Tuesday November 28 2006
Boulder
20:52 Hours

"Well," said Alicia, raising her wineglass to her lips. "Here we are again."

"Here we are again," said Christie, gazing at the older woman over the flickering jar candle in the middle of the square table.

"Yup," said Mike Loud, on the side between them. He hoisted his tapered glass filled with foaming amber liquid. "At least this time you picked a place that serves decent beer."

"Didn't know it served beer, actually," said Alicia. "I was just looking for a place we wouldn't be likely to run into anyone we know."

Loud made a show of looking around the tiny saloon, whose seating consisted of four card-sized tables and a bar with six stools. The place was so small that he could hear the toilet flush in the men's room, followed by water running in the sink. The man behind the bar was close enough to necessitate lowering their voices when discussing sensitive topics. "You did good. I didn't think there were places like this left anywhere. Anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, anyway."

A large man came out of the bathroom and sat at the table's last empty chair: Ernesto Castro, another of Colby's security men. "Surprised it's open past nine. This is the kind of watering hole where the same ten guys come in every day on their way home from work to grab ass and gossip for a few hours, get achispado and walk a block to their front doors for dinner and bed. Not someplace you'd take a date." The big Cuban eyed the two women. "Which one of you am I supposed to be dating again?"

"Let's leave it open to question," said Alicia. The two men were cover, supplied by Frank to provide chaperonage of a sort. Not only did they give the two women an excuse to meet, they provided a reasonable explanation for their secrecy, since Christie and the two security men were technically members of the same Directorate, and she was risking a black mark in her service record by dating one of them - neither Loud nor Castro actually outranked her, but they were definitely senior, and they were her putative boss's bodyguards besides. But, while the men were privy to whatever the two women might discuss, the meeting was entirely between Christine and Alicia.

"Director Santini sends his regards," Christie said. "He says things are ready to go at MacLean, and wants to know if he can provide you any assistance."

"Which is Benito's way of asking when we're going to get our asses moving," Alicia said with a little smile. "Remind him that we're working under Director Baiul's nose, not a thousand miles away in our own little fortress surrounded by loyal subordinates. And we've got the hardest part of the job besides. If we need help, and he's actually willing and able to provide it, we'll let him know."

The girl scoffed. "You two must go way back to get away with talking to him like that."

"Known him longer than Jack," she replied. "I was working for Ben when we met." Alicia and Christie's common ex-lover had been a cautious subject at first, but more than two years of association and shared danger had made them comfortable with each other, regardless of topic. "He has more confidence in people who stand up to him when he gives them grief, so long as they don't argue his orders with him."

"I'll have to remember that." Christie turned her glass by the stem between thumb and forefinger. "So, anything on those leads you mentioned last time?"

"Not with the researchers. That's a brick wall." Alicia tipped up her glass and emptied it; Mike obligingly picked it up and headed to the bar. "The active ones are sealed up tighter than the gold in Fort Knox. The retired ones aren't locked up, but they're too closely watched to approach. I heard an unconfirmed story about one geezer who was asking questions and trying to get in touch with the other retirees a while back - years ago, actually. They shut him down hard, and he disappeared shortly after. He's probably dead."

"What about the research? Director Santini thinks that might be easier to lay hands on than the scientists."

"You'd think so, but remember, that tech is the main source of IO's income, and part of its power base as well. Any working models and prototypes are cached at several very secure sites, as well as the research documentation, which resides on computers and storage devices that aren't connected to any network. It would take an army to penetrate one of those facilities. If-" Alicia studied her tablemate's poker face. "He's not."

"He doesn't tell me," Christie said, lifting her glass to her mouth. "But I'm sure he's considering it, if you can uncover the locations."

Mike returned with a round, the stems of the wineglasses gripped carefully between his fingers. "Turns out the place does close at nine. I talked him into keeping the doors open another hour. Good?"

