Your Girlfriend is a Criminal
After Lena left, slipping furtively into the late afternoon sunshine, Anna fussed over Nadine like a protective mother hen. Nadine grumbled as Anna wrapped her hand and pressed a cold pack into it. “How’s it feel?”
“Like someone’s jabbing me with a hot needle,” Nadine said. “Little electric shocks. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
“Maybe the hospital will figure something out.”
“Maybe.”
“Got something I gotta do.”
“What do you—”
“I don’t have a lot of time.” Anna rose and sat in front of the expensive computer atop the flimsy particle-board desk. It came to life, holographic displays hovering in front of her, sectioned up into little windows scrolling rows of cryptic information.
“What are you doing?”
“Let me work. Please.”
As Nadine watched, Anna’s hands danced over the machine. She muttered to herself, lips moving. Glyphs strobed across the display almost too fast to see. Nadine imagined them as sorcerer’s incantations, unreadable by anyone without the right training, calling up strange and forbidden powers…
A new panel appeared on the screen, a grainy fisheye view of the inside of a taxi, Marcus lying on the back seat convulsing, mouth open in a silent scream; Lena holding his hand; Dan-boy looking grim beneath his dazzle makeup. A faint rainbow fringe surrounded the edge of the view, distortion from a cheap plastic lens. The time glowed in the lower left of the image.
“Here it is. UCLA Medical.” Anna’s fingers danced. The video vanished, replaced with a blank black rectangle with “FILE NOT FOUND” in white letters in the center.
Her fingers danced again. Logs scrolled by: times, dates, pickup locations. One by one, they vanished behind labels of FILE NOT FOUND. About ten minutes later, she hit a switch on the edge of the computer and rose. Flowing screensavers rippled across the monitors. “There,” she said. “Best I can do.”
“You hacked the cab company?”
“Yeah. Long time ago, actually. Left myself ways in for exactly this kind of contingency. You’d be surprised how handy it is.”
“What about the cab? Won’t Marcus’s DNA be all over it?”
She shrugged. “Nothing I can do about that. But there’s a lotta cabs in LA, lotta DNA. Would take a long time and a pile of money to test ’em all. And they’d have to know what they were looking for.”
Nadine curled her hand into a fist. “Ow.”
“We should get you to a hospital, too.”
“I think it’s time you tell me what’s going on,” Nadine said. “Whatever it is, you can trust me.”
Anna’s lips pressed together in a tight line. “It’s not about trusting you!” Something flared in her eyes, gone too quickly to recognize. “You’re the best thing to happen to me in a long time. I’m not trying to protect me from you, Nadine, I’m trying to protect you from me.”
“So explain it to me.”
Anna closed her eyes. “Okay, listen. I met Dan-boy two, maybe three years ago. We had some connections in common. I was hustling, selling electronic intrusion, data hacking, that sort of thing. Also other stuff. Moving money too. Lot of that.” She shrugged. The movement against Nadine, the feel of Anna’s warm skin on hers, set a shiver through Nadine’s body. She shoved the thoughts away, irritated. “Anyway,” Anna went on, “guy I knew said hey, this guy he knew was into something, might want to pay for my services, was I interested?”
“A guy you knew,” Nadine repeated flatly.
“Yeah. Your girlfriend is a criminal. Sorry. You can probably guess the rest. I did a job for him. Easy work, paid well. After, he asked me if I wanted more. I said yes. Been doing jobs for him and his crew ever since.”
“So what is he? Like, organized crime?”
Anna laughed without humor. “Nothing that simple. You familiar with the PRG?”
“The Peace Resistance Group? Yeah, I’ve heard about them. You’re a Peacer?”
“I’m a hacker. Dan-boy and the others, they’re Peacers.”
“You work for terrorists?” Incredulity tinged Nadine’s voice.
“I work for a lot of people. But yeah, I work for the Peacers, if you can call them terrorists.”
“What else would you call them?”
“Kids, mostly. Idealistic kids on a crusade.” Tiny lights danced in Anna’s eyes. “Speaking of. Hey.” Pause. “Taken care of.” Pause. “Goddamn right I’m sure, how long we work together?” Pause. “Okay.” Her eyes cleared.
“Dan-boy?”
“Yeah. Wanted to make sure I took care of the taxi records.”
“Listen, we need to talk.”
The shutters had already gone down behind Anna’s eyes. “No. The less you know about what I do, the better.”
