The Caledonian Gambit: A Novel

by Dan Moren

  “I kin see that,” said the man, his expression darkening. “Mind tellin’ me why yer doin’ it here?”

  Craning his neck in an exaggerated show of looking around, Kovalic shrugged. “Didn’t see any signs,” he said reasonably.

  “Really,” said the bruiser. “Consider me a sign then. Pretend me face,” and he circled a sausage-thick finger at his mug, which Kovalic had no desire to spend any more time looking at than necessary, “says ‘No Trespassin’.’”

  With a sigh, Kovalic raised his hands in defeat. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I don’t want any trouble, I’m just waiting for my boss to come out of there.” He nodded at the MacDougal warehouse. “Perhaps you’ll tell me where I can stand.”

  The brute looked over his shoulder, presenting an all too tempting target in the form of an exposed neck. Need be, Kovalic could have taken him down, and it took a lot of willpower to resist the urge. But subtlety was the play here, and it was broad daylight—plus there was no way to get his cover back once he’d blown it in that spectacular a fashion.

  The big man looked back at Kovalic, his suspicion tempered with cautiousness. “Who’s yer boss, then, fella?”

  “Name’s Sterne. He’s an independent businessman.” He grinned as he dropped the cigarette to the cement and ground it out with his boot. “Very independent.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He wouldn’t be very good at his job if you had.”

  “I need to check this out. Wait here.” He started toward the warehouse.

  “Oh, by all means,” Kovalic called after him. “Interrupt my boss and—I presume—your boss while they’re talking business, just to ask them if the guy standing outside is all right.”

  The big man slowed to a stop, turning to face him. “What’re ye sayin’?”

  Kovalic shrugged. “Oh, nothing. I’m sure you know your boss better than I do. It’s just that in my line of work that’d be a quick road to unemployment … if he was in a good mood, that is.”

  Perhaps realizing he hadn’t thought this plan all the way through, the big man faltered. Kovalic could see the mental effort on his face as he considered his options, then slowly shook his head. “I still can’t have you hangin’ around out here. I’ll need to talk to my boss.”

  “Well, then, perhaps I should come in with you?”

  “Fine. Hurry up, then.”

  Kovalic took his time strolling over to the man, who laid a heavy hand on his upper arm. They crossed the open expanse toward the warehouse, the big man chivvying him along, and had gotten within about ten feet of it when the metal front door of the building clanked open and a short, graying man stepped out. He took the situation in at a glance.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded, looking back and forth between Kovalic and his escort. “I leave you alone for five minutes and you’ve already got yourself in trouble?”

  “Sorry, boss,” said Kovalic as sheepishly as he could manage. “I guess this guy didn’t like the look of me.”

  The short man fixed the bruiser with a nasty look. “I don’t pay him for his looks, friend; I pay him for his skills. I don’t know what your boss pays you for, but it clearly isn’t either of those.”

  Opening his mouth to retort, the bruiser clearly thought better of it. “He looked suspicious,” he said stolidly. “I was checkin’ it out.”

  “Superb,” said the short man, his voice steeped in sarcasm. “If everything is resolved to your satisfaction, I need my man in here to conduct some business. Unless you’d like me to call your boss and have him confirm that for you.”

  Clearing his throat, the bruiser released Kovalic’s arm. “No, that won’t be necessary. Sorry ’bout that.”

  Kovalic brushed at the wrinkles in his sleeve and straightened his jacket.

  With a brusque nod, the man walked away before he got himself into the hot tub over his head. Kovalic watched him round the corner out of sight, then let out a breath and turned to Tapper. “Excellent timing as always, sergeant.”

  With a grin, Tapper tossed him a salute. “Smart of you to leave your comm open.”

  Kovalic gave a modest tilt of his head. “I’ve been known to have a good idea or two in my day. Shall we?” He gestured to the open warehouse door.

  It was dark inside, especially after Tapper closed the door behind them. “While you two were having your little chat, I disabled the building security. Surprisingly top-of-the-line stuff, though at least the alarm wasn’t tied into the local authorities.”

