by Greg Rucka
The other man, perhaps fifteen years Mack’s junior, Cassandra had no memory of having met at all, and upon reaching them, he offered both her and Velez headsets, and she took that to mean he was Mack’s assistant in one capacity or another. Cassandra took the offered set, making certain to make eye contact with the young man as she thanked him. When she did, the look on his face seemed at once pleased and terrified, and as he turned away, Cassandra wondered if she was truly so frightening as a result of her position, or her person. She turned to face Mack uncertain as to which she would have preferred.
“Ma’am,” Mack said.
“Director Mack.” As before, she made a point of meeting his eyes, this time offering a hand as well, which he took. She kept the handshake brief, tried to make it firm, knowing that he would judge her by its quality. “Nice to finally meet you in person. That business in the Amman offices got sorted out?”
“Yes, ma’am. He was revealed to be working for Core-Mantis, as we suspected. We flipped him, as you directed, gave him the designation: Sunburn. It was a wise decision, if I may say so, Madame Director. He’s the source of our intelligence on this.”
Cassandra gave an approving glance to Velez. “Really? Well done, Mr. Mack.”
“Thank you, ma’am. According to Sunburn, the target attempted to make contact with a known CMO facilitator who goes by the name of Portia de Carcareas yesterday in Mexico City. Sunburn was able to obtain an image of the target from the security servers, and from that Director Velez was able to give confirmation. I understand that both you and the director have encountered the target before.”
“Once. Might I see the image, Mr. Mack?”
Mack nodded, gestured to the young man who had handed over the headsets. He stepped hastily forward, offering a military-grade d-PAL to his superior. Mack tapped the screen twice in quick succession, then handed the device to Cassandra, who took it with her free hand.
The image was as perfectly clear and bright as if Cassandra was looking at Joanna through a window, the young woman speaking earnestly to someone out of the frame. It was such a good shot of her, in fact, that Cassandra wondered if the young woman had offered herself to the camera willingly, rather than in ignorance.
“We have a full name for her,” Velez said softly at her shoulder. “It may be an alias, but according to Sunburn, she presented herself as Joanna Dark.”
Joanna Dark, Cassandra thought, still looking at the picture, thinking that the last two months had apparently been as rough on the young woman as they had been on Cassandra herself. The startling blue eyes stared out of a face marked with scratches and minor lacerations, and though she was smiling, Cassandra thought the girl looked very tired.
She handed the d-PAL back to Mack’s assistant, saying, “Yes, that’s her.”
Mack gestured to one of the nearby monitors, tended by an Asian woman in CORPSEC uniform. “Working from the ID, and with the knowledge that the target was seeking a meeting with Carcareas, we were able to run a keyword search through the traffic coming out of CMO’s Mexico City office. Their traffic is encrypted, of course, but given the priority of the mission, Director Velez granted authorization to connect with the quantum-optical at dataDyne Sydney. It wasn’t until three this morning local before we were able to decode the relevant communications between CMO Mexico City and Carcareas.
“The long and the short of it is that we know where the target is, and we have a good idea of exactly how long she’s going to be there. The strike team is staged, and they have confirmed that the target is on site and that Carcareas is with her at this moment.”
“Carcareas came to meet her alone?”
“According to the intercept, those were the conditions of the meeting.” Mack directed Cassandra’s attention to the map displayed on one of the larger monitors nearby. According to the call-out glowing brightly beside the image, she was now looking at an aerial view of the central plaza in Veracruz, Mexico. Dots in red, amber, and green pulsed gently, marking positions. There were twelve of the green, but only one each of the red and amber, and those were positioned so close as to be touching, apparently in one of the buildings. The green had broken into two groups of six around the red and amber, with one group positioned to the north and west of them, along the edge of the plaza, the other directly to the south.
