Chapter 3 San Vicente — First Come, First Served

Arya's POV

The terminal had one working jet bridge and a customs officer who never once looked up from his phone. The heat came through the doors flat and wet, and it sat on my forearms at exactly the temperature I remembered from the last time I stood on this ground, which had been four days after the sky turned, when the runway was under a foot and a half of water and the terminal was a burnt shell and the lobby I waded through looking for a generator had already drowned.

This time the lobby had orchids in it and a man in a blazer offered me a cold towel. I took the towel and said thank you, because that was the job.

The cab driver complained about cruise ships for twenty minutes. I told him I was in town for the energy summit, and he said everybody was, and I agreed with him and did not correct him, and he decided I was a nice young woman with a boring job, which was two-thirds of the disguise working by itself. He dropped me at the most expensive hotel on the waterfront for eleven dollars.

Recon cost me twenty minutes and one cup of coffee I did not drink. Cerebral overdrive was new and shallow, thirty meters of usable return and no more, but thirty meters covered a lobby, a mezzanine, and the service corridor behind the kitchen. Six on the detail. Two vehicles, one armored and one not. Out at 9:40, back at 2:15, same route, same stop on the corner for coffee nobody drank.

I wrote it into the notes app and put one line under it.

Easier than an alpha class.

That said more about the last ten years than it said about Makarov.

The summit's second afternoon put him in the top-floor parlor at two, and the kitchen sent a cart up at twenty to.

I went in through the service corridor forty minutes ahead of it, put the server in the linen closet with the towels and her wrists done up in cable ties, and came back out in her uniform with my hair under her cap. It was the nicest place I put anybody all week. Three camera dead zones sat on the route the kitchen staff already used, and I did not have to guess at any of them, because I had watched them blink on the way in.

Makarov drank longjing and nothing else, one cup, at the same half hour, and had done it for years.

The toxin was colorless and moved fast enough that a man would get the cup back to the saucer and not much further. It had gone into the fold eleven hours earlier in a small sealed vial, and when I took it out at the pantry sink the liquid was exactly as clear and exactly as cold as the moment I mixed it.

Two days of testing had proved that the fold held time. The only thing I had used it for so far was keeping a rack of ribs edible, and now it was a delivery system. I decided not to think about that too hard and poured the tea.

He was a decent-looking man with the easy face of somebody who had not been told no in a long while. He said something into the room in English that I did not catch and did not need to, in the tone of a man pricing furniture, and I dipped my head the way hired help does and rolled the empty cart back out to the pantry.

Three minutes later the chair went over.

The guards did better than I gave them credit for. Six men, no shouting, straight into lockdown on the corridor doors like somebody had actually trained them. I took the first one coming out of the parlor with the tactical knife and put him against the wall without letting him make a sound, and I had the other five inside four minutes, in a stairwell, in a service hall, and once in a laundry room where the machines were loud enough to cover everything I needed covered.

No talent in any of it. The fold was a warehouse, not a weapon. That function was still a theory sitting in a binder I had never opened, in a cabin I could walk into any time I wanted and did not, and ten years of the other world did the rest.

The key fob was in his inside jacket pocket. The wound was where I wanted it. I photographed both, face and entry, and sent it, and Junior Maddox answered in six seconds with YES in capitals and three American flags. I had never met the man in person, and on the strength of that text I intended to keep it that way.

Then I walked into a supply closet with no camera on the door and stepped out of the world.

The phone had four bars inside the fold, which I had stopped finding strange on the second day. The wire had posted while I was standing in the pantry: sixty million on confirmation, four tranches, exactly as written. That put me at a hundred and ten on the sheet.

I ate the last of the ribs while I waited for the hotel to turn itself inside out, and they came out hot, and the butter had not moved, and I gave the parlor a full hour before I went back into the corridor. Whatever was happening up there was not going to be improved by me standing around watching it.

I went out through the service corridor the way I came in, put the uniform back in a laundry bin on the way down, and took the soft car from the third level of the garage out to the south end of the island.

The storage district sat at the south end of the island, held by three offshore conglomerates in three tax domiciles with three identical disaster plans that all came down to the same thing: a great deal of nothing.

The maps I was working from were ten years old, but coastlines do not move and vault drawings had been a matter of public record long before anyone thought to lock them up, and a fault line does not care where a company is incorporated.

The perimeter ran a two-man loop every eleven minutes, private contractor, bored, and I did not have to touch either of them.

The first two vaults did not cost me much. The third had four generator sets that would not clear the door frame assembled, so I took them apart with a wrench and patience and lost twenty minutes to it.

I did not inventory any of it. Standing on top of a loaded fault line is a poor time to go looking for the limits of your own storage.

When I finished, I stood on the bare floor of the third vault with the pallet marks still in the dust, and the arithmetic did the rest by itself. Three days after the Aurora Pulse, the seabed under that building would give way, leaving these aisles underwater.

Now it sat on the black dirt beside the spring, and the spring threw its own light across the crates, and nothing in there was going to spoil.

The truck was in the hotel's underground garage where the valet had parked it in the shade, because the owner had paid for shade.

Alpine Armoring, B7 glass, close to four tons of diesel and steel, built for men who expected to be shot at inside cities. I had seen this exact truck once before, sitting at an abandoned fuel stop off a Colorado highway with a pack of aberrants using the front fender for a scratching post. The glass had held. The people inside had not.

I sat down on leather that still smelled new. Rico was going to want to see it, and then he was going to want to take it apart, and I was looking forward to both.

I bought a bottle of water at the only shop still open and sat on the curb outside it until the sky went gray, which is what dawn looks like when it has not committed to anything yet. The island had until the Pulse—and the storage district had three days after that. I did not intend to spend one of them on it, but an hour on a curb cost me nothing and I had already taken the last thing off the rock worth taking.

The first flight out went to Miami, and I slept through most of it and woke with my forehead against the window and the water below going on and on.

At cruise altitude I opened the notes app and wrote the log the way I wrote it every time.

Makarov: paid in full.

Truck: in the fold.

San Vicente storage district: three vaults, cleared, nothing left standing.

Next: Horizon International, Gulf of Mexico, and the private army that came with it.

Then I read the number back the way I read every number, and put the phone face down on the tray table.

Eighty-four days, and not one of them to spare.