by Dan Moren
Kovalic let out a breath. “Nothing goes as planned.”
“Bingo,” said Tapper, waving a finger, and going back to his puzzle. “Relax. They’ll contact us when they’re good and ready.”
Leaning back in his chair, Kovalic turned the pieces over in his mind. The information the general had passed along from CARDINAL – that Crown Prince Hadrian himself was headed to Bayern – had been old by the time they’d gotten it, and though Kovalic had hopped the fastest transport he could find, the chances that he’d outrun the arrival of the prince were slim. And that might mean that the situation Nat and Brody had run into was most definitely not the one they’d prepped for.
Nat would be fine; she was used to situations going dynamic. To be honest, it was Brody that he was worried about. The pilot was on his first real mission and, as Kovalic had tried to impress upon the general, the kid had no training. And then there was the little matter of him being a former Illyrican officer. The general had a soft spot for defectors – little surprise there – but then again, the general had been one of a kind.
Although, he supposed Brody was one of a kind, too, in his own way. Still, he’d been the one to recruit the kid. Whatever happened to Brody was on him.
Tapper gave him a sidelong glance. “Look, I know you’re outside of the chain of command on this one, and believe me, I get how weird that is. But you’ve got to trust the team. They’ve got it under control. Even Brody. And you know how it pains me to say that.”
“I do trust them,” said Kovalic. “I just want to make sure that they have all the information. The general sent me here to apprise Nat of intel that might impact the mission. The sooner I relay that, the sooner you get me out of your hair.”
“Boss, don’t get me wrong: I’m delighted you’re here,” said Tapper, spreading a hand across his chest. “Really. But we’ve got protocol for a reason. A transmission could put the team at risk.” He ran a hand through his gray hair. “You know all this. Why am I even talking right now?”
“Sorry, Tap. I’m not trying to put you in a bind here. It’s just… my gut is saying we’ve missed something. I’d feel a lot better if we had a twenty on Nat and Brody. Besides, if I’m right, they may already be at risk.”
Tapper stared at him for a few seconds, then threw up his hands in resignation. “I get the feeling I’m going to get yelled at either way,” he muttered, reaching for the headset. Swiveling around, he tapped a few buttons on the console. “Socialite, this is Bulldog. Do you copy?”
“Bulldog?” murmured Kovalic.
Tapper was in the middle of mouthing “shut up” in his direction when a shriek of electronic interference so loud that it even made Kovalic wince squealed from the sergeant’s earpiece. Cursing, Tapper ripped off the headset and flung it onto the counter.
Kovalic raised an eyebrow as the sergeant dug a pinky into his right ear. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“If you knew that was going to happen and let me do it anyway, then I’m going to have a little talk with your psych evaluator,” growled Tapper. “Wide-spectrum jamming?”
“Sure sounds like it. Now you believe that something’s wrong?”
Tapper was still holding a hand over his ear. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Tell me you have a contingency.”
“A contingency? You want I should send up a smoke signal?”
“In the old days we would have had a contingency,” Kovalic said, a little more sharply than he’d intended.
“In the old days, we wouldn’t have been forced to beg, borrow, and steal our equipment from the local station chief.”
“Fair point.” Kovalic’s eyes swept around the well-equipped van, alighting at last on the pistol that the sergeant had accosted him with earlier in the evening.
Tapper followed his gaze. “No. Absolutely not.” He placed a hand on the weapon’s grip possessively.
“We’re blind and deaf,” Kovalic pointed out.
“And you’re what, going to scale the walls and creep across the grounds, looking like a dockhand?” He nodded at Kovalic’s peacoat. “Just as a reminder, the nearest body of water is about eighty klicks away, through the better part of a mountain.”
“You have a better suggestion?”
“Stake out the entrance,” Tapper said immediately. “Look: wide-spectrum jamming suggests a precautionary measure. If they knew we were here, they’d only be squelching our frequencies. It’s security, plain and simple. So, if the team hasn’t set off any alarm bells, we definitely shouldn’t do it for them.”