"Should be plenty. Thanks." Alicia eyed the barkeep just a dozen steps away, who seemed to be very busy wiping out clean glasses and arranging bottles on the shelves, studiously ignoring his customers. "How did you do it?"

"Well I'm sure the fifty helped," he said, seating himself again. "But I think he's got the idea that, if I had another hour, I might get you drunk and trusting enough to go home with me."

Castro snorted into his beer, sending a teaspoonful of foam across the table. Alicia said, "I'm sure he came up with that all by himself. So, that's how you boys have us divvied up?"

"Well, Chris and Ernie seem like a matched set. Rough and ready, you know? We're more the intellectual type. Sensitive."

"Christie has a degree from William and Mary," she said. "You're a cardsharp."

"Hey, I do a lot of philosophizing while I'm watching suckers trying to draw to an inside straight." His chin lowered. "And you've got the look of somebody who asks herself a lot of questions."

"Ahem," she said. "Let's not waste our hour's reprieve. Back to business. Christie, the sites' locations aren't actually that secret. Too many people involved with guarding and maintaining them. We have them all – well, almost all. But they're not easy to get to. Most of them are on military reservations, desert land in Nevada and California. Not only are they guarded by IO, the sky and ground for miles around will be watched and patrolled by one branch or other of the armed forces. The uniforms probably don't know what that facility on their property is all about, but they know who's authorized to go in and out, and the clearance protocols are elaborate. Any assault you launch is unlikely to have surprise on its side."

"Well, like I said, I'm sure he's thinking about it. But Plan A is still eroding Ivana's power base by publishing proscribed tech, using picked IO researchers as front men. I doubt storming a research facility with Razors or X-troopers is Plan B, or even C. It would mean open war between Boulder and MacLean. He doesn't want that."

"God, no. It would be absolute chaos. Things would escalate out of control in no time flat."

"Speaking of things spinning out of control." Christine locked eyes with the Psy Ops agent. "I heard something this afternoon, about Colby and Nicole Callahan." She looked at the faces of Castro and Loud. "It's true. How bad?"

"For him? Pretty bad," Alicia said. "But it was just fun and games for her. He's not under suspicion. She didn't question him. If he had told her anything, we'd all be dead or in cells already."

"I also heard," she went on, "that she's planning on making him a regular thing." She searched their faces again. "You didn't know?"

Alicia shook her head. "She never does the same guy twice."

"Well, it seems she's making an exception."

"Where did you hear this?"

"From Colby's girl Friday. Blonde, I don't remember her name."

"Cheryl."

"Right."

"Where did she hear it?"

"From Nicole. Told her to cooperate or stay out of the way."

Loud blew out softly. Castro muttered in Spanish. Alicia said, "This may force us to accelerate our schedule, such as it is." Which would increase the risk of discovery, perhaps exponentially. But if Colby had become the subject of Nicole's continued attention, the Genactive interrogator was certain to learn everything he knew - unless she killed him first.

Castro said, "Maybe Nicole needs to have an accident."

"I'm PsyOps," she reminded him. "Assassination's not my forte. I'm sure I'd bungle it."

"Director Santini knows people, I'm sure." Christie toyed with her glass. "It's a case of balancing risks. Taking out one of Ivana's Specials, even in a convincing accident, is going to be very high-profile. Are you that sure he'll crack? He's pretty tough."

Alicia shook her head. "Nicole's methods aren't like cracking an egg, or even a stone. They're more like peeling an onion. And she can do that, working through the layers, till there's nothing left. Willpower is irrelevant. She can get what she wants out of absolutely anybody. All she has to do is press the right spots and ask the right questions."

"How do you propose to accelerate the work?"

"Well, there are a couple of possible weak points in Research's security. One regarding the tech caches, and another pertaining to the researchers. But we need to understand those weak points as thoroughly as possible before we make a move."

"And we're running out of time."

"Yes."

"What sort of weak points?"

