She’s sitting on her bed when her new phone rings.
“Bad news,” says her soldier. “He’s gone to ground in his new offices, and there’s practically a battalion in the parking lot. I’ve never seen a non-state principal with that much security, and I served five years in Pashtunistan.”
Of course it’s like that—she’s already sent Parthenon most all of her savings, but it couldn’t be as easy as making a call and beggaring herself. “Could someone, say, sneak in?” she asks, trying to hide her despair.
“No. Too many drones in the air. It would be difficult under the best of circumstances, given that the building stands alone in the middle of several acres of empty parking lot.”
“What about a frontal assault?”
“Prohibitively expensive. That kind of thing is only really practical for the great merchant princes. Moreover, a dust-up is one thing, but no matter how well connected you are you can’t just start a ground war in the U.S. proper, not in the coastal cities, and hope to have a future.”
Just room tone on the line as she tries to see how to work from the givens of the moment to Cromwell’s violent end. She could try to hack a military weapons satellite, but that’s a counsel of despair—she’d almost certainly fail, and if she somehow succeeded she’d be the focus of the state’s unappeasable wrath and probably live out her life at an extraterritorial black site in a hermetically sealed box. If she could somehow lure him to Greece, Fabienne’s old lover might have him disappeared; she could send him a ticket for Athens, coach class, and a pass for the Acropolis.
“Why are you laughing?” asks her soldier.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “Are his troops armored?”
“Of course.”
It’s a potential weak point, though by now they must know she’s coming.
“What if I neutralized his soldiers and his drones?”
“They are many.”
“But if I did?”
“Then I’m your man.”
*
She dreams she’s in an antiquarian bookshop in the Back Bay, an atlas pressed into her waiting hands as someone says, “This is what you need.” The atlas is unwieldy, lovely, perhaps eighteenth century—waft of old paper as she opens it at random to a gilded mappa mundi, sees the faded olive of the plains, the black type on the spines of mountains, the rivers’ dendritic blue threads. The abandoned central latitudes are colored in washes of red aquarelle, the sites of dead cities marked in mottled bone white, and tiny silver circles gleam in LA, Sydney, Tokyo, what’s left of Costa Rica, though she can’t quite tell what they mean, and there, a fifth one, smaller than the rest, high among the towers of the city of Hong Kong.
The silver circles fill her eyes though their significance eludes her and it’s only as she realizes that this is just a dream, and the circles an empty form, that she remembers.
There was a report on W&P’s servers, glimpsed in passing in the course of her assault, and it’s right there in her other memory but she’d somehow till now overlooked it. “I traced the phone’s traffic,” wrote Andy Simoni. “The exercise was cut short, but it’s communicating with servers in LA, Australia, Tokyo, and Central America. I duly monitored the traffic on these nodes—all were in contact with the offshore server that’s been sending us email. It seems reasonable to infer that these four nodes are the points of origin of the stranger’s communication.” There are the nodes’ network addresses and GPS coordinates. Cromwell annotated the report: “Good job. Now leave them alone. No monitoring, no interference, no anything that might offend them or even come to their notice. I’m saying the same to all my people. Hiro will take anyone who doesn’t listen. Please attend meticulously to my orders, as I’m entirely serious.”
Now she’s falling down into deeper levels of sleep but somewhere she’s smiling because she knows she’ll retain this wonder, this insight, her opening.
*
She sits up in bed. Her phone is ringing. The bedside clock reads 5:37 but it doesn’t say a.m. or p.m. and she’s not sure if it uses military time.
“Don’t be mad,” Philip says, when she fumbles the phone to her ear. “I made Maya give me this number. I had to browbeat her. She was drunk, and knew my loyalty.”
“Philip,” she says blearily, glad to hear his voice, but already this chink in her security.
“Cromwell’s office is an armed camp now,” he says. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“I heard about that,” she says.
“Really?”
“A … an employee told me. A mercenary, actually. A killer, I think. I’m keeping strange company.”
“Tell me about that. In fact, tell me the whole deal. Last time we spoke you were coming to my house, in fear of your life, but you never actually showed up. I know you’re private, I try to be discreet, I never ask you for anything, but come on.”
“I wish you hadn’t called Maya,” she says.
“I have to try to make new friends, as my old ones are so disengaged.”
“Philip.”
“You’re right. Sorry to interfere. When you’re killed I’ll just have my secretary send flowers to your grave. Plastic ones. Few, and botanically incorrect.” The lightness of his irony is forced, which means she’s really wounded him, but even so it’s in her mind to just hang up—she has enough to deal with, and her silence was partly for his benefit, but that’s not really honest, and in fact she has kept him at a distance, and here he is, still trying. With a sense of moving a great weight she tries to make herself apologize but the best she can do is “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s act like I believe you so you can tell me what’s going on. Maya wouldn’t be specific but I got the sense it’s a bad scene.”
“I’m in…” she says, and as she’s about to tell him she remembers the atlas, the nodes, Cromwell’s orders that they be left alone. It seems reasonable to infer that these four nodes are the points of origin of the stranger’s communication. A plan arises fully formed in her mind—she’ll go to a node, break in, send email to Cromwell as the stranger. She could tell him to move his troops, then send Parthenon in for the kill, but no, her true intentions would be too obvious—Cromwell has limited leverage but isn’t stupid. She needs some reasonable pretext for Cromwell to leave himself open, but what does he want so badly he’d grasp for it blindly?
“But don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” Philip says, and she’s being rude, again, and she’s already unworthy of his loyalty. The words “Magda to my Cromwell” arise in her mind, a thought that shames her, but she remembers Magda’s illness, Cromwell’s despair, the university he’s founding in her honor, and then, like a gift, she has it—she’ll make Cromwell expose himself by offering him Magda’s life.
“Actually, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “You do a lot of business abroad, right?”