Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

The place was like the rough draft of a town. An idea of a town, in which a very real battle—or perhaps many of them—had been fought.

“What is this place?” he asked, shivering.

“Hell town.”

“What was it for?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Osnat?”

“What?”

“Could we…can we talk about what we talked about the other day? You know, about that friend of mine I was telling you about?”

“And why the hell should I do that?” she asked.

“I just thought—”

“You just thought nothing,” she snapped. “If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to Moshe. I’m not in the business of doling out charity or letting people cry on my shoulder.”

She pulled off her jacket, moving with rough irritable gestures, as if annoyance had pushed her body temperature above acceptable limits. And then she did something that set Arkady’s pulse racing with hope and terror. With her right hand, partially shielded by the camouflage swirl of her coat, she pointed skyward.

It was a momentary gesture, gone so quickly that if Arkady’s eyes hadn’t been sharpened by the fear and tension of the past weeks, he would have missed it entirely. But its meaning was unmistakable: they were being watched.

A shadow, no more than the shadow of a passing sparrow, flitted across the rocky ground. High in the sky something flashed silver in the morning sunlight. A surveillance drone. Had it been there on their prior walks? Yes, he realized; he’d noticed it but assumed it was just a passing shuttle or a satellite in low orbit. Who could possibly pay attention to all the scrap metal humans had chucked into orbit around their planet?

He dissembled, scrambling to pick up the conversation where it had faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to imply that I was asking you for something. I just…wanted to thank you for what you’ve done so far.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“But you have. The books. The walks. I…I appreciate it. You’re a gracious person.”

The sunburned forehead wrinkled in bemusement, and she cocked her head again to get a better look at him. “Well! That’s sure as fuck the first time I’ve ever been called gracious!”

Carefully, trying not to be too obvious about it, Arkady looked in the direction he thought she’d been pointing.

A house—or rather, a nonhouse—just like the others along the street. He went into it. Osnat followed him.

Inside, in the dark, she prowled around him like a cat. She was in a hurry, he realized. And she was trembling with nerves or fear—a thing that scared him as much as anything in the past weeks had scared him.

“Did you mean what you said the other day about being willing to stick your neck out to save this friend of yours?”

“Yes.” Arkady had to crane his neck to keep track of her.

She prowled back toward the door, and reached a hand up to twitch away the curtain. “Are you sure? You’d better be sure. Because I’m about to throw out a lifeline. And if I throw it to the wrong person, we’re both going to get our teeth kicked in.”

Why did Arkady suddenly have the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just, for the first time in his life, heard the phrase “get our teeth kicked in” used as a euphemism?

“What—who are you going to go to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I’m just going to send up a flare and whoever shows up shows up. But you’d better be damned sure, Arkady. You can’t put the bullet back in the gun once you’ve pulled the trigger.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’d better be able to keep your mouth shut until I tell you not to. I know you can do it. I watched you do it at GolaniTech. You willing to do it for me if I help you?”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Okay. Good enough.” The whisper of cloth on stone. Scuff of her boots in the dust. “You ever heard of the Mossad, Arkady?”

“Of course.”

“Moshe and I used to work for them.”

“But I thought—”

“They recruit out of the IDF. First pick of the litter, so to speak. We were both Sayeret Golani. Commandos. What you’d call tacticals. Didi Halevy tapped us after officers’ school.

“We went through training together. There were a hundred and thirty in our incoming class.” Pride sharpened her normally husky voice. “A hundred and thirty chosen out of over two thousand. And Didi Halevy told us”—her voice shifted into a schoolmasterish tone that Arkady assumed must be an imitation of Halevy’s voice—“We have no quotas. We take only those who we think can do the job. And if the best of you can’t do the job, then we won’t take any of you.” She looked at Arkady, dropping back into her own, rougher voice. “They took three out of our class, and even after that we had two years of training, living in one room, eating reheated garbage, only getting to visit our families twice a year. Me, Moshe…and a boy named Gur who you never met and never will because Gavi Shehadeh got him killed.”

“Is that why you’re so loyal to Moshe?”

“You think it’s a bad reason?” She coughed, took a step toward the door, turned around again, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I went back to my home unit after Tel Aviv. And then when it was time to re-up, I signed on with GolaniTech instead. Which hasn’t exactly been…well, never mind what it has or hasn’t been. I chose it, and I’m not going to whine about it. The point is, someone I know from King Saul Boulevard came to me a few months ago and asked me to keep my eyes open and, uh…let him know if I saw anything fishy going on at GolaniTech. I thought it was crazy. Reamed the guy out, actually. Told him Moshe wouldn’t be messed up in anything like that and he’d better tell the eighth floor to mind their own fucking business and clean up their own house.” She licked her lips. “Then you showed up.”

“Why are you telling me this, Osnat?”

“Remember what you told me about wanting to help your friend? I’m putting it to the test. Basically I’m handing you a loaded gun. If you want to pull the trigger on it, I’m dead. If you don’t pull the trigger…then I’ll do my best to help you. And your friend.”

“What changed your mind?” Arkady asked. “Was it something I said to Turner?”

Osnat turned back to face him, a stark silhouette against the backdrop of silver clouds, dust-gray desert. “You know damn well what it was.”

He shook his head no.

“Bella. Bella and her so-called sickness. That’s not a genetic weapon, Arkady. That’s Armageddon. And if Moshe were really working in Israel’s best interests, he would have sent you back to Korchow in a body bag the second he figured out what you were selling.”

“Outside!” Aurelia panted. “Now! H urry! ”

Arkady and Arkasha stared, bewildered. But by the time Arkady thought to ask what was happening she was already several doors down, repeating the message. And already someone else was pounding on the hab module’s metal walls, hammering out the panicked signal that means only two things to a spacer: decompression or fire.