Cally's War

by John Ringo

  He set the bowl down in front of Mary Lynn and sat down with his own breakfast, having his AID pull up his morning e-mail. He could see right away today was going to be tricky. The Tir's secretary had left a message asking what he had turned up on Worth's death, and the bald truth was that despite a week and a half of trying, he had squat. So the task of the day was going to be coming up with something that, while it might not be accurate, would be convincing enough that it would do until he could start finding the real thing. He sent her an e-mail telling her he'd be sending a report first thing Monday morning. Best not to put them off any longer than that.

  Smart money was that it was a hit, of course. But he wasn't going to keep his new job by restating the obvious. He needed something and he needed it now. Maybe a little misdirection would help. People died all the time. If he couldn't find anything about Worth's death, maybe he could find something about some other death and claim that they were linked. It didn't really matter if they were or not. Paranoia always played well, and it was like that numberology con—you could link anything to anything else if you tried hard enough. Some of his best rumors had been built that way. Besides, if he turned up anything later that contradicted the link, chances were it would give him something real about the Worth business, and he'd just be doing a good job. And if he didn't turn up anything contradictory, well, then there would be nothing to detract from his story, would there?

  * * *

  Once Mary Lynn was safely occupied by the big pink and black bumblebee surrounded by a mob of smiling children that seemed to have taken over their vidscreen, Johnny opened a tray table and had his AID project a virtual keyboard and a holographic screen. The trick was to find anyone else who had ever worked for the Darhel and died, preferably since Worth bought it, but before would do in a pinch.

  "Leanne, I need you to search the database of people who have done work for our organization. List me anybody who's died or disappeared between May ninth of this year and now," he said.

  "Worth, Charles. Reported missing as of May thirteenth, death is likely. Fiek, Samuel. Missing as of May thirteenth, death is likely. Greer, Michael. Dead as of May fifteenth, purposeful termination of contract. Samuels, Vernard. Dead as of May nineteenth, car crash. Petane, Charles. Dead as of May twenty-first, drug overdose. List complete," it recited.

  Okay, Fiek and Worth were almost certainly linked, which meant they disappeared after six forty-five p.m. on May tenth, when a boy remembered delivering a pizza to a man at Fiek's apartment. The pizza boy had picked Fiek's face out of a slideshow of images, after he handed him a half dozen twenties.

  Fiek had no known reason to have a particular grudge against Worth, and vice versa. More to the point, the Darhel had checked their local bank accounts, and their personal numbered bank accounts in discreet countries, that each man had set up secretly, and their money was untouched since Worth had drawn out a modest amount of cash on the morning of the tenth. It was almost inconceivable that someone who would work for the Darhel would run without their money.

  If he'd just had to guess, he'd have said whatever happened was at Worth's Chicago apartment. Fiek lived in the same building, and although Worth didn't actually live there most of the time, he frequently used the place when he was in town. He'd searched both apartments himself, along with a cousin who used to work in the sheriff's department in Silverton. Bobby had said that Worth's apartment looked a little too clean to him, and pointed out the lack of dust and fluff, especially below the wall with the kinky crap bolted onto it. And what his dead boss had done with that, Johnny hoped he'd never have to know. At least, not unless it was just business.

  Getting his cousin set up had been the kind of thing he'd taken this job for in the first place, and it made him proud. A man liked to be able to take care of his kin. And after Bobby got himself fired for being high on the job, Johnny had seen the opportunity in the situation and had helped Bobby out, getting the nanodrugs to get the monkey off his back as well as getting him an income his ex-wife couldn't get her hands on. That was a situation he was glad to fix. Brenda was a two-bit whore and that was Jimmy Simms' kid, not Bobby's, and everybody in town knew it. The judge just also knew Jimmy was a worthless drunk who still lived with his momma and so had stuck poor Bobby with the bill for the cheating bitch's brat. Johnny liked kids as well as anybody, hell, he'd do anything for Mary Lynn and damned near had, but a thing like that just wasn't right.

