Hidden Steel Read online

  He moved closer, putting a foot on the first step. Brave of him. “I don’t think I get it.”

  It had been a gut reaction, and she had to think it through. “What if it just sets me off? Totally messes with my head? I can’t afford that right now. I’ve got to be able to think through what’s happening. Make good choices.”

  And yeah, he totally got that. How could he not, with his throat still reddened and his voice still hoarse from the last time something just set her off? “Maybe later,” he agreed.

  Except—

  “No,” she said, surprising herself—surprising him. “If I know who I am … if I remember … maybe we can find Naia. Warn her. Save her.” It was worth the chance. It had to be worth the chance.

  He watched her, giving her the opportunity to change her mind. No doubt he was thinking of those moments in the stairwell, the moments in the gym. When she had lost herself. Completely and totally lost herself. But she waited, and he finally said, “Pleased to meet you, Anna Hutchinson.”

  Anna Hutchinson.

  Nothing.

  Disappointment gripped her, bitter and twisting in her stomach. Nothing. Her name was Anna Hutchinson, and it meant no more than Jane A. Dreidler. No more than Mickey Finn. “Anna …” she repeated out loud, and let it fade away, offering him a helpless, frustrated expression.

  “Give it time,” he said gently. “Don’t think too hard about it. And maybe now that we have a name, we can hunt down your address.”

  Right. As easy as that. She didn’t think so. Nothing about this had been easy. She shook her head, both acquiescence and doubt. Dammit. Nothing. She was Anna, and it meant nothing.

  He moved ahead for her, pulling her out of that particular emotional black hole. “You learn anything?”

  She pulled the note from her lap. Such feminine, precise handwriting … such a concise plea. Need help. How long had this been sitting in the dead drop? She held it out to him. “I don’t know. It might be too late already.”

  He took it, running his thumb over those words and then shaking his head. She could see it on his face …the what the hell have I gotten into of it all was finally hitting.

  Hard to believe it had taken this long.

  He said, “Got a plan?”

  She gave him the same wary look he’d given her a moment ago. “Maybe.” And as he made a face in acknowledgment of that faint cleverness, she said, “This place is my plan. I just scouted out the third floor. It’s unused, mostly. And it’s got everything I need, right down to a working bathroom.” A disgusting bathroom, but a working one. “It’s got two potential exits, plenty of room to plunk down a camp mattress, good solid moorings near the fourth floor exit for ropes—”

  “Ropes?” he said, startled.

  “Exit number one. Rappel right out of trouble.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right. Of course. What was I thinking?”

  She decided against mentioning that exit number two was an old elevator shaft in one of the towers, and that the elevator seemed to be stuck between the first and second floors.

  She cleared her throat. “What I want,” she said. “What I hope—is that Naia will come back here to check on the dead drop. If she hasn’t given up yet. Right now … this is my only connection to her. I’d like the chance to do a little more Internet surfing … maybe early evening, after this place closes. Could find some clues there. But I’ll plan to stay here. I needed a place to hide out, anyway. I have to get some gear, though.”

  “We can use my credit card for that,” he offered.

  “We? This is where the whole we thing ends. You need to—”

  “Hide out.” He gave her a pointed look. “I’m sure there’s room.”

  “It’s not safe,” she blurted, and instantly regretted it. What guy—what self-defense instructor—was going to walk away from a challenge like that? “Look—whatever my world is about, I don’t think I want it rubbing off on you. And I sure as hell don’t need the distraction—”

  He perked up at that one, damn him. “I’m a distraction?”

  Cranky, she said, “Don’t let it go to your head.” And then she rubbed the heel of her hand across her eyes, huffing out a breath of weary frustration. “I don’t think I can deal with it if you get hurt, okay? And you’ve already been hurt, from the last time I tried to leave you out of it and you didn’t cooperate.”

  “I can be like that,” he admitted. “Just ask the kids.”

  She wasn’t getting through to him.