“Okay.” Nadine touched her shoulder. “I’m in this with you, one way or the other. When you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.”
“How’s your hand?”
Nadine flexed her fingers. Little shocks of pain jolted up her arm. “Feels like touching a live electrical wire. Starting to fade a bit.”
“We should get you to a hospital—”
“I’m fine.”
The cry of gulls dragged Nadine from her sleep. At high tide, water raged at the seawall right behind the house, sending crashing spray against the window. Even at low tide, the ocean was always there, patiently nibbling away at the edge of the doomed row of crumbling mansions. Soon, Anna had told her, the water would start rising over the seawall when the tide came in. City planners kept talking about building the walls higher against the encroaching ocean, but the money never materialized.
Nadine called a cab, lips moving as she subvocalized to her implant, then dressed and made breakfast. Anna, already up, sat naked in front of her computer, damp hair wrapped in a towel. Her fingers flew. Windows appeared and disappeared on the holographic displays too fast for Nadine to follow. Nadine didn’t bother trying to talk to her. When Anna worked like this, she’d go hours at a time without acknowledging Nadine, lost somewhere in a world of abstracts.
A soft beep from Nadine’s implant told her the cab waited for her outside. She waved in Anna’s general direction. “Heading to work!” she called. Anna didn’t respond.
The cab deposited Nadine at the foot of the bland glass tower where she worked. Generically sleek company ads shifted across wide plate glass windows. The moment she closed the door, the Tesla slotted with mechanical precision into the early-morning flow of traffic and was gone. A compact, vaguely dog-shaped robot trotted by, painted LAPD blue. White italic letters on its side read “To Protect and To Serve.” The black barrel of a sniper rifle jutted from its snout, just below the dark glass lens of night-vision optics. Overhead, a FedEx drone carrying a large canister descended toward the receiving platform that jutted from the top of the building, lights blinking. Far above drifted the vast black bulk of a police surveillance platform. Oppressive heat hung heavy and humid in the air, covering Nadine’s body with a thin film of sweat.
The moment she stepped into the lobby, a blast of Arctic air from the laboring air conditioning system turned the sweat chill. She flashed her badge at a bored security guard behind an enormous U-shaped desk of off-white Formica and rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor. The noise and bustle of a sprawling cubicle farm, identical compartments with identical desks and identical computers as far as the eye could see, washed over her.
“…don’t care what he says,” an angry voice raged. The angry voice belonged to an angry man in an angry shirt with thin blue pinstripes, sweat-stained despite the best efforts of the air conditioning. “Tell him payment’s due on the first or I’ll have his ass in a sling on the second.” He snapped his fingers at Nadine. “You. Coffee. And bring me the lease agreements for Sunnyside.” Tiny lights glittered in his contacts.
He stomped off between rows of cubicles. Nadine sighed, shook her head, and made her way to the cramped break room stuck as an architectural afterthought between a broom closet and a bank of air handlers for the servers on the floor below.
Eight hours and two minutes later, Nadine stepped out into the early evening heat. Mirages shimmered above the pavement. The surveillance platform had moved on and was now nowhere to be seen, but small delivery drones bustled about picking up last-minute packages before the offices closed.
She summoned a cab. Less than a minute later, a battered black Tesla with a cracked headlight purred up to the curb. The back door popped open. Nadine slid across the scuffed seat. The car pulled into traffic with a faint whine. Its climate control battled the heat to a barely-tolerable stalemate. “Stop,” Nadine said, leaning forward abruptly. “Change of plan.”
“Do you wish to change your destination?” the cab asked.
“Yes. UCLA Medical. Take me there.”
“Booker is not liable for passengers in need of medical attention. Should you require urgent care, please exit the cab and call 9-1-1,” the car said primly.
“I don’t need medical care! I just want…never mind. Just take me there.”
“Change of destination requires fare modification,” the cab informed her. “Please indicate your assent to the new fare.”
“Fine!” Nadine mashed her thumb on the screen. She settled back on worn leather and watched out the window as the cab navigated itself through traffic. There was a mathematical precision to the flow, a mechanical correctness unruffled by the vargarities of human drivers with human emotions. The car whisked her calmly through the shabby streets lit by the harsh yellow glare of the merciless sun.
They pulled up in front of the hospital. The car made its way to a cab stop. “Wait for me,” Nadine said.
