“I did,” Marissa said. “For months, I pretended to be your girlfriend even though it was supposed to be a short-term assignment. I pretended even as you and I grew closer and it became impossible to tell what was real and what wasn’t.”
I frowned. “I thought it was real.”
“It couldn’t be real while I was under orders,” Marissa said, looking disgusted, but I couldn’t tell if it was with the situation or herself. There was more she wasn’t telling me and I realized now, whatever her secret was, it was something she felt guilty about. “Then the pregnancy happened, and I wanted to do something for myself.”
I had a suspicion of where she was going with this. “You cheated on me?”
“Can you cheat on someone in a fake relationship?” Marissa asked, using the single most devastating words she possibly could have.
I was still for the next few seconds. The words of S resounded in my ear and I tried to avoid saying something I’d regret.
“Who?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
I was angry because she’d done it to hurt me. To spit on our relationship. A fake relationship, apparently. Just like all my others.
Marissa relaxed, perhaps realizing I wasn’t that sort of person. Contract killer or not.
“Are you sure—” Marissa asked.
“Tell me.” There was no threat in my voice, just icy cold disdain.
Marissa answered, finally. “Gerard.”
“When?”
“Last month. The twelfth. When we were having a layover after recruiting W.”
“And so I lose another friend.”
Marissa looked down. “It wasn’t to hurt you, G.”
“It was exactly to hurt me. To strike a blow for your freedom against someone who’d been a patsy for you this entire time.” I was angry and let that anger pour fourth, even if I let her think it was because of her nonexistent cheating. Hell, I still slept with prostitutes. If she wanted sexual comfort elsewhere, I wouldn’t have cared. I’d offered to make a Devil’s threesome for her birthday once. The fact that she’d chosen Gerard for her supposed paramour meant she wanted her evasion to be painful. Something to anger me so I didn’t question the details—she should have known better.
“G—” Marissa started to say.
I clenched my teeth. “I even killed my creator because of you.”
“You wanted to kill Doctor Gordon,” Marissa said, her expression darkening. “Don’t blame that on me. Hell, I shouldn’t have left you alone with him. We were supposed to take him in alive.”
“You’re right,” I corrected myself. “You shouldn’t have left me alone with him. You knew what I was going to do and chose to side with me over the President. It’s why I was glad to betray the Society.”
“I—”
“We’ll talk about business,” I said. “I won’t respond to anything else. I need time to process this.”
Marissa stared at me, then lowered her gaze. Now was the time to come clean with the truth if she was ever going to.
She didn’t.
It was a long plane ride to Tokyo and then train ride to Kobe.
But a quiet one.
Chapter Twelve
Rather than head directly to Japan in the private jet, which would announce to the world “Assassins are onto you, Persephone,” I decided to have it go on to Seoul, South Korea instead. Once there, Marissa and I exchanged clothes with a pair of actors I’d hired independently of Strike Force-22.
My hired help wouldn’t be able to fool any agents of the Society up close, but I suspected our foes relied more on tips from locals and electronically gathered intelligence than professionals. The actors had been paid to ride the plane to Beijing and meet with two local businessmen who were to come to the plane and spend time there.
There were plenty of ways that plan could go wrong, such as if the plane was bugged or the pilot compromised, but a lot of spycraft depended on simply throwing shit at the wall and hoping some of it stuck. Either way, Marissa and I took on the identities of fair-haired Canadian tourists working as environmentalists before taking a boat ride around Japan to Kobe. Kobe was the sixth-largest city on the island nation and the capital of Hyōgo Prefecture on Honshu.
It was a beautiful port city and just the right mix of out-of-the-way as well as right-on-top-of-the-action for someone like Persephone to hide. Plenty of idiots in the intelligence community focused their efforts exclusively on the biggest cities in the world or the middle of nowhere.
You never really considered the thousands of places in the middle. It was why my go-to spot for hiding in the event of needing to lay low was Cardiff. Kobe was also isolated from the economic meltdown affecting much of the world following the stock market crash on Black Wednesday. As the International Refugee Society remained preoccupied, the forces they controlled were spinning increasingly out of control. Puppets placed in power found themselves forced to act in jobs they had no idea how to perform while bad faith actors moved freely. Three European nations had already gone bankrupt since January, and at least six wars had been started. There were already calls for Japan’s Prime Minister to commit suicide, and I hoped that was just the public being funny about cultural stereotypes—but I somehow doubted it.
It wasn’t that difficult to smuggle my equipment past the locals since my sniper rifle, explosives, bugs, and other items all fit into a single carry-on case that looked like camera equipment. My only regret was I’d had to deal with dozens of people commenting on how I should just use my cellphone. In any case, after depositing Marissa at a hotel far from the Hotel Ozara Kobe, I disguised myself as a Japanese man with a surgical mask, ball cap, a new set of clothes, wig, contacts, and opaque sunglasses.
It was a simple enough disguise, but the best ones were. I was medium build, and that allowed a lot of flexibility in terms of appearance. Besides, since surgical masks were the local symbol for having a cold, no one wanted to get too close.
