The Valkyrie Project (19 page)

"Based on what we know, yes, that's true. But how do you plan to get him out of there?" Ana threw a hand up at the restaurant. "He's in there, armed and clearly delusional."

Jrue grimaced, his brow crushed into a triptych of deep wrinkles.

"I wanted help," he said, his voice low. "If we get him away, we can give him the same kind of help. The medicine. Safety."

"Jrue," Ana said, "
if he's being controlled by the Continuum, you can't compare yourself to him anymore."

"But what if…" He couldn't finish. If the Continuum had somehow gotten to Alando and cast an unholy spell on him, even a purely scientific biological spell, Jrue was apt to be a victim of the same poisonous magic. The coincidence of timing and symptoms was too strong to be ignored.

A look of horror or shock or surprise or a combination of all three mixed with a pinch of worry took over Ana's tender lips and large, passionate eyes. Had she been trying to deny what Jrue already suspected? She was one of the most intelligent people that he knew, so Jrue wondered if the same emotions that kept her at the forefront of his mind also clouded her judgment when it came to evaluating his mental state and capabilities. He had seen her use logic and reason combined with her experience and well-honed Valkyrie intuition, and those faculties would lead any reasonable person to at least consider the same conclusion that Jrue had already reached. But she had fallen a step behind and ignored the obvious until he spelled it out for her. Maybe she was just too concerned with the possibility of facing another mind-controlling Continuum agent to extrapolate conclusions from the current situation.

His thought process ended there, cut short as the whine of a capacitive weapon charging echoed across the food court. It came from the Best Burger.

Ana's hands went to the guns slung across her hips. Jrue's pulse rose, vibrating his chest like a drum beat. The outline of his friend appeared in the door. Bullets sprayed from two guns, one in each of his hands, flying at them, cutting wide, wild swaths across the food court. Ana pulled on Jrue's arm hard enough to make him kneel and probably saved his life. He strained to watch the madness that erupted from the scene as guns flashed all around, Agents scattered like teens at an unsanctioned rock
concert
, the noise of gunfire rose in
concert
with orders and warnings yelled, and Jrue watched Alando twisting and collapsing behind panes of shattered glass.

Jrue shouted a warning into the chaos, but it was too late. At least two days late. Perhaps years too late.

Ana pulled on his arm again, and now the resistance in his muscles had disappeared. His desire to see what had transpired was gone. A friend, not a good friend, but a friend and a good man, was gone.

He dropped to the floor and Ana fell on top of him as the echo of gunfire, voices, breaking glass, and cries for help faded, soaked up by the walls that penned them in. Her body was warm on top of him: a shield, a blanket, a shelter, a barrier between the world blasting apart overhead and the fragile image of Alando hanging on to a tiny string of hope.

--

Jrue watched as Alando's body crashed to the ground, again and again, as he once again lay sleepless in his bed. He'd only been awake for four hours since they had made their way out of the shattered shopping center. It didn't look that bad, really, considering what had transpired, and Jrue knew that his own emotions transposed additional layers of carnage over the scene.

The sun had set and Jrue decided to see if he could sleep again. The four hours of sleep with Ana had revived him, but the stress of the events that followed had drained what little reserves of energy the rest had replenished. He'd collapsed into bed upon returning to his apartment, but he simply stared at the ceiling through the darkness, thinking about Alando, and Ana.

He wanted to call her. Half of him wanted to thank her for saving him
—at least temporarily—from his burgeoning madness. That half could feel her warmth between his arms. The other half wanted to curse her for forcing Alando to his death. He had needed help, just as Jrue had, but instead of giving mercy, they had taken life. It might have been standard operating procedure for every other agent in the building, but Ana was a Valkyrie. She was supposed to decide who lived. She was as helpless as he had been. Her inner demons were probably battling it out in her head in the same sort of tug-of-war that wrenched him back and forth between love and hate, lust and anger, relief and mourning, the desire for sleep and the fear of not being able to.

