A few recognized him and raised their glasses. For the most part, he had no idea who they were, but he grinned and smiled as he moved through to the gaming room, sometimes winking at them, sometimes making a toy gun of his thumb and forefinger.
Kapow. Gotcha.
He was Slim Jim. King of the world, and if he was bored, there was something wrong with the world, not him. His mood picked up as he strutted into the main gaming room. He scanned the floor, looking for a mark.
The casino was small, in the European style. Nothing like the monsters he was building in Vegas, squeezing out the Mob before they got started. (A large part of why he had so many bodyguards.) The clientele was discernibly old school Continental too. Viscount This and Baron du That. The Dupleix comped them their stay because they added a bit of class to the joint. But he wasn’t scanning for class. He was looking for loud, brash American money.
He found it sitting under a ten-gallon hat at the big craps table. The man was a blowhard. Bloated with crude oil and bullshit. You could hear him roaring over the crowd with every throw.
“Reckon I might roll me some bones,” Slim Jim told his bodyguard. The man nodded without comment and fell in behind Davidson as they threaded their way through the room. The closer they got to the craps table, the wider was Slim Jim’s grin. The ass-hat oilman had two hotties attending him, one on each arm. He was drunk and laughing like a retard with each throw, losing money hand over fist, and boasting about it because he could.
“I could shit gold all over this table until there weren’t no more gold to shit in the whole world,” he roared, which made not a lick of literal sense to Slim Jim. But he knew what the guy was about. He was just flopping his dick out on the table so everybody could gasp at how fucking big it was.
“Whoa, friend,” said Slim Jim, glad handing good humor as he rolled up to the table. “I don’t need to take all your money. I got trouble enough hiding what I already got from the taxman.”
“Mister Davidson,” the ass-hat beamed as he recognized Slim Jim. One of the hotties slid off his arm. “A pleasure to meet you, sir! A real pleasure. I’ve just been enjoying the hospitalities of your fine little establishment here.”
“Well don’t enjoy it too much.” Davidson grinned. “I’d hate for you to go home broke.”
The big grinning mask slipped a little on the other man’s face. An appreciable tension, immaterial but unmissable, tightened around the knot of people at the table.
“Oh hell, no chance of that.”
“Still,” said Slim Jim soberly, “best be careful, right?”
Tighter.
“What are you saying, sir? That I can’t cover my losses? I could buy and sell this two-dollar whorehouse with my walking-around money.”
One of the man’s women was clutching his arm, digging her fingers into his bicep. The other one had put a little distance between herself and her master. Slim Jim wondered at the odds of taking her for himself before the night was done.
“I’m sure you could,” he said. “But I got plenty of whorehouses. And I just want everyone to have a good time here. So take it easy. Let me get you a free drink. And you know… just… gamble responsibly.”
He had to shoo away his bodyguard, who had taken a professional interest in the escalating confrontation.
The Texan flushed bright red.
“I’ll gamble any way I see fit, you little peckerhead. I’m worth a billion dollars. Did you know that? An actual billion US dollars.”
The silence that had fallen over the craps table had spread like a virus across the entire gaming floor.
Slim Jim rolled the dice.
“A billion dollars? Really? That’s a lot of money.”
He made a show of thinking it over, but not for too long.
“I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Double or nothing.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Charlotte had a bad moment in the hold of the Russian ship when the cargo hook tangled in the thick netting and would not release. Two stevedores scrambled up the mounded sacks of coffee beans. One of the men, barefoot and swearing in Arabic, came to stand less than a few inches from her head. She could smell his unwashed feet, even through the scent of the beans. Her throat spasmed, but she clamped her mouth shut, willing her breath in and out despite the reek. She relaxed her grip on the knife and pistol. If she was forced to strike she would move with unhurried calm, coming to her feet, using the knife on the man closest to her, and putting a bullet into his workmate.
But violence was not needed.
The cargo monkey disengaged the hook, shouted a few choice curses at the crane operator high above them, and clambered his way down the sides of the netted coffee bags.
Charlotte exhaled a ragged breath.
At least there was no chance of another cargo load dropping on top of her. The sacks of Kenyan coffee beans were not stable enough to form a base. The stevedores muscled and maneuvered another seven loads into the hold before they were done. Lying in her hiding spot, she plotted out her next moves, consciously avoiding any thought of what had happened back onshore. There was no sense wasting her time in mourning her team or obsessing over the ambush. That would come later, if she survived. The time for revenge would come too, if she was given the opportunity. But for now, she had to complete the mission. They had a contract with Six. She would fulfil the contract and seek a new one. A sanctioned kill order.
The first check box? Getting out of the ship’s hold and locating Bremmer. She no longer had drone cover, so the tracker they’d planted under the professor’s skin was useless. Even if she did have cover, the ship’s steel hull would mask the signal like a giant Faraday cage. He could be on the other side of the nearest bulkhead and she would have no way of knowing.
No, Charlotte would be doing this old school. A hard target search in a hostile area of operations.