  She wasn’t getting through to him at all.

  Where he found the strength to keep on hoping—after all he’d seen of her, after she’d gone after him in this very stairwell, lost in the throes of what had been—she couldn’t imagine. And she didn’t know how to fight it. “I just mean … look, I don’t know when it will happen again. When something will trigger me.” She looked at him, grabbing his gaze with enough intensity so his eyes widened slightly. “I don’t get any warning. I don’t have a safety. I could go off on you whenever.”

  He raised his brows, leaning against the stairwell in a way that pretty much blocked this particular exit—filling it, somehow, even though she wouldn’t have said he had the size to do it. “Then I better be around to pick up the pieces, don’t you think?”

  She leaped to her feet, quite suddenly, towering over him. He didn’t flinch—she was completely under control if you didn’t count that fraying temper—and he didn’t let go of her gaze. She was the one who had made that particular connection, and now she was caught in it.

  Caught in his decision, too. Sure, she could evade him. She could evade him any time she wanted to. But that wouldn’t keep him from coming after her, and who knows how long it would take him to stumble into the line of fire.

  So she did the only thing she could do. She stamped her foot and she said, “Dammit!”

  And Steve just grinned.

  * * * * *

  “Check this one out,” Mickey said, leaning away from the computer monitor so Steve—who sat at the computer beside hers—could see. The Internet café bustled around them, full of tourists and foreign exchange students. A handful of languages pattered against Mickey’s ears … she wasn’t sure if she should be surprised that she understood most of them. Japanese, Spanish, Farsi, French … Steve seemed oblivious, though it was obvious enough to Mickey that he spoke Greek. His own speech had just the slightest of blurring around some of the consonants, and she suspected he’d learned Greek before English.

  Together they could—

  She blinked, shook her head in the most infinitesimal way, and refocused on the monitor. Steve had already absorbed the gist of the editorial she’d shown him, one from the San Francisco paper. Irhaddan Leadership Confused From Within. The body of the piece offered all sorts of implications that President Mejjati had recently lost consistency—that he needed to be replaced. His most staunch supporter was a man named Mounir Farooqi.

  “Mounir Farooqi,” Mickey mused out loud.

  “You know him?” Steve gave her a sharp look.

  “Just another one of those brain tickles.” Disgruntled, she gave up when another moment of thinking resulted in no astonishing revelations. “It’s probably important … but we’ll just have to keep it in mind.”

  “Okay, then check out this site.” He tipped the monitor in her direction. “This is the Stanford student paper. Got some editorial types discussing privileged foreign students, making the point that they don’t add anything to the student body experience if they go reclusive—and what’s the point of schooling in a foreign country if you don’t experience the country?”

  “But Naia wasn’t like that,” she objected, then hesitated, thinking about that—about why she’d said it. Because it’s true, that’s why. She had to trust her reactions—otherwise she’d paralyze herself into inaction.

  “I’m thinking something changed,” Steve said … one of those trying-to-break-it-gently voices. “The article mentions bodyguards.”


  “Good,” Mickey said. “If she’s taken steps to protect herself—”

  “Unless they aren’t bodyguards,” Steve pointed out. “Because wouldn’t that just make it clear she thinks she should be a target? Wouldn’t you have taught her better than that?”

  She could only hope.

  “Watchdogs,” she groaned. “What’s the date on that thing?”

  “It’s today’s.” Steve ran his thumb around the rim of the foam cup that had held his long-gone specialty coffee. “It references a ‘certain lecture hall’ from yesterday.”

  A whoosh of relief ran all the breath out of Mickey’s lungs. “She’s okay, then. At least within the past couple of days …”

  “And we know someone we can ask about her. He knows her lecture hall, at least—I bet he knows the class. It could be a connection point.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “You’re awfully good at this. Should I be worried that you’re a plant?”

