Never Say Spy (15 page)

Pain crashed over my head, and I slumped down in the chair, holding my skull with both hands.  Kane’s powerful arm supported me, and I leaned into him for a few seconds before straightening slowly.

“I guess speed kills,” I croaked.  “I took it slow, and this time was no worse than usual.”  I looked up at Kane’s concerned face.  “Thanks, I’m fine now.”  I massaged my eyes and temples, trembling with relief while he went back to his seat at the table.

Spider eyed Smith’s vacant face.  “What’s taking him?”

“I guess he had a few things to work out,” I muttered.  I caught myself unconsciously flexing my fist.  The knuckles didn’t hurt anymore.  Gotta love simulations.  Kane gave me a sharp glance, but made no comment.

A few moments later, Smith’s eyes refocused and he sagged, then pushed himself up straight, palms on the table.  “She assaulted me!”

I gave him a deadly look.  “Play back the data record.”

“You know it wasn’t being monitored,” he snapped.

I shrugged.  “Oops.  I forgot.”

Smith scowled at Kane.  “Arrest this woman.  She’s a spy, and she attacked me.”  He turned back to me.  “Admit it!”

I maintained silence.

Kane gave me a level look.  “Aydan, you didn’t respond to Smith’s accusation that you assaulted him,” he said carefully.

I stared at him.  I couldn’t believe it.  Mr. By-The-Book had left me a loophole.  I took it.

“I didn’t,” I agreed.

Spider spoke up.  “Which didn’t you...”  He intercepted Kane’s look.  His eyes widened and he shut up.

“She lies!” Smith cried.

Kane’s baritone was silky, and I shivered.  That voice bypassed my intellectual processes and went straight to sensation, like velvet on skin.  “You have each accused each other of assault, and you have each denied it.  I have no possible method of determining whether either of you is lying.  This issue is closed.”

He turned to Smith.  “Get the monitoring back up, and open up the network,” he said, his velvet voice turning rock-hard.

Smith reached sullenly for his laptop and began to type.  Kane appraised me from across the table, and I met his eyes squarely.

“We need to resolve this search issue once and for all,” he said at last.  “I checked with the Drumheller RCMP detachment this morning.  They have a female officer on staff.  Aydan, will you consent to a thorough body search?”

Oh, joy.

“Yes,” I said firmly.  “I want this resolved as much as you do.  Probably more.”

He made the call.  When he hung up, he turned to face us again.  “The officer will be here in about forty-five minutes.  Smith, arrange for a meeting with Sandler in an hour.  You and he will check Ms. Kelly’s clothing and belongings to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

I recoiled.  “I don’t want either of those creeps whacking off with my panties!”

Spider and Smith both blushed scarlet.

Kane sighed.  “This is the only way I can be sure nothing has been missed.”  He added in a steely voice, “There will be no impropriety.”  His look scalded Smith.

“If he even touches my underwear, burn it,” I said.  “I’d rather go without.”

“I’ll supervise the entire search,” he reassured me.  “Now, I have some more questions for you.”  He turned to Smith.  “Go set it up with Sandler.”

Smith packed up his laptop and shuffled out of the room, and Kane returned his attention to me.  “Does the name Kasper Doytchevsky mean anything to you?”

“No, should it?”

“I wanted to ask you about your comment to Smith yesterday about the alias.”

I scrambled to catch up with the non sequitur.  “Um…  Oh.  Yeah, I was out of line.  Sometimes my mouth starts up before my brain is in gear.”

“Really.  Because after the way he reacted yesterday, I decided to check into it.  He changed his name to John Smith about five years ago.  His real name is Kasper Doytchevsky,” Kane said.  “Did you know anything about that?”

I internally cursed my inappropriate sense of humour.  “No, I was just running off at the mouth.”

“All right,” he agreed without inflection.

I resisted the urge to beat my head against the table.  What sadistic fate kept putting me in these situations?

“I don’t know what to make of you,” he said.  “You claim this is all coincidence, but you drop these hints that tell me that you know more than you should.”

I threw up my hands.  “It’s all just stupid coincidence.  That’s all I can tell you.”

He assessed me, his brow furrowed.  “But I wonder if there’s something you can’t tell me.  Aydan, are you under duress of some sort?  Are you trying to communicate something without telling me directly?”

