big bolts of cloth?”
Keys clicked. “Nothing that shows on the electronic manifest. Hang on. Let me check the hard copy.” Papers fluttered. “Okay, a last-minute load. One container.”
“Contents?”
“Not listed.” Jimmy whistled. “Someone at SHA has been a ba-aa-ad boy. All container contents are s’posed to be logged and checked by customs twenty-four hours before loading. Looks like this one got loaded up after the rest of the ship’s containers were inspected.”
“Could that container have bypassed a customs inspection?”
“Only if money changed hands somewhere down the line.”
“Sounds like a snakehead’s involved,” she said.
“Human smuggling? Stowaways usually try to get in, not out.”
“True.” She thought for a moment. “What do you know about SHA?” she asked as she used Google to search the company name.
“They log about six, seven shipments a year. Small scratch. Manifest says they have offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Istanbul.”
“Where’s this boat headed?”
“Itinerary says Hong Kong. Should take about four weeks to get there.”
Four weeks from April 27 meant the container ship would be in port in less than a month, give or take the weather.
Then a thought occurred to her. “Were any civilian passengers logged for this trip?” Sometimes adventurers would book passage on a commercial shipper as an alternative to flying. The signal Oracle picked up might have originated from a passenger.
Jimmy rummaged on the keyboard for a moment, then said, “One guy. An Alexander Wryzynski.”
Nikki scribbled down the name as he spelled it for her. “Thanks for the trouble, Jimmy. I owe you.”
“Anything for you, chica, anytime.” He clicked off.
Nikki’s smile faded as the search engine came up with about twenty-eight thousand incomprehensible listings for SHA.
SHA, she discovered, was a database programming tool used to encrypt data, so the vast majority of the search links led to either propeller-head sites or to database companies. Including shipping, transport and China in the search term brought up more programming links, only in Chinese.
The manifest had listed the SHA company as based in Hong Kong, with offices in Singapore and Istanbul. She tried a search with those cities and shipping, and dropped SHA. Bingo. A plethora of shipping companies, none of which were SHA. What shipping company these days didn’t have a Web site?
So a little-known shipping company had sent a light load of handwoven textiles in the least likely direction for such goods to go, and taken on a single container of unknown contents that had bypassed U.S. Customs and Border Control.
It smelled as rotten as the shrimp she’d raked this morning.
Nikki blew out a breath. She had her mark. She fired off two words via e-mail to Delphi: Got it. Now she’d just wait to be contacted.
Delphi’s e-mail warning back in February had been followed up by a face-to-face visit from a former classmate, Dana Velasco. Dana had been two years ahead of Nikki and now test-piloted experimental planes for a major aircraft manufacturer. Oracle, Dana had told her, was an intelligence-digesting system run by someone known only as Delphi.
“I don’t know who Delphi is,” Dana had said over a crowd of lively teenagers as they walked down Calle Ocho in Little Havana, “but they’ve used Oracle to piece together puzzles intelligence agencies can’t manage on their own.”
“And Athena figures in how?”
Dana had only shrugged. “A lot of what gets pieced together has to do with the academy. And students like you.”
Students like you. Nikki sighed and kicked back in her office chair. Students like her, who’d been manipulated at the genetic level, unbeknownst to their parents.
Jaime and Teresita Bustillo hadn’t wanted much—just a girl. Seven sons had kept their upscale East Flagstaff construction business going, but they’d wanted one last chance at a daughter. That’s where the fertility clinic in Zuni, New Mexico, came in. The clinic, doctors assured her parents, could guarantee a girl.
They just hadn’t mentioned that the girl, conceived in vitro and implanted in her mother’s womb, would be born with a little something extra. That little secret would be kept until only a few months ago, when Delphi made her phone call and Nikki finally understood the details about where her “gift” had come from. Nikki, Delphi had made clear, wasn’t the only girl to have a special talent.
Another, Nikki knew immediately, was her best friend, Jessica Whittaker. Jess had been two years ahead of Nikki at the academy, but something had drawn them together. Maybe it was the fact they were both “egg babies,” even though they, at the time, had had no idea why they could do what they could. Maybe it was that Jess seemed like the older sister Nikki didn’t have. Whichever, as Nikki had grown up at Athena Academy, she’d found herself closer to Jess than even to her Hecate sisters.
Egg baby. Jess could breathe water and Nikki had a nose like a bloodhound. It was almost as if the scientists at Lab 33 had been splicing in the traits that humans longed for but didn’t have.
Which often made Nikki wonder if Catwoman really did exist out there. Or someone more brutal, more cunning, more…insane.
Her cell buzzed and Nikki caught it on the second tone. “Bustillo.”
“Girlfriend!”
“Dana!” Nikki replied, grinning. “¿Cómo estás, chica?”
“Hell, Nik,” Dana groaned. “My Spanish still sucks, okay?”
“You said you were going to practice.”
“Life’s short but the journey’s busy. Let’s eat.”
“Name the place.”
“That little club we didn’t get to check out last time I was there. In a half hour.”
Nikki hung up. The little club they’d missed was called Hoy Como Ayer, a few blocks away, and it deserved something much nicer than her gray sweat-pants and a ragged T-shirt. She dug through her closet until she came up with a red knit top and a short black skirt with a bit of flare to the hem.
Twenty minutes later Nikki sat in a corner table as far away from the little stage as she could get. A couple of youths unloaded gear from a lowered pickup truck outside; Thursday nights jammed with class acts from the finest musicians and singers working the circuit. According to Nikki’s watch, she had five minutes to wait for Dana and another hour before the night’s live music would start.
On the dot, Dana wound through the growing throng toward her table. Dressed in a flowing, flowery skirt and a solid black top, her dark hair loose on her shoulders, Dana looked striking—and totally unlike a turista.
“Hey,
