Cally's War lota-6

by John Ringo

  “This is General Bernhard Beed. General Beed has been tasked with, basically, finding out everything he can about us. He is setting up his headquarters on Titan Base to coordinate the intelligence they develop. The office is covered as criminal investigations and military policing for Titan Base.” She touched the screen again and the hologram changed, revealing a young goddess in a captain’s uniform.

  “And my cover, Sinda Makepeace.”

  Fuck, she is stacked as all hell. And look at those power-lifter thighs. I think I’m just as glad Wendy will not see Cally in this cover.

  “Captain Makepeace is presently on Earth and due to board a shuttle for passage to Titan from Chicago O’Hare this Sunday at 0815. The preliminary plan is to make the switch at the airport. I go on the slab in an hour.” She tossed each of them a cube.

  “Here’s the rest of what the higher ups gave me and what I’ve been able to develop. Tommy and Jay, I need you to get a complete profile on everyone in that office, including voice and motion samples for Makepeace. Granpa, I need you to review the airport and Titan Base, plan the switch, plan the extraction after I get the data. Your cover is as crew on an in-system freighter taking manufactured goods for the shops in the business district. The local tong will cover you because you’ll be taking an unofficial cargo of partial doses of rejuv drugs. Apparently, there’s a worthwhile supply of troops willing to pay just about anything to take a little wear and tear off a dependant or two. They will, of course, pay you for the drugs — they’re just getting a particularly good deal. They don’t know why you want to be in the vicinity of Titan Base, and they don’t want to know.” She noticed their eyes were still fixed on the hologram and touched the screen of the PDA again, watching them blinking as the image vanished.

  “Does anybody have any questions? No? Great. I’ll head down to medical and see you back here in three hours.” She scooped up her PDA and headed for the door.

  “Uh… wait a minute, Cally,” Jay interrupted, looking around at Tommy and Papa, “I just wanted to say, and I think I speak for all of us, how glad we all are that you’re still going to be with us on this mission. And I’m sure I speak for all of us again when I say that I’m sure that, well, everything will work out just fine.”

  “Well… thank you, Jay.” Her forehead had wrinkled slightly, but her eyes warmed as she turned and left.

  “Will you be carrying a no-name pill?” Papa sounded like he thought it was a very good idea.

  “No. The secret of that pill is worth more than I am. And if I was taken, they could find it or, even if they didn’t, the chances of you getting to me inside the time limit would be small. That’s too much like a suicide pill for my liking. I don’t plan to be caught, but if I am, I’ll do everything the nuns taught us in SERE. Besides, there probably wouldn’t be time to make one up to my new stats. And, frankly, I don’t plan to need it.”

  “If that wasn’t the fastest briefing I’ve ever had, it’s close.” Tommy sat watching the door for a moment before taking the cube she’d tossed him and swapping it into the reader slot of his AID.

  “To the point, though.” O’Neal spat neatly into his cup, as he brought up a map of the Chicago air and space port.

  “Okay, I feel better now that I see what she pulled together and what she left for us. Cally always has had a good sense of the hacking she could get away with.” He walked over and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Jay, you take the cover, I’ll take the personnel files of the other staff.”

  “Wouldn’t have wanted to say it in front of Cally, but the captain has some damn fine architecture,” Jay said appreciatively.

  “Yeah, but her nose is a tad off-center and she’s always going to need makeup to darken her eyebrows and stuff,” Tommy commented.

  “You noticed her nose and eyebrows?” Jay sounded disbelieving. Papa O’Neal just shook his head.

  “Briefly. Very briefly,” Tommy grinned.

  “You guys keep working. I’ve got something to take care of. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Papa had a stubborn look on his face.

  * * *

  Silverton, Texas, Saturday, May 25

  Johnny Stuart was not a morning person. Unfortunately, the Coburn girl had the morning off to go to the dentist and, like most kids, Mary Lynn was an early riser. Which is why he was sitting up in a rumpled bed, rubbing his eyes, while a wriggling five year old climbed into his lap.

