The Valkyrie Project (24 page)

"Whoever you are, your con
-woman coolness has gotten you in a bit over your head. We are not one of the rinky-dink private security companies you are used to coming across on your little capers."

Ana let her attention move from the ornate scrollwork of the furniture throughout the room back to the woman in front of her.
Forced to decide between swallowing hard and continuing her sassy charade, it was always easier to fake apathy than pretend to care.

"But you're not above taking money from a single
, lonely Southerner."

"But I am above taking snide remarks from you.
" The Slavic accent in the Raven's voice became more pronounced as it filled with anger. "So do you want to listen to what I have to say, or do you want to try being sarcastic by yourself in a little room with one hundred percent less comfort than this one?" She sped up as she went, the pronunciation of the vowels changing slightly, but her grammar remained flawless as she fired the words like perfectly enunciated little bullets.

"Listen to you or be free of your screeching arrogant condescension?
Well, I wouldn't want my wit to wither. I'll weather your words."

"
I appreciate your clever consonance, so I'll try to speak in a vernacular you can understand. By that, I mean money and punishment. We are willing to give you the first and if you do what we want, you won't have to worry about the second."

"My vernacular probably would have used former and latter instead of first and second, but you said something about giving me money, so I will let it go."

Ana watched the anger fighting for release just beneath the woman's calm exterior. She blinked hard a few times, clenched her firsts, took a deep breath, and relaxed her hands again.

"Yes, well, that small grammatical contention aside, I'm sure my point was made,"

"I'm not trying to say I'm looking for a new job, but, I mean, sure, I could use the money."

"Listen
. I know you're not stupid. I am also not stupid and I know that no threat of mine will make you drop the misanthropic misfit routine. But when I say that we can expose you on every subsequent attempt to get more money, I know that you'll hear me. Even when playing the game is more of a prize for you than the money, we will ruin that for you too."

Ana swallowed hard, knowing that
, as Julia, the game she was supposed to be playing meant more to her than the money she might have gained from Heston.

"Well, I'm not sure why such a high
-quality organization as yours would want to employ someone captured so easily, but it would seem that I owe you one."

--

Ana and her new "partner" Etienne—a young lady several generations removed from her French ancestry—left their New York City hotel in outfits Ana presumed the Continuum thought said "belle of the ball" but which Ana equated more to "high-class prostitute." Or maybe the Continuum wardrobe staff knew and just didn't care.

The
ir two pairs of towering heels clacked down the sidewalk, barely audible over the noise of the busy city. The trip to their destination spanned all of a block but in that time they managed to catch the attention of two groups of young men, still decked in conservative suits and ties from work, and had to fend off persistent requests to join them at one local bar or another, or another, whatever would please them. Guppies compared to the sharks in the tank into which the two women were about to swim. Upstream past the rocky gray shorelines of massive buildings smashed in so close that one might have grown from its neighbor like a benign architectural tumor.

In the middle of the jutting dingy masses, Ana spotted the gleaming curved glass of the shark tank, known to
the world as Triton Laboratories. Part of Ana hoped it was a front for a Continuum training ground, merely a test for her meticulously crafted con artist persona, Julie Anderson. Most of her, though, wanted it to be real, to expose a piece of the Continuum agenda. Even if it gave her only a bullet point on a memo, any step forward brought the Agency a step closer to bringing down a threat, and Ana a step closer to finding out why her brother showed up in the Agency's Continuum files. If the Agency wanted to send her to find answers for it while keeping the answers it already had a secret, then she would just have to find out what they knew in the process of finding out what they didn't.

The political games always came across as far too 'meta' which led An
a to avoid them where possible. But the Agency forced her to forget about possible when they concealed information about her enemies and her brother.

The thoughts about Memo and mind games distracted Ana enough that she almost walked right by the fanciful facade that served as the entrance to
Triton. The faint tinkling of cocktail music through the thick panes found its way to an appropriate synapse in her brain just in time for her to make a smooth turn and follow Etienne's protruding posterior into the lavish launch party.

Inside the foyer somewhere, among the throngs of scientists who weren't used to drinking any more than they already had, lurked not just the exponentially increasing possibility of hormone
-driven responses, but a man who would give the Continuum details about Androkal. The word stood out from the briefing document because Ana hadn't ever seen it written out before. She masked her confusion as that of Julie having never seen a real brief before. Now she knew how to spell it, but it still gave her no clue as to what it really did, and the briefing doc provided no further context. Ana remembered Allen Poole's random blubbering at the hands of the Valkyries and the word stuck out like a bayonet from the end of a gun, pointed recklessly at something or other, threatening based solely on its appearance, regardless of who wielded it.

They scanned the crowd with what Ana realized probably looked a
search for the highest net worth and easiest prey. Of course, they were playing the sex card and would continue throwing it out there until it stopped working. If that ever happened, though, it would mean the male half of the human race had ceased to exist. And even then, there were circumstances in which it would still work.

Etienne nudged
Ana to the side and they began to work their way through the crowded room of revelers.

Ana's
new
handlers hadn't told her much about her colleague. Her pale skin and combination of middle Euro and north African features narrowed down her ancestry, but the name tipped her hand. A couple of generations of American living had worn away any trace of an accent, and Etienne spoke in a clear, bright voice, natural and unrehearsed.

