Liberation (I Am Margaret Book 3)

by Corinna Turner

  “Pretty much anyone in here who isn’t liable for extra sentry duty, I trust not to play with the safety catch.”

  Most of the people in here were under orders of the military kind. Hyena was a layman, but the Foxes, the Fish, Gerbil, the Birds and Giraffe were all Swiss Guards, whilst Hippo and Elephant were Vatican Police. Like Alligator (Jack) and Snail (Jacques!), Grass Snake and Bumblebee were VSS, Eduardo’s men. Bane had rescued Jack from official re-Christening as ‘Unicorn’ by saying that mythical beasts must be kept in reserve as code names for a future team. Jack had promptly picked Alligator, probably because it was the least similar animal imaginable!

  “Let’s have them back, then,” Bane was saying. “And look in the next one.”

  The pistols were replaced, the lid forced down again, and Father Mark repeated his trick with another ‘can opener’. Again the Foxes dragged the lid up and removed the foam. A short, delighted silence from everyone.

  “Oh yes!” said Bane, “These are the things!”

  Everyone reached for one at once, crowding forward.

  “Just pass them round,” urged Father Mark. “Or we’ll have to unpack the whole crate.”

  One arrived in my hands at last and I examined it. A rifle. A nonLee rifle. Very cutting edge. Very expensive. I raised the butt to my shoulder and looked through the sights – nothing far enough away for it to focus on.

  “These are the things,” I agreed. Actually, our whole plan rested on these. If there’d been none on the train, it would’ve been very, very disappointing.

  The gleaming rifles were eventually reclaimed from their admiring fans and we moved on to the second to last crate. This time the awed silence went on for several moments.

  “Oh yes!” exulted Bane, snatching up one of the long, elegant sniper rifles. “This is the thing for you, Brown Bird.” He deposited the small fortune of military technology in my hands.

  I looked it over. Much like the rifles, just longer and sleeker in every way. A much more serious telescopic sight on top. The range would be considerably longer. Hence why Bane wanted to give me one. Keep me further from the machine guns.

  “I’ll be happy to use one if I’m the best person.”

  “You are. Here, Pussycat, take a look.” He passed one to Sister Krayj, as well.

  I shot Father Mark an appealing look, afraid Bane was letting his heart overrule his tactical sense. But Father Mark just smiled slightly.

  “He’s right. You’re two of our best shots, neither of you would be here otherwise. And you certainly can’t go hand to hand with anyone, Margo, so until the guards are neutralised, you’re the logical choice to be far away with that thing.”

  I shrugged and passed the rifle on to Snail and Bumblebee, who were trying to look like suave Vatican Secret Servicemen and not hop up and down with eagerness. Certainly I’d no excuse not to hit the target with one of those.

  “Only half a carriage of those,” Eduardo told Bane. “But we’ve a good number.”

  The guys drooled over the sniper rifles for ages. Sister Krayj and I sat down on either side of Jon and began yawning. Father Mark joined us and helped me struggle out of the boa constrictor vest.

  “That one didn’t really feel much different from the one before.” Jon sounded bemused.

  “Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the EuroGov get that invoice.” Father Mark smiled rather less pleasantly than usual.

  “How much do you think this little lot’s going to come to?” I asked.

  “Goodness knows. Millions of Eurons.”

  “How much credit have we got?”

  Father Mark burst out laughing.

  “Drop in the ocean, this will be. They really, really owe us a lot of money.”

  “It’s going to be one gracious reconciliation gesture if and when we finally have peace and the Holy Father lets them off that debt,” said Sister Krayj.

  “You think it’ll never be paid?” I said.

  “How could it possibly be paid? They’ve spent it all. They’d have to wring it out of their innocent – fairly innocent – citizens, and insisting on that’s just not our style, is it.”

  “True.”

  “Useful to have the credit now, you must admit,” said Father Mark. “Whoa… you’d better catch Jon…”

  I hastily slipped an arm around Jon and sat him up. He stirred enough to nestle his cheek against my shoulder and nodded straight off again. Guessing he’d not got much more sleep than we had.

