Gaul fixed the man with his best unsettling stare. He’d actually practiced it, after reading a book on human psychology that discussed conversational gambits, and had found it quite effective on the Academy staff. It failed, however, to invoke a reaction of any kind in Mr. North’s regular, placid face.
“Have you ever encountered one previously?” Gaul asked, hoping that he didn’t sound as tired as he felt. “A silver Weir, I mean?”
Mr. North scratched his head and then offered Gaul the faintest ghost of a smile.
“Odd that you should mention it, Director,” he said, looking vaguely interested for the first time since Gaul had met him, “but you are the second person to ask me that question recently. The first, since you are certain to ask, was Mr. Cruces, head of the Terrie Cartel’s operations in Asia. He asked me at the last Hegemony Executive Committee meeting,” North said, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I believe it was as an aside to anecdotes being shared regarding the Weir hill tribes. He felt strongly, as I recall, that the silver breed were not as rare as was generally thought, and that in some regions, particularly Cambodia and Vietnam, that they could still be found if you looked hard enough. I thought it odd, at the time, when he asked me if I had seen one. I got the distinct impression that he had seen one, and recently, from the way he talked about it.”
Gaul tried to digest the information, and then decided that he couldn’t stomach it. He felt like he was being fed something, and he’d never liked handouts. Still, he didn’t think that he would get any more out of North, even if he decided to push him again, so he elected against trying. He changed subjects.
“Mr. North, investigating these incidents would proceed more smoothly and, I might add, impede on your time and liberty less, were the Committee-at-Large to approve the candidates the Board submitted for the vacant Auditor positions over the last two years,” Gaul said carefully, shuffling the papers on his desk into completed and incomplete piles. “I would hope that this experience would color your thinking on the subject.”
Mr. North smiled his faint replica of a smile and folded his hands before he spoke. Gaul knew what he was going to say before he started. Rebecca was right, he thought, exasperated, the man was simply boring.
“I believe that I speak for the Committee-at-Large when I say that we would be happy to expedite approval of the candidates for the vacancies in Audits if you would be willing to review our proposal to expand the selection process for Audits personnel, Director,” North offered mildly.
“You are referring to the proposal in which we add two more Auditors, selected by the Committee-at-Large rather than the Board?”
“The very same. Surely it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement, yes? You said yourself you need more Auditors, Director.”
“An Auditor a piece for the Hegemony and the Black Sun, then?” Gaul said darkly, pausing in his paperwork to fix North with another practiced glare that was wasted on him. “That defeats the purpose of the Auditors in the first place. They are meant to be impartial, Mr. North.”
“I resent the implication that the Committee-at-Large is not capable of making an impartial selection,” Mr. North said, not looking like he resented much of anything. “On the contrary, some might be moved to call the Board less than impartial when it comes to approving your own recommendations. After all,” Mr. North continued blithely, as if he were reading the weather report, ignoring Gaul’s stormy expression, “you have managed to get two of your Auditors onto the Board itself, sir! Certainly, that is a violation of the spirit of the Agreement, if not the letter.”
Gaul held on to the glare a moment longer, and then gave up on it, helpless in the face of total apathy.
“I must say, Mr. North, that you are either an exceptionally dangerous bureaucrat or a surprisingly genteel Operator,” Gaul admitted reluctantly, returning to his paperwork.
Mr. North gave him a short, ambiguous nod, then stood up part way.
“A compliment, surely. I take it, then, that you won’t need anything further from me?”
Gaul glanced up, pen poised above the document laid out in front of him.
“Not at the moment, no,” Gaul said, looking back down at the paperwork. “You may inform the rest of the Committee-at-Large that I will consider their proposal. Please keep yourself available for potential future inquiries in this matter, Mr. North.”
Mr. North nodded again and turned for the door.
