by John Ringo
“Fine. It’s easier if I send a courier to fetch my husband, if possible, since I need to be here probably more than he needs to be wherever he is. I happen to know he’s on Earth indefinitely, anyway. It’s business. Potentially big business. Even if he doesn’t get a deal, the Tong will be content with him trying.” She brushed at her hair nervously with one hand. “No, on second thought, I’ll meet him partway. Like you said, time’s irreplaceable. It’s quicker and easier if we don’t have to take him through a bunch of special rigamarole to get him in here.” She waved her hand, indicating the base.
“Is anyone sorry I’m married, now?” she asked sweetly, not waiting for a reply as she left.
James Stewart, aka Yan Kato, reflected on how much trouble he’d be in if his employers knew he’d given his wife this extensive a list of their network of safe meeting places. A business organization like the Tong ran on negotiations and deals. Each organization to its nature: the Bane Sidhe needed safe houses; the Tong needed privacy for business. Of course, he’d be in lethal trouble if they knew he had a wife, and who she was. However, in this case, it was going to make them a buttload of money.
This meeting place was especially well camouflaged, because while it was a restaurant, one ordinarily did not associate the Tong with places like Harry’s Barbecue Palace in West Bumfuck Indiana, even if one knew the owner’s wife was Chinese. At nineteen hundred, it was pitch dark outside except for a couple of parking lot lights and the great big pink neon sign on the roof outside, announcing the name of the place to any of the locals too braindead to remember it or, more optimistically, to stray travelers coming in off the interstate.
Pine trestle tables had a thick coating of some kind of clear varnish. Stewart supposed they could afford real pine because it was the quickest growing, lowest grade of wood there was. Ceiling fans churned slowly above, despite the season, to circulate the patrons’ after-dinner smokes. A cheap plastic carnation sat in an equally cheap vase beside a steel napkin holder, salt and pepper shakers, barbecue sauce and ketchup. He really loathed this shit, but he wasn’t going to criticize his wife’s choice of restaurant. He’d just order a cheeseburger and be done with it. He looked at the menu and winced at the prices for real meat.
His wife walked in the fire exit of the meeting room, all five foot ten of luscious. He really hated it that their belated honeymoon had been cut short, but acknowledged wryly that the miracle was that it wasn’t cut short sooner. He had seen pictures of her before, but the only Cally he had ever known wore the body of one Captain Sinda Makepeace for a cover role seven and a half years ago. If, probably when, Cally got her real body back, it would be a major change for him to adjust to. The original Cally was also quite beautiful, not that he was biased. It would just be like she was in a new, different body to him, while it would be going back to the same original one for her. The original had smaller tits, among other things, but he really looked forward to exploring all the differences himself, whenever.
Part of him was regretful for what he was about to do to her. Part of him had that competitive buzz that he mentally slapped himself for, but that was there regardless. The sad truth was, his wife totally sucked at business, and whoever sent her out to negotiate a major deal had to be a fucking moron. However, she had already told him that she was negotiating for a bunch of Indowy clans, not even for the O’Neals, so he had zero conflict of interest in taking them for all he could wring out of her. Which would be a lot.
The truth, which she couldn’t possibly know, was that he had already made the beginnings and inquiries of expanding the Tong’s new shipping venture completely on their side. It became very profitable to smuggle from various unreclaimed parts of the world when truly competent people were available for hire to kill Posleen, rather than the usual crop of low-grade mercenaries. One of the hitches in the plan had been lack of available labor that could be spared from the network, disappeared from where it was, and relocated to the new ventures. Indowy worked like little green labor machines, and if the Bane Sidhe were evacuating their base, they’d be evacuating their admittedly few Sohon tanks, tools, and other necessaries, which would then also become available for hire. Hey, any covert GalTech production availability was priceless. He mentally rubbed his hands together.
Then there was the slab. Dear God let her be naïve enough to undervalue the use of the slab. He was, alas, confident that his prayers would be answered. He suppressed a grin and slapped himself again. Then again, a man was supposed to enjoy taking advantage of his wife. Boy was she gonna be pissed when she caught him. He was pretty sure he would survive this. Pretty sure. He’d just explain that it hadn’t been her money, what a good job it did of setting his employers’ minds to rest about his loyalty, and how much less likely the Tong was to kill him when they eventually found out about the marriage. That’s it. Present it as a when. It was close enough to true, anyway. Yeah, he was pretty sure.
There was a reason he watched her stock picks and portfolio very carefully. It wasn’t that she was dumb. Far from it. She just had no idea of the economic value of things beyond casual consumer purchases and light, backpack-level smuggling. And, poor girl, she trusted him.
“Good evening, Mr. Yan,” Michelle said as she slid into the booth with Cally.
“Oh… shit.”
Chapter Twenty
“She’s here,” Cally’s buckley said, reading from the sticky camera dot Cally had posted above the door jam outside.
Cally had elected to meet Sands in her quarters. For a one-on-one briefing, there was no point reserving or otherwise taking up a room, and in here she could offer some coffee from her own black-market stock. The place was shabby, but it wasn’t like any of them were used to better.
