Carlota took a deep breath as the taxi deposited her over a few blocks from her destination. She adjusted her satchel over one shoulder and looked around the neighborhood innocently. Downtown. High rises and offices.
And one publishing company.
According to Rob, the building itself was under constant surveillance, but not that closely. They would likely see her enter, but might not realize it was her immediately.
She had gotten Erika’s help to strip all the color from her hair. Not much had lasted this long, so what she had naturally was mostly gray and starting to come in fully white.
Carlota caught her reflection in the mirrored surface of a storefront as she walked and did a double-take at the ancient crone who stared back at her. Makeup tricks pushed the other direction had added wrinkles instead of hiding them. Carlota had even added a bit of a hunch to her walk.
Babushka, making her way, rather than sexy secret agent.
She had to trust Erika.
More especially, she had to trust Rob.
It helped that she’d woken up this morning and realized that she really did want to survive. The game that had sounded so awesome and powerful a year ago had turned out to be a death wish writ large, though it had taken her a long time to fully appreciate that.
Carlota had been railing against a galaxy that seemed to be done with her. Why the hell had she decided to help it get rid of her?
But she knew that answer. The Rage was real. All the things that had been foisted on her over the years—the decades—because she was a woman in a system built to maintain men.
She’d lost her cool. Her composure. Had fallen prey to that seductive siren call of destruction.
Until she woke up and decided to survive.
Technically losing was acceptable if it gave her more years to enjoy who she might invent herself to be. Not the old woman in the reflection, though she supposed at some point she might just give up on keeping her hair dark and let herself turn into the sexiest grandma in the galaxy.
Erika had certainly managed something similar.
Today, she was dressed in a casual business suit. Slacks and matching tunic blazer in navy, a particular fabric Rob had picked out. Black shirt underneath instead of white, with a ribbon where a man might have worn a tie.
Sensible shoes for running. Even in heels she could move quickly, but the plan today assumed angry men chasing her.
Men.
Rob had managed to seduce her in a way Carlota wouldn’t have believed possible a week ago. He had surrounded himself with competent women and then listened to them. Some of the arguments she’d participated in, setting this up, had seen Rob on one side and Carlota and Erika on the other, with the younger woman handling communications security siding with her when she spoke.
And Rob had listened. Changed his mind when their take made more sense. Even thrown himself fully into it, rather than sullenly.
She looked forward to the chance to seduce him later. Erika had whispered a few things in her ear over the last four days.
Carlota crossed the last intersection now and made a point to ignore the vehicle at the far corner across with two men seated in front. Or the one fellow at a nearby kiosk, ostensibly buying a newspaper and coffee.
Amateur hour, if they stood out that badly. The first two looked like cops, rather than agents. The other one was a stringer who would need to seriously up his game if he ever wanted to be fully recruited.
Instead, she pushed open the door to the building itself and went inside, starting a timer clock in her head.
Somewhere, the woman who handled electronics would be watching as Carlota vanished from sight and would set Rob and Erika in motion.
How long did she have?
Carlota didn’t know, and found that element of uncertainty comforting. Emil Yankov was as dangerous a foe as they came. How soon would somebody call him? How many resources did he have immediately on tap?
Right here was the game. That surge of adrenaline that she’d missed, dying slowly by inches behind a desk. Any fool could move paper around.
Only a field agent could do something like this.
She ignored the elevator and found the staircase. Better to climb steps than be trapped in a small box. She’d gotten lucky that the man holding the pistol to her chest had wanted to seduce her rather than execute her. Carlota had felt his eyes undressing her and smiling at what he found.
She would take him up on that unspoken offer when this was all done.
If she survived something so crazy.
Armand had shown her how to be an agent again. Erika had reminded her how to be sexy. Rob might be the third piece. Being alive.
Carlota emerged from the stairs and found the door for Constanz Books. She’d only ever dealt with him via comm and mailed package, but Carlota had scouted the place once, at the very beginning.
