08 Cold Fury

Chapter Eight

Tris is forced to come to grips with her new life. Various people begin momentous shifts in the direction their lives are taking.

November 2000
Tris angled across Regent's Park.  She jammed her hands savagely into her pockets.  She'd snuck out shortly after Bethany had left and she'd been walking- wandering, really- without purpose ever since.  Unconsciously, she'd been avoiding cameras and security, the paranoia she'd been trained to keeping her guard up even though she was distracted.

It was a Friday morning, crisp and cold, the sun a weak star, too distant too provide much in the way of warmth despite the absence of the nearly perpetual drizzle.  As she scanned her perimeter again, she saw with annoyance that a couple uniformed officers were moving in her direction.  Tris wrapped her arms around her waist and hugged herself, waiting.  Standing still, she started to feel the cold- she should definitely have grabbed something warmer than the sweater she was wearing.  The bobbies ambled over and the one in the lead- a tall, broad-shouldered man- nodded good morning to her.

She tilted her head in acknowledgement.

"No school today, young miss?" he asked curiously.  Tris had no interest in attending classes today.  The two officers seemed completely relaxed; Tris was certain she could drop both of them and vanish before anyone was the wiser.  The fact that she actually considered that as a tactical option gave her a slightly queasy feeling.

"Not for me- I'm on vacation," she chirped.

"Oh- American?  How long're you here for?" he asked cheerily, the last vestiges of suspicion completely erased.

"I got a while," she admitted, letting her Midwestern drawl color her speech patterns.  "I'm staying with my Uncle Rory.  Thought I might take in the zoo, today."

"The London Zoo's all right," the officer smiled, "but you might want to bundle up before you spend too much more time outside.  The forecast is calling for dropping temperatures and we may be in for a bit of wet this afternoon."

"Oh, sure.  Thanks, officers!"  Yeah- I should definitely get in out of the cold, she thought as she waved goodbye to the retreating policemen.

*****

Marie hadn't been home in over a week.  Duncan Boyd had, instead, helped her to stay hidden.  The myriad of tricks and techniques used to fool the government- and anyone using them to do their snooping for them- into believing that they didn't exist was both plentiful and complicated.  A day after Marie's arrival, she'd overheard Duncan speaking with a man she didn't actually get to see.  They'd had an argument- apparently bringing her home was a serious breach of security protocols- but Duncan had, eventually, gotten his way.

Marie went through the latest batch of photographs and documents Duncan had brought home.  She no longer questioned where or how he got them- he never answered her anyway- but instead tried to see how this new information fit into the puzzle she was slowly piecing together.  From what she could see, Brody had never actually had any direct contact with Devin Andersen.  Actually, the only real connection between them was that they'd both been connected to Trista's case.

Since his work on the Boyd girl's case, Brody's work had gone downhill.  Not enough to get him fired, but the brilliance that had characterized his earlier career was gone.  In fact, looking at the paper he'd filed on subsequent cases and comparing it with his reports from previous cases, it was almost as if two different people were writing them.  The first person- the man who'd clawed his way up through the ranks of the FBI into a position of respect and authority- was smart, cagey, intelligent.  An expert investigator, cautious of rules and procedure, capable of making deductive and inductive leaps and then backing up and uncovering the evidence to support his conclusions.  The latter man used the same wording, followed procedure every bit as carefully, but displayed none of the spark or drive of the earlier Brody.  It's as if, she thought suddenly, one man is an expert on detective work; the other man is an expert on Detective Brody!

She put Brody's file aside and brushed her fingers across Andersen's rather thinner file.  Andersen was a spook's spook.  He visited the United States only rarely and never had any direct contact with anyone known to be in government employ.  He was paid through a slush fund that was so classified that the file describing the codewords needed to access the files was code word protected- an oubliette of hidden phrases, meanings, and deceptions that would take an army of expert cryptographers and accountants a decade or more to untangle.  She knew, now, that his position as the European section chief of the National Clandestine Service was legitimate, but she could not begin to discover what duties that title entailed, nor who he controlled from that lofty position.

She shook her head in frustration as a tall redhead entered the room with a couple mugs of steaming tea.  Kenzie Boyd seemed as different from her husband as night is to day- tall and slender where her husband was short and stocky; delicate, beautiful features, graceful as bone-china while her husband was rugged, scarred, and appeared almost to be hewn directly from rock with a chisel- but somehow the two fit together like a hand in a glove.  Kenzie placed a mug near to Marie's hand, smoothed her skirt and sat opposite her at the small table.  "You should take a break, detective," she said, her voice soothing and warm with concern.  "You can't solve it all yourself."

