CHAPTER TWELVE

Let me tell you the worst thing about being the world’s second worst psychic.

Shit happens to everybody. It’s part of the human experience. We process this shit as best we can: sometimes it cleans up nicely and we can wad up the toilet paper and flush it away, and sometimes it smears itself all over our psyches. In my weird life, shit happens on a fairly regular basis, and most of this shit is outside the scope of the typical human experience.

My best friend is Benjamin Franklin’s ghost, for fuck’s sake! My perspective on what is normal is somewhat skewed.

So when I have a dream in which I’m Helen of Goddamned Troy—prepubescent Helen of Troy, no less, and hunting a deer while buck (sorry) naked—I can’t dismiss it as just a dream.

I also can’t call up any of my psychic buddies for advice, since I don’t have any. Just Mike, and he knows less about this weird stuff than I do.

I didn’t have a lot of options, so I did what any sensible person would do when they woke up from something that was half a nightmare: I rolled over and went back to sleep.

The morning came in another bright blaze of golden glory across the ruins of the Parthenon. Mike and I got dressed, deposited Speedy at a nearby café under the watchful eye of a heavily-bribed barista, and went for a jog around the city.

Athens turned out to be larger than we thought. We called it quits after a couple of hours, and took a shortcut through the Plaka to get back to our hotel. The Plaka is this great little neighborhood near the acropolis, kinda touristy but with an old-world charm. We grabbed some slush drinks from a cart, and wandered through the streets. Cars aren’t allowed in the Plaka, but small vehicles are, and I nearly got trampled by a donkey.

Then I told Mike about my dream.

I didn’t leave anything out. The sounds, the sensations… Most of all, I focused on what I had seen. I have a Hollywood education in ancient Greece, and nothing from my dream matched my mental images of pale stone and flowing robes and curtains. Hell, nearly every adult woman there had had at least one boob showing, and that definitely didn’t fit into anything I had ever bumped into while channel surfing.

Mike’s noisy when he’s thinking quietly.

“What do you think? Did I buy Helen’s ghost along with those glass beads?”

He shrugged.

“That’s it?” I asked. I popped the lid on my drink and started gnawing on the ice. “No sage advice? Woulda sworn you’d pull out some obscure Buddhist saying and tell me that the dream is significant.”

“All things are significant.”

“But…?”

He shrugged. “Not all things have meaning. At least, not in relation to our own small scopes of self.”

“That’s more like it. What about this dream?”

Mike turned and lobbed his empty cup into a trash can, swoosh, nice and clean. As the can was across the street and had a fancy iron cover over all but a teeny cup-sized hole, half of the people walking the Plaka turned towards us. Some of them started to point.

I waved. “Damn it, Mike,” I muttered as the cameras came out.

We took off running.

We stopped before we reached the café where we had dumped Speedy. “Here’s what I think,” he said, as we walked the last couple of streets to cool ourselves down. “The dream was probably just a dream, and until we learn otherwise, I suggest we don’t worry about it.”

I nodded. That’s about where I had ended up myself. Except…

“Ever heard of psychometry?” I asked.

“Oh lord,” Mike said, rolling his eyes. “Which superpower is that again? The one where you touch an object and know its past?”

I chuckled. “Yup.”

“That’s bullshit,” he said. “Psychics can’t affect objects, or vice versa. We deal with biological matter, whatever form it takes.”

“I thought so, too,” I said. “But those beads, Mike…”

He shrugged but didn’t say anything. When I had brought the beads back to the hotel the night before, Mike couldn’t look away from them. When I had asked what he thought of them, he had said they were loud.

I knew what he meant—they were still loud. I had expected that the pressure that kept chiming against the inside of my skull would ease over time. Nope. Before we had left for our run, we had agreed that they were still as loud as they had been the previous night. Maybe louder.

“I’m thinking psychometry might be an advantage,” I said. “If it is a real talent, it’d definitely be useful on this trip. Even if we can’t pick memories off of an item, it could help us separate real pieces of the Mechanism from false leads.”

“I’ll call my mother,” he said, his voice as tight as it ever got. “Maybe she knows something.”

I laid my hand on his arm. It felt as if I were touching iron.

Inner peace only gets you so far. After that comes family.

We strolled up to the café. I was expecting a crowd out the door: Speedy tends to enjoy putting on a show. Instead, the koala was sitting on a table, deep in conversation with Atlas Petrakis.

“Wow,” Mike said as he caught sight of the antiquities broker.

“I know, right?”

“You said he was delicious, but…wow.”

“And he’s got a sexy accent,” I said. “And he’s hella smart, and he likes to wear really thin linen, and—”

My mouth stopped working as Atlas looked up from a spreadsheet and spotted me and Mike. He gave us that million-watt smile as he waved us over.

“Wow!”

“You mentioned,” I told Mike, as I propelled him towards the table.

We dragged over some loose chairs on the way, and I flagged down the waiter for some water. Lots of water. Athens is a little arid.

Atlas stood. I needed a few moments to realize that he wanted to help me into my chair.

