“Well, I don’t think I’m going to just stand toe to toe with you and slug you,” Robert answered. “By the look on your face you don’t care, and the ladies love how I look already.”
“That’s because your ladies like pretty boys, American!” Broken Nose said. “While mine like virility.”
“Look, Jacko, it’s the money you’re paying them. They’ll tell you anything for a few euros,” Robert answered, and sure enough, after a few moments of thinking, Jacko yelled something ugly in German and came forward to grab him, arms outstretched.
The end, when it came, was almost anticlimactic.
Jacko Broken Nose got a swift snap kick to his groin as Robert’s upper arms blocked and pushed Jacko to keep from being grabbed. Jacko’s head took a dive as he folded around his abused family jewels. Robert grabbed it and pulled hard so that his rising knee intercepted Jacko’s face, inciting a bone crunching sound.
By the time Broken Nose finally hit the dirt, four others were down, and one had his hands up, as all of Robert’s team eyed him like he was the one hamburger in front of a bunch of starving men.
“Robert,” Terry’s voice came across his earpiece.
Robert grabbed his earbud and stuck it back in his ear. “Yes?”
“Dock security are on their way, probably just a couple of minutes if you need to hide anything.”
Robert looked around. “No, this was just a fisticuffs episode, you got anything to show our side of the fight to security?”
“Yes, I’ve already shot over the beginning few seconds, so you should be okay. If not, I’ll pull some more.”
“We should be good, but they’re going to need a forklift for Broken Nose here.” Robert poked the man with his toe, but he didn’t even groan.
“Yeah, okay. Well, shit,” Terry replied.
“What?”
“Just noticed Melissa is gone. Well, I’m sure I’ve fucked up somehow, and I’ll learn about it as soon as I make sure you guys are covered.”
“Nah, go find her now. Tell her you went searching as soon as you figured she wasn’t with you. You’ll be out here in a few.”
“That’s not right,” Terry started, but Robert interrupted him.
“First round on you if within sixty seconds of finding her, she sends you out here,” Robert said.
“Deal, but I’ll head out there immediately if she isn’t in her berth,” Terry said.
“Okay,” Robert replied and then dropped the call to make sure his men were good.
Two minutes later the dock security rolled up, and within another sixty seconds, Terry came out of the ship.
Robert was watching his men help the security group move the thugs. They had all been woken up with smelling salts and were being loaded into a van. He looked over at his friend. “She was pissed you went and checked on her, right?”
“Yeah, what the hell is that?” Terry asked while he watched the toughs getting added to the van.
“You can’t win, but you tried so that gives you some points. You won’t know you got any points, but her time to cool down just dropped thirty-three percent or more. Plus, she feels good that she told you to go do your job, which is probably what you were doing that got you in trouble in the first place,” Robert explained.
“If you know so much about women, why don’t you have a wife?” Terry asked, sighing loudly.
“Because that is the culmination of four serious relationships and a little therapy trying to figure out why I failed four times in a row,” Robert answered. “Looks like it’s our turn to talk again.”
“Fantastic, something I can understand,” Terry said as he stepped forward and held out his hand to the security lead.
South America
Michael’s house pyre had gone well. The flames had climbed high into the sky by the time the team had to jump into the waiting Pods and leave before the local emergency crews came to put the flames out.
When the fire trucks arrived, it was too late to do anything but contain the fire.
They dropped their critical equipment off on the QBS ArchAngel and grabbed rooms. The chosen rooms were similar to the Queen’s Bitches’ setup with a general living room, common area in the middle. Tabitha’s team, however, preferred to keep the lighting down and use indirect lighting up the walls for minor decoration. Tabitha liked the effect and the Zen feeling, so she just used a couple of lamps by the table for when she wanted more light.
With her own enhancements, that wasn’t often unless someone human or not very modified came in.
It had taken Tabitha and her team a couple of days to track their first lead after talking with Mason and Sheila. There was a small warehouse that also housed a business office on the outskirts of Bielefeld, Germany. After researching the city, they found the Bielefeld Conspiracy where those on the internet persuaded others the city did not exist, and the team laughed how gullible people were.
Tabitha got down to business.
She thought it interesting that the people she sought would be located in the same small area as the Praetoria Mercenary Group, a company most Germans would refute existed if they were told about it. War, to Germans, is often a four-letter word.
Still, the three-story building seemed to be fairly well set up. It was on a few acres of grassy land and had no trees or shrubs blocking their field of view for a hundred meters in any direction before they allowed local shrubs and trees to grow.
