“Did you hear anything that upset you?” I pointed over my shoulder at the door to indicate what I meant.
“Yes. Do you think perhaps I have no ears?”
She was definitely scowling now, but the attempt at covering up her hurt with anger was breaking down as I talked with her. A few minutes later I was sitting on the bed, next to where she had lay. Her face was buried in my shoulder, and the quiet sobbing seemed to be all she wanted. Just a shoulder to lean on. Sometimes that’s all any of us need.
After a few minutes of that, her body heat was starting to be very comforting to me as well. Hell, I hadn’t had a great day either. We held each other like that until the sobbing died away to small sniffles. I pulled back a bit and offered my handkerchief, which was gratefully accepted. She knew enough to keep it, and not offer it back to me, used. I hated that.
“Therese, I think we’re making progress with the case. I have to make some calls now, but tomorrow, well, tomorrow could find us face to face with Ted. You still want to help us, don’t you?”
She sighed a big sigh and flopped back onto the bed.
“Yes. I will do anything I can to help catch the man who killed my John. He may have been like a small child sometimes, but most men have the same problem. You don’t seem to have it, but I only know you a little bit, so far. No, that’s not true. I know you more than you think, maybe. I believe that when you act like a child it’s the wonderment of life that makes you do it, resulting in a very attractive characteristic.”
I had no idea whatsoever how to respond to that, so I didn’t.
“Well, duty calls, and all that stuff.”
“Do what you want, don’t let me stop you.”
I smiled, and picked up her hand as I stood, and made a bow as I kissed it. She laughed at me with her eyes and dismissed me with her other hand at the same time. I gave her back her hand and went over to the wing chair in the corner, sitting down and getting comfortable.
The HP Palmtop went on the side table while I got out my digital cell phone and my connecting cable. Then I took a piece of hotel stationary from the drawer in the table next to the chair.
The chair itself was a marvel of old-school design. Form and function. There was a small wooden writing surface that swung up from the side of the chair facing away from the door. It was perfect for my needs. I quickly jotted down all of the relevant points to investigate, then wrote them back onto the flash card that held the memory for the Palmtop. Then I encrypted it and dialed the internet, posting it to one of Walter’s safe sites. At the same time, I downloaded the latest bulletin from him, logged off the ‘net, and decrypted the message.
George was on his way from Cairo to Paris on Lufthansa. He’d be Okay. His flight would be landing in about three hours. The Paris team members would meet him at the airport, I’d see to that. They would need to have the password, which would be useless once used. But hey, that’s what passwords are for, when you definitely need them.
The rest of the data was detail work about questions I’d posted in the last transmission. We had confirmations on the origins of the calls made to and from the apartment of the traitor, Mr. Smith. They showed occasional direct connection between the house of the French employee of Citecorp’s Geneva Office, in reality from Heidi Meir herself, and Smith’s apartment in Ottawa. We had also tied J.D.’s apartment number to the French number. Again, suspecting that it was Heidi Meir at that number, on those occasions. Then there was the kicker.
Walter had gone underground until this matter was resolved to his particular satisfaction. There were far too many linked pieces that were deadly, for Walter’s liking, anyway. He felt that because of the leaks, and he was sure that there were more than the one we’d found so far, it was too easy to target him as a part of the operation. That wasn’t the way Walter saw things. I was his client. What I got up to was none of his business, and what he got up to was nobody’s business. There was something in this one that touched too close to home.
He’d be available and working on the data requests for this mission that I was on, to the exclusion of all of his regular clients. He also mentioned a joint cost program, with him as a member. I was floored.
In the entire time I’d known Walter, which was my whole life minus the part that you go through before you enter first grade in elementary school, I’d never seen him give away business for any discount, and surely never for free. He was playing it personal this time. That old softy! Was I going to rag on him when this was all over?
