THIRTEEN

Another hot, cloudless day, and Carson Pierce was well protected by the solar-reflecting glass of his hotel room, giving him a view of mirrored windows of the building across the street.

Pierce rarely presented any vibe except relaxation. It wasn’t a pose. Simply an undeliberate result. Part of it was his clothing. He was far enough up the NI food chain to ignore dress code. Never a suit jacket. Today was a black mock turtleneck, short sleeves. Not fitted so tightly as to blatantly show off his work in the gym, but not loose enough to hide the coiled physical strength in his body, even at rest. His face and blondish hair would put him at thirty, but his eyes, a blue so pale they verged on gray, had a hardness that to close observers would add another decade.

When possible, Pierce preferred to be at street level. He needed to be near the action to understand it better, for it to seem real. That’s why he was now in the Pavilion hotel, in the downtown core. Able to get onto the street for action in seconds, but in a place that allowed him to be wired for connection.

Otherwise, whenever he was forced to be cocooned in a sound-deadened, sanitized, and air-conditioned office at the big building, Pierce would stare at the computer screen’s images as abstractions. He’d watch and make keyboard commands and phone calls, but it felt like a multiplayer warrior game, one without the special effects to compensate for the artificial stakes. Some midlevel agents preferred it that way. If the game didn’t seem real, neither would the blood. Easier, then, to sacrifice players.

That’s why he avoided the office. Outside of the cocoon, weather and smells and sounds reminded him that operations were flesh and blood and the clumsiness and randomness of people responding to pressure and relationships. It’s why he’d gone into Appalachia himself to find the girl instead of sending in a lower-level operative wired for 24/7 audio and video.

It also meant he carried full responsibility for having returned without her weeks earlier. Why he’d wanted to remain responsible for the continued search.

After her escape the night before, Pierce had taken a train from home and checked into this hotel suite at the Pavilion, within a few blocks of where Caitlyn and the Illegal had fled the NI Agents. The suite was still a form of cocoon, but when things broke loose—a certainty sooner or later—he’d be out in the street immediately, in the action. Bean counters might argue the hotel was unnecessary, given that his home was only twenty minutes away, but Pierce wasn’t worried. He had no desire to move further up the NI food chain into political territory, so another hand slap added to his docket was one more reason he wouldn’t have to face a promotion. He also knew that Daniel Wilson, his immediate boss, who did work at a level where politics were unavoidable, would ensure that the costs were buried.

The reason was simple. This operation was high priority and tightly controlled.

Roughly two decades earlier, just before the Wars, the military genetic experiments that had spawned Caitlyn had been classified with code-ten security. Pierce knew nothing had changed the secrecy level or the urgent need for the code-ten. As Wilson had explained, the discovery of Caitlyn’s existence in Appalachia had given the government a chance to recover crucial experimental knowledge that had been lost when a rogue scientist destroyed the laboratory and found a way to melt down all the software and backups. As proof of the politics Pierce would have to face if he couldn’t avoid promotion, not even Wilson’s higher-ups wanted to know details of how recovery of data would be accomplished. They wanted deniability, and they wanted the experiments resumed, but as before, out of sight. Pierce’s small team of operatives understood the goal was to capture the girl; only Wilson and Pierce knew some of the reasons for it.

For Pierce, it had not taken much to transform the Pavilion’s hotel room into a base of operations. Just his gym bag with a couple of changes of clothing and a toiletry kit. And his laptop and a vidphone and an encrypted Internet connection.

At a table near the window, with a view of downtown DC, Pierce had his laptop open and was ready for Wilson to come on the line for vidchat. A room service tray was on the floor behind him. Good as the scrambled eggs and croissant had been, he didn’t think it was worth what the hotel charged. Coffee, on the other hand, was such a priority for him that the price could have been double and he wouldn’t have cared. The Pavilion’s coffee was excellent—he didn’t spoil the dark richness by adding cream.

With a confirmation ding, Daniel Wilson’s head and shoulders filled the computer screen. Wilson had a block of a head, covered with close-shaved hair that had once been deep red but was silvering after his three decades in the agency.

“Forgot to ask,” Pierce said. “Did you get my postcard?”

Pierce had spent two weeks in Cuba after returning from his unsuccessful foray into Appalachia.

“I did,” Wilson said. “So original. ‘Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.’ Shared it with all my friends.”

“But I was in Cuba. So that left nobody for you to share it with.”

“More idle chitchat?” Wilson asked. “Apparently it’s a bad habit that you’ve obviously passed on to your team. What’s her name? Holly? Ten seconds into reviewing last night’s mess-up on the Enforcer monitor, and I discover she’s hot for you.”

“That’ll change,” Pierce said. “She doesn’t know me yet.”

“You know I don’t like complications anytime. This would be the worst of times for you to be tempted to do something stupid. Maybe she needs to be transferred. And the bigmouthed clown with her.”

