“I need you to tell me who this Li Guiying is to you.”
She shudders, understanding that what happened doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t deserve so much as a comment or a denial.
He adds, “I’ve got you as co-author on a paper with her, along with six other names. What else is there?”
“Nothing. Not really.”
The car is leaving the warehouse district, joining a light flow of traffic. True leans forward, cycles through the dash display until it shows a map of the cab’s planned route: a circuitous path marked in green that runs past the tourist district before turning toward the ocean, doubling back, and ending at a neighborhood less than a kilometer from her hotel.
She leans back again, working her cheeks to get moisture in her mouth. “Am I bait?” she asks. “You trying to see if something’s following me?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Not that I can see. Not so far. Tell me about this Li Guiying. You must know her.”
“Sure, I know her. I don’t work with her. She’s not my business partner.”
“Would she like to be?”
True thinks about this, recalling Tamara’s teasing words, She likes you, True. I can’t imagine why, but she does. She thinks of you as a friend.
“I don’t know what she wants,” True admits. “I only met her once in person but she’s friendly to me. Too friendly. It gets awkward. But she’s a really good engineer. She’s mostly in academia now, but—” True breaks off in midsentence, thinking of the hawk that flew past Daniel’s house… and the biomimetic deer.
“Say it, True. Whatever the hell you’re thinking.”
She does: “What kind of surveillance did you have on my house?”
Two seconds of silence. When he answers, there’s suspicion in his voice. “Why?”
“What kind of surveillance?” she insists.
“Nothing. You were not on my hit list and I was not running any kind of surveillance on your house.”
They had all believed Shaw was behind the ongoing surveillance. They interpreted it as a warning, clear notice that he’d mapped their lives and could hit them at any time.
He asks, “Did Li Guiying have you under surveillance at home, too?”
“Why would she? There’s no reason for it. I only know her because we attended a seminar together, six or seven years ago. That paper you found with my name and hers, it’s the collected presentations. I remember, at the time, she’d just moved into the private sector. She was networking, making new contacts. Before that, she worked for Kai Yun Strategic.”
“Kai Yun?”
His voice is abruptly lower, with that lethal note she heard before. Her own tone softens in response. It’s instinct. She speaks innocuously, determined not to trigger his temper. “A Chinese government company. Cutting edge technological development.”
“I know what Kai Yun is.” That low, ice-cold tone.
A flush prickles in her pores. Her voice sharpens. “What do you want me to tell you, Shaw?”
“Tell me what she did for them.”
“As far as I know, the same thing she does now. Autonomous swarms. She’s strictly civilian though. I remember she told me she won’t work in the defense industry.”
“Kai Yun is defense industry,” he growls.
“Yes, and that’s where she got her start. But that was years ago and she’s done with it. That’s what she told me. She works on humanitarian projects now. She wants to make a positive contribution to the world, and she has. She’s done good things.”
An alert pops up, telling her the voice link to Shaw has closed.
“Fuck,” she whispers in frustration. What did Shaw have to do with Kai Yun? Did he work for them? Was he running from them? “Damn it, Shaw,” she says out loud, using her data glove to reestablish the link. “Don’t you disappear on me.”
The link stays closed.
Frustrated, she drops the MARC on the seat beside her and gets her burner phone out instead. Powers it up and calls him.
No answer.
She berates herself. She should have said nothing about Li Guiying. Held back the information. Traded for what she needs to know, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know Guiying mattered. Not to her, not to him.
Damn it.
Now he’s gone.
Free Will
Do what needs to be done.
She checks herself for bloodstains, but she’s clean. The pistol is still in her pocket. Logic tells her to get rid of it but instinct’s advice is the opposite. She decides to hold on to it.
She puts her visor back on, then instructs the cab to pull over. The navigation screen shows her still a half kilometer from her planned destination. She notes the address, then resets the screen. The cab doesn’t ask for payment, so presumably she’s been riding on Shaw’s credit.
She gets out. As the cab drives off, she starts walking. Not toward her hotel, not yet. She wants to know if he’s watching, if she’s being followed. She walks past expensive apartment complexes towards the ocean, waiting for him to call.
He doesn’t.
After a few minutes she calls him again.
No answer.
It’s very late. The streets are lined with parked cars but empty of traffic. She stops in front of the dark display in a clothing store’s window. Activating the MARC’s sky survey function, she turns in a slow circle, but the program picks up only a single municipal UAV. No private devices at all.
Too bad she’s gained the attention of someone on the ground. She takes off her visor, slipping it into her right pocket to obscure the shape of the pistol as a police car glides up beside her. The window goes down. The officer—she is a woman—leans over to speak out the window in stern and heavily accented English: “Are you well, ma’am? Have you lost your way?”
True answers in Arabic phrases: “Shokran, ana kewayisa.” Thank you, I am well. She shows the officer her passport and her hotel keycard. Tourists should be handled gently and left to their foreign ways whenever possible. So the officer bids her goodnight. True is sure, though, that she has become an object of interest for the municipal UAV on patrol overhead.
She reviews her choices:
Return to the hotel—where she’d be easy to find if anyone is looking. Or head for the airport and hope to get a flight out before she’s tied to tonight’s incident. By some calculations that would be the smart move. But she walked out on Alex when she came here, she broke the bond of trust between herself and Lincoln, and she wants something back for that.
She wants the truth from Shaw Walker. All of it.
In that context, the watchful eye of the municipal UAV is the least of her concerns. Until the local police can link her to the unwitnessed crime in the warehouse district, she is just another lonely middle-aged tourist.
She walks on, slowly, pondering the question of Li Guiying.
The robotics engineer used to be employed by Kai Yun but she left the technology company years ago. Six years ago? Seven? True is uncertain. It never mattered before. She considers calling Guiying, asking her straight up, What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing having me followed? What am I to you?
Before she can decide if this is a bold or a foolish move, her tablet buzzes with an alert. She pulls it out of her thigh pocket. Finds a message from the beetle left on watch back at her hotel. From its hidden perch on the hotel’s façade, it’s been recording everyone who’s gone in or out of the hotel tonight. And it’s finally found a set of familiar faces—faces that are absent from most public databases but that exist within the private collection True has compiled, and that are associated with a private military company.