and buy them some time. Not that there was a
them
(there was a him and a story), but you didn't half drag someone to a mysterious meeting place just to give up on your chances. Really, he was her best option. He had no idea where Samuelsson had been when the shooting started. And if anyone else showed up looking for her, he was pretty certain it would be bad news. If she was leaving, best she leave with him.

He set the bouquet in the corner of an empty nurse's station where he could, in an emergency, come back for them and pretend he'd just been in the men's room. They were safe—no one would want to claim these. Then he went back outside, to gather courage and steal a coat.

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

He'd known people back home who could really run cons like this—they got into parties, press conferences, hotel suites. It had been for money or blackmail, most of the time, but a skill was a skill.

He understood being shameless (of course he did), but he'd never been able to mirror the people who pulled it off. They always acted as if whatever they were asking for was the dullest, most necessary chore in the world. He could spin a decent story, but every once in a while he'd overdo it. The trick was in the boredom.

He could stop letting this matter. He could stop letting Suyana Sapaki have any hold over him at all. Why should he care? Once you cared, you had something to lose. This was just the most necessary chore.

He came in through the front entrance, stolen coat on, jaw set, not looking left or right. He'd watched enough footage of the IA to know how people acted when they knew they could move mountains. The few people in the waiting room glanced over from the TV, just for a moment, like people do when someone important passes by.

He went up to the reception station and rested the tips of his fingers on the desk, leaning in just slightly, the way handlers sometimes did when they were taking something off the record.

“I'm here for your nameless mademoiselle,” he said in deliberately awful French, half an order, half bored out of his mind.

The administrator started with recognition and blinked before she could summon the lie. “I'm sorry, Monsieur, I don't know who you mean.”

“Good,” he said in English, “and we appreciate your discretion. Now tell me where she is.”

She cleared her throat, glanced at the computer. “Sir, I'm very sorry, I don't—”

“All right. I was warned about a lack of critical thinking, but I was hoping you'd surprise me. I'm not here because I like leaving in the middle of a state meal. I need to see her so we can clean up this mess before half of Europe's IA Peacekeeping forces descend on Paris. Now, please.”

She frowned and looked him over. He wondered if it was too late, and Magnus had come in while he was gone, and Suyana would be going right back into the sights of whoever had tried to kill her.

Don't care, he thought, don't care, don't care.

“Do you have ID?”

Withering, he said, “In my division, it wouldn't be my real ID anyway, would it?”

Behind him, Daniel heard a familiar voice (on television, he realized, just after his heart dropped into his stomach).

“—under fire,” Magnus Samuelsson was saying. From the stone silence that followed, Daniel couldn't tell if it was a studio recording or a press conference, and he didn't dare turn around.

“Today,” Samuelsson went on, “Suyana Sapaki suffered a grievous injury at the hands of parties unknown, here on Paris soil.”

Daniel felt a little sick. But the receptionist had blanched, so he raised his eyebrows at her, spread his hands. What did he care if the IA descended? It wasn't his hospital.

“Just a moment,” she said, reaching for her phone.

He glanced at the television. He wanted to know what the man's face looked like when he was giving a party line like this. He'd probably been in on it.

Samuelsson looked utterly calm, the front of one of his three-piece Impressive Suits utterly smooth, and he was reading off a piece of paper to a room of stone-faced photographers wearing their national colors and dutifully recording.

“Due to the nature of her injuries,” Samuelsson read, “Ms. Sapaki's prognosis is, at the moment, unknown.”

He glanced up into the camera, just for a moment, then back at the paper. He kept going, and there was a murmur through the audience, but as Samuelsson was talking the receptionist was hanging up and telling Daniel a room number and waving him through a door that needed a buzzer, and Daniel was trying to keep his voice even as he asked her as archly as possible to let him know when the police had arrived, and his pulse was so loud in his ears he probably wouldn't have heard whatever Samuelsson had to say.

[
ID 29963, Frame 7: Daniel Park in black coat, walking through security doors of Hôpital François du Lac, looking over his shoulder at broadcast of Magnus Samuelsson giving press conference regarding the shooting of Suyana Sapaki.
]

Daniel couldn't afford to look worried and he'd forgotten what being casual looked like somehow, so he walked the length of the corridor without turning his head until he reached Suyana's room, and pushed open the door without knocking. Seemed like the kind of thing an IA type would do.

She was already sitting up, and he recognized her expression—the flash of ambivalence before she went in to romance the Americans, resigned but desperately thinking of a way out—before she saw him.

Then there was an expression he couldn't place, just for a second, before her face closed shut like it always did when cameras were on her.

It occurred to him that she might have been making alternate plans, and she'd call out to the nurses any second to get rid of the guy she'd blackmailed and who wouldn't leave her alone.

But she didn't call out. She didn't say anything. She watched him, eyes narrowed, braced for the worst.

A lot of questions fell out in front of him, any of them worth a hundred thousand euros if he got an answer. Who shot you? Do you think Magnus Samuelsson knows who shot you? Who's the friend you never met? Are you so short on friends that you're surprised I came back?

Are you all right? Do you know what's happened to you, while you were in here alone?

He settled on, “There's something you need to see.”

×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×  ×

This channel was predictable—they were replaying the whole statement with inconvenient breaks so studio commentators who had no idea what was happening could talk with great authority about it.

Suyana watched the introductions with no expression. If Samuelsson had arranged to have her killed, it must not upset her much. Maybe they'd worked together after all, setting up the publicity stunt of the year. Maybe she'd set it up herself and cut Samuelsson out of it. He was beginning to think she had it in her to arrange quite a bit.

Eventually, they watched as Samuelsson, unflappable behind the safety of the mic, issued her sentence.

“Due to the nature of her injuries, Ms. Sapaki's prognosis is, at the moment, unknown.”

When Magnus glanced at the camera and down, Suyana sucked in a breath through her teeth. Daniel watched a dozen things flicker across her face and vanish.

Then she said, “I have to get out of here.”

Daniel blinked. It sounded like Samuelsson was spinning his wheels, which was useless but seemed reasonable enough when you didn't want to admit you'd lost the person you were responsible for. What had she seen?

“I don't—”

But she'd already swung her legs over the side of the bed and was struggling out of her hospital gown.

“I know that look on Magnus. He's about to cut his losses. I have to go.”

She didn't elaborate, but the hair stood up on Daniel's neck. He thought of Samuelsson saying, “Are you ready to be charming?” and the flicker of sympathy that had gone through him, even then, that this was the person Suyana was stuck with.

Before he could think better of it he said, “What do you need?”

She looked like she was debating sending him on another errand, like she knew this was her last chance to shake him before he got to be trouble. Not that he could convince her otherwise. He tried a smile. (Don't care, don't care.)

“Your name.”

It felt like giving in, which was strange. “Daniel.”

A moment later, she said, “And clothes.”

He let out a breath that sounded more relieved than he'd meant it to. “Sure.”

It wasn't difficult. The hall was nearly empty, and most of the patients unconscious. By the time he came back, she'd wrapped her IV puncture to keep it from bleeding—it matched the wide white bands on her left arm and her right calf—and had two rolls of gauze in hand.

Planning to be on the run for a while. He wondered where she thought she was going, with half of Paris out to find her for one reason or another.

She slid into the pants and shirt, and it wasn't until she was looking at the boots that he realized she must have been nearly naked before.