She climbed out of her hiding spot, using the thick rope netting to scale down to the deck. Her boots scraped and crunched on the steel plating, crushing a few stray coffee beans underfoot. The hold was dark and empty for now, but a crew member or more cargo handlers could happen along at any moment. She put on her goggles, powered up low light mode and took in her first real 360 of the storage bay. It looked to be about the size of three tennis courts end to end, and occupied most of the ship’s vertical space—three or four decks. That was a quick, rough guess she confirmed by picking out gantries on three levels when she had oriented herself.
She was down on the lowest deck, probably just a few feet above the bilge. If she were able to exit the hold at this level, chances were she’d emerge into more stowage. A good option for stealth, but a poor choice given her limited time. She needed to extract or eliminate Bremmer before they left port. She moved carefully through the hold, threading a passage between a disparate collection of cargo. Sacks, tea chests and packing crates were laid out in a rough grid pattern. Most of the vertical space went unused, which initially puzzled her, until she realized that they could not stack this cargo like containers on a modern ship. The first hint of a swell in the open ocean and everything would come tumbling down.
It was inefficient and disorganized, but then so much of the old world was.
Charlotte heard voices and the telltale clang of heavy boots ringing on the deck-plate, forcing her to hide again. Bright shafts of torchlight flared in her night vision goggles, as she squeezed between the inner hull and a head-high stack of tea chests covered in a salt-encrusted, sun-faded tarpaulin. The boots implied permanent crew, not scurrying Arab dockhands, and the voices confirmed it when they resolved out of the background of the ship’s noise. Russian.
She was able to pick out snatches of conversation, but learned nothing of tactical value. It was a just a couple of the Bulgakov’s crew bitching about the locals. The local port workers. The local whores. The local thieves. They said nothing of the ambush or the rocket scientist being held on their vessel. That didn’t mean they knew nothing of him th
ough. A ship was a small enclosed world.
She turned off her combat goggles and eased out of her hiding place, inching towards the men with her gun raised. Their conversation continued, a tired litany of complaints about the trip. The banality of the exchange almost robbed Charlotte of her resolve and then—in the darkness—she struck gold.
“Bad enough we have to give up most of our shore leave, that we cannot even leave the port, but I hear from Anton that we will have those cocksuckers from Moscow with us all the way home.”
“Quiet, Dimitri. The cocksuckers are always listening. Never speak of them. Never.”
There was a pause before the first man spoke again.
“You are right. And I suppose we will have more money when we dock in Marseille because we did not spend it in Cairo…”
It was enough.
Charlotte moved towards the voices, ghosting around a pallet laden with boxes full of machine parts. The men returned to complaining about the poor quality of the prostitutes they had been forced to use because they could not leave the port district. Artificial light from the docks spilled in through the open cargo hatch, but the hold was still a labyrinth of shadows. The crewmen passed in and out of the dim light as they inspected the cargo, tugging on the nets and occasionally kicking a tea chest to ensure it was securely stowed. Charlotte moved through darkness, closing the distance to her targets slowly and quietly.
She drew up behind them as they reached the load of coffee beans on which she had boarded their vessel.
“Fucking typical,” grumbled the man closest to her.
“What a mess,” said his colleague. “This shit will be everywhere as soon we leave harbor.”
They set to rearranging the spilled load and poorly secured netting, seeming happy to have something worth bitching about. Charlotte emerged from behind the nearest stack of chests. She put a round into the skull of the man furthest from her, blowing his head apart like a piece of rotten fruit. She had closed the distance to the nearest crewman before he could react, beyond gasping “Piotr!” Charlotte slammed the butt of her pistol into the side of his neck, stunning him long enough to apply a rear chokehold as she dragged him to the deck.
“If you want to live, you will tell me what I need to know,” she said in Russian.
She tightened the stranglehold at that point, cutting off both air and blood to his brain.
“Do you understand? Be very careful how you answer. Very quiet.”
She eased off, but ground the muzzle of her pistol into the man’s skull, just behind his ear, exactly where she had shot the other man. Doubtless the survivor could imagine what would happen to his own head if she squeezed her trigger just a little tighter.
“I understand,” he grunted. As a reward, she eased off even more, but gave him another jab with the gun barrel to remind him who was in charge.
“The cocksuckers from Moscow,” she said quietly, still using the man’s native tongue. “They have a prisoner on board. Tell me where he is and live.”
The man stiffened and struggled a little until she drilled the gun in hard, just under his jawline.
“They will kill me,” he protested. His voice was a snuffling mess and difficult to understand.
“Only if they find out,” she whispered, as though reassuring a child. “You can tell them your friend gave up their secrets. You can tell them you resisted bravely even after I beat you. I am happy to beat you if that would help.”
The man protested. Extra beatings would not be necessary.
“The first mate’s quarters,” he gurgled as she turned her forearm, cutting a little deeper into his throat. “It is forward of the galley. On B deck.”
“Is there a guard? More than one?”
“There are three or four guards,” the man said. He was really giving it up now. That was the way it went. Getting them to give up the first secret was always the hardest part. After that, they usually pissed the lot away as quickly as they could.
“Four guards? For one potbellied old German? I don’t think—”
The man struggled against her restraint and she gave him another taste of the pistol grinding into his jugular.
“No, no, no,” he protested, his voice getting higher and louder.
