by John Ringo
Tommy moved in to check her work, the task being both necessary and in the way of a final technical interview. A row of buckleys sat on the battered desk in front of them, each lined up, after many obfuscatory hops through the network, to make very sincere, urgent police calls in a short period of time.
He had handled the hack into the police computers himself, as there was more risk of getting caught. The run had yielded a list of forensic evidence collected and where it all was presently.
While the Organization didn’t have anyone inside this particular station — had few people inside any stations — they did have extensive records on who could be bribed where. These days, the list was long as hell, and they might have done better to compile a list of who couldn’t be bribed. The right payoffs were already in the right hands, plans in place to deal gently with any honest officers who couldn’t be avoided along the way.
Throughout the O’Neal Bane Sidhe, other teams were preparing for other missions in their areas of specialty. Cleaning teams did a phenomenal job of forensics work when there was a call for it, as now. Professionals thoroughly schooled to leave no evidence at a scene were adept at finding bits others had missed.
This was probably the nicest of the offices available to operations, which meant it was usually booked solid by office staff and other chair warmers in the hierarchy. Some things never changed. The proximity to the holidays had made for a rare vacancy. The non-field staff hadn’t been recalled, which had kept it that way. The chairs were all in good repair, and the walls had been tuned as a project by one of the Sohon kids with decent taste.
“Don’t get used to such palatial surroundings, Amy. This is the first time I’ve gotten the good office in a couple of years, and it’ll probably be that long before we luck out again.”
“Got it.” She grinned at him. “Everything okay?”
“Sweet. Some of the wrinkles in the data hops are creative and clever. I wouldn’t have thought of dynamically routing through machines for sale on auction sites. Excellent,” he said. “Byron, get me Cally.”
“Easier said than done, boss; she is one hot lady. Should I be jealous? Connecting…”
“All set?” he heard Cally ask him, the 2-D of her on the small screen showing a damp face, her hair in a towel in that wrap thing women did.
“A-ffirmative,” Tommy confirmed. “And Papa’s gonna have a run for his money when he comes back. Miss Sands here is one hot-shit electron mechanic.”
“Amy,” the sweet soprano corrected from the background.
“Yeah, well, anyway, Amy passes with flying colors, we’re good to go on our end,” he said.
“Roger that. Golden on our end, too. Chill or rack out or whatever, meet in room twenty-eight delta foxtrot at eighteen hundred. Got it?” Cally asked.
“Check. Twenty-eight delta foxtrot, eighteen hundred. Later, I’m out.”
“So what do I do between now and eighteen hundred? Oh, and Sands is okay, too.” Amy grinned at him again. “Just please no ‘miss’ — it makes me feel like James Bond’s Moneypenny.”
“Right. Sorry, Sands. Do whatever you want, within common sense. I’m probably going to be playing Diess Challenge.”
“I haven’t played it yet. Is it any good?” she asked, more avidly than he would have expected. “I’ve heard mixed reviews.”
“It’s got a few rendering bugs in places, and don’t PvP on the Galactic side unless you’re prepared to lose. There are some God King exploits that totally screw Galactics. There’s supposed to be a patch coming, but…” he began automatically, then paused. “I’d rate it a four out of five.”
“She shoots, she scores,” Amy said, popping to her feet and grinning. “See you at eighteen hundred, boss-man.”
George Schmidt’s own mother wouldn’t have recognized him — black hair, dark brown contact lenses, skin tone bronzed to a level his own fair complexion would never support. His features had been altered by the tried-and-true contoured cheekbone pads. The make-up department had subtly altered lips, eyes, brow line, ears and nose with expert application of a long-wearing, highly localized astringent. Among other tricks, they had even managed to give him a mild, temporary case of acne. Juvs tended to be immune, as did anyone who could afford and paid for the vaccine. Acne was a near guaranteed way to camouflage a juv for a short stint. It would be gone by morning.
In this case, they had designed the acne and other facial changes to both put him squarely in the college student age bracket, as well as feed false data to any facial geometry analysis tools.
Cally and Sands had undergone similar treatments. It saved the trouble and risk of having to hack out too much police security holo. Body changes were thermal. Costuming had pulled out all the stops. Local police systems tended to be difficult to fool. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be done, it just made the cover process more expensive than the Bane Sidhe usually liked to shell out these days. Cost was not a factor on tonight’s missions, for their team or anyone else’s.
The car they had brought for insertion was a typical anonymous beige of the kind currently in vogue among the feds, down to the detail of being between three to five years old — and having interior cop car construction, complete to the back seat and valid government tags.
Cally looked George over thoroughly before looking at his brother. “Will we do?” she asked.
“Flawless,” Harrison said. “Oops, bro, you’ve got a string.” He reached down and clipped a hanging thread from the bottom of his smaller sibling’s T-shirt.