  “Well, they’d hardly want the constabulary poking around their shady warehouse, would they?”

  “That they would not. Did find what looked like an attempted professional tap though. Eyes’s work, unless I miss my guess.”

  “Attempted?”

  “Ah.” Tapper chuckled. “These folks are dead clever. They let the tap in, but then cross-wired it to the security cameras in the warehouse next door. So all IIS is getting is a feed of people unloading crates of smoked meats and cheeses.” He shook his head in admiration.

  The main floor of the warehouse was about the size of a light aircraft hangar, featuring floor-to-ceiling metal scaffoldings that were piled high with crates of all varieties: small, large, even groundcar-sized.

  “There must be thousands of them,” said Kovalic, sighing. “How the hell are we going to find the ones we’re looking for?”

  Tapper jerked his head up at what looked like a small trailer of corrugated iron hanging above the warehouse floor. “That’s the shipping office. They must have some sort of inventory management system.”

  Kovalic tapped a finger against his lips. “Maybe we could cross-reference with the delivery dates from Danzig’s ledger.” He looked at Tapper, who raised his hands.

  “Hey, I got you in. My work here is done.” He lounged against a nearby support beam and twiddled his thumbs.

  Kovalic snorted, then headed for the stairs. His feet clanged noisily off the steps, echoing in the vast emptiness of the warehouse. Stacks of boxes aside, the place was awfully empty. You didn’t necessarily expect a warehouse to be a bustling hotbed of activity, even for an illicit organization like this one, but nobody at all? Well, not counting the bruiser outside. He’d bought that his boss was in here, which either meant that he wasn’t very smart or he wasn’t in the loop.

  The office was a mess, just as Brody had described it. He saw the calendar on the wall with the name MacDougal Shipping Incorporated on it, and sent an appreciative thought in Brody’s direction, wherever he was. Papers were strewn all over the desks in no apparent system, so he went straight for the terminal half-buried under stacks of notices.

  It was an archaic computer system, even by Caledonian standards. With its two-dimensional flat-screen display and push-button keyboard, it wouldn’t have been out of place in a museum back on Earth. Firing it up presented him with a prompt for username and password.

  He triggered his comm. “Hey, you got Three’s can opener on you?”

  “Indeedy,” came back the sergeant’s voice. “I’ll bring it up.”

  Leaning back in the desk chair, Kovalic stared at the glowing prompt on the screen. His mind spun, running over the situation to combat the vague feeling of unease that was perched on the back of his neck. An empty warehouse with archaic computer equipment in an office that was a little too strategically messy. He knew it was a front, but it was the artful detail with which that front had been constructed that set Kovalic on edge. Then again, the Black Watch had been doing this for twenty years now; surely they’d picked up a few tricks along the way. If De Valera had stayed ahead of IIS this long, he had to be smarter than your average criminal.

  A sharp whistle broke his concentration and he saw Tapper at the doorway to the office, holding up a small data card. “Three’s magical incantation, in concentrated form.” He tossed it to Kovalic.

  “Thanks. Let’s hope it’s an adequate substitute for the man himself.”

  “I believe he s
aid it carries a money-back guarantee.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when his pay review comes up.” Kovalic slid the card into the computer’s data port. For a moment nothing happened, then the machine began to whir; the screen blinked, as if trying to right itself, then blinked again and displayed a load of garbage characters. A moment later it shut itself off, then cycled back on, showing scrolling lines of white text on a black background, finally coming to a stop at a command prompt.

  “Quaint,” said Kovalic. He flexed his fingers and typed in a few commands. The terminal spat the information back out at him, happy to help. “All right. Let’s see what we can do about those dates.”

  The database itself wasn’t password-protected, instead relying on the overall security lockdown for preventing access to the system in the first place. Page’s ingenious data card had circumvented that by booting the terminal into its own custom operating system, putting all the information at Kovalic’s fingertips.