  Mary Lynn had the dark brown curls of her mother, but his own facial features. They just looked better on her. After the cancer had taken his wife, three years ago, the doctors had told him that it raised Mary Lynn’s risk considerably. If he’d had some pull, he might have been able to get the new drugs to save her, but Sue hadn’t much held with pull, and the cancer had come on sudden and before he could do anything, Sue was gone and him left to do the best he could by Mary Lynn. He didn’t understand much about the numbers in what the doctor said, not having got much past high school algebra, but what he did understand was that he owed it to Sue never to be in a position to be unable to help his sick kin, their daughter especially, again.

  So he had set about going to work for the people with the most pull he could find, getting a reputation for resourcefulness and the willingness to get things done no matter what it took. And plenty of times it had taken things that were way outside the normal rules. But a man who wouldn’t break a few rules for his own was no kind of man at all. That was the best thing about his recent promotion. If he could pull this off and keep the damned aliens happy, he and Mary Lynn would never lack for the best of care again.

  “How’s my Sunshine this morning!” He began tickling her ribs mercilessly, until she squirmed away from him and off the bed.

  “Silly Daddy,” she said. “I’m hungry. Where’s Traci?”

  “Traci had to go to the dentist, Sunshine. Just you and me this morning. Let me make some coffee and I’ll see if we can find some cereal.” He yawned.

  “Lucky Charms!” She ran off towards the kitchen, giggling.

  “Okay, I think we’ve still got some,” he called, pulling up his worn cotton pajama bottoms a bit as he got out of bed. Probably ought to get around to replacing those. He trudged into the kitchen and made coffee, taking out two bowls while it dripped through the old-fashioned appliance. He was really just back in Silverton winding up his affairs. The promotion meant moving them to Chicago and a lot of travel for him. He was going to hate being away from Mary Lynn so much, but it was for her own good, so he could protect her better. It was hard, but she’d understand when she was older.

  He had tried to get Traci Coburn to move with them, so Mary Lynn wouldn’t have to change babysitters, but Traci hadn’t wanted to leave her family. He could understand that. It took a real cosmopolitan individual to deal with city people and country people alike. And if there was one thing Johnny was, it was good with people. The trick was to tell them as much of what they wanted to hear with as few actual lies as possible. He’d always been gifted that way, but in the years since Sue’s death he’d gone to it with a will and developed it to a high art.

  He set the bowl down in front of Mary Lynn and sat down with his own breakfast, having his AID pull up his morning e-mail. He could see right away today was going to be tricky. The Tir’s secretary had left a message asking what he had turned up on Worth’s death, and the bald truth was that despite a week and a half of trying, he had squat. So the task of the day was going to be coming up with something that, while it might not be accurate, would be convincing enough that it would do until he could start finding the real thing. He sent her an e-mail telling her he’d be sending a report first thing Monday morning. Best not to put them off any longer than that.

  Smart money was that it was a hit, of course. But he wasn’t going to keep his new job by restating the obvious. He needed something and he needed it now. Maybe a little misdirection would help. People died all the time. If he couldn’t find anything about Worth’s death, maybe he coul
d find something about some other death and claim that they were linked. It didn’t really matter if they were or not. Paranoia always played well, and it was like that numberology con — you could link anything to anything else if you tried hard enough. Some of his best rumors had been built that way. Besides, if he turned up anything later that contradicted the link, chances were it would give him something real about the Worth business, and he’d just be doing a good job. And if he didn’t turn up anything contradictory, well, then there would be nothing to detract from his story, would there?

  * * *

  Once Mary Lynn was safely occupied by the big pink and black bumblebee surrounded by a mob of smiling children that seemed to have taken over their vidscreen, Johnny opened a tray table and had his AID project a virtual keyboard and a holographic screen. The trick was to find anyone else who had ever worked for the Darhel and died, preferably since Worth bought it, but before would do in a pinch.

  “Leanne, I need you to search the database of people who have done work for our organization. List me anybody who’s died or disappeared between May ninth of this year and now,” he said.

  “Worth, Charles. Reported missing as of May thirteenth, death is likely. Fiek, Samuel. Missing as of May thirteenth, death is likely. Greer, Michael. Dead as of May fifteenth, purposeful termination of contract. Samuels, Vernard. Dead as of May nineteenth, car crash. Petane, Charles. Dead as of May twenty-first, drug overdose. List complete,” it recited.

