“I shouldn’t need this. Not if I’m going to monitor through my ’link.”
He shrugged. “Have it just in case. I’m a double- and triple-plan kind of guy. My backup plans have backup plans.”
“I understand that.” Makeda gazed at the laptop. “He’s going to try to find you. His hacker is good.”
“Why do you think we’re doing this on the water? Bobishere2 is good, too. Maybe she can get a lock on him and see where he is now.”
Makeda raised an eyebrow. “She?”
“What?”
Makeda shrugged, rubbing the back of her hand. “Bob. I just thought…I guess it could be short for Bobbie or Barbara.”
“Doesn’t matter. Bobishere2 identifies as female and elvish. Thus, I treat her as such. That’s all I need.” He opened a shared ARO for the call. “As for Schmidt, if he insists on a meet, I’m going to make him meet us in Rabat. I’ve got people there. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Or, at least, he can’t hire that many in such a short amount of time.”
“What do you want me to do?” Makeda put the earpiece in but didn’t turn it on.
“Listen. Watch the feed. Advise silently. I said I’d work with you.” He cocked his head. “This is just so we can be on the same page. You’ll know everything that’s said. Plus, you might see something I don’t.”
“I can do that.” She shared a private message ARO with him.
Imre nodded. “Got it. Ready?”
Makeda relaxed on the couch and closed her eyes. In the shared ARO, the connection process started.
She watched Imre access the call program then type:
Just as Makeda was about to suggest they try another time, Herr Schmidt responded:
Imre accepted the call. From the slightly disheveled look of him, they’d woken Herr Schmidt up. His hair was combed, and he had on the corporate executive’s uniform of a button-up shirt, vest, and jacket. But he also had circles under his eyes and a puffiness indicative of sleep. Makeda bet he was in his underwear beneath the waist and wondered if he wore boxers or briefs. He seemed like a tighty-whitie kind of guy.
“Good evening, Herr Schmidt. I hope I didn’t wake you. I didn’t think it was that late.”
Makeda checked the time. Just before midnight.
“No, Rabenhaupt. I was reading. You missed your last call time.
What happened?”
Both men spoke in German. Makeda’s language linguasoft program translated the words as they spoke.
Imre tilted his head. “I got named on a news report as either a victim or a terrorist co-conspirator. I needed to take some precautions. Do you know what that is all about?”
“Just covering for you.” Herr Schmidt glanced to the left before giving a calculated shrug.
“You didn’t need to do that.”
Herr Schmidt smiled. “Oh, but I did. I received several reports that you were seen in the company of the terrorist, Makeda. I had to do something.”
Makeda wanted to punch his teeth in for him. Instead, she typed.
Imre kept his eyes locked to the ARO, not reacting physically to her anger. “She wasn’t a terrorist until that news report.”
The blond man spread his hands. “Things are what they are. Do you have my codes?”
Imre nodded. “Yes. But, as things are too hot in Málaga for me, I need to change the meeting place.”
Herr Schmidt’s scowl was immediate and fierce. “I do not like these sorts of changes.” The words were clipped, irritated.
“I don’t care. You’re the one who made things hot. Now you need to deal with it. We’re going to meet in Rabat, Morocco. There’s a nice little international airport there. I’ll call you in six hours and tell you where the actual meet is.” Imre’s voice was cool and professional.
Schmidt took a visible, calming breath and nodded. “Rabat? Why there?” Instead of angry, the words were smooth, oiled.
Makeda watched Herr Schmidt with an experienced eye. He nodded again and made a small gesture with the index finger of his left hand. If she hadn’t been looking for the clues he was communicating to someone other than Imre, she would’ve missed it. All of them had been directed to the left, as he had before when he had his hacker come after her.
“Because you’ll have thirty minutes from the time I call you to make it to the meet. If you don’t arrive, I’ll assume you aren’t interested, and I’ll open the paydata up to the highest bidder. Privately, of course.” Imre gave him an insincere smile.
“There is no need for threats, Herr Rabenhaupt. I will be there. I was merely curious as to why Rabat and not Casablanca.”
Imre shook his head. “Because this isn’t a romantic movie.”
Herr Schmidt glanced up to his left and nodded.
Herr Schmidt’s voice took on a purr. “Speaking of romantic movies, how is Frau Makeda?”
“Dead. Assassination squad, as I heard it.” Imre frowned at the screen. “Why do you ask?”
He clicked his tongue. “I don’t think so. I think she’s very much alive and with you now.”
A firewall warning popped up as someone tried to hack into her headware—her cybereyes, specifically. Everything went red, and then black. TechnoGalen’s counter-intrusion measures when into full swing. Her PAN shut down and locked up.
Makeda opened her eyes, but the blackness remained.
“You have an active imagination.”
She stilled, not wanting to alarm Imre and have him give away her presence. She reached up to the earpiece and turned it on. Biting the inside of her cheek to keep the panic at her sudden blindness at bay, she listened and took slow breaths through her nose. The pain helped focus her as she tasted blood.