  “Hey, guys!” Sister Krayj raised her voice. “It’s a rifle. It’s a really good rifle. End of story. Now I don’t know about you but I’d like to get some shut eye so shall we take a look in that last crate?”

  Reluctantly, the sniper rifles were passed back and put away. The final crate was opened. Everyone stared in bewilderment.

  “What are they?” asked Jack.

  Father Mark lifted out a cylindrical object he could just touch finger to thumb around and examined it.

  “Looks like a grenade. But there’s no pin.”

  “There aren’t supposed to be any explosives!” Eduardo began to stab rather indignantly at his networkAccessor with his stylus.

  Father Mark dug around in the layers of foam at one end of the crate and pulled out something like a machine gun mated with an ancient crossbow.

  “Grenade launcher. NonLethal grenades, is my best guess.”

  Eduardo lowered his networkAccessor again.

  “I’ve heard about those in the pipeline. Could be very useful – but if they’re too early in the development process they might be pretty unreliable. It’s not easy to get into the Top Secret military files, but I’ll get on it right away.”

  A mutter of disappointment as Father Mark replaced everything carefully in the crate and rammed the lid down...

  “No.” Father Mark sounded equal parts humorous and exasperated. “We are not messing around with potentially unstable early prototypes of a weapon we aren’t sure what is and have no idea how to use. Are we?”

  An embarrassed shuffling of feet.

  “Okay, you crazy lot.” Bane wore an amusingly similar look of adult disapproval. “That’s all for now. We’ve got what we need, so we’re on for tonight. Get rested, get fed, briefing at nineteen hundred, departure at twenty hundred. We’ll have plenty of time to zero the new guns under cover of the French forest tomorrow. Any questions?”

  “What’s zeroing?” asked a voice from near the door.

  Bane glanced that way and started slightly – all the guards in the room leapt to attention with such enthusiasm Giraffe’s head scored a direct hit on a dangling strip light.

  “Oh, your holiness, I didn’t see you. Uh, zeroing means adjusting the sights according to each person’s aim so they’ll hit what they’re shooting at.”

  “Oh, I see. Have I missed all the fun?”

  “Of course not,” said Eduardo. “We’ll find something for you to look at.”

  Grinning gleefully, the Foxes yanked up the lid of the sniper rifle crate and Fox Two deposited one of the rifles in Pope Cornelius’s hands.

  “Oh, I say.” While the Holy Father was looking at it as though he wasn’t even sure which way around it went, Bane snapped a picture on his omniPhone, to a chorus of delighted cheers.

  “All right, you got me,” smiled Pope Cornelius.

  “Perhaps we should send a copy with the invoice,” murmured Sister Krayj.

  “Tempting, my dear, but you must admit, not very tactful. Well, this thing looks very, hmm… dangerous.”

  “Dangerous to the EuroGov, but not to life,” said Eduardo. “At least if used responsibly. You’re holding the pride of our new arsenal.”

  “Well, er, thank you for showing it to me. Does someone want…” At least six people leapt to relieve him of it, then tried to pretend they hadn’t.

  “You all look shattered,” went on the Holy Father. “I’ll go away and let you get on.”

  The Swiss guards all leapt to attention again as he left, wit
h a Crash-Clatter and several hisses of, “For pity’s sake, Giraffe! ”

  “Okay...” Bane was still grinning at his phone screen – must’ve got a good shot. “Dismissed.” Everyone trooped after the Holy Father. “Right, Father Mark, let’s get these things counted and charging…”

  “I’ll deal with that,” said Eduardo. “The correct number will be charged and waiting for you by seven tonight, and ample power mags. You two sleep, eat and go over the plan for any last minute changes to take into account the sniper rifles.”

  “Don’t think I’m going to make any changes,” said Bane. “All I’ll do is instruct our main shooters to stay right back in the forestline. They won’t need to risk crawling to the top of the bank. Never was happy about that.”

  “Very wise. Off you go, then. Get rested.”

