A Better World (12 page)

CHAPTER 12

It didn’t look like much from the outside. But in Shannon’s experience, the truly scary places never did.

The first thing she saw was a low granite wall bearing the words D
EPARTMENT OF
A
NALYSIS AND
R
ESPONSE
. Beyond that, a dense line of trees screened the compound from view. She signaled, waited for an opening in traffic, and then steered the sedan up to a security gatehouse. It was a bright fall day, and the two men in black body armor looked alien against the cloudless blue. They moved well, one of them splitting off to circle the car while the other approached the driver’s side. Both had submachine guns slung across their bodies.

Shannon rolled down the window and reached in her purse. The ID, scuffed and faded, identified her as a senior analyst; the picture looked like it was a few years old. “Afternoon,” she said, polite and bored at once.

“Good afternoon, ma’am.” The guard took the ID, his eyes flicking between it and her face. He swiped it against a device on his belt, which beeped. He handed it back to her. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“One of the last,” she said. “S’posed to be colder next week.” She didn’t look behind her, didn’t check the mirror for the armed man examining the back of her car.

The guard glanced over the car roof at his partner, then nodded at her. “Have a good day.”

“You too.” She put the ID in her purse. The metal gate parted, and she drove through.

And into the lion’s cage we go.

No, that wasn’t really it. This was more like walking into the lion’s cage, strutting up to the beast, and jamming her head between its jaws.

The thought sent a shiver of adrenaline. She smiled, drove steadily.

The DAR grounds were nice enough, in a lethal sort of way. The road meandered in curves that seemed senseless, but would keep a car bomber from gaining speed. Every fifty yards or so she felt her tires hum over retracted spike strips. The landscape was green lawns and carefully pruned trees, but tall towers were dotted amidst them. No doubt snipers were tracking her progress.

The building itself was bland and sprawling, looking more like a Fortune 100 office than the nation’s largest spy agency. At the west end, a construction crew worked on a five-story addition, welders on the beams sending showers of sparks. Apparently business was good at the DAR.

Shannon found an empty parking place about halfway down a lane, turned the car off, and flipped down the visor to look in the mirror. She could never get used to herself as a blonde. Odd how many women dyed their hair that color. In her experience, being a brunette hadn’t turned men away.

It was a good wig, though, the highlights layered well to blend with a hint of root. The makeup was heavier than she preferred, but that was the point. She put on a pair of plastic-framed designer eyeglasses. An affectation in this era of easy surgery, but that was what made them fashionable.

“Okay,” she said, then shouldered her purse and left the car.

It really was a beautiful day, the air cool and tasting of fallen leaves. One of the things she loved about being on a job, it heightened her awareness of everything. Every taste sweeter, every touch
electric. On the walk in, she could just make out the tips of antiaircraft batteries mounted on the roof of the building.

The lobby was marble floors and tall ceilings and armed guards. One line broke into several, each leading through a metal detector. Cameras stared unblinking from every corner. She joined the queue, looked at her nails, and thought about John.

When he had first proposed this little adventure, her response had been, “You want me to go
where
?”

“I know.” John Smith wore a gray suit and a clean shave, and he seemed taller than she remembered. Healthier. The benefits of not being on the run, she supposed, not having that 24/7 paranoia pressing down. “It sounds crazy.”

“Crazy I’m okay with. This sounds like suicide. Besides, I’m tasked out. All my attention is focused on West Virginia. I’ve got sins to make up for.”

“I understand,” he’d said, with that smile of his. A good smile, he was a handsome guy, though not her type. Too conventional, like a real estate agent. “But I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t worth it.”

“Why?”

He told her, and the more he talked, the more incredible the tale seemed. Coming from anyone else, she wouldn’t have believed it. But if John was right—a safe bet—then this could change everything. Shift the entire balance of power. Recalibrate the world.

Of course, first they had to find it. Which was where robbing the DAR came in. Why dig through a haystack yourself when someone already had the coordinates of the needle?

“Thing is, we can’t just hack in. The DAR knows any data connected to the Internet is vulnerable. They keep their most precious secrets on discrete networks inside the compound. The computers are connected to each other, but not to the world, so the only way to access them—”

“Is to go into the compound itself.”

He’d nodded.

“How would I even get through the gate?”

“I’ll take care of that. The ID won’t just get you in, it’ll confirm your whole life. Redundant records backfilled into their system. Payroll data, employee reviews, work history, the whole bit. I’ve got my very best on this. It should be simple.”

“If it’s so simple, why do you need me?”

“In case it turns out not to be. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Shannon. If you get caught, there won’t be a trial. They probably won’t even acknowledge they have you. You’ll end up in a maximum-security cell where they will spend the rest of your life trying to break you, and there will be nothing I can do to help.”

“You really know how to tempt a girl.”

“But that’s not going to happen. You can do this, I know you can.” He leaned his chin on his hand, the drink untouched in front of him. “Besides, there’s more. While you’re in there, you can get everything there is to know about West Virginia. The complete security package. You’ll be able to wash away your sins without risking lives.”

She’d weighed that. “What if I say no?”

