Saira Kohli stared out the rear window of the limousine as the traffic on 36th Street crawled toward the Midtown Tunnel. She checked her watch, impatient about getting to LaGuardia in time for her flight. There were always later departures to DC, but she had a speech scheduled that evening to a pharmaceutical convention at the Mayflower, and once the airport got backed up, she could spend hours sitting on the taxiway.
Beside her, Darrell Forster looked agitated. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen him like that. His smile had melted away as soon as the stranger left the office, and since then, his blue eyes had been lost in concentration. He’d said nothing as the two of them left the building together.
“So who was that man?” Saira asked.
Her voice had a precise, delicate quality, which mirrored her fragile appearance. People sometimes made the mistake of thinking she was weak, but Saira had a toughness that was not to be underestimated.
Forster’s head swiveled. He stared at her with surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “No one to concern yourself with.”
“He was asking about Varak. Why?”
“He was simply fishing for information. He knew nothing.”
“Still, if someone is investigating the institute? Perhaps we should find out if others have been contacted.”
“He knew nothing!” Forster insisted.
“Yes, all right. If you say so.”
Saira frowned and returned her attention to the streets as the limo inched forward. She had to come to New York often, but in truth, she disliked cities. The noise, crowds, smells, and crime gave her too many memories of her childhood. She’d grown up in the teeming squalor of Mumbai—far worse than anything in New York—but she’d used her intellect and work ethic to fight her way out of the slums. Eventually, as a scientist, she’d escaped to the rarefied world of American academia. Now, even though her research still took her around the world for months at a time, she preferred the serene grounds of the Georgetown campus. She could be by herself in her office. Read. Think. Listen to classical music. Put the hunger and disease of her childhood far behind her.
Disease.
Her whole life had been about the ravages of disease, from then until now.
A malaria epidemic had taken three of her siblings when she was ten years old. She could remember sitting by their shared bed, watching in horror as they died, their little bodies racked by seizures. That was what had set her on the course to become an epidemiologist, to study how diseases spread among people, and most of all, to promote a world in which the cures for deadly pathogens were available to those living in poor countries, not just rich countries. She’d come a long way in her life and was now wealthy and successful, but in many ways, she was still that starving girl swiping vada pav in the Mumbai street markets.
“What do you think he hoped to find out?” Saira asked, because she couldn’t shake the handsome stranger from her head. There had been something attractive and yet frightening about him. She’d met violent men in many corners of the world, and she knew the look of them, the way they sized up every situation and every person they met through the lens of potential threats. But this man was different. He had more in his eyes than coldness or cruelty.
“I have no idea,” Forster replied dismissively. “Varak is a billionaire. When you have that kind of money, someone is always looking to take you down.”
“And the institute?” Saira asked.
“You told him the truth. The institute is about defeating lies with facts. That’s our mission. We’re fighting the good fight here, Saira, but we can’t do that without money. Access. Power. That’s what Varak gives us.”
“Yes, of course.” Saira looked out the car window again. “But sometimes I wonder if we’ve gone too far. I’ve never doubted the ends we’re pursuing, but sometimes the means trouble me.”
“Our opponents are ruthless,” Forster reminded her. “We have to be ruthless, too.”
“Even if it means ruining people’s lives?”
“We simply uncover the truth. People without secrets have nothing to fear.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Saira agreed. Then after a pause, she added, “And that’s all, isn’t it, Darrell?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is simply the truth we uncover? That’s what they do in Frankfurt? There’s nothing else?”
His eyes narrowed. “Naturally. Why do you ask?”
Saira hesitated but said nothing more. Because she had a secret, too.
She hadn’t told Darrell or anyone else about the German girl who’d accosted her during a World Health Organization meeting in Oslo. That had been in December the previous year. They’d had only thirty seconds together before the girl disappeared, but that was enough time for her to deliver a warning.
My name is Louisa. I work at the institute in Frankfurt. It’s not what you think! It’s evil! Look into it, I’m begging you! Don’t tell anyone you talked to me, or they’ll kill us both!
Saira hadn’t seen or heard from the young woman again. However, she’d arranged to take a trip to Frankfurt not long after, and she’d toured the institute’s facility, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl. But she hadn’t seen her anywhere, and she’d found no evidence of anything happening in the building, other than IT workers sifting 24/7 through endless databases. The director had told her there was no one named Louisa working there. So Saira had written the young woman off as another fringe activist, trying to disrupt the work of the institute.
Until the girl’s picture had shown up in the newspaper a few weeks ago under a totally different name.
Deborah Mueller. An innocent tourist. A murder victim. But she was clearly much more than that. Since then, Saira had been replaying that meeting with the young woman over and over in her head.
