Artemis

I popped open the case to discover…a cable?

It was just a coiled cable, maybe two meters long. Had someone taken the secret device and left the po

wer cable behind? Why do that? Why not take the whole case?

I looked at the cable more closely. Actually, it wasn’t a power cord. It was a fiber-optic cable. Okay, so it was for data. But what data?

“Okay. Now what?” I asked myself.

—

The door beeped and slid open. Svoboda stepped into his studio apartment and dropped his Gizmo on the shelf near the door.

“Hi, Svobo,” I said.

“Svyate der´mo!” He put his hand on his chest and panted.

I’d smuggled in so many illegal chemicals for him over the years he’d given me the keypad-code for his apartment. It was just easier for me to deliver that way.

I leaned back in his desk chair. “I need some work from you.”

“Jesus Christ, Jazz!” he said, still breathing heavily. “Why are you in my apartment?”

“I’m in hiding.”

“What’s with your hair?”

I’d changed back into normal clothes, but I still had my whore-do. “Long story.”

“Are those sparkles? You have sparkles in your hair?”

“Long story!” I pulled a square of wrapped chocolate from my pocket and tossed it to him. “Here. I read somewhere you should always bring a gift when visiting a Ukrainian.”

“Ooh! Chocolate!” He caught the morsel and unwrapped it. “Rudy came by the lab today asking about you. He didn’t say why, but scuttlebutt is you’re involved in those murders?”

“The guy who killed them wants to kill me.”

“Wow,” he said. “This is serious. You should go to Rudy.”

I shook my head. “And get deported? No thanks. I can’t trust him. I can’t trust anyone right now.”

“But you’re here.” He smiled. “So you trust me?”

Huh. It never occurred to me not to trust Svoboda. He was way too “Svoboda” to be sinister. “I guess so.”

“Awesome!” He snapped the chocolate in two and handed me half. He popped the other half in his mouth and savored it.

“Oh, hey,” he said with his mouth full. “Did you get a chance to test the condom?”

“No, I haven’t had sex in the two days since you gave me the condom.”

“Okay, okay,” he said.

I picked up the ZAFO box and tossed it to him. “I need you to tell me what this is.”

He plucked it out of the air and read the label. “Huh. ZAFO. You asked me about that earlier.”

“Yeah. Now I have a sample. What can you tell me about it?”