The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  Harv pinched his nose with his left hand. With his right hand he kept stuffing special ops gear into a duffel. I admire a man with a work ethic. “We could be your allies, Spetz.”

  I sighed. I’m not a charitable organization and my patience with this little comedy of errors had run out. “Then prove it. I’ve saved you and your people from certain death. Twice so far. Possibly three times and on top of that, I’ve given you some really solid options against your enemies. What the hell happened here?” They knew what I meant. All of them went collectively white in the face. Even Pina. Ah.

  Pina looked me dead in the eye, something perhaps literal as those cold stars showed not an ounce of humanity. “I ordered my men to kill you.” Then she smiled electrically and waited, holding my gaze.

  Beside me, Nadya gave a kind of snort of amusement and patted my shoulder, handing me a waterproof packet. By the heft I knew what it likely was: my PSS with kit and ammo. Good. I’d need that.

  “Harv knew better.”

  Pina nodded slowly and her smile got wider. “Harv and Pierre both. My own team were less self-preservational.” Meaning they tried to execute her impossible order like good foot soldiers without a scintilla of imagination. Pina didn’t want me dead. Certainly not now, yet she had just tried to have me killed. Correction. She had ordered me to be killed. With Nadya Karkova in the room. Ah and double ah. So Nadya knew Oslo. Perhaps also worked with Oslo. Or perhaps with Pina directly since her daughters worked for San Valentin.

  My people were her people. Or vice versa. It could get maddening down the rabbit hole. And my people had stopped her mooks from doing a very stupid thing. But what did their blind loyalty mean? I’d already seen her sacrifice a pair of men without a second thought. They’d likely been sleeper agents or had enough snooper GPS gear to guide a missile to us, but they’d not been definitively guilty. She took no chances. So she had a plan. Maybe all along. We had never left her agenda then.

  I thought for a moment. “Because you really didn’t know whether Harv was going to jump with you or not.”

  Pina nodded while Harv looked at us both, jaw slack. “He’s shown where he stands. As have his team.”

  I agreed. Harv Littman had a rock solid reputation as a man who stayed bought. As a merc, as a man on a team, and now as the Chef de Cuisine. It had always been about Pina interviewing him.

  “And you planned to kill the man playing Roger today?”

  She nodded again. “Although it did happen much earlier in the day than I would have liked.”

  Gods, but this woman had foresight. So not San Valentin and Gutlicht alone; Karthago was in the Game and was playing to win. Then I realized what had happened and why she had been so quiet. “When they dropped the hotel they triggered your own explosives. They dropped the block by accident. They’re confused, even scared.”

  She nodded again. “I lost some good people today. There wasn’t time to get the signal out.”

  I patted Nadya kindly and she turned to me as I broke eye contact with Pina. In Ukrainian, I told her quietly, “Nice of you to make the trip for me.” She blushed, which I thought impossible of her. “I’ll take care of her.” This made her nod, once and fiercely, and then she squeezed my hand and went forward to George’s domain.

  I gave the hand signal and Nadya’s mute men started shoving the zodiac rearward to the edge of the rear door ramp. “Pina, is my ship still there?”

  She gave me a wry grin, something less incandescent and far more genuine. “No one told me about the boat. I had a ride waiting in Halifax.” Not a bad plan. But it would have gotten some or all of her people killed. Now it might sell the story even better. Bless Nadya and George. They knew their trade.

  “Well then, it appears I’m to come with you, yes?” No reason to pretend we weren’t on her agenda.

  She gestured to Harv, who got his two woman team up and moving to the raft. La Flambé grabbed a few more pieces of gear and followed them. “Is there anything I could offer you?”

  I thought about it. George and Nadya, whom I respected fiercely, had taken up her banner. That meant that given the options available, they felt Karthago lent the shadows some modicum of honor and predictability. She was the least evil among some pretty evil people. And maybe more, maybe she had within her own circle of responsibilities, the power to do some good.

  “If I were your concierge, you’d give me the truth.” She knew the extent of what I was asking.

  She started walking with me to the rear. All of us congregated around the zodiac, hunched under the arching rear ceiling. “Would you believe me? Would it really matter?”

