The Valkyrie Project (15 page)

"
Mother of—Dammit!" she yelled.

Marisol looked around, still unsure what was happening.

"He's gone! Fucking gone!"

"No
," Marisol said. "He escaped. He tricked us."

"Yeah, he tricked us like a couple of cheap whores." Ana bent to rest her forehead on the rusty wrought
-iron railing of the cheap piece-of-shit motel. She could still feel the chill of the ocean. Maybe it was just her sweat cooling in the wind off the lake. She went back to the door jamb, pointing inside.

"We have a dead guy. That's it. One dead Continuum agent."

And Ana had killed him.

The Valkyries decided who lived.

--

Ana and Marisol had no choice but to bring back what little they had. Ana took little consolation from the fact that they had succeeded in their primary mission of stopping Huang from selling his weapon to the Continuum.

A hammer swung at that consolation moments after Ana mentioned Dr. Allen Poole in her debriefing. She'd already gone over how she and Marisol had found Lukas Huang and persuaded him to reveal the location of his meeting. When she said that Dr. Poole found his way into the musty motel room, it didn't take long for the computers recording her recap to send the audio for cross-referencing by other specialized hardware appliances, which found the doctor's name in another one of the Agency's files.

An alert of the match came up on the desk where Malcolm was talking to Ana, and they both looked down. Ana read the message and slammed the table, her fist the hammer that crashed through positive emotion she'd been trying to conjure.

Dr. Allen Poole (syntax indicates name) matches a name in file alias: Surgeon List.

"We had him! We had him and a live Continuum agent! We had them!"

Malcolm was more shocked than upset and tried to calm her down.

"Ana, you had no way of knowing."

"But I knew I had a man who had found the time and location of a Continuum weapons deal!"

"And you were right. Bringing in a man like that was the right thing to do."

"But I didn't bring him in!"

"Ana," he said, as he'd said several times already, "you stopped the Continuum from getting the weapons from Dr. Huang. That was your mission."

"Right, instead I handed them someone on the Surgeon List!"

"Ana, there was no way you could have known."

"Maybe I need to memorize the list. How many names are on there? How many do we have pictures of?"

"You need to take it easy."

"You need to take it less easy!"

"Ana, look at it this way: Allen Poole could have been anywhere in the world. But now we know where he is."

"Do we really, Malcolm? Three hours ago I was only as far as a shady motel on the outskirts of Gary. Three hours before that, I was halfway between Midland and Odessa in the Greater States. Where do you think Poole is after three hours with the Continuum?"

Malcolm sighed. He had no answer for that question, and they both knew it.

--

Justin tried to cheer them up after their report was made, and he put it well
, saying, "You wouldn't feel so bad if you hadn't been so close."

"But we were so close," Ana replied.

"But it's not like you came back empty-handed."

They knew he had a point. It made Ana feel a little better. Especially when he offered to take them out for a drink.

"I need to talk to Aerin for a bit," Ana said. "I'll meet you guys over there."

Ana took her time heading down the corridor to Aerin's lab. He was probably still going over the body they'd brought back, so no need to rush. Besides, she wanted to take a little time to feel sorry for herself. She had needed a win on this one. In the past few weeks, she'd recovered an escapee, only to be captured by him
, and then she’d blown him up. She had found thirty-six children, undoubtedly part of a trafficking project, but had failed the primary mission of finding Senator Dilger's son. She had recovered a sample of a substance being mined by the Continuum only to destroy it during the examination. And now she had nearly captured two enemy agents and one of the members of the Surgeon List only to end up with nothing more than a corpse.

The arti
ficial light in the hallway didn't ease her tension or lift her spirits. She wanted to get up to the rooftop and just sit with her face turned up to the sun. And she would, just as soon as she'd talked to Aerin.

The tiny blond man's smile as she approached was enough to keep her moving for now.

"Good news?" she asked as the large glass door slid aside to let her in.

The smile disappeared.

"Oh, that. No, I'm just happy to see you're all right. It sounded like a bit of a dangerous situation there with some telepath from the Continuum."

