Shieldmaiden

“You’re not here.”

Lexa centered herself. Focused. Middle of London. A café in the center of an outdoor mall. Christmas shoppers hustling about in brightly colored jumpers, Boomer Xmas standards playing over the PA—thankfully not to the ear-gouging levels of the States. The cars were well-behaved, puttering about the turns of the tightly congested roads with a minimum of horns and motors revving. Some of them were even electric.

It was peaceful in a way Lexa couldn’t quite trust.

“Lexa? Are you even getting radio transmissions from where you are?”

Costia. Lexa looked at her and tried to really look at her. The cocoa-colored skin from a Jamaican father and an English-rose mother. The pink lipstick that shouldn’t have suited her face in a million years, but somehow fit. The big eyes. The short haircut that coiled under her beret. Every facet of her appearance Lexa wanted to grab hold of and hug tight to her chest. But if she kept looking at Costia, she’d miss…

Lexa shook it off. “I’m right here.”

Costia didn’t believe her. “It’s those people. What they have you doing. Every time you come back, you’re a little further away.”

Lexa scoffed: “Listen to yourself. I’m here.” She swung her hand out, lightly striking the bag of gifts they’d collected over the past two hours. “I’m not at some gun range. I’m here.”

“Yeah, you’re here, but you keep slipping off to—”

“To what?” Lexa demanded, seeing in her mind’s eye, feeling in her gut all the old anti-war marches Costia used to chant in. “Burning down orphanages? Blowing up buses?”

“I would never think that of you,” Costia insisted, reaching across the table to take Lexa’s hand. “I know you. You’d never do anything that wasn’t called for.”

Lexa drew in breath. She felt like arguing with that—making what point, she didn’t know.

“But it’s still… it’s like a garden.”

“A garden.” Lexa chuckled.

“I’m serious.” She looked that way. Enough to make Lexa assume a solemn enough look to assure Costia she was taking her seriously. “A garden, yeah, with all these parts of your life. And you water them and you give them sun. And there are weeds. There are always weeds. But I see you just letting those weeds grow and choking out everything else that can grow in you.”

“Maybe I like weeds.”

Costia’s lower lip stuck out. She was pouting. “You’re not going to be serious with me, are you?”

“Costia, it’s Christmas. We’re at a café, there are tiny sandwiches—do you think we’re going to settle this here?”

Costia took her hand away to steeple all ten fingers under her chin. Lexa missed it. Using her thumbnail, she scratched where her forefinger had been squeezed.

“It’s not that you like weeds. It’s that you don’t like pulling them up.”

“I have so lost this metaphor.” Lexa shifted the platter closer to her girlfriend. “These really are the most insanely small sandwiches. Is this really a British thing? ‘I want to bite into a sandwich twenty times, but I want each bite to be individual. I can’t just have a really big sandwich—that’s for the Colonies.’”

Costia managed a smile. “How do you Yanks bite into a sandwich when it’s as tall as a fire ladder?”

“It’s something you can only learn if you watch Scooby Doo as a kid. That’s why we’re legally mandated to have a Scooby Doo cartoon airing every year.”

“What’s your excuse for The Simpsons?”

Lexa was going to say something about Doctor Who and how many times he—they, it, whatever it was now—had fought giant rolling traffic cones, which could only have been conceived of by a country which had a hard time putting down the French. But then she heard the roar of the engine and she turned her head and saw the panel van screaming down the road. Brakes squealed and it rocked to a stop, even as the side-door flew open.

Men in ski masks.

Men with guns.

The first hit the pavement firing, a burst of automatic fire that shattered a glass storefront and stitched into the shoppers beyond. Glass tinkled and screams rang out and Lexa had her concealed-carry out, firing three rapid shots as she turned the table over for cover. They collected in his chest: gouts of blood and sucking wounds, making his white shirt a shade of red in the few moments he had before he went down.

Second man, right beside the first. He sent a spray Lexa’s way. She ducked down so that only her head and arm were over the table and fired another three shots. Chest-chest-chest. She wouldn’t try for a headshot, not in this chaos. People were screaming, running, it was all Lexa could do to block them out, but she had to. No one else was here, no one was coming. If she didn’t stop this, hundreds could be dead by the time the Met responded.