It had a sort of sense to it. Well. A lot of sense. That didn’t mean Kovalic had to like it, as the slight clenching of his fingers suggested. His shoulder ached and he kneaded it, feeling the knot of sealant underneath his thumb. “And if they don’t come out? Or the Illyricans bundle them out the service entrance?”
“You know as well as I do, boss, that we can’t be everywhere. Let’s give the commander and Brody a chance to do their job. If we need to, we fall back to the station and regroup, call in the cavalry.”
“If the cavalry will listen,” Kovalic said, thinking back to the conversation between the general and Kester. He had a hard time resisting the urge to wipe even an imagined smug look off the deputy director’s face, but he certainly didn’t have any problem believing that Kester would hang them out to dry if it suited his purpose, or even just to prove a point. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll stake out the entrance. You stay here, but get ready to move. They must have a tightbeam rig in here somewhere.” The laser-based system wouldn’t be susceptible to the jamming, but it only worked in line of sight.
“There’s a receiver on the roof,” said Tapper, nodding upward. “I’ll get it set up.”
It took the sergeant only a few minutes to get the communication array online. He raised an earpiece and a small box that looked like the key fob for a hovercar. “You have to be somewhere you can see the roof of the van, got it? Use the visible beam to figure out where you’re aiming, and then switch it over to the infrared system for comms. And, for god’s sake, don’t point it at the embassy. Not only are they liable to freak out, but they’ll also probably be able to pinpoint your location within a few seconds, and then where will you be? That’s right,” he said, not waiting for Kovalic to interject, “up shit creek with a paddle.”
“Without a paddle.”
“No, you’ll have the paddle. Just no boat.”
Kovalic gave him a sour look. “Anything else, mom?”
“Thank the kindly nature of the universe that I’m not your mother,” said Tapper, slapping the rig into Kovalic’s hand. Then, with a long-suffering sigh redolent of parenthood, he raised his sleeve toward the van’s wall. A panel popped open and Tapper pulled out a sidearm, checked it, and then placed it on the counter.
“Stun cartridges only,” he warned. “Just… watch your six.”
Kovalic nodded his thanks, taking the weapon and the comm gear, then slipped out the back of the van. Crossing the street so that he’d be opposite the embassy’s entrance, he made his way down the block.
The after-dinner crowd had mostly dissipated, and the temperature had dropped another few degrees; he drew his coat tighter around himself and jammed his hands in his pockets. Glancing up into what passed for a sky in this city, he watched as a few blinking lights, far overhead, crossed against the backdrop of the ceiling. There was an extremely limited amount of air traffic in Bergfestung, highly regulated. Most of it was rapid response services: police hoppers, ambulances, fire fighters; occasionally, a news skimmer or transport for a VIP in the mix. He inhaled the cool air deeply, and tried not to smile as he flexed his fingers – he shouldn’t be enjoying this, he knew, but it felt good just to be doing something. Even a few days out of commission had made him antsy.
The building opposite the embassy was a low-slung concrete edifice that rose about four stories high. Conveniently, an alley ran along the side of it, and it was even equipped with an external emergency fire escape
. He probably could have free climbed it had it been necessary, but he had to admit he’d be happy enough not to do so. To call those skills rusty would be underestimating the potential effects of severe metal fatigue. He could feel his injured shoulder thanking him.
Climbing to the top took a little longer than usual, as he moved slowly to avoid his footfalls clanging loudly in the still night air. Whatever the status of the party at the embassy, it clearly wasn’t a barn-burner. Then again, it also meant there wasn’t, say, a gunfight going on in the main ballroom. So he’d take it.
As he stepped onto the roof, he got a look out over Bergfestung. Most of the buildings in the city weren’t exactly high-rises, given the nature of the settlement’s construction, so the view from this vantage was pretty good. Stretching away from him, off into the distance, constellations of streetlights and lit windows sparkled in the darkness. Bergfestung’s population of two million were all living their own quiet lives tonight.
