"Yes?" he said. "Who's this?"
"Dr. Surikov," Rico said.
Surikov nodded, now looking a bit impatient. "Yes, yes," he said. "Your vid's off. Who am I speaking to?"
Another message from Piper winked on the telecom screen: LINE SAFE.
One final check had been made. Surikov's telecom was clean, right down to the handset at his ear. "You don't know me," Rico said. "I'm calling about something you wanna know about. Be careful what you say and how you react This line's clean, but your apartment may be monitored."
Surikov frowned puzzledly, maybe irritated. "I'm afraid I don't-"
Rico gave Moffit's shoulder a nudge. She jerked her head up and around to look at him, then looked back to Surikov when Rico motioned at the screen. She seemed nervous as hell, desperate. Definitely off-guard. As Rico intended.
The question was: how would she handle herself?
Moffit abruptly shifted in her seat, sitting up straight. Her fingers shook. She gasped. "Darling… darling, don't say anything, don't say my name?"
That last came out in a rush. Surikov opened his mouth as if to interrupt, but then stopped.
"You'll give us away," Moffit continued, only pausing to gasp again. "Someone may be listening. Listening to what you say. Please don't say anything for a moment. I know this is hard. Just say… say yes if you recognize my voice."
Surikov was gazing intently out of the telecom screen. Rico couldn't be sure if the slag was angry, incredulous, or both. "Do I-" he said, abruptly cutting himself off. "Well, of course. Of course I do."
"Darling, please be careful," Moffit said. "Be very, very careful. I'll explain everything that's happened as soon as we're together. Right now I need you to help me. Think carefully. Do you know what I mean when I refer to our special project?"
Surikov frowned, now seeming puzzled. "Well," he said, "yes. Certainly." He waved one hand vaguely. "What else could you mean?"
Moffit nodded. Her eyes seemed riveted to the telecom screen. Her gaze seemed even more intense than Surikov's. "This is why I'm calling," she said. "This is what I'm working on. Our special project. I'm with people who are going to help. After we're done with this call, you must act as if nothing unusual's happened. Do you understand, darling?"
"Yes, obviously." Irritation rose suddenly into Surikov's face, but in an instant faded to nothing. He nodded. "Yes, yes, I understand. I'm just, well… I didn't expect this."
"I understand, darling. Please listen. The people I'm with are very, very careful. They want confirmation from you that you're willing to go along with our project. You must say something to convince them, but you must assume someone's listening to you at your end."
Moments passed. Surikov pressed his hand back over his brow and his thinning hair. His eyes widened briefly, like a man struggling with the incomprehensible. Twice he opened his mouth as if to speak, then said nothing.
"Well," he said finally, "I don't know quite how to say this. I just want to be reunited with my wife. Everything else is rather secondary. It's been, very difficult… difficult to concentrate on my work. I'm so used to her being here. I know she loves me very much, and she wants what's best for me. What more can I say? I trust her implicitly. She wants what I want. I want what she wants. Do you see?"
Farrah Moffit turned her head and met Rico's eyes. She looked scared, expectant, and hopeful all at the same time. Rico looked at the man on the screen, then back at Moffit, watched her a moment, then nodded. "Say bye. We'll be in touch."
Moffit said that, and then a few other things that only helped persuade Rico that the relationship between her and Surikov was real, or real enough that it didn't matter.
The slag wanted what Moffit wanted.
Likely, that was what he'd be getting.
34
Twenty minutes in the lavatory did slightly more for her psyche than for her looks. More than half that time Farrah spent seated on the toilet, face in her hands, eyes closed, struggling to regain her composure, and to reinforce it. The ploy by the runners' leader had caught her off-guard. She had walked into that little room at the top of the hall expecting to face Osborne, only to be confronted by Ansell. It had forced her to shift mind-sets very abruptly, in little more than a moment. With a man like Osborne, she could afford to be every bit the corporate woman, cool to the point of ruthless. In fact, she had to be like that. With Ansell, she couldn't afford to be anything less than the stereotypical woman, as defined by Ansell's own views. Approaching the man in the wrong manner would have invited disaster. Failing to impress upon him the dangers of the situation would have invited so much greater a disaster. It had forced her to think very quickly, to make leaps of intuition she felt only half-able to make. It left her in a state-heart pounding, body shaking-practically on the verge of fainting. She needed time alone to recover, and to prepare for what was coming.
She felt as if things were beginning to rush past her too swiftly, slipping out of control. She told herself that wasn't so. Her plan was coming together. She would make it work.
She had to.
Before the grime-streaked mirror over the lavatory sink, she did what little she could to improve her appearance. There wasn't much. She had no supplies. She was lucky the runners had seen fit to provide her with a change of underwear. She washed her face, then combed her hair and tied it behind her head. Fortunately, the subdued tones permanently bonded to her face, lips, brows, and lashes simulated the most basic effects of makeup. The resulting look was neat enough, though anyone who knew her would see the difference at once. She looked somewhat less polished than her usual self. Unfinished. A woman would certainly spot that. But would a man like Osborne notice?
"I'll make you a promise," said a quiet voice.
Farrah turned to face the man standing in the doorway. The latest one to act as her guard. His graying, razorcut hair and three-day growth of beard made him appear the oldest of the runners. He was also the one who had seemed most acutely distressed after the runners' meeting with Prometheus. The woman who had died at that meeting had apparently been his woman.
"If you cross us," he said, lowly, "you'll never see home again."
Farrah believed it. For all this man's apparent skill at first aid, he carried himself like someone used to confrontations, physical violence. Farrah did not doubt that he could kill her if so moved, without difficulty, without remorse. It was a frightening realization. Her days lately had been fraught with such realizations.
"You scan?" the man insisted.
"I won't cross you," Farrah replied, somewhere finding the capacity to speak in a voice that did not waiver. "I want to get out of this alive. I want to get back to my husband."
To Farrah, those seemed like persuasive proofs, but she saw at once that she had slipped and slipped badly. The man's expression turned venomous, his mouth twisting into a vicious sneer. "That's it," he snarled, motioning with his gun. "Move it."
She did, stepping again into the hall, expecting something, she wasn't sure what-a blow at the back of the head, a shove at the very least. Nothing like that happened and she immediately saw why. The runners' leader waited, watching from the top of the hall. The leader's expression was hard, but she saw none of the fury that had lit his features on previous occasions. Farrah suspected that she might have at least a slim chance of survival as long as she did nothing to provoke that fury.