by John Ringo
He wasn't all that worried about these flashy guys. They'd run and hidden. Most of them were smart enough to hide their families, but dumb enough to tip their hands that they cared. Any of them who were smart sons of bitches would have cut the dead weight. Women were cheap. Besides, this method inherently targeted the stupid ones who hadn't even done a decent job of cutting out.
It had never occurred to Bobby that he wasn't particularly bright, either.
Kerrie Maise added another hole to her belt with Joey's pocket knife, wrinkling her nose at the baggy slacks and the salt cellars at her collar. She absently rubbed at the scars on her right knuckles. She had not intended to lose weight again. It was just that even after three years of treatment for bulimia, if she didn't consciously plan six small meals a day, her weight tended to slip again. All the turmoil from that mess with Keith had been so upsetting that she had frequently been too nauseated to keep anything down. Ginger snaps were high on her list for the supermarket run. No nutrition to speak of, but they were calories she could trust to stay down pretty good. It wasn't like she could find herself a new shrink—not as hot as the whole family was right now. It was going to be one hell of a lonely New Year's Eve.
"No, Pinky, we cannot get a dog. Not right now, and no, I don't know when." She sighed. His plaintive reply was unintelligible, but she could guess the gist of it. "I don't know means I don't know. Now quit whining at me before the Darhel come to eat you." That shut him up.
Pinky's chubby face and huge brown eyes, not unlike a puppy himself under the silky black curls, stared up at her, his forehead crinkling slightly in worry. "How about I go play now?" he asked seriously. Sometimes the boy was scarily smart.
Kerrie closed the knife and flipped on the safety catch. "Give this back to Joey on your way," she said. She didn't think twice of handing the little boy the knife. Not only was he biddable, but Bane Sidhe children started weapons' safety training at age two. He wasn't opening that knife short of an instruction from an adult or a bona fide emergency.
Pinky carefully did not look excited as Mommy handed him the knife. It was Joey's pride and joy; Pinky had often asked for a chance to look at it, but Joey was stingy and wouldn't share. As soon as he got out of his mother's sight, he ran down the hall as quietly and quickly as his legs would carry him. There was one place he could count on privacy to examine the treasure before he had to hand it off to Joey.
The basement stairs always creaked, just like the ones back home. Mommy's room was far enough away that she wouldn't hear, but he didn't know exactly where Joey was. He followed his customary sneaky route, which consisted of stepping to the very edge of the wall, right on top of the nails. Only the third stair from the bottom creaked if you just stepped on the nails. Pinky knew it was the third one because he was a very smart boy. Everybody said so, because he could already count all the way to ten, and knew his numbers, too. He had another little secret, though. Pinky liked secrets, because it was practice for when he grew up. He was going to be a spy. The grown ups thought he didn't know, but he suspected Uncle Neddie was a spy, because of the way he talked secrets sometimes with Daddy. That didn't make him a very good spy, but it did make him cool.
He figured if he showed he could keep lots of good secrets, then when he grew up, maybe Uncle Neddie would help him get a spy job, too. One of Pinky's most precious secrets was that he couldn't just count to ten. He could count all the way to a hundred. He had more reasons than one to keep this ability to himself. One was that Joey tended to punch him when Mommy or some other adult wasn't looking, for "showing off." The biggest reason was because he had discovered that secrets built upon secrets and secrets. The second secret was that Uncle Caspar, whose house they were staying at while Daddy was away with the other soldiers, had this really neat, huge trunk in the basement. It was only partway full with old clothes and papers and stuff, but the empty part was big enough for a very small boy to fold up and hide real comfortable. He had a flashlight, crayons, and paper hidden under the other stuff. When he wanted a little very special privacy to examine some treasure he shouldn't have, or when he was tired of Joey bossing him around, he could sneak down to the big trunk and hide inside, for as long as he wanted.
One reason nobody would look for him there was the trunk had a combination lock on it. Joey had once, very snottily, Pinky thought, told him about combination locks and all about how he knew how they worked while he tried and tried to get it open. There was nothing Pinky liked better than to secretly do what Joey couldn't do. Joey thought he was so smart just because he was six. Pinky laughed inside about this a lot. He knew six-year-olds who weren't as smart as he was. Why, Pinky had been smart enough to stand behind Uncle Caspar, three times, while the man worked the lock's spinny dial. He had made sure to ask a lot of questions about everything he could see in the basement while he watched that lock. Grown ups pretty soon quit noticing anything you did if you were asking them enough dumb questions. All he had to do is imagine he was Joey and think of what questions Joey would be asking.
