Now she was Sophia.
Denton stepped out onto Vanderbilt Avenue and pulled on his overcoat. He had two Phoenix viruses almost in his grasp now. He looked up into the night sky, felt the breeze on his younger face.
All he needed was the third.
Chapter 6
Sophia pulled her rucksack open on the motel bed. On casual inspection, it was a discreet black ruck with a bare fifteen liters of capacity. It was in fact the perfect ruck for her. Waterproof, military grade, slim against the contours of her back. Inside, she had two field packs and three rows of webbing fitted with essentials.
On the top row of webbing she kept a small torch with a red lens filter. She liked it because it had a dedicated strobe button and it took AA batteries she could source anywhere. Next to it, a monocular. Beside the monocular she kept a cheap GPS with a color touchscreen. It ran happily off two of any civilian GPS services at any time: American GPS, Russian GLONASS, European Galileo and Chinese BeiDou.
On the second row of webbing she kept a pair of compact night-vision goggles, generation two. She pulled the door wedge from under the motel room door and slipped it between her goggles and baseplate compass. In the next motel room, glasses clinked and someone laughed. She ignored them. On the end of the second row, her black oxide multitool in a pouch. Wedged in behind it were a few strips of plasticuffs. Next to the multitool she had a second multitool. It was a present for Aviary; her birthday had been the week before.
Sophia had removed the Velcro from all the pouches and sewn in press-studs. She’d converted one of her field bags into her trauma kit. Trauma bandages, tape, burn dressing, a scalpel and a tube of Dermabond. Aspirin for pain relief or fever reduction, metoclopramide for nausea, loperamide (an anti-diarrheal agent), an EpiPen (adrenalin auto-injector), morphine auto-injector, two sachets of QuickClot and a spare tourniquet. A tourniquet was the only medical kit she carried both in her ruck and on her person, usually secreted in her jacket.
She kept a hard, water-resistant Pelican case the size of a smartphone. It was identical to the one issued to her in Project GATE, just small enough to stuff down her jeans. She’d customized the contents quite a lot, given the urban environments she was now operating in. This time, she didn’t bother with a wrist compass. They were inaccurate to the point where she never bothered using them. And she hardly needed one when Nasira the human compass was around.
She neglected to insert a small multitool into the Pelican case because she already carried a larger one. The issued flint-and-striker combo barely worked. She used a cigarette lighter and waterproof matches as backup. The laser pointer went — as an operative she hadn’t used it once. She’d filled the gap with iodine tablets and ten foot of paracord. And a hypodermic needle and vial she’d taken from Dr Cecilia McLoughlin. The vial McLoughlin had almost injected into her.
Sophia had planned to destroy it when she was ready but she hadn’t gotten to it yet. Every time she packed her ruck and checked it over, she found herself distracted by the tangerine liquid. She didn’t know why she hung onto it. If injected, it would obliterate her conscience. To her, that was almost suicide. Or worse than suicide. She tucked it behind the waterproof matches so she couldn’t see it through the Pelican’s transparent lid.
In the ruck’s interior zipped pockets she kept a few other items. Small headsets with earpieces and throat mikes; an old iPod Aviary had passed down to her. It was an unapologetic red that Aviary had probably bought to match her hair.
Sophia also kept her essential toiletries in her ruck, along with hand sanitizer, water, some dried food, a pair of cheap sunglasses, sewing needles and safety pins. She also kept a full set of lockpicks and a small tin of WD-40—good for erasing fingerprints and DNA. And of course secondary batteries and chargers for everything. She lived out of her bag so it was always packed and ready to go. One spare pair of jeans, six T-shirts, one sweater that she wore mostly in her room. Seven pairs of underwear, six light support bras, two sports bras and five pairs of socks, a cluster of elastic hair ties, all zipped into a compact washbag so they didn’t get in the way when she was groping for tools.
In the interior pocket that ran across her back: a single flashbang and two Glock mags, upright so she could grab them. In the exterior pocket against her back she stored another two mags.
Depending on the environment, her clothing and the level of danger she was walking into, she either carried her Glock 17 pistol in her waistband or in the interior pocket of her ruck. But she always carried her Gerber Mark II fighting knife. She could reach for either the knife or the pistol quickly without having to take the bag off her shoulders. Naturally, the pistol was already loaded. She also carried a cleaning kit in the ruck, and her backup Gerber knife, which she was planning to give to Aviary for her birthday.
Fastened to the ruck’s carrying handle were two carabiners. One was a non-locking carabiner, the other locking. She’d connected them with forty foot of paracord. She’d wrapped the paracord over the locking carabiner to the point where she couldn’t even see it. Handy in case she needed to do any climbing. Or falling.
On her person she kept very little. A slim wallet, a burner phone, a waterproof watch. And her own version of the cumbersome escape and evasion kit she’d once been issued. Her new kit was as thin as a credit card and not much longer than a toothpick. It wasn’t really a case at all, just a few items bundled together. A single handcuff key, kevlar rope, a shim and her pair of mini lockpicks. She could walk through any metal detector without arousing attention. With this kit secreted in slits cut in the waistbands of both pairs of her jeans, they would also go unnoticed in a casual body search.
She checked her wallet. Various dollar bills, false license and false debit card. Behind them, a photo of Leon Adamicz. Behind that, a photo of Owen Freeman. Behind that, a photo of Benito Montoya. They weren’t her own; they weren’t taken by her or anyone she knew. They were photos she’d printed at an internet café after a quick Google Image Search. They were photos she should have burned by now. In fact, they were photos she should never have had to begin with. Accompanying the photos, a motel business card. On the back she’d written the names of her sister, her brother, her mother and her father. To anyone else they didn’t exist, but she needed them to exist for her.
The motel room next to her thumped soft music from someone’s phone or laptop. She could hear voices chatting and laughing: she counted at least four. They weren’t packed and ready to go. They weren’t concerned with who might be tracking them, or how many exits this motel had, or who knew their real name. They didn’t have the laces on their sneakers pre-tied. They just laughed, talked excitedly, told each other stories, poured drinks.
She closed her ruck, turned her burner phone on and lay down on her bed, wondering for a moment what it would be like in that room next door. Listening to a story that didn’t involve the Fifth Column or a deniable project. Laughing, holding her cup steady as someone refilled it.
It wasn’t the first time she’d lain on her bed awake. In whatever motel, hotel or apartment she’d rented for the night she listened to conversations next door. She liked the concerned murmurs, sparks of gossip, pop music while they showered, cable television they watched, gasps for breath.
The hardest thing about being an operative in exile was the time. She had too much of it. And all she could do was think. About everything. It might explain why her ruck was so well organized. She had little else to do.