Valhalla

by Ari Bach

  “We really want your old job,” said Violet. “Wulfgar killed my parents.”

  “We know,” said DeMurtas, “but do you really want to watch him day and night? You know you can’t just kill him. It would wreck half of Italia.”

  “It would, but you won’t get the chance,” interrupted Dani. “You’d get torched if you tried. In case nobody told you, the Geki aren’t just keen observers like us. They’re omniscient, inhuman, and aware of everything on this planet. They’re gods.”

  “So are we,” said Death, “to normal men.”

  “Point is,” Dani continued, “nobody will flambé you for deactivating a wave bomb. You’re stepping into responsibility here. Tread lightly at first.”

  “We will.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “At first,” whispered Violet.

  “Good,” Death cooed in her helium tone. “I’d hate to scrape you off fate’s grill. The Orange Gang is tricky to keep tabs on. They know what they’re doing. As soon as you get a Tikari into one of their meetings, they meet somewhere else. As soon as you get a rat, they bring out the rattraps. They’ll kill off half their men before letting you get an intel foothold.”

  “Any tips?” Violet asked.

  “Well, it’s a family affair,” Deva began. “Wulfgar and his brother were tight, and his men trust their families, rightly so. They won’t take newcomers outside one of their members’ families without high, high recommendations. And they won’t take people outside Danmark without a whole lot more.”

  “Our best streaks came from the old tricks,” said Dani, “Flies on the walls and bugs in the soup. We managed to get Dorian in for almost a month, but they kept him in the dark, so there was nothing to learn. He did a great job and dug deeper and deeper, and before he could even meet Wulfgar, Hrothgar found him snooping. A sad day, but DeMurtas is a capable replacement.”

  “Dorian lasted,” Death said, “as long as he stuck to dead drops and rare contact with the team. Once, maybe twice a week. They caught his link at the last meeting, and we don’t know how. Haven’t tried an insider since. I wouldn’t link out if you get someone in, not until you know how they got Dorian.”

  “We were planning to replace one of their high-level men,” Deva revealed. “Have Niide modify one of us into a duplicate and infiltrate from there. We were in no hurry, as all the high-level OGs are male, and none of us wanted to wear the phallus to penetrate their ranks. Luckily Udachnaya grabbed our attention before we might have tried. One of your boys can try, if he’s got the….”

  Varg was about to speak, but Vibeke thought it best to cut him off. “Guts.”

  It was something to consider. V team knew they wouldn’t be content observing from bugs planted on lowlings. There was no shortage of options. But Violet wanted to know more about one specific aspect of the gang. “What do you know about Wulfgar?”

  Death smiled. “So brazen, Violet. You don’t hide it at all. Did you know that I joined when Hrothgar Kray killed my parents? Back when he was heading up the Purple Gang. Yes, he was a nasty little man back then too. This is back when all the color-coded gangs were still sponsored by the state, test cases to see just how much illegality a company could get away with funding. My mother was a whistle-blower in Gang Green. I’d wanted to kill Hrothgar for twenty years. How old are you, Violet?”

  “Eighteen in three days.”

  Death loomed closer. “I’m not jealous, Violet. But I understand you very well, and I owe you some thanks. Yes, I am thankful that you did it. I say all this because you may have to do the same. You might not get to kill Wulfgar. You might have to wait a decade to see someone else do it. When the time comes, darling”—her light candy voice was as deep now as a Geki’s—“don’t get in their way.”

  Violet let the idea soak in.

  “As for Wulfgar,” Death went on, “he’s guarded by a small band of people he trusts. He doesn’t trust people easily. You’d have to save his life or bring him the head of his worst enemy.”

  And therein lay V team’s advantage. The head of his worst enemy was resting on Violet’s shoulders.