As she looked at the map, Cassandra could make out movement, the shapes of small figures as they moved around the fountain at the center of the plaza, and she realized that it wasn’t a map at all. What she was viewing, she was viewing in real time. She stepped in closer, discovered that she could make out small details, see the shadows cast by the people as the moved in the early morning sunlight.
“This is a satellite image?” she asked Velez. “NSA?”
“Yes, Madame Director.”
“Your friend Mr. Easton?”
Velez nodded slightly.
“Give him my compliments,” Cassandra said, turning her attention back to the map. “Red is for the target? And amber is Carcareas?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mack said. “The green represents the strike team, now in two elements.”
“Is there any way to hear what’s being said?”
“No, ma’am. The meeting was already underway when the strike team arrived, making it impossible to plant a surveillance device in the café. Any attempt to close to establish line-of-sight necessary for an Audioscope feed would risk undue exposure and possibly cause the target to bolt the trap.”
“I see, yes.” Cassandra stared at the two dots, amber and red, wondering what it was they were saying to each other. It seemed so clear, now, what it was that Carrington was up to, what he was trying to do. He was strengthening Core-Mantis at the expense of Beck-Yama and Zentek, perhaps even forging an alliance with the hypercorp.
And once he has that, does he come after us? Cassandra thought. Does he wait until CMO has digested its meals of Zentek and Beck-Yama and then come after us? Are they talking about it right now, this Joanna Dark and this Carcareas? Attack dataDyne now? Later?
She remembered where she was, then—why she was in New Zealand, all of Velez’s fears for her safety. Without meaning to, she found herself wondering if, at that very moment, Carcareas and Dark were talking about her, and how best to kill her, and the paranoia of it made a shiver race along her spine.
“Why is Carcareas marked in amber and not in red?” she asked.
Velez answered, “Red is reserved for target designation, Madame Director. Amber signifies third-party forces not specifically identified in our Rules of Engagement.”
“I see. Yes, I do see.” She ran a hand through her hair, considering. “Director Velez?”
“Madame Director?”
She turned to look at her, settling the headset over her ears as she did so. “I am hereby granting authorization by direct verbal command, as Chief Executive Officer and Director of dataDyne, to alter the designation on Carcareas from amber to red.”
“As you say, Madame Director.” Velez nodded slightly to Mack, and Cassandra turned back to the map in time to see the dot that was Portia de Carcareas change from amber to red. She could hear Mack’s assistant speaking softly into his headset, heard him relaying the order to the strike team in the field.
On the map, Carcareas and Dark began to move in the direction of the plaza.
“Targets are going mobile,” someone said.
Mack turned to Cassandra. “Madame Director?”
Staring at the two red dots, Cassandra de Vries found herself thinking of her brother, and the sadness in that moment threatened to overwhelm her.
Then she thought of Daniel Carrington.
Damn you for forcing me to do this, Daniel, she thought. Damn you. And damn me with you.
“Take them,” she ordered.
Plaza Lerdo
Veracruz, Mexico
January 25th, 2021
“Stay close to me until we reach the exit,” Portia de Carcareas said, rising from her chair. “There are tw
o teams, one to the west, one south of our position. Once we enter the plaza, the southern team will attempt to come up and flank us.”
“How do you know this?” Joanna hissed, following suit and concealing the P9P, still in her hand, beneath her jacket. “Where are you getting your intelligence?”
Carcareas shook her head, and as Jo watched, the woman’s eyes changed color again, the brown washing away to an entirely unnatural, almost mirrorlike gray. She looked past Jo, then turned her head slowly from side to side, apparently focusing on nothing before looking back to her. With her right hand, she took a handful of Core-Mantis scrip and dropped it on the table; with her left, she brushed back the hem of her coat to rest her palm on the butt of a small automatic, riding in its pancake holster there.
Probably a CMO Rapier, Jo thought, which would suit Carcareas—small, elegant, and deadly.