  Of course, the Black Watch were more than a little paranoid, so even once you were into their files, they’d designed it to look like nothing more than the shipping company it purported to be. Not unlike Danzig’s ledger, the database employed its own sort of code for shippers, contents, and even the dates on which packages were received.

  “Shit,” Kovalic muttered as he scrolled through the data. “How the hell are we going to find a specific crate in a room full of crates? It’s like trying to find a polar bear in a blizzard.”

  Something caught Kovalic’s eye on the screen and he frowned. He stopped scrolling and reversed, trying to suss out whatever it was. There was so much data it was hard to tell exactly what had pinged his attention—but something in there had registered. Upon closer inspection, he noticed a string of characters that looked familiar.

  “Huh.”

  “What’s up?” said Tapper.

  “They didn’t encode the crate IDs.”

  Tapper peered over his shoulder. “How the hell can you tell that?”

  “I may not have Three’s eidetic memory, but I remember the format from Danzig’s ledger.” He pointed at an entry on the screen.

  “If they changed the crate IDs, it would have been a lot harder to find the damn things on the floor,” said Tapper slowly.

  “So, all we have to do is cross-reference the list of crate IDs from Danzig’s ledger and we’re all set.” Kovalic scratched his head. “Well, this is going to be a lot easier than I thought.”

  “I guess they didn’t expect anybody to be crazy enough to come looking for a crate by ID number.”

  “Works for me.” Rifling through his pockets, he pulled out the data chip with the entries from Danzig’s ledger and plugged it into the terminal alongside Page’s magic card. His fingers flew over the keyboard, running the intersection of the two data sets, and a list of a dozen crates popped up. Selecting out the location numbers, he grabbed a piece of scrap paper from the desk and jotted them down, then yanked both chips from the terminal and restarted it.

  “And it’s like we were never here.”

  Sorting through the crates on the warehouse floor wasn’t difficult, but it was time-consuming. It took a solid ten minutes for them to locate the first one that Kovalic had found on the list; it had been tucked away behind a stack of larger containers that probably could have held small elephants.

  There was an automated retrieval system for the crates, but they didn’t want to risk turning it on in case it garnered unwanted attention. Instead, they had to crawl into the shelves themselves, crouching under the low overhangs and shining their pocket flashlights at the IDs on the boxes.

  “Found it,” Tapper crowed finally, waving Kovalic over toward him with his bobbing light. “Over here.”

  They brushed off the thin layer of dust on the crate and peered at the number which, sure enough, matched one on Kovalic’s list. “All right, sergeant. Open it up.”

  There was a slight hiss as Tapper popped open the container, breaking the pressurized seal. “Um,” said Tapper.

  “Um?”

  “Take a look, boss.”

  Kovalic joined Tapper at the crate, bending almost double to avoid whacking his head. Tapper held the top of the crate propped open with one hand while shining a torch into it with the other.

  “Holy shit,” said Kovalic, giving a low whistle. “That what I think it is?”

  “HV-357 carbines,” Tapper confirmed, reaching into the crate and pulling out one of the sleek, black killing machines. “Ooh, they opted for the retractable stock. Nice choice.” He sighted down the barrel, then checked the magazine. Tilting the gun to one side, he ran the torch over it and shook his head. “But the ID barcode looks like it’s been filed off—wait.” He frowned. “That’s weird.”

  “Weirder than a crate full of guns under Commonwealth diplomatic seal in a terrorist warehouse?”

  Peering closer, Tapper ran a finger across a spot on the carbine’s body, then rubbed his finger against his thumb. “The ID number wasn’t just filed off—there were no scratch marks on the metal or rough edges. There was never an ID number here at all.”

  Galactic accords had long enforced the weapon ID program, even across enemy lines. The only way that a gun could avoid getting stamped was if it had just rolled off the assembly line.

  Kovalic swallowed. “Hey, just to confirm: who makes the HV-357s?”

  “That’d be Harlan Armaments.”

  “And they’re based …”

  “On Terra Nova.” Which also happened to be the capital of the Commonwealth.