But he wasn’t concerned with them. Approaching the edge of the roof opposite the embassy, he dropped flat; there was no railing or wall to keep him from tumbling off, so he crawled the last several feet. Reaching into a pocket of his coat, he pulled out the tightbeam rig and powered it on.
Below, Tapper had started the van, and pulled it around in a semicircle so that it was facing the embassy. He’d left the lights doused, so as not to attract undue attention from any of the remaining security personnel. From another pocket, Kovalic produced a pair of night-vision binoculars that he’d also found among the van’s equipment – the benefit of Bayern station, it appeared, was the budget.
Aiming the binocs at the van, he picked out the tightbeam receiver and played his visible laser beam over the top of the van until he was pretty sure he was on target. Flipping a switch on the side, he activated the transmitter’s infrared beam.
“You reading this, Bulldog?”
“Loud and clear, smartass.”
“What, I don’t get to pick my own callsign?”
“Any movement?” Tapper said, ignoring the gibe.
“Negative. Everything’s quiet.” He ran the binoculars over the guards near the front entrance. They appeared to be standing at ease; no sign that anything untoward had passed inside. Making out the uniforms in the green-tinted night vision was a no-go, but if he’d had to place a wager on the colors those guards were wearing, he would have gone all in on crimson and gold. “So far, so good. Guards on the ground and…” he panned upwards to where he could make out some bumpy shapes on the roof of the complex, “snipers on the roof. Looks like there’s a jetpad up there too. Far as I can tell, they’re all just running standard patrol.”
“I told you. Nothing to worry about.”
Kovalic frowned. He wasn’t so sure. Something still felt wrong in his gut and as he’d learned from every operative worth their salt, you never went against the gut – it was your operational antenna. Even when every other piece of evidence was telling him that things were fine.
Everything he was seeing on the ground more or less confirmed the intelligence that the crown prince was the Imperium’s envoy to Bayern. The general had suggested it could be a coincidence, but Kovalic knew that neither of them had really believed it. To an intelligence officer, a coincidence just meant that you hadn’t figured out the pattern yet.
Not that they had. Even if Prince Hadrian were acting as the Imperium’s envoy to the Corporation, they still had no idea what the two sides were talking about. And the combination of the Imperium’s vast war machine with the Corporation’s nearly bottomless coffers was not a mixture that Kovalic had any desire to see. After the Imperium’s occupation of Earth, Caledonia, and Centauri, their further expansion had been stemmed by the heavy losses inflicted on the Third Fleet at the Battle of Badr, followed by the destruction of the Fifth Fleet in the Battle of Sabaea; an influx of the Corporation’s cash would let them replace the ships that they’d lost in that engagement and then some. That was a build-up that the Commonwealth just didn’t have the resources to match.
But Bayern had remained independent in the galactic cold war so far – and, seemingly, profited handsomely from it. Why change that stance now?
The simple answer, of course, was that there was something in it for them. The Corporation didn’t lift a finger unless that infinitesimal movement somehow benefited it at the end of the day. Or week. Or year. They could afford to play the long game.
He wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d lain there, turning the ideas over in his head, wrestling with each individual piece and seeing how it interlocked. But it was at least half an hour; long enough that he’d had plenty of time to get cold from inaction. He shifted slightly, wriggling to one side and then back to generate a little warmth, and raised the binoculars again.
The guards on the door were still there, still standing at attention. If they were cold, it didn’t seem to bother them. There’d probably been a time he’d been able to maintain that level of discipline, but he consoled himself with the fact that most of those guards appeared to be fifteen or twenty years his junior.
Playing the binoculars over the scene with one hand, he found the tightbeam transmitter with the other and keyed it on.
“Still quiet, Bulldog.”
“You can’t see it, but I have my surprised face on.”
“You know, I don’t remember you always being this cynical.”
“Side effect from spending too much time stuck in this damn van.”
