Kris Longknife: Furious

by Mike Shepherd

  “I am, and I would,” Foile admitted. “However, we have an arrest warrant for the leader of this gang. A warrant I intend to serve. Find me your princess, Leslie.”

  “We’ve got her going on the freeway. She’s headed west,” Mahomet crowed.

  “Toward the mountains?” Foile shot back.

  “Toward the mountains or some place short of there,” Leslie pointed out

  “Get me a list of all the motels with multiday rentals using cash,” Foile quickly said to his boss. She got on her comm-link.

  “Also, get me a drone flight over the mountains. I want to know every lodge, lean-to, and campfire that’s lit up in those hills.”

  His boss came out of her commlink. “We’ll need a military drone for that.”

  “So?”

  “They’re not supposed to be used in civilian police matters. Are you calling this a terrorist threat? Terrorism wasn’t mentioned on our arrest warrant, was it?”

  She knew very well it wasn’t.

  “Either you call, or I call the Prime Minister and tell him if he wants us to find his daughter before anyone gets killed, we need someone to order up a training flight over those mountains and get the results of that infrared feed to us. Which way is it going to be?”

  Usually a subordinate doesn’t task his boss. But usually the subordinate isn’t the one called into the Prime Minister’s office and given the assignment. Foile eyed his boss. Just how much did she want to be in charge of this operation?

  Would she really want to have her name on this op when the fecal matter hit the fan? This use of Bureau resources by the Prime Minister for his family issues was bad and getting worse. When the media got hold of this . . . and they always did . . . there would be hell to pay.

  Whose name would be at the top of the devil’s bill?

  “I’ll call the Prime Minister’s office,” his boss said after a lengthy sigh.

  The woman had balls; that was one reason Foile liked working for her. They were all likely going down on this one. The boss knew it, and she wasn’t shirking her place at the head of the line.

  Foile turned back to his team. “Track that car. See how far you can catch pictures of it going into the mountains. Then get some sleep. We’re going to be here for a long time. You better catnap when you can.”

  “Sir, I hope you take a bit of your own medicine,” Leslie said. “You get awful grouchy when you’re tired.”

  28

  “Are you two decent?” Penny called well after sunset.

  “Of course we’re decent,” Kris shouted back. “We’re cooking spaghetti.”

  “Good, I’m starved. I missed the turnoff once and had to double back to find it,” Penny said, coming in and cuddling up to the woodstove. “I had to cut off the heater for fear I’d run out of juice.”

  “Isn’t there a backup gas generator in that car?” Jack called from where he was watching the pasta boil.

  “Yes, but the tank was only half-full, and I didn’t want to stop for gas. Yes, I’ve got cash, but they’d get my picture, and if they’re checking out all cash purchases, they’d have a hot datum on us in no time at all.”

  “You could have gassed up in town,” Jack said. “That wouldn’t have told them anything they don’t already know.”

  “I wasn’t willing to risk that, either. If they’ve got a serious dragnet out for us, paying cash would have raised a red flag. Before I got out of the station, there’d be a cop cruiser or nine charging in to block me.”

  “Did you miss the turnoff for real or use it to check your six?” Kris asked.

  Penny just grinned, and said, “I was not followed back. You two do anything serious while I was gone?” she asked, eyeing Kris.

  Kris had the good sense to blush before saying, “Yes, we put the time to good use. We also started going over Grampa Al’s compound. Do you know he has a shuttle on five-minute standby within easy reach of his suite?”

  “Got to have a quick getaway,” Jack offered as he threw a strand of pasta against the wall. It stayed there. “One day, when the angry peasants come calling with torches and pitchforks, you’re gonna need to vamoose fast.”

  “Nelly, show Penny what we’re talking about.”

  Kris stayed facing the kitchen table and a map of the compound appeared. Quickly, it tracked in to the central tower, then up it. At one level, where the tower narrowed toward the top, a shuttle sat behind screens.