“Ainia’s at least three minutes out,” she told Jo, her eyes reverting to their natural brown. “The southern team is moving to take entry positions, they’re going to come in the back any moment. If we don’t leave now, we’re going to be caught in here like fish in a barrel. Our only chance is to break the trap and get to a place of cover where we can hold them off until Xiphos arrives.”
“I don’t trust you!”
Carcareas all but snarled at her. “Then it’s mutual. I’m leaving now, Joanna. You either come with me, or you die here, and given the state you’re in, that’s liable to happen quite quickly. Don’t be a fool, girl! I have the answers you want, you know that. The only way you’ll get them is if we both can get out of here alive.”
With that, Carcareas turned and began making her way toward the exit onto the plaza.
Muttering a curse, Jo moved to follow.
She’d just caught up with Carcareas at the doorway when the rear wall, only six feet from where Jo had been seated with her back to it, exploded inward. Masonry and timber spewed in their direction, debris and splinters pelting them, and Jo heard screaming from behind her; then a second explosion, even louder than the first, obliterated all other sounds, and she knew a flash-bang had followed the breaching charge. Carcareas seemed to have frozen, everything seemed to have slowed, and Jo felt the strange comfort she always felt when her perceptions would shift like this, when the world would dilate and the adrenaline would drop.
As much as she might hate it both before and afterward, the truth was that it was in moments like these that she finally found peace with herself. It was in moments like these that she knew who she was, because she knew what to do.
Pivoting in place, Jo brought the P9P to bear, firing off half of her clip with almost machine-gun speed at the group of armored men coming through the breach they’d made in the wall. The details of them seared into her mind as she fired, their bulletproof helmets, the dataDyne-issued CMP machine pistols in their hands, the MagSec pistols riding in holsters at their thighs, the almost imperceptible double-d diamonds engraved in the ceramic plating at the shoulders of their matte black body armor.
Her shots were true, all of them, the way they almost always were, and her bullets found their marks in the small pockets of exposed flesh between chin straps and body armor. Three of them fell, shot neatly through the neck, and she was charging forward, firing at the remainder before the ones still standing truly had time to process what she had done to them.
From the corner of her eye, Jo saw Carcareas twisting, her gun now held in both hands. One of the men still standing had his CMP up, had begun loosing a burst that punched a line like perforations in the wall, trying to track her as Jo threw herself into a slide. Then his aim went wild, arcing up as he fell back, and she watched as impact after impact appeared in a line on his armored torso, Carcareas pounding bullets into the man, buying Jo time.
Carcareas emptied the gun putting another man down, and the one remaining was stepping back, as if trying to reach the cover of the breach, while laying down a sheet of bullets. Jo turned the slide into a roll, dimly aware that she could feel her ribs moving in ways that they were never meant to. She tasted copper in her mouth, fresh blood, and wondered if that was because she’d been shot or because she’d torn something open once more.
Then she was out of her roll, coming up inside the last man’s guard, and she caught the arm holding the CMP, trapped it as she turned her back into the man, forcing the weapon down, forcing her own finger over his on the trigger. The CMP ripped another torrent of rounds at the floor, and she directed the last of them at the man’s toes. Her hearing had cleared just enough that, with his mouth almost even with her ear, she could just about hear his scream of pain.
She twisted the CMP free of his grip, stepping forward and letting him fall back, then turned and cut a burst into his chest that made his body armor split and shatter. Then she moved the submachine gun to the man Carcareas had shot and dumped the rest of the clip into him to the same effect.
Turning back, she saw Carcareas coming toward her, shielding her own head, and it took Jo a moment to process why, what she was missing without the aid of her ears. Then the head of one of the patrons cowering on the floor burst apart, and at the same time a perfect lance of sunlight appeared in the wall from the direction of the northwest, and Jo understood there was at least one sniper who hadn’t liked what she and Carcareas had just done.