  As Varg stayed behind to flirt with Death, the rest of V team began to delve into the mindloads of information provided by D team. Violet didn’t look forward to the study, having failed every history class she took. She was surprised to find out how much she enjoyed it. It was all so much like her dad’s bedtime stories, but more than that, it was her dad’s job. He must have gone over every historical fact she was now studying. He must have hunted for some bits of information she now possessed. So she learned about the color gangs, the rise of the Krays in separate colors, the betrayals and consolidations and takeovers, and imagined her father learning the same. She let information trickle in from D team’s memory partition: the turning of political tides and gang wars, the slow shift from Danmark to Edinburgh and Italia, the preservation of Hrothgar’s work ethic of crucifying victims and traitors.

  All the while she imagined her father making notes, and Death just over his shoulder, waiting for her chance at vengeance that never came. She pitied Death but respected her, the will she must have had to wait so long, and the will to persevere after some little brat took her prize. Violet knew she had stepped hard on Death’s toes and was thankful she hadn’t held it against her. Violet tried to make that will her own. If she had to, Violet would wait twenty years. If it was someone else’s fate to take Wulfgar down, so be it. Thinking back on Balder’s speech, Violet knew it would very likely be someone else who pulled the trigger. Valhalla couldn’t do it without disrupting the order of things. But she could weaken the gang, rot away its supports, cripple it, and then see that once all was lost, Wulfgar would get shot by some petty thief as he lay defeated in the gutter.

  As soon as Violet had solved Death’s riddle of wills, planning began. They wanted to begin where D team had left off, with infiltration at a high level. Veikko was the master of disguise, so he would be the one to go in. He could do it by handing Violet to Wulfgar. Simple enough, but Wulfgar would surely kill Violet. She secretly liked that bit. It meant she would be celebrated as the first mission death for V team. They plotted out his most likely means of killing his nemesis and outlined a plan to see that she died safely and could be retrieved and resuscitated without too much risk. Veikko would then ingratiate himself with Wulfgar and prove himself a loyal and useful servant. But how to make contact with him again?

  Planning went on for the better part of October. So did daydreaming. As much as she worked out the specifics of communications and conferred with Death over a game of chess, Violet imagined the fall of the great gang. She let herself drift into ambitious fantasies from time to time, never letting hubris kick in or mistaking dreams for plans, but indulging in the sense that she was about to embark on the greatest of deeds, and of memorials. Great potential outweighed great peril in her mind.

  Violet no longer felt guilt for thinking of her dad as a lowly cop. She was about to do what he never could. Where police could try only feeble arrests and then only at the cost of so many lives, V team was working up the plans to strip the gang bare from the inside out. She didn’t feel guilty for having pride in what she was doing, and she didn’t feel the boredom of her previous assignments. Every step of the plan was like candy for her ego.

  They could get a top-level spy into one of the nastiest criminal gangs, and though many around Valhalla muttered that they might bite off more than they could chew, the plans were flawless, and everyone knew that V team could do everything they outlined. Vibeke anticipated so many potential problems that Alopex would report them hourly to the masses to be considered. Varg solved so many that few had a chance to add their thoughts. The team worked hard and relaxed harder in the gym, where the På Täppan pile was now subject to their tyranny. The chaos of the pile was like a living, broken testament to their quick teamwork and strength. Then as they slept, they attacked the chaos that could foil the observation that would take down the Orange Gang.


  “What if he tries to kill you the second he sees you?” Veikko asked.

  “Varg needs to be there,” Violet decided. “He’ll have to follow us. That will be hard. You know we’ll be taken somewhere they think is untraceable.”

  Vibeke affirmed what was becoming a mantra. “We have to think on our feet.”

  “What if we send them some meat and see where they drag it?” Varg suggested.

  “Unreliable but worth a try.”

  “When?” asked Veikko. “The timetable is crowded. We can’t do it close enough to our first move to do any good, and the schedule is full there.”

  Vibeke finally said what they were all beginning to realize. “We need another team working for us.”

