“I thought you said AIs weren’t interested in people, Cohen.”
“Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe you’ve done something that’s made them interested.”
Li swallowed. Her mouth felt dry, metallic. “Or maybe they’re using me to get at you,” she said. “Did you tell someone about us?”
“‘Us’?” Cohen looked like he was about to laugh. “‘Us,’ as you so delicately put it, lasted all of thirty-six hours. When exactly would I have had time to tell anyone?”
“Then what are they after, Cohen? What do they want from me?”
He looked away, and she saw his throat tense as he swallowed. “How the hell would I know?”
AMC Station: 21.10.48.
Game one.
Li shouldered her way into the All Nite Noodle at the bottom of the second inning. Hamdani was on the mound, dark socks pulled up to his knees, right leg shooting up in his high angular windup kick. The Mets’ big Cuban designated hitter had just crushed a line drive off the center field wall and put himself on second with the help of what Li thought should have been considered an error. The outfield was playing in close, looking nervous.
The line cook touched a finger to his hat and nodded as she walked in. Before Hamdani had retired the next batter, Li was settled at a quiet back table with a beer and a bowl of noodles. When someone sat down at the table next to her in the top of the sixth, she assumed it was the line cook coming to pass time with a fellow Yanks fan. She turned, smiling—and saw a man her oracle claimed she’d never met before.
She nodded, thinking he was just taking the empty chair, and looked back to the game just as Hamdani trotted to the mound. So far he’d held off the heart of the Mets batting order and kept the Yanks their tenuous two-one lead. But he had thrown far too many pitches. And he was looking shaky, fussing with his bad elbow between batters.
He was one of the great ones, but he was getting old, injury-prone. His fastball was slowing down. His curve and slider had lost their bite. He wasn’t unhittable anymore. And it looked to Li like he was about ten pitches away from exhaustion.
He wound up and threw a sharp slider that just caught the outside of the plate. “Fantastic!” Li said under her breath. A taste of the old magic there.
“Ball one!” the umpire said.
“God dammit!”
“Major,” said the man across the table from her, “I had no idea you were so passionate about this.”
Li’s attention snapped away from the game. The man smiled at her—a carefully rationed smile in a young-old face that revealed nothing. She took a closer look, trying again to place him. He reminded her of someone, but in a generic way. As if it were not a single person he brought to mind, but a whole type of person. A type of person that gave her a bad, uncomfortable, guilty feeling.
A thrill of apprehension ran down her spine as she made the connection. He was Syndicate. And he reminded her particularly of the diplomatic rep from… where? MotaiSyndicate? KnowlesSyndicate? Whichever Syndicate he was from, that must mean he was A Series. But what the hell was an A Series construct doing on Compson’s World? And how could his talking to her spell anything but trouble?
“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.
“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”
“Then you have the advantage.”
He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your… what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”
The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.
“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”
Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”
“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”
Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”
“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”
Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.
“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”
Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed. She felt like she had something up her nose, but she knew the feeling was an illusion. In fact Korchow had simply jammed her recorder, and her internals were spinning their computational wheels, desperately trying to fend off whatever he was throwing at them.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.
“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have… common interests.”
“I doubt that.”
“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”
She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.
“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.
“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”
Li kept silent.
“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows… an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”
“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people… gullible people… have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its… harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”
“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”
“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is human the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”