She popped out the almost-empty magazine and replaced it with a full one from her jacket pocket and she looked at Costia and she froze.

***

“Miss, uh, Heda? Lexa Heda?”

Lexa came back to herself. She knew where she was. Lobby of Kane Security. As if you could mistake it for anywhere else.

The ultra-masculine furnishings of black leather and bare chrome, extending to even the walls, were verboten for modern Corporate America. But exactly what you wanted for the most extreme of private security. You didn’t go to Kane because you wanted a tall guy in a cheap suit to follow you around and make you look important.

You went to Kane because you wanted to stay alive.

Lexa got up from the surprisingly comfortable chair, popped her neck, and approached the receptionist. She had it on good authority that Kane’s weakness for women was exaggerated, but you wouldn’t know it from the staff he employed. There were few men and the women looked like they could’ve come straight from a southern sorority. Thin, blonde, and with make-up that said they were as interested in a husband as a promotion.

“It’s Dutch,” Lexa told the receptionist, who gave her an approving smile. What she wouldn’t approve of, Lexa didn’t know.

“Mr. Kane will see you now.” She gestured to the express elevator. A thick-necked man waited with a security wand. If the receptionist was the velvet glove, he would be the iron fist.

Lexa approached him, allowed herself to be scanned, and surrendered her offending sidearm. Then she took the elevator up with Thick-Neck as her personal tour guide.

It was a long ride. The Manchester Building wasn’t just where Kane Security kept their offices. They’d fortified it into their own private stronghold, a castle for their intelligence-gathering, proprietary technology, and foreign operations. The way Lexa heard it, there were more than a few government agencies that would love to know what Kane felt with his finger on the pulse.

As for Kane himself, stories varied. He was a legend, came from nothing to be CIA royalty. From what Lexa surmised, he was ambitious, but a lone wolf, an iconoclast. Some rumors had it that he was getting too slow for fieldwork, but that struck Lexa as spin. She thought he’d gotten sick and tired of seeing company men promoted over him when he got all the dirty jobs done. But maybe that was projection—she knew the feeling.

The elevator doors slid open. Kane had given himself a penthouse apartment of an office. It was decorated largely in the black-and-chrome color scheme of the lobby, but with spots of color. Photographs on the walls, bits of artwork. A bust of some Roman emperor or another in the middle of the room. Lexa eyed it, impressed, as she made her way to a desk like the prow of a man-o’-war.

Kane did not look like he’d lost a step. Whatever training he’d been through had to be the same kind of thing that turned a pretty tree into a battering ram. He was handsome, but everything boyish had been sheared away, carpet ripped up to hardwood flooring.

His right eye was covered by a patch. Around it, scars radiated into his whitened eyebrow, along the slope of his nose, a little ways into his cheek and temple. Under his beard, Lexa thought she saw keloid tissue pinking the line of his jaw, but then, she knew what to look for. Stories of his stint in a North Korean prison camp were one more part of the legend.

They’d only worked together briefly, when he was on his way out and Lexa was on her way up. He’d given her some advice. Lexa had either forgotten it or internalized it so deeply she didn’t even remember it as a lesson. So it went.

“Lexa,” Marcus greeted, not getting up. “The guard took your carry?”

“He did.”

Marcus tapped his fingernail on the top of his desk. “You mind?”

Lexa produced a ceramic knife. A derringer. Four smoke canisters. The garrote in her bracelet. She set them down on Marcus’s desk.

Marcus eyed her. She clocked him registering her belt buckle and her steel-toed boots, knowing he’d have to defend against them if he tried to kill her. “Well, that concludes the job interview.” He gestured for her to take a seat. “Let’s talk.”

Lexa sat. “What’s there to talk about? I need a job, you need publicity.”

“You think that’s why I’m hiring you?”

“That’s what Murphy implied. In the hospital.”

Marcus smirked and in it, Lexa could see they had about the same opinion of Murphy.

He’d been a good agent, but had cashed out as soon as he made his bones to strike it rich in the private sector. Which, in this case, meant founding Kane Security with the man himself.