Neither Ana nor her new friend knew anyone
at the party, but their cover as the wives of a couple of investors gave them a spot on the guest list—if anyone bothered to ask—and a little leeway to look around, ostensibly in search of their much older, already heavily intoxicated husbands. Would anyone really consider tossing two women in dresses that fit like plastic wrap and covered barely more than a towel would? Only the wives on the arms of the men ogling them.

Ana hoped there wouldn't be any fighting in the jealousy-inducing garment, but she'd done it before, and in one made of a material
even less structured for combat.

The instructions were to meet the target at the makeshift bar set back at the opposite end of the foyer from the entrance. The elevators were conveniently located in a hall just off to the left. Ana panned the length of the bar as the duo worked their way through the crowd,
bounced and buffeted on waves of liquor. She doubted they would spot him before he saw them, but her hope for something close to simultaneous discovery was dashed on the rocks that lined the bottoms of the glasses in the many hands of the guests, none of which were attached to the target.

They approached the bar, Ana hoping they wouldn't be left waiting long. She wanted to be noticeable, but not noticed. The former would provide access, the latter would alert security.

Ana and Etienne waited, taking judicious sips from glasses of champagne obtained from the bar. Ana continued to worry, knowing that the longer they stood there, the further they went along the spectrum from noticeable to noticed. She hoped she looked as posh and unruffled as her running mate. She also considered finishing off the champagne to calm her increasingly restless nerves. It wouldn't be the most unprofessional thing she could do, and she was playing the part of a con woman and not an experienced field agent. But after thinking about it, what she really wanted was to figure out why she, as the experienced field agent, could not relax the muscles that clenched in her stomach or the ones that pulled her shoulders toward her neck as though attached to puppet strings. Ana expected to be nervous: years of experience, yet no work as a true double agent. Usually when she donned an artificial persona, there was a predefined time when the mask would come off. Working for the Continuum required a much longer-term view. She would not just reveal herself when this mission ended. She probably would not even get to go home.

A small movement from the hallway leading to the elevators caught Ana's eye. Etienne had turned away to talk to one of the many gentlem
en in suits. Ana hadn't noticed, but knew she could not afford to lose herself in thought like that again. She tapped Etienne on the shoulder.

"That champagne just ran right through me! I am going to see if there is a ladies' room down that hallway."

She turned before the man could point out the large sign indicating the direction of the women's facilities back by the entrance.

"Hold on, I'll go with you," Etienne said before Ana had even taken a step. "Excuse me, William. Good to meet you. I'm sure I'll see you around."

Ana couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for poor William. He had to recognize the reality of the situation. She did let a momentary thought circle the back of her mind, appreciating the irony that while Etienne's artificial pretense covered a deeper level of false identity like some sort of meta lie, the structure behind Ana's façade reached a level deeper than that: a lie within a lie within a lie. If she wasn't careful she might forget who she even was and end up in some sort of split-personality limbo.

The pair turned the corner and almost ran straight into their target
. The round red birthmark just ahead of his retreating hairline served as the bulls-eye. Ana and Etienne aimed crosshairs at it from up on their high-heeled perches. They would have been taller than the man in front of them even without the extra height, but it just made them seem more powerful from his point of view. And it made the costume more believable, not to mention fun to wear. Until Justin had come to the Valkyrie Project, fighting in heels had been a standard part of the training. They joked that he should have had to go through it just as the Valkyries before him. Sexist? Sure, but also necessary. The blisters had burned and stung for days, and the rolled ankles had lingered longer, but youth had quickly rescued Ana and returned her to top form. She wasn't sure how well she'd hold up to that these days. Hopefully she wouldn't have to find out.

The harried man appeared to be unaware of the attention he'd called to himself, clearly underestimating the observation skills possessed by the two women. He was the
one who'd arranged the meeting, so Ana blamed nerves for his lack of attention. He barely noticed them even as he stopped short to avoid running straight into them.

"Hey!" Etienne said. "We've been looking all over for you!"

That lifted his eyes from the floor and they boggled trying to take in the two Amazons who stood before him. Clearly he'd expected something—someone—else.

"Do I know you?"

"I'm sorry." Ana held out her hand. "Julia Anderson. This is my friend Renee Cooper."

It took the stunned little man a few seconds to parse the sentence and make the
associations between the names she'd given and the ones given to him by the Continuum, stashed away in memory banks operating at sub-optimal speed due to his heightened state of inattention.

The person who
set up the mission had let Ana keep her fake real name, since, as her raven-haired interrogator had pointed out, it probably wasn't her real name anyway. The alternate name for Etienne kept her in line with the unacknowledged French heritage. To the short, balding man, they were just code names to indicate that the right people had found him.

He finally took Ana's hand, giving it a
decent shake for someone trying not to make too much contact because they knew their palms were sweaty.

"Oh, yes," he stammered
. "Nice to meet you."

Ana was always amazed how little it took to send men into a state of mental disarray, but she tried to give this particular man a bit more credit since he was faced with not one but two women and clearly inexperienced in the sort of trade secret espionage in which they were engaged.

Even granted that extra leeway, Ana helped the man along, prompting, "Is there somewhere more private where we can get to know each other better?"

To anyone else it sounded like a proposition
: two statuesque women for this shy, awkward, fumbling man. Not so young as to be inexperienced, old enough to know his particular proclivities, and soft around every edge that could be rounded off with laziness and carelessness. The observers' minds would boggle as they imagined the amount of cash flying from his bank account.