“Damn.” Her expression was pinched. Too much tension there, he thought. He’d known Paulie for years, almost since before the Clan survivor’s exile in the Commonwealth: she’d been a protegé of Miriam herself. “That’s not good. I’m not sure I can cope if it falls below five minutes.”
He took a mouthful of soda. As ever, it tasted oddly alien—almost familiar, but not quite right, too sweet. It was the high-fructose corn syrup they put in everything, he decided; it tasted weird if you were used to cane sugar. “You don’t have to. You do a good and valuable job here, but if you think they’re onto you, or if it’s too stressful, all you have to do is say so: we can arrange an extraction to time line three whenever you want. There’s no reason for you to risk detection.”
She shook her head, very slightly. “I have family. Two nieces and a nephew who just married.” She paused. “Also, this is my country. It’s been good to my family, and good for me: I can’t just leave.”
He put the drink down, allowed his bag to slide down to the floor by the side of the booth. “Nevertheless, the offer remains open. She said I was to remind you that extraction is the lesser evil, compared to spending the rest of your life in a supermax prison cell for assisting supposed terrorists.” He paused. “I don’t like to be the bringer of bad news, but the risk level is becoming unacceptable. We’re going to have to stop meeting like this soon, possibly in as little as three months. We can work out another protocol for risk mitigation in the short term that’ll keep things going a bit longer, but…” He shrugged.
“I don’t want to relocate if I can avoid it.” She twitched: her expression was haunted. “I know how stupid that sounds. I ought to take you up on your offer: if I was sensible, I would. I mean, you’re winding down your operations over here, aren’t you? But part of me keeps thinking it’s about me. That I’m too old and unstable and you’re just saying this to cut me loose gently.”
“Eighteen million lives,” he said. “That’s what the antibiotic factories bought us.” The factories whose plans she’d researched and packaged for her world-walking employers, years earlier. “You asked last time, so I went and looked it up. Paulie, we’re not firing you. We owe you too much.”
She relaxed very slightly. “You’re just flattering me now.”
“There is a faraway land where you are known and honored as a hero of the revolution.” He didn’t have to fake sincerity. Then force of habit prompted him to glance at his antique windup wristwatch: “Nine minutes left.”
“The shopping bag is full,” she said. A moment later he felt something nudge against his ankle: a messenger bag, identical to his own, but considerably heavier. “I was unable to obtain a couple of the items on the list: I hope the substitutions are appropriate.”
“Thank you,” said the spy, reaching down to move her bulging bag closer to his feet. “They almost always are; you should know that by now.” Paulette was a very experienced supplier: she knew exactly what interested Hulius and his bosses. He nudged his own bag toward her. It was empty but for a block of increasingly useless $20 bills and the usual burner phone, battery physically disconnected, with a shopping list stored in its memory. When she got home she’d turn it on and use the stored credit in it to purchase items on the list, whereupon she’d arrange for delivery to a friendly local bodega. When the job was done she’d turn the phone off again for good, using a hammer. Once sterilized with acetone, the fragments could be safely flushed down a storm drain.
“They’ve discontinued the specific power supply model required for item eleven. I ordered a replacement device,” she said.
“Thank you.” He smiled for her and tried to put some warmth into the expression. Isolation took its toll on the sanity and sense of self-worth of the long-distance agent. “I really mean that. What you do here is making a huge difference. More than you can imagine.”
She sighed pensively, picked up her glass, and drained it. “I should go now,” she said.
He checked his watch. Four minutes remaining. “Yes, I think so.” He stood up and shouldered the messenger bag: it was far heavier than the one he’d walked in with. “The next rendezvous is in memory. Queens, I think. I’ll take the front entrance, you take the back.”
“Goodbye, Hulius,” she said, sounding sad. “Give my best to Miriam.”
“I will,” he replied. “Good luck, Colonel.” He stood and left, heading toward his bicycle.
The spy watched through the window for a couple of minutes, until she could stand the tension no longer. Rising, she walked to the back of the diner and then through a door, the exit into the alleyway behind. The cameras overlooking the dumpsters had been carefully tagged with graffiti the week before: blinded by paint. Nobody saw her leave.
Fifteen years of my life for eighteen million lives, she thought. From anyone but Miriam’s messenger she wouldn’t have taken it: she’d have sneered. The offer of extraction and a fresh start in a new world felt like a cynical joke. Who would she be, over there? A fifty-year-old spinster with no family and no life, just a pension and a medal to wear at alien parades: a life sacrificed on the altar of an undeclared war. Whereas this was her country: it had taken in her great-grandparents, the GI Bill had put her father through college, and she’d grown up and lived her entire life here. The thought of moving away was almost unbearable. Then the claustrophobic threat of exposure, the fear of omnipresent surveillance, closed in on her once more. Sometimes it felt like a noose around her neck, threatening to strangle the breath in her throat. Sometimes she wanted to scream. Is this all there’s ever going to be for me? Paulette wondered. Where did it all go so wrong?
PALACE OF THE PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES, NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, JULY 2005
Forget musketry. Forget aviation carriers. You’re going to need washing machines. Lots of washing machines.