"So you think it's possible too?"

"Well, it certainly seems like one explanation. I was able to go over the clothing you were wearing during the mission and found nothing but some blood splatter from what I assume was the agent who escaped."

Ana looked down.

"No, no, no, Ana, this could prove to be truly remarkable. I know that our government has been researching anything that even has the slimmest of chances for some sort of mind-control ability. If what happened is really the result of some cognitive distortion, it was truly remarkable!"

"I'm inclined to go with truly dangerous."

"Well, clearly, yes, that too. But the ability to have that sort of impact on someone's cognitive process…"

"We're going to need some sort of tinfoil hat. Preferably before we see these guys again."

"Well, you won't be seeing this guy again," Aerin said, chuckling as he pointed to the body of the agent Ana had killed.

"Speaking of him," Ana said, relieved to move away from the mind
-control discussion that left her with an uneasy feeling in the back of her mind, which was actually a very uneasy feeling closer to the middle of her mind. "Speaking of him, who is he?"

This made it Aerin's turn to look sheepishly at the ground.

"I don't know," he said. "He's not in any of the universal DNA databases."

"So either he was born in a place that doesn't do genetic tagging, or the Continuum had him expunged from whichever database he had been tagged in."

Aerin knew it was not a question, not even a rhetorical one, and responded as such.

"I would bet on the former. Though I did the calculation of the odds that a man of this size, build, complexion, and apparent ancestry would be born in one of the few remaining places without tagging and let's just say there was some use of scientific notation involved."

"Okay. But how hard would it really be for a group like the Continuum to get someone taken out of a DNA database?"

"Don't they train you on things like that?"

"Yeah, but my Hacking Into The Most Secure Systems In The World class was a long time ago. I could use a refresher."

"It may come in handy in looking for that person you are trying to locate."

"You mean my long-lost friend from high school."

"Yeah, that one."

And so Aerin explained, as briefly as his technically-detailed-mind could, the rotating separation of systems. He touched on the specialized hardware that required programming at a level where one felt like they were pushing electrons through biointerfaces. He told Ana about auto-updating security keys in facilities that made the Valkyrie Project headquarters deep within the building that housed the Chicago branch of the Agency feel as open to the outside as a fast-food franchise.

"You've heard of people trying to get though the biosecurity here, right?"

Ana nodded.

"Well, imagine doing that in at least
a hundred and twenty-nine locations at once. There aren't even a hundred and twenty-nine people with access. The Continuum would need a programmatic solution, and believe me, a lot of people have tried."

"So it's incredibly unlikely that he was born somewhere without being put in a database and it's nearly impossible that he would have been removed from any of the databases."

Aerin shrugged.

"Awesome."

--

The large brute of a man emerged with his gawky, awkward prey slung over his shoulder
. His lumbering gait carried him faster than the man in the sleek black hovercar would have imagined possible. No, check that. He just hadn't bothered to imagine how fast the ogre could have been made with an overstocked supply of synthesized muscle and bioimplants.

The burly Continuum agent tossed the man known as Allen Poole into the back of his own shined
-up hovercar, and somehow managed to fit in the driver's side. The vehicle rose like a whale in dark water, through churning eddies in the thick black of the sky, giving the illusion of disappearing like a memory fading into the empty space of the forgotten.

"Shall we?" the watcher asked of the strikingly handsome man occupying the driver seat of his car. 

"We shall."

Barren skyways greeted the two ships that would not pass in the night, emptied by the witching hour of what precious little cargo they might have borne across this poor man's version of a suburb.

The pursuing pair wasted little time catching the Continuum agent. He wasn't making the hasty retreat that either of them would have expected after escaping from two members of the vaunted Valkyrie Project. They waited for a point far from the regularly spaced waystations that provided rations and supplies, then flipped on the lights that would simulate the patriotic red, white, and blue of a law enforcement vehicle. The man riding shotgun half expected the other car to bolt, but instead it glided to the pavement below. They followed it down out of the noiseless night, closer to the hum of civilization, though not by much.