I laughed and let him. I was such a wreck that I could have wrung a gallon of sweat out of my shirt, and the gesture struck me as hilarious. He tucked me neatly into the table, as properly as if Mike and I had come in dressed all fancy-like.

“Hey, Speedy,” I said, as Mike and Atlas got acquainted.

The koala’s ears were flattened back. That’s…never good. At least they were at three-quarters mast. Half-mast or lower, and you might as well look around for a nice lead-lined fallout shelter.

He grunted at me. It was a typical koala greeting: whatever was bothering him must not have crossed over into his supergenius side.

(That’s a big problem with these altered types, if you ask me. Not just Speedy, but OACET, too. Sticking new smarts on top of old instincts sometimes means that the stupid-simple stuff has a hard time getting through.)

“Whatcha working on?” I asked.

Speedy looked up from the spreadsheets. “Tall, dark, and hormonal over there keeps detailed client lists. These are people or organizations who’ve approached him with items to sell.”

I glanced at the spreadsheets. There were organized by item and location, but the far left columns were blank. The clients’ names and contact information had been deleted; at least, on the version of the spreadsheets that Atlas had given to Speedy.

“Anything recovered from the bottom of the ocean?”

“Lots,” he replied. One of the claws on his right forepaw was tapping against the paper.

Speedy doesn’t twitch. Nervous activity is for animals—and humans—in captivity, and Speedy has plenty of outlets for any anxiety that might build up. I followed the tapping claw down to a small column that looked to be nothing but a line of dates.

Speedy watched me track his claws, and nodded. Something was on his mind besides whatever had flattened his ears. Something significant.

Ah. The spreadsheets weren’t just lists of queries. They also indicated if these particular clients had bought or sold items from Atlas in the past.

And the same client had bought multiple items around the same time, nearly six months ago.

I took the spreadsheets from Speedy and started flipping through the pages. Yup. Someone had walked this same road before we got here.

“Senator Richard Hanlon,” I said loudly.

Atlas Petrakis’ head whipped towards me so quickly that I didn’t need to ask the question.

I asked it anyhow, mainly for Mike’s benefit. “You performed this exact same search for Hanlon last year?”

“I won’t answer that,” he said. “I respect my clients’ privacy.”

I kicked the chair back and stood, fuming. “Figure out if we can still work with him,” I told Mike and Speedy. “I don’t trust my own judgment right now.”

I was three blocks away from the café before I realized I was scaring people. Whatever was written on my face must have been absolutely violent. I had the entire street to myself, as pedestrians and cars alike moved to get out of my path.

Hanlon.

I’m not a bad person. Really. But if you put a gun to my head and told me to choose the one person on earth who should die a prolonged, painful death, I’d pick Hanlon.

Eh, let’s be honest. You wouldn’t need the gun.

Hanlon.

The same guy who was responsible for putting my husband and the other members of OACET through five years of living hell.

The same guy who had hired a thief to break into the White House and steal a piece of the Antikythera Mechanism.

The same guy who had apparently been collecting pieces of the Mechanism using strategies that mirrored those we were using to track down Archimedes—

“Shit!” I swore, and ducked into an alley to call my husband.

Being married to a cyborg has its perks. I can’t remember the last time I had to set a digital clock, for one thing.

For another, our version of phone sex is pretty great.

Remember my ugly resin ring, the one Benjamin Franklin brought back from the future? [8] I activated it. A zillion (ish) miles away, Sparky felt it. He appeared in front of me in a flash of bright green, and smiled down at me.

“Hey, Sweetie,” he said.

He wasn’t really there. Well, his brain—consciousness, whatever—was, but his body was back home in Washington. Still, he looked as if he were standing in front of me, all fully fleshed and dressed in different shades of green, and when he reached for my hand, I almost expected to feel the warmth of his skin.

I didn’t; his hand passed through mine in a halo of neon light. My body vibrated ever so slightly where they blended together.

(I really don’t care if that delicious tingle is all psychological or whatnot, thank you. It’s real to the two of us, and that’s all that matters.)

Sparky pulled his hand from mine as he took in the setting. It was rather…

Ugh.

We were standing in an alley in a city undergoing a massive economic depression. We could count a dozen rats without even trying.

Phone sex would wait.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

“Oh, you’ll love this,” I said. We snuggled up behind a dumpster, out of the way of prying eyes, and I briefed him on Atlas Petrakis. “So,” I finished, “I’ve got my doubts that a guy who worked for Hanlon would magically show up and want to work for me.”

He nodded. “Too much of a coincidence. Where is Petrakis now?”

“Mike and Speedy are with him in a café. Mike will stop him if he tries to pull a runner.”

“What are you going to do?”

I kicked a stray soda can at a rat who was getting awfully curious about my feet. The soda can sailed over the rat and clattered noisily into a pile of broken glass, and the rest of the pack scattered.

Sparky watched the rats as they ran for cover. “Thought so.”

“Yup. I have zero problems covering the same ground Hanlon did. Hell, he saved us some work,” I realized. “Atlas wouldn’t have been able to come up with that list so quickly if he hadn’t already done the same search for Hanlon. If Hanlon’s already bought additional pieces of the Mechanism, good for him. I just need to know where those pieces were discovered.”

