Hidden Steel Read online

  He bet she went to a lot of parties.

  The discovery left only the question of who she worked for—truly worked for. And it didn’t really matter which combination of letters she reported to—CIA, NSA, NCIS, FBI, or even Homeland Security—it only mattered that they originated in the U.S. That she wasn’t somehow cultivating Naia to influence Irhaddan against the States.

  In which case, the men who had killed Anthony and shot up the gym might well be the good guys.

  “Screw that,” he said out loud, garnering a glance from the neighboring table. He offered a sheepish shrug in response and checked his email one last time. Nothing—again—from the editor he’d written the day before.

  So in spite of what he’d learned, he hadn’t advanced their plan. Mickey’s identity didn’t matter so much as her memory, and she’d already told him she didn’t want to force anything—didn’t want to distract herself from the matter at hand. At some point they could use the contact info on the website to track down her office, but she didn’t consider it a priority. And his research into Irhaddan had netted nothing but speculation.

  That, he could tell her. She had an uncanny knack for following her leftover instincts to a decision …she might well have an opinion on his speculating.

  And now? He had his own life to see to. The gym to check on. His people to worry about. And no one better to give him answers than Dawnisha.

  He logged off his email, dumped the browser cache, and emptied the URL history cache. Finally paranoid at that.

  His brother would have laughed.

  * * * * *

  Naia hooked the diminutive headset over her ears, not the least bit certain she could concentrate on the art history lecture podcast when she was still a prisoner in her own apartment.

  They wouldn’t tell her anything more. They made sure Badra was there at all times, preserving appearances and Naia’s virtue. They spoke among themselves when they thought she couldn’t hear—and they were right. The most she gleaned from any of it was that Badra was no happier about the situation than Naia, and that the men felt it would be necessary only until the situation was contained.

  What did that mean, exactly?

  In her ears, her professor droned on about the Parthenon. Naia typed a few desultory notes … highlighted a phrase in the open textbook beside her laptop. Most college students sprawled hither and yon for such work, using furniture in creative ways. Naia sat properly at a tidy desk, as dressed and presentable as if she’d been in the classroom itself.

  Partly because of Badra, of course. But partly just because it made her feel more in control.

  She turned the textbook page; her eyes strayed to her laptop screen. Her email icon had appeared in the tool bar. She swapped out program windows to check her automatically downloaded mail.

  Two pieces of junk, one email from a casual friend wondering if she was okay or just ditching class this week, and one email from someone she didn’t recognize … but the subject header made her look twice. Someone’s looking for you?, question mark and all.

  She glanced up to see if Badra was paying any attention, and found the woman embroidering the edges of a hijab, her culturally jarring PDA on the arm of her chair as though she were multi-tasking something. Badra, it seemed, had plenty on her mind. Naia opened the email.

  … Don’t know me … student newspaper … editorial … email from someone … interested in contacting you. But he didn’t, it seemed, give out other people’s email info without permission. Come to that, he shouldn’t have had hers in the first place. Very few people did.

  No, she wouldn’t read too much into that. She’d been tidy with her email, but she’d given it out to enough people so that asking in the right place would result in the information. For the moment, she’d assume this was just what it looked like—someone who respected her privacy enough to contact her rather than just handing out her email address when asked. The editor had pasted in the original query; she didn’t recognize that email address, either. [email protected]. The text was no more enlightening. The author knew her, had lost track of her, would like to reconnect. Hoped the newspaper editor could help. The author pointed out that he … or she … knew Naia well enough to read between the lines of who he’d been talking about in that editorial, and professed concern that she hadn’t been seen.

  Nothing terribly exciting. Nothing to catch her eye. Until the author of the letter signed off. The email signature included only an initial—A.—followed by the email address and a title, Community Interface, Pottery Warehouse.

  The Pottery Warehouse had no such position. It had no one whose first name began with A. on staff.

  But it had her dead drop.

  It had Anna.

  Swiftly, Naia deleted the email. The security detail hadn’t demanded to inspect her computer yet, but she thought it was just a matter of time. And though there was nothing overtly incriminating about this email or any other, she quickly emptied her mailbox trash—and with a grim satisfaction, she put her government-grade data chew-and-destroy program to work on those files.

  When Badra looked up again, Naia had rewound the podcast to the point at which her attention had diverged, highlighter in hand. But she was no longer Naia the student.

  She was Naia who’d had enough … and who now had somewhere to go.

  She met Badra’s gaze and smiled.

  * * * * *

  Mickey disembarked the bus as close to the pottery warehouse as she could, and carried the considerable results of her morning shopping spree the rest of the way. She hid the purchases in the prickly and unwelcoming evergreen shrubbery. A glance at the class schedule showed a nice gap at dinner time, and that would be the best time to haul this stuff to the third floor.

  Then, because she was running out of time, she gave herself the luxury of picking up a cab at the Caltrain station, and directed the driver to the Internet café. This bemused them both, as she did it in his native Russian when she ran into trouble with English.

  Huh.

  Steve wasn’t by any of the computer stations in the bright, contemporary café; she found him at the short bank of high-tech public phones along the wall, startled to see her. And beneath the startle was worry and no little turmoil. He gestured her over.