  Okay, Fiek and Worth were almost certainly linked, which meant they disappeared after six forty-five p.m. on May tenth, when a boy remembered delivering a pizza to a man at Fiek’s apartment. The pizza boy had picked Fiek’s face out of a slideshow of images, after he handed him a half dozen twenties.

  Fiek had no known reason to have a particular grudge against Worth, and vice versa. More to the point, the Darhel had checked their local bank accounts, and their personal numbered bank accounts in discreet countries, that each man had set up secretly, and their money was untouched since Worth had drawn out a modest amount of cash on the morning of the tenth. It was almost inconceivable that someone who would work for the Darhel would run without their money.

  If he’d just had to guess, he’d have said whatever happened was at Worth’s Chicago apartment. Fiek lived in the same building, and although Worth didn’t actually live there most of the time, he frequently used the place when he was in town. He’d searched both apartments himself, along with a cousin who used to work in the sheriff’s department in Silverton. Bobby had said that Worth’s apartment looked a little too clean to him, and pointed out the lack of dust and fluff, especially below the wall with the kinky crap bolted onto it. And what his dead boss had done with that, Johnny hoped he’d never have to know. At least, not unless it was just business.

  Getting his cousin set up had been the kind of thing he’d taken this job for in the first place, and it made him proud. A man liked to be able to take care of his kin. And after Bobby got himself fired for being high on the job, Johnny had seen the opportunity in the situation and had helped Bobby out, getting the nanodrugs to get the monkey off his back as well as getting him an income his ex-wife couldn’t get her hands on. That was a situation he was glad to fix. Brenda was a two-bit whore and that was Jimmy Simms’ kid, not Bobby’s, and everybody in town knew it. The judge just also knew Jimmy was a worthless drunk who still lived with his momma and so had stuck poor Bobby with the bill for the cheating bitch’s brat. Johnny liked kids as well as anybody, hell, he’d do anything for Mary Lynn and damned near had, but a thing like that just wasn’t right.

  So anyway, Worth and Fiek got done in his apartment sometime over the weekend of the tenth. And that was all he had. Worth had changed his appearance and changed his pattern so often that normal search techniques to see where he’d been and who’d seen him last just wouldn’t work with him. And that meant that unless Johnny could pull a good story out of the air on short notice, his ass was in a crack.

  “Okay, Leanne, give me a file on each of them, in print where you’ve got it, on my desk top, with all we know about each man’s death.” No women. That was funny, but then a lot of their field people were guys, so it could be just coincidence. All right, before weeding through the small stuff, he’d get a big picture.

  “Leanne, gimme a map of the world, about so big.” He spread his arms, watching a holographic illusion of a large flat screen project in the air in front of him.

  “Put a pin in it where each guy died. Waitaminute, is that three? Magnify Chicago. Who’s that third pin?”

  “What third pin, please?” The AID sounded confused. They were pretty smart, but sometimes they didn’t track too well.

  “Which one of the organization deaths you listed for me, besides Fiek and Worth, was in Chicago?”

  “Petane, Charles.”

  “Well, isn’t that something. Thanks, Leanne. Go to standby.” There was a trick to managing the AIDs that a couple of old veterans had brought home after the war. The big point was if you were planning anything to keep your thoughts to yourself. They recorded everything, all the time, but so far nobody had found a way as far as he could tell to read a man’s thoughts. So the trick with something like this was to keep all his thoughts to himself, read everything in the file, connect the dots, even if they didn’t strictly speaking go together, and then lay out his case talking to the AID, making it sound like thinking aloud. When you could record a whole hell of a lot, it was easy to forget about the things you couldn’t record. Besides, who knew, maybe he’d find something.