Learning the field of battle.
She entered the office and smiled at the young woman behind the desk.
“May I help you?” she looked up brightly.
“I’d like to talk to Jan,” Carlota said.
“I see,” the woman nodded, slightly evasively. “And you are?”
“Carlota Rojas,” she replied, watching those eyes get big for a moment.
Initially, Carlota had argued to walk in here looking like she had before. Rob had supported her.
Erika, of all people, had put her foot down hard and refused to budge from the old lady peasant routine.
“If you want to be you tomorrow, you can’t be you today,” she’d said emphatically.
Looking at the receptionist, Carlota could see the image of the ancient crone burning itself into the woman’s memory permanently.
“Certainly,” the receptionist said brightly. “If you’ll have a seat, I’ll let him know.”
Carlota smiled and moved with aging grace and stiff joints she didn’t feel, marking the legend as a withered woman.
Old, like Montague wanted to tell himself, those nights when her ghost might sneak up and howl obscenities at him when he tried to sleep.
Jan Constanz didn’t take long to emerge from the back. He took her in and saw only the makeup and white hair. That much was in his eyes.
He didn’t undress her like Rob had. Or Erika. Didn’t linger on her curves with questions as to what they felt like. Tasted like.
She was just another crone. A babushka and nothing more.
He blinked several times in a row as he studied her. Like the receptionist, he would tell reporters and police that she looked old and haggard.
“Madam Rojas?” he asked unnecessarily.
Carlota nodded.
“What a surprise!” he exclaimed. “Please, come back to my office and we can chat.”
His eyes strayed to the bag she had brought. It was large enough for stacks of paper. Possibly heavy enough as well. What might it contain? Could that be The Manuscript itself?
The man hadn’t lusted after her body, but she could see it lingering lovingly on the possibility that he might have the whole manuscript in his hands today.
If he was a good boy.
Carlota rose slowly. Painfully. Walked like an old woman, emphasizing that slight hunch with a bit of a limp thrown in.
Misdirection, which was apparently Rob’s signature move as an agent for Lincolnshire’s Service.
She followed Constanz into and through a maze of gaps between boxes and desks, noting how everyone had stopped working to stare at her.
Carlota wondered which ones had been quietly suborned by Yankov or Montague and would need to find an excuse to call someone right away with the coup of their careers.
Jan Constanz was still a liberal progressive fighting The Man. That was why she’d picked him in the first place, from more than a dozen options here in Bennan. But she could see where the thought of the money had gotten to him.
Too bad. Still, she supposed that he would at least put it to use grinding the gears of the system, rather than having a harem of bimbos or a string of mansions when this was all done.
“What can I do for you, Madam Rojas?” he asked as they got settled.
She had left the door to his office open. The better for the others to hear this conversation.
“I wanted to surprise you, Sri Constanz,” Carlota replied in a husky voice, a little ragged with time and age.
Pouring it on, since she wouldn’t ever see the man again, either way.
Carlota reached behind her and opened the satchel. She heard his breath catch with a faint gasp, but didn’t smile at his predictability.
She pulled out the whole stack and sat it on his deck, then peeled the next chapter off the top, extracted one page with backing details, and put the rest back in her satchel.
“I’ve already mailed off copies to everyone else, but wanted to deliver yours in person,” Carlota said off-handed, as if that wasn’t the single stupidest thing she could have done on the entire planet.
Right up there with calling Emil Yankov personally to taunt him and not expecting the man to have the line traced in moments.
“Thank you?” Constanz replied. “What brings you into town?”
“Call it a whim,” Carlota offered, sticking to the broad talking points she and Erika had worked out. “We’ve reached the mid-point of the game, and everyone needed a little break in their routine.”
“And the rest of the manuscript?” he asked, still breathless and jarred out of his own pattern of life by her appearance.
“You’ll have it in due course,” Carlota chuckled. “It would ruin everything if folks didn’t have a chance to stop me, after all.”