  “If he actually takes off in that thing, the whole top of the building’s gonna get scorched,” Jack observed as he drained steaming-hot water into the sink.

  Penny cocked her head to get a different perspective, then shrugged. “That will teach all those revolting peasants to take pitchforks to their betters.”

  “Could we use that for a getaway?” Jack asked, transferring the pasta to a plate.

  “I doubt it. Remember the time I tried to steal Hank Peterwald’s yacht? I was locked out until he gave me the codes.”

  “I wasn’t as good as I am now, Kris,” Nelly pointed out.

  Rather than argue with her pet computer, Kris took discretion as the better part of valor. “We’ll see how things go. I’d much rather we talked Grampa Al into being our ally rather than having to run for it. Besides, where could we run? A shuttle won’t take us anywhere.”

  “Do I smell something burning?” Penny asked.

  “Oh, the sauce,” Kris said, jumping for the stove. The vision of Longknife Towers followed her and ended up sketched across the stove as she grabbed for the pot of sauce and scorched her hands. Then grabbed again, using the dish towel Jack handed her, and moved the pot to a cold burner.

  “How appropriate,” Penny said through a grin. “Everyone knows a blushing bride worships her beloved by serving him burnt offerings. Too bad I’m going to be struck with them, too.”

  “I am no blushing bride,” Kris snapped, “and I would have been a decent cook if you hadn’t distracted me with work.”

  “The story of our life together,” Jack said. “Don’t stir up the burned stuff on the bottom. We’ll take our sauce from the top. That’s what I did in college when I burned the spaghetti.”

  “Glad someone’s lived on their own,” Penny said. “I doubt spaghetti was ever burned at Nuu House.”

  “We didn’t have spaghetti at Nuu House, and yes, Lotty never burned anything. Okay, you happy? You two happy, I’m incompetent to heat water.”

  “But she sure does blow up ships good,” Jack pointed out. “Given the choice of a little burned sauce and being blown to bits several times in the last four or five years, I’ll take our present situation.”

  Kris laughed, and swatted Jack with his own dish towel. He gave her a quick hug and kiss as he went to find plates. He quickly overfilled them with pasta and began ladling on way too much sauce.

  “Hey, champ,” Penny put in. “You’re not feeding a bunch of frat boys. Us dainty gals have to remember our figures. Unless Kris is already eating for two.”

  That got Penny a swat with the towel. But Kris dredged a bowl out of a cabinet on the third try, and she and Penny dumped half their plates’ contents into it.

  As they settled down to eat, Nelly again projected the map of the Longknife compound onto the table. “They usually put new hires on this post with an experienced guard.” Nelly highlighted a loading dock in red. “It’s the checkpoint for food deliveries and taking the trash and laundry out. Apparently, it smells.”

  “If we put the other guard to sleep, how long before a delivery?” Jack asked.

  “It usually slows down between eleven and one. Day deliveries are done, and the morning ones haven’t started.”

  “Are we on the night shift?” Penny asked.

  “You’ve been hired for the 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. shift,” Nelly informed them. “On the first day, you have to show up at eight for a new employee briefing. They’ll issue you a uniform and radio. No weapons for fresh hires.”

  Kris frowned at Penny. “So we’ll be changing into
our new uniforms and transferring all our sneaky gear right in front of their security cameras.”

  “Unless, of course, they respect our privacy in the ladies’ room.”

  All three laughed at the joke.

  “This is getting tougher and tougher by the second,” Penny said.

  “Nelly, do you have any pictures of female guards from this company?”

  A parade of women, short, tall, thin, or fat paraded across the dinner table.

  “You notice anything about them, Penny?” Kris asked.

  “None of them were carrying a purse,” the intelligence officer said.

  “What’s that mean?” Jack asked.

  The two girls exchanged smiles. “We’ll show you tomorrow night.”