“Certainly,” he said, pausing with his hand on the door knob. “But if I may ask, Director – I was wondering about the boy. He is named Alexander Warner, if my sources are correct. I have heard that he shows some promise, and a rather unique protocol. You never told me, sir, if he turned out to be worth all the trouble.”
Gaul didn’t even look up from the document he was annotating.
“No, Mr. North. No, I did not.”
--
Traffic was light on Market Street for a weekday; the last time Mitsuru had been in San Francisco, there had been talk about banning cars on Market, and until she was passed by a battered white Dodge van turning onto Spear Street, she suspected they might have done it.
The sidewalks were moderately crowded; it was late enough in the afternoon that the luckiest of the office workers had managed to sneak out early, and they plowed eagerly through groups of tourists and teenagers on summer break on their way to the train station. The sun was bright above the Embarcadero, the clock tower of the gleaming white Port Building also considerably changed since the last time Mitsuru had seen it.
Mitsuru moved with the crowd, along Market and then across the wide pavilion that adjoined the Embarcadero, picking her way through crowds of shoppers from the nearby farmer’s market and clusters of shirtless skateboarders. It was warm, and it felt good to her to be out in the sunlight – something she had taken for granted, once. She had new priorities, these days.
At the edge of the municipal railroad tracks she reversed herself, heading back toward Justin Herman Plaza, with the strange, dry fountain at the far end, which Alistair claimed had been built by a donation from Enron. Mitsuru doubted it, but Alistair often knew strange things like that. For a moment, she considered reaching through the uplink for the answer, but then she remembered that she was on mission, and therefore rigged for monitoring. Not a good idea to let her mind drift, then, given how hard a look Central had been giving her operational logs, in light of her application to Audits.
Today felt good, though – working her way through the crowd, elbowed aside by a tiny Chinese woman clutching a bag of what looked to be lemon grass, noticing a brash smile from a handsome Mexican teenager on a skateboard, and after a moment’s consideration, smiling back. The black static that had been eating at her thoughts since the whole thing in the park had lifted some, this morning, and she felt calm and in control.
She couldn’t understand how she’d ended up on the kill team – Alistair wasn’t one to indulge in revenge. In fact, he considered it a vice, and a foolish one. Debts had to be paid, reputations maintained, and that was it, as far as Alistair was concerned. The important thing to him was that someone had attacked a member of the Audit staff, even if she was only a provisional Operator, and that the rest of the world would be watching, and learning from their response. Mitsuru saw where he was coming from, even though she didn’t subscribe to that philosophy personally.
Alistair had no choice, the way Mitsuru saw it. He preferred negotiation to violence, but in this case, he needed to make it very apparent to anyone thinking about trying the same thing that it would be a very, very bad idea. To be effective, the consequences of such an attack had to be so dire that they would outweigh any potential gains. Alistair had avoided requesting many sanctions since he had become Head Auditor, but he had been up late last night, drawing up the paperwork for the sanctioning of the Terrie Cartel.
Mitsuru had not, by her own admission, been a very good girl. But there she was, nonetheless, a sanction order for an entire cartel falling
right into her lap. Maybe, she thought brightly, her luck was finally changing.
It had to be Gaul, she mused, pausing to look at the chalk drawings of the Golden Gate and Marin Headlands displayed by one of the vendor’s stalls at the plaza. Alistair was her friend and mentor, two very good reasons he would not have brought Mitsuru along for this job. She didn’t know what had gotten into Gaul, but she could have kissed him. That Alistair had decided to manage the operation himself, clearly to keep an eye on her, didn’t bother Mitsuru in the slightest. She appreciated his concern, and found his presence reassuring, though she would have never admitted it.
She hadn’t been assigned any wetwork since they’d reinstated her, not since the thing in Bangkok had gone so very wrong. She’d been authorized to use force, on occasion, but she’d only had a few opportunities to do so. Mitsuru wasn’t one to lie to herself. Breaking heads was her favorite part of being an Operator, and until she’d gotten this job, she hadn’t half-realized how much she’d missed it.
