Mister Impossible (Dreamer Trilogy #2)(13)

Immediately Jordan’s mind began to consider the challenge of how she would paint it. There were plenty of interesting red pigments, but she didn’t think they’d do the trick on their own. Probably to achieve that eye-popping red, she’d surround it with a green background. Green added to red dulled it. Green painted beside red made both colors look more like themselves. Red and green were complementary colors, on either side of the color wheel. Funny how opposites made each color look brighter.

“What do you have that’s cheap?” Jordan asked.

The bartender looked up through her eyelashes. Her eyes were green. “Open bar, for you.”

Jordan flashed a huge smile. “What do you have that’s orange?”

“Do you want sweet or sour?”

“Oh, I’m not going to drink it. It’s to match my top.”

The bartender did her best and Jordan tipped her with some of her precious forgery money and then took her orange top and orange drink to mingle. Fake-mingle. Really, she just wanted to information-gather. Jordan had crashed enough parties to be good at this, but she was thrown by all the famous faces here. Were these members or clients or both?

This felt higher stakes than it had in DC.

Higher stakes, she reminded herself, but same game. She knew how to play it. It was just forgery, after all. Forgery of people rather than art. The key was to remember to be better than a mere copy or mimic. If one painted exactly what one saw as accurately as possible, the result might be technically correct but was also stilted. Brittle. If one ran into a technical snag in its re-creation, the whole process ground to a halt. One had to stick to the script. But with forgery, the surface details were less important than the rules that proved them. Every work of art had rules: Paint was allowed to pool in the corners, lines were feathery at their ends as the brush was lifted, mouths were exaggerated for drama, blacks were unsaturated, so on, so forth. And if one learned enough of them, one could create endless new works based upon those rules and pass them off as creations by the original artist.

Humans were the same. They had rules that proved their behavior. Discover the thesis and you had them.

Jordan used this principle to forge a partygoer who had been mingling. Her lips carried a holdover laugh from a funny conversation she’d just left. She let out an audible breath as she stole a quick look at her phone, as if she’d just grabbed a moment between chats to check her business email. She nodded over her shoulder as she walked from a group, subtly suggesting she had just had a good talk. When people tried to catch her eye, she lifted a finger and pointed to a group in another room, indicating, Catch you in a bit, I’m on my way to a preexisting condition.

In this way she existed in the party without being of it, gathering information instead of giving it away.

Which was how she discovered that these were clients. She wasn’t sure what they all thought they were here to purchase, but they were decidedly here with wallets at the ready. What could this spangled company all have in common with each other? What could they possibly have in common with her?

“Jordan Hennessy!”

An older woman had drawn alongside her. She was far more dowdy than the other partygoers, dressed in a houndstooth dress with a hedgehog pin over her right breast. She had a glass of wine in her hand and she was a little messy in the way people sometimes are when they’re drunk, but Jordan could tell she was not drunk. She was just like that. “Jordan Hennessy, it’s been a GD long time.”

Jordan peered at her, trying unsuccessfully to place her. She must have met Hennessy or one of the other girls.

The woman’s face turned cartoonishly worried. “Oh, you don’t remember me! Don’t worry, I know some people around here get a little S-H-I-T-T-Y about these things, if you know what I mean, but not me. I’m Barbara Shutt.”

She held out her hand to shake and Jordan was running, running, running the scenarios, testing out replies that would work to make her seem reliable, like the real Jordan Hennessy, replies that didn’t promise knowledge she didn’t have, replies that didn’t have trapdoors with crocodiles underneath them.

They shook—Barbara did that shake with just her fingers—and Jordan said, “Oh, right, DC, yes?”

Barbara wagged her finger at her. “That’s the one. I’m so glad, just so glad, you could make it here when I’m sure you haven’t even settled in. I’m sure Jo’s already touched base with you to talk about apartment options. Jo? Jo Fisher?”

“Oh, no, I’d remember a Jo,” Jordan said.

“Of course you would,” Barbara replied. “Jo is that way. I’ll make a note in the little old brain-a-dex”—she tapped the rim of her glass against her temple—“to have her add you to the schedule. Don’t think we haven’t been keeping a good eyeball out for you, though. That little adventure on the Potomac certainly made a lot of people sit up and take notice, didn’t it! And we just have been doing our best to make sure none of that notice gives you the time of day here.”

Now Jordan felt truly uncomfortable. Had Boudicca been keeping menace from her doorstep? Or were they just saying it to pull her into the fold? She needed to say something. Something that kept Barbara from completely having the upper hand. Something Boudicca couldn’t know about. Think, Jordan.

Jordan smiled broadly and took a risk. “It’s nice to have Bryde on our side, too, after all this time.”