I closed up shop and went back to the sitting room leaving Therese with a kiss blown from my fingertips just before I opened the door and left the bedroom. I thought I saw her catch for it with her left hand just before I closed the door on her. Why I had done that I don’t know. Do guys act that way if it’s a ‘buddy’, but the ‘buddy’ is a girl? Why does the line that you so carefully pick at the grocery store always turn out to have a customer who has bought everything the store had on the shelves without a price sticker? Why is it that if you pay careful attention to your sock washing and drying, you’ll notice that one sock will disappear every once in a while, and no matter how hard you try, it will happen. Stop and think for a minute. Somewhere, there’s a parallel universe, and the only thing in that universe is socks, floating through space. Billions and billions of socks. It sure must look strange, and how can you mount an expedition to retrieve them? You can’t get a grown person inside a washer or a dryer. Maybe if the industrial kind were used, it might work. Nah. I bet the industrial sized equipment doesn’t link to that other universe. Go figure.
Terry was where I’d left him, as were the girls. Evie had finished working with the comms gear, and now she was onto ‘weapons maintenance’. There was a field-stripped fully automatic selective-fire machine gun on the coffee table, and several cloths with and without oils, solvents, whatever. It looked like it would build into a very compact weapon, very modern, very deadly, and Evie was smiling to herself as she went over every piece of it, one at a time.
I settled myself in my previous seat, and pulled out the handheld, to write on. Terry was just finishing an answer to a question that had been put to him by Ronnie. It looked like she had kept the ‘Lady of Steel’ image happening, because Terry looked actually glad to see me. I could tell by the way he tracked me from the bedroom door to my chair.
“…and I would swear a new allegiance to your Mission, to the Forces, and to my Country. I want desperately to try making up for what I’ve done, and what has been made to be done to me. I was a fool, I know that. Just one more chance to do the right thing. Then, I know. The courts-martial.”
Ronnie looked up as I passed
“Excuse me, Terry. Major Claxton, while you’ve been engaged,”
Evie looked up from the piece of H&K ‘Autokiller’ that she was working on, and smiled at me, Kind of a…welcome back from the land of ‘Froot Loops’ sort of smile. Her hands never stopped working while she took her eyes away. It was obvious that she could field-strip this weapon in the dark. It also flashed through my mind that when I’d been given the Grand Tour, I had missed the ‘Weapons of War’ section. Interesting.
“…we’ve been going over Terry’s acceptance of a proposal I’ve made to him concerning the man, Enrico, and Heidi Meir. He seems to feel that he could set up a meeting without too much danger to himself. Also, he is willing to wear his regular comm unit, the one he had on earlier this evening. The Commander has managed to modify his original transmitter to operate normally, and then, maybe the Commander would care to explain the way it works.”
Evie kept on smiling at me while she continued putting the machine gun back together. She picked up the ball immediately, while her hands were left to do the job on their own.
“I’ve set a remote switch into the additional circuit I’ve put in his unit. They were all a couple of generations behind us when it comes to communications, if what they were carrying tonight was any indication. Same manufacturer, though, so the upgrade w
as easy. He’ll transmit on their frequency only, as far as audio goes. I have added a video signal to the transmission. Coded and buried within the carrier signal. Without the code, it wouldn’t even show on an oscilloscope. The video is full-motion, we’ll get about thirty frames per second, so it’s more like a series of very fast stills. But they should be nice and clean. Good enough to have faces to go with the names, and voice prints. All we have to do is tie in on their transmission frequency. We’ll be able to switch back and forth after I’ve finished modifying all of ours.”
Then she turned her attention back to the machine gun. Now she had flipped over one of the main pieces, and it was clearly marked: H&K - Modified Model - .45 Calibre. Good God. A fully automatic machine gun, hardly much bigger than a pistol at the trigger and chamber area, and it was .45 Calibre. Now that was a dangerous weapon. From the original Thompson machine gun so favoured by the G-Men of the Prohibition era, to the .45 and .50 Calibre machine guns that ate up troops in WW II like a Twister takes your house over the State Line, with a gun like that, killing is as simple as pulling the trigger when the weapon is pointed in the general direction of the target.
