The Valkyrie Project (32 page)

Jrue pulled Ana closer to him. She almost punched him for
his abject condescension, for treating her like a child after a nightmare. But after relieving herself of the knowledge that had built up within her like a charged-up rail gun, she melted into the safety of his strong, warm embrace. At least until he spoke again.

"I know you've been working almost constantly, and it's been even more stressful than usual. Are you sure it wasn't just an extremely vivid daydream or something?"

Ana pushed him away and balled up her hands in preparation for actually hitting him. "How about 'or something'? I said I'll go get the gun!"

Jrue sensed the attack coming and held his hands up.
"Okay, we can get the gun in a second. Let's just calm down here."

"You're supposed to trust me! You're supposed to believe me! I'm supposed to trust you!"

"Ana…"

Then she remembered the key, its small dense weight tucked into her pocket. Though
she'd left the gun, she had brought the key. Ana yanked it from her pocket.

"This key," she said, holding it up
. "You threw this key through so I could shut down the machines."

Jrue stared at it, confusion once again riding high across his face. He touched the chest pocket of his vest.

"I used to keep it here. They told me it was for emergency safe house access," he said, his voice slow and cautious as it crept across a bridge riddled with holes of missing information that left precarious spaces over a precipitous drop. "But I lost it a while ago. I even filed a report. And I don't remember ever giving it to you."

"Y
ou gave it to me in the future. That's why you don't remember."

"If I went into the future from the past, why wouldn't I remember it? I would have already been to the future, given you the key, and come back before now."

"Give me a second, I'm sort of new to this whole time travel thing," Ana said. She thought for a moment then asked, "What if the Agency sent you through and when you got back they flipped one of those switches in your head to make you forget it?"

"I thought we fixed those switches with that doctor in DC."

He had a point there. Ana thought a moment.

"If they already made you forget, then it could have been before we went to the doctor. It could have been any time since we met. It's not like we've been inseparable. We both
have pretty hectic schedules."

"
Ana, you realize how ridiculous that sounds, right?"

Ana went back to wanting to smack him. Instead, she took him by the arm and led him to the nearest darkroom.
As soon as the door shut, she started again.

"Do you realize how ridiculous it's not? A time traveler who forgets he has traveled through time? That's why they were messing around inside your head. They designed your brain that way, Jrue."

"Where did they get the technology from?"

"Same place the Continuum got it: the future."

"And with both of these groups sending people back in time, they're not worried about messing up the future? What if they change something and then, boom, they don't figure out time travel anymore?"

"There must be something in the future they're fighting over. Maybe the Continuum achieved their purpose, whatever that might be, but the Agency sent someone back to stop them, so they sent someone back to prevent that."

"And eventually they ended up with whole armies traveling back and forth in time?"

"
Okay, yes, it's starting to sound ridiculous." Ana hesitated. "But Natalya said Etienne was part of the Infinite Army when she joined the Continuum. That sounds an awful lot like a code name for a Time Travel Army."

"Have you tried to fit the evidence to any other explanation?"

"I haven't really had much time to think about it since I just left the time machine to respond to the alert here!"

"Then maybe I should take you home, and we can both get some rest, and we can think about this more when we've recharged."

Ana didn't want to recharge. Or rather, she didn't want to have to recharge. She wanted to just keep going, but she recognized that her nerves were frayed and her mind had yet to come to grips with all the information that needed to be processed.

"Okay. Let's go."

--

The small silver hovervan dove in
to its home like a flying beetle, compact and full of buzz. Upon landing, it spat forth the members of the united Blue and Gold teams like a rush-hour train stopping in the Loop. They had made it to the roof of the Agency building and through the final door before anyone knew they were off the ninth floor. Now they were back in the bowels of the city, untouched and unharmed, but not entirely off the hook.

Jordan did not fear the rebuke he knew was coming
. His leader had been silent the entire ride back and no doubt the other members of the team felt the tension building as they broke out of the Bubble and sailed past the increasingly smaller buildings of the rest of the city.

As soon as they stood on the platform outside the van, he laid in.
"Jordan! What were you thinking?"

"I was thinking it was my life or his!"

"The Valkyrie Project saves people and you killed one of them!"

"Yes, Guillermo. Do you think I
didn't know that?"

"I know you knew. I just wonder how long you knew."

"Long enough that you don't need to spell it out."

"Good, 'cause there's no way to fix it now."

Ana didn't know the exact definition of "drizzle," but the rain at Justin's funeral seemed like a good starting point for one. It was a cold, ugly word, a perfect match for the day and Ana's feelings. It did not apply to the tears that ran down the faces of several ladies who stood around Justin's coffin. Those were tender and sweet, overflowing their eyes with love and loss.

The suburban cemetery ensconced itself in ashy gray trees, as though there would be no green spring growth in this place of death and mourning. Perhaps the whole world was just a cemetery, full of people who had not yet figured out they were dead.

Justin was gone and while Ana had lived through the passing of six other Valkyries before him, the innocent simplicity of the Project's mission had grown twisted like the limbs of the trees near Justin's grave. Someone had shattered the security blanket that wrapped the home of the Valkyries and the Agency around it. They had stolen data and taken a life.