"Well, like I said, the researchers are sealed up tight. The only time they leave their facilities is when they're transferred, at least until they retire. No communication with the outside world. Admins is another story, of course. But the science types – the only communication they have with the outside world is through Administration, no personal messages at all." She drained her glass, set it on the table, and placed her hand on top of it, shaking her head, as Loud reached for it. "We've learned that the Directorate is pulling the same trick on them that they did with the Specials at Darwin. The lab coats think they have contact with friends and family through a proprietary email system. But everything they send out is intercepted, and all the responses they receive are fabrications."

"That seems risky," Loud said. "Gotta be just a matter of time before somebody spots something off in the messages."

"No," she said. "Not the way they're being done." She picked up her empty glass and set it down. "It's part of Research's security protocol, a program to isolate them even further, without making them feel entirely imprisoned, and to divorce them completely from their old lives." She lifted her glass. "Maybe one more."

Alicia waited while Mike got her a refill. The wait wasn't long; they were the only customers in the place, and the barkeep was already pulling bottle from the fridge under the counter as her 'date' set the glass down. When he returned, she took a swallow and went on. "They're allowed to exchange real messages with the folks back home at first, maybe for the first month or two. The messages are reviewed, of course, without the senders' knowledge, and censored." She took another sip. "Not just for sensitive information. They're also carefully edited to emotionally flatten them. Both sides, researchers and outside contacts both. After a while, the censors stop passing the genuine messages entirely, and all the emails both sides receive are fiction, crafted to convince the people on the inside that their friends and family have lost interest in maintaining contact, and so that the people they left behind won't be suspicious when they drop out of sight and hearing. By the time they retire, none of them will have heard from the people they left behind in years, and vice versa. They're encouraged to retire to someplace far from their old homesteads, and after being ignored for years by everybody they ever knew outside the Shop, they're usually fine with that."

"Quit looking all disgusted over the simple-minded lab rats, Ernie," Mike said. "We swallowed IO's bullshit for years before we got this gig and Colby opened our eyes."

Christie said, "You said you had a possible way to reach the researchers. This doesn't sound like it."

"No," Alicia said. "I just wanted to drive home how tightly controlled these people are. There's a possible chink in the security wall, but it won't be easy to exploit, and even if we figure out how, we'll have to be positively surgical in our use, because I'd be afraid to use it twice." She went on, "I said that all their contact with the outside world is run through lab administration. That's mostly limited to correspondence with higher authority over research projects and proposals. Sometimes the lab coats ask for info about their company accounts. But that isn't quite everything. Admin also allows carefully filtered access to scientific journals and other research materials online. The sites have to be individually approved, and IO's firewall makes sure that nothing else slips in through the connection. But if my sources are right, the censors don't screen every individual issue of Tekhnika Molodezhi or MIT Technology Review that passes through the firewall, just audit them on occasion."

"You're thinking we might sneak something to one of the researchers in his download of Scientific American? Like what? And which one?"

"Don't know yet. First we need to know if it can actually be done. I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as appending an extra meg of data into somebody's inbound file. We need to get it past the firewall."

Christie shook her head. "I'm pretty sure anybody with the savvy to spoof IO's cybersecurity is on the other side of the firewall, waiting for his magazine."

Alicia rubbed a fingertip across the rim of her wineglass, rather surprised to see that it was empty again. "There's one person outside of the Shop who doesn't seem to have any trouble bypassing IO software."

The girl scoffed. "Do you know how to get in touch with him? I don't."

"No," Alicia said quietly. "I know Frank stayed in contact after Jack jumped ship. But that door slammed shut after Chula Vista." She turned an eye on the two bodyguards. "That's right, isn't it? No more meetings?"

Castro raised his bottle. "You kidding? The guy doesn't even go out to dinner any more. Just commutes back and forth from his house to Central, and not very often, either."

Mike gave the man an odd glance; Alicia caught it. "What?" She said to him. Castro looked sourly at his teammate.

Mike said, "We, uh, used to have a kind of back-door access to a couple of Lynch's people, but it dried up about a month ago. Not the boss, just us."