It was about nine in the evening, local time, when I was set up on the top of a construction site about one and a half kilometers away from the hotel. I’d assembled my sniper rifle, a computer monitoring system, and a thermos of extra-potent coffee at a workstation directly parallel to the hotel. I was wearing a steel-colored plastic tarp over myself like a parka since it was pouring down rain. The construction site was mostly red steel girders at this part with a narrow set of wooden walkways in a square formation, an open-air elevator leading down to the finished portions of the construction several dozen feet below, and tools spread about. The shoddy job was due to the fact the company had run out of money roughly halfway through construction and was currently in the process of litigation over who, if anyone, would take it over. Their ill fortune was my gain.
The skyline was lit up with lights, Japan being a country that never really slept these days, and the Hotel Ozara Kobe was the tallest completed building in the city. It was shaped like a jet-black monolith rising from the ground with the top floors, notably, lacking windows. The Taniguchi-Yumi Yakuza clan was the largest in the country and one of the few “public” criminal organizations with access to Black Technology. Its influence had been growing in recent years with police repression backing off in the face of their moving from a multimillion-dollar organization to a multibillion-dollar one. It was difficult to say what Persephone had offered them to give her sanctuary, but it can’t have been good.
“We can try this tomorrow, G,” Marissa said over our cyberlink, still trying to act friendly to me. “There’s no sign of Persephone leaving.”
“Never let a target out of your sight once you get a look at her,” I muttered. She could pick up my conversation since I had our link set to speaker.
“You know that.”
I checked the scope of my K2015 sniper rifle, which had color night vision as well as the ability to see through walls. I wasn’t clear on the science of it, but honestly, it made sniper work a little too easy. I wasn�
��t the world’s best sniper, but thanks to my computer brain, I could make calculations for the wind and Coriolis effect, which most humans couldn’t do. Given my electronic eyes, I was capable of shooting in excess of two kilometers. That put me in very select company indeed. Indeed, the only reason I didn’t have a claim to be the world’s best sniper now was a handful of better Letters, two military cyborgs, and a Canadian prodigy in Afghanistan.
“Can you even hit her through all that concrete?” Marissa asked.
“If I had to,” I said, tapping my computer keyboards. I’d purchased a relatively tiny drone, modified it, and used it to get close to the side of the building’s penthouse before attaching it. The only thing I couldn’t buy in a store was the C-10 I’d added to the bottom. If I chose to, I could blow a hole in the wall and shoot Persephone through it. That was Plan B if I determined I didn’t want to recruit her. After Marissa’s untrustworthiness, I was feeling less and less generous toward my ex-colleagues.
“Then you should take the shot,” Marissa said.
“No,” I said. “Not until I have more information. Have you got the jamming cleared up?”
“Yes,” Marissa asked. “How did you get a bug in her room, anyway?”
“Cheesecake,” I said, simply. “The Yakuza have men guarding the kitchens, the waiters, and the delivery carts, but I figured they’d prefer their food fresh from the market every day. When I saw they had cheesecake on the list, I put the bug in there.”
“Why cheesecake?”
“Almost all Asians are lactose intolerant.”
“And you’re not worried about Persephone eating it?”
“She hates the crust. One benefit of knowing a target this intimately. Worst case scenario, though, is she eats it.”
“See, this is the G I remember.”
I probably could have gone with several other methods of getting the bug up there, from planting it on one of the guards to using something shaped like a fly, but this had felt most appropriate. Besides, it didn’t matter how I got the bug inside her office, only that I did.
“Just patch it on through,” I said aloud, leaning down to look through the scope.
Seconds later, a holographic three-dimensional image of the interior of the hotel’s penthouse was beamed into my right eye through a single beam of concentrated red light. It said something about how science could go three steps forward like this, and yet they hadn’t been able to produce a microphone that was better than the soundproofing of the room.
The interior of the penthouse was beautiful, with modern art on the walls, a chocolate fountain on a table full of confections, and a massive entertainment center. It was a kind of sad luxury for someone who was clearly not enjoying their imprisonment, and I wondered how badly Persephone wanted to get back to her job.
The room had close to a dozen tattooed Yakuza guards standing around. Despite Japan’s strict anti-gun laws, they all had Uzis and shotguns with a couple even sporting assault rifles. All of them had been heavily modified with built-in silencers, though, and it took me a second to note that the soundproofing built into the building would also help them do whatever they needed to do in peace.
Persephone herself was sitting on the couch in a casual pair of slacks and a blouse while looking over a laptop. My mentor seemed to be somewhat haggard and had visibly aged in the past six months, perhaps because the longevity treatments she’d received as part of the Society were no longer being applied. It was also possible she’d simply not put on her makeup on, though I’d never taken her for a vain one.
I did a double take then as a tall, long-haired Asian man with pale skin and angular features walked into the room. He was gorgeous, with model-quality looks, but moved with the practiced gentility of a killer. His clothing was custom tailored—a long trench coat over a ten-thousand-dollar business suit I recognized as done by an Italian tailor named Alfonzo Allegri. I knew because he was my tailor too.
“Shit,” I muttered. “E.”