Despite the bobble on Mr. Casanova, Cally still really liked the younger girl. She was devious, evil, and nasty — while looking so harmless. Those were traits the older assassin could respect. She was also a damned talented cyber and had been working the problem of the dependent murders to track down the people who most needed to be dead. Initially.
She was as impatient for this appointment as she was every day. Every day one of the cybers — Sands, Tommy, or someone else if necessary — briefed her in on where the investigation was. She couldn’t have claimed this privilege as lead of a field team — not unless tasked with the particular mission. Need to know applied. As acting clan head of Clan O’Neal, Cally had a “need to know” for just about anything she damned well pleased, and was using it liberally. It felt like abusing the privilege, but it wasn’t. The additional responsibilities sat poorly on her shoulders, but they were hers nonetheless, and she really did need to know this shit. Besides, even though the official hierarchy had standards for defining operational need to know, Granpa would normally have been available to sort through the crap and — on his own authority — brief her in on anything likely to be tasked in their direction well in advance.
Gaming out the possibilities helped get the team a head start on operational planning. In her professional opinion, this had saved the lives of one or more of her people at least twice.
“Thanks, buckley.” Cally was opening the door to her quarters before Sands even knocked.
This usually spooked people a little, but Amy just glanced over the door and nodded infinitesimally. Yep. The girl definitely had the makings of a professional. Sands’ poker face, however, needed work. Cally wouldn’t have expected the girl to do anything so, well, girly, as bubble with excitement, but she was.
“We got him,” Amy said without preamble.
“Which one? And what kind of ‘got’?” Cally asked.
Sands walked over and pulled out the chair from the small desk, turning it around to sit down while her team leader perched on the edge of the bed.
“The Maise puker surfaced arrested for DUI in Akron,” the cyber said.
The scumbag in question had earned his sobriquet by leaving his lunch on the floor while taking part in the massacre of the Maise family. The k
illers had wiped it up, but you couldn’t get all that stuff out without a cleaner team or someone equally thorough. His DNA was, of course, all through the residue. They had found his identity fairly quickly with a simple hack and database search, but that said nothing about where he was.
His arrest in Akron, however, had resulted in the police taking a sample and running it against the federal identity protection system, which ostensibly existed to protect people from consumer fraud but was a far better example of the state of things in the post-war United States. The search of the database and resultant match had triggered a nice little bit of code that alerted the Bane Sidhe cyberpunks who had been seeking him. The puker was now in a known location, and wasn’t going anywhere until someone bailed him out, which couldn’t happen until after he was arraigned. This left a narrow window to move on the man and scoop him up. The priority was to take this one alive. The puker was a valuable property, under the theory that anybody so soft as to puke out his guts during a hit was a complete amateur and would crack like an egg. Sure, the puker would die, but only after he’d given them everybody else involved.
“We’re closing in on the Florida killers, too. That’s a slower process because we think we’ve got the killers in our search pool, but it’s still a matter of going down the list and finding the whereabouts of each possible. With the limited video from the mom’s buckley, we were able to narrow it down to ten thousand probables on one of the shooters, and we’re down to three hundred to check in depth. That is, they were probably within two hundred and fifty miles of Orlando at the time of the murders.”
“And if you don’t have them in your list? Then you’re back to Step One?” Cally asked.
“Not exactly.” Sands chewed on the end of one nail contemplatively. “We’ve got a search pool on the other car shooter, and he’s going through the same process. It’s a bigger pool, so it’s taking longer, but it gives us twice as much chance to find our targets in this first run of analysis. We could usually make a safe bet that thugs on this level would have a rap sheet and use those to narrow the pool more quickly, but in this case, we can’t, because the Tir’s people have the power to either eliminate or tamper with a rap sheet, and we don’t know whether they will have seen the need to do so or not.
“Oh, they’re starting the evac today. Tommy’ll be down there for the men who are seeing family off. I understand Cap Andreotti is going out on the first bus, so the Maise kid should be down there to say goodbye. It’d probably be a nice thing to update him on as much of the investigation as opsec allows,” Sands said.
“Pinky Maise is no kid. Yeah, I’ll fill him in on what I can. Keep your mouth shut, because I’m doing it on my own initiative and authority, and I don’t want any bullshit about it. Maise-the-younger isn’t going to say a word to anybody. I’d trust the dad with almost anything on base, and I’d still pick Pinky to be the most closed-mouth of the two. Kid’s fucking amazing. He’s having a hell of a traumatic childhood but, hey, look how I turned out.” Cally grinned evilly at the girl.
She had a meeting scheduled with the Maises but there was time to go over the defense plans. They would, naturally, hang back a bit to give her time to finish her business with Tommy. This, at least, was a military task she understood well, it being what she cut her teeth on at the tender age of eight. The defense of the house in Rabun Gap against the Posleen during the war had been her curriculum in the harshest school of all — survival.
This had some weaknesses, but it looked like the best defense they could throw together in a hurry with the resources they had. By the time they could do better, they’d have the base evacced, anyway.