“Waiting incurs charges as explained on the screen. Failure to return within twenty minutes without releasing the cab may adversely affect your Booker score. Exiting the vehicle indicates assent to these conditions,” the car said in its bored synthetic monotone.
“Fine. I’ll be back. Wait here.”
The hospital lobby smelled of antiseptic and stale sweat. Cameras in every corner kept a watchful eye on the people huddled around uncomfortable molded plastic chairs in institutional green. A large ceramic pot squatted in one corner, holding a mournful-looking plastic ficus with a bent stem, artificial leaves fluorescent green beneath LED panels. A security guard in a black bulletproof vest looked her over with lecherous eyes. Nadine glared at him until he scratched his ear and looked away.
She shuffled behind the line waiting to talk to the nurse, acutely aware of time passing and the cab waiting in the parking lot with its meter running. Eventually, she found herself face to face with a man in a rumpled white lab jacket that looked slept in. “Can I help you?” he said in a disinterested monotone.
“I’m here to see a friend. He would’ve been brought in yesterday afternoon.”
“Name?”
“Marcus.”
“Last name?”
“I—I don’t know.”
The man sighed. “You don’t know your friend’s last name? Do you know his Booker ID at least?”
“No.”
“I see.” He gazed levelly at Nadine until she looked down. “What do you know?”
“His name is Marcus. He came in yesterday afternoon with a chest wound.”
“That’s something, I suppose.” The man’s eyes grew vacant. He stared at a point past her shoulder, lips moving slightly. Nadine fidgeted. Finally, he returned his attention to her. “No.”
“No I can’t see him?”
“No, he isn’t here. Nobody with a first or last name of Marcus or Mark or Matt or anything like that has been admitted in the last 48 hours for any reason. Definitely not with a chest wound.”
“There must be some mistake. I know he’s here. Can you look again?”
“No.”
“Please!” Nadine said. “I know he’s here, he must—”
“Your friend is not a patient at this hospital. There are people waiting behind you.”
“But—”
His eyes went vacant again. The security guard started forward from his corner. “Fine,” she said. “Thanks for your time.”
She left the hospital under the watchful eye of the security guard. The cab unhooked itself from the charger and popped its door at her approach. She gave it the address and slumped in the seat as the hospital disappeared behind them.
Back home, she found Anna sitting in the living room winding a cold compress around her hand. Anna waved. “Hey, lovely! You’re home late today.”
“Yeah. Stopped at the hospital to check on Marcus. They say nobody with that name has been admitted.”
“You asked about him at the hospital?”
Nadine blinked. “Yeah, is that a problem?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Anna sat and rolled her chair in front of the cheap IKEA desk. The computer came to life. Glyphs glowed and danced across the monitors. Nadine held her breath.
A few moments later, Nadine watched a fuzzy, jerky image of herself waiting in line in the shabby reception room, shuffling toward the nurse behind the counter. The screen froze. A window appeared over it. Lines of text scrolled across.
“He’s right, Marcus’s not in the admissions log,” Anna said, more to herself than Nadine. “Huh. Hello, what’s this?”
“What’s what?” Nadine said.
“Deleted record.”
“Does that mean—”
“I need to focus.”
Nadine watched as Anna played the machine, muttering under her breath to herself. “I wonder if they deleted it from the backups, too. Let’s just see…” Her fingers flew. “Internal cameras, they’re recorded on a different system. How thorough are you guys?” The information on the monitors changed too fast for Nadine to follow. Anna’s eyes glittered, tiny bursts of light from her lenses writing data directly onto her retinas.
Nadine watched over her shoulder for a while. Anna seemed unaware of her, lost in whatever world she retreated into when she worked. Information flickered across the screen, too fast to follow, feeding directly into Anna’s implant somehow—Nadine didn’t understand how Anna did what she did, or even what it was she did.
Eventually, boredom drove Nadine into the bifurcated kitchen. She rooted around in the refrigerator and was midway through assembling a roast beef sandwich when things went sideways.
“Nadine.” Anna’s voice cut through the air, sharp and cold. “Pack some things. Now.”
“What—”
“Move!” The word exploded from her, driven by a flat sense of urgency Nadine had never seen before. Nadine bolted. Somehow, Anna beat her to the bedroom, already moving with the same eerie, surreal grace that had taken her when Dan-boy made his unexpected appearance at the front door with Marcus. She looked like a video played at the wrong speed, frame rate screwed up, dancing across the room with her face set in an expression of absolute calm, every motion precise but too fast by half.