George grimaced, as if more than used to being fussed over. Harrison was on the team for more than one reason. Clothes and make-up might seem trivial to the uninitiated, but the smallest oversight in appearance could blow a cover. World War II allied spies had gone so far as to make sure the buttons were sewn onto their coats the “right” way before inserting behind the lines into France. The job of “Schmidt One” was not to make them look good. Harrison’s job — one hat of many — was to make sure they looked right.
“Showtime.” Cally nodded, getting behind the wheel of the Fed car as Sands climbed in as shotgun, in this case literal as there was a short-barrel twelve gauge under the seat. She heard the loud slam of the door behind her as George got in. He had to slam it, as there were no handles on the inside and momentum had to carry it.
Tommy and Harrison had climbed back into the gray Buick sedan. It was cramped as hell for Sunday, but he wasn’t complaining. The car didn’t look like much, but it this model had the most aerodynamic body within the range of conservative and boring, given that it also had to fit a grand national engine under the hood. The windows also were something special. Nano-polarized, there was a set of dimmer switches on the dash that controlled the tint, from none to dark. It made the vehicle as good as a van for camping near a run, but much, much faster. A built-in electric heater under the hood kept the engine warm even in a Chicago winter.
Everyone hoped they wouldn’t need the car’s special features. Get in, get out in the Fed car was the plan. Yeah. It was good to have a plan. It was essential to have a backup.
At the station, Cally did exactly what real Feds would do. She parked in one of the reserve spots right near the building — but she was a nice Fed. She didn’t park in the chief’s space.
The station was typical for the age, with parking lot and cement walkways crumbling. The building was an ugly box of faded, stained brick and dingy mortar with “Greenville City Police” tacked on the side in aluminum letters. Two “e"s and an “l” were missing. The parking lot was also, given the time of day, damn near deserted.
As she and Sands took up flanking positions to escort George in, Cally noted the exits carefully, along with the lights and the collapsed bit of curb outside the emergency fire exit they planned to use. The chained and padlocked exit.
“Hold up,” she ordered, detouring to pick the lock and unthread the chain from the double door’s handles. She started to put the offending items on the ground, but then g
ot a quick mental image of some helpful soul coming through and noticing that someone had left the door unlocked. She jogged over to the car and shoved chain and lock underneath it before retaking her spot on Schmidt’s left.
In accord with their story that Bryan Cane was one of the coed’s ex-boyfriends who had come in “voluntarily,” George walked slightly in front of the two FBI agents who, while they were not actually touching him, walked almost exactly where they would have been had they been hustling him in by the arms. The implication was clear, displaying the typical unsubtle and humorless attitude of the modern Bureau Field Agent. If they carried the stereotype a bit far into HD true crime drama, so much the better. It would fit the locals’ preconceptions; people didn’t question what they didn’t notice.
Inside the building, the brand new, orange, plastic chairs reflected off a white institutional-tile floor, which was buffed until you could almost see your face in it. The rest of the room contrasted unfavorably, as the walls were scuffed and marked, long past the need for a new coat of paint, and the old-fashioned drop ceiling showed the stains of a current or one-time leak. The room was small, as befitted a town that barely met the population requirement for a city charter.
A counter stretched across the middle of the room and doubled as the front desk. A door had been cut to one side and was clearly the locking kind you had to be buzzed through, which was a nice little piece of security if you were keeping out blue-haired old ladies too frail to just vault the counter.
The rather chubby officer behind the counter was obviously very busy, and was presently playing a holographic game of multicolored blocks in various configurations, falling from the top of the virtual screen. He looked up as they came in the door and tapped the front of his buckley, which obediently switched off the game and brought up a screen of something that looked very serious and industrious. A boss program.
As they approached the counter, Cally let her eyes meet Sands’, and they both affected the attitude of federal agents who hadn’t really expected any better from local law enforcement. Near simultaneously and seemingly from nowhere, they pulled out little black leather folders and flipped them open to display their credentials to the embarrassed man.
“Special Agents Wilson and Brannig. We need an interrogation room, and then I’ll speak to the senior supervisor on duty,” Cally said, a slight nod of her head indicating that George was to be the person interrogated, as if the man behind the desk were too stupid to have figured that out on his own.
“That would be the chief. He’s working late tonight,” the officer said, clearly glad to be able to say something that might make the city police look good.
“Satisfactory. The room?” Cally reminded him as if he’d already forgotten. His slight flush deepened as her eyes noted the open box of donuts on the table behind him, and then returned to rest on him. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask why he was still just sitting there.
“Uh, yeah. Here.” He reached under the counter and they heard a buzz and a click as the small door unlocked.
Cally gestured for George to precede them, meticulously avoiding touching him, perfectly courteous, and yet managing to convey the clear message that if he wasn’t yet under arrest, that was a technicality that could be corrected instantly if she or “Brannig” became displeased.
Sands, on the other hand, looked at their not-prisoner, if not quite sympathetically, at least as if she hadn’t already convicted him in her mind as an ax murderer. As she followed Cally through the gap, she turned to the cop behind the desk. “Thank you, officer… Hardy,” she read off his badge.
Cally focused on the man again, her expression calculated to make him feel like an idiot that he was still seated and still hadn’t gotten them their interrogation room.