Kovalic let his binocs drift to the perimeter of the embassy. There wasn’t much else in this area–
“Hold on,” he said, stiffening. “I’ve got movement.”
It was a van – near a duplicate of the one Tapper was in, at least as far as he could tell in the dark. Whoever was driving it was being equally cautious, letting it roll slowly through the side street next to the embassy, its lights extinguished. Effective, perhaps, at keeping one out of sight, but once you were spotted, it wasn’t worth much – delivery vans didn’t usually run dark at molasses speeds.
“Van, northwest corner,” said Kovalic, keeping his eyes trained on it. “I can’t make out the tag at this distance.” He’d keyed the binoculars’ recording capability at the first sight of the vehicle; they could analyze the footage later with some more powerful hardware and see if they could pick out additional details.
“No way I’m going to be able to see it from here,” Tapper’s voice came back. “What about the embassy? You said they had snipers posted – have they picked up on it?”
Kovalic swung back towards the embassy’s roof, blinking as the brilliant light from the spotlight overwhelmed the night vision. Pulling them from his face, he rubbed at his eyes, and tapped a button to switch the binoculars to thermal imaging. The sniper appeared as an orangish-red blob on the top of the building. There was no indication of alarm; given the angle, Kovalic calculated that it was unlikely that the sniper could even see the van. Surely, though, they’d have snipers elsewhere on the roof?
“We’re still being jammed?” Kovalic asked.
“Like a piece of whole wheat toast,” Tapper confirmed.
So much for pulling Nat and Brody out. And Kovalic was going to be little help from this vantage. He reached under his jacket and touched the reassuring weight of the weapon he’d tucked in the back of his waistband. Non-lethal, but it would do in a pinch. More problematically, it was a short-range weapon, good only out to about ten meters. Ten meters from here would let him fire a little more than halfway down the building. Not helpful.
Bringing the binoculars to bear once again on the van, he frowned. The vehicle had pulled up flush with a short wall on the embassy’s perimeter, the angle obscuring it completely from anyone on the roof. Kovalic was about to glance back at the roof, when he caught a pulsing red glow from the front of the vehicle. Without taking the binoculars from his face, he flipped it back to night vision, and saw the pulse repeat itself, this time much more clearly.
The van was blinking
its lights. In a pattern.
It was signaling someone.
Kovalic cleared his throat. “Uh, Bulldog? I think we have a problem. Looks like we’re not the only ones interested in crashing this party.”
Chapter 14
Get her away? Sure. No problem. Eli may not have known Taylor very well after their less-than-a-week’s worth of acquaintance, but if he’d had to ascribe one particular adjective to her, he would probably have picked “tenacious.” If she had her teeth in the heir apparent, then she wasn’t going to let up just because Eli Brody – or anybody else – told her to.
Which presented Eli with a dilemma: on the one hand, both Erich and Frayn wanted Taylor and Eli away from the prince. On the other, he and Taylor had a job to do here, and walking away wasn’t going to further that. Going home empty-handed was not an option.
Could they find some other vector on which to attack the problem? Maybe, but it would take time and, if their initial briefing were right, that was a resource that was scarce at present. Who knew when this deal was scheduled to take place, and whether or not any record of it would be left after it had?
This was their data point, and this was their opportunity. Taylor was, for the moment, his boss, and it was his job to support her in any way he could. And right now, maybe that meant learning whatever he could from his opportunity.
All that took Eli about thirty seconds to process, which was a bit long for him to gawp at Taylor and the crown prince, so he closed his jaw, and looked back to Erich.
“Something I should know?”
“Uh,” said Erich, his glance darting back to the couple. “It’s just… I mean.” He fidgeted, an entirely un-Erich-like move that left Eli even more curious. “Can we talk, you know, off the record?” he whispered, jerking his head towards an unoccupied stretch of wall, much as Eli had done only ten minutes before.
“Sure,” he said, allowing himself to be ushered aside.
“What’s this all about?” Eli said, when Erich had finally satisfied himself that nobody was within eavesdropping distance.