I was widely considered to be the third best Letter and the fifth or sixth best assassin in the world. I personally disagreed with that assessment of my abilities, but either way E was somewhere around ninth or tenth on that list. He was meticulous, methodical, calculating. His only weakness was his assistant and lover Peter Starikov. Whom we’d picked up last month. Interesting. That could be very good or very bad.
“E is here? That makes things more difficult,” Marissa said.
“You could say that,” I said, trying to suppress my anger over her earlier lies. “Any word on the other two anti-Tribunal missions?”
“Yes,” Marissa said. “Neither good. W managed to kill Colonel Matthews’s body double, a Shell with his appearance. The actual managed to get away in the confusion. The Seal team sent after Viktor Nechayev suffered two-thirds casualties.”
“I see,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Hopefully, they’ll let us do our job like professionals.”
“Cheesecake forever.” Marissa’s joke was forced.
“I should have used the coleslaw,” I muttered. “No one eats the coleslaw.”
A painful wail filled my ears along with a terrible static, which I suspected was another bit of petty revenge on Marissa’s part. Afterward, I heard a clear and coherent set of voices which soon centered around Persephone and E speaking.
“Our contact in the White House says your identity has been compromised,” E said in French. An easy method of keeping their conversations secret. “We should prepare to move you.”
“Do they know my location?” Persephone said, also in French.
“G is said to have been sent to deal with it, but he’s in Seoul and moving onto Beijing from where our spies indicated.”
“Then they’re on another wild goose chase,” Persephone said. “We have a meeting with Nechayev and can’t miss it.”
“Use a phone,” E said, sounding contemptuous of the woman who once controlled our lives. “It’s too risky otherwise.”
“Hernando’s death has complicated matters,” Persephone said. “SF-22 is closing in us. We need to figure out another avenue to transfer funds which we can only access together.”
“That seems a very poor system for managing money,” E said.
Persephone snorted. “It kept us from assassinating each other until now. The only reason I’m part of this little group’s surviving board is that Clark was stupid enough to share his code with me. Right now, I only control a third of our resources, and that’s not enough to defeat Douglas’ pet project.”
“G is dangerous,” E replied. “You should worry about him rather than SF22.”
“G is a fool,” Persephone said. “He fell hard for a not-even-all-that-pretty face and ran to the government’s apron strings the moment things got tough.”
“Then why was he your favorite operative? Why is he still alive? Why are we in hiding and discussing what to do now that our treasurer is dead?” E said, showing surprising respect for me. We’d never been that close—not like me and S—so I believed his sincerity.
“Hernando’s loss is less important than Delphi’s,” Persephone said. “Another issue we’ll deal with at the meeting.”
“As you wish. About Peter—” E asked.
“Oh, for god sakes,” Persephone said. “We’ll get him back after the election is over. I still can’t see why you’re so obsessed with him. Assistants are designed to appeal to Letters. They’re as artificial as you.”
“What we had was real,” E said. “Would you be so comfortable if your husband was in danger?”
“I wanted to have him killed on my way out,” Persephone snapped. “However, having them and my children as potential hostages keeps them from trying to seek out someone truly worth imprisoning.”
E looked away in disgust. It was too much to hope for that they’d discuss when and where the meeting was going to take place. As useful as this conversation was, especially considering I’d fully expected to wait hours before anything was said, I hadn’t g
otten anything about when Nechayev was going to arrive. If he did, though, that was an opportunity to take two members of the Tribunal down. Better still, it would almost certainly lead me to Matthews.
“Should we tell the White House?” Marissa asked.
“No,” I said. “We keep the circle small. Very small.”
“I agree,” Marissa said. “The Alphabet agencies have been useless so far.”
“E says they have a mole in the White House,” I said. “Which means not even the President can be trusted.”
The elevator beside me started moving upward. Looking, I saw it contained six Taniguchi-Yumi shatei or younger brothers. They were all wearing raincoats, but I saw their tattoos, and each of them was carrying a baton, knife, or chain. I had my pistol smuggled in so I wasn’t exactly all that afraid of the group, but the fact that they’d found me disturbed me to no end. I also didn’t want to create six new corpses, which, unlike in many parts of the world, might get noticed here. If I did that, I might as well just blow the wall of the hotel and take down Persephone now.
“I’ll call you back, Marissa,” I said, staring at them. “Something just came up.”
“What’s going on?” Marissa asked, only for me to break our cyberlink.
“Hey guys,” I said in unaccented Japanese, stretching my arms out.
“What’s happening? I’m just here taking some pictures.”
“You’re coming up with us, gaijin,” the lead one said back. He was tall for a Japanese man, with coal black eyes and slick black hair. A screaming wolf was tattooed on his neck with two serpents coiled on his cheek. He was holding a chain in his hand and there was something off about it, not the least being there was a control panel on the end of it.
I pulled out my Black Falcon pistol, this time loaded with mere armor-piercing rounds, and waved it at them. “I don’t think so. I think you gentleman are going to get back on your elevator and go to the bottom floor.”
I already had an alternate escape route planned. Unfortunately, their presence was going to result in my having to accelerate my plans. I was going to have to break into the hotel after this and talk to Persephone directly. I gave that a fifty-fifty chance of not killing me.
Agent G: Saboteur Page 8