The comm he had dropped next to his bed lit up, casting a pale glow on the ceiling, the white duroplast reflecting the image on the screen like a portal opened on another dimension by some arcane magic
. He could make out Ana's face in the blue-tinged projection and the confusion of conflicting emotions swirled down on him like the funnel cloud of a tornado as he tried to decide if he should answer.

The screen blinked and then shone again, trying to attract his attention, unaware that he had been thinking about what to do for an hour and still did not know.

It pulsed a third time and its insistence made him lean over the side of the bed and pressed his finger to the screen.

"You awake?"

"I am now."

"You were before too. You can't get to sleep again."

Quite presumptuous of her, but also quite true.

"I don't think it's the same thing, though."

Jrue had never been afraid of falling asleep, but his bed lay beneath him like a stone slab in a dark cave and he thought going to sleep might feel like freezing to death.

"I'm coming over."

"You, what? Now?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

The security buzzer inside the front door sounded. She wasn't kidding.

Jrue shoved himself up from the bed and went to the door. He looked at the video panel next the door and there she stood, waving at the cam that provided the feed to the panel. Jrue pressed his hand to the panel and the locks clicked open. Ana pushed the door in and then they stood facing each other.

"How did you get up here?" he asked, meaning how had she gotten in the front door and past the twenty-four-hour security guard.

"You would be surprised what these fingertips can do." Ana held up her hand and waggled her fingers.

At that moment of playful innuendo, Jrue noticed the rest of her. Used to seeing Ana in plain black or stark white, Jrue was surprised to see her in civilian attire. Very revealing civilian attire. The image of her as an ambitious and sexy young businesswoman headed after Alicia Portofil already felt like a distant memory after watching Ana take over the scene in Gallery 37 silhouetted in black military garb. She had turned back into Ana the Agent then, calling shots, pressing for every advantage, not taking 'No' for an answer, and reacting with the reflexes and instincts of someone who was most comfortable when guns were blazing.

She stood in front of him, a tight multicolored shirt stretched across her chest and wrapped around the curve of her waist. Dark jeans painted the skin of her legs, and she had come from her apartment to his in stunning
—and certainly uncomfortable—black high-heeled shoes. It was the only trace of black on her. No, he could see the outline of a black lace bra through the thin—he tried not to look too hard, but yes, very thin—material of her shirt.

"Jrue is wondering if he's going to get laid," she said and he accepted it even though he hadn't quite made it that far in his thought process. "Not so fast, buddy," she continued, "I just brought you a little sleepy time medicine."

She thrust a bag out at him. He took it and peered inside. A small bottle lay inside with a white label stuck to the side. It must have been what the doctor had given him before to knock him out. Was he going to have to down this amalgam of drugs anytime he wanted to sleep, in order to stave off further bouts of hallucination, dysfunction, incapacitation, and borderline madness? And what if it stopped working? Would they have to tailor a new recipe to satisfy his neuroses? And where had Ana gotten this dose?

"Where did you pick this up?"

"Same guy. I told him what you went through with Alando and he agreed that it could trigger another bout of insomnia."

"Did he also say you probably shouldn't rush me into situations like that so soon after what was clearly only a temporary recovery?"

"He did say you should take it easy for a while. He wanted to see you again, though, and thought he could arrange for a paid leave, provided your activity was monitored."

"How about monitoring my sleep, or lack thereof? This doesn't feel like another bout of insomnia. It feels like a chronic disease."

"It's probably just the fallout from your grief for Alando combined with a fear that you won't be able to sleep. You're psyching yourself out."

Jrue could not accept that as the truth even if it made for a perfectly logical argument. He knew the lack of sleep had turned him irritable and made him cranky, though, so he let it go and popped the cap on the small bottle of liquid Ana had brought him.