  So anyway, Worth and Fiek got done in his apartment sometime over the weekend of the tenth. And that was all he had. Worth had changed his appearance and changed his pattern so often that normal search techniques to see where he'd been and who'd seen him last just wouldn't work with him. And that meant that unless Johnny could pull a good story out of the air on short notice, his ass was in a crack.

  "Okay, Leanne, give me a file on each of them, in print where you've got it, on my desk top, with all we know about each man's death." No women. That was funny, but then a lot of their field people were guys, so it could be just coincidence. All right, before weeding through the small stuff, he'd get a big picture.

  "Leanne, gimme a map of the world, about so big." He spread his arms, watching a holographic illusion of a large flat screen project in the air in front of him.

  "Put a pin in it where each guy died. Waitaminute, is that three? Magnify Chicago. Who's that third pin?"

  "What third pin, please?" The AID sounded confused. They were pretty smart, but sometimes they didn't track too well.

  "Which one of the organization deaths you listed for me, besides Fiek and Worth, was in Chicago?"

  "Petane, Charles."

  "Well, isn't that something. Thanks, Leanne. Go to standby." There was a trick to managing the AIDs that a couple of old veterans had brought home after the war. The big point was if you were planning anything to keep your thoughts to yourself. They recorded everything, all the time, but so far nobody had found a way as far as he could tell to read a man's thoughts. So the trick with something like this was to keep all his thoughts to himself, read everything in the file, connect the dots, even if they didn't strictly speaking go together, and then lay out his case talking to the AID, making it sound like thinking aloud. When you could record a whole hell of a lot, it was easy to forget about the things you couldn't record. Besides, who knew, maybe he'd find something.

  Okay, Petane was the drug overdose. That was good. You could always make something suspicious out of a drug overdose. Bad was that it wasn't another disappearance, but he could just argue that "they" were crafty enough to change methods. Coroner had ruled it an accident, but that didn't matter. First thing would be to have his own people get hold of any stored tissue samples and run them for anything he could use. Found in his mistress's bed. Had to be hard on the wife. Mistress had been drugged, cops figured by him, was unconscious while he died next to her. And, not to put too fine a point on it, forensics said he hadn't come. Well, didn't that stink to high heaven. Good. No telling who had really offed the puke. Could have been the wife. Unlikely as hell to have been anything to do with the Darhel. He had only done something useful once and it had been thirty years ago. Still, make the story good enough and it was a whole lot better than reporting in empty handed.

  * * *

  Under a cornfield in Indiana, Sunday, May 26, 04:00

  They were in the same conference room as Thursday for their final pre-mission check. The cheap folding conference table and bare Galplas walls didn't improve with familiarity, but the coffee was good, and the corn muffins were . . . well, they were at least predictable, anyway.

  "Okay, people, one more time through. Cally, you first." Papa O'Neal, with sandy brown hair and looking rather strange without his usual wad of tobacco, spitting absentmindedly into a mug, nonetheless.

  "Baggage check-in at six, security around six-forty-five, in the women's room across from the gate Sierra-six departure lounge by seven-oh-five. Once there, if I didn't see Granpa and Tommy on the way in, I send an 'arrived' text
message so you know I'm in place. I wait until my PDA tells me that the target is in motion, then when she enters, I inject her with my handy-dandy tranquilizer, trade clothes with her with Tommy's help, go back out and catch the shuttle to Titan Base, et cetera," she said, pointing to Jay. For the insertion, her silver-blond hair was unkempt, and the white sweatpants and oversized men's sweatshirt with horizontal blue and white stripes made the most of her figure, most very definitely being the word. Contact lenses muted Sinda's cornflower blue eyes to a nondescript grayish hazel. Cheap, zero-prescription glasses were fitted poorly enough that they kept sliding down her nose a bit, and she pushed them back nervously, furtively nibbling at a candy bar now and then.

  "Hey, how come she gets chocolate and we get these?" Tommy said, staring disgustedly at one of the muffins.