When the driver emerged he was dressed to continue the story the flashing lights had begun. A routine traffic stop. No need to panic. Dr. Poole's captor probably assumed he needed to simply hand over some money and be on his way. The toll paid to a corrupt cop, a cog in a corrupt system, for crossing his swath of sky and catching him in the wrong mood. Only the uniformed man backlit by three piercing colors of light knew that society was still in better shape than Mr. Tall, Dark, and Ugly could have imagined possible.

The man who remained in the faux police cruiser chortled at how easily the ruse was perpetrated. The Continuum agent was completely convinced, rolling down the window after the man in the uniform gave it a quick rap with his knuckles. His eyes were focused on the officer, but even so, they barely caught the movement of the man in uniform as he whipped a gun from his belt, shot three times through the open driver's side window, and returned the gun to its holster.

The
watcher emerged, stretching from the car like a puma emerging from the shadows, and together he and the man in the uniform carried Dr. Poole back to their own vehicle.

Ana's foot searched for purchase as she tried to gain entrance to the speeding vehicle. There was a handle just inside the open door that she managed to grab and her right foot jerked from the ground below as the momentum of the transport carried her forward. Moving in place. It was one of those odd sensations that she'd grown accustomed to in her line of work. She was holding on, her left leg inside—dropped to one knee when the van had swept her away—the right trailing behind, feeling like it might sail away on a current of wind.

Ana pushed herself upright on the leg that had gained the solid floor of the van and swung her other around to bring herself fully inside.

"Close the door!" she yelled at Jrue, probably louder than she needed to, but the howling of the wind still pounded her ears from just outside the door as they sped through the city. The door slid shut and the whipping ceased. Inside the van there was nothing but a rhythmic drone and Jrue asking, "You okay back there?" He didn't look back because at the speed the van had attained, a slight distraction could leave them splattered like so many bugs that had suffered the same fate on the windshield.

Ana strapped herself to the right of an amply proportioned young woman, giving her as polite a nod as she could manage, before resting her arms on her knees and sucking in a lungful of air. She wished she could fill and empty them asynchronously in order to replenish the oxygen in her muscles and brain faster.

She had just recovered enough to introduce herself to the woman she recognized as Dr. Alicia Portofil when her comm buzzed to life. Aerin's face appeared on the screen. Ana tapped it, hoping that whatever he was prepared to say would impart some meaning to yet another confusion of a mission.

"Ana," he said, very excited, "I just got a hit on the DNA for that Continuum agent you brought back."

Close enough.

--

Marisol and Ana closed on the large glass block of a building with the bustling rush of two women late for work. They pushed through the doors and entered without slowing down. They had worked in this building for years, probably since they were newly minted college graduates
, and their bosses called them dirty names in meetings to which they were not invited.

Of course, having studied the building holo model and knowing their target's routine, they knew where they were going as well as anyone in the building. And while they m
ight not still look like the sexy eager new hires, a pair of winning smiles and cheery "Good mornings" got them past the security guard, who nodded and sipped on his first cup of coffee.

The elevator came faster than expected. Marisol had grown used to certain things coming faster than expected, but the swift arrival of the elevator left little time to tap her foot with practiced impatience.

When you trained for hours every day to be good at the routine part of your job, you got to the point where the routine became routine. You had to do something to stay sharp. Marisol broke out of her comfort zone with details. Not the kind of meticulous planning that Rani felt was necessary to succeed in a mission. Marisol planned details just outside of the box. Little things here and there that drove home the sense of verisimilitude in the projection they put forth. She had been instructed in a creative writing class in college that small details readers didn't even realize were planted there were what made a story believable. And so, even though she didn't do any creative writing, she tapped her foot impatiently, careful not to overact and reveal herself as a mere caricature.

The elevator opened to reveal a tall man in a dark freshly pressed suit. He wore matching dark hair cropped close to his head and his nose leaned just enough to one side to be noticeable. His broad shoulders stretched the suit coat across his wide chest and
he held what Marisol counted to be a dozen roses.

