Trust Is Your Only Asset

The hollow in the fallen birch log was empty. Of course it was empty. Rena ran her gloved fingers over the rough, damp interior, feeling for a false bottom, a seam, anything. Nothing. Just cold, dead wood that sucked the warmth from her fingertips. The air was so cold it felt solid in her lungs, each breath a sharp-edged crystal. Ten minutes. She had been here ten minutes. Ten minutes too long.

Footsteps crunched on the frosted path behind her. Slow, deliberate. Not a civilian out for a winter stroll. She didn’t turn. She knew the sound of his tread, the arrogant patience of it. Dave. Right on time to be fashionably, deniably late.

“Anything?” His voice was flat, devoid of warmth, a perfect match for the day.

“What do you think?” Rena straightened up, turning to face him. He looked like a catalogue model for winter gear—dark parka, close-fitting beanie, face impassive. His eyes, a pale, washed-out blue, scanned the log, then her, then the log again. A flicker of calculation. He was deciding if she was lying.

“I think you got here early,” he said, walking past her to inspect the dead drop himself. He crouched, his movements economical, shoving a hand deep into the hollow. He found the same nothing she had.

“And I think you’ve already been here once today.” The accusation hung in the frozen air between them. A bird chirped somewhere, a sharp, metallic sound.

Dave stood, brushing nonexistent dirt from his gloves. “If I had it, I wouldn’t be here now, would I? I’d be on a plane. You, on the other hand.” He let the sentence hang. His gaze drifted past her, a subtle shift of focus. “You have a tell when you’re cornered. You get chatty.”

Her jaw tightened. He was baiting her. Standard procedure. Keep the rival off-balance. She refused to bite. Instead, she followed his gaze. The park was mostly empty, a stark watercolour of white snow and black, skeletal trees. A few figures skated on the frozen duck pond far to their left, their laughter thin and brittle on the wind. Closer, a man stood near the riverbank, half-hidden by a snow-dusted willow.

He was middle-aged, built like a retired dockworker inside a bulky green parka. Binoculars hung around his neck. He was perfectly still, staring out at the river. Watching for mergansers, maybe. Or maybe not.

“Green parka,” she said, her voice a low murmur. “Two o’clock. Been there since I arrived.”

Dave’s eyes narrowed slightly, the only sign he was processing the new variable. He didn't turn his head, just shifted his weight, his peripheral vision doing the work. “Binoculars?”

“Standard birdwatcher gear. Or standard surveillance gear.”

“No such thing as a coincidence on a workday,” he muttered. The man on the riverbank lifted his binoculars, not towards the sky or the river, but in their general direction, a slow, deliberate sweep of the tree line. It was too perfect. Too on-the-nose. He was either the sloppiest spook she’d ever seen, or a civilian. Paranoia screamed it was the former. Professionalism whispered it was the latter. Paranoia was winning.

“He has it,” Dave said. It wasn’t a question.

“He lifted it before I got here, and now he’s waiting to confirm our identities.” Rena’s mind raced, assembling the pieces into a shape she could fight. “He’s got a comms device. A phone, most likely. We need it.”

“I can take him,” Dave said, a hint of eagerness in his tone. Brute force. It was always his first, last, and only answer.

“In a public park with security ten minutes away? You’ll get yourself shot and the asset burned.” She shook her head, the gears of a new plan clicking into place. It was risky. It was theatrical. It relied on him. She hated it already. “We need a diversion. Something to bring him to us. Something that doesn’t look like an attack.”

Dave looked at her, skeptical. “Like what? Ask him for the time?”

“Like a damsel in distress.” The words tasted like ash. “The path along the river is a sheet of ice. People fall. It’s natural. It’s sympathetic.”

He understood immediately. A flicker of something—annoyance, maybe even respect—crossed his face. “You fall. He comes to help. I get the phone.”

“You get close enough. A brush-by. He won’t even know it’s gone until you’re halfway to the parking lot.”