“What’s going on?”
“Pack a bag. Only what you need. Clothes. Cash.”
“For how long?”
“Assume we aren’t coming back.”
“I don’t unders—”
“Move!”
Nadine jolted into action, prodded by the sharp urgency in Anna’s voice. She shoveled a handful of clothes at random from the bedroom floor into her travel suitcase. Her keys, several boxes of disposable contacts tuned to her implant, her meager collection of jewelry, and her passport followed them in. She zipped it shut and wheeled it out to the living room, where Anna had collected a duffle bag from the closet, already packed and ready to go. The hilt of a compact pistol protruded from the back of her jeans.
The thin wail of distant sirens drifted in on the humid air. Anna cursed. “Out of time. Stay with me.” She pressed her thumb against the computer on the desk. The rolling screen savers on the monitors flickered out. Something hissed and spat. Smoke curled up, carrying the acrid smell of burnt electronics. She grabbed Nadine’s arm and dragged her out the back toward the seawall. Behind them, the sirens grew louder.
“Close,” Anna muttered. She unlatched a long box of black fiberglass bolted with stainless steel straps to the cracked concrete wall. A black bundle lay wadded up inside it. She pulled a red cord. The bundle started to unfold with a loud hiss. A short curved steel ramp jutted from the seawall over the angry, stormy water below. Waves lashed at concrete. Salt spray beaded in Nadine’s hair. Anna shook her head. “Gonna be close.”
“What are you doing?”
“Get down!”
Tires squealed out front. Nadine heard shouting voices, followed by a dull thunk thunk thunk. A row of metal balls about the size of her fist rose over the top of the house. They froze impossibly in midair at the peak of their trajectory, then spread out like glittering birds of prey. “Fuck,” Anna said.
The black bundle unfolded itself into a long wedge shape in front of Nadine’s eyes. Overlapping plates slid into place in the bottom. Nadine heard glass shatter from the direction of the house, followed by two ear-splitting explosions. She clapped her hands to her ears. “They’re shooting at us!”
Anna shook her head. “Flash-bangs.” The hissing stopped. The black bundle finished expanding into a long, narrow boat with a rigid floor and inflatable sides. Anna grabbed Nadine’s hand. “In!”
“But—”
Anna seized Nadine’s jeans and flung her bodily into the boat. Three men trotted around the side of the house in a tight group, shadows in black riot gear and helmets. “Over here!” one of the men called. “You! Stop!”
Anna half-leapt, half-crawled into the Zodiac after Nadine. She tugged frantically at a thick knotted rope that lashed the end of the boat to a steel ring on the ramp. The knot resisted her. One of the three men knelt and leveled his rifle at them. The other two came fast, flanking the sides of the boat.
The rope came free. Nadine’s stomach lurched. The boat slid down the ramp. Behind them, she heard a sharp series of shots, earsplittingly loud. She screamed. Then they were falling, plummeting toward the water below.
They hit with a sickening impact that flung Nadine from the boat. Her vision went black. Water closed around her. She forced her way to the surface, still clutching her suitcase, gasping and choking. A second volley came from above and behind her. Something small and fast struck the water around her.
Nadine caught a handle on the side of the Zodiac with one hand. Her bag dragged at her. Anna folded down a compact electric motor and hit the throttle. The boat leapt forward as if kicked. Nadine spun around, her face smashing into its rubber side. Her arm screamed in agony. She inhaled a mouthful of seawater and coughed violently. Bullets carved bubbling channels in their wake.
“Hang on!” Anna cried. The tiny boat bounced across the waves, each jarring thud threatening to rip Nadine’s arm from its socket. The shoreline fell away.
Anna didn’t slow until they were far enough out they could no longer make out the men on the seawall. The Zodiac bobbed when she cut the motor. Anna dragged Nadine aboard, exhausted and coughing. The skin on Nadine’s hand had been rubbed raw where she clung to the handhold. Her arm shrieked pain at her. She dragged her small suitcase aboard. Her fingers refused to unclench from its neoprene-coated handle. “Are you okay?” Anna said.
Nadine choked violently. Her eyes stung with salt water. She nodded.
“Good. We’re not out of this yet. Look.” She nodded. Overhead, a fan of drones raced out toward them, forming a net of gleaming silver balls across the harsh blue sky, each drone a small round ball at the corners of an array of hexagons.