  Of course it would matter. But she had been living within a jaded world where loyalty was a commodity not an absolute. “With me, yes. As with Harv. With us,” I made a motion that signaled the collective around the raft, “it would mean something.” Next I’d be pounding my chest and whispering Sans peur, sans reproche. Blech.

  “Okay.” Just that and with that little agreement, she set us to war. Somewhere, if Hans and Cassandra had anything left of their souls, there would be a whisper as a cold shadow crossed them. We were coming. Team Karthago. Then we lowered the boat, abandoning the CV22 to seven confused gunsels and my people. Correction, Oslo’s people. I’d bet dollars to donuts the thing would crash with a crew of six or seven near the water of Halifax, Canada loaded with radical propaganda and some cheap bioweapons. If I remembered rightly, George had lost a son to the Chechens. Payback was about to be a bitch. A multi-payload B-2 airwing bitch.

  Chapter 5

  Liars, Tyrants and Brigands, Oh My…

  What you want to buy the fashionable eco-terrorist this season is a nuclear ice breaker from Project 22220, disguised as an oceanographic research vessel. Preferably with lots of rust, distressed paint job, a couple of Fast Forty DARDO chain guns inset with the upper tween deck, some jury rigged high performance computing clusters with, voila, a water cooled system in the cargo hold, and several hidden compartments for smuggling of weapons, people, vessels, and the occasional endangered species. The Arnapkapfaaluk also sported a deep freeze seed bank, five independent communication suites, and some cool passive radar and lidar arrays with a whole bunch of fabulous cryptography gear and some hacktivists to man it. Or as the case was here, trans-man it since the reigning queen of the crackers was a strange creature known as Gay Eddie who went by Edith when she worked for the NSA.

  The BBW—in this case big bad woman when you translated her name from Innuit—looked like a typical husky girl, wallowing in the water as her double hull dragged her through cold waters. Always dirty, crawling with greasy hippies and academic types, she slunk port to port, bristling with some of the most dangerous eco-radicals on the planet. Folks angry enough to join Earth First or the ELF but smart enough to see how futile their work was.

  I’d won her from the previous captain in a game of cards. He had three aces and I had a shotgun. Then I’d stacked her full of people who hated the civilized world far more than one another and loved their work enough to stay civil. Some funds, some connections, and a whole lot of ammunition later, they were a small independent micronation that banked for pirates and criminals, helped smugglers, and generally supported the black and gray markets for a steep price. Every time some fat banker has an aneurysm or some foresting exec accidentally gets shot, you can thank the BBW. Shh. You’re welcome. When I retired, I had owned about forty percent of her outright or through proxies.

  We took the zodiac onto the open water with Pierre entertaining me as I sped us towards the BBW a few miles further out to sea. I got the whole of his tale about how someone as connected as La Flambé ended up working for Oslo. It’s an instructive tale for folks in my trade and as old as time. Lafontaine had three children: two sons in the trade and one daughter, born twelve years after the boys. The darling of her mother’s eye, they named her Cherie and, from there, the punsters took Cherry Flambé to the logical conclusion. We’ve all been calling her Jubilee since she was two y
ears old. Jubilee, given free rein and far too much money for a young woman, made a series of increasingly poor choices, always cleaned up the Brotherhood. Pierre wasn’t home much, so his wife, her indulgent family, and his sons, stepped in to raise the young lady. By all accounts she was a talented, if care free, spirit.

  Enter the inevitable bad boy father surrogate, in this case, a lovely woman named Butchie who helped Jubilee up the drama, aggravation, and stick it to ya of the whole relationship for her Corsican Catholic family. Jubilee and Butchie flew with some friends to a beach resort in Malaysia where, at some point during the third week of their public frolic through the scandalized streets of Kota Kinabalu, some resentful proletarian called the gendarmerie. Were there drugs in their room? Of course there were. The friends were nowhere to be found, having split the scene when they happened to walk by and see the vice squad raiding their bungalows. Malaysia takes a dim view of briefcases of heroin. Fast forward past the kangaroo court and death sentences, to Pierre’s dilemma. For all his power and pull, he’s got no one who could rig things in this godforsaken pit. They’re a kingdom run by Muslims, they’re ethnically Malay, and they really don’t much like French people in any form, even if they pretend to be Italians.