  He laughed, short and humorless. “Let’s just say I have a lot of experience in tracking down Zander. Not at the end—he was fairly predictable by then. But when it had just started. When we still had—”

  “Hope,” she finished for him softly.

  He highlighted the editor’s name and hit the CONTROL-C hotkey combo with more force than Mickey suspected he’d meant to. “I can email the person who wrote this,” he said. “I’ve got a throw-away account as a spam trap.”

  Mickey nodded. “Do it,” she said. “And then let’s go shopping. How much cash do you have?”

  That stopped him short. “You think they’re tracing my credit card?”

  “By now?” She shrugged. “They might be. I’d rather not take the chance. We can get what we can for the night … and then later I’ll go harvesting.” At his skeptical look, she gave him a beatific smile. “I’ve still got the tank top with the holes,” she said. “And maybe I’ll sing for them.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 15

  He’d thought, for that one moment, that he was dead. He’d felt the prick of that blade against his skin. He might have been stronger than Mickey, he might be the one who knew who he was and who he’d been …

  But she’d been quicker.

  And dammit, she’d been more skilled.

  Amazing, how quickly she’d come back to herself after that. Turned back into the Mickey he knew … what little he knew of her.

  That’s plenty. He knew of her grit, of her refusal to bow down to odds so overwhelming that some deity, somewhere, was having a god-sized laugh at it all. He knew she didn’t give herself enough credit for who she was—everything he’d seen about her spoke of her compassion and loyalty, but all she saw was her ability to hurt, her willingness to be mixed up in the spy games that had brought them to this place.

  Then again, she had a point there.

  And then there was this. Sitting on his motorcycle, ready to be the getaway vehicle if needed. He didn’t even have his bow; his role would be to scoot them out of there and nothing more.

  Mickey sat pillion behind him, separating her latest take into cop drop and assimilate piles.

  He twisted to look at her in the late evening darkness. “This doesn’t bother you?” For this, at least, was something he didn’t quite understand.

  She didn’t pretend not to understand. “The original victims are getting more back than they would if I weren’t doing it.”

  “Unless you interrupted the mugging as it was going down. Stopped it.”

  She stopped her sorting, and stowed the grocery bag for the cop drop. And she sighed. It was a sad sound, but he couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the situation or his words. “Let’s pretend I try. What do you suppose would happen?”

  “Mugger loses out,” Steve said promptly, but suddenly he wasn’t sure he liked where this was going.

  “I’ll give you that one,” she agreed, scratching an itch beneath the shirt on her head. “‘Trembling in fear, mugger thinks of Tank Top Woman’s fast-growing rep and runs away.’ But it’s not the only scenario.”

  “Scenario,” he repeated, and wondered if that was her background coming through or just one of those words any average Tank Top Woman would use.

  “Then there’s the mugger who, rightly deducing that Tank Top Woman isn’t going to do anything worse than ping the hell out of him, takes out his righteous anger on the muggee, shooting him or her dead.”

  Steve made a grmphing noise.

  “Or the muggee, who, sensing help is at hand, tries to play the hero and bang—”

  “Okay, okay.” Steve held up his hands in surrender. “So I guess the real question is why these guys are still dinging this neighborhood.”

  “Two nights ago, I was only an aberration. Tonight might make them think … but I doubt I’ll be back after this.” She considered her words a moment, and then straightened in a cheerful way that alerted him. “Not unless I’m in the mood.”

  He growled. “Now you’re just tweaking me.”

  She patted his shoulder, flipping open his backpack so she could drop her gleanings inside. “Maybe,” she said airily, and dismounted the bike to regard him with head tipped. “Maybe mostly.”

  He growled again and she laughed lightly, fading into the darkness and off to patrol the streets. She headed off toward a small patch of bars that were just beginning to disgorge their ripe-for-trouble customers. Steve shook his head in the darkness, amazed at her knack of finding the right situations, of spotting the right potential victims. Whatever she truly did in her real life as Anna Hutchinson, he bet she was good at it.