Anna slammed the throttle. The Zodiac jumped as if kicked. The drones raced after them, the hexagons growing larger as they sped out to sea. “We can’t outrun them!” Nadine said.
“We don’t have to. They’re part of a mesh network. Each one relays information to its neighbors, then on to their neighbors. We just have to get out far enough the mesh can’t reach the shore.”
“What happens then?”
“Right now, they’ll be retasking a surveillance platform. That takes time. Twenty minutes if we’re lucky, ten if we’re not. Until then, they’ll want to keep an eye on us. So they’ll be taking measures to stay in contact with the drones.”
“What measures?”
“There.” Anna pointed. Nadine followed her finger to where something glinted in the sky. “Communications hub. Powerful radio, big batteries. That’ll let them stay in touch with the drones until they can task a platform and get some boats out here.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Take it down.”
Anna turned. As she did, she seemed to speed up. She moved with the easy grace of a ballet dancer, drawing the gun from the back of her jeans in one smooth motion as she spun toward the oncoming drone. She stood still as a statue, waiting, arms outstretched, holding the gun in both hands in front of her, her body still as a statue as the Zodiac rocked beneath her.
“Anna—”
“Not now.”
The drone grew closer. The hex grid overhead rippled as the smaller drones moved out of the way. The large drone came closer, six arms extending from around a flattened body, a small propeller on the end of each one. Nadine could see stubby antennas sticking from its upper side.
Anna held her breath. She held her aim at it, unmoving. Nadine’s nerves jangled. “Anna—”
The gun roared. The drone exploded into a thousand fragments. Instantly, the neat hexagonal pattern above them collapsed. The small drones swirled in a long funnel that swooped almost to the water and then climbed again, reminding Nadine of a flock of starlings. “What happened?”
“They’re cut off. We have a few minutes.”
“Why are they doing that?”
“Fallback routines built into their firmware. They have no command and control link, so they revert to flocking behavior, keep from crashing into each other or piling into the ground. You don’t want to lose a whole cluster of drones just because they’ve been disconnected from the network.” She shoved the throttle. The Zodiac darted forward. “If we’re really lucky, and we don’t make any mistakes, we might wake up tomorrow outside of a prison cell.”
Nadine lay on her back, fingers still clutched around the handle of her small suitcase, clothes and hair soaked with salt water, shaking violently as the adrenaline ebbed. Her shoulder screamed at her. She felt a bruise rising where her face had planted against the Zodiac. Anna did not speak as she piloted the Zodiac in a broad arc parallel to the shore. Nadine stared up at the featureless blue sky. The drones looped and swirled aimlessly without pursuing them.
Eventually, Anna cut the small motor. She unzipped her bag and stowed the gun inside. “Give me your terminal,” she said.
“What?” Nadine shook her head. Her clothes clung to her body, the saltwater already starting to itch. Her hair hung down in her eyes. The last dregs of adrenaline made her shaky. She stared at the swirling cloud of drones without comprehension.
“Your terminal. Can I see it?”
“Um, sure.” Nadine fished the compact portable computer from her bag.
“Thanks.” Anna dropped it on the bottom of the boat and stomped on it. Jagged shards of polycarbonate scattered across the floor.
“Anna!” Nadine gaped at her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Keeping us out of prison.” Anna tossed the terminal overboard. It sank with a dull splash. “Look, I’m really sorry. Contacts too. And any other electronics you have.”
Anna knelt in front of Nadine’s bag and rummaged through it. The contact lenses followed the computer into the water. Nadine’s watch, a gift from her mother, was the next to go, stomped flat and thrown overboard. “Anna! Stop! Anna!”
Anna touched Nadine’s cheek. “I am so, so sorry. You’ve been kind to me, and now I have ruined your life.”
“Anna, what’s going on? Talk to me!”
Anna shook her head. She unzipped her duffle bag and pulled out a round loop of metal attached to a handle studded with switches. “Hold still.”
“Anna, what are you doing?”
Anna raised the loop to Nadine’s head. “I promise this won’t hurt.”
“Anna! What—”
Anna pressed a button. Nadine heard, or felt, a sensation like a heavy ringing of a bell, so low she could only barely perceive it, then a sudden absence, as though a sound that had whispered in her ear for so long she’d stopped paying attention to it suddenly ceased. “Anna, what have you done?” she cried.
“I’ve disabled your implant.”