“I’ve looked at the tape a few times too,” Pierce said. “They couldn’t expect what happened, so I don’t blame them for the escape. We’re trying to keep this under wraps. No sense sending them out and bringing others in. And you know I hate the suits who expect their operatives to act like machines. If Holly and Jeremy go, I’d just bring in a couple more smart asses. More fun to work with.”

“Don’t make it too fun,” Wilson said. Paused. “And thought I already made it clear I was done with idle chitchat.”

Pierce rubbed his face with both hands. He looked at Wilson on the screen again. “Yeah. We almost had her. The Illegal knew what he was doing. He knew that everything was recorded.”

“All of them do. Nobody lives on the streets long without understanding what happens when Enforcers show up.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Pierce said. “He did a good job of orchestrating it. It’s one thing to dodge Enforcers. It’s another to be conscious of where the camera is while you’re doing it. He’s not a run-of-the-mill Illegal.”

“We’ll get him,” Wilson answered. “He kept his face off the camera, but there’s enough there. I mean, how many Illegals pull that kind of stunt? Forensics is pulling together the trace elements of what caused the flash. We’ll track him backward when we find out how he got the chemicals. And we’ve got her face locked in with face recognition software. It won’t be long. We’ll have her.”

Pierce had given plenty of thought to the girl’s face on the video. He’d tracked and lost her in Appalachia, never once seeing her. If it hadn’t been for a set of x-rays leaked from Appalachia showing the unusual bone structure that would support wing development, they would have had no chance of finding her Outside either. All they’d had to go on was the tracking device they’d managed to put into the glasses of a kid named Theo, because Pierce had been with them going out of the underground river and was able to find them later in Lynchburg. When Billy and Theo had fled Lynchburg and moved into the shantytowns outside DC’s wall, it helped narrow the search. NI had access to all local Enforcer communications. It had been a simple thing to have computer software monitor for keywords that triggered an alert and to have his team on 24/7 notice. The previous night, all it had taken was the word wings, and Pierce had been notified in seconds, with operatives on the way less than a minute after the video feed confirmed the girl in the squad car was likely Caitlyn. Pierce was grateful for the lack of vehicular traffic on the streets—he was aware that a generation or two earlier, his counterparts would never have been able to strike with such swiftness.

“You know, she could have chosen any city other than DC,” Pierce said to Wilson’s image on the screen. “Isn’t it strange she’s here? In the lion’s den? NI headquarters?”

DC, like New York, had copied the other city-states, ringing the inner city with walls. Clearing the postwar rubble around it with armies of bulldozers. And giving up on fighting the shantytowns and soovie parks that kept returning. Influentials needed cheap help, supplied by desperate Industrials who made no demands for any kind of government infrastructure.

“Stranger that the same night we find her,” Wilson answered, “we have to stealth chopper her friends out of a soovie camp right outside DC.”

“I’ve given that a lot of thought,” Pierce said. “Can’t think of anything else except coincidence. It happens. Not coincidence that they are nearby. That’s why we had them tracked from the Carolinas, and we were in alert mode here in DC. But coincidence that the near-riot happens the same night we finally find her.”

“Still don’t like it,” Wilson growled. “Got the situation with the kid with the glasses under control?”

Theo. But Pierce knew Wilson wasn’t a details person.

“Avery’s going to try a song and dance on them at the hospital. We’ll be able to track them once they leave. If it’s not coincidence, we’ll find out soon enough.”

“In the meantime?” Wilson asked.

“Holly and Jeremy are putting heat on some of the locals. Holly will be here any minute to discuss it. I’ll let you know if there’s anything new, but I’m confident we’ll get her. Soon.” Pierce paused, then spoke in a softer tone. “This one seems different, doesn’t it?”

Wilson was more cynical. “She can fly. It’s not our job to ask anything about that. Find her. Move on to the next job. Keep the wheels turning.”

“Got that message loud and clear. Just like every time you’ve delivered it about this operation.”

“We both need to keep our heads down on this one,” Wilson said. “This is way bigger than anything you and I want to deal with except on a need-to-know basis. You got that loud and clear too. Right?”

Pierce leaned forward to the computer screen, sensing Wilson was finished and about to go. “Got it. You and Elizabeth doing okay?”

Pierce didn’t have to explain. He was good enough friends with Wilson. Trouble was, it seemed they didn’t get together much these days.

“It’s not getting worse,” Wilson said. “I suppose that’s the best we could ask for at this point.”

“Can’t imagine what it’s like.” Pierce danced around the word leukemia. “Luke’s only eight.”

Wilson gave Pierce a grim smile. “What it’s like is that you’d take it on yourself if you could take it from your kid. And that there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to stop his pain, even if it meant putting a noose around your neck and jumping off a building.” Wilson stopped himself. “Sorry.”

“Let me know what I can do,” Pierce said. “Really.”

“Get this done; then get yourself over to our place and help me grill some Freddy Flintstone steaks, and make sure you don’t leave until there’s a couple empty bottles of red.”

The screen went black as Wilson clicked off before Pierce could answer.

Pierce could guess why. Wilson didn’t want Pierce noticing how hard Wilson had to fight to blink back his tears.