Hidden Steel (21 page)

With his bike at hand they wasted no time getting the day started; he dropped her off at a sporting goods store and headed for the Internet café. The menu was limited, but orange juice and an egg muffin wannabe combo did the trick. He thought guiltily of Mickey, but she’d been happy enough with her granola bars.

Mickey.

No, it was Anna. Anna Hutchinson.
Ahn-na,
the pottery instructor had said, along with commentary on how well-liked she was.

So Steve had been good. He spent a few moments to check the reporting on Anthony’s death and found nothing. At first he truly didn’t believe it—he looked for twenty minutes longer than he should have, certain he was missing something.

And then his brother’s voice—a voice that hadn’t found its way into his thoughts for a startling number of years now—said quite practically,
they cleaned up after themselves.
It was the kind of statement Steve would have dismissed when his brother was alive—but right now it struck him as exactly right. They’d cleaned up so thoroughly that no one but those involved knew it had happened at all. And who would miss Anthony, or report him missing, aside from his homeless neighbors?

He forced himself away from the subject—from even letting the bitter afterthought of it taint his progress—and delved into Naia and Irhaddan, hunting for any piece of information that would make it all make sense. He discovered a recent
Times
article about UN weapons inspections—that certain Mid-East countries had been declared weapons-free in spite of everyone’s belief that they had been manufacturing and acquiring them. Irhaddan was mentioned simply because it was one of the few countries never under any suspicion.

Huh. Well, WMD was always worth some attention, but it didn’t seem as though it could be related to Naia’s situation.

He couldn’t find any photos of Naia, not even old ones. He did find plenty of photos of her father, an older man with much dignity who seemed to do a decent job of keeping his country stable with massive instability all around them. He found photos of the man with his contemporaries, most of whom appeared more than once and some of whom always seemed to be on hand—mostly Mounir Farooqi, the man Mickey had known. He found a number of articles praising the president for his temperate ways, and more than one that praised his decision to send his daughter overseas, acknowledging the personal difficulties this created for the man.

So Naia was clearly a figurehead. A private, protected figurehead.

Steve’s brain felt like it was tied in knots. So Mickey and Naia were somehow involved in a spy game—one in which the agencies were still an unknown. None of it made sense—especially the encounter with the pair outside the CapAd.Com building. They’d used CIA terms … but the CIA didn’t work on native soil. Didn’t spy on its own. And Steve, for whatever research he’d done to deal with his brother’s street friends once upon a time, had no truly special insight into the various agencies. Who did what, where they did it, how publicly they did it … he knew enough to throw around a few terms. The end.

And then there was Naia. Protected, private … she had somehow acquired importance in this game.

What the hell could be so important in relation to Irhaddan? They were one of the few countries in that area
not
being a problem or a threat—
not
under close scrutiny with regard to WMD.

Oh.

Idiot.

What would be important to a country with certain freedoms and reputations would be to keep those freedoms and that reputation. And the Irhaddanians—the ones who had killed Anthony, who had come for him and Mickey at the gym—they acted like men with a lot to lose.

So the Irhaddanians had something they wanted kept quiet, and Naia knew it, and Naia was working with Mickey.

He wanted to believe that this meant Mickey was working for U.S. interests. The Good Guys, not the Bad Guys. She could be FBI; she could be … well, something he didn’t even know about.

No one who cares so much about protecting others would work against her own country.

He believed that. He was even satisfied to leave it at that.

Mickey wouldn’t be.

Then let’s find out more about Mickey.

Steve went hunting for Anna Hutchinson. He threw in keywords like hostage and college, and it didn’t take him long. Ten years earlier the Internet hadn’t quite been the archival tool of its current incarnation, but an event like that …

There were anniversaries. Memorials. Various ceremonies, lingering like aftershocks through the years.

He found a few photos from that time—longer hair, same bright eyes, the rest of her looking young and shell-shocked. He found reference to her role in the incident. He learned that she’d been hurt. She hadn’t mentioned it; maybe she didn’t know. Otherwise, nothing new to be learned. Only what she’d said.

Except he hadn’t realized it would be such a relief to find that confirmation. For her sake, and for his.

He took the moment, breathed deeply a few times. His Mickey—right here in phosphor history. Lost her mother, protected her sister, took on gunmen … and danced with brooms and on beds.

His
Mickey.

I am such an idiot. I know better than to believe in this.

And still, on a whim, he did a People Search. No phone or address for Anna Hutchinson here in Northern California. But he went to the regular search engine and linked her name to Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco …

Bingo.

A simple one-page website, a simple one-screen front page. It looked like the online business card it was. Classy, simple, with just a hint of “if you have to ask, you don’t need to know.”

Antiques. She sold antiques out of San Francisco. If he interpreted the display correctly, she was also an antique hunter—the person to go to with those special requests.

He had to admire the beauty of it. It meant travel; it meant she had an excuse for being anywhere she needed to be. It meant that dropping out of sight wasn’t a problem—she need answer to no boss, and no set work schedule. It meant, from the exclusive look of the website, that she had clients in the very upper strata of San Francisco society—second only to DC when it came to the number of foreign embassies in residence.

He bet she went to a lot of parties.

The discovery left only the question of who she worked for—
truly
worked for. And it didn’t really matter which combination of letters she reported to—CIA, NSA, NCIS, FBI, or even Homeland Security—it only mattered that they originated in the U.S. That she wasn’t somehow cultivating Naia to influence Irhaddan against the States.

In which case, the men who had killed Anthony and shot up the gym might well be the good guys.

“Screw
that
,” he said out loud, garnering a glance from the neighboring table. He offered a sheepish shrug in response and checked his email one last time. Nothing—again—from the editor he’d written the day before.