Jo tossed the CMP in her hands to the other woman, then dropped low and began gathering the other five weapons. Two more shafts of light cut into the café in quick succession, one destroying a table, the other the left leg of one of the old men she had noted earlier. She felt the revulsion and outrage surging in her chest, strong enough to threaten the abandoning of sense.
Carcareas was shouting, the words filtering into Jo’s hearing as if being thrust through mud.
“—stay here! They have at least one rocket launcher, they’ll blast us to pieces.”
Jo slapped the butt on one of the CMPs, activating its secondary mode. Instantly a detailed three-dimensional holographic duplicate of herself leapt forward a meter and a half from her position, in an identical pose. Carcareas’s eyes, once again almost silvered gray, widened with understanding, and she repeated the move with the CMP Jo had tossed to her. The duplicate Carcareas leapt forward, mirroring her movements beside the holographic Jo.
“All of them!” Jo shouted to her. “We need to activate all of them!”
Each woman scrambled to take up the discarded CMPs, activating one after the other, and the holographs multiplied, jumbled, mixing with one another, each in perfect mimicry. They wouldn’t last long, Jo knew; for the holographs to be convincing duplicates, they had to not only appear identical to their subjects, but they had to move and mimic them with absolute precision. That took power, a lot of power, and the batteries in the compact submachine guns wouldn’t last long. Fifteen, maybe twenty more seconds at the most.
Jo slung one CMP over her shoulder by its strap, took the other two in each hand, and saw Carcareas doing the same. Both women scrambled to their feet, the field of duplicates doing likewise. Jo caught a glimpse of herself as one of the holographs, saw that there was blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. The pain in her side was dull, almost easy to ignore, and again she wondered how much hurt she was doing herself by moving in this way. When it was over, if she survived, she was sure she would be paying the price, that the ache her mind was dulling would erupt and that the agony of it would be thorough.
“Go!” Jo shouted, and her multiples mirrored the movements that came with her words perfectly, if not the sound of them. Carcareas, her now-silvered eyes shining, surged forward, and Jo sprinted along with her. Together, the two women and their six copies burst from the entrance of the café and into the sunlight of the Plaza Lerdo. As Jo cleared the doorway, heard the roar of the rocket on approach, she knew it hadn’t been a moment too soon.
The explosion took her and Carcareas off their feet, sending them tumbling forward, a rain of shattered glass and blasted building pelting the marble-covered grou
nd around them. Jo heard gunfire, watched as two of her duplicates vanished, their projection fields disrupted by rounds that would have found her head or heart. She rolled forward, felt the pain in her side sharpen, then abate as she lunged for the cover of the fountain at the center of the plaza. Carcareas dove in after her, the last of her holograms winking out as she came to a stop, and Jo realized that hers were gone, now, too, that it was truly just the two of them against dataDyne.
An abrupt and uncomfortable silence dropped onto the plaza, at first almost impossible for Jo to discern over the sounds of her and Carcareas’s labored breathing. She belly-crawled forward, closer to the base of the fountain, and then, once she was certain it would give her protection from the west, turned her back to it, the CMPs still in her hands, to cover her left. Carcareas slid herself into position beside her, mirroring the pose to cover the right.
Jo realized she couldn’t catch her breath, that there was blood dripping from her mouth and down onto her shirt.
“Were you hit?” Carcareas hissed. “Did they hit you?”
Jo shook her head, and suddenly the pain in her abdomen and chest surged, made her whimper before she could stop herself. She shoved herself back against the fountain with her feet, almost grinding her teeth as the intensity of the pain increased, building until she thought she would have to scream. The taste of her own blood filling her mouth threatened to make her gag.
“I think I’m kinda hurt,” Jo managed to say.
Carcareas dropped the CMP she was holding in her left hand into her lap, then reached out and grabbed Joanna around her right bicep. A burning sensation leached into the muscle, Carcareas’s grip tight, and Jo tried to pull away out of reflex. The burn spread through her arm, up into her shoulder, then abated, taking the pain Jo was feeling with it.