Succeeding rings of claymore mines were set to drive enemy into a kill zone, with a camouflaged trench line of defenders to cut them to pieces and mop up whatever was left.
It also showed her why Tommy wanted to split the on-base DAG contingent into three groups. One group manning the fixed positions, one group sleeping, one group doing readiness tasks that gave their attention a break from the vigilance required on the line. Each group on the line would rotate one or two men onto break every ten minutes, so that each hour each man got a break, in place, to restore his alertness.
The plan made use of available automated sensors. In this case, just a couple of clean AIDs were almost unbeatable, but redundancy in defense layers was rarely a bad idea.
When she was down to the fine details, she had her buckley page Maise and request his presence.
When he and Dad got to the cafeteria, Pinky thought, and not for the first time, that these people must be poor. Their tables and stuff, and the food, were crappier than at Joey’s school, and that was saying something. He had to try not to sniffle or even almost cry when he thought about Joey. These people didn’t think he understood that Joey and Mom weren’t ever coming back. Kids his age didn’t understand death. It was one thing he decided he’d keep hidden, after all. Pinky liked secrets. He didn’t much like this one, but it would make Daddy feel worse, so he kept his mouth shut.
The floor in here was all shined up, as if somebody had decided that if they couldn’t have money to buy better stuff, they could at least be clean. It made sense to him, but he reminded himself not to ask for too much stuff and maybe embarrass them. They were being real nice, and kept him and Mr. Andreotti alive even if they couldn’t — he decided not to think about that anymore right now.
Pinky figured he could get lots more information out of this if he played it right. The grown-ups were trying real hard to treat him like he was older. They were trying too hard, and he figured he might be able to use that.
He’d have to be real careful. Miss O’Neal came across pretty sharp. Pretty all around. Her hair was the blondest he’d ever seen without being white, and her eyes a real pretty blue. He didn’t know if they were really that color without her contact lenses. She had really big breasts. Joey would have — well, anyway, they were big — the first thing you noticed even if, like him, you were too young to really care.
His dad was holding his hand. He’d done it a lot ever since he came back. He didn’t think Daddy noticed how much he did it. It was okay.
They walked over to the table where Miss O’Neal was looking at something on her buckley. Pinky had to free his hand from his dad’s to scramble into a chair. He sighed. His feet still didn’t reach the floor and it was embarrassing. He wanted to move all the time, and with his feet hanging down like this, he almost couldn’t help but swing them. With a child’s instinct for manipulating adults, he stilled them and sat up straight like a good boy and tried to look earnest, wise, and precocious. It wasn’t as easy as he’d expected, because he was so used to acting the other way. Trying to look more mature was new.
“I’m glad you could take time to see me,” Cally said.
Pinky knew this was a grown-up politeness, because she was his dad’s boss. Daddy would have had to come regardless, but he was glad to be there himself. He wouldn’t have gotten much information out of Dad.
He wasn’t supposed to interrupt, but Pinky decided this was a good time to get away with being a kid and forget that. “Can you tell us what’s going on about all of it?” he asked. “I mean, it’s all linked together with the same guys behind it, right? So the more you know on the rest of it, the more it helps with Mom and Joey.” He let his voice break just a little on that last bit, and hoped it was the right touch. He tried to add “hopeful” to the complicated expressions he was already trying to pull off and quashed a twinge of triumph. She was buying it.
“Okay, Pinky.” She looked at him like she respected him, not like a kid.
His dad, thank God, didn’t break in. He was still buying the advice of that shrink to let him get information. Good.
“We have, besides your family, the Swaim murders in Florida, the grandmother murder, and the coed murders. The grandmother case is… closed. Three people that we know of were involved in the coed murders. We’ve located two of them, but we want to verify that there weren�
�t other participants before we take them down.”
She grimaced and Pinky guessed that she would have preferred they do that for Mrs. Grannis, too — wait in case they needed the guy to find somebody else who was in on it. Pinky didn’t think so. Why would somebody need to send more than one person to kill a little old lady? Anybody who would kill somebody’s grandma like that, Pinky was glad he was dead. It made it the tiniest bit better for him that somebody on the bad guys’ side was dead, even if it wasn’t the same ones that — he wasn’t going to think about that right now. Miss O’Neal was still talking, and he didn’t want to miss anything.
“We’re still looking for the people who killed the Swaims in Florida. On your case, we just caught a break, we hope. The guy who left his DNA at the scene—”
“The puker,” Pinky broke in, unable to resist.
“Yeah, the puker. He’s been arrested for something else, so we know where he is and can grab him.”
“Somebody’s on the way, right? How far do they have left? What if he gets bailed out before they get there?” Despite himself, the questions burst out of Pinky in a rush. It was embarrassing, but okay. He already had probably the only extra information he was gonna get.
“Oh, I forgot to offer you anything to drink, do you want—” Miss O’Neal began.
His dad shook his head. Pinky just kept his eyes fixed on hers and said, “No.”
“As soon as we have the members of a team in one place and a mission plan, we’re on the road,” she said. “We should have plenty of time to get there. Like I said, we’re getting a team out as soon as we can.”