  “Yeah, that’s kind of what I was afraid of.” He motioned at Tapper to return the gun to the crate and seal it up.

  Twenty minutes later, they’d checked three further containers, which had respectively contained several thousand rounds of ammunition, a case of subsonic grenades, and a military-grade crowd dispersal device.

  They hovered over a fifth crate as Tapper unsealed it and levered off the top. Casting the pale glow from his comm unit over the interior, his face hardened and he swore softly. Brow knit, Kovalic leaned over and peered inside. His own breath caught.

  The fifth crate contained Jim Wallace.

  “Damn it.” Reaching in, Kovalic pressed two fingers to the man’s neck, but it confirmed the obvious: Wallace’s skin was ice cold.

  Sighing, Kovalic pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and slid down the crate to rest his back against it. “Shit.”

  “He was a good man,” Tapper said, staring into the crate and shaking his head slowly. “Didn’t deserve to go out like this.”

  Drawing a breath, Kovalic pulled himself up again and cast his eyes over Wallace’s body. Ligature marks around his wrists suggested he’d been bound at some point before his death. Cause of death wasn’t immediately apparent, but asphyxiation from lack of air in the container seemed likely. It also made it difficult to tell exactly when Wallace had died or how long he’d been in the crate.

  Before he could utter a word, the sound of a door creaking echoed throughout the vast warehouse. Tapper and Kovalic exchanged a glance and Kovalic raised a finger to his lips. Footsteps rang in the silence—two pairs, by Kovalic’s count—and as they grew nearer, he could hear the quiet murmur of conversation passing between them.

  Motioning to Tapper, Kovalic crept toward the edge of the row they were in and pressed his back to one of the crates, trying to keep himself to the shadows. The voices became louder.

  “To the ground?” said the first.

  “That’s what the boss said. Just move the boxes from this list first.”

  There was a snort from the first man. “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s the boss, Kingsley. You want to go up against De Valera, be my guest, but don’t drag my name into it.”

  “Wouldn’t want to tarnish your reputation, Shen.”

  “You’re just sore he didn’t pick you for this little jaunt of his.”

  “Hey, I’m happy to stay here where it’s safe.
Damn fool idea if you ask me.”

  “He didn’t ask you.”

  “Whatever,” grumbled the one who’d been addressed as Kingsley.

  “Let’s just do the job, okay? Don’t want De Valera thinking we can’t handle a simple task,” replied the other one—Shen.

  “Yeah, whatever. Maybe you’re afraid of him—not me.”

  “Got the eye on the big chair yourself, do you? Good luck getting through Brody. Everybody knows he’s next in line.”

  The two chose roughly that moment to walk past Kovalic’s hiding spot, their backs to him. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get the drop on them—they weren’t armed as far as he could see and clearly weren’t expecting any sort of trouble on their home turf. But it seemed like there might be more to gain from seeing what they were up to. He waved at Tapper, signaling that there were two men and pointing in the direction they were going. Tapper waved back and disappeared down the far end of the row.

  Kovalic checked the knife in his boot top, making sure he could get to it in a hurry if need be, then skulked out to follow the two men’s path.

  They were still walking down the aisle, oblivious to his and Tapper’s presence, making what looked to be a beeline for the office. Kovalic glanced up at the window overlooking the warehouse floor. They’d done a pretty good job cleaning up after themselves, but there was always the chance they’d missed something.

  “Let me put it this way,” he overheard Kingsley saying.

  Kovalic’s comm chose that extremely inopportune moment to buzz for his attention.

  It wasn’t a loud buzz, but it was loud enough—the warehouse wasn’t particularly noisy and the man had taken a breath before launching into whatever he was going to say. Shen gave a brief glance over his shoulder, his eyes widening in shock as he looked right at Kovalic.

  “What the fuck? Kingsley!”

  Kingsley turned, even as Shen’s hand went to the inside of his jacket. It could have been for a gun or a comm, but Kovalic wasn’t about to wait and see. His instinct told him that the last thing they’d expect was for him to run toward them, and, to be honest, his instinct had a pretty good track record.