The PsyOp operator's eyebrows rose. "Care to explain that?"

"It'd probably use up our hour. But… we know a guy who might have Caitlin Fairchild's phone number."

...

Wednesday November 29 2006

0024 Hours

IO Central

As she touched the double doors to Central's fitness center, Nicole was surprised to hear the rhythmic clank of someone doing sets on one of the machines. At this hour, she was almost always alone in the big room, which was why it was her preferred time slot – not just for easy access to the machines, but because, when it was too crowded to maintain a safe distance, men had a tendency to injure themselves in various ways when she was here. But one or two were generally easy to work around, and occasionally entertaining. She smiled as she pushed the doors open.

The big mirror-walled room held dozens of machines and exercise stations, all empty. A single occupant, wearing loose terry shorts and a cutoff sweatshirt, lay grunting at a heavily-loaded bench press machine. Nicole admired the man's flexing arms and shoulders and pecs before letting her eyes travel southward to his flat belly and well-developed thighs. He paused and looked her way, and she recognized him: a recent hire in Special Security, a trooper assigned to the team hunting Uncle Jack and the kids from Pod Seven. "Hey, Dan. Another late-night workout, huh?"

He gave her a friendly smile. He was far enough away that she knew the smile was genuine, and it warmed her and made her glad she had never seduced him; men she had bedded generally gave her a very different look when they saw her approach. "Hey, Nicole."

"How's things?" She passed him by, swinging wide around him – he was unusually sensitive to her call, she remembered – and mounted an elliptical machine, dropping her towel and bag on the floor. "Still cheating on your girlfriend?"

The smile disappeared. He pressed the heavy bar upward and held it. "I took your advice. We broke up about six weeks ago." He brought it down to its stop, and the cabled weight stack clanked. "You were right, she was too good for me."

She scoffed loudly as she programmed her machine. "I never said that. I said sweet and innocent just didn't seem your type, and that was probably why you went looking for strange. You're both better off, I'm sure." The machine started up, making her swing her legs and hips along in a gait that used more muscle groups than a treadmill. "What about the woman you did it with? The one you both knew?"

"She moved in." He sat up and moved to a decline bench. "About a month ago."

"Quick work. Told you she had an agenda."

Dan laced his fingers behind his head and began a set of sit-ups. "She's my ex," he grunted. "Sort of. Separated, but we didn't sign papers, though we came close. We have a kid together."

"Why'd you break up in the first place? Her idea or yours?"

"She initiated," he said, "but we were neither of us happy for a long time."

"Hm. And getting the girlfriend out of the picture was all it took to make things right with the two of you?"

"It wasn't like that," he said, looking at her upside down. "We both have different jobs now. That was a lot of the problems between us."

Nicole raised her eyebrows. "She's okay with you having a job you can't talk about? One that keeps you away from home most nights?"

"At least I'm home every weekend. Almost every weekend," he amended. "Instead of spending eleven months a year posted overseas."

"What was wrong with her job?"

He moved to a leg station and began fussing with the weight stack. "She … was a stripper."

"Really."

"I don't have anything against strippers…"

"I don't suppose you do."

"Just doesn't seem like a proper profession for a wife and mother."

"She didn't agree."

"Not at all." He began doing leg extensions, his thighs flexing enticingly. "But while we were separated, she built her own club. She manages it, so she spends a lot of time there, but she quit dancing."

"Her own club? As in, owns?"

"Her and a partner she won't talk about." His nostrils twitched. Nicole took that as a confirmation that Dan and his wife still had problems they hadn't worked through yet.

"If she could afford half interest in a club, it sounds like she must have been a pretty good stripper."

He paused and gave her a heavy-lidded look. "You'd make a better one."

Perhaps moving to that last station had brought him a bit too close, she thought. She tugged at the hem of her shorts, brief enough to expose her panties for a moment when the elliptical raised her knees. "Well, modesty certainly wouldn't get in my way. But I'm sure I make more money here. Speaking of which – how are you liking your new paychecks?"