“No, I’m not under duress.  I’m not trying to tell you anything.  I’m not spying.  It’s all just coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in that many coincidences,” Kane said.  “Let’s go over the list, shall we?  First, we suspect Samir Ramos of spying.  You coincidentally meet him in the portal, which you accidentally accessed during an implausibly small window of opportunity.  Then you coincidentally fling yourself out of your car right in front of us, drawing attention to yourself.  You were the one who suggested talking to Mike Connor.  Why would you do that if you were trying to hide your access to the network?”

I shrugged.  “I told you, I didn’t know what was happening.”

“Let me finish.  We check the data record, so Ramos’s access to the network is revealed.  We would have missed it due to Connor’s cover-up, if you hadn’t suggested the meeting.  But why cast suspicion on yourself?”

I kept silent, realizing it was a rhetorical question.

“Then, you access the network right in front of us, proving once and for all that our security has been and still is compromised.  Why?  If you’re a spy, why would you do that?”  He frowned at me.

“We search you and find nothing, proving it’s not a simple security breach.  It’s complicated and potentially disastrous.  Again, you draw suspicion.  You make an apparently casual joke that uncovers a name change you should have no way of knowing about.  Which, by the way, was in his personnel file.”

He rubbed his forehead and continued.  “We beef up security and bring you in again to test it.  You break through, and you make no effort to hide that fact.  If you were a spy, why wouldn’t you just lie about it and tell us you couldn’t get in?  But you don’t.  You tell us.  Now you’ve consented to an invasive search that anybody in their right mind would prefer not to undergo.”

He frowned at me, frustration written on his face.  “If you’re a spy, you’re the stupidest, most incompetent spy I ever met.”

I gave him a half-smile.  “Lucky I’m not a spy, or I might take offence.”

“I don’t believe for an instant that you’re stupid or incompetent,” he said flatly.  “So that leaves me with limited possibilities.  The first is to accept a ridiculous and improbable string of coincidences.  You know how I feel about that.  Another possibility is that you’re working deep undercover for our government, and we’re both working toward the same goal of identifying and eliminating threats to national security.  That’s equally far-fetched.  Both Webb and I have top-level security clearances, and along with our best analysts, we’ve spent most of today and half of last night digging into everything about you.  We’ve found nothing.”

I stared at him, open-mouthed.  Far-fetched didn’t quite seem to cover it.

“The last possibility is that you’re a super-spy, and you’ve developed a complex plan to manipulate us somehow, for purposes I can’t even begin to fathom.  There’s no logic to that possibility, either.  Accessing the network right in front of us would be insane.”

“I’m not a spy.  Please believe me,” I implored.

He shook his head.  “I don’t know what to believe.”

The phone on the credenza rang.  Spider picked it up and listened for a moment before passing it to Kane.

Kane gave me a severe look.  “Stay here.”

“Yessir, roger that,” I sighed.  Kane turned away to his call.

I jerked upright in my chair as a thought occurred to me.  “Hey, Spider, if you can pull somebody out of the network by touching them or making a loud noise, why didn’t you just pull me out the first time I went in?”

“We needed to know what part of the network you were trying to access.”  He grinned.  “We weren’t expecting a bathroom renovation.”

I eyed him curiously.  “Here’s something I’ve been meaning to ask.  Why did you show up looking like Ensign Expendable in my bathroom?”

Spider looked sheepish.  “It’s a quirk of the network.  If you don’t consciously control your physical appearance in the sim, then you appear exactly as your self-image dictates.  People with a poor self-image look uglier.  People with a strong, realistic self-image look just like real life.  You looked like yourself, except you were wearing old, baggy clothes.”  He dropped his eyes.  “I looked like Ensign Expendable because that’s how I feel around Kane when he goes into combat mode.”

“So if somebody identifies themselves strongly with, say, a profession, that’s how they’ll appear,” I deduced.  “So Mike Connor was wearing his paramedic’s uniform, because that’s how he sees himself.  And Kane was wearing combat fatigues because he really was in combat mode.”

“That’s about it.  If you concentrate, you can change your physical appearance, but it’s hard to hold it while you do any other kind of simulation.”

“So if I wanted to, I could be a cute little five-foot-nothing blue-eyed blonde,” I speculated.

Spider frowned.  “You could.  But... it wouldn’t suit you.”