The modern versions of the heavy calibre fully automatic machine guns had a vicious sting. They left the muzzle well in excess of the speed of sound, and the rounds usually expanded to almost .70 calibre after the first some-odd feet or so. The penetration capability of this full metal jacket non-specific round at that point, would be about twelve inches, in terms of a human body. Once you introduce specialized rounds into the equation, well, the sky’s the limit I suppose, and knowing Evie, she probably had packed less regular rounds than the ‘Specials’. I actually suspected that she had a secret type of round that she hadn’t shared with me, so far, and may not even have shared with anyone yet, she reminded me too much of the cat that ate the canary, she definitely had something up her sleeve.
There was a recurved clip on the table that had to hold at least two hundred and fifty rounds. The other clips were all different, one slow curve in a half-moon, holding maybe half that number, two straight clips that probably fell in between the other two styles for capacity, and a straight clip that probably held about fifty or sixty rounds. That one was set aside with two more just like it, next to a roll of good old duct tape. Next to that, she had a selection of grenades, but grenades the like of which I’d never seen before. They were… small. I mean miniature. I suppose that was the main thing that stood out. You could pocket twenty of those suckers in a pair of Levi jeans.
There were some that were obvious like the fragmentation grenades. It’s hard to disguise the intent of one of those babies, but there were several types on display of which I knew nothing, and there must have been about sixty of the bloody things in a knapsack on the floor next to the table. She looked like she was getting ready for WW III. Maybe we all were, and we just didn’t know it yet.
Something told me that we would know exactly what we were preparing for by the time this day was done.
~
Chapter Twenty-Seven
O
nce I’d gotten caught up, I saw that the Colonel had been busy ‘planning’ while I had been on-line. I know. It takes a woman at the most only half the time it takes a man to communicate anything, and mostly, a lot less than half. They do it differently.
It was now agreed that Terry, whom I’d warmed up nicely for Ronnie, had just committed himself to the Colonel, her team, and forsaken all others. Bingo.
Now we had completed the ‘Master Trick’ in this game. Turning one of their people into one of ours, without them knowing. Turning a counter-agent back into an agent. That was quite a coup. In Las Vegas terms, it would be as good as turning an elephant into a tiger right before the eyes of the audience. As any good magician knows, the true challenge is to maintain that illusion. In our case, if the illusion failed, our man Terry would be killed as fast as you could say ‘Gotcha!’. Unless we did it right.
It seemed that despite my original feelings about this from the start, we were a pretty good team already. Just with the main branch: we had the Commander, Ronnie; we had Comms, Evie–and; of course, we had Highjacked Jeffry, me.
For the first few hours, anyway, then it had started to bubble up inside of me of its own free will until it had me and I was hooked. Ronnie had gambled on that using women’s intuition when she spoke with George about me. It had to be a gamble on her part, because these are things that nobody but myself knew.
My official reason for leaving the Forces had been ‘Burn-out’. They had been willing to accept that at face value, due to the number of missions I’d come back from, and the number of times I’d needed patching and stitching, and so on. With the record I had though, ‘Burn-Out’ would never have made it to paper. Even on the deep-cover file. They were very very nice about discharging me, With Honours. I had so many medals and crosses and whatnot that I had a special drawer I kept them all in. It was in the false bottom to my steamer trunk, which never left my main hallway closet.
Speaking of which, the one time I know of that Walter had let curiosity get the better of him, he’d tried to access the data on Six-Alpha, and my file in particular. Apparently, he never did get to my file. How he’d found the name Six-Alpha I’ll never know, but he hadn’t gotten as far as he’d expected. The next morning, there had been a letter in the mail slots of both Walter and myself. Not posted, hand delivered. There had been no stamp.
