Wired (21 page)

Oh
. I blinked rapidly in a futile attempt to process. My nerve wasn't improved when he added, “And where you're taking it isn't exactly easily accessed.”

I stared at him. “I don't understand. If I'm not the guy in the van . . .”

Blink. Blink. Blink
. I suddenly had flashes: mental pictures of other offices in this building, offices where he might send me. “No way. Uh-uh. I'm not breaking and entering anywhere, and setting myself up to be lasered or arrested or pulverized or whatever the hell happens when you go into places and spaces owned by powerful people with ties to the government for whom security is paramount.”

Leo leaned over and caressed my cheek. “Roxanne,
you do have such an imagination. You will not be pulverized.”

That left breaking, entering, lasered and/or arrested, and all things included under the abbreviation
etc
.

“I'll mess it up. I'm not graceful. I have a natural way of looking suspicious. I always get picked for bag searches. The dogs always spend extra time sniffing the backs of my knees, and agricultural agents never believe there are no oranges in my trunk.”

He raised an eyebrow.

I don't know how I knew what I'd just said to be true, but I had a vague sense that on some wire or another, it was. “
When
I go out,” I said through gritted teeth. “In the versions of reality when I go out. Okay, this isn't the point. The point is that
technology
is what I do. It would be ludicrous to put you on the tech end and have me pretending to be some kind of spy.”

“Yes, well, it's not ideal,” he agreed.

“But?”

“But you're smaller.”

That was it? I was going to risk getting arrested, maimed or terminated because I was smaller? Maybe if I lopped off a couple of his limbs, he'd be small enough.

“That and, as we've already determined, you have the security clearance I don't have. If I went, I'd be thwarted by security before I ever made it anywhere. That is simply not going to work.” Leonardo consulted his notepad again. “Now. Please let me know if I lose you somewhere,” he said, obviously not clueing in to the fact that he'd already lost me somewhere
back around “pulverization.” I peered down at his carefully penned illustrations, obviously diagrammed to scale, with attractive flourishes around the F's and the P's of the labels.

He removed a pen from inside his same pocket. I meant to ask him if he had condoms, a fishing hook, and some dry soup mix in there as well, but I got distracted by the gold nib of his fountain pen as it scratched a satiny black X between two lines on his map.

“Do you see this piping?” Leonardo asked. “It runs from beneath the basement, all the way up the building. Next to the piping is the air conditioning system—a tangle of air ducts, really. The best access is on the thirtieth floor, so you must take the regular or service elevators up and only then move into the walls. With your clearance, you can use the regular elevators, of course.”

I gulped and tried to focus on the route his index finger was taking toward the X.

“The air duct I marked, like so, follows
this
route, to
this
particular room. Our destination.”

The air duct?
I was still reeling.

“It's rather narrow, as you can see from my illustration, and it will be a rather tight fit.”

A tight fit
.

“I suspect it will also be rather difficult to turn around in the confines of the space, so a quick exit might be tricky, and . . .”

A quick exit might be tricky?

“. . . ahead of any explosives or the like.”

Explosives?!

I burst out laughing. It was a high-pitched whinnying sound. Awful, really. Not the kind of sound I normally make. It totally revealed my fear.

Leonardo took my hand in his. I pulled it away.

“Roxanne,” he purred.

“I'm immune, Leo.” I put my hands on my hips and did my best to look all business. “I just hope I'm also indestructible.”

When I'd said it seemed too simple, I was right. I passed through security only to be confronted with more security. Getting the flash drive Leo wanted was like going to get something from a safety deposit box, except there were a lot more cameras and security guards lurking everywhere. They asked me where I planned to work on my project, and told me I only had two hours before I'd have to bring it back and check it out again. This was obviously some serious technology I was dealing with, and it occurred to me that as far as its likely purpose, it was either going to make someone a lot of money in the future, kill a lot of people or cure the common cold.

I knew I was supposed to get right to part two of Leo's plan, but I ran to the nearest computer I could find and plugged in the drive just to have a peek. There was nothing on there. I couldn't believe it. I simply couldn't understand. But as I'd been feeling odd heat waves as I moved, I wouldn't have been surprised if by the time I got to Leo's
X
there
was
something on it.

I'd been heading toward X for about two minutes when I realized that being an operative wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I was on my hands and knees in an air duct with my dress hiked up around my waist, a headset he'd given me crackling with painfully loud static in my ear, and the flash drive in my bra poking into my left boob. I was wondering when I was going to wake up from this surreal dream when Leonardo swore. It scared the piss out of me, because it was the third time, now, in as many minutes, and each time I'd heard a twinge of something I hadn't ever detected in his voice before. It was the sound of insecurity. The sound of fear. It was not a sound I wanted to hear while jammed inside an air duct and wearing a high-tech earpiece, an evening dress with fuck-me pumps, and with an illicit flash drive in my possession and stuck in my bra.

“Mason's using a lot of wire on this,” he said.

Static overtook our connection. “. . . major splice, bigger than he's ever done. Listen to me, Roxanne. It is critical that you finish this operation. Everything we said goes out the—”

Static.

I started freaking out. The air duct was trembling now, and the metal above me must have split because tiny grains of something were pelting down on me.

“Leo? I'm going to get the hell out of here. Leo?”

Just static.

A loud whistling sound filled the duct, the sound of my own panicked breathing. So much for abject silence. A large clump of something struck me on the head and bounced off, clattering away in front of me.
Fuck silence
. I kicked off my pumps and started
turning my body around in the duct—not easy, since the thing was shaking and the falling dust was making it hard to see. I got one leg pointed up and was trying to get it over my head to turn myself around, but my neck was twisting in a really bad way.

The static cleared for a second. “Roxanne! Roxanne! Can you hear me?”

