Iceweasel was so distracted by the thought of a single-use automobile that she almost forgot about the police interceptor. Then its doors clunked open and she plunged her hands into her parka’s pockets—lined with soft fleece—and bit down her rising panic.
The woman who got out of the interceptor was middle aged, in a duffel coat and mud-spattered yellow rubber boots. She was Asian—Chinese maybe. When she looked them up and down, her fleece earmuffs slid and some of her gray-streaked black bob came loose and blew in the wind.
“Weapons?” She had a strong voice, unaccented, commanding.
“None. But if you have any, I would like to negotiate with you for them.”
The woman pursed her lips. “Smart-ass. In, before we freeze.”
Nadie walked to the interceptor and made to get in, waved impatiently at Iceweasel: “You first, come on.”
Moving like she was in a nightmare where you can’t stop yourself from going into the room where the monster waits, she drifted to the interceptor, stooping to enter. She swallowed panic at the smell, which was purely tactical, eau de zip cuffs and ruggedized interfaces and body armor. The older woman entered from the other side, and then Nadie came in behind her and she was sandwiched in the middle. She stared at the heavy plexi separating the passenger compartment from the front cop compartment. There were grommets set into the floor, walls, and ceiling, molded into the bodywork. For restraints. She swallowed once more.
“Calm, calm. Come on, no need for all this.”
“She’s shaking like a leaf. Young woman, there’s no need. I used this car because it was the fastest, most secure means of transport at my disposal. You aren’t under arrest. You aren’t being kidnapped or rendered, or being taken to a lonely country lane where you’ll be killed, your body slid into a trench—”
“This is supposed to be reassuring?” Nadie’s tone was bantering. This spooky shit was her element, rendezvouses in commandeered official vehicles in ghost towns.
“Fine. The point, Ms. Redwater, is that you are perfectly safe and have no cause to worry. My name is Sophia Tan. I know your father, of course, and I know your uncles better.”
The name rang a bell. Iceweasel studied Tan’s face. It was familiar.
“You were … deputy premier or something?”
She laughed. Her smooth skin sprouted laugh lines. “No, dear, I was attorney general. The Clement years. We met, though I had forgot about it and I suppose you did, too. But my social diary doesn’t lie. You were a schoolgirl, a charity event for something your uncle worked on, the scholarship fund for Upper Canada College.”
“You’re right, I don’t remember. I hated those things.”
“Me too.”
She was warming up. She unzipped her parka, took deep breaths. Nadie looked from her to Tan.
“Onto the business at hand,” Tan said. She touched her fingertips together in rapid succession. “Evidentiary.” A line of red lights along the compartment’s ceiling began to pulse. “Everything we say and do now is being recorded on tamper-evident storage. The car will transmit a hash of the video to a federal data-retention server at ten-second intervals. Everything we say is admissible in any court in Canada or any OECD nation. For the record, I am Sophia Ma Tan, Social Insurance Number 046 454 286. Ms. Redwater, please identify yourself.”
She cleared her throat. “Natalie Lilian Redwater, Social Insurance Number 968 335 729.”
“Ms. Redwater, when you attained your twenty-first birthday on July 17, 2071, you came into full possession of your family trust, a copy of which I obtained from the Public Trustee. I have a hard copy of the trust documents here.” She retrieved a plastic document folder from a pile by her feet and held it up, flipped the page and did so again, repeating the process forty times. Iceweasel’s eyes glazed.
At last, she was given the papers. They were vaguely familiar—she’d signed a set of documents on her eighteenth birthday, with her father and someone from the family law office, a Bay Street white-shoe firm called Cassels Brock. The young woman from the firm made a point of explaining each document in detail, seeking verbal confirmation of her comprehension at set intervals, while a bulky, sealed evidentiary camera peered at them. This was a reversal of that process, undoing what she had done.
“Ms. Yushkevich, please identify yourself.”
Nadie had slipped smoothly into waiting, that relaxed attention/inattention she’d had during the long stretches of guard duty at the start of Iceweasel’s imprisonment. Now she came to life like a machine woken from sleep-state: “Nadiya Vladimirovna Yushkevich. Belarusian passport 3210558A0101. Bahamian national ID number 014-95488.”
The rest of it was call-and-response, orchestrated flawlessly by Tan, with endless professional patience for bureaucratic ritual. She referred periodically to a long checklist, made them re-do any step that was less than flawless. Once, Iceweasel stumbled six times in a row over the complex wording of her statement of noncoercion and mental capacity. Tan gave her two precisely counted minutes to calm herself before giving her the wording again. Iceweasel got it perfect.
As their throats ran dry in the heated car interior, Tan produced waterskins, sipping at her own, pinching it shut and tucking it on the bench between her and Iceweasel.
“That’s that, then.” At last. The sun had set. The sky was murky with low cloud. The rising moon visible as a dull glow above the tree line. “End evidentiary.” The red lights went out.
“Won’t my dad’s lawyers know we’ve done this?”
“Oh yes,” Tan said. “I’ve made very powerful enemies today. Ms. Yushkevich and I have an arrangement that compensates me adequately for that.”
In the dim light of the compartment, it was impossible to read either face.
“Now what?” She remembered the woman’s joke about dumping her body, realized if that was in the cards, now would be the time. “Time to bump me off?”
“Certainly not,” Nadie said. “When this is challenged in court, any sign of foul play will make my case much harder.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” Tan said, “we like you. Nadie spoke very highly of you.”
She didn’t know what to think. Nadie was a killer ninja super-spy—far as Iceweasel could work out, Nadie viewed her as a piece of complicated, delicate furniture.
“I like her, too,” she managed.
Tan did something with her fingers and the windows depolarized, showing the true view of the outside, not a video feed. The smudgy sky, the black silhouettes of the winter trees, the crumbling buildings.
“You have everything?” she said to Nadie.
“Food, water, power, if you have them,” Nadie said.
“Just as you requested.” She nudged a backpack on the car’s floor with her toe.
“Phones? Clean ones?”