“Think Petrakis will sell you the information?”

“If he’s not a plant? Yes,” I replied. “If Hanlon’s set him on us, he’ll balk on the sale and invent a reason to come with us while we travel.”

“Even if he knows you’re on to him?”

I muttered something and tried not to blush. I was already regretting my outburst at the café. I should have done what Speedy had done—play dumb and string Atlas along. Instead, I had jumped and roared.

Spy stuff? Not my strong suit.

Sparky grinned. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Is Petrakis dangerous?”

I laughed. “No,” I said. “Manipulative? Definitely. But he’s about as dangerous as a sexy kitten.”

“Sexy?” My husband’s eyebrows moved up a twitch, and then up a whole inch as he found Atlas Petrakis’ photograph in a database. “Wow.”

“Right?”

He groaned aloud. There was a world of emotion in it, ranging from regret all the way to jealousy that another man was roaming around a foreign country with his wife. I would have hugged him but, you know. No body. Instead, I reached out and touched the space where his shoulder appeared to be.

We steal our moments when we can, Sparky and me, so we stayed like that until I needed to head back to the café. He disappeared in another flash of green, with a promise to check back with me later that evening.

I turned down the street and wandered towards the café. I was walking slowly, pacing my way west in the early afternoon sunlight. Apparently, that’s all the opportunity that someone needed to try and pick my pocket.

I was having none of that nonsense.

The thief was good; she didn’t do that careless bump-and-shove that most pickpockets do. Instead, she waited until a car blew its horn as it passed me, and then used the moment in which I was distracted to drop her hand into the pocket of my shorts.

I slammed my hand down on top of hers and pinned her hand inside my pants (shut up), and then whipped my upper body forward. The would-be thief went tipping forward, her top half shooting straight over my shoulders.

Except for that one hand. I wasn’t about to give up control of that hand.

Hey, I was nice to her; I could have snapped her arm like a twig. Instead, I made sure to throw her in the same direction her shoulder rotated. I used our momentum to slam the two of us against the nearest building, using her torso as my personal air bag.

“Apologize,” I said, “and I’ll let you go.”

I couldn’t see her face, what with it dangling somewhere near my butt and all, but she squeaked out my name.

“I know who I am.”

“David sent me!” she said in English.

I’m not all that quick. I banged her against the wall again (shut up, shut up) before I remembered the passphrase that Mike had used in the knife shop.

I had just beaten up our black market contact.

Well.

I carried her into an alley as rat-infested as the last one, and tipped her gently onto her feet.

The woman was…um…

Let’s go with “plain”.

She appeared to be a local Greek woman a few years older than I was, and hadn’t had the advantage of modern orthodontic work. Or dermatology. Or tweezers. The part of my brain that hadn’t come along on my spring break from medical school diagnosed her with a moderate case of hirsutism.

She was also wearing one of the neatest jackets I had ever seen. It looked like a military make, just not any military that I was familiar with—greens and khakis were splashed across her arms and chest, the perfect hues to blend in with the landscape around the Parthenon.

It was long, too, and darker at its bottom than the top. She could squat down in the middle of a Greek field, pull the jacket’s hood over her head, and disappear into thin air.

Atlas Petrakis might be polished perfection, but this woman was real.

“Why’d you try to mug me?” I asked slowly.

“Heard you were good,” she said.

“And?”

She flipped her hand around so I could see her palm. I would have sworn it was empty, but no, there was my wallet.

“I’m better,” she said, grinning as she handed it back to me. “Call me Darling.”

I didn’t reply as I made a show of counting out my credit cards.

“I don’t steal from my clients,” she said, and did that empty-palm trick again. My Visa card appeared, and she held it out to me.

“You’re hired,” I said, and she dropped the Visa card into my hand. Followed by a second credit card…she had also snagged my Amex? Oy.

“Just like that?”

“Anyone who can rifle though my wallet while I’m smashing them upside down against a wall can get the job done.”

“Yes… Tell me,” Darling said as she made a show of rubbing her head. Her English was excellent, her accent and cadence similar to Atlas’. “How often will the beatings happen?”

“As often as you try to put one over on me.”

“Good,” she said, holding out her hand for me to shake. “I will not be doing that again.”

We talked shop as we walked the rest of the way to the café. Terms, wages, contracts (Darling laughed at that one), and legality. Especially legality.

“I don’t know how you usually operate,” I said to her. “When I’m paying you, law and order are your key words.”

Darling nodded. “I can do such things,” she said. “I have the proper paperwork.”

With that, I pushed open the door of the café.

Mike always kept a keen eye on his surroundings, so he spotted us the moment Darling and I walked in. It took Speedy and Atlas a few moments more, but when Atlas caught sight of Darling, he lunged to his feet, his chair banging against the stone floor as it toppled backwards. The gorgeous man began shouting angrily in Greek, and to go by Speedy’s impressed expression, he was nailing the profanities pretty hard.

None of that held a candle to what Darling had done the moment she had seen Atlas, which was lunge at him with an honest-to-God drawn gun!

As she leapt, she shouted: “You!”