Marie snorted.  "I know it," she admitted, "but I'd like to solve at least some of it."  Kenzie's eyes flickered over the piles in front of Marie, resting very briefly on the last pile, the one that Marie had yet to finish going over.

"My baby…" she began, a hopeful note in her voice.

"Is alive and well, from all we can see," Marie answered.  You don't want to know the rest of it, she thought.  The evidence was sketchy at best, and there were the telltale signs that someone capable had been cleaning up the details, but there were a variety of crimes and dead bodies in that file- a staggering number.  Marie privately suspected that Tris had been involved in- was actually responsible for- the deaths of more than a dozen men, most of them in a spectacular bloodbath in, of all places, Seoul, Korea just a couple of weeks ago.  How did a girl of- she checked her memory- seventeen years suddenly turn into a mass murderer?

*****

The man wearing Mitchell Brody's life sighed.  He still couldn't seem to make it work, even after two years, and lately that woman- his partner- had been sniffing around places that were making him distinctly uncomfortable.  A little over a week ago she had stumbled across something that linked him to Andersen- nothing incriminating in itself- but far more information than she should ever have seen.  He'd decided to take action, then, and have her removed.  A quick, clean removal and he could stop worrying about her.

Something had gone terribly wrong.  His cleaners were found, dead, in the parking garage, their van smashed into a cement wall.  Felix was useless, having been blinded by pain and unconscious from the woman's three shots to his body.  It was just good that he'd been wearing his vest, otherwise he'd be dead, now.  The other operatives had been less lucky.  While his partner used a relatively small holdout pistol, three men on the ground had been killed by something more powerful- a military rifle, probably, in 7.62 NATO.  That meant that Cunningham had unexpected backup, and he didn't know where it had come from.

He was working on getting information from forensics, but he'd lost a lot of credibility in the bureau and was running up against a number of irritating roadblocks.  The clerk in front of him- a weasel-faced office rat named David Palmetto- was one such stumbling block.  "Look, Dave, do you know who I am?" he asked.

"Sure- Special Agent Mitchell Brody, hotshot investigator.  Everybody knows your jacket."

He grimaced.  Palmetto was determined to be difficult.  "Then you can understand why I'm interested in this case, right?  Felix claims that Marie shot him in the parking lot; if she's gone rogue, I want to know what turned her, and I want to know everything we have on what went down in the garage.  You can show me that, right?"

"No, I can't," Dave said stubbornly, sticking his jaw out.  "You're too close to this, Brody.  Drop it and go home, okay?"

"Come on," he wheedled, pitching his voice sweetly and persuasively, "it wouldn't hurt you- hell, we could keep it totally off the record, and no one would even have to know…"

Any lingering sense of humor or sympathy left Dave's face in a heartbeat.  "I'm reporting this conversation, Brody," he said, reaching for his desk phone.

The man wearing Mitchell Brody's life reached out and put his full weight down on the receiver.  "I wish we could have settled this civilly, Dave, I really do," he said.  Dave looked up, first in surprise, then in shock as the man he'd believed to be Mitchell Brody slid a long, slim knife out from beneath his bottom ribs and his lungs began to fill with blood.

*****

Ms. Kalen looked… Tris decided the best description would be worn, as if she hadn't slept for several nights and was struggling under a load too heavy for her to carry.  Susan hadn't always been gentle with Tris, but she'd always looked out for her.  Analytically, Tris knew this was part of being a good handler.  Ms. Kalen protected her as an asset, but, if required, she could spend her with barely a second thought.  Emotionally, though, Tris couldn't help but feel a little responsible for the additional lines on her handler's face.

The people here were careful not to let Tris overhear them talking, and they practiced exceptionally good tradecraft, as Tris was starting to learn it- they left no records out or unguarded, they used aliases and covers so that it was virtually impossible to know who was who, and, as far as she could tell, almost no one knew everything about any of the, she suspected, many different operations they were involved in.  Even so, she had managed to piece some information together- based on overheard snippets, suppositions, and shadowy suspicions.