  Bane and I woke Jon and steered him back to the accommodation block, and our beds. Despite our almost wholly sleepless night, with midmorning light flooding around the curtains it was a long time before I fell asleep. The train, whilst the lynchpin of our whole operation, had kind of been the easy bit.

  Tonight our team, and nine others, were taking advantage of the satellite-free slot to head to the southern French department. Strike before the EuroGov – if they’d even come to suspect us yet – had time to re-evaluate what would surely be their first assumption – that we were planning to re-take Vatican State.

  They wouldn’t have to think about it long to realise we weren’t suicidal and we must be up to something else. So we were going to liberate at least ten Facilities – all in the same region, for ease of logistics – tomorrow night, before they figured it out. That was the plan. No further operations planned – we’d so far only thought of one way to get in…

  ...A knocking at the door. I blinked sleepily in the late afternoon light. Must’ve been tired, I’d slept without dreaming.

  “Margo?” Bane.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Are you coming to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  My watch said six o’clock. An hour before the briefing. I wasn’t going to think about it until then. Wasn’t going to think about the fact I was going back to a Facility. Voluntarily. I shuddered, rolled out of bed and began to pull on my clothes.

  Outside the canteen, a crowd of people were gathered around the front page of a newspaper which Jack was just pinning to the noticeboard.

  “What d’you think that’s about?” I asked Bane. He shrugged.

  Jack caught sight of us and grinned.

  “Hey, let Margo through...”

  Huh? For some reason everyone complied with a will – I moved forward, saw the headline... oh.

  MARGARET V. DEMANDS:

  RE-TRY EVERINGTON

  I went right up to read the small print... The petition had just been delivered to the EuroGov, and the Human Rights group had made very sure the press knew about it. A large photo showed the page of the petition contributed by our little community, my name at the top, sharply in focus.

  “Won’t help,” I couldn’t help saying, with a sigh. A less pleasant thought struck me... “Oh no, won’t people be more likely to believe the charges if I’m standing up for him? I didn’t think of that...”

  “It was never going to help him, with or without your name,” said Jack. “Having you on the front page helps us, though.”

  “How’d we get the newspaper?”

  “Eduardo’s looking into getting them regularly. The enterprising Gozitan who brings the post and papers over daily in his little motor boat is in the Underground and it looks like he can be trusted.”

  “Oh.”

  I yielded my place in front of the newspaper to the curious throng and headed into the canteen with Bane.

  We were back in that conference room all too soon. The crates were gone, moved to our new expanded armoury, wherever that might be. The room was packed, mostly guys, a few women. Lots of over-excited young guardsmen – uh, guardsmen, anyway – some older more serious-faced individuals. A handful of other laypeople, a handful of priests and religious sisters and brothers. Several more of the less dilapidated houses had been packed full of bunks to house the extra guards – one whole street was now known as the Barracks, less tongue-breaking than the Gozitan street name. The others had been fitted into the main accommodation block.

  Twenty to a team, plus two drivers. Ten teams. Two hundred and twenty people. Even I could work that out. All hand picked, approached and shipped over by Eduardo whilst we were working on the early stages of planning the train hijack. ‘Animal’ team had worked hardest, drilling for two operations simultaneously.

  Most of our guys – giddy as schoolboys in a sweet shop earlier – now stood, looking all grave-faced and battle-hardened in front of their unblooded comrades. I tried not to smile, but Sister Krayj caught my eye and did a slightly too accurate imitation and a laugh spluttered from me.

  “Oh, hi, Brown Bird.” Giraffe stared down at me solemnly, oblivious to the strip light his friends had edged him under. “Looking forward to going into action again?”

  Anyone who looked forward to going into this sort of situation was a nutter, in my opinion, but I just said, “Of course,” managing not to smile too broadly at the looks of silent admiration Giraffe had won with his casual ‘again’.

  “Ready, Sis?” Kyle, dressed in black/grey/green camo like the rest of us, though like Father Mark his dog collar showed under his open jacket – a small symbol of defiance requiring a lot of courage.

  “Oh, hi, Deacon Gecko. Are you ready?”