"I'll have my mortgage paid off next month," he said. "After that, maybe I'll buy another car."

"I can just see you in some retro muscle car with a rumbly exhaust."

"The wife owns an Aston convertible," he said. "Actually, I was thinking of shopping for an SUV, something to get a child seat in and out of easy. I'm a family man now."

They continued to work out together at what they judged to be a safe distance, conversing between stretches of companionable silence. Nicole found that she was enjoying the company, as well as the attention the big hunk was paying her: attention that she knew wasn't being squeezed out of him by her power, but was rather the normal attraction of a healthy young man for a pretty girl in brief clothing. It occurred to her that Dan rather resembled Francis Colby, and, more distantly, Bobby Lynch. Will Frank ever look at me like that? She scoffed, smiled, and shook her head.

"Something funny?"

"Me."

After awhile, Dan mopped his face and the bench with his towel and picked up his bag. "Well, see you. Thanks for the company."

"My pleasure. Really." As he approached the double doors, she said, "Dan. If you two didn't settle everything that separated you, don't ignore the issues. Things may be okay now, but six months from now, you'll have a disagreement over which drawer to put the socks in that'll end up in a screaming match."

He paused with a palm against the door. "Okay." He pushed the panel open and was gone.

Nicole sighed. Dan wasn't going to talk anything over with the wife. She'd moved back in, and things were going the way he wanted, and he wasn't about to rock the boat. She wondered if the woman was fooling herself as thoroughly as he was.

Do Frank and I really have a better chance?

The thought surprised her. Nicole Callahan was not a person given to introspection or self-doubt. She had decided that she and Frank would be lovers; any obstacles or consequences connected to that decision were simply complications to be dealt with or ignored.

When his strength returned, he would call her.

...

Thursday November 30

Undisclosed location
Southwest United States

Joel Richards sighed softly in frustration, closed his laptop, and pushed away from the little desk. He looked around his studio-apartment-sized quarters, feeling an uncharacteristic restlessness. It was just a little eyestrain, he decided. He'd been at this for four hours; he just needed to focus on something besides his screen and the four walls.

Leaving his little apartment, he looked up and down the door-lined corridor – empty as usual at this time of day - and finally turned toward the canteen. He wasn't really hungry, but the eating area was spacious and fairly quiet, and provided a view of sorts. There would likely be people there, but he was sure he could put up with that.

He wasn't ready to admit that he was feeling lonely; loneliness was an emotion that he had suppressed for so long that he scarcely acknowledged its existence.

The eatery was clean and not too institutional-looking, with padded chairs and varnished wood tables. It could have seated a couple hundred people easily, but Joel had never seen it more than a third full; it was easy to come here and find an unoccupied table. He picked one close to the floor-to-ceiling glass wall, which showed a breezy hillside, carpeted with grass and wildflowers, that fell steeply away into a green mountain valley. The resolution of the huge screen was excellent, Joel thought: even with his nose nearly touching the glass, he couldn't discern the pixels. Anyone would take the view as real, if they didn't know that this room was thirty feet underground in one of the flattest and most barren locations on Earth.

His attention didn't stay long on the view before it returned to his current project. The damned thing simply wasn't coming together right. He was missing something. They were all missing something, the entire team, some vital component that was keeping the test data from coming together. If they couldn't find a way over this hump, they might end up shelving the entire project.

Kat would have had this figured out by now, he thought. She was a certifiable genius, a demon for work, and the best lab partner he had ever had. When they put their heads together, there seemed to be no stopping them. But Caitlin Fairchild had dropped out of his life as soon as he had boarded the plane to take this job.

She had warned him that she didn't do texts, and cellphones weren't permitted here anyway. Emails – filtered through the company server for sensitive information, no doubt – were the researchers' only communications with the outside world. But Kat had never sent him one, nor had she given him an address – he suspected that she didn't have one.