  After Butchie had been tried, beaten, and raped in prison, then summarily hung: while Jubilee’s high paid lawyer filed delay after delay, it became clear that the Malays had set a date and planned to wipe out the youngest Lafontaine without further judicial notice. Pierre’s wife caould not sleep, his sons wanted to hire some mercenaries for a snatch and grab. They made a few calls. Perhaps a call to someone like Harv. Then Pierre gets a call himself, on a phone slipped into his pocket while he stood on docks of Ajaccio receiving a midnight shipment on behalf of the Brotherhood. Jubilee was saved.

  Every person has a lever. Mine were Arkady and Olga, and even more so Sonia, my godchild. Oslo found Pierre’s lever and, at the right time, she pushed it. What choice did he have? Four days after he agreed to the deal, a battered but living Jubilee began house arrest in Pierre’s hometown. She would never leave the island, a queen in exile like Napoleon in reverse. But even this legal fiction suited the Lafontaines. Their wild spirited daughter will never again be in danger, never beyond the reach of their power. And if Pierre were to renege on the deal? This was the beautiful nature of the trap. Only Oslo’s hand stayed the executioner. Without her good will, Jubilee flew back to her Malaysian prison to follow in Butchie’s footsteps. Wash, rinse, repeat. And this is precisely why I got out of the business until today.

  By the time we’d gotten to the part of the story where Oslo, who we now knew to be Pina, had Pierre by the knickknacks, I had the Arnapkapfaaluk sighted. I made a call. Did I mention she had some cell towers and a satellite feed too? They picked us up thirty minutes later using one of the side bays. The BBW has three independent port doors that open at the water line and allow smaller boats in and out (and of course the two mini-subs). We were received in Bay Two where a pair of piratic Norwegians smoking pipes and wearing fox fiber fisherman’s sweaters, blasted Queen’s Jazz LP while they hoisted us onto the deck near a cask of fish and some crates that might have been flares. They had reached Fat Bottomed Girls as we dismounted the zodiac.

  When I looked over the fish, one of the Nords approached me, assuring me in Russian, “Don’t worry. They’re a sustainable species, wildcaught using Drogo’s new sonic nets.” Drogo was First Officer, a techno-anarchist from Oregon who took his nom de guerre from Bilbo Baggins’ father but lately had been getting some props from George RR Martin’s Khal Drogo. The Captain, Acacia, greeted us warmly and handed out mugs of cider, which was a nice touch. Drogo’s boss was a woman I could trust, which in my world carries a lot of weight. She was also a wanted woman in four countries, so I had my own lever on her. Everyone just called her Ace. Ace stood almost two meters, a dagger of a woman, her dark face weathered from sun and sea, her limbs covered in old jackets or sweaters, hiding the scars left by the Congolese torture squad that had abducted her village. She’d never leave the ship voluntarily and, for that reason, the ship cleaved unto her as a single-minded family. As long as she breathed, Ace was the BBW and vice versa. For many, it was more effective to think of the ship as an extension of Acacia’s will. Or as I often did, to think of Acacia as an extension of Arnapkapfaaluk’s will. Some of her indigenous crew even whispered she was the reborn goddess herself.

  The goddess was in fine form when we arrived. She made a gimme gesture and, when I handed over my phone, Gay Eddie materialized in a sequined sarong and lime green wellington boots with spurs. His jing-jangle swagger competed with Queen for our attention. Ace tossed him my phone.

  “You’ve gotten a new haircut, Old Lad.” That made Eddie smile. His hair was also lime green.

  “Spetzie, you tall drink of water. I dream of you no more than three nights a week.” He looked over the phone, nodded to himself, and stuck some kind of doo-dad with a blinking blue light into a port I had not realized existed. Then he wiggled away, disappearing around a corner.