She knew that she was part of a project that Andersen was personally overseeing, and that meant that it was considered extremely important.  She knew that specialists had been enlisted- people who were not part of the regular staff for the National Clandestine Service, such as O-Sensei, and the doctor who had been performing regular check-ups on her ever since she had arrived in England- and that their price was exorbitant in the extreme.  She knew next to nothing about the doctor, save that his specialty was definitely not pediatrics, but O-Sensei was quite possibly the single greatest personal combat instructor in the world- a master of tactics and strategy applied at both the individual and the field level and at every level in between.  And she also knew that O-Sensei was becoming increasingly unhappy with his job, although he disguised his feelings well.

She wondered- if she could figure these things out, how much more did the puppet-masters at the top of the organization know?

She realized Ms. Kalen had been speaking and had to rewind the conversation in her head to realize that a response was required.  "Yes, ma'am.  I… I needed to have some time to think on my own.  I'm sorry I disabled the surveillance in my room- I won't do it again."  That was a lie, she thought- there was no way she was going to leave them with eyes on her everywhere she went in her room; but she'd be more careful in the future, manufacturing a single plausible blind spot instead of removing all of it.

Ms. Kalen looked at her hard, her eyes trying to burrow into Tris's skull as if they could extract the truth by sheer will, but Tris was impassive.  Finally, Ms. Kalen sighed.  "Fine, Tris.  It's time for you to move on, anyways.  In one month you will pass your A-levels.  Yes, this is a bit unusual- you will be about six months early, actually- but it will be necessary because of the nature of the next part of your training."

"Yes, ma'am," Tris nodded, then added as an afterthought, "Ma'am?"

"Go ahead, Tris," Ms. Kalen prompted.

"It's just- something bad happened to Bethany while I was away on the last mission.  You remember the boy I told you about from the party?"

"Yes, I think so," she said, shuffling through her papers.  "Jon, right?  He tried to take advantage of you by using some sort of date-rape drug, only Bethany interrupted him.  So what?"

"He… hurt Bethany-" she wouldn't say raped, because that would make it even more real- "while I was in Korea.  I found out about it when I got back."  Ms. Kalen was watching her intently.  She swallowed, her tongue felt thick and dry.  "I killed him.  I- I think," she said, squirming slightly and blushing, "I kind of enjoyed it."

"Are you worried about that?" Susan asked, her attention sharpening, "that this Jon fellow deserved anything less?"

"No," Tris denied, shaking her head, "it's not that.  He was… well, he deserved it.  But I don't want something like that to happen again."  She hadn't just killed him.  She'd broken him, tortured him for hours until he was a sobbing, bleeding wreck, begging her for mercy.  In the end, when she'd finally twisted his neck past the breaking point, he'd stopped even trying to fight.  He'd been babbling, confessing to sins and crimes that Tris had known nothing about.  He'd stopped begging her to spare him altogether and was pleading for her just to end it.

"I see.  Hm.  Tris, I think I need to make this absolutely clear.  Bethany will cease to be your responsibility as soon as the next phase of your training begins.  You weren't responsible for what happened to her when you were out of town, either, do you understand?"

"Yes, but…"

"The Service has been monitoring her; if she had been in life-threatening danger, someone would have stepped in.  A decision was made- it was unfortunate for her, but necessary.  You will have nothing else to do with this, am I clear?"

Tris seethed.  "Yes, ma'am," she bit out, "very clear."  So why did her murder of the boy still disturb her so?

"Good," Ms. Kalen averred, all business again.  "The NCS will take care of this- there will be a cover up, but this is nothing we haven't dealt with before.  I'm glad you came forward when you did, though- these sorts of situations can be much more difficult to clean up once the police get their hooks into them."

She pulled a thick folder out from her desk and handed it over.  "This is a copy of the exams you will be taking in one month, as well as the rubrics that will be used to grade them.  Memorize them and prepare your answers; the papers may not leave this building.  We will have an examiner go over your answers to make sure that they are of a sufficient standard to pass the exams, but not so exceptional as to excite comment."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Very well.  You are released from your other duties save for daily academics and conditioning.  Was there anything else?"

"No, ma'am," Tris said after a pause.

*****

"Bad news," Duncan said without preamble.  He seemed to just appear in the room, half the time, moving with an unplanned stealth that belied a lifetime of rigorous training.  Marie looked up from the files in front of her.  "The Bureau finally put a BOLO out on you," Duncan finished.