But Kat wasn't the only person he had lost communication with. Even emails from his family had petered away to almost nothing after the first year, becoming more and more impersonal until they seemed like something written by strangers just going through the motions.

The ones from Alex had been the worst of all.

He took his wallet from his back pocket, and from the clear accordion cardfile removed a photograph, one of several. His former girlfriend's image smiled up at him. It was one of half a dozen she had slipped into his back pocket as she had kissed him goodbye at the airport. Just so you don't forget me, she had said as she squeezed his butt and kissed him again.

He studied the print, taken at some Friday bar gig as the Sirens took a break between sets. It was the only image of her that he kept in his wallet; the other pics she had given him were NSFW, at least to his eyes, though she was at least somewhat clothed in all but one of them. Though the others had their points, this one was his favorite, because he well remembered what had transpired between them that night after he had helped her pack her drums into her pickup and ridden off with her. He knew the smile and sidelong glance in that pic had been for him, and knew precisely what is had promised.

He reminded himself for the hundredth time that she had told him, at the very start of their relationship, that she hadn't expected anything from him after he finished school. I'm not a dumbass schoolgirl with a crush, Joel. You're self-centered and impatient, and I know as soon as you graduate you'll be gone without a backward glance. But it was Alex who had moved on. Her last message to him, less than six months after he had left, was a terse and offhand note saying that she was 'seeing' someone, and she hoped he was doing the same.

A girl's voice: "I swear, you must be the only guy in this place who still carries a wallet around with him." The chair across from him wookie-groaned as it was pulled out, and squeaked some more as Indra seated herself and scooted up. Joel quickly returned the pic to his wallet. "You've got to have the same six banknotes in it you boarded the plane with. Why bother? Or maybe it's your driver's license you want to keep close, hm?"

"I've got pictures in it." He returned the wallet to his back pocket.

"You ever going to let me see them?"

"Probably not."

The two studied each other. Indra Gadhavi was a good-looking young woman, Joel thought. Physically, she reminded him a little of Kat's friend Sarah, though their ancestries were half a world apart. And their personalities were nothing alike.

"You're moping again," she said. "What is it this time?"

"Nothing," he said. "The project is just a little frustrating right now."

"Funny, everybody else on the team thinks we're whizzing along. Doctor Preiz even said that we seem to be ahead of projections. And that's mostly because of you." She leaned forward, forearms folded on the table. "I heard stories about you, before I joined this project. You really are just as driven as they say."

"I came here for a reason besides the paycheck." At her raised eyebrow, he went on, "Well, sure, I wouldn't have signed on without it. But I expected to be able to get things done."

"You don't think you're getting things done? Look at your bonus payout this year. You don't get compensation like that if you're not getting things done."

"When they recruited me, they said I could have a free hand, that they'd basically turn me loose to develop my own ideas. I haven't worked on a project of my own since I got here." He hoped that didn't come out sounding too petulant.

She scoffed. "You always believe everything a recruiter tells you?" She smiled, teeth white against her caramel-colored skin. "You really thought you'd come here, and they'd just give you a particle accelerator and a wheelbarrow full of money and tell you to go play? Even the senior researchers have to submit proposals for approval, Joel."

"Have you ever seen one get turned down?"

"No. But some of them have been here since you were in kindergarten. You've been here, what, thirty months? If you were working at a research college, you'd be doing all the grunt work and correcting equations for some professor who wouldn't even mention you in his paper. If you went corporate, you'd be pulling graveyard shift in some cruddy lab, counting mold spots in Petri dishes or something." She dropped a hand over his on the table. "Give it a little time, Lex Luthor. No doubt your genius will be recognized in due course."

Indra's hand was warm atop his own, the feel of her skin against his oddly pleasant. How long has it been since somebody touched me? "Reed."

"Hm?"

"Reed Richards. The clueless genius from Fantastic Four. A friend of mine used to call me that."

"Good to hear you've got friends somewhere."

"Used to." He slid his hand out from under hers. "I haven't heard from any of them since I came here."

