The fight on the screen was like nothing he had ever seen, and he had seen a lot. Paulie was suddenly very glad he had not picked a fight with Roland earlier. This was not some amped up street muscle with a couple dozen augmentations. This was next-level military tech. He watched in stunned silence as the screen showed Roland beat a near-unkillable cyborg monster into scrap. Then he watched that same monster turn tail and flee for its very life. Grim Roper had been a legend, he was the reason young mercs still slept with a night light. Hearing that Pike’s crew took him out was one thing: that was exactly the sort of impossible heroics Pike’s people engaged in with impressive regularity. But to learn that the terrifying cyborg had been dropped by a single man was quite another.
“Shit,” he whispered. Then to his employer, “How much time do I have? I’ll need to prepare for something like this.”
“It will be a few days, yet, a week maybe.” The greasy man smiled without warmth, “He will need to come to us, though. One does not try to take Tank out in the open, and never without an edge. You understand me?”
Paulie smiled back, “Don’t tell grandma how to suck eggs, pal. You say he took down Roper? That means he is armored to shit and strong as hell. I’ll need heavy weapons and I’d like to bring in one of my armatures, too.” He phrased it that way to imply he had more than one armature in his group, but in reality he did not. After watching the video, he wished fervently that he did.
“I presume there will be an additional charge for this?”
“Fucker dropped Roper?” Paulie snorted, “Hell yes there will be an additional charge. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, though. You’ll get your money’s worth.”
As scary as Roland (apparently) was, he was still just a target. Put enough ordnance into anything or anyone and they went down, eventually. The question was not ‘can he be killed,’ but rather ‘how hard do we have to pummel him to kill him.’ It was not complicated math, and Paulie knew how to solve those equations. But he was a pragmatist, and he figured he was likely to lose guys and equipment in the process. “Can I take these videos and study them? We will need to gauge his capabilities and build some plays for taking him down.”
“You can view them here as often as you like, but they cannot leave this room or be transmitted in any way. Believe me, Mr. Paulsen, if word gets out that we have this information, our problems will grow exponentially.”
Shit. What the fuck have I stepped into here? Paulie was starting to regret taking this job, but the money was just so damn good.
“Well, boss,” Paulie shrugged, “I figure our problems are big enough without adding to them. I’ll bring some of the boys around tomorrow and we’ll go over the files.”
“I’ll help. I have a lot of unique insights when it comes to Mr. Tankowicz. You will need my input.” There was a catch in the oily man’s voice, an inflection Paulie noticed but couldn’t assign any meaning to. His mercenary’s instincts were screaming warnings to his brain, and he suspected Tank and his client had history extending beyond professional entanglements. It was history Paulie would have liked to have known about before taking the job. Such was the life of a mercenary though.
Just think of the money, Paulie.
This was always sound advice when one was a professional mercenary. Paulie put his reservations to the back of his mind and got to working on a plan to kill his very first super-soldier.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Back at the office, Roland debriefed Lucia and Mindy on the operation. Lucia was less than thrilled with Roland’s report. He did not believe in lying, but he had to admit he was sorely tempted to gloss over the part where the gorgeous loan shark disrobed and attempted to ply him with delights of a carnal nature.
“I will put the bitch on like a snow boot, Roland,” Lucia bristled.
“I told her that. Verbatim.” He was supremely happy he had done so. Lucia knew that Roland did not lie, and his declaration made Lucia smile, which is ninety percent of the reason Roland got out of bed in the morning.
“Did she believe you?” Lucia wanted to stay mad, but the situation was so ridiculous she couldn’t hold onto her irritation.
“I think so,” he shrugged. “She was just scared. She didn’t want me to hurt her, so she tried to make me like her. When it became clear I wasn’t going to bust up her place, she was fine.”
“So she put her clothes back on and gave you the intel you needed?”
Roland froze. “Not in that exact order.”
Lucia rolled her eyes, “She wasn’t all that scared, then. You are seriously helpless when it comes to women, goofball. You are lucky I like you.”
“I tell myself that very thing every day.”
“You two make me want to throw up,” Mindy added helpfully. Then she addressed Lucia, “Want me to kill this Sid bitch, boss?”
“No, Mindy. But thank you for offering.”
“I have no idea what chicks see in you, Roland. You have to be the ugliest guy I’ve ever met,” Mindy slapped his arm and winced as her fingers went numb.
“I don’t know what they see in you, either. You have to be the craziest bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah. But I’m pretty.”
“Pretty annoying.”
“Children!” Lucia interrupted them, “Let’s table the issue of Roland’s newfound sexual charisma—”
Mindy faked a retch at this, which made Lucia chuckle.
“—and focus on what Sid has told us already.”
“It’s apparently a Brokerage thing,” Roland was all too happy to move the conversation in a more productive direction. “They are up to their usual gig. Trying to get other people to handle their wet work. This time they want the Lodge to come after me.”
Mindy tilted her head, “That’s not a terrible plan, if you think about it. If it looks like Roland is stomping hunters, they will eventually put him on the Hit List. You’re tough and all, Roland, but if every Hunter in New Boston comes after you...” She made a face, “I don’t think you can take all of ‘em.”