Noxious fumes leapt from the bottle, assaulting both of their olfactory senses, so Jrue threw the contents to the back of his throat to save them from having to take another breath filled with the pungent odor.

"That smells a lot worse than when he gave it to you downtown," Ana said, her face screwed up in disgust.

Jrue considered trying to hack the stuff up, but he'd swallowed it as fast as he'd tossed it back, and only a full-scale upchuck would bring it back. Instead he sputtered, "Was that the same stuff? I don't remember what it smelled like!"

"I got it straight from the same doc who just treated you. It's got to be the same."

Jrue wanted to press the issue but a sudden drowsiness overtook him and he dropped the idea of arguing for the thought of idyllic sleep. The strange, sweet comfort of sleep.

Jrue fled across his apartment and the Valkyrie followed.

The trip back to his bedroom felt far longer than it had when he had come out to greet Ana. Jrue caught himself on the door frame in a moment of dizziness; the world seemed to disappear around him, leaving him clutching the door while everything else faded. It passed, and he stumbled to his bed and collapsed for the second time since coming home.

As he s
ank into a dark chemical fog, Ana's soft fingers touched the side of his face and her warm body curled around him. He heard her voice, almost in his ear, say, "You won't need the medicine forever. We'll make you right."

Retina scanners made for good security, but no matter how advanced biosecurity technology got, it could not infer intention. Ana keyed in a passcode sequence after glancing briefly into the device that hung outside the elevator disguised as part of the building's sprinkler system.

The elevator knew its destination before the heavy metal doors parted and would only make the journey if the weight sensors came up with a figure that matched the one that
the Airlock had stored when she'd gone into the Valkyrie Project that morning. There was some leeway for meals eaten as well as the minor weight loss that could take place in the bathroom. Ana would not be surprised to come across a table that recorded the volume of those bowel movements in the database that stored the employees' biometric data.

Ms. Callif, you've only eliminated
five hundred milliliters today. Are you sure you are hydrating properly?

The elevator dropped, and Ana's stomach fell with it, into the lower levels of the Agency building. It stopped and
the doors opened on a floor unfamiliar to Ana. She knew the layout of the concise, constrained level though. If the Agency had taught her anything, the lesson was to never enter a mission environment without at least trying to gain some knowledge of the arena.

Ana
's mission to the horseshoe-shaped floor did not exist in any of the systems that the Agency controlled—much as they would have liked to know everything that went on inside her head. Spying on your own organization as Ana was doing tended to be frowned upon and was not something you wanted to keep on book.

Ana
had taken as direct a route as she could in going around the internal security systems to insinuate herself into the electronic access permission records. In order to reach the unfamiliar lower level, she could not just mosey on over to the restricted area, flip through a few menus and select "Government Experiments On Its Own People Database" and figure out if something besides a strong coincidence connected Jrue Gueye and the late Alando Piscina. So she stayed late, when the relative emptiness of the Valkyrie Project headquarters allowed her the time to follow clues and cover her tracks without the worry of someone passing by and looking over her shoulder.

Ana
had done plenty of stalking and data-mining in the service of the Valkyrie Project, the experience making it almost too easy to find the information leading to her ultimate goal. The GEOIOP database did actually exist. Ana found it hiding out on a network with only a single connection to the outside world. The Agency ran many such isolated computing centers, so Ana considered herself lucky that the one she wanted lay several floors directly below her. The window for which she would have to grant herself access was smaller than if she'd had to fly to New York or Boston or Seattle to get on one of the systems there.

Ana
walked out of the elevator with the poise and confidence she assumed anyone else visiting the classified area would have. The stark white hallway was empty, but she kept up the illusion just in case.

A few dark doors marred the clean white straightaway that led to a right
-angle turn into the middle third of the squared-off U shape. Ana passed the other rooms without looking in and followed the turn, spotting the door to the computer lab exactly halfway between the two corners. She quickly entered the code that would only exist for another few minutes into the lock on the door and went in.