She rode the escalator up one level, into the semi-enclosed mall of One Embarcadero, a modern glass combination of condos and retail space. She wanted a cup of coffee, but she was in San Francisco, so she figured she could do better than the Starbucks franchises that she had seen on virtually every block.
The crowd was thinner, on the second level. Outside of a few groups clustered around some round metal tables, the area was moderately clear. She saw the target almost immediately.
She thought of Alistair, then, as loudly as possible, while moving casually across the walkway, ambling in the same general direction as the target.
Mitzi?
Even after all these years, hearing Alistair’s voice in her head creeped Mitsuru out. There was something about telepathy that was so intrusive, even when it was consensual. And the idea of Alistair knowing what she thought about him made her feel very vulnerable.
I’ve got him. I’m behind him now, on the second level of Embarcadero One, heading toward Spear Street.
She slowed her breathing. She forced herself not to look at the mark.
Good job. I’m a couple blocks over. Let me know where you hit street level, and I’ll meet up with you there.
Okay, boss.
Mitsuru hung back, pretending to examine the display of truffles in the shop window in front of her. Behind the window, a bored salesgirl talked loudly into her cell phone. The target, a grey-haired man in his late fifties, wrapped in a dark coat, seemed not to notice her. He was a slow walker, and she found herself struggling to hang far enough behind him to not stand out.
Her disguise was purely Etheric, installed by Gaul before the start of the job. He’d wrapped her in obfuscation and deception protocols, and as far as she could tell, eyes just slid off her. She’d started a subroutine when she’d seen the target, and now, discreetly and at intervals, her appearance shifted. The target was only an E-Class Operator, so he shouldn’t be able to pay much attention to her, not with Gaul’s protocols around her. But it was still best to be careful.
At Spear Street the target descended to street level, and Mitsuru informed Alistair. She waited until he had turned a corner, counted to five, and then went down the same stairwell herself. She hit the street, blinking at the sun, and Alistair caught up behind her after a dozen steps, clearly hot and sweating underneath his heavy black coat.
Alistair had made it clear during the briefing that the Terrie Cartel were probably only the front for the whole scheme – North hadn’t left much behind, when he’d eliminated the Weir, but it hadn’t taken Alistair long to run down who had put out the contract in the first place, there were too many people who owed him favors.
The Terrie Cartel was a relative newcomer to the Hegemony, with a reputation for unsavory human experimentation, though all of their previous misbehaviors had been deemed minor. They were small-time, localized primarily in Geneva for the last thirty years, with affiliated commercial firms in Paris, Macau, Jakarta and San Francisco. In recent years, they had made significant inroads into Southeast Asia, working primarily in transportation, mostly of the extralegal variety. Mitsuru wondered what Terrie could have possibly been offered that would have made conflict with Central seem worthwhile, and couldn’t come up with anything. Everyone had heard stories about the Al-Hajra, the last cartel to be proscribed by Central, and how Rebecca and Alice Gallow had Audited them into extinction. What could have made the Terrie Cartel think it would go any differently for them?
By the time they reached the corner, the target had made it most of the way down the block, and was in the process of jaywalking to the other side of the street. Observation on previous days made his most probable destination the little park a few blocks up – he often had his lunches there, according to the workup she’d gotten from Analytics. Mitsuru slid her arm through Alistair’s, their disguises morphing to become complementary – suddenly, they looked like a college-age couple, casually dressed, strolling in the sun. She acted like it was an operational necessity. They stayed as close to the target as was possible on the lightly crowded street.
Mitsuru got a bit nervous, all of a sudden. She thought for a moment, and then nudged Alistair.
This is wrong.
Alistair looked over at her and raised his eyebrow inquisitively.
Why isn’t he worried, Alistair? Why aren’t they preparing for some kind of retribution – the cartel has to know its coming.
Alistair shrugged half-heartedly.