He didn't exit the elevator and without even looking at Ana, Marisol knew they were on high alert. Sure, there were lower levels of the building, and somewhere in those bowels were hovercar docks from which this t
all, dark, and handsome wannabe most likely came. It wasn't like a man had never brought flowers to work before: an argument the night before; a birthday; even the simple desire to get in someone's panties or briefs. Further brainstorming would have yielded twice as many plausible scenarios as the number of roses wrapped in the man's bouquet.

Marisol wasn't about to let things like facts and logic trump her intuition. Her gut had been inoculated against such things by the Agency and it had served her well in her career so far. She had no reason to avoid identifying all the possible weapon locations on the man's body. Doing so would not hurt anything if he turned out to fit with one of the several dozen conceivable situations. Not doing so, however, could leave Ana and Marisol needing their own Valkyries to carry them from the battlefield.

As the two of them stepped in and turned back to the door, Marisol checked the number of the floor that the curvy-nosed gentleman from somewhere below had selected. She knew Ana had not bothered to check: her not-so-young-anymore co-worker-ride-sharer of so many years always keyed the elevator control.

"Hey, same floor!" Marisol squealed, perhaps a bit too much like the member of a high
-school spirit team who had just overheard the girl in line ahead of her order the exact same coffee drink, down to the metrically precise measurement of soy milk versus real cream. But there were roses involved and that was enough to make any scrumptious little tart light in the head and tingly between the legs.

"Cool!" Ana chimed in. "Who are those for?"

"My wife." His answer contained no hint of joy. Marisol thought maybe he was trying to make it sound like they were apology flowers—she'd been on the receiving end before and found that guys who apologized with flowers because they couldn't apologize with their mouth wouldn't ever change the behavior leading to the flowers. This man, though, had no trace of the humiliated sullenness nor the petulant arrogance of a lover forced to make amends. Not just missing details, a total lack of verisimilitude. Advantage Valkyries.

Marisol pressed at the obvious pap
ier-mâché mask. "I'm surprised we haven't met before. Who is your wife?"

If it had been Marisol, she would have played a happy lover with a surprise birthday bouquet. A lesbian lover at that: clam up the gents while they plunder
ed their treasure chest of dirty thoughts, stuff up the ladies who were uncertain how to relate, and play the simple sweetheart to the straight women who wished their partner could muster some of that romanticism.

His answer threw her from the house she was turning into a quaint little home.

"Alicia Portofil."

Marisol's head froze as though she'd just crushed a pint of ice cream. She'd known they had their man the minute the elevator doors opened, but for him to issue such a blatant confirmation still came as a shock.

Ana caught the ball as it fell from Marisol's grasp, saying: "Oh, Ali? What a lucky lady!"

The six words gave Marisol time to recover. She was unsure if Ana had a plan, though, and in that lost second, the elevator sighed to a stop and chimed its arrival at their communal floor.

"Ladies first," the would-be assassin said as the doors opened.

Marisol turned enough to scan the man again for weapons and said, "Where can I find a man like you? So polite, and bearing flowers." Whatever armaments he carried were well concealed.

He managed to construct a weak smile.

She turned and exited the elevator. Ana followed. Just as the man was crossing the threshold Ana threw herself back at him, smashing the roses and sending him stumbling back. He recovered with reflexes faster than either of the Valkyries expected, and Marisol only watched for a moment as Ana grappled with him in the elevator door.

"Go!" she yelled and Marisol ran down the hall. She reached the lab in which Dr. Portofil conducted her research clear of any pursuers, hoping Ana would join her soon without their elevator companion. Marisol keyed the access code and slipped inside, making sure the door shut and locked behind her. It hadn't been hard to get the code. If the Valkyries had it, the gentleman caller probably did as well, but at least the locked door would give them a little extra time if the man with the crooked nose managed to take Ana out and follow Marisol to the lab.

Marisol had little time to take in the room before Dr. Portofil advanced on her.

"Excuse me, miss. This is a private lab and as I'm the one who hands out security authorizations, I know for a fact that you should not be in here."

