The Valkyrie Project (13 page)

He frowned.

"That's the best we can do? I tell you my deepest secrets and you don't trump up some charges that my lawyer will have dismissed before we even get to a processing facility? I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for something a little more immediate."

A wide sneer took over his face, even more sinister than the cat-like one it replaced. Ana didn't have time to take in the full grotesque mask it formed before a new video jumped onto the three monitors that sat behind him. As it began playing Ana saw herself in a dress that was shorter and tighter than anyone
—even someone with a body like hers—should be allowed to wear. She remembered the dress as easily as she remembered the Texan diplomat she was about to ensnare with a passionate kiss.

"I've seen what you can do for the people you want something from."

Marisol recoiled slightly, giving him the reaction he wanted. Ana just glared.

"I killed him," she said.

"Oh, come now. We both know that was nothing more than unintentional manslaughter. Besides, to go out like that? What man doesn't want that?" He gave her a slight wink. Then, looking back at the video, "Wait, here's my favorite part."

On the video, Ana had secured the data card with the Surgeon List, and was getting the security alert trigger from the diplomat's pocket. The hem of the dress was not quite high enough to show the camera what Ana had on underneath, but the taut material stretched tight across her backside left little to the imagination.

Lukas let go of a groan that carried with it a clearly perverse pleasure.

"Of course, it's not as revealing as some of the other entertainment my good friend recorded," he said, flicking his fingers over the controls. The image on the screens showed the diplomat with his pants down, in flagrante with a beautiful, naked young woman.

"But sometimes," Lukas said, "the subject makes up for the lack of content." His eyes held Ana's, and she fought down the hairs rising on the back of her neck.

"We've made our offer. If you want anything more, you'll have to take it. Trying that, though, will probably result in the termination of our offer, and we'll simply take what we came here for."

"Yes," he hissed, "you seem to be good at taking things from defenseless people. But please, Miss Valkyrie, do not think that because I am a research scientist that I haven't any sort of combat training. I could take what I want by force, but then none of us gets what we really want."

He broke from Ana to wink at Marisol.

"I think this one knows what I'm talking about. I bet she has spent more than a couple lonely nights imagining what it would be like to be intimate with her Valkyrie friend."

Ana snuck a glance at Marisol without moving her head. The other Valkyrie’s posture and expression remained unchanged.

Lukas’ voice snapped her attention back. "Do you know what your friend the diplomat's wife looks like?"

Ana frowned. She and Marisol remained silent, their arms folded in a sign that meant Lukas would not be entering their minds with his all-too-obvious distraction.

"I know for a fact that her breasts are not still riding as high as that young lady's."

Ana clamped down on several retorts, but Marisol was ready to attack.

"Is there a point to this—besides your own demented arousal—or can we get back to business?"

The video monitors went black. Perhaps Lukas intended to conduct an actual negotiation.

"This is business, my dear Valkyrie. This is your business. These are the kinds of people you're helping when you think you're saving the world."

It wasn't the first time either of the Valkyries had heard that.

"Those are the people we sometimes have to help in order to help others."

"So why not help me in order to help others?"

He had been waiting for it. Ana felt stupid, ashamed even, for having walked into the statement that had been twisted around so easily. It was like a gun had choked in her hand and the blast had melted a layer of flesh. Then, just for a second, she worried that they might not be clever enough to outwit the venomous man leaning back in his chair with a sly grin she couldn't help but want to slap off his face.

The dark, metallic taste of fear and failure crept from the back of her mouth. Ana felt it marching like a sentry, a harbinger, stronger than usual, but
she looked at Lukas and knew that she had overcome adversaries much more worthy in the past. She focused on his small lidless eyes and almost felt bad. He was a man of extremely high intelligence and here he was trying to negotiate sexual favors with highly trained, explosively violent, potentially lethal government weapons. Yes, she had given up the illusion that she was anything more than a tool of the government without looking back. Had that been a mistake? Or had Lukas started to burrow under her skin? The answer to the latter was clearly yes because she had already answered the former.

"You can help us, or we can kill you."

Lukas chuckled, but there was a hint of nerves behind the laughter. "If you kill me, you won't ever find my weapons."

"And neither will the Continuum."

He laughed again but doubt tinctured the haughty condescension.

Marisol spoke, offering another solution. "Or we can leave here and ambush you when you meet your contact from the Continuum."

This time Lukas laughed boldly with no trace of nervousness. "You've just told me your plan, Valkyrie! Do you think I'm foolish enough to keep my meeting knowing that you'll be lying in wait?"

"Perhaps. Or maybe I just want to see how the Continuum reacts when you contact them to alter your arrangements."

A hint of fear pushed out on Lukas' eyes, causing them to bulge ever so slightly. He knew that he'd stand a higher chance of living with this new option, but he might not like changing the straightforward deal he currently held with the Continuum.

"If they kill you out of hand, then not only have we essentially followed through on option number one, but we have a much better idea of what kind of organization the Continuum is."

"Is it not the smallest of double standards that you can murder without reproach and protect those who ruin the lives of innocent children with their sexual deviances?"

Ana pointed to the screens, her voice rising a few decibels. "I don't think Mr. Hutchison was taking advantage of a girl who didn't know better there."

"I was talking about you, my Valkyrie. Nothing to do with Mr. Hutchison's minor perversions. Don't think that because you saved a few children from the Continuum that your side of the fight does not have its own crates of human merchandise. I have to believe you have seen the dark underbelly that casts a shadow over creatures it has left behind."