  We were supposed to use only code names whilst on operation. Though we weren’t hiding our identities like most of the Resistance, Carla had insisted on the grounds it encouraged professional behaviour or something.

  “Of course. Went well last night, didn’t it?”

  “That was the easy bit.”

  “Oh come on, allow yourself just a teensy bit of optimism.”

  “I was being factual.”

  “Pessimist.”

  “Realist.”

  “Whatever. It’s a sound plan.”

  “It is a sound plan,” said Jon. “But if it goes right at all ten Facilities, we’ll be doing very well.”

  “You haven’t talked them into letting you come, have you?”

  “No, I’m just seeing you off. I’m on the planning committee, I’m allowed to be here.”

  “I never said you weren’t, I was just afraid you’d make rather a good target, limping around walking into walls.”

  “Kyle,” I objected.

  “That’s why I’m not going, isn’t it!” snarled Jon.

  “Okay, okay…” Kyle held up his hands in surrender and backed away to join his partner, Grass Snake.

  “Ignore him,” I muttered to Jon. “He didn’t used to be that much of a tactless clot.”

  “He’s right, though, isn’t he? I could be completely free of holes and you still wouldn’t want me along. The eyeless wonder, why would you…”

  Seizing his hands atop his sticks, I squeezed them firmly.

  “I think eyeless wonder is a good name for you. Who saved us from the bear? Who stopped us stepping on an electric rail? Who heard the dogs in time for us to get into the stream and out of sight? That’s three times you saved our lives, just which leap straight to mind, so don’t you dare listen to what Carla says!”

  Jon looked at the ground.

  “You still don’t want me along.”

  “Jon…” I couldn’t keep the distress from my voice. “Of course we’d like you along. But it’s not that simple…” Surely he understood…

  He turned one hand to capture my fingers, gave them a squeeze.

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to start wallowing in self-pity. I know I can’t go. I suppose it was just harder being left behind than I expected.”

  Considering how I’d felt when Bane was away… and I hadn’t been left on my own. I reached out and gave him a quick hug, then said in a mock threatening voice, “We�
��ll be back!”

  “Please, Lord. Amen!” He hugged me too.

  Crash-Clatter.

  A chorus of smothered giggles from around Giraffe, though all the guards remained impressively poker-faced. Pope Cornelius waved them to their ease and went to sit at one corner of the rostrum, a small white clad figure among all the dark camo, leaving Bane and Eduardo and Father Mark the centre stage.

  “Sit down, everyone,” said Bane. “We’re going to run through the whole plan. Yes, we’ve been over it a hundred times. I don’t care. Clean out your ears and listen. Any messing around and you’ll be staying here. If you can’t concentrate for an hour, you’re not going to be up to this. Yes, I am talking to you, Ferrari, so stop whispering to Porsche. Any questions?”

  “Yeah, why’ve we got a leader who barely needs razors?” came a mutter from the front. Probably Ferrari, pissed off at being singled out.

  A flash of irritation crossed Bane’s face. Yeah, if the Holy Father and Eduardo thought Bane had proved himself enough to be in charge that should be good enough for everyone! Father Mark, as second in command, surely made up for any experience Bane lacked. And Eduardo had to clear all the plans, anyway…

  Jon must’ve felt me bristling, ‘cause he gave my hand a warning squeeze. Yeah, I’d really been about to leap up on the rostrum and give Ferrari a piece of my mind. Please, Jon! My hormones are fine now.

  “Not sure what leader you’re talking about,” Bane was saying calmly, “I distinctly remember shaving off quite a respectable beard, a month or so back. You must be talking about Eduardo.”

  Which raised a laugh. Bane had brushed the insult off with a joke! Really turning into quite the little leader, wasn’t he?

  “Anyway, you can talk!” called one of Animal team.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” said Bane quickly. “Before one of the backups gets to pretend to be a posh car for a few days.”

  Silence. Ferrari wasn’t going to risk it. First thing when the guards arrived, they’d tested Bane, pushing, pushing to see how far they could go. When they found it wasn’t far at all, they’d quickly settled down, satisfied the guy in charge wasn’t made of jelly.