I laughed.  “Thanks, I think.  But other than the fact that a brainwave-driven network is cool, what do you use it for?”

Spider hesitated.  “Research and development,” he said at last.

“But what good is it?” I prodded.  “If your expectations drive the sim, you couldn’t use it for research.  You could run a test, but you’d just get whatever result you expected.”

He eyed the table while he ran his thumbnail back and forth along a joint in its surface.  I knew I’d pushed the limits, and I was surprised when he finally responded.

“You can create external parameters that remain constant inside the sim regardless of your own input.  That way you can physically interact with your theoretical models, and they respond strictly according to the data you’ve pre-programmed.”

He looked up to meet my eyes with a strained expression.  “I probably shouldn’t have told you that.  This is all classified.”

Kane ended his call and was turning back to us when the phone rang again.  “Kane.”  He listened, then replied, “Good, I’ll be right down.”

He hung up.  “The RCMP officer is here.  Everything we’ve discussed here is highly classified.  We can’t disclose any details at all to this officer.”  His eyes bored into me.  “You will recall that you signed a non-disclosure agreement.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll get Smith to bring down the network completely.  It won’t be accessible, even to you, Aydan.  Officer Peters will conduct your search in the ladies’ washroom.  There are no surveillance cameras there, so you’ll have complete privacy.  Webb and I will wait outside.  The officer will give us your clothing and your waist pouch.  Webb will stay.  I will take your personal effects to Sandler and Smith for analysis.  As soon as they’re done with your clothes, I’ll bring them back to you.  Is everything clear?”

“I meant what I said about burning my underwear,” I told him.

“I’ll make sure that’s not necessary.”

I sighed.  “Okay.”

Kane picked up the phone again and dialled.  “Sandler, it’s Kane,” he said.  “Have Smith bring down the network now.”  He hung up and turned to us.  “Let’s go.”

I hid my nervousness as best I could.  A strip search.  Fabulous.  What a great way to end my day.

The RCMP officer was mercifully quick and competent.  She had even brought a blanket for me to wrap up in while we waited for my clothes to be returned.  We made stilted conversation, but Sandler and Smith were quick, too, and Spider tapped at the door in short order.  The officer handed me my clothes and tactfully withdrew so I could get dressed.

Once clothed, I hovered in the bathroom for a few seconds.  This was embarrassing.  Everybody knew where that officer’s hands had just been.

I shook myself and squared my shoulders.  What the hell, it wasn’t like I had anything none of them had seen before.  Except maybe Spider.  I smiled to myself at the thought and stepped out of the bathroom.  Spider blushed and averted his eyes.

“I need to walk Officer Peters down to the lobby,” he mumbled.  “You’ll need to come, too, because I can’t leave you alone.”

“Okay, no problem,” I replied, and followed them down the hall.

By the time we saw Officer Peters out the door and walked back to the meeting room, Kane had arrived bearing my waist pouch.

“All clear,” he said with obvious relief.  “Now we can concentrate on figuring out what’s really happening here.  Aydan, you can go for now.  This network access issue isn’t dead, but I need to track down some other leads.  Webb will walk you down to the lobby.”

As we rose and moved toward the door, he spoke again.  “Oh, one more thing, your car will be released tomorrow afternoon from the police impound lot in Calgary.”

“Great, I’ll go down on the bus tomorrow morning.”

He nodded, and was on the phone before we left.  “This is Kane.  We need to look at Ramos’s place again.”

In uncharacteristic silence, Spider walked me to the lobby to turn in my visitor’s badge.  As I opened the door to leave, he burst out, “Aydan, I’m sorry about... about... today.  I believe you, I just don’t know what’s happening or how to make it right.”

I gave him a smile, warmed by his vote of confidence.  “Thanks, Spider, that means a lot to me.  Call me if you need me again.  I’ll help any way I can.”

The icy air took my breath away when I stepped out onto the sidewalk.  The chinook was over and the temperature had dropped rapidly while I’d been inside the building.  I shivered my way to the truck.  Its engine turned over reluctantly before firing.

At least it wasn’t snowing.  I turned the heater to high and blasted it all the way home, shivering with reaction after my harrowing afternoon.  On my way into the house, I checked the thermometer.  Minus 20.  And dropping fast, by the feel of it.  I scurried inside and locked myself in.