Don’t tell anyone you talked to me. They’ll kill us both!
“Saira?” Darrell asked again. “Is something wrong? Why are you asking about Frankfurt?”
She smiled at Forster, but she realized, looking at his face, that she’d made a mistake saying anything at all. “It’s nothing. Oh, look, we’re finally at the tunnel. Maybe I’ll make my flight after all.”
“Oskar!” his friend Jochim called to him in a whisper from the adjacent stall in the toilet. “Oskar, I have a riddle for you.”
Actually, Jochim was not technically Oskar’s friend. The rules of the institute were very clear about that. There were to be no out-of-office friendships among the employees. No after-work beers in the Wochenmarkt, no Christmas shopping on the Zeil together, no phone calls, no texting, no contact of any kind. A violation was grounds for immediate termination. So Jochim was just a man who’d worked at the desk next to his for the last three years. Oskar didn’t know anything personal about his colleague, not where he lived or what car he drove or whether he was married or what his family was like. Even so, you couldn’t be complete strangers after three years. So they took turns trading jokes when no one was around to hear them.
“What riddle?” Oskar called through the toilet wall.
“What noise does a parachutist make when his chute doesn’t open?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“This!”
From the accompanying stall came an enormous splurt as Jochim emptied a full load from his loose bowels into the toilet. This was followed by the man’s raucous laughter.
“Oh, that’s bad,” Oskar told him, but he found himself laughing, too. Jochim was obese, bald, and crude, but he was also very funny.
Oskar finished his own necessities in the bathroom, and then he washed his hands and returned to the office before Jochim did. The layout of the eighth-floor space lacked any imaginative design. It was just a long, large rectangle, with private offices on one wall and dozens of rows of desks stretching from one end of the long building to the other. However, the top floor was high enough to give a view toward the Main River and the redbrick spire of the old Nikolaikirche.
This was the research headquarters of the Varak Institute, where Oskar had worked for three years. Their employment rules were strict, but if you were willing to put up with it, they paid three times what Oskar could make anywhere else in the city, and Oskar had the IT credentials to make a lot of money. As far as he was concerned, the quirks of the institute were worth it for the amazing salary. And given the sensitive work he did, he understood their obsession with security.
His small desk, next to Jochim’s, was located near the windows. From there, he could see the south bank of the river, where his apartment was. He liked living close by; he could walk to and from work simply by crossing the Alte Brücke and heading through the plaza toward Berliner Straße. The institute wasn’t fussy about hours. They had rules for everything else, but if you wanted to work thirty hours in a row at your desk without sleeping, that was fine. For a hacker like Oskar, it was paradise.
Oskar Vogel was a handsome man, thirty years old and just under six feet tall. He walked with an easy, athletic gait, and he played soccer on most weekends, which kept him in shape. His wavy blond hair was cut short, and he had very pale white skin and light blue eyes. His mouth was small, his jawline bony and square, and his ears jutted out a little too far from his head. He wore a crew-neck gray T-shirt and jeans.
He sat down at his desk, which had nothing on it except a keyboard, mouse, computer, and monitor. Personal items weren’t allowed. He tried to get back to work, but he found his gaze drifting to the empty private office thirty feet away. That had been Louisa’s office. Normally he would see her there, that intense face, those penetrating eyes, which softened when she stole a glance back at him. But she hadn’t been to the office in weeks. He was used to her mysterious trips; she’d come and go for days at a time, and she would tell him nothing about where she went or what she did. But this trip was different.
He knew better than to ask anyone in the institute about her. The last thing he wanted to do was admit that they’d been sleeping together for more than a year. If she ever did come back, she’d lose her job, and so would he.
But she wasn’t coming back. Oskar knew that.
Louisa was dead.
He’d only found out about it by accident. He’d been having a beer at an outdoor table in the Römerplatz, and an American businessman had left behind a copy of the New York Times that Oskar had grabbed. He’d glanced through it and then felt his heart stop when he saw a small article on page A14 about a woman tourist killed by a homeless man in Washington, DC. The passport photo printed in the paper was of a woman named Deborah Mueller, but with one glance, Oskar knew that it was Louisa Bell. His lover. His soon-to-be fiancée. She was dead, killed on a trip he knew nothing about, identified under an alias he’d never heard of.
He’d thought about nothing else since then. However, he also knew he had to be careful about looking for answers. The eyes of the institute were everywhere. They monitored his searches and outgoing messages. Louisa had hinted that the homes of the eighth-floor employees were all bugged, too. If you stepped out of line even once, they knew it.
