Cairo by Armand Louis

Author:Armand, Louis [Armand, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Equus Press
Published: 2014-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

☐ AVATAR

34°37'15.09"N

27°13'4.36"E

“Tell me he suffered.”

But he hadn’t suffered and that was what galled Shinwah the most. She’d like to’ve seen him chopped into bits. Would’ve preferred to’ve done the chopping herself. But she’d had to go and get herself shot. And Margarita’s people had traded him back to the same people he’d traded her to. The problem was, she knew they wouldn’t kill him, that they’d want him very much alive. And as long as de Laurentiis was alive, she could rely on him to come after her. Which meant she had to get back to Beijing before he did. Except that, de Laurentiis was her dûchà , her controller . He had her coordinates. It didn’t matter where she went, he’d find her. It’d be simpler just to pull the plug, but with him it’d be personal. A power thing. He’d want to look into her eyes while he was doing it and know she could see him while he was killing her.

So now she had enemies on both sides.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Margarita said, clasping Shinwah’s hands between hers. They were sitting in the galley in a padded booth, like the booths in diners, facing one another across the table. The dark- eyed boy was making coffee on the stove. There was someone else on the yacht too, who Margarita called Paladino and who Shinwah also recognised from the farmhouse. At that moment he was manning the wheel. Margarita looked hard into Shinwah’s eyes.

“Right now,” she said, “this is the safest place in the world for you to be.”

Shinwah shook her head.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh?” Margarita’s left eyebrow rose almost imperceptibly.

“I’m not what I look.”

“Well, from where I’m sitting…”

“It’d be hard to explain. But there’s… A computer. In Beijing. It keeps tabs on me. De Laurentiis was my… Control. If they can’t pull me in, they’ll pull the plug.”

“You know,” Margarita grinned, “if you’d said that to anyone else, they might decide you’re crazy.”

Shinwah shut her eyes. What the hell are you doing? The words had come out of her mouth without her thinking. Margarita was right. It sounded crazy.

“What I meant…”

“I know what you meant. We’re in the same business. Only not for the same reasons. That’s why you’re still here. But you may as well know now, whatever they showed you on that slab in Beijing wasn’t you. They lied. Like they lied to all of us. There aren’t any avatars. The teleports are real. All of it. You go in, you come out. You just rely on them to get it right. And so far, they’ve been pretty good at that.”

“Then what about…”

“What loverboy didn’t bother to say is the comsat that used to feed the coordinates back to your Head Office got taken down. We don’t know how. The signal went dead two days ago. Something crashed in New York. Ground Zero. Maybe that was part of it. The Americans are pretending it was an asteroid. But then they would, wouldn’t they?”

“Ground zero?”

The lines at the corner of Margarita’s eyes deepened when she smiled.

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