“Not just for the German. For the British prince, too, and his American woman. NKVD has them as well.”
He surprised her with that, enough that she let her technique slip for half a second and the man reacted by trying to force his way out of her grip. Charlotte did not think. She snapped his neck with a single violent twist, cursing as his dead weight knocked her over. The corpse’s bowels let loose with a flood of foul-smelling dead man’s shit.
She swore and rolled him off before it could soak though her clothing. That wouldn’t help with stealth mode.
The clock was ticking. She had two bodies to stash. Two men who would be missed.
And now, two more captives to find.
CHAPTER SIX
It was raining in Paris, a light drizzle that beaded the windows of Kolhammer’s hotel suite, reminding him of all the watches he had stood down through the years; from the bridge of the USS Lambright, a venerable old Vietnam-era destroyer, to the Big Hill herself, the super carrier Hillary Clinton. From steam turbines to fusion stacks. Vietnam was just a country in this world, not shorthand for a war and an entire disrupted era. So much had changed since Manning Pope’s disastrous wormhole experiment had punched a hole though the wall between his universe and this one. So much that had once been would now never come to pass.
Richard Nixon, for one. He wasn’t even a senator here, let alone vice president. That role, colorfully described by one incumbent as not being worth a bucket of warm piss, was now Philip James Kolhammer’s to savor. And the former admiral was taking a deep draft of it tonight. He held a printout, almost forgotten as he stared into the night, the city a blur of jeweled lights under the warm rain.
He craned his head upwards, looking to the heavens, but the stars were lost behind the low clouds and constant rainfall. It would have been a pointless gesture on a clear night anyway. He was looking for something he would never see, for an absence.
Somewhere up there, and far away over the eastern horizon, the sky was empty where it should have been traced with the long, graceful arc of an Access Mark III spy satellite. The three-ton surveillance platform had been compiling a vast database of imagery from the far side of the Iron Curtain every day since it had been boosted into orbit by the National Reconnaissance Office four years earlier. Every day until yesterday.
Eighteen hours ago it had dropped off the net somewhere over the Kamchatka Peninsula. Three hours later, a sister satellite over eastern Europe had followed it into darkness. Someone had put out their eyes.
He did not believe in coincidence, not past a certain point. To lose one satellite might be regarded as misfortune. Two really could be carelessness. But to lose both of those birds and to have that British operation go sideways in Cairo yesterday, just a few hours later?
That was hostile action.
Kolhammer had urged the president to move the military from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 3, at least in Europe. That would put frontline air force squadrons on a fifteen-minute standby.
Ike had reset the Defense Readiness Condition to level 4, and only then with great reluctance. He had read the future histories, had seen the number of times Kolhammer’s world had blundered right up to the edge of the abyss. Hell, Ike had been the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the war. He didn’t need to read books to know how foolishness and misjudgment could lead to tragedy. So, caution was his watchword.
US intelligence agencies—and those of close allies which heeded the alert—hardened their security and increased the hourly “take”. But no fighter pilots stood to their jets. No armored battalions woke up their dark steel behemoths. Hundreds of thousands of fighting men and women would remain comfortably abed tonight w
hile Vice President Kolhammer chewed at his lower lip and stood by this window, absentmindedly folding and unfolding a message from Washington.
The single sheet of paper, safe-handed from the embassy by a Marine Corps courier, was a directive from his only superior. The president instructed him to secure access to Boeing’s satellite network, in particular to the pair of experimental VHO Combat Optics birds currently over the Eurasian landmass. They were the assets best placed for exploit under the CASE TANGENT protocols: an executive order upgrading all operations against the Soviet’s space-based platforms to Priority Ultra—a classification previously unused outside of wartime.
After Rome, they had done that at least. Anybody could see Stalin was making a play for the high ground. But what sort of play?
Kolhammer read the paper again. The old-fashioned courier typeface made it seem like an historical artifact but he knew Ike had signed the original in Washington only half an hour earlier. He recognized the president’s plain style of speaking. He could imagine the man dictating it to his secretary in the Oval Office, probably just before retiring to dinner.
“I’d prefer that Boeing just let us quietly piggyback on their birds and have a look at what we need. I’m sure you can talk your former colleague into that, Phil. But make sure she understands that we can also take what we need, if necessary.”
That former colleague was Karen Halabi. She was also former Royal Navy, master and commander of the HMS Trident, former head of Combat Optics, a Zone-based start-up acquired by Boeing after the war, and currently VP of the giant multinational’s space-based platforms division.
She was their head of Star Wars, in other words.
Kolhammer folded the paper away in his suit pocket and let the heavy drapes fall back across the rain-dappled window. He knew Karen would understand very well what emergency powers the executive branch could bring to bear in time of national emergency. But, like her, he also knew those powers were feeble instruments compared to the fearsome apparatus of state security they had left behind in the 21st century. She might be entirely amenable to helping them out. Or, if she thought this was some sort of boondoggle, she might jam everything up in the Supreme Court. He smiled ruefully at how Vice President Nixon might have handled this. It would almost certainly have ended with Karen kicking his ass to the curb, or at least out into the hallway, where the Secret Service would step in.
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