Carlota leaned back as Alicia cut the comm line. She’d finally gotten properly introduced to the woman, though she could see why Rob and Mac had waited until now. Carlota might have backed out. Might have fled.
Might have spent the rest of her life looking over her shoulder for men like Emil Yankov to finally catch up with her.
“Now what?” Carlota asked, looking around.
Rob and Mac had a cozy starship, apparently named Widowmaker. Alicia had set up a remote control console on the kitchen table, and Rob was flying her stolen ship.
Had been flying. It was freefalling in pieces now. Possibly on fire, as the image on the screen showing the bridge was fuzzy. Smoke? Or internal electrical shorts.
“It slams into the ground in about forty seconds,” Rob said matter-of-factly. “The front end catches on fire in a few seconds, burning your corpse beyond recognition, even before the bow hits at terminal velocity and destroys your body.”
“Her body,” Carlota corrected him automatically. “She might have already been dead, but between the four of us, her sacrifice will make it possible for me to survive. To escape. And we never learned her name?”
She was facing Erika as she asked that. Mac. Whoever she was.
Carlota’s savior in more ways than one.
“We did not,” Mac said. “They had her down as an indigent, possibly dead from a narcotic overdose, with no immediate identification papers available. Rob and I have been calling her F-2 for the drawer she was in when we stole her.”
“That will never do,” Carlota said, turning to all of them. “I propose we call her Carlota, as she took my spot in line for death. I will become Helen. That was how you found me. Saved me.”
She reached out a hand and Mac took it, squeezing. And not just Mac. Now-Helen reached and took one of Rob’s as well. He’d set things in motion in a way Helen had never really imagined possible, bringing along another Carlota to sniff and track the first one.
Nobody else had assumed a middle-aged woman would be good enough to be a threat. Rob had assumed she was at least his peer and treated her as such.
It was good.
Even Alicia put a hand on Helen’s shoulder, perhaps a benediction of rebirth.
“Will they believe?” Helen asked Rob.
He shrugged, but there was a wicked gleam in his eyes.
“The aft section with engines and crew cabin should withstand the crash,” he said. “The back half of the manuscript is in a reinforced case that should survive impact and flames. Yankov will get his hands on that and see the other half of the book that will never be published. At least, not until a lot of time has passed.”
“Wait,” Helen said. “What?”
“Did you leave a copy with your lawyer, with instructions to open the package in the event of your untimely death?” he grinned at her.
“Oh.”
“Exactly,” Mac said, still holding her hand. “You can be dead, and still reach back from beyond the grave to have your revenge on people.”
“But I didn’t keep a copy,” Helen said.
Alicia laughed heartily.
“Good thing somebody quickly scanned all those remaining pages then, isn’t it?” she asked.
Helen watched her pull a memory chip from a pocket and hand it to her.
“This is all of it, except what’s already at various publishers,” Alicia said. “Plus we have copies here so you can recreate everything when you finally are dead long enough.”
“Thank you,” Helen said simply.
She couldn’t see it from here because Widowmaker had no windows in the kitchen on that side, but if she could, the van and the stolen starship’s now-empty hangar weren’t more than one hundred yards away. Two bays over and across the street, which was why Rob had known about the ship.
That and an appreciation for things that went fast.
Helen—she got to be Helen from now on—watched the screen as her supposed starship continued to tumble, at least from the way the horizon indicator was turning clockwise. She’d never really learned to fly all that well, which was why Rob had been remotely piloting.
But without her personnel records, Montague wouldn’t know anything beyond what Emil Yankov told him.
Would it be enough?
“And here we go,” Rob said.
Helen watched as fire engulfed the small cockpit. The blue suit she was wearing was made of the exact same material as the Carlota whom Rob had put into the pilot’s chair before they left. The material would burn well. Carlota would be reduced to a charred corpse, then possibly broken apart on impact.
Assuming Yankov found the manuscript, then he could verify that it was her that had died in the crash.
And she would be free.
Helen rose from her seat and leaned over to kiss Mac on the forehead, then wrap her arms around Rob awkwardly and just hug him as hard as she could.
“Thank you,” she repeated herself. “I’d hit the end of the road and never realized it. They would have killed me.”
“That’s on Rob,” Mac smiled. “When he asked me to impersonate you, I did the same thing, letting the rage take hold and run rampant for a while. He was the one who asked what my endgame was. Neither Alicia nor I had had one until that moment.”
“So what will your superiors demand?” Helen asked the man. “Is Miguel Cabrill still in charge of the Service?”
“He is,” Rob nodded. “His was the decision to send us, but he never expected we’d find you. My job was to mostly spend my time identifying all those agents running around looking for you for his files. That includes the young woman at Rittendorf Imports who doesn’t show up in any of our files. As to what he wants from you, I presume immediately he wants the rest of the manuscript, so that will buy you time. Then you made out like a bandit at the poker tables, so you won’t really need money for a while. That will help. Eventually, they’ll want to buy more information off of you, so make sure you don’t sell it cheap.”
“You could just take me prisoner, you know,” Helen pointed out.
“Things done without active, verbal, positive consent just aren’t as much fun,” he smiled at her, meanings on a variety of layers far beyond what a man that young should understand.
Somebody had been teaching that boy. And well.
Helen looked forward to final exams sometime soon.
“So you’ll haul me to Ramsey and turn me loose?” she asked coyly.
“If it were up to me?” Rob asked. “Sure. Miguel will have the final vote. But again, you as a friendly witness and talking is far better than holding you in a cell and threatening you for information. You can never trust something someone tells you under that sort of duress. Eventually, they are just making shit up and hoping you like it.”
Helen nodded. Interrogation was all about building rapport with a person over time. Being friendly and drawing them out. Whips and abuse just hardened most people.
You caught more flies with honey than vinegar, as her mother had always said.
The screens had all gone dark. Impact or at least enough fire damage to render all the electronics dead. Carlota Rojas was dead with them.
Good riddance.
Who might Helen be, if she could be anybody she wanted to?
Helen caught Rob’s appraising glance and smiled.
Anybody she wanted.