Ana bit her tongue, literally, but the expression on her face did not change. Marisol stood firm at her side.

"Do I need to spell it out for you, Number Twenty-Four?" The number came out as a devious pejoration of her quasi-codename call sign. "I have seen how your government uses the money it extracts from even the smallest of the people it claims to protect. Have you not witnessed the same things? Think. Even the hint of a question?"

Silence.

"No? Frankly, I find that impossible. I know you have doubts. How can an Agency that green-lights murder hesitate more than a fraction of a second before giving in to the baser desires of its biggest contributors?"

Still the Valkyries said nothing.

"Do they really have you so brainwashed that you think that everyone you save is an angel? That every deed you do has nothing but a positive impact? My dears, I think that nothing might please me more than to disabuse you of that notion. These people are worth saving, but not for the reasons you think. And the reasons change. Why do you think I go for what I want whenever I can get it?"

"Because you're a selfish
, egotistical pig," Ana barked.

"No, Ms. Valkyrie, it's because while your lovely
Agency may want to protect me today, it will just as likely want me dead tomorrow."

"Not if you
—"

"Not if I nothing! There is nothing you or I can do to stop the men at the top with nothing but dollar signs in their eyes!"

He flicked the monitors back on. The young woman was allowing the Texan diplomat to enter her in a place that was designed to be exit only.

"Your
Agency, my stupid little Valkyrie, is fucking little girls in the ass and you do nothing but help because they tell you they're saving the world! Why—"

There was a sharp crack and a look of astonishment smashed into Lukas's face. His head tilted down to look at the new hole in the leg of his pants which was already leaking dark red liquid. Ana watched, masking her amusement with heated disgust, as the surprise slid away, the initial shock wearing off, turning to pain and anger. Good. She felt much of the same.

"What the fuck?" The only words he could manage through the wave of shock and sting.

"Now we can start negotiating," Ana said, glimpsing Marisol from the corner of her eye. Her partner looked only mildly shocked. Good.

"You," Lukas started again, regaining a bit of his previous composure, "you see? This is exactly what I mean."

"Yes," Ana said, "I see. I see that this is how shit gets done. I see us waiting here, only one of us with a slug in their leg waiting to bleed out. Or I see you telling us where your meeting is taking place and Miss Twenty-Six here calling in a medevac for you."

The awareness that his options had shrunk dramatically came faster than Ana had expected for such an obstinate ox. He spat fragments of words for another few moments, and then lowered his head in defeat.

You see? Didn't have to kill anybody.

The Valkyries would decide who lived.

--

The door let go of a steely creak as it let in a shaft of dirty yellow light. A stooped man crept cautiously through, concealing himself in the shadow created by the open door.

Ana was herself hiding in a shadow, crouched in the corner next to the window that ended at the door, partially obscured by a bulky curtain. Marisol had hidden herself just inside the door to the bathroom at the back
, as there were precious few hiding spots in the tiny room itself. Having Marisol there would also prevent any escape attempt out the back if the agent spotted Ana and got spooked. She could cover the front door with nothing more than a long stride and a half, and the bathroom window was the only other way out.

The agent looked around and missed Ana in the corner. She wasn't sure if she should blame his
eyes adjusting to the darkness or conclude he had a lack of field experience. The latter was a dangerous assumption, so she went with the former.

The man moved to the bathroom which, despite the window to the outside, was darker than the
room itself. Ana moved to cover the door as the man reached in to hit the button for the bathroom light. Even if his eyes were used to outside, the fiendish yellow safety lights were much dimmer than the bathroom light would be, especially in a seedy hotel without light sensors. He had to know that. It didn't take a great deal of intelligence—not even field experience—to know that anyone waiting inside could take advantage of the blinding flood the bathroom light would produce.

Marisol did just that. As soon as his fingers reached the button and the light appeared, she grabbed his arm and pulled, smacking the side of the man's head against the door frame as she jerked him into a headlock. With Marisol's arm around his neck, the man put his arms straight up in the air.

"I'm not armed!" he cried.

After seeing the kind of weaponry and technology that the Continuum possessed, Ana found it highly unlikely that an agent of theirs would come unarmed to a meeting with a bioweapons dealer. She moved in to frisk him while Marisol restrained him. As she patted him down, she shuddered with a thought of how Lukas Huang would have reacted to the contact. The small, nerdy
-looking man was babbling about meeting Huang and working on negotiations with the Continuum and seemed to hardly notice her hands doing a quick dance over his body, deriving none of the perverse pleasure that the man he had intended to meet would have.

"Are you Continuum agents? Crap. Of course you would have had the whole place staked out. Probably bought out the whole crappy little motel
, didn't you? God, I'm such an idiot."

The man's eyes tightened behind the circle frames of his glasses. He grimaced. Sniffled. Was he going to cry?

Ana examined his face, squinting a bit against the backlighting from the bathroom. She was having a hard time believing that a man as apparently inept as this one had somehow been able to get the time and location of Lukas Huang's meeting with the Continuum. Those tears seemed to come too easily. Did he possess insider knowledge simply recast as innocent questions? Ana was willing to bet on the fact that a Continuum agent would be trained to create such a façade. Yet his behavior since entering the room contradicted the possibility of professional training.

"Identify yourself," Ana said. Getting a truthful answer from such a request was unlikely, but Ana's mind had entered information
-gathering mode in order to be able to assimilate and analyze on a rational level. If this man was not an agent of the Continuum, then they needed to subdue him to return the room to its "empty" state.