“I'm here! Make that, I'm getting the hell out of here.”

“No! It doesn't have to be real if you keep going. You must proceed!”

I must proceed? I must
proceed?

“Remember why you did this in the first place. You can be the person you want to be.”

Could he read my mind? What exactly did he know? “It's called a fantasy for a reason! I
did
this because I was confused. Because my life is going crazy and I confused wanting to have control and be a Bond girl with the fact that Bond girls don't exist—and if one does, she probably has a shorter life span than a fruit fly.”

The air duct was shaking; I was wedged with my legs over my head, dust blanketing my face and in my nose. A pastiness covered my tongue. The gig had been to silently approach a contained area without triggering security due to temperature, sound or the presence of suspicious substances. Hopefully,
substances
didn't include something like me.

“Kaysar, I'm in trouble here. I've got to go back.”

“You listen to me, Roxanne. Mason has managed a critical shift in fate. I don't know what he did, but you must—I repeat,
must
—proceed with the plan and deliver that code before the chain of events he set
off reaches completion and you are buried in what is essentially an archeological layer of reality.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shouted, though I grasped that, at best,
an archeological layer of reality
wasn't a good place to be buried.

“It means you'll probably die in this version of reality if you do not pick yourself up and move on. You. Must. Proceed!”

Even if I could've seen more than a foot past my hand, I would have been blinded by anger. There Leo was, sitting in his nice limousine. A limousine with wheels and a motor and the potential to get him the hell out of Dodge. I, on the other hand, was stuck—make that wedged—in Dodge. I had to believe that if I was caught this was clearly a criminal breach of security. At best.

“I'm in trouble, asshole! I'm going back!”

“The only way out is forward, Roxanne!”

Behind me, the air duct was crushing downward and the only untorn metal I could see was some sort of drainage pipe that wasn't there before. I felt a sudden chill.
What if what Leo said about archaeological layers of reality—whatever they are—is true? What if the only way out is forward?

I had to hope to God it was true, because there was no more tunnel behind me. I heard an odd roar of twisting metal, and the sides of the duct vanished before my eyes.

I flipped my legs back to the way they had been in the first place and started hauling ass forward, down the narrow passage that was supposed to be a simple air duct and was now just some kind of nightmare. “Leo? Are you still there?” On my hands and knees I
scrambled as fast as I could, desperately grabbing at the slippery metal under me, trying to gain traction.

“I'm not leaving you. I'll never leave you. Stay ahead of it. Run as fast as you can. Forget about the alarms. Forget about security. Focus on one thing. No matter who or what tries to stop you, no matter how scared you become, put the code back, Roxanne. Otherwise Mason will kill you, whether he means to or not.”

He didn't have to convince me anymore; I was pretty sure that the only thing behind me was the potential to be buried alive. Scrambling, clawing, lunging, I finally saw the light at the end of the literal tunnel. Just where Leo had said it would be. The opening where I was supposed to lower myself down.

Being able to see my goal spurred me on, but it was getting harder and harder to move. It seemed like my legs were being buried, crumpled in metal that would crush me forever. There was no time for finesse, silence, grace, security, carefulness, nothing. The metal was compacting around my body and I could hardly move. I couldn't even hear Leo in my earpiece anymore.

I am alone. Regardless of what he said, I'm alone
.

Sheer terror propelled me toward the light. There was so little room to wriggle that I knew in a few more seconds I'd be toast.

I reached the vent, punched it with my hand, grabbed the edges of the opening, and pulled my body out with all of my might, throwing all of myself through. I plunged down into a secret, secure, hermetically sealed, pristinely clean, pure white room where I was supposed to be completely silent and
never so much as break a sweat. The grille was still rattling on its side on the hard floor when I followed it, smacking spread-eagle and face down. The alarms had started going off while I was still in the air.

“Leo?”

But my headset had fallen off and I was on my own. A video played on the wall, the recorded voice warning me that I was going to the equivalent of hell and back for breaking and entering, something about a minimum sentence of thirty-five years in prison, to cease and desist, to put my hands up and step to the wall, the whole nine yards.

I raised my arm and tried to think about what Leo had said to me, that if I just kept going I could outrun the outcome before it got to the end of the line. I couldn't pretend to understand.

Nonetheless, I had to act. I turned from the wall, put my hands back down, and pulled the tiny flash drive out of my bra. I scanned the labels lining the rows and rows of slots until I found the one matching the alpha-numeric Leo had made me memorize. The door flew open behind me. I looked over my shoulder; a uniformed security team was closing in on me, and it was all so strange because the walls of the high-tech, very pristine, high-security, don't-sweat room looked like a bomb had gone off, and the sparkling white floor I'd been standing on was nothing more than dirt.

The security guards shouted at me, still a ways distant. They pointed guns at me, and all I could do was think:
Outrun fate. That's what it's going to take
. My hand shook so badly that I could hardly hold the flash drive straight. I ducked down, punched the
in/out button, and a drawer slid out with a little slot for the disk. I plugged the drive in, and even though I pushed the button again right away, it seemed so damn slow.

So slow that the armed guards had time to come up and grab me by the back of my dress and throw me to the ground, to twist my arm behind my back, to shove a boot down on my spine and get a handcuff around one of my wrists.

All I could think about was thirty-five years minimum in prison unless I managed to plead insanity based on the fact that I believed I was operating with the best of intentions for the good of a reality that hadn't happened yet, and that I apologized for any inconvenience but that a guy from the future had told me . . .

You're going down, Roxanne. You're going down
.

The floor slipped out from under me and the guards went flying, and suddenly it was like freaking
Alice in Wonderland
and I
was
going down, with metal and pipes and dirt all around. The craziest part was that Leo caught me in his arms at the bottom of the rabbit hole.