  Okay, Petane was the drug overdose. That was good. You could always make something suspicious out of a drug overdose. Bad was that it wasn’t another disappearance, but he could just argue that “they” were crafty enough to change methods. Coroner had ruled it an accident, but that didn’t matter. First thing would be to have his own people get hold of any stored tissue samples and run them for anything he could use. Found in his mistress’s bed. Had to be hard on the wife. Mistress had been drugged, cops figured by him, was unconscious while he died next to her. And, not to put too fine a point on it, forensics said he hadn’t come. Well, didn’t that stink to high heaven. Good. No telling who had really offed the puke. Could have been the wife. Unlikely as hell to have been anything to do with the Darhel. He had only done something useful once and it had been thirty years ago. Still, make the story good enough and it was a whole lot better than reporting in empty handed.

  * * *

  Under a cornfield in Indiana, Sunday, May 26, 04:00

  They were in the same conference room as Thursday for their final pre-mission check. The cheap folding conference table and bare Galplas walls didn’t improve with familiarity, but the coffee was good, and the corn muffins were… well, they were at least predictable, anyway.

  “Okay, people, one more time through. Cally, you first.” Papa O’Neal, with sandy brown hair and looking rather strange without his usual wad of tobacco, spitting absentmindedly into a mug, nonetheless.

  “Baggage check-in at six, security around six-forty-five, in the women’s room across from the gate Sierra-six departure lounge by seven-oh-five. Once there, if I didn’t see Granpa and Tommy on the way in, I send an ‘arrived’ text message so you know I’m in place. I wait until my PDA tells me that the target is in motion, then when she enters, I inject her with my handy-dandy tranquilizer, trade clothes with her with Tommy’s help, go back out and catch the shuttle to Titan Base, et cetera,” she said, pointing to Jay. For the insertion, her silver-blond hair was unkempt, and the white sweatpants and oversized men’s sweatshirt with horizontal blue and white stripes made the most of her figure, most very definitely being the word. Contact lenses muted Sinda’s cornflower blue eyes to a nondescript grayish hazel. Cheap, zero-prescription glasses were fitted poorly enough that they kept sliding down her nose a bit, and she pushed them back nervously, furtively nibbling at a candy bar now and then.

  “Hey, how come she gets chocolate and we get t
hese?” Tommy said, staring disgustedly at one of the muffins.

  “It’s a prop,” she responded haughtily, and harrumphed, wiggling a bit as if settling into a new suit of clothes as she got back into character. “Go on, Jay.” But she surreptitiously slipped Tommy a candy bar from her purse.

  “At five-forty-five, I go through baggage claim and check a dummy bag. By six-fifteen I’m headed through security. By seven, I’m at the S-six departure lounge, seated, with a cup of ice water from one of the snack counters. When Makepeace enters the lounge and sits, I move nearby. I take a brief video capture of the target and her location and forward it to the team so Cally knows where to sit and which stuff is ‘hers.’ If the target doesn’t go to the ladies’ room on her own by seven thirteen, I make a klutz of myself and spill my drink in her lap. I apologize profusely, and as soon as she heads for the door I hit the button on the screen of my PDA which alerts you three. When Cally comes back out as Makepeace, she touches her right ear to confirm the switch. I proceed to the rendezvous with Tommy and O’Neal, arriving no later than eight-thirty. I change clothes, we return to the port by the freight entrance, board the freighter, and take off for Titan at eleven-fifty. Tommy?”

  “Papa and I arrive at the freight entrance in the vehicle at oh-six-forty-five, dressed as crew, with Jay’s clothes and cleaning crew uniforms in the trunk. We change on the freighter and retrieve the cleaning cart stashed there. We have until oh-seven-hundred to make it to the Sierra-six departure lounge women’s room. I send Cally an ‘arrived’ text message. We put up an out-of-service sign but admit Cally. We remove the sign and wheel the cart aside towards the men’s room when we get the word the target is in motion. We politely turn anyone but the target away. When the target enters the restroom, we return with the sign and wait until Cally signals. Then I push the cart in and help as needed with the clothes switch and put Makepeace in the bottom of the trash bin, covering her with appropriate debris. We maneuver Makepeace back to the car, add the wig from the glove box, douse her with the cheap beer and whiskey samples in same, drive her to rendezvous one, Hiberzine her, and hand her off to the cleaning crew for live handling. Make rendezvous two no later than oh-eight-thirty and proceed like Jay said. Papa?” He licked bits of chocolate off his fingers before wadding the wrapper and making a basketball shot into the trash can in the corner.