  The three of them plotted path after path from their probable station to the private suite at the top of the towers. There were plenty of private access and working areas in a building that huge, almost as many as there were on a space station. Kris and Jack knew their way around stations, both for offense and defense. They got to feeling right at home with the tower.

  Approaching midnight, with yawns all around, they called it quits. Penny dismissed herself with, “I’ll take the back bedroom and close the door.”

  She did, for about five seconds.

  “It’s freezing in there,” she announced as she busted back in on them.

  “I had the door open to warm the place up,” Jack said, in defense of his effort to keep all the women who presently occupied his life warm.

  “You may have, but that place was freezing to start with, and it’s not much better now,” Penny said.

  “Heat rises,” Kris said. “I wonder what the loft is like.”

  “I’ll try it,” Penny said, heading up the ladder and disappearing for a minute. Then her head popped over the railing. “It’s quite nice up here, and I can rob the blankets from the other bed. You just ignore me. I’ll be asleep in no time.”

  “We’ll never ignore you,” Kris said. But one thing led to another on the floor before the roaring woodstove. Kris found she didn’t really care whether Penny was awake or asleep, just so long as Jack was close, and Kris managed to keep quiet.

  And Jack was very close.

  29

  Foile was exhausted.

  Around him, his team was asleep, Leslie curled up beside her desk, Mahomet with his head down on his desk. His boss had retreated to her own office and was likely asleep on its couch.

  There was a sofa in Foile’s office. At the moment, it looked pretty inviting.

  From the drone overflight he’d ordered, they’d heard not a word. Had the Prime Minister balked at using military assets to hunt for his daughter? Foile was not about to make a phone call. If it happened, it happened. If not, well, maybe the Prime Minister wasn’t as worried as he’d sounded yesterday. No, day before yesterday, and soon yet another day more.

  Foile was way behind on sleep, but as he settled down on the sofa, he had to wonder: just who would Billy Longknife be afraid of for his daughter? Who on Wardhaven would even think of killing Kris Longknife?

  It hadn’t been too long ago when it was in all the media how she’d saved all their hides when those strange battleships showed up demanding the planet surrender.

  Boy, talk about your political failure there.

  Everyone on this planet owed the princess their life. So who might kill her?

  Foile got comfortable on his sofa. His mind was spinning with questions. How many of them did he really need to answer?

  Then he sat bolt upright.

  If he knew who Billy Longknife feared would kill his daughter, Foile would know where he needed to deploy his police assets. Get between her and whoever it was.

  He shook his head and settled back onto his sofa. Billy Longknife hadn’t told him anything when he assigned Foile this case. Nothing had changed to make him reveal more about his wayward daughter now.

  Foile regulated his breathing. Tomorrow would be another day. Likely another very busy day.

  30

  Kris was up as first light filled the lodge. She cooked bacon, without burning it, and scrambled eggs. That brought a complaint from Penny that there was no way to mangle scrambled eggs. Kris cut her off like a good slave driver by pointing at the diagram of Longknife Towers. They went over it until they could talk their way through it without their computers’ flashing a map on the wall in front of them.

  If things went according to plan, they would be at Al’s suite twenty minutes from leaving the loading dock. But all three of them knew that matters rarely went according to plan—on black ops or white.

  So they sat around the fire trying to think of everything that could go wrong and what they’d do when it did. It was kind of fun. Each took a turn playing the red team and punching a hole in their plan. Then all of them would have to come up with a solution.

  It worried Kris how easy it was to make their plan go off the rails. And while they always came up with something that would put it back on track, most of the solutions looked pretty flimsy to Kris. Hope was not a strategy, but it sure looked like they were counting on hope and lots of good luck to get them through this.

  Lunch was sandwiches. They ate in silence. Meal done, Kris stood.

  “Let’s get in our disguises,” she said.

  “You know something I don’t know?” Jack asked.

  “Nope. It’s just the hairs on the back of my neck are beginning to stand up.”

  “Mine, too,” Penny said.