  She got a few double-takes from the other customers as she threaded her way through the tables, since her current look was meant to blend in with a slightly more downtrodden crowd. But this was a college town, and those who noticed her did little more than shrug and return to work. Here, she probably would have blended better if she’d added electric blue and pink to her hair and turned herself punk.

  “Dawnisha,” he was saying. “I can’t—” Frustration then. “But everyone’s okay?” He met Mickey’s eyes, shook his head slightly. She didn’t take it as a response to his conversation with Dawnisha—more like frustration, part two. “Okay, good. Just keep your distance from the place. Don’t mess with these guys. Anyone who comes up against them should just say what you know—that I’ve taken off for a while.”

  He looked up at the ceiling; Mickey thought he was grinding his teeth. “Of course I think everyone there can take care of their own neighborhood. But these guys …they’re cold. It’s not about honor or family or proving themselves to some gang—it’s bigger than that, and they don’t care who gets in their way. You hearing me? This is one of those times where running is the best option. What do you think I’ve done?” He made an expressively exasperated gesture that looked like it had come from an Old World relative. “Look, Dawnisha … it comes down to this. If anything happens to anyone there, it’ll be my fault. I don’t think I can live with that. Don’t make me, okay?”

  After that he seemed to relax a little; he made only a few more comments, promised to come back as soon as he could, and hung up. When he turned to Mickey he looked as though he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight.

  “You’re not running,” she observed. “You’re ducking and dodging so you can find the righ
t opening to strike back.”

  “I don’t think that would have made much of an argument.”

  “Everything’s okay, though? Hey, guess what—I speak Russian.”

  “Among other things, I imagine.” Steve took her arm, a gentle guidance that she allowed. “Dawnisha doesn’t think they’ve been there since you pulled me out of my loft. I think I convinced her that no one should screw with them.” He rubbed his lower lip, a disgruntled gesture. “She didn’t believe me about Anthony. Not at first.”

  “Surely someone found him—and we left the gym wide open.”

  “We did,” Steve pointed out. “They were still there.”

  Of course. She felt foolish, walking out into the late morning sunshine without a clue in the world. “They cleaned up,” she said, voicing his unspoken conclusion. And then, “It’s just as well. The cops won’t be looking for us, either. They won’t know I stabbed … I shot …”

  She’d been so busy with everything else … she’d thought more about that old man’s expression than she had about the two men she’d been willing to kill. Might have killed, for all of that. And she found herself surprisingly able to put them aside. They’d come after her; they’d made their own troubles. The old man … he’d deserved none of it. So she cleared her throat and said, “It’s just as well.”

  “Anthony deserves better.”

  “He does,” she agreed, following him down the sidewalk to the bike. “We’ll make sure he gets better, too. Before this is over.”

  It seemed to reassure him and bring him back to the moment at the same time. He looked at his bike, the one he’d strode to with such purpose, and he said somewhat sheepishly, “So, um, where are we going?”

  “I want to give your email more time to stir things up before I go looking, and that leaves us with a block of free time.” She checked her nails, an affected gesture. Even when she’d arrived at Steve’s, they’d been without color.

  Unlike her toenails.

  Her concentration somewhat fractured but a whisper of memory concerning a struggle over foam toe separators and the cat, she added, “I considered a manicure but I think we should go big box shopping instead. Maybe there’s a grocery store closer to the underpass than the one I used the first time—I don’t think we’re going to fit the half of it in your saddlebags.”

  He brightened considerably as he regarded her. “I like it.”

  She shrugged, not quite comfortable with that gaze. “It’s part of the deal. Steal from the rich, give to the poor. Some of it, at least. Same as last time.”

  “Did you?” he asked. “Is Mosquito still there?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Don’t remember much from that night, do you?”

  “I’ll take that to mean yes,” he told her with some dignity. He handed her the extra helmet, strapped on his own, and waited for her climb on behind him.

  She gave in to the impulse to spread her fingers wide over his chest and stomach, touching as much of him as possible—when, with the sedate pace they traveled, there wasn’t all that much excuse to touch any of him at all.

  * * * * *

  Once at the store, Mickey also gave in to the impulse to buy some items not strictly practical. Toaster pastries, some pretty hair clips. She crammed her cart full and stuffed a few last things into the bike saddlebags. “Meet you there,” she said, and pushed the cart on out of the lot, looking forward to the big downhill section.

  Steve had gathered an audience by the time she got there. The place seemed almost familiar to her by now—the vast lines of concrete, the sound of traffic far overhead, the haphazard signs of humanity here below. The underpass was cool, the air slightly dampened there; the acrid smell of smoke from someone’s nighttime fire still hung in the air.

  With some reluctance, they broke away from Steve to greet Mickey, pulling her cart into the shadow of the bridge. “Hey,” she said. “Looks better than he did the other night, doesn’t he?”

  “It was dark,” said an older woman, quite practically. “Who knows?”

  “Where’s Mosquito?” Steve asked, joining the group from the other side.

