“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” the assistant said, as Shannon stared into the cabinet and counted seconds. On three she closed the door and left the break room, not looking at the assistant and the FedEx guy assuring each other they were okay, not looking at Bobby Quinn and his friend, already past, both of them glancing back but at the wrong thing.
Always at the wrong thing.
Three minutes and five floors later, she was in a basement hallway lit by fluorescents. The air was chilly and quiet. In the left lens of her glasses, a dot began to blink on the map. It grew larger until she stood outside a metal-framed door. A camera was mounted to the ceiling above, and there was a swipe pad on the wall beside a big red button.
In the right lens of her glasses, a message appeared. LOGS SHOW NO ENTRANCES SINCE LAST EXIT. SHOULD BE CLEAR.
Should be? That’s comforting.
There was a long pause as the machine scanned her ID. This was the real test. There were probably fewer than a dozen people with the credentials to open this door.
With a click, the lock disengaged.
The room beyond was freezing, maybe forty degrees, and packed with neatly organized metal racks, each holding row upon row of wafer servers, computers a centimeter thick, each pumping and processing terabytes of data. Bundles of wires ran behind them in clusters as wide around as her arm. The hum of unseen fans filled the air.
The beating heart of the DAR. The facts and files of every covert operation, every secret facility, every profile on every target. She was in here somewhere; the details of her life, her childhood, her schooling, the things she had done and the people she had known. Shannon followed the map down the rows, the hair on her arms rising in the electrified air. Five aisles down and four over, she stood in front of a rack just like all the rest.
Shannon reached up to her necklace and twisted the central icicle. It unlocked, revealing a stamp drive insert. She ran her fingers down the I/O panel, found a connection, and slotted the drive. Nothing seemed to happen, but she knew the program was unspooling itself, sliding down the pathways of data, searching for the files they needed. A progress bar appeared in her right lens, slowly ticking up, 1%, 2%, 3%.
Nothing to do but wait.
It was always the strangest moment of a job. The nature of her skills meant that she often had to get into position and then wait. It was tense, and yet there was also something delicious about it, like that first drag of really good dope, like bouncing a glider between updrafts in the desert, like the clenching before orgasm. Her head served up a memory of a Washington, DC, intersection, the first time she’d seen Nick, she realized, almost a year ago. The DAR had managed to flip a defense contractor named Bryan Vasquez, and Nick had sent him back out to meet his contact, hoping to scoop them both up.
John had predicted the move, of course, and had a contingency plan in the form of a newspaper dispenser packed with explosives. Shannon was the one who’d triggered it, shifting past Nick’s whole security team to stand next to Equitable Services’ biggest badass as she blew the bomb and his operation in one.
Of course, at the time, she hadn’t imagined she’d end up dating him.
Dating? Is that what we’re doing?
The progress bar clicked agonizingly slowly. 63%.
It was reckless, getting involved with him. He’d left the DAR, but now he worked for the president, which was at best a lateral move when it came to the likelihood of a happy ending for the two of them. And she wasn’t some teenage girl lost in a steamy fantasy. Two months ago, when Cooper had come after John Smith, Shannon had pointed a loaded shotgun at him, and while she hadn’t liked the idea, she could have pulled the trigger.
Of course, there was also a moment when the two of you sat in a basement bar in the New Canaan Holdfast, your thighs touching as he quoted Hemingway. There was also a moment when he trusted you with the lives of his children.
96% complete, but the bar seemed frozen, just a tiny fraction of an inch to go. She sighed, tapped her toes, and fought the urge to curse. No matter how far technology went, some things never changed.
Come on, come on.
97%. 98%. 99%. 100%.
The display vanished. Shannon unplugged the stamp drive, reconnected it to her necklace. If everything had gone as planned, the program would have downloaded every detail they needed, a mass of information on privately funded labs, underground think tanks, and black facilities doing cutting-edge research. The kind of place that didn’t have stockholders and didn’t pay an excessive amount of attention to government regulation. The kind of place where almost anything could be developed.
Even a magic potion that could change the world.
She turned and walked back to the entrance, her boots making a clonking sound on the hollow floor. Three-inch heels plus one-inch risers, ridiculous footwear, especially on a mission, but they served a purpose. At the door, she took a breath, blew it out, brushed her blond hair back, and stepped outside. She turned right and started back the way she’d come.
“Hey! You!”
The voice came from behind. Shannon thought about running, turned instead, pasting a Me? look on her face.
The guy was tall and pale, wearing jeans, a T-shirt with a logo, and a ragged cardigan. He had his ID in his hand, already stretched toward the door. A technician or a programmer. She began to audition lies, all of them thin to the point of transparency.
As it turned out, she didn’t even get a chance to speak. As one of the dozen people who belonged in this room, he knew she didn’t. His eyes widened, and then he slapped the big red panic button.
Nothing seemed to happen, but she knew alarms would be sounding all over the building, in every guard station. The whole of the DAR’s security forces would be mobilized, hundreds of heavily armed soldiers.
There were no klaxons, no flashing lights, and somehow that only made it scarier.
Shannon turned and ran.
The hallway seemed longer and narrower, and the cameras more numerous. Her mouth tasted like copper, and her heart slammed in her chest. She rounded a corner, sprinted for the stairwell. The distance between her and safety was measured not in distance but in impossibilities. She was in the heart of a militarized complex, actively hunted by enemies. Not only that, but she was racing down an empty hall, an easy target.
Okay. Start there.
She slowed long enough to reach over and yank the fire alarm.
Now came the sirens, a loud repeating whoop and bleat of danger. Doors began to open behind her. She hustled into the stairwell, ran up the steps. Paused, then stepped out. The hall was filled with people. She could have kissed each and every one of them. Without people, she was exposed. But in a milling, confused crowd?
Shannon shifted.
Slid behind and between, paused and spun and dodged. Smiled and stopped to bend down as though her boot needed zipping. Stepped into open offices on the blind side of the people stepping out of them. You move like water flows, kiddo. Her dad’s voice, years ago, talking about her on the soccer field. Water always finds a way.
Find a way.
Falling in behind a pair of burly executive types, she used a coded sequence of blinks to control the display of her glasses. The map zoomed out, then changed to a 3-D view, the hallways now laid out like one eye was playing a video game. She wished she could communicate with the handler on the other end of the lenses, could ask him—her?—to stream what she needed. But the link went only one way; an outbound signal from inside the DAR would have tripped all manner of alarms.