As she took a seat
at a terminal angled away from the window set in the door, Ana became acutely aware of her heart pounding in her chest, her blood soaking with adrenaline, and her hands sweating. She took in a deep breath and blew out on her palms. She drew another breath, shaking her hands a bit to loosen them. The she placed them on the panel for the terminal and set them dancing across the interface in search of secrets.

Ana
followed the canary in the coal mine she had uncovered from cross-referencing Jrue's files with Alando's, feeling more like she was following a dove into a house made of candy and gingerbread. As she sifted through the information stored in the lab, she added new bits and pieces to the tables she organized within the database of her mind. She found a project that indicated, though in the cryptic language of coded results, that Jrue and Alando had both undergone mind-altering treatments during their service for the Northern United States military. Aerin had said that the government researched anything related to mind-control abilities, and the project bearing the code name Sleepwalkers clearly substantiated that claim.

Ana
continued to blaze through the electronic ones and zeroes that contorted and assembled themselves into information she did not technically have permission to see. The experiments had been logged in detail but were obfuscated by layers of technical jargon, agents referred to as Subjects Seven, Eight, Nine, etc., and deliberate transformations that cast square pegs into pieces that fit in round holes. Ana was familiar with government research reports though, and put together a decent hypothesis for what had been done to her colleagues. There was even some evidence pointing to insomnia as one of the side effects. The irony of the name of the project and that side effect was not lost on the researchers. Then, in that same list of unintended consequences, something caught Ana's eye and she sucked in a sharp breath.

One of the listed after-effects of the Sleepwalkers treatments had been to make the subjects resistant to the sort of mind
-controlling effects they were supposed to impart.

The report read
: “This could prove useful when dealing with agents of the terrorist organization known as the Continuum, whose agents have displayed the ability to alter the thoughts of those with whom they come in contact.”

Ana checked the date on the report. Three years ago. The existence of the Continuum had been documented
in the report by the Agency three years ago and yet the Valkyrie Project treated it as though it had simply sprung into being like Athena from the head of Zeus.

She tried to follow up on information linked to the Continuum, but the display pulsed red and flashed security warnings, cutting her off
from every path she pursued. Once again, she had achieved her main mission objective, but was left wanting more. At least in this case, she could repeat her incursion efforts and give herself a different set of permissions that would grant her entrance to the hidden world of the Continuum. She would help rid Jrue of his insomnia as well as the resulting inevitable fallout inside his head. Then she would come back and figure out what the Agency already knew about the Continuum, as well as why the information had not been available to Ana and her fellow Valkyries. She and Marisol had walked into a potentially lethal situation lacking information that might have helped them bring in enemy agents as well as one of the Surgeon List targets. Ana was not going to let that happen again.

She logged off
, put the terminal to sleep, and headed out the door of the lab.

Then she heard
voices coming down the hall.

Ana froze. She remembered the door, grabbed it, and eased it shut without alerting the men around the corner
to her presence.

"It would appear
that they found him when he was eleven years old. Trained him from then on."

"At eleven? How did they know?"

"Their technology is years ahead of ours. Been that way for as far back as we can trace their existence."

"But technology to choose their leader fourteen years ahead
of time? What kind of bioscanning or intelligence testing could do that?"

"It's more likely that they had several subjects in mind. I doubt they would have put all their eggs in one basket. They probably constructed an Easter egg hunt, if you'll pardon my butchering of the metaphor, figuring that
one of the eggs would survive to give them what they wanted."

The voices and footsteps grew louder. Ana realized she was going to need somewhere to hide. She'd been so distracted by the conversation that she hadn't even looked around.
She knew the area well, though. Sneaking around the Agency unnoticed required foresight and preparation.