Are you suggesting we abort?
Mitsuru shook her head. She wasn’t about to take the chance that this job would be reassigned to someone else.
Mitsuru had a number of talents. She was a skilled field tactician, a living node on the Etheric network, capable of making strategic decisions on the fly. She was a trained intelligence operative, skilled in counterintelligence and espionage, and a competent field medic. Also, when the mood struck her, she could make an acceptable curry.
But her strength, her heart, had always been here – in the field, with a combat team. She hadn’t felt this good in years, and she hadn’t even had a chance to kill anyone yet. She wasn’t just giving up on the operation, not when her chances at becoming an Auditor could well ride on a positive outcome.
No. I still say we engage at the park. But we should be careful.
Alistair chuckled and hurried her along, around another corner, in time to watch the target walk into a Thai takeout place across the street from the park. A quick check with the network confirmed that this restaurant was one that he normally frequented. She and Alistair paused to admire the dresses on display at a nearby boutique, discreetly altering their appearance again to avoid suspicion. In the shop window, Mitsuru and Alistair now appeared to be an elderly Asian couple, grey-haired and dressed like tourists.
Mitsuru still felt a bit edgy, but the adrenal rush of a combat operation about to execute had hit her, and washed away most of her nervousness. While they waited for the target to finish buying his lunch, Mitsuru activated her uplink to the network, and accessed the latest probability projections from Analytics, as well as the target’s dossier. She’d read it before the operation, of course, but a quick refresh before things got heavy couldn’t hurt.
His name was Luke Estelle, age unknown, naturalized U.S. citizen, originally from France. An orphan, he’d been activated at puberty and trained at the Academy in operations and intelligence, specializing in an energy manipulation protocol. He’d affiliated with the Hegemony before graduation, and had been recruited by the Terrie cartel as an Operator almost immediately after. He’d acted first as an enforcer, gradually working his way up the ranks to become the Chief Security Officer for the cartel, as well as becoming their top field agent. With his experience, Mitsuru knew it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Still, given that the kill team had three Operators and one Auditor, she didn’t see many probable outcomes that left him alive.
Wait, Mitsuru thought, the last part catching up with her. Not many outcomes?
/> There hadn’t been any, just hours ago, during operation prep. She accessed her uplink again, and took a good look at the analytical projections and the tangle of probabilities surrounding the event.
Alistair?
Alistair looked at her reflection in the window, obviously irritated by her pestering.
Yes, Mitzi?
According to the projections, there is a now almost a six-percent chance that the target survives this encounter and escapes capture.
Alistair looked at her for a moment, and then his eyes went distant. Mitsuru knew that he was in telepathic contact with Central, demanding answers. While she was waiting, Mitsuru noticed the target leaving the restaurant, a plastic bag in one hand, headed for the park.
She felt the Isolation Protocol cut them off from the city around them, heavy and definitive, a chill running down her spine. She looked over at Alistair, but his face told her that he had not invoked the field. It was a powerful, suffocating in its intensity. Anyone outside the field suddenly found compelling reasons to walk around it, or to skip their business inside it. Those trapped inside the field simply fell into a sort of trance, eyes open but unseeing.
It was clear that the target hadn’t been expecting the Isolation Protocol, either – he was scanning the streets around him cautiously, his lunch thrown to the sidewalk, a puddle of chili sauce and rice noodles in the gutter next to him. One hand hovered near his coat pocket, which Mitsuru’s observation protocol advised her indicated a firearm, as if she didn’t know from experience that it was unlikely that he kept a bastard sword in his coat pocket.
Mitzi!
Alistair was already moving, away from the target, back toward Market Street. He was excited, or nervous; his mental communication was shouted, and it startled her a bit. Alistair was usually unshakable during field ops. Something, Mitsuru knew, had gone very wrong.
Take him, Mitzi! Forget about questions – I’ll interrogate the corpse, if I have to.
The Academy Page 9