Roland nodded, “Of course I can’t. Several hundred pro bounty hunters and assassins? They’d drag me down on numbers alone.”
“Is this ‘Hit List’ like Weregild for mercenaries?” Lucia asked.
“Not exactly,” Mindy explained. “Weregild is an official blood debt. It’s all about honor and brotherhood and macho bullshit like that. Hunters and assassins aren’t really big on the honor stuff. The Hit List is more of an unofficial call-out. When someone runs afoul of the Lodges, everybody keeps an eye out for the guy and kills him if they see him. We have a fund that pays a bonus to whoever gets the guy. It’s really just a way of keeping a whole ‘don’t fuck with the Lodges’ vibe current and viable.”
Lucia raised her eyebrows, “Wow. You guys have issues.”
“But I’m pretty!” Mindy beamed a vapid smile back.
“Yes Mindy,” Lucia sighed, “you are a pretty princess. But pretty doesn’t fix our problems. What we need is an angle.”
“I’m out, then,” the blond shrugged. “I only do curves.”
“Well,” Roland interjected, “I think we may have foiled that part of the plan entirely accidentally. I haven’t killed either of the guys who’ve come after me.”
Lucia nodded, “This is true, and the grievance has been filed, so tthe Lodge now knows that they are being set up. You were there, Mindy. Any chance they’ll give up the client?”
Mindy snorted, “Not a chance. First, they just won’t do it. Terrible policy. Second, even if they did, there is no way this guy is dumb enough to have used any traceable info in the postings.”
“Especially if this is a Brokerage thing,” Roland agreed. “It’ll be buried so deep we’ll never find anything useful.”
“So that leaves us with Manny and Sid as our best bet.” Lucia did not sound happy about it, “Two folks I do not trust at all.”
“But they’re all we got right now, Boss” Mindy supplied with an unhelpful sh
rug.
“Okay,” Lucia breathed, “Let’s keep him working the client. No other hunters are going to take the bounty now that the word is out, so the client has to keep Manny in the loop or abandon this tack.”
“I would abandon it, personally,” Roland mused out loud. “Without the chance to turn the Lodge against me, it’s just a waste of time and money.”
Mindy scoffed, “But the money and time are already spent, so he may stick with it for the hell of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like something The Brokerage would do,” Roland argued. “They rarely act in a petty or emotional manner. Everything is an actuarial table with them.”
Lucia’s voice was soft and distant as her thoughts swam with possible answers, “What if they are using somebody? Somebody who hates you, Roland. They can make this play through some patsy and keep it running as long as they want.”
Roland nodded, “And keep us chasing a dead end while they keep doing what they are really planning!”
“Shit,” Mindy gasped, “This is all a goddamn distraction, isn’t it? We are hunting a snipe while they have some other scheme going? Fucking clever little shits, ain’t they?”
Roland had to admit that this whole thing felt like a big con. Using low-rent hunters, trying to get the Lodge to come after him, and burying the client in layers of secrecy were all a great way to keep his attention away from whatever else might go on behind the scenes. He could not deny the cleverness of it. “We don’t know that for sure, but it certainly has that feel, doesn’t it?”
“The only reason it’s not working is because so few hunters took the bait and you haven’t been killing them,” Lucia opined. She gave herself a sarcastic golf clap, “Glad to see my influence has been beneficial, all the same.”
“He’s growing as a person,” Mindy snarked before Roland could say it, “we know.”
Lucia stayed on topic, “We need Manny or Sid to draw the client out more. How can we do that?”
“Unfortunately, we really can’t.” Roland and Lucia looked askance at Mindy when she said this. The little blond killer threw up her hands, “It just isn’t done. He’s gone to a lot of effort to stay anonymous, there is no way he is going to just agree to show up and meet some no-name street muscle or a loan shark.” She smirked like a teenager, “No matter how naked she agrees to get.”
“Options, then,” Roland barked at Mindy, “If I was paying you to hunt this guy down, how would you do it?”
The assassin stopped and thought hard for a minute, “It’s got to be this Sid character. We followed the courier to the money already. That’s Sid. This guy will be running the transactions through her to stay anonymous. He was smart enough to hide the nature of the deal from her as well. I think we will need to stage a bit of a show, here.”
“What the fuck does that mean” Roland hated the theater.
“Sid is holding the money. What if Manny, finding out that the job he took was a set-up, went after Sid? Then Sid could cancel the transaction with cause, and she’d have to return the money she’s holding in escrow. Sid will want no record of the cash ever going through her because, you know, Roland’s all scary and shit. So, she will have to send it as hard creds to either the client or one of his proxies. That will get us a big step closer than we’ve been getting, anyway.”
“Good idea,” Roland harrumphed, “We need to wrap this loose end up, because now I’m really goddamn nervous about whatever it is they are trying to distract me from.”
Mindy smiled, “We’ll need Manny to make a little noise over at the counting house. Something believable. You know, the sort of quality drama that will travel through the rumor mills.”
“You think he can manage it?” Lucia asked with a hint of incredulity.