He almost stumbled over his feet in his hurry to get up and comply.
The police chief looked distinctly less than happy to have a pair of Feds on his doorstep, even if they did come bearing what might be a major break in his case. He also looked resigned, and uncritically swallowed their story about the ex-boyfriend aka person of interest.
“We’ve been ordered to coordinate and cooperate with you,” Cally said, with a hint of sourness under the professional mask. “Strictly speaking, since there is no hard evidence of linkage across state lines as of yet, it’s your case, but I’m sure you’ll understand how much pressure we’re facing from above.” There was no evidence of linkage across state lines. Or, more accurately, no evidence the Bane Sidhe was going to let civil police authorities in on.
“Frankly, most of the reason we brought him up here was as an excuse to drag him on a three-hour road trip and get him tired and hungry,” Sands admitted. As if on cue, her stomach growled.
“Okay, so what have you got?” he asked.
“The ex-boyfriend from high school. Word is the breakup was not friendly. This one used to work for a grocery store. In the meat department,” Cally said.
The chief turned a little green around the gills.
“You saw the body,” she said, unsurprised when he nodded, swallowing hard, and his eyes narrowed grimly at George.
“Time to shake him until his teeth rattle.” The ersatz agent didn’t wait for a reply from the chief, but turned and entered the room vigorously, slamming the door behind her.
The interrogation that followed was a skit played out entirely for the chief’s benefit, the characters being the good cop, the bad cop, and the suspect. Said play continued until the buckley vibrating on Cally’s hip told her part two of the operation was kicking loose on the PD’s emergency lines.
The beauty of the whole drama was that none of them had to do a particularly good acting job. George’s character could be believably bad at pretending total innocence, while Cally and Sands could get away with a bit of overacting. They were playing agents playing good cop, bad cop. Cally was, thus, free to make a dramatic production of losing her temper and slamming out in a huff when Sands bodily kept her from assaulting the “suspect.”
She ran a hand through her hair as she walked into the observation room with the chief. “That always winds me up. I really do need a time out,” she said.
Right on cue, a pleasant female voice issued from the other man’s hip pocket. “Chief, you have a call. Chief you have a call. Please see the screen for details,” it said.
He pulled the device out and glanced at the screen casually, doing a quick double take. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“If you need to go take care of something, she’s not going to be asking him any real questions for at least another five minutes as she tries to build a bond,” Cally told him. “I’m gonna take a walk and get my head back in the zone before we really start up again.”
“Uh, sure, if you wouldn’t mind.” The chief didn’t even look at her as he took off for the front office at a pace just short of a run. Step one accomplished. She now had the freedom of the station.
She didn’t dither, but made a beeline for the probable locations of the evidence room. There were several candidates because she only had the building plans to work from. Unfortunately, the small room on this side held a broom closet and assorted junk that was quite clearly not evidence, unless you considered it evidence that somebody had a pack-rat problem. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and prepared her excuses as she backtracked to the front of the building, which was laid out in a horseshoe pattern. She would have to go through the front desk area to get to the other side of the building. It was also the side with the fire exit she’d originally prepped. She would, no doubt, have to unlock their side’s exit to get Sands and George out.
In the front of the station, she smiled apologetically at the cop working the desk. “Do you mind if I grab one of these? I haven’t eaten in five hours,” she said.
His eyes glinted at her, amused, and roved over her body. For once, his eyes didn’t even stop at her breasts, but skimmed on down to the thighs men seemed to like but she fought a constant battle with.
“S
ure,” he said.
“Thanks.” She could practically feel him watching her butt as she walked on through the front and around the other side, through the emergency call room where two other cops and the chief were dealing with the frantic spate of calls. They barely looked up when she waved at them and sashayed on through. Ass man. That would explain it.
The evidence room was as jumbled as the broom closet had been. It didn’t really qualify as a room, more a large closet. The lock was laughable, and she picked it in three seconds. It took her almost half a minute to find the bagged articles she was looking for. The fingers would be in the pathologist’s lab at the hospital, of course. Greenville being too small for a hospital of its own, that was at the county seat six or seven miles away. Those weren’t her problem. The Bane Sidhe had made other arrangements. All she needed from here was a plastic zipper bag with a used tissue in it. It took her almost five minutes to find it, but with the air squeezed out of the bag, it was easily concealable on her person. She repressed a laugh as she realized that technically this counted as stuffing her bra, and the visual image of herself carrying twice the ample amount of cleavage was just too much.
“Hey, what are you doing?” a suspicious female voice asked behind her.
Without missing a beat, she palmed a Hiberzine injection from a pocket and turned to face the cop. “Checking something the scumbag told us. This is interesting; have a look,” she said. It was out of character for a federal agent to offer free information to anyone, but curiosity kept the woman from noticing, and she leaned over to peer into the closet, turning her back on Cally O’Neal
Who then had to prop the unconscious body rather awkwardly because of the pack-rattishness of the evidence room.
Hiberzine was so cool.