“And what if he doesn’t take the bait?”

“Good Samaritans are a statistical probability.” She didn’t believe it, not really, but it was the only play they had that didn’t involve gunfire. “Just be ready.”

She didn’t wait for his confirmation. She started walking towards the river path, her boots crunching a steady rhythm on the snow. The air felt charged, every nerve ending tingling with adrenaline and the biting cold. She could feel Dave fall into step twenty feet behind her, a silent shadow. She could feel the man in the green parka, a fixed point of hostile energy.

As she reached the icy patch, she glanced his way. He was still there, binoculars down, looking idly in her direction. Now or never. She took another step, let her left foot slide out from under her with practiced ease, and threw her arms out wide. Her body twisted, and she went down hard on her hip, a jarring impact that shot up her spine. A genuine grunt of pain escaped her lips. Perfect.

For a moment, there was only the cold shock of the ice against her skin and the high-pitched ringing in her ears. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, feigning a wince. “Ow. Damn it.”

It worked. Too well. A woman walking a small terrier stopped. “Oh my goodness, are you alright?” A jogger slowed his pace, concern etched on his face. From the corner of her eye, she saw the man in the green parka take a half-step towards her, then hesitate, frowning.

“I’m fine, just… twisted my ankle, I think,” Rena gasped, playing it up. Dave should be moving now. This was his window.

The woman with the dog was already pulling out her phone. “I’m calling the park patrol. They have a first aid station.”

“No, please, don’t bother!” Rena said, a spike of real panic lancing through her. This was wrong. This was spiraling. The jogger was now jogging in place beside her. The man in the green parka, seeing the growing crowd, seemed to make a decision. He took a deliberate step back, then another, melting back towards the cover of the trees. He wasn’t coming over. He was a civilian. A real one. Frightened by the commotion.

And then she saw them. Two figures in dark blue uniforms, walking briskly from the direction of the skating rink. Park security. They’d been alerted. Her fake fall had become a public incident.

Across the way, sitting on a bench that had a clear view of the entire scene, a woman in a grey coat calmly closed her book. Rena hadn’t even registered her before. She’d been a piece of the scenery. But the way she moved now—with a fluid, unhurried finality—was not civilian. The woman stood, dropped her paperback into a trash receptacle, and walked away, her pace steady, disappearing behind the concession stand.

Rena felt the blood drain from her face. That was her. The grey coat. The book. That was the signal. She had been waiting for them to clear the area, to give the secondary all-clear. And instead, they had gift-wrapped a full-blown security response for her. The book in the bin wasn’t just a book. It was the data, now irretrievable.

“Ma’am? Are you hurt?” A security guard was crouching beside her, his face a mask of professional concern. Dave was suddenly there, hovering, his expression perfectly neutral, but his eyes were churning with furious energy. He’d seen the birdwatcher retreat. He’d seen the woman in grey. He knew.

“I’m alright,” Rena said, her voice hollow. She let the guard help her to her feet, her entire body screaming with the humiliation of it. They had to give their cover names, their local addresses. They were logged. Burned. All for nothing.

After a few minutes of polite refusal for medical assistance, the guards left. The small crowd dispersed. The park was quiet again, save for the distant skaters.

Rena and Dave stood on the icy path, a few feet apart, wrapped in a silence more damning than any accusation. The mission was gone. The contact was gone. The data was destroyed. All that was left was the cold and the catastrophic weight of their shared failure.

He looked at her, his face stripped of all pretense. The fury was gone, replaced by something much worse: a flat, dead certainty.

“He was just watching birds,” Dave said.

Rena’s gaze drifted to the empty bench, the trash can beside it a small tombstone for their mission. Her own paranoia, her need to outsmart him, to control the situation—it had been the very thing that doomed them. His bluntness, his eagerness for a fight—the other half of the equation. They hadn’t been compromised by a third party. They had compromised themselves.

She looked back at Dave, the architect of her failure, and saw in his eyes her own reflection.