When the funeral concluded, the
data would become the more important piece as the Valkyries hunted the group that disturbed their sanctuary. The threats to the Valkyrie Project were mounting and the strain and fear scratched themselves in harsh tones across the faces of all the agents who worked the floor. The intruders who had disturbed the frenzied harmony of the Project had accessed, and presumably taken with them, what little information on Androkal the Valkyries had. The stunned bewilderment that invaded the office had turned quickly to impatience for revenge. Everyone wanted to protect their own, their family, but Ana soured at the thought that the Agency, with all the safeguards and rules and regulations, had put up such a mediocre defense and offered so little in the way of follow-up.

Ana thought the Valkyrie Project was an example of the good the Agency could do, a tiny diamond sparkling against the backdrop of loaded guns and lies. But the glittering refractions
grew more dull the longer you looked, as you noticed the flaws inside the gem and realized that it looked like nothing more than a minor jewel atop a tarnished crown. The people telling her what to do were just as clueless as the foot soldiers who did as they were told. Ana wondered if sticking with people who appeared less and less competent and more and more insidious really moved her toward the goal that had been the underlying core of her life for fourteen years.

Ana took the money
the Agency paid her and used their resources to pursue leads in tracking her brother, but with their alterations to Jrue's brain—and who knows how many others—they had altered Ana's plans. She was not one to put pride or honor or even dignity at the top of her list of values, but they were there somewhere. Closer to the top sat practicality and when Ana began to question what the Agency offered there, her mind overran like the skywalk had overrun with the rainwater that morning with new ways to achieve her goal.

The heavy heart she
had carried on the skytrain out to the funeral turned hard as she stood with the slow, wet chill passing over the proceedings. And as the casket sank into the ground, Ana considered that the only thing to soften it would be reuniting with her brother. She offered conciliatory hugs and words of compassion to colleagues, true emotion straining its way through the cracks in the armor that locked itself around her. Ana wanted to support her team, but she could not focus on the idle work of coping with their loss. Memo was out there, and she would find him.

What more could be gained from the Agency and her work inside the Continuum? Now was the time to find out.

--

Ana had broken several regulations by failing to disclose the bugs in the security and permissions programming that she had discovered when she g
ave herself access to the data center holding the information on the Sleepwalkers project which had turned Jrue into an unwilling time traveler. As she wound her way through the pattern to open up the loopholes once again, she wondered what the leaders of the Agency would do if constrained by the same regulations under which their agents worked. Clearly they went off some other set of principles, which by itself might have been acceptable up until it put Ana and her colleagues in danger. Better safe than dead? She was not sure how Rani would apply that maxim in this situation, but she would certainly adhere to the idea of taking the field and showing them who lived.

The elevator ride up
had taken all of five seconds, but seemed like an eternity compared to the three subsequent hours Ana spent poring over files in a secret little data lab almost identical to the one that had housed the data on the Sleepwalkers project and her Scarface friend. She constantly checked in with herself regarding the data she was looking at to make sure she didn't fall down any rabbit holes. There was so much information that it was easy to jump into one file to check a fact and end up wandering through a maze of data that appeared related but ultimately led nowhere. With each minute that passed Ana became more certain that the Agency was tapped out of information on her brother and anything that would help her locate him.

She found the picture that the other agents had brought up the last time she visited the data islands. The only information attached to it told her that he worked for the Continuum. While she did not want to believe that, she uncovered nothing to disprove it, and that meant she needed to get back to the Continuum's home turf and start digging there. Ana didn't like the lead, but to be a real detective, you c
ouldn't ignore a fact simply because you didn't want to believe it.

--

The defense seen from the members of the Valkyrie Project, despite being taken by surprise, or perhaps because of it, reminded Memo of a tiger defending its young from a predator who got too close to the cubs in the den. The claws came out, but the feral feline strayed too far from its home and got slashed across the nose. Guillermo Callif hated casualties, but recognized that they were inevitabilities in the course of war.

There would likely be more when Memo brought a group of
unofficial operatives into the Continuum building in downtown Chicago. From the outside, the Spire wore the dress of a high-class residential building in the same way Etienne Saltoun wrapped herself in silk: tall, majestic, and rather beautiful. But there would be no more of Etienne's high-slit dresses, though he enjoyed seeing those; no more of her graceful gazelle lope; and no more of the artful deceptions that made her such a formidable opponent. Whether or not the lovely lady was still around to challenge him again made no difference. Moze's plan to infiltrate the Spire rolled downhill, gaining mass and momentum.

He
intended to find his way up the slash in the hem of the Continuum building's security to a treasure chest of information. As much as Moze liked improvisation and the luck he conjured from it, the plan for the Continuum intrusion relied much less on good fortune than the concoction that brought them successfully through the United State Intelligence Agency with the desired information safely in hand. Going into the heart of the Continuum organization raised the stakes. Their technology leapfrogged the foreseeable future to the edge of the imaginable. With bigger guns came bigger risk, but with bigger risk came bigger reward.