“—shall see,” Herr Schmidt said. “In the meantime, I will await your call for our meeting in five hours and fifty-seven minutes.”
“See you in Rabat.” She heard Imre close the laptop. “Makeda, are you all right?”
“I’m not in pain. No. But, we might have a problem.” She blinked again and again. “I might be blind. My cybereyes were attacked.” She heard him put his commlink to the side.
He shifted next to her. “Bob says the attack didn’t actually get through. It just traveled down the same connection she used to let you monitor the call.”
Galen would never have let something like this happen. He would’ve burned the other hacker to bits. This is amateur-hour stuff. Makeda kept those thoughts to herself. No use insulting Imre’s hacker. “That sounds like it got through to me.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Looks like it, too.”
Shoving the marauding thoughts of being blind for the rest of the trip to the side, Makeda ran through her headware start-up process, keeping it in safe mode. “If I’m lucky, Galen was just a bit over zealous on his counter-intrusion shutdown procedures. If that’s the case, we’re going to have to revisit it. Going blind in a firefight would be a death sentence.”
“This hasn’t happened before?” Imre got up and paced in the small room.
“No. No one has gone after my cybereyes before. They look natural. I paid a lot of nuyen to make them like that. Make it look like a cosmetic touch with the gold, but nothing more. Hopefully, I can get them to restart. It may take a bit.”
He didn’t respond to this. Makeda got the impression that he was talking with Bobishere2. She couldn’t tell if he was scolding or comforting her. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B.
Seconds ticked by like hours. Makeda knew that time was passing as normal in the grand scheme of things, but it felt like for
ever. Either the reboot would work, and she would be fine. Or it wouldn’t, and they would need to find someone who could fix whatever was wrong with her headware. Until then, she was Schrödinger’s blind woman.
While she was waiting, Imre returned to her side. He sat on the couch and said nothing, just trying to be a comforting presence. It worked in a distracted sort of way. It made her want to jump him right then and there.
* * *
“Do you have pheromones?” The question came out harsher than she’d meant it to.
Imre twitched next to her. “Yes. I’m sorry. They’re automatic if I don’t think about them.” There was a long pause. He took a breath. “I have a question for you.”
“It’s not like I’m doing anything else at the moment.”
His voice took on a teasing quality. “What did you think of me when you first saw me in the Party Train lounge?”
She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. It was a question she’d asked him earlier. She knew he was trying to distract her. It worked, as she thought about seeing him across the crowded room. “I thought you were the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I wondered why you were watching me in a room full of beautiful people.”
“Because you were the most striking woman there.” He whispered this, his breath tickling her ear.
Her soft smile hardened into something a little more cynical. “I also thought you’d be the perfect arm candy to take with me onto the train.”
“Great minds think alike. Also, I got a good look at your face earlier. I was able to get your name and look it up. That’s how I knew about Queen of Saba, Queen of Sheba.”
Makeda patted his leg. “Here I thought you were well read.”
“Nope.” He covered her hand with his. “I just wanted you to tell me your name so I could trot out the line…and not call you by name before you told me.”
“You mean like when I—” Makeda stopped in mid-sentence as light appeared in the darkness. She wanted to cry when a screen popped into view and lines of text scrolled by, rebooting her eyes in safe mode. When the world reappeared, she slumped against Imre, relief making her weak. “Oh thank God.”
“Makeda?” Imre craned his head to look down at her. “You all right?”
“I am now.” Makeda looked up at those beautiful dark eyes and seized the moment. She kissed him, hard. He returned the kiss with the same urgency. When he pulled away, she murmured, “No. Stay with me.”
“I just need to lock the door and tell everyone to stay topside.” He gave her another searing kiss, then got up and pressed a button next to the door. While he was there, he took off his shirt, revealing his lanky, muscled, and scarred body.
Letting her eyes roam the roadmap of his skin, she realized what had been bothering her about him the entire time they’d been together. He was built wrong to be human. Too slender. Slightly too elongated. “Oh, you’re—”
“Human,” he interrupted, his voice hard and distant. “I was born human. I am human.”
“I was going to say ‘handsome.’” It was a lie. They both knew it.
The one thing Makeda never would have guessed in a million years was that Imre was a human poser. Either he’d goblinized and he was older than she thought he was—over forty at a minimum, which would explain a lot—or he was born elven, and felt like he’d been born in the wrong body. He’d had work done to make him look human. Cheek implants and ears fixed.
Either way, he was still Imre, and she had business of the sexy kind with him. She beckoned him to her. “C’mere, lover.”
Imre hesitated, then accepted the lie as truth and tossed his shirt at her. “You come here.”
Makeda stood and took two steps to him. “If I have my way, we’ll both be coming.”
He laughed, took her into his arms again, and kissed her over and over, murmuring, “Your wish is my command.”
She shimmied out of the tacky tourist shirt and pressed her skin to his as his hands fumbled with the clasp of her bra. “I’ve wanted you since I first saw you.”
“You and me both,” he whispered. “More than arm candy distraction.”
“Much, much more.”