Mindy’s smile fell away as she remembered her conversation with the young man. “I don’t think it will be a problem,” Mindy’s voice had lost its irreverent jocularity. “I’m pretty sure he was one of the Red Hats.” She shuddered, “The boy has seen and done some shit, you can just tell.”
Roland’s face drew tight and even Lucia paused a long moment.
“What the hell is a Red Hat doing here?” Roland asked, face wrinkling in confusion as to how he should feel. He had more experience than anyone in the room with that particular organization. None of it good.
“I don’t think he’s one anymore. I think he’s running or hiding or both. He’s scared, I can tell that much.”
“How sure are you, Mindy? Did he say anything to you?” Lucia wanted answers, her voice was pitched slightly higher than normal, a trace of fear betraying her intense apprehension with this revelation.
“We were talking about Roland, actually,” she gestured to the big cyborg, “and I realized that something about the jolly black giant here freaked him out.”
She paused, trying to broach this with some tact. Mindy and tact had never really become all that well acquainted, however. “He let it slip that perhaps you and he have a lot of the same...” she faltered, “... issues.”
Lucia looked confused, but Roland caught on right away and said it out loud, “You think Manny has woken up on top of a few corpses too, huh?”
“He’s the right age, right type of personality. If they got him young, they’d have had him running ops long before he understood what he was doing.”
Lucia gasped, “Holy shit. Our mole is a goddamn terrorist?”
“Cut him some slack, Lucia,” Roland’s voice was tight, but not ungentle, “I’m technically a war criminal. Mindy is a murderer.”
“But...” Lucia stammered, as her augmented mind processed the new information too quickly and with too many unpleasant results. As powerful as her brain was, her fear and anxiety were as magnified as the rest of her faculties, thus both had to be managed with care. The sudden realization their ranks were now occupied by a member of the most reviled terror cell in the solar system started a spiral of catastrophic potentiality that accelerated faster than her normally unfailing mental discipline could recover from. Her jaw flexed and her eyes grew wide as she imagined the thousands of potential conclusions this new information might engender.
It was Mindy who calmed her down, “He would have been a child, Lucia. Probably an orphan. They love that because it means they get to prey on his fear and anger to trick him into believing things that aren’t true. It would start with small stuff to desensitize him and then get gradually bigger until he was as vicious a zealot as the rest of them.”
She took Lucia’s shoulders in her tiny hands, “But he ran, Boss. Bailed. He didn't want to be that sort of thing, so there is a chance he’s not lost forever.”
“You figure he’s hiding from them?” Roland asked out loud, trying to keep the thread going.
“Pretty sure. He’s scared as hell. Scared of them, and he’s scared of you,” she pointed at Roland.
“Boss,” she continued, “this can be a good thing. He will be an excellent infiltrator, well trained in weapons and demo stuff. He’ll know how to navigate black markets and smuggling operations. He can think and fight at the same time, or he would not have lived this long, and he’d have never gotten away.”
What Mindy was doing here was deliberate. She was feeding Lucia’s brain data it could use to build positive outcomes. When Lucia could wrestle the massive bandwidth of her brain into manufacturing positive scenarios, it was usually enough to keep her anxiety from blossoming into a full-blown panic attack. “How can we use him?”
Roland watched Lucia’s jaw loosen, and the tension left her back and shoulders. Her breathing slowed, and her eyes refocused. Her forehead wore a thin sheen of sweat, but she nodded briskly to Mindy, “It’s okay. I’m okay. Just... that was a bit much to dump on me.” She still looked strained. Roland could tell she was still in the process of beating her panic into submission, “And yeah, this is probably not the best group of people to get all judge-y without more info.”
“I’ll feel him out,” Mindy offered helpfully. “But I seri
ously think he’s running from them.”
“The Red Hats do not deal nicely with folks who reject their ways,” Roland concurred.
Lucia spoke through gritted teeth, “Let’s bring him in and sort him out. Where is he now?”
A few brisk comm conversations and twenty minutes later, Manny was ringing the door chime at the office. The door opened to the nervous-looking young man, shuffling from foot to foot and wearing an expression of acute discomfort.
Lucia looked carefully at him, studying his face and mannerisms as if there would be some external sign giving him away as a fanatical terrorist. There was none, which frustrated her for reasons that did not make her feel good about herself. Life would be much easier if evil had a dress code. But it did not, and all she saw was a boy barely twenty-four years old, looking for all intents and purposes like he was about to be given detention for throwing spitballs.
Roland started the conversation. “All right Manuel, the job is getting a little more complicated. We need you to pretend to hit a counting house to give us a back door to the clients’ accounts.”
Manny looked very confused, “How do I ‘pretend’ to hit a counting house? Wave a gun at it and shout 'pew pew?’”
Mindy chuckled, and Roland scowled, “The owner is in on it. We are going to force him to take his money back as cash, and for that we need it to look like the broker is in trouble with you.”
“Ah,” Manny nodded, “I see.”
When he did not continue, Lucia jumped in, “Can you handle that?”
Manuel shrugged, “Sure. I guess. As long as everybody is in on it.”
Instead of dancing around the issue, Mindy just blurted out, “Were you a Red hat?”
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