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“You don’t need me for this part,” Lito told Kala. “You work here. This is where you belong. So just act like it.”
“You make it sound so simple,” Kala muttered, and focused firmly on the part of her brain that was taking in the night air on Lito’s balcony instead of the part that was walking toward a room she was not actually allowed to be in, whatever Lito had to say about it.
When she was finally in the same corridor as the server room, she forced herself away from Mexico City. There was someone else walking toward the server room, a tall handsome black man who Kala didn’t recognize. That was definitely not part of the plan.
“Excuse me,” Kala said to the stranger, stopping him in front of the door to the server room. “May I help you?”
The man looked up and turned a grin on her that made her knees a little weak. He spoke with an accent that reminded her of Capheus. “Oh, hello there. My name is Elijah Mutua. I’m visiting from the Kenyan branch of the company.” He held out a hand to shake.
Capheus appeared, facing Mr. Mutua with his arms crossed. There were smudges of dirt and motor oil on his face and arms – it was early morning in Nairobi, he’d been repairing his van. “That is not a real Kenyan accent. He’s faking.”
“Help me,” she hissed to Lito under her breath, and they switched off, Lito standing in her place with total, easy confidence, Kala pressed against the wall like some kind of very unsubtle spy.
Lito folded his arms, narrowed his eyes a little, and said to Mr. Mutua, or whoever he was, “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here, and maybe I won’t report you to security.”
The lines of Mutua’s body relaxed. He laughed. “Nice try,” he said in an American accent. (“I knew it,” Capheus said, grinning, then disappeared.) “If you were legit, you would’ve called security already. How about we trade? We both tell each other why we’re here, and nobody calls security on anybody.”
Kala and Lito traded a look. “He has a point, you have to admit,” Kala said. She had a Bluetooth earpiece, now, so she wouldn’t seem insane. “We can’t have security here, either.” She wasn’t supposed to be in this wing of the building at all.
Lito shrugged. “I think they call this situation mutually assured destruction.”
Kala laughed nervously. She held up her ID pass and said to Mutua, “I’m an employee here. I’m trying to break into the server room because I think the company may be selling drugs to… unethical dealers.” Unethical seemed like such a polite word for what BPO was.
Mutua raised his eyebrows. “Huh. That’s interesting. I’m here because my client’s pretty sure these guys are buying trade secrets from the Germans using blood diamonds.”
Kala thought of Wolfgang and his stolen diamonds, and a hand of ice wrapped around her heart. Lito squeezed her shoulder, then stepped into her place again and said, “I think we may have some common interests in what’s in that room over there.”
The man offered his hand again. “Alec Hardison, from Leverage International.”
Kala felt, like a spill of light from under a locked door, a tiny glow of amazement from Wolfgang. In a shabby apartment in San Francisco, Nomi heard that name and nearly spat her tea all over her keyboard. This time, Kala shook the offered hand. “Kala Dandekar. I, ah, don’t have a cool team name, I’m afraid.”
Mr. Hardison hacked the high-tech lock to the server room. He held the door open for her. “After you, ma’am.” He tapped his ear. “By the way. You might want to try a smaller earpiece. Makes it way too obvious that you’re talking to your team.”
Kala stared at Mr. Hardison’s ear. “There is no way you have an earpiece in there.”
“You’re right,” he said, smiling. “I don’t. I’m psychic.”
Kala gaped at him. Another sensate? Another cluster? “You… are you…”
Mr. Hardison cracked up laughing. “Gotcha! Man, I can’t believe you bought that. Nah, I’ve got an earpiece. Did you hear that, Parker? This lady thinks I’m psychic!”
Lito laughed, too, because they had all gotten far too paranoid, and it felt good to realize this was just normal crime, not part of the secret war against their cluster. Kala stepped into the server, glad that her skin was too dark to show her blush. She walked right up to the nearest computer. She let Nomi take over, searching through the files for hidden records of transactions with BPO and Whispers.
Mr. Hardison stood behind her and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, damn, you’re good, Kala. And I thought you were the grifter on your team. You nearly got me there with the ‘I’m gonna call down the big bad security’ act.”
Nomi grinned at him and said, “I have a lot of talents, Hardison. Did you hear about the Pentagon hack in ’03? Level III security breach?”
“That was you? Damn, girl, I’d high-five you if you had a hand free!” Mr. Hardison rolled his eyes at some voice Kala couldn’t hear. “I can nerd out whenever I want to, Eliot. Okay, we’ve got a deal, Kala. Let’s dig up all the dirt on these people. And don’t worry, I got my people watching the building. No one’s gonna walk in on us. Blood diamonds, corporate espionage, dirty drug deals – we got this in the bag.”
For the first time, Kala could start to understand why Wolfgang chose a life of crime. No worry about whether the law would carry out justice, a shadow society where all the rules were different, a world of high stakes and secret handshakes. It would never really be the life for her. But for now, she had no choice but to get involved in it, so she might as well have a little fun along the way.