Marie grimaced.  "We were expecting that," she commented.  "It's a pain in the ass, but hardly a surprise."

"Yeah, but the warrant for your arrest is," Duncan said, pulling out a sheaf of papers and handing it to her.  She scanned through the usual salad at the top- nothing surprising there, except, possibly, that the contact listed for information was Henry Bainbridge- another Vice detective, not ISS or homicide, as she'd expected.  She scanned over the case history- apparently she was under suspicion of working for Felipe Dominguez.  She tasted bile- Dominguez had been the rat she'd been trying to catch for five years, now; it was on one of the operations meant to nail him that a close friend of hers had been crippled, and she couldn't understand how anyone could actually believe she might be working for the sleaze.  Then she saw the other charges, and her breath caught in her throat.  She was suspected of stealing case files- the files regarding her involvement in the attempted murder of Felix Guzman- and the stabbing death of the officer in charge of records, Dave Palmetto, and was further a suspect in the shooting death of Special Agent Mitchell Brody just outside her own apartment, downtown.

"Jesus Christ," she breathed, finally, "I'm screwed."

"What're you going to do?" Duncan asked.

"I have to turn myself in," she started, then stopped.  "I can't.  I'm a suspected cop killer twice over, with an attempted cop murder on top of it- I wouldn't even make it to the holding cells before someone put a bullet in me.  I need to go underground- deep under."

"I can help with that," Duncan said, "but you're going to have to do me a favor in return…"

*****

Tris found herself making excuses to spend more and more time with Bethany over the next few weeks, going to her house to study, to help Bethany with her self-defense training, even to just hang out.  She relented from her self-imposed no-sparring, no-grappling rule to the point of allowing Bethany several actual full matches; when Bethany actually beat her in a point-scored match, she stopped the exercise and backed up.

"Okay, Tris," she panted, catching her breath, "what the Hell's going on with you?"

"I- what do you mean?" Tris hesitated.

"This is the third time we've sparred in two weeks; yesterday, I almost choked you out, and last Friday I landed a pretty solid kick…"

Tris winced in remembrance.  "Yeah," she agreed, not liking where this was going, "you're getting pretty good."  That, at least, was true- Bethany was getting better; stronger, more confident- despite the harrowing attack she'd had several weeks ago, and just generally more fit.

"Bullshit," the willowy blond retorted.  Although she had filled out quite a bit since the first time Tris had seen her, she was far from the plump, sweet innocent girl she had been in her earlier photos.

"No, really-" Tris denied.  Without warning, Bethany's hand shot out, flipping and slashing in a short, vicious arc at Tris's temple.  It was so fast and so unexpected, Tris didn't have time to think or plan; she simply reacted.

One moment, Bethany was standing, the next, her arm throbbed, her nose was bloodied, and she lay on her back on the floor.  Tris's finishing punch, driven with the force of her entire body dropping onto Bethany's prone form, had barely been averted as she twisted slightly and punched the floor hard enough to bruise her knuckles on the thick wrestling mats.

Bethany, who had been expecting a counter, had been tensed and ready- she thought- but had barely even registered the rapid series of counters and attacks, and hadn't even had time to register the pain before she was knocked to the floor.  She grinned through the pain, swiping carefully at her bleeding face.  Her nose was definitely broken, she realized.

Tris got off her friend and rose to her feet, white-faced, and offered Bethany a hand.  "What the hell was that?" she demanded angrily, "I could've killed you!"  Still could, she thought- now that the shock was wearing off, she was left with a kind of dull, throbbing rage.

"That's what I'm talking about," Bethany said, her voice coming out strangely muffled as she gingerly held her nose.  "I'm getting better, maybe… but you're amazing.  You've been letting me win."

Tris let the air out of her lungs in a puff.  "Okay," she said, finally, "maybe…"

Bethany nodded and winced again.  Even surprised and off balance, Tris hit hard.  "So… spill.  What's been eating you up?"

Tris thought about it, looking at her friend again and trying to really see her.  Bethany had been through a lot since she'd known her, but, more than that, she'd risen to the challenge.  She hadn't withdrawn inside herself, or erected a shell or barrier to keep out the world; she hadn't collapsed from the pressure, either, nor exploded and lashed out.  She was sure Bethany knew something was odd about her, but she never pressed and she was discreet about what she knew.  If anything, she thought, she was a better spy than Tris, who had trouble keeping her emotions in check.