“Then you say no. It’s always up to you, you know that.”

The line moved well, and within a minute she was walking to a metal detector. She took off a delicate silver necklace shaped like three icicles and coiled it beside her purse in a bin on the conveyor belt.

The fear hit as she was walking to the metal detector, armed guards on either side, DAR agents behind and beside her. A sudden heavy thump in her chest like a double-kick drum, and a dump of chemicals into her bloodstream. It was nothing new,
nothing she wasn’t used to; it happened every time. But this time the fear was sharper, more intense.

More fun.

Shannon smiled at the guard as she walked through the metal detector. He waved her along. She waited for her bin to come through the conveyor, put on her necklace, grabbed her purse, and headed into the headquarters of an agency that had maintained a kill order on her for years. John hadn’t been kidding; whatever brilliant had coded the ID truly was good.

He damn well better be.

As if in response to her thought, the glasses flickered to life. The inside of each lens was lined with a monofilament screen, the display visible only from this angle. The left showed a 3-D wireframe map of her position in the building; on the right, the words G
OOD HUNTING
appeared. She kept her smile internal.

Shannon strolled down the hall, the heels of her boots clicking on the tile. Once past the security, the Department of Analysis and Response resembled nothing so much as a large corporation: offices and cubicles, elevators and employee washrooms. It made sense. The department was split into two parts, and this was the analysis side. It was larger by far, employing tens of thousands of scientists, policymakers, advisors, headshrinkers, and stat-counters.

The other section was response, a different creature altogether. A creature that planned kidnappings, arrests, and assassinations. That had a governmental mandate to murder. Nick’s old department.

This facility had been his office once, the source of his power. He’d been the top gun of its most secret division. How many times had he strutted these hallways? What had he been thinking when he did? Back then he’d drunk the Kool-Aid, believed in everything the DAR stood for. She pictured him, that almost cocky calm he wore like a tailored suit.

Speaking of her type.

She’d hated him the first time they’d met. Nick had killed a friend of hers, a brilliant who had started robbing banks. A sad and damaged boy, broken by the academy, lost in the world. It wasn’t his fault that he’d gone so wrong, and while she agreed that he needed to be stopped—innocent people had been killed—that didn’t mean she was okay with his murder, or prepared to forgive the soulless assassin who had committed it.

Thing was, Nick turned out to not be that at all. He was warm and passionate and smart. He was dedicated to his children and willing to do anything for them. In truth, they were actually a lot alike, both of them fighting to make a better world. They just had different ideas of how to accomplish it.

Shannon wished she could have told him what she was doing today. His first reaction would have been fury, but once she’d explained the reasoning, she was pretty sure he would come over to her side.

Pack that all away. Telling him was too big a risk, and this place is too dangerous to be thinking of anything but the job.

She walked down a long corridor, took an elevator up three flights into a broad atrium. People passed, looking at d-pads and talking about meetings. At thirty years old, Shannon had never been in a meeting, liked it that way. An aerial walkway with glass on both sides gave her a view of the complex. Enormous, with that rabbit-warren look of constant expansion. She reached the end, turned left.

Twenty yards away, a door opened, and a man and woman walked out. She was small, maybe five-one, but strutted with a screw-you spitfire energy. The man was fit, medium height, wore a shoulder holster. She recognized him. They’d brought down a presidential administration together. Bobby Quinn, Nick’s old partner, the planner with the dry wit. A funny guy, good at his job, she’d liked him.

She had no doubt, none at all, that if he recognized her, he would take her.

Don’t kid yourself, sweetie. There’s no “if.” You think fake blond hair, high-heeled boots, and a pair of glasses is going to protect you from Bobby Quinn?

He was talking to the woman as he walked, his hands out and gesturing. He would reach Shannon in seconds, and if he saw her, she would never see another autumn afternoon.

She didn’t need to think. Didn’t need to look around. The trick to doing what Nick called “walking through walls,” and what she called shifting, was that it wasn’t about studying the world and then making a decision. The only way to be invisible was to know where everyone was all the time, where they were looking, and where they were going. Every room, every minute. On bad days she got wicked migraines from the data overload, like sitting too close to the tri-d.

Data. Like:

The analyst in the bad tie digging through a file cabinet, actual printed papers, trust the government to be running behind.

The FedEx guy pushing the trolley, whistling, the stops on his route clear to her as a diagram.

The administrative assistant stepping from the break room with a coffee in her right hand and her eyes on the d-pad in her left.

The flirting couple almost-but-not-quite touching, his hand about to reach for her arm.

Quinn turning from the woman, the trust in the move; they were teammates.

The water fountain compressor kicking on.

Shannon shifted.

Slid into the path of the delivery guy, paused, opened her purse like she was looking for something, cut across the hall past the assistant with the coffee, slipped the toe of her boot forward just enough to catch the heel of the woman’s shoe, the assistant stumbling, not falling but making a panic clench, keeping her grip on the d-pad instead of the coffee, now into the break room,
opening a cabinet so her back was to the hall, the coffee cup arcing, hitting the side of the FedEx trolley just as Quinn and the woman reached it.