They rode in behind a shield of forged identities. Guillermo
had fashioned most of these himself, not because he was unwilling to cede control of that aspect of the operation, but because he was still in the process of disseminating the knowledge necessary to do the job and no one else had the skill to create something that would stand up to the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the Continuum's systems. The availability of publicly accessible commercial and residential areas meant the Continuum needed several layers of filters and automated processes to conduct on-the-fly background checks. With the correct infrastructure of deception in place, passing the checks was not a problem, but it had to be more than a mere facade. A spaghetti Western set would be torn apart like raw meat in a circle of jackals.

But Guillermo had been trained by the best, so he could beat the best. He'd done it before and in all likelihood he'd do it again.

When he entered the gleaming front doors with his newly-minted, lovely but just a bit too young for him trophy "wife" and their just as fresh from the Bar exam "lawyers"—having someone write a pre-nup was a formality, but also a requirement nonetheless for someone of his "wealth"—the eyes of tens, perhaps hundreds, of security devices lit upon them like the ghosts of forgotten eagles perched atop redwoods. The security cameras and remote scans stalked the quartet like creatures roaming under a canopy of trees and the darkness of night. From the greeting at the front desk all the way to the lavishly furnished sample condo to the empty office just large enough for a start-up intellectual property firm, a choreographed dance played out between sensors, data relays, government data banks, and proprietary analytic systems, the information swirling like women in ball gowns from one partner to the next and then back across the floor.

Guillermo was not concerned that
someone would figure out he was not planning to buy any of the available real estate, not as a lakefront investment property nor as an office space for his latest business venture. The trouble, as usual, came in accessing the more heavily fortified floors of the building.

The realtor and security guard found that out when they discovered the tranquilizers lodged in the side of their throats. The security guard was a bigger man, so he was treated to a second once the first had seen him safely to the ground.

A few moments later, the Gold Team—having won the name not by a flip of the coin this time, but because they were the ones with the riches—signaled the Blue Team—also appropriate as it was the color generally used for visualizing the flow of data connections and interactions—to dive in to the network tap they had established for their part of the plan. In the hall outside the exorbitantly priced office space, Guillermo heard a snick as the claws drew back on the locks of the door at the end of the extravagantly, yet tastefully decorated corridor. The stairs were open.

The four member of the Gold Team shut the door behind them just as chimes sounded to announce the ar
rival of more after-hours guests. Guillermo hoped it wasn't another prospective buyer, because while they'd stashed the unconscious bodies in the supply closet of the office, anyone who opened that closet door was sure to find them.

No time to hesitate
, then, as the group made their way up five flights of stairs. At the door to the twenty-fourth floor, they stopped, taking a moment to reset the amount of oxygen in their brains and lungs by sucking in a few deep breaths and letting the air out in a steady flow. Short bursts of intense activity were an easy way to get into oxygen debt which was a gateway to bad decision-making.

Guillermo let the Blue Team
hiding in the bowels of the building know that they were ready for the next step.

The lights on the panel shifted through a series of binary combinations then all flashed in unison. Guillermo held up a mock communicator, its bare
-bones components programmed to fake an interaction with the invisible waves of conversation from the security like a psychic communing with the dead in a room full of people by calling out, "I'm getting an 'A'; like an 'Ann' or an 'Al'…"

The lights on the panel changed colors a few times as they reacted to the device's faux extra
-sensory perception.

Guillermo's
own ESP sensed that the four "technicians" in the lower levels were firing slow bullets of sweat from their skin, reciting some Hail Marys and Our Fathers to get the code to work.

The lights stopped their shuffling dance but the door remained locked. Memo worried that the security routines had seen through their psychic's preparation, puffery, and peacocking. The mating dance had failed to sufficiently impress the female
bird of paradise. Then the lights started up again, bouncing on and off with renewed vigor.

Guillermo sighed, exhaling a huge lungful of air
, and realized that even after their race up the stairs, he had been holding his breath.

After a few more seconds, the cryptic light mambo came to an end and a pulsing green circle appeared. Memo hoped that Codar hadn't done anything sloppy in coming up with what must have been an improvised routine
programmed in mere seconds, and injected to get the door open. Most of the regular Continuum agents might have clocked out already, but Guillermo knew their security force never dwindled. They would swarm like frenzied bees if they got even the slightest inkling that someone was trying to steal their honey. In this case, the honey was Androkal and the stingers were probably electrostatic rails, though with the Continuum, you never knew what was in store.

The Gold Team surged through the door and skittered down the hall, not quite running, but certainly not walking. The musty smell of the stairwell dropped away as soon as the
door shut behind them, replaced by what Guillermo could only classify as an absence of smell. There was no such absence of sound, though, even after hours, as doors slammed and people carried on conversations. Luckily those were far-off echoes compared to the insistent buzzing of the bright overhead lights and the hum of electricity just beyond the duroplast paneled walls.

Through one of those walls lay a data vault that held the location of the facility that the Continuum called the Transportation Center. Through anecdotal clues and somewhat unsubstantiated analysis, he had narrowed it down to the
area of the entire Greater States. Without any satellites at his disposal, Guillermo had no idea if that meant they'd built it in the middle of an abandoned cornfield or the middle of an abandoned oil field.