  "It's a prop," she responded haughtily, and harrumphed, wiggling a bit as if settling into a new suit of clothes as she got back into character. "Go on, Jay." But she surreptitiously slipped Tommy a candy bar from her purse.

  "At five-forty-five, I go through baggage claim and check a dummy bag. By six-fifteen I'm headed through security. By seven, I'm at the S-six departure lounge, seated, with a cup of ice water from one of the snack counters. When Makepeace enters the lounge and sits, I move nearby. I take a brief video capture of the target and her location and forward it to the team so Cally knows where to sit and which stuff is 'hers.' If the target doesn't go to the ladies' room on her own by seven thirteen, I make a klutz of myself and spill my drink in her lap. I apologize profusely, and as soon as she heads for the door I hit the button on the screen of my PDA which alerts you three. When Cally comes back out as Makepeace, she touches her right ear to confirm the switch. I proceed to the rendezvous with Tommy and O'Neal, arriving no later than eight-thirty. I change clothes, we return to the port by the freight entrance, board the freighter, and take off for Titan at eleven-fifty. Tommy?"

  "Papa and I arrive at the freight entrance in the vehicle at oh-six-forty-five, dressed as crew, with Jay's clothes and cleaning crew uniforms in the trunk. We change on the freighter and retrieve the cleaning cart stashed there. We have until oh-seven-hundred to make it to the Sierra-six departure lounge women's room. I send Cally an 'arrived' text message. We put up an out-of-service sign but admit Cally. We remove the sign and wheel the cart aside towards the men's room when we get the word the target is in motion. We politely turn anyone but the target away. When the target enters the restroom, we return with the sign and wait until Cally signals. Then I push the cart in and help as needed with the clothes switch and put Makepeace in the bottom of the trash bin, covering her with appropriate debris. We maneuver Makepeace back to the car, add the wig from the glove box, douse her with the cheap beer and whiskey samples in same, drive her to rendezvous one, Hiberzine her, and hand her off to the cleaning crew for live handling. Make rendezvous two no later than oh-eight-thirty and proceed like Jay said. Papa?" He licked bits of chocolate off his fingers before wadding the wrapper and making a basketball shot into the trash can in the corner.

  "I got the easy recital. Same as you, Tommy, except I wait outside the restroom while you assist in the switch. Abort code?"

  "Toledo," they chimed.

  "Right. Your PDA or AID calls Toledo, disappear and lie low for at least two days before returning to base or dropping the Bane Sidhe a cube, your best judgment which. We're all seasoned operatives. If your best judgment says 'abort' somewhere along the line, call it. There's no points for heroism in this business. Jay, it's way out of line from her profile, but if Makepeace comes running up to the gate right at boarding and never sits down, just call Toledo. A switch that's not clean would be worse than an abort, especially with this mission. All right. Let's split up and move." He grimaced at the muffin in his hand and paused by the door, apparently debating whether to toss it uneaten. He took another bite of it and walked out the door.

  "What's the matter, Granpa? Don't you like corn? We have it so seldom," she said, grinning.

  "I can eat cornbread for every meal if I have to, you hellion. Even if the yankees do insist on putting sugar in it."

  * * *

  Sunday morning, May 26

  Cally's dummy suitcase was a good match for the persona. Her ID said she was Irene Grzybowski. Irene was the kind of woman nobody would look at twice in a crowded area like an airport: maybe forty to fifty, dumpy figure, eyes on the ground most of the time, polite but not friendly to security. And nobody did. Nobody looked at her as she heaved the battered cloth suitcase, made out of fabric that looked like a college student's sofa, onto the counter. Nobody looked at her as she walked through security with the all-plastic syringe of tranquilizer taped into the reinforced elastic under band of her sports bra, which did a good job of helping her look fat and lumpy rather than well-endowed. Nobody looked at her as she walked to gate S-six and went into the ladies' room across from the departure lounge, taking up a natural-looking position in the second stall from the end. She had beaten Granpa and Tommy in getting here. She had not looked for Jay. It would have been bad tradecraft.