  “If both of your feminine intuition is ringing a bell, this guy is listening.”

  “We’ll need new disguises,” Penny pointed out, as they surveyed the wreckage of their old covers. “Nobody would hire Ms. Travaford for a guard job.”

  “We all need to not look like ourselves, Jack included,” Kris said. “I put the chances that we’re not all being hunted as zed or worse.” That got nods.

  They opened the suitcases Harvey had packed for them. Oversized middle-class work clothes poured out of one. The second held nearly as much makeup and padding material as Abby had provided.

  “Does everybody want me fat?” Kris cried in dismay.

  “Kris, you are a lovely lady of light and delicate proportions,” Jack began diplomatically. “How else do we disguise you?”

  He paused for a moment, then got a big grin on his face. “Well, there was that time on Turantic when you didn’t wear much at all.”

  “Yes, you enjoyed that. Don’t tell me you didn’t. I felt the proof on my leg.”

  “I had to get close to you.”

  “People, people,” Penny said. “You’re scandalizing this poor girl, and I really don’t think we have time to waste on distant, if very fond, memories.”

  They busied themselves with different disguises. Penny and Jack worked over Kris, much to her own dismay. Then Kris and Jack did the same to Penny. Finally, both girls got to take a swing at Jack. He refused several of their initial suggestions.

  In the end, all of them put on weight, just not as much as Kris had before. All their faces changed, from brow to nose to mouth, and foreheads got narrowed as armored wigs went on. Jack would likely be ordered to get a haircut by their new boss, but he certainly didn’t look like a Marine anymore.

  Kris was the one that discovered the C-16. It was carefully wrapped and nestled next to an explosive sniffer that assured them that there was no boom stuff here. Move along.

  There were also several flash bang grenades of different persuasions. Finally, from the bottom of the last suitcase, came three plastic automatics. All gave them the option of deadly force or sleepy darts. Kris set all three for sleepy and fired a dart from each into a support post. The darts hung there, not all that deep in the wood.

  “No casualties tonight,” she said, handing the weapons over to her team.

  “Just make sure the other guys chop on that order,” Penny said.

  The explosives and grenades disappeared into various portions of their disguise.
Kris had to sit down three times before she was comfortable with the placement of her weapons load.

  It was just past two o’clock when Kris surveyed their preparations and found them good. She glanced around the mess they’d made of the lodge and felt a strong need to be somewhere else. “Let’s move out, folks. Someone once told me a moving target is harder to hit. I say let’s beat feet.”

  Kris and Penny grabbed their purses and, without a backward glance, left.

  Twenty minutes later, going well below the posted speed limit, they passed a convoy of dark SUVs roaring along in the opposite direction.

  Penny kept driving. Kris followed the putative police rigs, and found herself looking at Jack in the backseat. Ever the gentleman, he was doing yoga in its small space. Their eyes met.

  “How much you want to bet me,” Jack said, “the folks in those rigs really want to make our acquaintance?”

  “No bet,” Kris said through a grin. “I can’t bet. Remember, I’m just a poor, homeless waif.”

  “Thank God both of us felt the strong urge to be homeless again,” Penny said, and kept driving.

  * * *

  Senior Chief Agent in Charge Foile surveyed yet another empty hideout. He was getting very tired of being one step behind the Longknife princess.

  “Boss, you need to see this,” Leslie said, waving him over to look at a six-by-six post that supported the roof. Three darts stuck out of the wood. Leslie pried one out and lifted it to the light.

  “They’re sleepy darts, sir. They have a coating on the tip of the dart that should put anyone it hits to sleep. Princess Longknife’s troops have used them a lot.”

  “So they won’t kill you,” Foile grumbled.

  “Not if you don’t have a bad heart or fall asleep in the bathtub. They are a weapon of less than lethal intent, but they’re still a weapon.”

  “Three darts,” Foile counted. “So likely three less than deadly guns on our three fugitives.”