"Me neither," she said soberly. "Friends from school, guys I dated, nobody. Just a couple emails a month from my family, and they read like they were watching TV or something while they wrote them." She shrugged, her head and eye movements taking in the whole room and its occupants. "It's the same with everybody."

"Maybe the company's doing it," he said. "We know they're reading our mail. Maybe they're editing it too, so we don't miss anybody so much."

"That sounds a little paranoid, don't you think?"

"We're living in a nuclear shelter," he pointed out. "It's a good place for paranoia."

"Is it so strange, really? Nobody we know has seen us or heard our voices since we left. They don't even have letters from us that they can hold in their hands and keep in a drawer. We're just lines on a screen to them now. Is it any wonder they're moving on?"

He looked down at the table. "Well, truthfully, I don't suppose I was that big a part of their lives in the first place."

Indra folded her arms on the table again and set her chin on them to meet his eyes. "You could have as many friends as you want right here, Joel. You just have to show a little interest."

"How do I do that?"

She scoffed. "You could start by spending more than thirty minutes a week in the lab. You know, actually working with your teammates?"

"I don't run experiments," he protested. "I just set them up for the others, and analyze the data. I do all my work on my laptop."

"Then bring your laptop to the lab. It's like the emails, Joel. Let people see you and talk to you. Let things develop from there." She raised her head. "And if you want something a little more, I know for a fact that there are three girls in this room right now who think you're the cutest guy in the complex. You just have to be a little more sociable." She pushed her chair back and stood. "Gotta go. See you in the lab."

He watched her until she was out the door, then his attention shifted to the other occupants of the near-empty cafeteria. There were only two females his approximate age at the other tables.

He took out his wallet again. One at a time, he pulled out his other pictures, examined them briefly, and put them back: Melanie, sitting at the kitchen table at the house in San Diego, talking to someone out of frame; his parents, carefully posed together in front of the fireplace at their old house; Lori with her boyfriend Rej at one of the band's gigs. He gave out a sound between a sigh and a grunt, glanced quickly around to be sure no one was close or watching, and tugged out his last picture – not in the accordion file, but hidden behind his driver's license.

Caitlin Fairchild reposed poolside on a nearly fully-reclined lounger, wearing a white string bikini. Joel had always thought that string bikinis were pretty much one-size-fits-all, but on Kat it looked a couple sizes too small. So did the chair: her heels hung off the end of the lounger, and her head was high enough above the seat back that her copper ponytail spilled over the top and trailed off the back to just touch the concrete. Her skin was flushed and glowing in the bright California sunshine, her hair radiant. Her face was turned up toward the sun, oblivious to the camera, her eyes hidden behind dark shades. Even in a hasty digital photo, she looked like some celestial being fallen to earth.

Kat hadn't given him the photo. Her sister Roxanne had slipped the bit of cardstock into his palm as she had shaken his hand goodbye in his driveway. Still gripping his hand, she had leaned close and said in a conspirator's voice, "Don't look at it until you're on the plane."

Joel flipped the snapshot over, to read the message printed in a small neat hand.

She told me a bikini pic was her end of a bet she made you once. But she only agreed because it was a sucker bet that she knew she'd win, so that's kind of cheating, right? She was asleep, otherwise she'd never have let me take it, let alone give it to you. Keep it close. If she ever finds out about it, we're both dead.

He smiled at the pic. The wager had been very early in their friendship, before he had learned not to bet against her. When Kat said she could do something, she did it. And, while she was certainly an incredible physical specimen, in Joel's estimation her looks were the least of her positive attributes.

He tucked the pic back into its hiding spot. His caution in handling the photo went far beyond Roxy's injunction. He wasn't one of those guys who trotted out family photos to acquaintances at the first excuse, but he had shown his other pics to a handful of interested people in the past couple years. But the snap of Kat was different: he didn't show it to anybody, didn't even let anyone see him looking at it. He had no explanation for it, but some strange intuition made him uncomfortable with the idea of even letting anyone here become aware of his friend's existence.