So in spite of what he’d learned, he hadn’t advanced their plan. Mickey’s identity didn’t matter so much as her memory, and she’d already told him she didn’t want to force anything—didn’t want to distract herself from the matter at hand. At some point they could use the contact info on the website to track down her office, but she didn’t consider it a priority. And his research into Irhaddan had netted nothing but speculation.

That
, he could tell her. She had an uncanny knack for following her leftover instincts to a decision …she might well have an opinion on his speculating.

And now? He had his own life to see to. The gym to check on. His people to worry about. And no one better to give him answers than Dawnisha.

He logged off his email, dumped the browser cache, and emptied the URL history cache. Finally paranoid at that.

His brother would have laughed.

* * * * *

Naia hooked the diminutive headset over her ears, not the least bit certain she could concentrate on the art history lecture podcast when she was still a prisoner in her own apartment.

They wouldn’t tell her anything more. They made sure Badra was there at all times, preserving appearances and Naia’s virtue. They spoke among themselves when they thought she couldn’t hear—and they were right. The most she gleaned from any of it was that Badra was no happier about the situation than Naia, and that the men felt it would be necessary only until the situation was contained.

What did that mean, exactly?

In her ears, her professor droned on about the Parthenon. Naia typed a few desultory notes … highlighted a phrase in the open textbook beside her laptop. Most college students sprawled hither and yon for such work, using furniture in creative ways. Naia sat properly at a tidy desk, as dressed and presentable as if she’d been in the classroom itself.

Partly because of Badra, of course. But partly just because it made her feel more in control.

She turned the textbook page; her eyes strayed to her laptop screen. Her email icon had appeared in the tool bar. She swapped out program windows to check her automatically downloaded mail.

Two pieces of junk, one email from a casual friend wondering if she was okay or just ditching class this week, and one email from someone she didn’t recognize … but the subject header made her look twice.
Someone’s looking for you?
, question mark and all.

She glanced up to see if Badra was paying any attention, and found the woman embroidering the edges of a hijab, her culturally jarring PDA on the arm of her chair as though she were multi-tasking something. Badra, it seemed, had plenty on her mind. Naia opened the email.

… Don’t know me … student newspaper … editorial … email from someone … interested in contacting you.
But he didn’t, it seemed, give out other people’s email info without permission. Come to that, he shouldn’t have had hers in the first place. Very few people did.

No, she wouldn’t read too much into that. She’d been tidy with her email, but she’d given it out to enough people so that asking in the right place would result in the information. For the moment, she’d assume this was just what it looked like—someone who respected her privacy enough to contact her rather than just handing out her email address when asked. The editor had pasted in the original query; she didn’t recognize that email address, either.
[email protected].
The text was no more enlightening. The author knew her, had lost track of her, would like to reconnect. Hoped the newspaper editor could help. The author pointed out that he … or she … knew Naia well enough to read between the lines of who he’d been talking about in that editorial, and professed concern that she hadn’t been seen.

Nothing terribly exciting. Nothing to catch her eye. Until the author of the letter signed off. The email signature included only an initial—
A.
—followed by the email address and a title,
Community Interface, Pottery Warehouse.

The Pottery Warehouse had no such position. It had no one whose first name began with A. on staff.

But it had her dead drop.

It had Anna.

Swiftly, Naia deleted the email. The security detail hadn’t demanded to inspect her computer yet, but she thought it was just a matter of time. And though there was nothing overtly incriminating about this email or any other, she quickly emptied her mailbox trash—and with a grim satisfaction, she put her government-grade data chew-and-destroy program to work on those files.

When Badra looked up again, Naia had rewound the podcast to the point at which her attention had diverged, highlighter in hand. But she was no longer Naia the student.

She was Naia who’d had enough … and who now had somewhere to go.

She met Badra’s gaze and smiled.

* * * * *

Mickey disembarked the bus as close to the pottery warehouse as she could, and carried the considerable results of her morning shopping spree the rest of the way. She hid the purchases in the prickly and unwelcoming evergreen shrubbery. A glance at the class schedule showed a nice gap at dinner time, and that would be the best time to haul this stuff to the third floor.

Then, because she was running out of time, she gave herself the luxury of picking up a cab at the Caltrain station, and directed the driver to the Internet café. This bemused them both, as she did it in his native Russian when she ran into trouble with English.

Huh.

Steve wasn’t by any of the computer stations in the bright, contemporary café; she found him at the short bank of high-tech public phones along the wall, startled to see her. And beneath the startle was worry and no little turmoil. He gestured her over.

She got a few double-takes from the other customers as she threaded her way through the tables, since her current look was meant to blend in with a slightly more downtrodden crowd. But this was a college town, and those who noticed her did little more than shrug and return to work. Here, she probably would have blended better if she’d added electric blue and pink to her hair and turned herself punk.

“Dawnisha,” he was saying. “I can’t—” Frustration then. “But everyone’s okay?” He met Mickey’s eyes, shook his head slightly. She didn’t take it as a response to his conversation with Dawnisha—more like frustration, part two. “Okay, good. Just keep your distance from the place. Don’t mess with these guys. Anyone who comes up against them should just say what you know—that I’ve taken off for a while.”

He looked up at the ceiling; Mickey thought he was grinding his teeth. “Of
course
I think everyone there can take care of their own neighborhood. But these guys …they’re cold. It’s not about honor or family or proving themselves to some gang—it’s bigger than that, and they don’t
care
who gets in their way. You hearing me? This is one of those times where running is the best option. What do you think I’ve done?” He made an expressively exasperated gesture that looked like it had come from an Old World relative. “Look, Dawnisha … it comes down to this. If anything happens to anyone there, it’ll be my fault. I don’t think I can live with that. Don’t make me, okay?”