  The older woman gave Mickey a sideways glance. “It’s not a good day. He’s inside.”

  Inside what? One of the refrigerator box homes dug into the sloping sides of the underpass culvert? One of the metal corrugated storm pipes sticking out of either side of the underpass area? Some hidden spot by the riverside?

  Maybe just inside his own head.

  Mickey pushed the cart forward, and that turned out to be the signal; the assembled denizens of the underpass dove in.

  When Meth Woman approached just a tad on the late side, Mickey pulled out some of the hair clips she’d saved aside. Meth Woman tore into the package and clipped her hair away from her face with much relief as she gestured Steve over.

  “What’s up, Missy?” Steve said, familiar enough with this place, with its people, to be easy with such questions.

  Missy looked around, making sure the others were engrossed with the cart. “I’m worried about Anthony. There were people here yesterday. Wanted to know if we’d seen someone who didn’t belong. We didn’t say nothin’, ‘course. None of us talks to people who have that look in their eye. You know, the one that says they want to make the way the world is run? And like we don’t fit in it anywhere?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Steve said.

  “So then they started waving around money. But we know that trick. You put it together with those expressions? Never turns out right.”

  “But … Anthony talked to them?”

  She nodded. “Not at first. But they started making threats. So Anthony said he’d get them off our backs. I don’t know what he told them. He took their money and that was it.” But she looked troubled, and she looked away, and she said, “That shoulda been it. But he couldn’t just leave it. He said he was going to warn you, Steve. He said he ought to have lied about that part.”

  “That part,” Steve repeated blankly.

  “Oh, you know,” Missy said, and smirked a little at Mickey. “How she’s sweet on you.”

  Steve looked over at Mickey, eyebrows raised. She shrugged, very hey, watcha gonna do? “Later,” he told her.

  “I thought we’d already established that,” she responded sweetly.

  Missy waved a hand between them. “Hey, Anthony?”

  Right. Anthony. Mickey glanced at Steve in a grim, tacit game of you’re it. And Steve said simply, “Anthony was trying to do the right thing, Missy. But it looks like they found him first.”

  Missy’s lips thinned; her eyes shone and she blinked fast a few times and looked away. She muttered something; a curse, Mickey thought, at Anthony’s stupidity. When she turned back, her face was hard. Street hard. “I guess we’d best be moving on from this place for a while, then.”

  “That might be best,” Steve said. “Not for long.”

  Damned well better not be. Mickey didn’t have patience for much more of it. “Can you describe the men?”

  Missy made a face that indicated she hadn’t really cared. “Foreign, like I said. They had funny little caps—not like a Jewish thing, but not a whole lot more. One had a big fat mustache, one had a big fat nose. They were big. They were dressed too nice. Didn’t see guns, but I bet they had ‘em.”

  “Who doesn’t,” Steve grumbled, grumpy in a way that made Missy nudge Mickey and grin. But even as Mickey grinned in response, the other woman lost her smile, lost all her animation. She froze, except for her eyes. First they darted around, a little wild thing in search of escape, and then they got stuck, staring. Dreading.

  Mickey had a good idea what Missy was looking at. Her spine prickled … someone might as well have been drawing a target on it. Steve had only to turn his head slightly, and his widened eyes pretty much confirmed Mickey’s suspicions.

  They’d returned. They’d failed to nail Mickey the night before and they’d come back to their little treasure trove of information.

 
; But they were only looking at her back. They had no way of knowing who she was. So she eyed the distance between Steve and his bike parked back under the bridge, and she eyed the distance to the various cover opportunities—the bridge support structures, the galvanized pipe tunnels, the trees planted out and beyond the underpass.

  The bike had the disassembled bow. She wondered how fast she could put it together. How fast Steve could put it together ... and put it to use.

  And she made sure he saw her wondering—that he followed her gaze toward the bike. And then she drew a deep breath and, because it pleased her sense of dark irony, chose a song from Cats. “Mem’rieeeees!” she belted out, startling Missy as she drew the woman in for a few dramatic, swaying dance steps—and then shoved her away, toward one of those drain tunnels. “Lala la la la lalaaaaahhh!” Missy didn’t quite get it, but she didn’t hesitate to retreat, either. Dancing, swooping, Mickey bumped into Steve just long enough to shove him, muttering, “Get the bow!” A grand swoopy gesture let her pluck a knife from the harness still hidden beneath her oversized t-shirt; she palmed it, twirled around, and faltered in assumed confusion when she faced the two men.

  They weren’t the men she’d seen at the CapAd.Com. These men were more outwardly foreign, from the cut of their baggy suits to the headgear Missy had described. They were less suave … and more purposeful. They may have been at the gym the night before … she’d never gotten a good look in the darkness. She drew herself up to regard them with great dignity. “Oh,” she said. “Were you invited? This is opening night, you know.”

  They spared each other only a glance. They showed no concern for those who had scattered before them—and no doubt that they’d found their target. They came on.

  Boy, she hoped Steve was fast with that bow.

  Chapter 17

  “Tickets,” Mickey said, gesturing grandly to the Irhaddan intruders with the hand that didn’t hold the knife. “You must have tickets.”