  I made polite introductions and made sure Ace understood that Pina was both the reigning Concierge of the Syndicate and the mysterious Oslo (as well as our esteemed guest). Pina and Ace then dropped into a dialect I’d never heard before which sounded like garbled Armenian or maybe speed Korean. It was a weird language. Apparently, BBW did business with Oslo. Being out of the game has a downside. I was all thumbs on the modern contours of world power. Oslo appeared to know everyone I knew.

  Ace pointed at me a few times, drawing a shared chuckle from the two. It would make a lesser man nervous. It just terrified the hell out of me. I had planned on finding safe ground (even if it was asea) and holing up while I planned my next few moves. Now it would appear, in my absence, Pina Karthago had absorbed some or all of my network while I was away baking. And if not her, then perhaps some other players on the board. I had made a mistake. I had not factored on what time and invisibility would do to friendships and professional associations.

  It might seem naïve, given my business, but it’s not unthinkable when you realize how outside the Web I’d been and for how long. It’s our name for our world: The Web. Some agents call it the Underworld and conspiracy nuts call it things like the Illuminati, New World Order, Gnomes of Zurich, and so on. Or Masons and Rosicrucians, secret societies, the Hashashin, whatever local name for gangs and triads and mafiyas that people use. It’s all and none of that. As long as there have been cities from Ur and Nippur onwards, there have been spies and conspirators. More than that, there have been gangs, criminal families, people who live at the edge of the society whether whores, thieves, leather tanners, or sorcerers.

  Where these folk met, they organized, created languages like Cant, Polari, or Fenya and, at times, cooperated beyond their small region or area of influence. They created crime families, triads, and secret societies, which met spies for governments real and imagined and secret cabals of alchemists, assassins, early Christians, cultists, deviants, and the occasional group of bored gentlemen out for a lark. The Web became the word for it all. It’s not a place, it’s not a people, it’s not even a concept, but it’s all these things. It’s the sum total of all the clandestine, illegal, revolutionary, anti-social, anarchist, and immoral activity that drives black markets and spycraft. It also drives revolutions, terrorism, assassination, riots, famine, and rampant corruption.

  The Web has always been a dangerous place needing order. No one knows who or how but over time a set of rules emerged for the apex predators of The Web to govern themselves and, equally important, how they enforce their will upon the smaller, weaker groups who operate independently of them. The famed Hashashin were created to punish infractions within our world and only loaned out to rulers as an afterthought. Ditto the Shinobi clans of Nippon and the clever men of Australia. Most ages have had a reigning set of groups who set the agenda and establish the rules for agents and powers. Run by ciphers and fanatic loyalty, these old world powers enjoyed
a kind of rock star status, giving themselves fancy names like, yes, the Bavarian Illuminati or the Black Hand.

  In the modern age, telephones, cameras, recording devices, and computers have created unique problems for secret societies. Fanatic loyalty turned out to be insupportable once the Enlightenment made all men free(ish). Money and power became the tools with which agents were bought and murder the lever by which they were brought to bear. Along with torture, blackmail, petty extortion, and lots of fear. Every flavor of fear known.

  Enter The Syndicate. In my lifetime, the Syndicate has been the closest thing The Web has to a government. It’s a clearinghouse of power, a kind of custodial service that remains impartial and utterly secret with your secrets unless you cross them. The Syndicate has set the rules of The Great Game, which is what we do in The Web, since the fall of Third Reich. Are they good or bad? Irrelevant. They broker murder and child slavery, tidy up assassination and rape camps, arrange deforestation and famine, and pretty much take a cut of every shady deal made in The Web from a simple drug deal in a back alley to the receipt of billions of euros’ military equipment to fund, say, the overthrow of Ukraine.

  Why would any civilized power tolerate such a monstrosity? It’s the ultimate question. One asked often on the BBW, itself a portion of The Web. Mainly because civilization has been powerless to stop it. Civilization causes The Web; civilization needs crime and spies to persist. More than that, without The Syndicate there would be more rape camps and of worse quality. More planetary damage, more wars, more senseless violence, more of everything we fear and hate. To quote our Patron Saint, Hobbes:

  In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.