Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

A pair of Legion fighter jets flashed overhead, wreathed in a virtual mist of encrypted spinstreams.

“Stop looking at your watch,” Li griped. “It’s always slow, then you get the wrong time in your head, and I catch it from you, and it screws with my wetware.”

“That sounds fun,” Cohen quipped. “Can we try it when we get back to the hotel?”

A squadron of Legionnaires walked by, their faces young and hard behind mirrored sunglasses, the creases in their uniforms sharp enough to threaten innocent passersby with paper cuts. As they passed the café one of the young men skipped a step, bringing himself into marching rhythm with his companions with the naturalness that only comes of long training.

“The real problem,” Cohen said, returning to the subject of the watch, “is that I can’t take it to Geneva for revision anymore. No one knows how to clean a real watch properly anymore. No one has the patience.”

“Just waiting for the barbarians, are we?” Li said in a voice of patently fake sympathy.

“Yes, darling,” Cohen drawled, “but who are the barbarians these days? There are so many people lining up for the job it’s getting hard to pick a winner.”

Li smiled, but her mind was only half on the banter. She was back at work again; Cohen could feel her on the other end of the intraface, scanning the approaches, converting the three-dimensional world into a relief map of lines of fire and points of cover and potential kill zones. “If I were this late,” she muttered, “it would only be because something was wrong. Or because I was planning to make something go wrong.”

A lone Israeli man settled at the table behind them, shalomed politely, ordered a cup of black coffee, and opened up the weekend section of the Ha’aretz. A moment later two camera-toting NorAmArc pilgrims sat down at the next table over and began a high-decibel argument about whether the cog railway ran to the Dome of the Rock overlook on Saturdays. Cohen goggled at them, only to realize that his friendly Ha’aretz reader was doing the same. Their gazes crossed, and the two men shared a moment of anonymous amusement.

“You watch,” Li muttered. “The contact’s not going to show up until after lunch. And meanwhile we’re goddamn sitting ducks.”

“Relax, Catherine.”

“If you wanted relaxed, you shouldn’t have brought me. Speaking of which, why the hell are we here anyway?”

“My country calls and I answer,” Cohen quipped.

“Your country called all right. But they don’t seem to give enough of a shit about you to provide bandwidth for the return call. Sometimes I could just strangle Hy Cohen for saddling you with this baggage.”

“He probably never thought twice about it. He could be a bit lacking in subtlety sometimes. And he never could get his brain around the idea that Israel wasn’t perfect.” Cohen grinned sheepishly. “Not all of my pig-stubborn loyalty is the Game’s fault. Some of it I come by honestly.”

Li stopped scanning the approaches and actually turned in her chair to stare at him. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit he wasn’t perfect?”

“He was anything but perfect. He slept around behind his wife’s back for one thing. I hated that. Not the adultery so much as the lying.” Cohen felt the familiar flutter of self-loathing stir somewhere near the pit of what would have been his stomach if he had one. “I despised the lying.”

“But you never told her.”

Cohen stared into the middle distance, seeing the face of the first woman he had ever loved…and who had slipped away from him just as Li was now slipping away. “She didn’t want to know,” he said at last.

“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”

He reached out for her instream, ran into a wall, and stared into her eyes only to find that they were equally unreadable. “Not you,” he whispered. “I love you.”

At that instant their contact stepped out of a narrow alley between two restaurants, glanced at them—so briefly that Cohen only caught the look when he replayed Li’s spinfeed—then looked quickly away.

Li settled in her chair, shifting her weight forward, sliding her feet farther apart. Her face was expressionless, but onstream she radiated a profound and wordless satisfaction that Cohen suspected was pretty close to what you’d get if you tapped the neural feed of a cat who’d just found a nice fat mouse to play with.

The contact turned out to be a woman, and a woman who had the history of Israel written on her face. She could have stepped straight out of a 1950s kibbutz harvest photo or a grainy black-and-white movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The rawboned farmer-turned-soldier body. The tousled fair hair and the hawklike face. The steel-blue eyes—one of them dark with the stain of an old injury.

‹Shrapnel?› Li asked. ‹Or did she have a rifle blow up in her face?›

‹Love tap from a grenade. Sayeret Golani training exercise.›

‹Ah. So you do know her.›

‹I told you, I don’t want you having any contact with people from the Office unless it’s absolutely necessary. I thought we agreed about that.›

‹No. I just stopped arguing about it so router/decomposer wouldn’t have to waste his time playing magical moving files for you.›

Cohen ignored the jibe. Li could complain all she wanted to about unequal file-sharing protocols, but he wasn’t going to drop the firewall he kept between her and the boys on King Saul Boulevard as long as he had a choice in the matter. She could think up enough ways to get herself killed on her own without his help.

‹So what should I know about her that you’re actually willing to tell me?› Li asked.

‹Let’s just say that Tel Aviv might not be the most tactful topic to raise.›

The woman stopped in front of their table, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw her head a little back and sideways in order to get her good eye on them. “Oh, so it was you back in the airport. You could have said so. Or don’t you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you, Osnat. I just didn’t know you’d gone private sector.”

“Lot of people’s careers went down in flames after Tel Aviv. Can’t complain. Could have been worse. Could have ended up with a bullet in the head.”

The fury radiated off her like a bomb blast. Well, Cohen couldn’t blame her. They’d known each other very slightly. As far as she was concerned he was Gavi’s friend, end of story. And Osnat had special, complicated, and intensely personal reasons for hating Gavi.

“I heard Gur died,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry.”

She pulled the empty chair free of the table and sat down in it. No one spoke for a long and extremely unpleasant moment.

“When do we get to talk to the sellers?” Li asked finally.

Osnat ignored her. “You were supposed to come alone,” she told Cohen flatly, “not bring a golem of your own.”

Li made her move so fast that even Cohen missed it. One moment she was on the far side of the table from Osnat. A blink later, she had her hand around the other woman’s wrist and was squeezing hard enough to drain the blood from her face.

“Being a golem has its uses,” she said in a companionable tone. “Also, the only way to ALEF is through Cohen, and the only way to Cohen is through me. So the next time I talk to you, you’ll look me in the eye when you answer.”

Osnat gave her a pale hostile stare. Then she did what every well-trained infantryman does when pinned down by enemy fire; she called for air support. And she called for it, of all places, from the next table.

Cohen followed Osnat’s glance just in time to see the Ha’aretz reader put down his newspaper and smile politely at them.