Alicia
—Ali to her friends, they hadn't lied about that—reached for a comm on her desk. Perhaps calling security would not be such a bad thing. Unless it yielded only a hapless, undertrained security guard who would end up a victim of the stranger in the elevator.

Marisol measured her next words and actions with the precision of a laser sight. She whipped the sport coat down, slipping her arms from the sleeves and catching the back of the collar in her left hand. The businesswoman's camisole that served as part of her costume was stretched flush against her body so it wouldn't interfere with the twin firearms tucked into holsters on either side of her ribcage. Marisol knew that revealing those accessories would lay the groundwork for her to take command of the situation. Not an easy task when dealing with someone as used to be
ing in charge as Dr. Alicia Portofil.

"Dr. Portofil," Marisol said, carefully dosing her tone with panic
. "Please, there is a man outside who is coming to kill you."

The doctor's look turned from commanding to confused.

"Why would anyone want to kill me?"

"If he doesn't plan to kill you, he is at least going to kidnap you and steal your research."

Marisol couldn't be sure if she had backed off from the threat of death too quickly, but she knew that for the woman in front of her, the idea of her research being in jeopardy held more weight than protecting her own life.

It worked. The look of confusion vanished and Dr. Portofil was once again a woman of
status and authority.

"Let me gather my most
important notes and kill this terminal."

Marisol would have preferred to leave without letting her do either of those things, but she worried about burning through the goodwill she had engendered f
or no reason other than she had a pair of boobs. It worked out well that the Valkyrie Project had only one male field agent since the personality analysis had determined that Dr. Portofil would react most cooperatively to a female able to issue commands. Marisol had dealt with women of power who did not work well when others of their gender demonstrated a high level of confidence and competence. Dr. Alicia Portofil, though, was searching for a peer, another relatively young, moderately attractive woman who could impose their will on a situation to make things happen.

The doctor scrambled to gather up print-outs and back-up data cards, then dug into the terminal interface to find a few programs and set them off running. The hologram started to flash and pulse. Satisfied that her research would be protected by whatever encryption/destruction apps she'd set in motion, Ali looked to Marisol for further instruction.

"Is there another way out of here?"

"Just the front door, I'm afraid."

"I'll go first. Stay close to the wall."

Marisol cracked the door, leading with the gun from her right holster, and peered out.

Nothing.

No man in the elevator and no Ana either. Perhaps they'd both ended up inside the lift and headed to another floor. Better for Alicia and Marisol, at least.

Marisol ushered the doctor ahead of her down the wide hallway. She did a decent job of staying against the wall, but the awkward stack of data she clutched to her chest distracted her as she tried to keep it all under control. Marisol followed, glancing back down the hall, trying to decide if they could afford to stop to let the doctor get the mess organized.

"Ali," she said, "I think we're okay. Let's take a second and get this stuff ordered so we
—" She hesitated, hoping it was not enough for Ali to notice. Marisol wanted to say "so we can get out of here faster in case he comes back" but was able to finish with "so we don't lose anything."

Dr. Portofil looked relieved. She had been worried about dropping something as they fled and she dropped to her knees, letting the pile of documents fall while simultaneously trying to organize things in mid-air to save time. To Marisol it seemed like trying to give a guy a blow job before getting his pants open, but Ali made quick work of it, so Marisol let the doctor do whatever it took and simply stood watch for the man with the crooked nose.

Just as Ali stood with her papers and digital copies organized, he barreled around the corner of the long, wide hall. He skidded to a stop upon seeing them there, and Marisol spotted a swollen wound that Ana must have slashed across his side of his face. She was surprised that with the depth of the cut it hadn't drawn blood, but she had little time to think before he sprinted down the hall after them.

Marisol yelled "Go!" just as Ana had done for her. She fired two quick shots at the man before following. He hit the deck and while she missed on both counts, it forced him to take a more tac
tful approach in pursuing them. The two women had enough time to scurry into a stairwell and begin a descent to the ground floor and the exit where Jrue would be waiting.