Her best hiding spot would be back inside the lab, unless the two men decided to join her there, in which case she would be trapped. They were coming down the hallway she had used to get there, but she knew that around the corner at the opposite end was an emergency stairwell that would take her back up. She could duck around the corner and hope they went to one of the other rooms in the hall that held the
lab. She would only have to deal with the security door to the stairs if they continued to follow her to the third side of the horseshoe. She moved down the hall at a speed calculated to allow her to remain silent, but also get out of sight before the men rounded the corner. The conversation continued while she did.

"It's easy if you're not a government obligated to make an entire country of eleven-year-olds succeed. Cherry-pick the best candidates and fund their training with probably only a fraction of the proceeds of the weapon sales."

"And whatever else they're selling. You don't get to be that big trading in arms alone."

"You might if you're selling the kind of stuff they produce."

A door swung open and Ana peeked around the corner. The two men were entering the lab. She'd made the right choice, but wanted desperately to hear the rest of what they said. They were talking about the leader of the Continuum, and Ana needed that information.

"We need to figure out how to get to this guy and take the whole thing down, 'cause if it's not just the tech but some sort of mind control, then we're playing a game that we don't even know the rules for."

The door closed and Ana scurried around the corner and peered through from the side of a window that cut through the wood exterior and steel core of the door.

One of the men was at the controls of the terminal, the image
forwarded to the large screen at the front of the room. Ana double-checked that the terminal she had been using showed no signs of intrusion. The input surface pulsed with a soft, sleepy glow, just like the ones on either side.

S
he refocused on the large output up front and the files and images that jumped across it, appearing and disappearing. As the two men delved through security encryption, access points, and different connections, the array of mission logs, briefings, photographs, video clips grew into an ever larger map before Ana's eyes as the man moved his hands across the surface of the terminal. Everything linked together in ways that Ana could not fathom. There was no thread she could see to tie all the disparate information together. She saw pictures of people she recognized: some she had saved, some she had seen in other mission briefings, some she knew were enemies of the state. Titles of missions. Headlines of wire articles. Press conferences. Data piled upon more data, and somehow it all linked to the Continuum. The two men inside had their feet on the loom that would weave the tapestry together, but Ana could not make out the design. It was like five different puzzles mixed up together and she couldn't make any of the pieces fit. Yet Ana took in every bit of information she could, filing things away, linking them to events and records that she was familiar with, trying to construct a map in her own mind that would allow her to see the same thing that her two "colleagues" were able to.

The door lock beeped. The access code
had changed. Any opportunity to get back inside the lab was gone. Ana was an observer only.

She continued to watch
as photos of agents of the Continuum that she had faced in person and seen in other mission briefs started appearing in a row across the top of the screen. At the end of the line, in dramatic fashion, larger than the rest, appeared a picture of a man who was very familiar.

She had never seen him before. She didn't know who he was. Yet she did.

It was her brother.

Ana's breath stuck in her throat.

One of the men composed a memo. The words only appeared on his terminal screen, too small for Ana to make out what it said or who it was addressed to. She needed to get inside. She needed to figure out how she could view the contents of that memo. Her brother was in there. She needed to see. She needed to know.

The man finished
typing and sent the document securely through the single pipe that connected that room to the rest of the floor, and through the single connection from that floor to the outside world. Electrons flowed down hard wires like a river throughout the building. Ana wondered for a moment which section of the Valkyrie Project floor was hot, knowing that the floors alternated on switches, making it more difficult to splice in and capture the bits as they streamed between the offices. It was too late for Ana to do anything like that now anyway. The chance had gone as soon as the memo was sent. She would have to find an artifact of it somewhere if she wanted to see the contents.

The two men stood abruptly and turned toward the door. Ana sprinted back to her corner hiding place. She heard the door open and the two men walk out. Their voices became loud again as they left the sound-proof lab. Ana wanted to rush forward and catch the door before it shut and locked her out, forcing her to retrieve and
input another access code before she could re-enter. She did not look forward to that prospect. But the men took their time and there was no way for her to get to the door without being seen.