She had already tried to hack computers, but there wasn’t anything there for her to get. No databases, no servers, nothing.
It’s like these people didn’t trust computers or something. What a pain in the ass.
Now, she, Hirotoshi and Ryu were dropping down in one of the new four seater Pods. The two guys were up front while she reviewed the building’s layout.
“We’re going to see what kind of security they have and then do a little B and E, guys,” she said.
“Break and enter?” Ryu asked.
“Yeah, you watching more American police shows now?”
“Yes, I particularly like the older stuff on Netflix,” Ryu admitted. “I can just watch right through with no commercials.”
“I wonder if Netflix would be surprised to find out ADAM is ripping everything they have and storing it on the ArchAngel’s servers?” she wondered aloud.
“Does the Queen know he is doing this?” Hirotoshi asked.
“Probably not. When she finds out, I figure she’ll find a way to pay them for it,” Tabitha shrugged. “They say you can watch as much as you can for free, just because ADAM can watch, and understand it, at inhuman speed kind of gets around the rules.”
“I don’t think the Queen would buy that argument,” Hirotoshi admonished.
“No, me either. If it were me, I’d just… well… never mind,” she finished lamely. No reason to let these guys know what she would do. She needed to uphold the impression she was working for justice, not actively figuring out ways to steal movies.
They rode down in silence for the next few minutes. Tabitha was watching her tablet scroll information as they got closer to the building’s location. The nearest neighbor was over three kilometers away, nestled in the hills.
“We have four walking the grounds,” Ryu said from up front, looking down at the information displayed on the windshield. “Also, it appears that there are multiple devices radiating something all over the landscape.”
“Yeah, probably motion detection,” she agreed. “They don’t have anything up on the roof for some reason, let’s see why not.” Tabitha started subvocalizing instructions to the AI ArchAngel had supplied her for this operation. “Ha!” she announced. “The idiots actually do have something going on the roof, but it looks like they have it on their own loop. Now, why the hell would they do that?”
Hirotoshi kept them above the trees over a half kilometer away, silent and practically invisible in the night.
“Wow, these Germans really know how to do the bunny together.” She finally said.
>
Ryu turned in his seat to see Tabitha holding her tablet up, twisting it sideways and muttering, “Hell, I might sign up for that…” She dropped the tablet to see Ryu looking at her. “Ah, there was some footage.”
She paused, then added, “Apparently, the guards are of both genders, and a couple was getting freaky up on the roof a week and a half ago, and never changed the security back.” Ryu noticed her blush, just a little. “Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?” she asked, fanning her face with her tablet, smiling.
Ryu snorted and turned back around. It was rare for Tabitha to ever be embarrassed about anything sexual.
Made him wonder just what was in that video she found.
Tabitha slid two Jean Dukes pistols into her holsters and tied her hair back, grabbing a full face mask from her bag. “Here’s the plan. Find when all of the guards are walking away from the building and drop me down. I’ll jump out, get into the building and find the stuff. I’ll exit the building, and you guys pick me back up.”
Ryu turned around, and she looked back at him. “What?” she asked. “Easy-peasy.”
Ryu caught Hirotoshi’s eyes rolling and carefully schooled his face to not give anything away.
“We go down in twelve seconds, Kimosabe,” Hirotoshi said.
Ryu turned back to see Tabitha messing with her holsters and her breasts, muttering. “Dammit, these ta-tas weren’t made for clandestine shit. I need some titty-tape. I can’t get my holsters to lay right around these big bazoongas.” A pause, some more pushing followed by, “Shit, that hurt the nips,” and then more muttering.
Ryu turned back around and faced the front, trying to keep his own blushing to a minimum.
Seconds later, Tabitha cracked open her door and dropped the ten feet to the building’s roof, rolling and coming up quickly to move in the dark towards a door as Hirotoshi and Ryu quickly went back up into the night.
“Do you think she will make it in and out quietly?” Ryu asked.
It took Hirotoshi only a second to respond, “No.”
They laughed.
—
Tabitha stopped by the door and pulled out her smaller tablet, the screen set to minimum intensity. She subvocalized, “Check for alarms in proximity.”
“Alarm active on the door,” came back a reply in her ear.
“Can you disable?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So, disable it!” Tabitha said, exasperated.
“Done.”
Tabitha reached up and listened carefully, turning the knob and when no alarms sounded, and nothing seemed to be amiss from either outside or inside, she slipped in and closed the door. She turned her small tablet around and allowed the dim light to give her enough to see the stairs as she went down, ending up at a normal door. According to her schematics, this opened into one of the major halls.
Time to go looking for information the old fashioned way.
—
Kamilla heard the noise from the floor above her but ignored it. Jürgen must be walking his third-floor shift.
She continued looking through the new potential recruits. Their team in America had never called back in, which was going to be a problem. Since the house they had been casing blew up, she figured something bad must have happened to them, and everything had been done to erase any trail from the operatives back to their organization.
A few minutes later, she heard Jürgen come into the outer office and get a cup of coffee. After another couple of minutes, he rapped on her door, and Kamilla looked up to see him smiling with not one, but two cups.
“Java?” he smiled.
“Gladly, thank you,” Kamilla accepted the cup as Jürgen sat down. “How was your third-floor walk?” she asked.
“I haven’t done it yet, I’ll do it right after this cup.” He saluted her with his coffee and took a sip. He noticed her forehead furrow. “What is it?”
“I heard footsteps up there a few minutes back, I thought it was you. Is anyone still on three?”
Jürgen put his cup down. “No, they left for Victor’s birthday celebration at four-thirty to get a jump on the beer drinking.”
Kamilla reached over and pulled out her second drawer. Reaching in, she pulled out an S&W 60 LS Ladysmith. Jürgen nodded and pulled his own Beretta 92fs out, and the two of them left her office, Jürgen speaking into his headset microphone.
—
“Fuck me,” Tabitha said. “Wonder-twin superpowers and all but what I need is a simple answer to a simple question. Who hired Bethany Anne’s killers from here?” She looked around the office. It had three desks, all facing a central round table with the middle desk in front of a large window. The room was about twenty-five feet square with lots of bookshelves all filled with old books, some knickknacks, and three-ring binders.
She walked around the room, looking at the table but everything there seemed to be about a project in Ethiopia.
—
“It’s been over five minutes, and we haven’t seen anything disastrous happen... yet,” Ryu said as he and Hirotoshi watched the video feed. Presently, they had four tiny video drones flying around the building’s perimeter as their Pod stayed up in the clouds, out of sight.
“Give her time, I’m sure we will see her calling card, soon,” Hirotoshi replied.
—-
“If I was a book of names, where would I be?” Tabitha asked herself, walking to the first desk. “Fuck if I know, I would stick the data in a folder inside my… Shit.” She put a hand on her head. “Where the hell do you think computer operating systems got the metaphors, Tabitha?” She looked around for a filing system. “Stop having a blond moment and start moving a little faster!”
—
Kamilla and Jürgen crept up to the third floor and opened the door, looking down the hallway, which had several doors branching off of it.
It was empty.
“Each door in order?” Kamilla asked Jürgen. “Or go straight to the main office?”
“Let’s go for the office, that’s where most of the information is stored. If someone is up here and in another office, we might spook them, but they shouldn’t find anything,” he whispered back.
She nodded in agreement, and they crept forward towards the second to the last door on the right.
—
“A… B… C… Clients, got you, bitch!” Tabitha whispered when she heard a creak outside the door. She looked around and rolled her eyes.
She hadn’t been paying attention, now someone was outside the door. She grabbed the last two months’ folders and quickly rolled them, putting them inside her chest piece across her stomach. Pulling one of her Dukes specials, she flicked it to five.
“Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum!” she murmured into her mic. “Look out guys, here I come!”
—
Kamilla held her pistol in her left hand as she slowly turned the doorknob. She mouthed to Jürgen ‘three, two, one…’ and flung open the door, stepping back as glass started shattering inside the room.
Jürgen rushed into the office and aimed at a black figure that had a pistol out, shooting the glass. He fired two shots, but the figure just… disappeared.
Kamilla was right behind him and aiming at nothing.
“What the hell?” she asked as they rushed towards the window.
—
The shattering glass happened at the same time Tabitha’s comment came over the comm links.
“Who are Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum?” Hirotoshi asked as the Pod came screaming down from the night sky.
“Probably our latest nicknames,” Ryu answered. “I see she has started running northwest. She is out of the fire zone already.” He looked on the map and tapped the glass. “Head here, it looks like a good pickup point.”
“Adjusted course,” he replied.
—
“How the hell did they get off the grounds so fast?” Kamilla asked, the lights blazing in the night.
“Why don’t you ask the more intere
sting question,” Jürgen admonished, pointing to the ground. “How did they land from three stories up, not kill themselves, and still run away?”
—
“FUCKITYFUCKFUCKDEEDEESCREWME!” Tabitha bitched to herself as she ran through the trees. “Dammit, that shit hurt! When will I learn to stop jumping off three story buildings?”
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 15