  Veikko wanted to give Wart something to do, but he was only just beginning to train. Mishka and Marduk volunteered as the rest of M team (Mortiis and Motoko) was busy on a two-person fact-finding assignment in New Guam. Violet finally had a chance to get to know Mishka better and was surprised at how well they got along. In a rare offline chat when Mishka was cleaning her butterfly/shuriken Tikari, Violet noticed a strange insignia on its wings, a line intersected by two straight lines and a slanted one.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Mishka said simply, “A Russian cross.”

  “Why a cross?”

  “Because I’m Christian,” she said. Violet wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. She knew it was a religious sect, one that Balder despised. As for the specifics, Mishka might as well have called herself a Huguenot. Vibeke occasionally mentioned reading a book about Christianity and its schisms, Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Khlysty, but Violet failed to listen when she elaborated. She knew so little that she asked Mishka flat-out, “What does that mean exactly?”

  Mishka stopped working on the butterfly. “It means I believe in a god, a forgiving one.” The idea was peculiar but extraordinarily comforting. Violet admitted why. “I suppose we all do plenty that needs to be forgiven.”

  “We do. Here, take this.” She handed Violet a small leather-bound book. “You can read all there is to know in here.”

  Of course she lost Violet with the word “read.”

  Marduk was an odd sort as Valhalla boys go. He spoke little and spoke softly when he did. He mostly just did what Mishka asked. He was a fast and skilled fellow to be sure, and he seemed to zelig the traits of whoever’s company he held. Around Violet he was eager to do the job, around Varg he picked up a slight macho streak, with Vibs he was all brain, and with Veikko he was playful, even given to humor in his own quiet way. Around Mishka he was the purest of emulators; even when they parted, he would maintain her love of Mussorgsky.

  With all the teams in Valhalla giving input, obstacles in the plan crumbled and every conceivable possibility was soon accounted for. Alopex began devoting a major partition of herself to monitoring the gang’s influence on the globe. If V stepped on any toes that might radically shift company actions, she would be able to catch it. Every team member would look out for Violet to see that her sacrifice would be neither pointless nor permanent.

  Before sending her to Scotland to pose as her former self, Dr. Niide implanted her with all sorts of undetectable tracking and monitoring gadgets. When Varg pointed out that “her fly was open,” the medical staff sealed her skin over the Tikari port so as to make it invisible. Her second link would attract no attention, as double links were common enough. With it intact she’d still be able to use her Tikari in an emergency, albeit with a painful launch. Violet was also implanted with several dozen hyperanalgia packs, so that at will she could block out the pain of months of torture. Every unnatural component was checked and double-checked to stay invisible to any scan Wulfgar might try, including vivisection. If need be, her Tikari could make any of three subtle escapes, welding its port closed as it did so to leave a normal-looking chest cavity. Only two of them involved severing her spinal cord.

  Orange Gang studies gradually turned from history to current events. It became clear to V team that Wulfgar was done scouring Scotland for the last MacRae and was looking globally for any possible lead as to where she might have gone. Only recently, his men had killed a couple in Prague who claimed to have found her so as to collect a reward. Obviously they hadn’t really found her and no reward was paid. The couple was dumb enough to insist that she had been killed in her apartment after Achnacarry and then demand payment. Though the police believed it, Wulfgar was quite aware that his own men had not caught the girl.

  Vibs tracked down the deceased couple’s online movements and discovered that they had come across an odd sort of personal ad, a rather obvious one, if criminals knew what to look for: “Missed Connections 655321 Scotland—Kyle—posted by Orange W, ‘seeking a girl who made the news, you all know why. Will pay for help in finding her. Reply to Orange W Monitor at Ognet.’” The door was open.

  VIBEKE STARTED by breaking into Kyle’s police network. She loaded Veikko’s stats and picture into a new officer profile named William Rickman. Will was getting a transfer to Kyle’s witness protection division with top-clearance access. If the cops checked his background, they would find his complete service record and all the bells and whistles. Before departing, Veikko mastered his police persona, talking with experience in the field, knowing specifics of his life in and out of cophood, and somehow holding his face in such a way that he looked thirty years old.

