Foundry by Eliot Peper

Author:Eliot Peper [Peper, Eliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

35

An evening breeze ruffled the surface of the canal, blowing intricate whorls across the water, the fading ruby-gold light touching up reality like an Instagram filter.

As I waited for Barend, I tried and mostly failed to take a moment to enjoy the view from his veranda. I needed to marshal my resources. I needed to bend the will of one foreign power to frustrate the will of another.

Just another day at the office.

Back in the conference room on Mindanao, a bead of sweat sliding down my butt crack, I’d thought Leia had found me out. Surely, she’d seen through my thin veneer of competence to the miserable wretch beneath—a shadowy parade of Carolines stretching out behind me. But no. The alpha predator didn’t gobble me up. Quite the opposite. The tainted goods I’d delivered were the ammunition she needed to stalk her prey.

You could see it in the set of her posture, and in how the other bosses deferred to her during the meeting. Only a few months before, I’d been a newcomer to Mindanao, and Leia had been just another member of the cabal directing Operation Glass Ceiling. I don’t know what kind of horses she traded to get a seat at the table and her man in the mix, but they must have been thoroughbreds capable of sweeping the Kentucky Derby. And I had delivered. Whatever Beltway game Leia was running, Phillip’s pilfered chip designs had strengthened her hand to the extent that her besuited NSA, DoD, and State equivalents were content to let her take charge, or, if not content, at least unwilling to oppose her—the best any despot can hope for.

You’d think Leia’s inexorable ascent through the DC hierarchy would make me swoon with self-satisfaction. I’d chosen the right patron, given her what she wanted, and now I was drafting her like a doped cyclist on the last leg of the Tour de France. Except that Leia’s waxing ambition terrified me, not least because it rendered my own absolution all but impossible: the faster she pedaled, the less I wanted to admit that I hadn’t checked her brakes.

So now I was pedaling my heart out just to keep up.

Win or die, motherfuckers.

“Do you take cream with your coffee?” my host, Barend, called from the kitchen. His mild accent rendered the everyday words exotic. I returned to myself, sitting on the veranda watching lights come on in the houses on the opposite bank as dusk deepened. If the Netherlands is a swamp, Barend is its swamp monster.

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