He nodded, and she could see him at a loss for words.
“How is the publishing process proceeding at your end?” she queried.
“Well,” he replied, brightening right up. “We have a cover selected, and are working with a graphic designer to do the back and the dust jacket. Since we know how long it is, we will only need a day or so from receiving the final chapter to do a quick copyedit pass and then send it on to the printer.”
“Has anyone warned you that they’ll blow up your warehouse or anything silly like that?” she asked.
Imperial Intelligence wasn’t known for subtlety. Salonnia could be worse, except that most of those warehouses would be owned by some Syndicate who would need to be mollified afterwards.
Or at least warned so they could have an insurance fire.
“We’ve specifically engaged folks outside our usual suppliers,” Constanz nodded primly.
As if that would matter, given the explosive nature of this book. Which was exactly why she was mailing copies to so many places.
Only Salonnia and the Fribourg Empire would have any interest in suppressing it. Others would titter behind polite hands, while perhaps buying excess copies just to drive it onto bestseller lists. She could see smugglers bringing in pallet-loads later for the black market.
Oh yes, Carlota understood how this game was played.
“Excellent,” she said, rising stiffly, still in character. “I expect that I might mail off all the copies on the same day for the last chapter, but not use the slow post for yours. I might even just drop it off again. Until then.”
Carlota had happened to be facing in the direction of the open door as she said that, so of course she’d had to speak louder, so that Constanz would hear her. As well as everyone else.
She stepped into the open and noted which folks had retreated back into their offices. Who was on a handset, versus who was actually working.
Which folks might be making spare cash on the side as various intelligence agencies slipped bills into their pocket against today.
Carlota moved quicker than the old woman as she made her way back out, exited, and hit the stairwell with a smile nobody else could see.
Somewhere, fires were being lit under various asses.
Angry fires. Pique at being taunted so boldly in broad daylight, when she was certain that most of the watchers were too busy watching each other to have even noticed her down on the street.
Down she went, but exited a rear door onto the alley. Carlota paused to look up and spot the pulley that Rob had used to get into the building the first time, when he’d been uncertain what he would find.
A panel van was parked nearby. The door slid open as she turned that way and Erika smiled at her.
“How are we doing?” Carlota asked as she suddenly sprinted over and jumped in like a much younger woman.
Erika slammed the door behind her and Rob started driving.
“All hell is breaking loose,” the younger agent monitoring things said, beaming. “Slowly, though. Inertia is an utter bitch after this long.”
“Nobody would believe I’d be dumb enough to do something like this?” Carlota laughed as the van rumbled out the back of the alley and turned into mid-day traffic.
“Professionals are predictable,” Erika laughed with her. “The amateurs are the ones that mess everything up. And that was about as amateur a move as we could come up with.”
Carlota grabbed a seat and strapped herself in as Rob turned another corner, moving with a sure certainty in his hands and motions that she was certain would translate later into other things.
“Okay, I have the first alert,” the younger analyst called. “Police are being summoned and given the old woman description with an all-points notification.”
“What about the goons?” Rob called from the front.
“Yankov’s people, if they are his, are in a complete tizzy, and talking on a channel that’s not encrypted. Low-use channel. Open dialogue. Someone is reading them the riot act.”
“Let me hear,” Rob ordered.
The woman pulled a headset and the back of the truck was filled with his voice.
“Yes,” Carlota said. “That’s Yankov.”
“Recording this for later?” Rob asked from the front.
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
Rob went back to driving and Carlota reached out to take Erika’s hand. Who could have imagined that a strange, black box theater filled with an alien musical would lead to all this? More than once in the last few days, she’d wondered if her personal atheism needed to be modified slightly.
Someone, somewhere, seemed to have decided that they liked having her around. Lincolnshire’s Service wasn’t that powerful, so they had some pull with some entity.
Erika smiled at her, as if reading Carlota’s mind.
“Now, the fun starts.”