The letter had been succinct, and clearly indicated that one try was all you get. The next time it would be treated more ‘seriously’. I ensured that Walter had lost his curiosity overnight, as it were, and I’d never even wanted to look at the file in the first place. There wasn’t anything in it I didn’t already know, unless it was lies, which was possible, I suppose. Anyway, if Walter had asked me, I could have told him what would happen. What I did end up telling him was what was likely to happen if he got traced again. I would only be able to stop what I knew about. If he tried it again and then compounded his error by not telling me about it, then I’d have to find a new Data Acquisition Department, because I was damn well sure that I’d never find the one I’d had.
I had held the record for ‘Borrowed Personnel’ in terms of missions. The number of them, and the fact that I’d been crossed from a ‘Borrowed’ to a ‘Native’ in the Special Forces Group Six-Alpha. The number one Middle and Far East covert force. There were about twenty of us altogether. We had been very good.
I had Rank, Decorations, Honours, all the things they can give you. Except peace. I had wanted peace more than anything else when I’d left. They had thought I was no longer able to carry out my missions, because that’s exactly what I had told them. I had also learned to lie reasonably well. The only one who could tell every time was Sarah, my sister. I couldn’t lie to her for all the tea in China. I always either started to laugh, or I got so sentimental that I’d be on the verge of tears. Easy to spot, basically.
Part of the reason I had left in the first place had been the feeling that had started coming over me prior to missions. Detachment, efficiency, precision, honour to the ‘Team’. All sorts of feelings that would be better spent on other aspects of life. But first you had to have a life. For that, you had to be a civilian. Of all the feelings, the one of detachment was the feeling I hated the most. I didn’t feel that this time. I had started out fair and square by taking the toughest case yet in my private practice, and it had led here. So be it.
I jotted down the information on George’s arrival in Paris, and Evie looked it over once, nodded, and then left the room to make a call of her own. But not before designating me as ‘Warden’ of the materiel scattered over the table while she was out of the room. That suited me, I wasn’t even sure what some of it did, so it sure wouldn’t make sense to play with it, and that went double for anyone else.
The Colonel’s plan was very simple, which was the best kind, and went something like this.
Terry was supposed to call Meir, and force a mee
ting based on the action that had taken place earlier tonight, indicating that he had obtained inside information on the team that was here, and they had been sent to get her. Then, he was going to call Enrico, and leave a message that he was going to meet with Meir, and he would be glad of some moral support in the form of his attendance. This was all going to happen tomorrow morning. Simultaneously with the pre-arranged bank monitoring, I suppose. Sounded Okay if we were all ten years old.
Meir and Enrico would certainly speak prior to any meeting if they were even in town, and Terry would be under heavy suspicion if he didn’t show up somewhere soon. They knew by now that three more of their men had been killed, and this time two of them, the shooters, were definitely not supposed to be letting that happen to them.
Me, I just couldn’t help myself. I operated on a simple principle. If someone has a gun and he wants to use it in my presence, it’s mandatory that the shooter be on my side. If he wasn’t—then I killed him—that was simple enough, and it gave the choice of fight or flight to the bad guy. He didn’t have to die. I’ve never shot an unarmed man in the back. The drivers tonight, though. I had let them go, and they would have headed straight for home after the disaster that had befallen them. A wasted opportunity to tag the cars with micro-transmitters.
The only problem with that is that it would have to be planned for, and then implemented by another member of the team. Tonight, if I’d gotten as far as the grey Audi’s, the plans I had for them didn’t include ‘tracking’ or ‘negotiation’. I still had possession of the incendiary grenades I took from Eduardo, back at the pub. It would be brought up again at the earliest time that we had an hour to go spare. The grey men didn’t count any more in my mind. I already knew who pulled their puppet strings; the trick now would be to find out who pulled his, and so on ad nauseam. Sooner or later, you found the final link to the top tier, and then you had them. Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 60