“Anna!” Nadine said. “Stop!” Tears blurred her vision. “You have no right! What are you doing? You destroyed—destroyed my—”
Anna caught her up in a close hug. Nadine beat her hands on Anna’s back as she wept. “I’m so, so sorry,” Anna murmured. “This is my fault. I wish I could go back in time, stop you from getting involved in all this. With me.”
She held Nadine while Nadine screamed and raged, until eventually Nadine’s cries spent themselves into small quiet sobs. “We have to go,” Anna said. “We don’t have much time.” Nadine sat shivering in the bottom of the boat, clutching the handle on her bag, as Anna revved the tiny electric motor.
Anna sat silent in the back of the tiny boat, piloting them in a broad arc that curved until they roughly paralleled the shore. Merciless sun beat down on her. Every bounce and jolt sent a blast of salt spray into her face. Nadine stared numbly at the water sloshing in the bottom of the boat. Without her implant, she felt cut off, some vital part of herself torn away. She could not call anyone, could not summon a cab or look up directions, could not make notes, could not record or replay what happened around her.
The sun hung low when Anna finally steered them toward the shore. “Hang on. This might get a little rough.” She revved the engine and pointed the boat toward the shore. A deluge broke over the bow as they plowed through the surf. The small boat skidded onto the beach, scattering tattered scraps of seaweed. Rotted stumps of palm trees jutted from gray sandy dirt. Anna hopped out and offered Nadine her hand. “Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Here.” Anna zipped open her duffle bag. “Put these on.” She pushed a nondescript T-shirt and dark jeans into Anna’s hands. “Your clothes are wet. This too.” She handed Nadine the hoodie she’d worn the night they met. Cartoon faces leered at her.
“It’s too hot.”
“Wear it anyway. It confuses facial recognition.”
“Anna—”
“Crash course in your new life as a fugitive. Part one, cameras. You’ll need to learn to hide your identity. Dazzle, camouflage, confusing clothing. The cartoons register as faces to facial recognition AI. Put it on. Keep the hood up.”
Nadine dressed in silence. Anna took her wet clothes from her unresisting fingers. She threw them into the Zodiac and hauled out her duffle bag and Nadine’s sodden suitcase. She stripped down to her underthings. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Where are you going?”
Anna put her hands on Nadine’s shoulders. “I think I’ve always known this day would come. For a while there, I’d hoped…”
“Hoped what?”
Anna shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to stay. There might be a way out for you, I don’t know. If you can convince them you weren’t involved, you didn’t know anything about my life…” She shrugged. “Your parents are rich, right? They can afford good lawyers. There’s only one way forward for me. That might not be true for you.” She placed an achingly gentle kiss on Nadine’s lips. “If you aren’t here when I get back, I’ll understand.”
She pushed the Zodiac back into the water, then paddled after it. Nadine watched her go without expression. Once she’d passed the surf, she climbed into the boat and gunned the engine. The Zodiac vanished into the setting sun.
Nadine sat heavily on her suitcase. Salt water squished around her. A breeze blew in from the ocean, heavy with the smell of things that lived and died in the sea. Anna receded until she was a dark dot in the distance.
Nadine sat sweltering in the early evening heat, feeling a yawning chasm opening beneath her. She wrestled with her impulse to flee, turn herself in, find some way to make the black-uniformed police and the people behind them believe that she wasn’t part of whatever Anna was part of. Her eyes swam. The tears came on slowly but implacably until her chest heaved with wracking sobs. She wept until her nose ran and her eyes turned red and raw, huddled into herself on that open shoreline. Several times she stood to go, and several times she stopped, slumping back onto the suitcase to wait.
Beyond the line of surf, the tiny black dot of the Zodiac bobbed, still and silent. Anna arced gracefully into the water. Nadine’s heart hammered. She held her breath, waiting for Anna to surface. Her chest ached. In the distance, the boat seemed to sag as it collapsed in on itself.
An agonizing eternity later, Anna’s head broke the surface of the water. She swam back toward shore with strong strokes, and hauled herself onto the seaweed-strewn beach.
“What did you do?”
“Bought us some time.” Anna stripped, opened her bag, and dressed quickly. She shrugged into a dark-colored hoodie decorated with random bars, lines, and splotches of color. “I slashed the boat. It should drift for quite a ways. It’ll take them a while to figure out where we came ashore. They might even assume we drowned.” She grinned without mirth. “Not that I expect to be that lucky. Come on, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”