“Take one of Sarmax’s shuttles.”
“And when I get there—you want me to just go to this house and knock on its door?”
“No need to even knock. You’re the new owner. No need to announce the old one’s untimely demise just yet. Besides, we need all the leverage we can get. Things are getting out of hand back on Earth. The Newfoundland Yards got wiped off the map. HK’s under embargo. The Rain jacked one of our spaceplanes and downed it there. Along with some key CICom agents.”
“How are we responding?”
“With the usual recriminations. The shit’s going down in the Inner Cabinet. Apparently Space and Info are at each other’s throats. Undoubtedly the Rain are in the mix somewhere. The Throne is threatened like never before. Our Throne, Carson. Our man. There’s war in heaven.”
“Heaven save us from war’s worst kind,” mutters the Operative.
“Don’t look to anybody to save us, Carson. Only we can do it now. Now go. You’ll be on the other side of sky in under two hours.”
“And our contact protocols?”
“The same as ever. Extreme judiciousness.”
“Got it.”
Lynx cuts out. The Operative stares at the blank wall. Turns to the blank expression of the man standing next to him.
“Well,” says Leo Sarmax.
“It’s complicated.”
A s were the first hours in the city. The first hours past the point of no return—a fact only just now dawning on them. Threading their way through streets of silver and corridors of chrome, rubbing shoulders with the men and women of a hundred nations…into what strangeness had they stumbled? They didn’t know. They scarcely cared. All they knew is that they were on the run. And that they needed a base: some space to catch their breath. They needed a place.
They found it.
In a room. Same story as ever: find walls and a floor. A door you can close. And above all a ceiling. Anything to blot out the sky. Cheap-ass motel in Old Port Moresby district, no questions asked, no answers needed. Just naked light overhead while their bodies writhe naked in front of a wall-screen that pulsates static. They leave it like that. It seems fitting. It’s how they feel. It embodies what they feel tossed upon. So they make love while they let the static play around them.
Until a face appears within it.
It isn’t one they recognize. It’s a man. He’s got one eye. He wears a mustache. It looks absurd. Yet his expression’s anything but.
“Shit,” says Marlowe. He’s pulling himself off Haskell, vaulting onto the floor. Haskell turns the vid off.
But it remains lit. The face persists.
“Shit,” she says.
“The CI codes,” says the man. And the codes of CICom fill the screen, flit in and out of static, float in front of his face. Both Marlowe and Haskell recognize them. Friend-or-foe identifiers, changed every hour on the hour according to algorithms given to each agent at the start of every mission. Embedded with myriad fail-safes for an interloper to trigger. Doesn’t mean they can’t be fucked with.
But it’s a long way from easy.
“We should go,” says Haskell to Marlowe on the one-on-one.
“You shouldn’t,” the man says. “I’m Sinclair’s man in HK.”
They stare at him. Haskell’s first to find her voice.
“How’d you find us?”
“Sit down,” the man says.
They sit. He gazes at them. He shakes his head.
“I found you because I’m a handler. I know agents. I brief them. Track them when I have to. Snuff them when I must.”
“Going to try that on us?” asks Marlowe.
“No. All I wanted to do is locate you.”
“But how did you do that?” persists Haskell.
“I’ve got the edge,” says the man. “I’ve got everything on you two. Your psych profiles, for one—which way you move when under pressure. That helped. But it wasn’t as useful as your neutral accounts. Figured you’d go back to those. I mean, what else could you have done?”
“You’re lying,” says Marlowe. “Those weren’t even the accounts you gave us. Those were the ones I set up last time I was in the neutrals.”
“We’re not stupid, Jason. We know how our agents do it when they get out beyond the border. We know you think you live longer if you don’t link to us. We’re not even against insurance policies. Doesn’t mean we don’t like to keep an eye on things.”
“If you have those account numbers, then Morat might have them too,” says Haskell. “He had access to every code you’ve given us as well. So why should we trust you?”
“Trust me,” says the man. “If I were trying to nail you they’d have kicked down your door already. Nailing people’s easy. Saving them’s the hard part. I’m changing up the codes even as I speak. I’m here because you’ve got a new mission. I’m the one who’s going to tell you all about it. Besides: don’t you want to know what’s really going on?”
“What happened on that spaceplane?” demands Haskell.
“You know damn well what happened,” replies the man. “Morat betrayed us. He helped the Rain to jack it.”
“Why?” asks Haskell.
“Surely it wasn’t to get at the two of us,” says Marlowe.
“Actually, I’m sure that was part of the reason. But it wasn’t the main one.”
“What was the main one?”
The handler smiles mirthlessly. “The main one was the cargo you were carrying.”
“I didn’t know we were carrying anything,” says Marlowe.
“Of course you didn’t.”
“What,” says Haskell slowly, “are you talking about?”
“Like I just said: I’m talking about the fact that you were carrying a cargo.”
“And are you going to tell us what the fuck it was?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer,” says the handler. “In fact, I’m not even sure I can answer it. What you have to understand is that Sinclair was intending to take the fight to Autumn Rain. He put all his primary agents into the field. And he emptied out the research labs of anything that even looked like it had any promise. Every black-ops project, every R&D prototype—all of it got deployed.”
“Which,” says Marlowe, “was exactly what the Rain wanted.”
“Chalk one up to hindsight,” says the handler. “The plan was to assign an artifact to each team. You were one such squad. When you reached the Moon, your briefing was to encompass that artifact’s activation. We couldn’t transport it out of sight of those we trusted most. But we weren’t going to tell you about it until you absolutely had to know.”
“But you were going to tell Morat.”
“We don’t know what happened to Morat. We don’t know how he found out what he did. We don’t know how he broke loose. It calls into question every—”
“Never mind that crap,” says Haskell. “Tell us what was on that plane.”
“Next-generation AI,” replies the handler. “A comp that combined state-of-the-art battle management capability with the ability to do zone incursions far beyond the level of our best razors.”
“Oh,” says Haskell.
“Oh. What was on that plane was the ultimate machine for waging secret war. And not just secret, either. Situate it in an inner enclave, and you could vector a first strike through the thing. All housed in a highly mobile chassis.”
“It moves?”
“In point of fact, it bailed out.”
They look at him. Look at each other.
“Why so surprised?” asks the handler. “After all, that’s what you did.”
“Sure,” says Marlowe, “but that’s different.”
“Is it?”
“What kind of chassis? Is this thing humanoid?”
“That’s the problem,” says the handler. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“There’s nothing on file?” asks Marlowe.