Oskar forced himself to concentrate on his project again. Today it was a deepfake video. There was a far-right member of the Polish senate who’d been stirring up violent anti-immigration sentiment in the country and was beginning to poll at alarming numbers in the presidential race. Someone—Oskar didn’t know who, and he didn’t need to know—had filmed a homosexual interlude with a man who closely resembled the Polish politician. It was Oskar’s job to manipulate the video pixel by pixel until there was no way to discover that it had been faked. He was very good at it.
The politician would scream and protest, of course. He’d claim that he was being set up. They all did. But it didn’t matter. The distinction between reality and fiction was nothing but a blur these days, and the public had short attention spans. Even if the truth came out a few days later, half the people would still believe the lie, and the other half would have moved on to other things. Perhaps it was wrong, but Oskar had no problems taking down a pig who trafficked in hatred. If you played with fire, expect the fire to come for you, too.
He’d been working on the video for an hour when he heard someone call his name. “Oskar?”
When he looked up, he saw his boss, Heinrich Kessler, standing in the doorway of his office. Kessler gestured for Oskar to join him, and when he did, his boss shut the office door behind them.
Like the other workers, Kessler had no personal displays in his office. No photographs on the walls or the desk, nothing that would identify who he was outside the building. Kessler was a medium-height man in his fifties, who always wore a suit and tie. He had a round head, thinning brown hair parted on the side, and wore black glasses. Oskar couldn’t ever remember seeing the man smile, but that was common here. His boss wasn’t unfriendly, but there was typically no small talk in the institute.
“Tell me something, Oskar,” Kessler said, sitting down at his desk. “Do you like it here? You like the work?”
Oskar was surprised by the question. “I do.”
“It’s important work, yes? We amplify the facts, we suppress the lies.”
“Yes, we do,” Oskar replied, ignoring the irony of the fact that most of his daily work was spent on creating lies himself.
“The institute makes the world a better place.”
“I agree, sir.”
“Good.” Kessler pursed his lips, as if satisfied by Oskar’s answers. “I have a new project for you.”
“Okay. Well, the Polish job should only take another day or two, and then I’ll be free.”
“No, this one takes precedence. I want you to begin right now. It’s top priority and must be done immediately.”
“As you wish.”
“There is a journalist in Washington who is trying to take down the institute. I think you’ll agree we can’t allow that.”
“Of course,” Oskar said.
“You’re my best man, which is why I’m giving you this assignment.”
“Thank you, Herr Kessler.”
“Also, I would not normally tell you this, but you have a right to know why this particular project is so significant. This journalist is not what she seems. Her media credentials are a cover. She is working for others. She is part of a fascist organization that wishes to stop us at all costs. In fact, we believe she is responsible for the death of one of our colleagues.”
Oskar held his breath to avoid a hiss of shock. He had to restrain himself from glancing through the glass wall at the office next door.
“She lured our colleague to the United States,” Kessler went on, confirming all of Oskar’s worst fears. “She set up a meeting with her. The pretext was to threaten us with damaging information. Instead, it was a trap. Our colleague was murdered. The crime was covered up, false identities established.”
Oskar felt his hands squeezing into fists. “May I ask, Herr Kessler, which colleague are you referring to?”
Kessler nodded his head at the office next door. “You know Louisa?”
He struggled to keep his emotions off his face. “Only to pass her in the office. Are you saying she’s dead? And this journalist is responsible?”
“That’s right. So you see, Oskar, we must know who this woman is working for, and to do that, we need to discredit her. Isolate her. Destroy her. There can be no mercy on this one. She must be a pariah. Only then will she give up the others in the network.”
Oskar shoved down his grief and rage, and he kept his voice flat, almost disinterested. “Fine. I will handle it.”
“Good. I’ve sent you the woman’s information.”
“Do we have in-person resources in DC we can use for backup? And is our voice actress available?”
“At your disposal, as always.”
“Thank you, Herr Kessler. I won’t disappoint you.”
“I know you won’t.”
Oskar returned to his desk, his mind a blur of grief and rage. Louisa! This woman killed Louisa! Even after seeing the article in the newspaper, he’d prayed that it was a mistake, that this was a false story, like so many he’d planted himself. But no. It was real. His lover was dead, and the woman responsible had to pay!
Then he wondered with a flash of panic: Why did Kessler tell him that? It was so out of character for any kind of personal information to be shared.
Did they know?
Had they found out about the two of them? If they did, why did Oskar even still have a job?
But none of that mattered.
What mattered now was revenge for Louisa’s death.
He sat down at his desk in a frenzy and opened the file that Kessler had sent him, which was a one-page profile of the journalist, including a photograph. She was pretty, with messy cherry-red hair, smart dark eyes, and a sexy smile. But Oskar had learned working at the institute that evil could hide behind the prettiest of faces.
The journalist’s name was Abbey Laurent. Destroy her! No mercy!
Oskar began to type.