Spin State - Chris Moriarty [97]
The line cook touched a finger to his hat and nodded as she walked in. Before Hamdani had retired the next batter, Li was settled at a quiet back table with a beer and a bowl of noodles. When someone sat down at the table next to her in the top of the sixth, she assumed it was the line cook coming to pass time with a fellow Yanks fan. She turned, smiling—and saw a man her oracle claimed she’d never met before.
She nodded, thinking he was just taking the empty chair, and looked back to the game just as Hamdani trotted to the mound. So far he’d held off the heart of the Mets batting order and kept the Yanks their tenuous two–one lead. But he had thrown far too many pitches. And he was looking shaky, fussing with his bad elbow between batters.
He was one of the great ones, but he was getting old, injury-prone. His fastball was slowing down. His curve and slider had lost their bite. He wasn’t unhittable anymore. And it looked to Li like he was about ten pitches away from exhaustion.
He wound up and threw a sharp slider that just caught the outside of the plate. “Fantastic!” Li said under her breath. A taste of the old magic there.
“Ball one!” the umpire said.
“God dammit!”
“Major,” said the man across the table from her, “I had no idea you were so passionate about this.”
Li’s attention snapped away from the game. The man smiled at her—a carefully rationed smile in a young-old face that revealed nothing. She took a closer look, trying again to place him. He reminded her of someone, but in a generic way. As if it were not a single person he brought to mind, but a whole type of person. A type of person that gave her a bad, uncomfortable, guilty feeling.
A thrill of apprehension ran down her spine as she made the connection. He was Syndicate. And he reminded her particularly of the diplomatic rep from . . . where? MotaiSyndicate? KnowlesSyndicate? Whichever Syndicate he was from, that must mean he was A Series. But what the hell was an A Series construct doing on Compson’s World? And how could his talking to her spell anything but trouble?
“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.
“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”
“Then you have the advantage.”
He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your . . . what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”
The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.
“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”
Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”
“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”
Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”
“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”
Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.
“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”
Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed.