"Wonderful ambush spot," she remarked.
"Yeah, well I'm hungry enough to risk it. I just wish the takeaway joints could put themselves up the top of tall buildings or something, so we don't even have to land to pick up dinner. We'd just fly through."
"And get our curry splattered all over the windshield?"
"Yeah, I wasn't thinking at three hundred kilometres per hour, genius. We'd hover."
"I don't think a curry house could pay the rent eighty storeys up," Sandy remarked, happy that the conversation had moved along. "Unless they charged about sixty Feds per meal."
"Hmm." Ari considered that. Drummed briefly on the steering grips with his fingers. "So d'you think she's jealous of me? Or of us, I mean?" Sandy scowled at him. "What?" An protested. "It's important, right? I'm asking!"
The queue bumped up another space, then another. "I don't know, An, I honestly just don't know."
"I mean, I guess that must have hurt, huh?" An appeared quite intrigued at the prospect. "Although we don't ... you know ... we don't carry on together like some couples I could name ..."
"She's not the jealous type," Sandy said firmly.
"You're certain? I mean, how would you know?"
"Ari!" Sandy stared at him, her eyes hard. "I don't want to talk about it! Understand?"
An sighed. Sandy resumed fiddling with the com-systems until the cruiser reached its spot in the queue beneath the awning, then lowered the window as an Indian girl on skater-blades zoomed from a building door with a tray stacked with containers. Sandy paid with her civvie card, and An followed the cruiser ahead out and down the road. Sandy unpacked the meal onto the plastic holders always given to airborne customers, and finally lined up a com-sequence that worked for her.
"I got it," she said, "patch me in."
An touched a few markers on a display screen, aligning his own carrier boosters ... on internal visual, Sandy could see the cruiser's CPU com-matrix reconfiguring for long-range transmissions. An dialed up the destination and in a flash, the signal sorted and multitranslated through a dozen encryption and security walls to connect with CSA HQ's own central com network, with an ease and precision that even Sandy had to respect. An's codework was as eclectic and individual as An himselfimpenetrably so, she'd heard many fellow codeworkers complain. On some subconscious level that very few straights or GIs could access or analyse, An's conceptual brain simply worked differently to everyone else's. As a GI, she possessed far greater raw processing capability than An ever could. But as a straight, if impressively augmented, human, Ari's consistently baffling mental processes gave him an edge that very few GIs could hope to match-in individuality, and uniqueness.
"It'll take a few seconds for the relay-satellite to acquire Mekong's receptor dish," he warned, brow furrowed with concentration as his intent eyes studied the display screen. The cruiser took a left turn on automatic, away from the main highway junction, and on toward the next transition zone. "The Third Fleet's been a little jumpy lately, I hope they haven't been fiddling with basic access codes or we might not get in ...
Sandy handed Ari his tray, opening her own and cracking the lids. The smell of steaming curry filled the interior. She broke off a piece of pappadum and munched, waiting. The signal connected.
"This is Mekong com-three, please identify?"
"Hello, Mekong," said An, "this is CSA special operative Googly. I believe Captain Reichardt is expecting my call."
There was a few seconds' pause for transmission and encryptionprocessing delay. Then, "Hello Googly, please hold."
The cruiser pulled up behind the one in front, which was in turn behind three more aircars waiting at the transition zone-on weekday evenings, takeaway fly-ins were always crowded.
"Hey," said An in dismay, gazing down at his meal, "I ordered lamb kashmiri, not rogan josh. The most sophisticated goddamn infotech city in the history of humanity, and still they can't get a fucking takeaway order right."
"Would you prefer butter chicken? I like rogan josh."
They swapped, as Sandy knew they would-Ari loved butter chicken. The cruiser bumped up a space as ahead an aircar rose into the air and past the parkside treetops. Wheels retracting into the underside before accelerating off toward a busy overhead skylane, soaring black dots against a brilliant sunset of towering, orange and pink cumulous cloud. Sandy's uplink clicked back to life.
"Hello, Googly, this is Captain Reichardt."
"Oh, um ..." Ari swallowed his mouthful of butter chicken fast, "... hello Captain, I have Snowcat here to speak to you."
"Commander Kresnov?"
"I'm here, Captain," said Sandy, "you'll have to excuse the poor speech clarity, we just stopped to get some dinner and we're starved."
"I was under the impression that you were keeping clear of uplink networks, Commander?"
"Yes, sir, I was, but that problem seems to have been solved for the moment. Besides, I've got some help in making this a particularly secure line." With a glance at An, who was eating again-quickly, in case he was once more required to speak. "Captain, I understand that Director Ibrahim has been in contact with you regarding certain contingency plans of mine."
There was a pause from the other end that lasted too long to be just transmission delay. She took the chance to shovel another mouthful, and chewed quickly.
"Yeah," said the Captain. His Texan drawl seemed suddenly stronger to her ear, and she could almost hear the pained wince in his voice. "Well ... I gotta say, Commander, you've got a pretty interesting notion of what `contingency' means. "
"The Fifth Fleet has committed an illegal, hostile act, Captain. We only seek to protect what is ours."
Reichardt's reluctant sigh was clearly audible over the link. "Ifol- lowed you down this road once before Commander, you might recall. Didn't work out all so beautifully now, did it?"
"On the contrary, Captain, it worked marvellously. There were of course personal consequences for yourself, and your career ... and doubtless what I ask of you this time will have similar ramifications. If that matters to you."
"Don't even go there, Commander. The fact is, it's not just me up here. I have other captains, and I'll need to consult. This is one call I simply don't have the authority to make alone. And I'll need proof. "
"What kind of proof, sir?"
"Proof that Duong's murder was all a setup, as your people claim. Proof that the Fifth is clearly in league with the setup, and deserves what's coming to them. They might be arseholes, Commander, but they're our arseholes. We're not going to call down bad things upon their heads on the sayso of some bunch of downworld foreigners, beggin' your pardon, ma'am. "
"I understand entirely," Sandy said calmly. Fleet loyalty, he meant. She was asking the Third to be complicit in a military action against their brethren. Reichardt's people and the third Fleet might be as politically opposed as two groups of people were likely to get, but still, she had no illusions of the scale of what she was asking for upon any Fleet man or woman's conscience. "We're in the process of acquiring that proof now."
"Better make it real good, Commander. I'm a clever man, but I ain't no miracle worker, you understand?"
CSA operatives found Enrico Kalaji shortly after midnight, shot through the head in what appeared to be his safehouse apartment in downtown Mananakorn District. The shot had awoken neighbouring residents-the bullet had passed through the corridor beyond and sev eral adjoining rooms, just missing a man asleep in bed. Ari wasn't happy.
"Damn it," he muttered as they climbed from the cruiser atop its rooftop pad, "we nearly had it. Just another thirty fucking minutes and we'd have had it."
Sandy nodded tiredly, gazing about at the view from a mere eight storeys up, atop the Mananakorn residential building. Since dinner that evening, they'd been constantly on the move, acting on pieces of information, codes, suspicions and guesswork that had taken them right across Tanusha and back several times over. They'd paid visits to two of Ari's friendly underground code breakers to analys
e bits of Kalaji's gear taken from the State Department network that neither Ari nor Sandy were familiar with. Then there'd been a blackmarket weapons expert (in a noisy bar down a dark alley, of course), then a suburban family man they'd dragged from dinner with promises to tell his new fiancee about the previous conviction and probation for smuggling if he didn't explain certain key details about the loopholes in Callayan customs it seemed Kalaji had dealt with in order get the rocket launchers through shipping inspections.
And so on, constantly cross-referencing their latest discoveries with the hundred-plus CSA operatives also searching, hoping for new clues and directing regional police to search those locations they didn't have the manpower to cover. An, as Sandy had already seen, knew Tanusha inside and out, and had avenues to so many irregular sources of information, she couldn't help but wonder how he found the time to maintain contact with them all. Or maybe, she'd found herself figuring at about 10 PM, all these shady figures deferred to him on reputation alone. Some of them clearly expected favours ... which as far as she knew the CSA operating manual, were illegal to grant to anyone, least of all convicted or suspected felons, as the majority of his contacts appeared to be. Which cast new light entirely upon An's unpopularity among certain more formal, starch-collared segments of the CSA hierarchy ...
The building they'd now arrived on reminded Sandy somewhat of her and Vanessa's old home in Santiello-a modest eight-storey residential building, with a skyport on the roof with awnings to keep off the worst of the Tanushan rain and hail, and garden boxes aligned decoratively about the railings. About them, the suburbs slept, streetlights smothered beneath the profusion of semitropical trees. The air smelled heavy with recent rain, their boots splashing on rooftop puddles as they walked. Distant lightning lit the horizon with discontented rumbling, a sharp, dark outline of towers against brilliant flashes of blue.
The crime scene was a square of space by the edge of the rooftop, where a narrow gap between a decorative bush and a rising wall afforded a clear view toward the Mananakorn central business district, slightly less than one and a half kilometres away. About that small square, scanner wands had been erected, sweeping near walls, bushes and puddles with searching lines of light. Elsewhere on the rooftop, CSA agents swept with handheld devices, or entered data into compslates, or stood about and watched, or talked with colleagues. One man stood at another gap between bushes, and gazed out at the rising cluster of Mananakorn towers, alive with light.
"Anil," said An, leading the way over. Sandy detoured slightly to the "crime scene," vision-shifting through multiple spectrums in the vain hope of seeing something the wands couldn't. Agent Chandaram turned to greet them, eyes refocusing from distant thought. "That where it happened?"
"We lined up all the holes in the apartment," Chandaram said wearily, "and the trajectory points straight back to there." Pointing at the crime scene. Sandy stopped behind the sweeping wands, gazing out through the gap between bush and wall. Her eyes found the residential building in question, then zoomed upon the target windowtwenty-five storeys, second from the left. Her visual zoom was impressive, but she still couldn't see the bullet hole, fifteen hundred metres away. "There's no apparent platform upon which to rest a tripod or other support. Just the railing."
The railing around the rooftop perimeter was wet and narrow. Sandy shook her head. "No use if the shooter was a straight."
"Our trajectory matches aren't entirely perfect over this distance," Chandaram continued, "but they appear to indicate the shot was fired by someone standing upright."
"With no brace support with a heavy sniper rifle," Ari murmured. "Hell of a shot." And he raised an eyebrow in Sandy's direction, questioningly. Sandy looked for a moment longer at the trajectory. Considered the weapon in question from Investigations' initial ballistics report, and the prevailing conditions. And nodded, once.
"There's four people in Tanusha I know of who could make that shot," she said. "Me, Ramoja, Rhian and Jane."
"You have an alibi," Chandaram said drily. Sandy gathered from his expression that he was not about to leap to conclusions. Plenty in the CSA, it seemed, didn't trust Major Ramoja and the League Embassy contingent either. "Not the other League GIs in the embassy?"
"No." Sandy shook her head. "Not high-des enough."
Chandaram frowned. "A GI's designation affects accuracy? I didn't think intellect and physical capability were linked?"
Sandy shrugged. "Just does. I'm not a psych, I couldn't tell you why."
"There are root strands of lateral processing capability that meld with basic motor functions," said An. Sandy gave him a blank look ... she should have known An would know more about GI neuroscience than she did herself. "You see it in straights too-most of the great athletes are smart. Great soldiers too, look at Major Rice. Physical performance is partly a function of spatial processing-the, um, awareness of a body's position and motion within a three-dimensional space. The broader an intellect, in terms of raw neuroprocessing capability, the broader the perimeter field and thus the, um, more minuscule, precision adjustments required to shoot or run or ... or whatever."
"The Parliament massacre," said Chandaram, nodding slowly.
An nodded. "Yeah, sure ... Sandy versus forty lower-des GIs is really a little unfair on the regs, they never had much of a chance."
"I knew their patterns," Sandy said quietly, gazing out at the view. "I helped write some of their patterns. It wasn't raw ability, it was knowledge and memory. If the League had trusted lower-des GIs enough to impart a bit more knowledge upon them, they'd be that much more effective. But then, maybe my defection proves that they're right not to."
"Hang on," said Chandaram, "it's still a static sniper shot. Surely a lower-designation GI can hit a still target just as well as a higher-des?"
"This is the eighth storey," said Sandy. "The target's on the twentyfifth. It's a rising trajectory, the windows were waist-height, that means there was no chance to hit the target sitting down. He'd have been standing, and with Kalaji being so jumpy, standing means moving, or pacing, more likely. The windows were reflective, the air's humid, and the shot had to be a head shot to make certain. Too many variables. The real difference between a high- and low-des GI is the ability to process multiple strands of information. The rest is minorthat's the big difference."
"But Rhian Chu has the right designation?" Chandaram asked.
"Rhian's not a sniper," said Sandy. Lying through her teeth as she said it. An would know. Chandaram wouldn't. She hoped. "She could do it, but it was never a specialty or preference, and her spatial processing isn't as good as mine. At this range, in the dark, she might miss. Ramoja's a perfectionist, he'd never have taken that chance with her. He'd do it himself." If the League had a cause to execute Enrico Kalaji, that was. Recent experience in these matters had taught all concerned never to rule anything out. To Chandaram's side, Ari's expression never altered. "And besides, we had a deal. If anything strange went down, she was going to contact me. She'd never have taken an order like this without telling me first."
Chandaram looked at her curiously. Rhian, it occurred to Sandy, hadn't killed anyone for quite some time. Not since Dark Star, anyhow. As always with Rhian, it was difficult to know exactly how these things affected her. Possibly Rhian wasn't aware herself. Sandy suspected personally that that absence of death from her old friend's life had done wonders for her new growth and depth as a person. Death required justifications. Rationalisations of why it was all proper and necessary. Rationalisations that held a person back, forcing them to believe things that weren't necessarily true, for the sake of continued mental stability. She doubted, now, that Rhian could even do something like this, whatever her orders. Surely she would flinch. Surely she would ask questions, and wonder at the morality of what she was being ordered to do. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, and Rhian's morality continued to revolve around the old soldiers' creed that all morality came from following orders, and nothing else mattered.
&nbs
p; Damn, she hated leaving Rhian in their hands. They could destroy her, or corrupt her irreparably. Force her to do something that her new, awakening conscience would punish her for, for the rest of her life. And if they hurt her, or otherwise damaged her with their Machiavellian bullshit ... well, Jane was not going to be the only high-des GI in Tanusha with cause to fear for her safety.
"We've been monitoring the League Embassy around the clock," said Chandaram. "Ramoja hasn't left ... but then, he's snuck out before without us knowing, he might not have even been there in the first place."
His expression remained curiously unreadable. Most senior CSA types tended to swagger. Particularly the Indians, who maintained the very cool, suave demeanour at large in that subculture at the timealong with breezy sports jackets, open-necked shirts, swept-back hair and glossy moustaches. Even Sandy's old buddy Naidu went for that Director of CSA Intelligence and more than a hundred years old, so it wasn't something sparkling new and Tanushan, evidently. Chandaram wore a plain, grey suit (none of the popular cream or even bananayellow that had come recently into style), displayed no showy silver chain beneath his open collar, and disdained even the moustache. To the best of Sandy's knowledge, he remained single at the age of fortyseven. Rumour had it that his last steady partner had left him two years ago, during the last major crisis, when he hadn't come home for a week without calling. Rumour also had it that he didn't sleep. Sandy didn't believe that. Even she had to sleep ... if just for a few hours.
Killswitch: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel Page 30