  He walked into the forty-first Kyle precinct as Will and enjoyed the ritual doughnut feast. Vibeke kept a well-hidden uplink going as he made friends, completed simple work for his chief, and spent some time snooping through old files, should the right people be watching already. He looked at Violet’s case and allowed the police computer to record him doing so. He found the high-security log about her going to Achnacarry, saw that she’d been kicked out, and then he saw the bit Vibs had just added to it stating that she was still in Achnacarry city, skulking around outside the gates of her would-be camp, having faked her death with only a few top-clearance cops months before.

  So Will Rickman recalled an old missed connection ad and replied to it. “Found little purple riding hood, still at grandma’s house. Will give the address to big bad wolf in person. Meet at straw house in Plockton 1150 Monday?”

  He got a response in under an hour. “Confirmed, little Pig. No address needed. Have the girl there and alive or I huff, and I puff, and I blow your brains out.”

  Wulfgar wanted him to capture her. So he did. Vibs watched the activities of the responding avatar and found that he had discovered the police records and false identity and was no doubt convinced of its authenticity. Will Rickman then traveled to Achnacarry, to the house of Sgt. Jack Cameron, who, the day before, had spotted his old recruit wandering the streets and invited her to dine with him. Violet had in that time told him what falsehoods he needed to know, so when Will came in and asked her to come along, any observer would see the crooked cop escorting Violet from a house in Achnacarry where she might well have been hiding all those months.

  He took her to Plockton’s rustic Straw House pub. She suspected nothing, or so it appeared. Then, as the crooked cop and his quarry drank, an orange pogo landed outside. Violet saw it and screamed. Veikko whispered his opinion that she was overacting. She shouted “Traitor!” at the top of her lungs and gave him a good kick to the mouth. Three orange-suited men came in to restrain her. Veikko complained about his split lip convincingly and called Violet a few ugly names, not just for the benefit of the gang members. Violet continued to fight and managed to give the traitorous officer another solid kick in the mouth, also for more than the gang to see. The orange men hauled her out of the pub and began trying to stuff her into their pogo. Will the cop followed after, shouting how he’d like to kill her for breaking his lip twice and using some very impolite words, for realism’s sake, of course. Violet, for more realism, called him some even worse names and thrust her foot out for one last hard kick to his mouth before they gave her a hypospray.

  T
hrough one of Niide’s implants, Vibs analyzed the hypospray substance as soon as it entered Violet’s bloodstream. She could not risk an open link to Veikko, so she told the microde in his shoe to give him two tiny shocks, meaning “safe sedative.” The man then offered the hypo to Officer Will.

  “You travel asleep,” said the happy gangster. “Trust me, you’ll get paid, and more.”

  So Will let them knock him out. He woke up in a plain office in a plain Dansk skyscraper. There were four men in the room: a doctor dutifully shrinking Will’s lower lip, which had swollen to four times its original size, so that he could speak; one man standing to the right of a big orange desk; one standing to the left of the big orange desk; and one man behind the big orange desk. Veikko recognized him immediately but was surprised by his smart, respectable presence. Veikko’s false identity—he told himself it was just the false identity—hoped that someday he could appear just like the man before him.

  “I owe you a great debt of gratitude,” said Wulfgar.

  “And of cash, I hope you recall.”

  Wulfgar smiled broadly. “That too, and I will not break my word. You will be given riches to last a lifetime. You will be rewarded, to be sure, but my men have looked over your employing swine. They saw what you did. They are hunting you.”

  “I expected it.”

  “So you did, and came anyway. You may leave with your earnings in any form you like, or you may work for me now.”

  Will Rickman was in. Only one concern was left. He asked, “What did you do with the girl?”

  Wulfgar breathed a sigh of triumphant relief. “All I wanted, my friend. I tortured her to death while you slept.”

  Veikko could not contact Vibs via link yet; he couldn’t take that risk. He didn’t hear the tale of Violet’s demise.