  She took her PDA out of her purse and flipped it open, setting it on the top of the tissue dispenser. The buckley's voice access was, of course, off. Should the abort code come in while the screen was off, the PDA was set to vibrate. She hoped it wouldn't be necessary.

  She looked at the clock icon on the screen. Six-fifty-three. She had made good time. After sending Tommy her arrival message, getting the syringe out and ready, and brushing her hair, there was really nothing to do but hurry up and wait. The trick on this type of setup was to keep her attention focused on the PDA screen without her mind and eyes wandering off and without falling into a daze staring at the screen. Cally's solution was to split the screen, with the small custom icons labeled "in motion" and "video" on the top half and an old logic game based on hunting for hidden mines on the bottom half.

  At six-fifty-eight, the message icon on the control bar blinked at her. Tommy and Granpa were in place.

  The blinking of the video icon caught her eye at seven-oh-five. She set it to play on the lower screen and had just caught her first glimpse of the target when the in-motion icon started blinking at her. Okay, time enough to watch the movie after I take the target. If she's moving on her own, she needs to be here. Best to take her on her way out of the stall.

  She breathed evenly as the door opened, all senses hyper-alert. Something was wrong. The tread was too heavy on the floor, and not a woman's shoe. She tensed.

  "Cally?" a voice whispered.

  That could be Tommy. Or not. "Um . . . this restroom is occupied."

  "She bought a donut and went back to sit down. Reset and wait for him to send it again," he said.

  "Got it." The voice was definitely Tommy. She heard him leave again as she tapped options on the screen, working quickly to reset everything so she'd know when the target left her seat again. It didn't matter what the mission was, there was always something. Although I hope to God this is not another mission day from hell. Good grief, under the damn bed!

  She watched the video, taking note of the target's seat location and that she had a laptop computer with her. It made sense, since the assignment was clerical. Real screens were still the best option for minimizing eye-strain from all-day use.

  As she waited, she could periodically hear apologetic male voices as Tommy and Granpa redirected a female traveler to the next nearest restroom. At seven-fourteen the in-motion icon blinked again.

  She shut off and pocketed the PDA, palmed the syringe, and stood. As the door opened, she flushed just for verisimilitude and opened the stall door, going to the sink as the target came in the door looking down at her silks and swearing softly.

  By the time Cally reached the sink, the other woman had grabbed a handful of paper towels and was rubbing at the large wet blotch. She didn't even look up as the assassin slipped behind her and clapped a hand over her mouth, finding the right spot for a neck injection with the ease of l
ong practice. Makepeace didn't have time to struggle much before the strong drugs hit her system and she went limp, breathing smoothly and evenly as Cally lowered her to the floor.

  You're lucky. I get to let you live. She went to the door and opened it a crack, motioning Tommy inside with the cart. Granpa nodded shortly to her before turning to look back outward, watching for threats. As Tommy came through, she was back out of direct sight of the door, over by the sinks and already unfastening the top of the target's gray silks.

  "I'll get her, you get out of those." Tommy waved her away from the unconscious woman.

  She quickly stripped to her panties, leaving the clothes neatly on the floor in the order they'd need for the other woman. She shrugged into the woman's thankfully well-designed bra and the silks, finding enough in the woman's purse to do a passable copy of her makeup, pinning the silver-blond hair in a knot at the base of her neck. Thank God she doesn't wear nail polish. Having to match the shade on the go would have been annoying.

  Socks and women's low-quarters, which were thankfully not quite regulation—having added support insoles—and she was almost ready to go. The buckley on her PDA and the on-board storage had been sanitized by the best the night before and given a surface makeover to the make and model of the other woman's. As far as it was concerned, she already was Captain Sinda Makepeace. The cube in the reader slot had the only sensitive information. She handed her PDA and Makepeace's to Tommy and took over finishing dressing the target while he convinced the other PDA to surrender its files to hers. He opened a bottle of "cleaning fluid" and dropped the cube in, handing her back her PDA.