It had only been a week since her new ally, Aviary, had found someone talented enough to pinpoint and remove the genetic marker McLoughlin was using to keep tabs on her. McLoughlin was dead now, but Sophia couldn’t be sure who else might take over the tracking. For two months she’d moved daily, stayed mobile during daylight and hardly slept at night. It was hard to break the habit now, even though she no longer needed to go to such extremes.
Her burner phone buzzed across the carpet floor. She’d only just turned it on.
The number was stored as A.
She almost let it ring out but decided to pick up.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ Aviary said.
Sophia sat upright, phone to her ear. ‘Hi.’
‘Yeah, um, actually calling people is weird. I have something to show you. Do you want to meet? I’m—’
‘Don’t tell me where you are,’ Sophia said. ‘When are you thinking?’
‘Um, as soon as you can. This Friday?’ Aviary said. ‘I’ll send you the address tonight.’
Sophia had been training Aviary over the past six months, on and off. Aviary knew not to send anything direct. The address would appear on the front page of a company website they’d agreed on. Aviary would hide the meeting address in the source code. Sophia could reveal it using the inspector tool in any web browser. Following Sophia’s instruction, the numbers in the address would be offset by twelve. 108/170 Broadway would become 120/182 Broadway. The time would not be offset. But if Aviary needed to communicate a red flag, the last two digits would both be 9. That was all Sophia needed.
‘What time tonight?’ Sophia said.
‘When I finish my shift,’ Aviary said. ‘I have to go now, but tell me if you can’t make it.’
Aviary ended the call. She was using a burner phone too, as much as she detested it. She’d vowed to convert Sophia to a smartphone made sometime in the last decade but Sophia didn’t trust them. She’d been out of the loop with technology since defecting from the Fifth Column.
She checked her watch. It was already past ten at night so she decided to wait until first thing in the morning. Friday was still a few days off.
Chapter 7
Nasira drew to a halt along the rocky path. Her lungs screamed to catch up and her legs burned. The path had led her higher into the mountains. High enough that clouds shimmered before her, tempting her to the unknown.
She’d reached the Forest of the Clouds.
After spending a few days in Cusco, a town below the mountains, to acclimatize herself to the altitude, she had started her trek through a less explored region of the Incan empire. And she had still a way to go.
The tops of the rocky mountains were swathed in haze. She’d clocked another thousand meters of elevation today, reaching an uncomfortable 5,000 meters above sea level. And it was starting to show. She had to stop every twenty paces to catch her breath.
She wielded two staffs fashioned from small tree branches along the way, using them to transfer some weight from her knees to her shoulders. Her arms could handle the fatigue but her lungs were really slowing her down. And it was starting to piss her off.
She took the moment to sip from her canteen and watch the clouds drift between the mountains and past a flock of grazing alpacas. They jerked their fluffy, unshorn heads in her direction and hummed. The cloud drifted over them, coating the yellowed grass and low bush.
She wanted to reach the summit before sundown and lay up overnight. She started moving again, able to breathe calmly in through her nose and out her mouth. She used her wooden staffs to help herself across some rocky steps and around a sharp bend. The side of the mountain dropped sharply below and she had to be mindful not to stray too close to the edge.
The last hours of the afternoon slipped behind her as she thought of Sophia. With each passing week Sophia had withdrawn. She still acted like everything was cool and nothing had changed. But everything had. She was struggling and Nasira could see it in her eyes.
With Sophia’s tagging mechanism removed, she could afford to slow down and move as she pleased. But she never did. Even her plans to fight back against the Fifth Column seemed to evaporate. Nasira knew they were still there, but she stopped talking about it. She hadn’t mentioned Denton in a while.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was Sophia didn’t speak of anyone. Not Freeman. Not Benito. Not even DC. If he had been in contact with Sophia she certainly hadn’t told anyone. It annoyed Nasira because Sophia had the support of her friends to help her do what had needed to be done. At Desecheo Island. In the Philippines. And in Denver. And then she had just shut down.
Sophia was supposed to be here with her. In the mountains. But she’d used some bullshit excuse of putting people at risk by being here. That she might lead the Fifth Column to a remote location in the mountains and put a village in danger. Even though the tracking mechanism was gone and that wasn’t possible anymore. They both knew it wasn’t the real reason. Sophia just wanted to be left alone.
So Nasira had left her alone.
Nasira reached the summit between the two mountains and fought the urge to collapse where she stood. She wiped sweat from her face. Her lungs struggled to pull enough oxygen and it took a few minutes before she felt normal again. As normal as you could feel up here.
The mountains in the distance were a faded blue. Between them and her, an ocean of cloud. They were beneath her now. Soon the sun would move under the clouds and darkness would coat the summit. Nasira set up camp in a clearing, erecting a hammock and tying her waterproof poncho overhead to keep the rain off. She sprayed the ends of the hammock and the two trees with bug spray before curling up inside and listening to the night.
At this altitude the sound of wildlife was sparse. Most of the nocturnal activity was far below now. She kept her Gerber Mark II fighting knife in the hammock with her. It dug into her side if she kept it in the scabbard so she held it, sheathed.
She wondered what Jay was up to and whether he was thinking of her much, if at all. Where Sophia had slipped, Jay had improved. A large part of his improved day to day function was because he worked with Damien now. The fools were almost brothers. Although Jay still called occasionally and asked about Sophia. But it wasn’t why he called.
Last week Jay had floated the idea of a reunion, just the four of them. Grab some food at the diner, nothing fancy. He was on for a job in New York next week, which was only one state north from where Nasira was supposed to go anyway. Talking Sophia into it would be another thing.
A light rain dusted the surface of her poncho. The sound reminded her of thunderstorms rattling her roof when she was young. She drifted to sleep.
The blizzard swept flakes of snow into Nasira’s eyes. She pulled the hood on her waterproof jacket to one side, compensating for the angle of the wind. The snow was hard underfoot, crunching and sliding with each step. At 6,000 meters above sea level, she walked among the mountaintops — peppered with snow like choc chip and vanilla ice cream — drawing closer to her final destination. The cold air made her cheeks sting and her head painfully numb. She checked the touchscreen on her GPS, grateful she could use it with gloves on.
She stopped.
It should be right here, she thought.
But there was nothing. Just snow, mountaintops and more snow. And the blizzard.
She ran her gaze in full circle, returning to find thin gray shapes ahead of her. The blizzard rippled through the air and the gray shapes took sharper form. At first she thought they were pillars, the remains of the Incan fortress rumored to exist in these mountains. But they were irregularly shaped and their tops were bumpy. She realized she was looking at the heads and shoulders of people. Three of them standing before her, hooded and cloaked in dark gray to protect them from the blizzard. They didn’t say a word. They didn’t move.