Then the talking was done. The two of them lost themselves in the slick skin and throbbing flesh of each other for a brief time on the rolling waves of the Mediterranean Sea.
Later, tangled up in the sheets, happy and satisfied, she walked her fingers up his pale arm. “Why Rabat?”
He blinked sleepy eyes at her. “I have people there. Resources, too. Plus, a place no one will care about if it gets shot up. No one but me, that is. Less trouble with the local mercs and authorities. It’s one of my home territories. I am known. I am comfortable there.”
“You really are an international man of mystery. Holdings in Germany, Spain, Morocco. In all my time in Europe, I never heard of the shadowrunner Rabenhaupt.”
He rolled her over and kissed her. “I did that on purpose. Those who need to find me, can. If everyone knew who I was and how to get to me, I would’ve been dead long before now. I’m known for my discretion—no matter what you hire me to do.”
“Smart.” She rolled him over and pinned him to the side of the boat. “How much more time do we have?”
He gave her a slow smile. “Enough.”
“For round two?”
“If you wish.” He leaned up and nibbled her neck.
She slid her hand down to cup his ass. “I do.”
“My command.”
25
There was nothing like satisfying sex before a dangerous run. It reminded you of what you could come back to. It also worked some of the mental kinks out. Makeda ignored Saladin’s good-natured eyebrow waggling as they left the boat. She rolled her eyes at his comm’d teasing questions on their drive to Rabat, but said nothing.
She and Imre continued to share mingled hands and mingled glances at every opportunity.
Makeda considered what it would be like for the two of them to work together as a team moving forward. She didn’t know how that would work. Right now, he was the man in charge, but he was correct: she was used to running her own team. With the two of them used to being in charge, the question was: Could they work together? She supposed they could, if they could come to an agreement on who would be in charge for each kind of run. Maybe she would lead extractions, and he could take charge on paydata runs.
One thing was certain, he’d be fun to keep around. She would never be bored.
Imre’s team took turns driving the hours-long trip to Rabat. They were the ones who knew where they were going. All of them knew they were going into a fight with a dirty Johnson who wanted them dead to keep his convoluted plans secret. Sleep was caught in catnaps. Later, it would be substituted with stims to keep the team as alert as possible.
Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, was a mixture of old and new. Shiny, tall buildings stood next to dusty tent markets. Modern train stations ran on time next to the main highways. With a little elevation, outside the city center, there were swathes of rural land where dunes competed with walled palaces and fought a land war against the farmers. Outside the city was a bit more lawless and wild. Inside, it was a modern city with a fantastic metro grid and memories of its past dotted through alleyways and alongside the industrial districts.
Stopping at a two-story stone building with a cracked façade, Imre parked in front. “We’re here. With three minutes to spare.” He didn’t bother to get out of the van, a twin to the one left behind in Spain. He gestured for his commlink. Fatima gave it to him and got out of the vehicle. She gestured for everyone to follow.
The building was dark. The word “AVATARS” glowed on the left side of it in the morning light. Makeda looked down the left side of the building and saw a set of stairs and a closed metal door.
“That’s the dance club. It’s downstairs. The main bar is upstairs.” Fatima unlocked the double doors and pulled them open.
Larger than the Bar Moraga, it could’ve been its older brother.
Nondescript with some kitsch, the bar had eight stools. Twelve small tables dotted the room around a jukebox. There were clear signs for the restrooms and a door marked “Private.” In truth, there was nothing to recommend it other than as a place to drink. Makeda eyed the bottles behind the bar. Nothing looked top-shelf.
“Who comes here?” Makeda noted that while the place was worn, it was clean.
Fatima shrugged. “Locals. People with a need. Quieter than some places. Noisier than others.”
Imre walked in. He now wore his red, sleeveless duster from the train. It’d been cleaned, but looked like it’d seen better days. “Clock’s ticking. Meet officially in thirty. My bet is that they’ll be here in ten. Fatima on the door. Saladin in here with me and Kraken. Makeda, you’re in the corner and aiming. MissTree, you’ll be in the private room, on healing duty, watching through the peephole. Bob has eyes in the sky. Any questions?”
As Imre spoke, Kraken handed out injectors. When Makeda gave him a quizzical look, he grinned. “My special combat helper. This side is a stimulant. One injection will keep you going. This side numbs the drek out of you. Careful with it. Too much, and you’ll lose all feeling in that limb.”
Makeda nodded and took the injector.
MissTree stood with balled fists on her hips. “I want to hurt him. I owe him.”
“Be that as it may, you’re on heal duty. If it looks like he might be winning, send in a spirit to eat his face. But we’re counting on you to keep us up and alive. Got it?” Imre glanced at Makeda. The request was clear: Control your people.
Makeda touched MissTree’s arm. “It’s important that you keep us alive. Hurt him if you can, but we are your top priority. It’s what Plath—Sylvia—would’ve done.”
MissTree scowled. She didn’t say anything more, though she refused to take Kraken’s injector. Invoking HiddenPlath’s name was dirty pool. Makeda didn’t care. There was a job to be done, and they were the ones in the crosshairs.
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