  He prepared for another long wait. Tonight they’d return to the Pottery Warehouse … tomorrow morning, they’d do more shopping—they hadn’t been able to afford her rappelling gear, for starters—and he’d check his email. And then … he wasn’t sure. They couldn’t wait in the warehouse for Naia forever, and their records had proved bemusingly elusive. Mickey had muttered something about breaking back into the CapAd.Com building, hoping to shake loose the surveillance again—if it still existed. Or hoping to find more memories.

  She wouldn’t sit around hoping for something to fall in her lap, that much Steve knew for sure. That much, he’d already seen.

  Something popped in the distance. Again. And twice more, in quick succession. Steve stopped breathing—listening. Might not have anything to do with her.

  Except as far as he could see, action followed Mickey like a faithful dog. Of course it has something to do with her! The only question was whether he waited here or went to check on her—and after a few moments of infuriating indecision, he realized that if he needed to go to her, it was already too late.

  He’d wait.

  It would kill him, but he’d wait. He’d stay where she knew to find him. He fidgeted, went for the ignition key, and let his hand drop away.

  And then he heard the footsteps. Fleet, light … on the run.

  He started the bike and pulled out into the open before he even saw her—and when he saw her, he also saw the others. Not close, but coming. Half a dozen of them—heads bobbing, arms pumping, gun metal glinting briefly in the streetlights.

  “Go!” she gasped, still fifty yards away, ripping the tank top off her head and glancing back on the run. “Go, go!”

  She couldn’t mean it.

  Except she’d said it.

  He got it, a sudden light-bulb of understanding—she wanted him already rolling. He eased off the clutch and put the Suzuki in motion, pushing off with first one foot, then the other—and then she was there, flinging herself onto the back of the bike, wrapping her arms around him and ducking her head against the backpack he wore. He didn’t need encouragement—he gunned the engine hard, slipping the back tire a little in spite of the rolling start.

  Something popped behind them—a closer, louder pop than before. “Shit!” he muttered, ducking in spite of the fact that it would have been too late anyway. Mickey ducked right down with him, and they rode low and fast, squeal
ing through streets as one creature—man, woman, and bike.

  Within a few blocks they straightened, but Mickey didn’t release her tight hold on him.

  Damned if he didn’t like it that way.

  * * * * *

  They’d been waiting for her. Or if not waiting, ready. And in the middle of his little slingshot-inspired mugger dance, her latest target had managed to hit an instant-dial on his cell phone and yelp a few words into it.

  By the time back-up arrived, Mickey had his recent take and was on the run, but …

  It had been a close thing.

  “You are a crazy woman,” Steve had said, and he’d said it as though even he wasn’t quite sure how he meant it. Then when they’d reached the co-op and he’d discovered she’d thought ahead, jimmying the rarely used outside door to the stairwell so it wouldn’t lock and they could easily gain after-hours access, it seemed like a weird last straw. “I can’t believe,” he’d said, “that this is the way you live your life.”

  “I don’t think it is,” she’d said, her voice rather small.

  Though she thought it was probably how she lived her life when things went wrong.

  Never like this.

  Surely not.

  Even though she seemed perfectly prepared to deal with it.

  And now she lay on a surprisingly comfortable camp mattress in a huge, dusty space, and every time she closed her eyes she saw nothing but the old man’s face as he was being mugged, and thought about how she could have stopped him from facing such cruelty, stopped him from facing mortality that was clearly all too close already.

  Steve wasn’t far away but he wasn’t close, either. He’d reached his limit; he needed space. He needed to recharge.

  She could understand that. She was exhausted herself, and wanted nothing more than a deep, long sleep. It was just …

  Every time she closed her damned eyes, she saw that old man’s face.

  “Hey,” said Steve, so softly she barely heard it. “You okay?”

  She hadn’t even known he was awake. And she almost said sure, but it was far too blithe a response to someone who had earned every bit of her respect. “What makes you ask?”