Lexa didn’t begrudge him that. They’d made a good team in their time and he’d been nice enough to keep his door open, even after Lexa rejected going with him the first time. No hard feelings.

Still, what a bitch move.

“Murphy has an angle on everything,” Marcus said. “It’s an asset, but he has an issue with the straightforward.”

“So you just want to hire me because you think I’d make a good bodyguard?”

It sounded ludicrous to say aloud: Lexa was in the warzone business. Every ranker in Anomalous Operations had tried to poach her for their own private fiefdom, going after this terrorist, that warlord. Or a general. Or a president.

“I have you earmarked for a particular position,” Marcus said. “A protection detail that requires someone who’s absolutely trustworthy and capable of a high degree of… nuance.”

Lexa crossed her legs. This sounded like the kind of job that would use up a lot of black highlighter back in Anomalous Operations. But if she didn’t like that, she would’ve left a lot sooner than she did.

Marcus took her silence as a signal to continue: “Clarke Griffin.”

Lexa made a vague gesture. She’d never heard of her. And from the way Marcus was talking, you’d think she’d be protecting Bill Gates.

“Her mother is an old friend. Clarke herself is a researcher. Aerodynamics, space exploration, habitation…”

“She’s a rocket scientist?”

“She’s the new Van Braun, is what they tell me. And despite what we tell the mall-walkers, that’s who got us to the moon, not some black ladies who added two plus two.”

Lexa nodded. Anyone who worked in intelligence for more than year pretty quickly got a feel for psy-ops, all the little social engineering going on. You tried not to be too much of an ass about it. But it was hard when all your friends were going on about Kony and you knew they were taking marching orders from a mining conglomerate that wanted to make a mint on rare-earth minerals.

“Well, the space race is over,” Lexa said. “I can’t see who would be after her.”

“Maybe no one is,” Marcus said.

Lexa waited. ‘Her mother’s an old friend’ had been a warning.

“When Clarke was a child, her mother took up with a… very unsavory character. She came to her senses, thankfully, but Clarke didn’t bounce back as easily as her mother did. Bad time in high school. Then, in and out of mental institutions. Stable these days, but antisocial, neurotic. Can’t even stomach the idea of a male bodyguard, which rules out most of my boys. She says she’s being stalked, but…” Marcus spread his hands.

A frown. “If a woman says she has a stalker, I’m inclined to take her seriously.”

“You won’t find a shortage of white knights around here, Lexa. It’s not that. She’s…” Marcus shook his head, searching for words. “A handful.”

“A handful?”

“Obsessive-compulsive. Autistic. And blunt. Very blunt. When she engages at all. You’ll have to handle her with kid gloves. With most of our clients, they have the good sense to appreciate that we’re here to keep them safe. Clarke will have to be…” Marcus tilted his head from side to side. “Managed.”

“You’re sure she needs a bodyguard and not a therapist?”

“She has three therapists. She tells each one about her sessions with the other two to make sure they’re not manipulating her.”

Lexa raised an eyebrow. “Wonder why someone’s trying to kill her.”

“I realize this assignment may seem ludicrous to a woman of your talents. But we’ve been trying to place Clarke under some protection, any protection, for weeks now. You’re the only one she’s taken a fancy to. Her mother’s worried sick. If she knows there’s someone protecting her daughter…”

“From the stalker or from herself?” Lexa asked.

“If you wish to pass on the assignment, I’ll understand. It’s a challenge. You’ll have to play diplomat, not soldier. I’m aware you haven’t had the best luck with that.”

Lexa didn’t wince. She went too still to wince. “Let me see her file. Then I’ll have an answer.”

Marcus opened a desk drawer. Of course he’d have it ready. “If you take the job, I’ll be assigning Murphy to you.”

Lexa took the folder he handed her. “You’re sure this isn’t overkill? Even if she does have a stalker, it’s just some creep, right? Not an Al-Qaeda cell?”

Marcus laid his hands flat on his desk. “Right now, I’m operating under the theory that I’d rather have a gun and not need it than need one and not have it.”

Lexa nodded. In this scenario, she was the gun.

She was used to being a weapon.