He missed her. He missed all of them, even snarky Lori and his mostly-absent parents. He scoffed. Me, homesick. For years, all he had wanted was to be left alone, to better pursue his schooling and interests. He had never had a girlfriend before Alex, and had never had a real friend before Caitlin had bulldozed her way into his life. He'd been lonely, he had to admit, but it had been something he was long used to. Here, he was learning to be a loner all over again.

In the lab, Indra briefly returned the greetings of her lab mates without stopping as she approached her supervisor, Doctor Preiz, at his desk in the back wall of the big room. She passed a paper across the desk – nothing important, but it gave them something to appear to be discussing. "I just left Joel in the dining room."

He pretended to study the sheet. "Did you talk to him about spending more time in the lab?"

"Yes, though I don't know if I made any impression. He was looking at pictures again."

"Did he share them with you?"

"No," she said. "Never. Do you think they're important?"

"Just family photos, I'm sure," he said. "And the girlfriend."

She leaned a little further over the desk. "Is she still writing?"

"On occasion. Birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing. All rather wistful, I'm told. She hasn't gotten a reply in two years."

"Must have been some relationship."

He scoffed. "The company didn't even know he had a girlfriend before he got here and started writing to her. That sent them scrambling." His eyes rose to meet hers. "Making any progress on that front?"

"I don't know. I think he's interested. But he's so self-absorbed."

"Are you uncomfortable with the idea?"

"I am, really."

"Why? Don't you like him?"

"I do like him," she said. "That's why I'm uncomfortable with it. Well, one reason I'm uncomfortable with it."

"Well, don't think of it as doing it for the contractor. Do it for yourself, and him. It's unhealthy to spend too much time alone. But it's easy to become isolated here." He leaned forward. "You're all bright and talented people, Indra. But Joel is the main driver of this project. Administration is likely to approve his next proposal if we can just make a team player out of him. You don't have to sleep with him, Indra. Just keep him company. Don't let him isolate himself."

And keep steering him towards the lab, where he's more easily handled, she thought, and sending in those regular reports. "I'll do what I can."

"Good." He smiled. "My next report is going to include a very positive review for you, young lady." He slid the paper across the desk to her. "Keep up the good work. In the lab and outside of it."

"Yes sir." She took the sheet and started to turn away. "The girlfriend. Do you know what she looks like?"

"Nothing like you." He gave her a little smile that she didn't like at all. "But, after the callous way she dropped him, maybe he's ready for something different, hn?"

She headed toward the knot of young men gathering around their team leader, who stood beside a big monitor showing the team's progress reports as he laid out their work schedule for the coming week. One of the young men watched her approach, and they shared a smile. Indra squeezed his hand briefly as she joined the group, and wondered how many of the other young women at the complex had been recruited for extra duty as informants and 'morale officers,' tasked with keeping the others cooperative and motivated.

Probably all of them, she decided. Like everyone here, her grades in school had been exceptional. But she had come from a school where everyone's grades were exceptional, and she was certain that no one else from her graduating class had been approached by her employer. The recruiters had told her that she had been scouted for some time prior to the company's offer. Had her evaluation included psych profiling as well as academic achievement and extracurricular activities? It seemed likely. Being easily persuaded to assume the role of infiltrator and sheepdog had been another reason for her selection, she suspected.

Her looks might have been another; it surely made her second job here easier. Men are more willing to believe what a pretty girl tells them, after all. And, now that she was thinking about it, nearly all of the dozen or so girls at the complex were pretty and personable and positive-minded, weren't they? And was it a coincidence that they were distributed one to each team?

You don't have to sleep with him, Preiz had said, not needing to add, unless there's no other way to get the job done.

"You're thinking hard," said the young man whose hand she had clasped, his voice low and intimate as he ran two fingers down her forearm.

"Just thinking about the job," she said quietly. "It's more of a challenge than I expected. I just hope I'm up to it."