"Okay," she repeated, "after you put some ice on that nose.  I'll tell you what I can."

As soon as Bethany left the room, Tris started a quick scan of the room.  She found a bug in the overhead light, another in the intake for the air conditioner.  She knew there was a bug in her cell phone and suspected there was one in Bethany's as well.  Assuming Andersen was using proper tradecraft- and she couldn't imagine that he wasn't- they would all be operating on different frequencies so as not to interfere with one another.  Absently, she walked into the bathroom and dropped her phone in the toilet.  She fished it out and left it on the sink, wrapped in a towel.

Returning to the workout room, Tris moved the large fan so that it projected air across and into the floor intake- not a perfect solution, she judged, but the static should cover virtually any conversation noises.  Finally, she unscrewed the light switch with her multi-tool and disconnected the wires, rendering anything at the other end of the switch, like the bug, inoperative.  She'd probably catch Hell for it, and she didn't doubt that Andersen would have an agent in to correct the problem, probably in under an hour, but it would give her the privacy she needed for the short term.

Bethany came back, holding an icepack wrapped in a towel over her nose.  "Okay," she said, "give."

Tris sat her down near the fan and spoke in a low voice.  "First, tell me what you remember about the time you were kidnapped," she demanded.

Bethany looked at her oddly.  "Not much," she admitted, "but I remember the day I was rescued."  She took a steadying breath.  "The day you rescued me," she added with conviction.

Tris swallowed and nodded.  "You never saw my face," she noted, not denying the truth of Bethany's accusation, "how did you know it was me?"

The blond girl smiled enigmatically.  "I would know you blindfolded," she said simply.  When Tris looked at her, she shook her head.  "I don't know how, but… we're connected, somehow.  I'll always know you."

Tris considered this and, finally, nodded.  "A man I know would say that you have a gift- you see to the heart of things."  Bethany twitched an uncertain smile and Trista gave her a sympathetic nod.  "You understand that it isn't the sort of gift that makes your life easier."

Bethany nodded.  "It makes things much harder, usually."

Trista smiled in grim concordance.  "Look at me, then.  What do you really see?"

Bethany sighed.  "Not what you see," she admitted finally; "you think you are… broken inside."  Trista jerked slightly.  This was not what she'd expected.  Bethany groped for the right words.  "You… you see someone who is shattered.  You're trying to fool the world into believing you're a person, complete and whole.  You fear the death of your parents has left you hollow."

Tris shook her head.  She'd wanted to confront Bethany with the truth; she'd never expected that she would face a mirror so directly, so powerfully.  Bethany's voice continued, drilling deeper, a trance-like auger that could be neither silenced nor denied.  "You fear that your experiences have left you unfinished, half a person, weak and fractured, prone to inconvenient breakage.

"Damaged goods, useful for only one thing."  Tris looked up and was caught by Bethany's huge, blue eyes, pinned as if a butterfly to page.

Bethany continued, her voice relentless.  "I see all that, and I see something more:  I see that you are, more than anything else, a hero."

"Bethany, I…" Tris' voice hitched and she stopped, drawing in a ragged breath.

"Shh," Bethany smiled, reaching out and gently touching her friend's lips.  "You were going to tell me what's been bothering you, remember?"

Tris squared her shoulders and quickly jerked her chin.  "Yeah.  I… I'm not going to be around forever," she said gruffly, "I'm going to be leaving soon."

Bethany nodded.  "I know."

"I can't- I won't be able to protect you, anymore-"

Bethany chuckled and dabbed at her broken nose, eyes twinkling, and Tris sucked in a breath to protest, but the blonde held up a hand.  "Is that what you thought you were doing?" she asked quietly.  Tris nodded.  "That was never the point- you were teaching me to stand on my own feet.  Now we get to see what kind of a teacher you are."

"I know," Tris finally admitted, after an uncomfortable pause, "but you- you're not ready.  What happens if you get hurt again?"

"Then I get hurt," Bethany remarked drily, "and then I get back up and I heal.  It's called growing up."

Tris slumped.  "Hey," Bethany soothed, "this isn't the end for us.  I'll find you again."

There was a long silence, then a pounding on the front door.  The Kazmirs' butler answered the door and there were muffled voices from the lobby.  Tris could guess what it was about- or, at least, what the men were really there for.

Bethany smiled wanly and held her gaze.  "I promise," she said.