Pinky was good enough at the combination lock by now that he could even think about other things while he worked it. He hadn't realized he could do that before he noticed the lock opening in his small hands.
He had lots and lots of tricks. Tricks were fun. Secrets built on secrets. It had taken him a long time to bend the coat hanger just right, so he could leave it through the crack in the opening of the trunk. With a lot of practice, now he could hold the lock on the end, and close the lid so the latch came down. The first couple of times were scary, because he'd had to work hard to get the lock back out so he could get back out. He was an unusually patient boy, if only when a secret was involved. By now, he could lift the combination lock so its curvy part went right back through the little loop thingy, and move it around so it almost looked closed.
He'd played spy a lot. The calm game came quick and easy, the combination lock sliding right into place, the side pulling smoothly even so it almost looked closed. He scrabbled around for his flashlight, but decided not to turn it on. If it was Jenny Sorenson from next door, they'd be trying to find him to make him play with her. Some girls were okay, but Jenny was yucky. His mother kept telling him he was too young to think girls were yucky yet. Easy for her to say. She didn't have to play with Jenny.
Sure enough, it wasn't long before Jenny came clomping down the stairs, calling his name. It was almost smart of her to guess he'd be in the basement. Almost. Maybe the worst thing about Jenny was she had black curly hair and brown eyes, too, and everybody was always saying how cute they looked together, like twins. Yuck.
The doorbell rang again and Pinky felt a lift of hope. Maybe Jenny wasn't supposed to go out and her mother had come to make her go home. Please, oh please, he prayed silently. Very silently.
The firecracker popping noises upstairs told him immediately that whoever was at the door, it wasn't Jenny's mom. Pinky had been to the range with Mommy and Daddy lots of times. He knew what those firecracker sounds were, and he suddenly knew several things. Daddy wasn't on an ordinary mission, they wouldn't be going back home, and Mommy was upstairs dying. Mommy didn't carry her gun, and she was a lousy shot. He hoped Joey was out playing, but the awful high-pitched shriek told him he was wrong. Some small voice in the back of his head told him he ought to do something to save Jenny, but for some reason he couldn't move. He was scared, and realized he'd peed his pants like a baby.
It was almost like all of it was happening to somebody else. He was still frozen, staring through the crack, when more popping went off, a lot louder. Jenny's brains blew across the room. Then three men and a woman clomped down the stairs, looking all over the basement. Their eyes skated right across his trunk, and Pinky knew, just like somebody else was telling him, that it was a good time to play the calm game. A spy—a spy—is always calm under pressure.
Pinky breathed real slow and quiet. How weird that everything was happening so slow, like ketchup out of a bottle. He blinked twice, noticing tha
t light was coming in through a round hole in the side of the trunk. His heart pounded loud as he realized the bullet must have just missed him, and he hadn't noticed it. Maybe while they were shooting Jenny. Maybe it was even the bullet that hit Jenny. He swallowed hard.
The murderers looked around so much that he got a good look at all of their faces. Finally he heard some guy yell from upstairs, "Status!"
"One target down, down here. Got the younger kid," the brown haired man yelled back up the stairs.
It dawned on Pinky that they thought Jenny was him. As they clomped back up the stairs, he knew they weren't looking anymore for him because Jenny was dead on the floor, right over there. A whimper escaped his throat, finally, but nobody came back.
Too scared to climb out of the trunk, and deeply ashamed of it, Pinky cried himself to sleep. That was where Uncle Caspar found him four hours later, when he came home from work.
"Oh my God! Pinky?" Caspar Andreotti stared in shocked disbelief at the five-year-old asleep in his document chest. All of the material was old, paper or textile, and relatively nonsensitive. It also all had at least a little significance to his family's multigenerational work in the Bane Sidhe organization, and had strong sentimental value. The stink of urine, quite unremarkable in the circumstances, told him that restoration of anything he kept would be necessary. He dismissed the thought, irritated at the irrelevancies that always sprung to mind in the worst circumstances.
Coming home to find his house drenched in blood, with a pair of clenched fists painted in black on his living room wall, and the people who embodied the very raison d'etre of his safe house—he laughed at the bitter joke—dead in pools on the floor, counted as "worst circumstances." The use of the mafia revenge symbol was an ironic misdirection. The Darhel collaborators used the legends of his own ancestry to hide their message in plain sight. In a Chicago suburb, the implication that he and the murders were connected to old-fashioned organized crime guaranteed the police would give the matter only a pro forma inspection. This—keeping the cops out—was good for everyone, but it made him want to puke. As if the bodies themselves didn't.
But now, miracle of miracles, the youngest of his charges had somehow survived. The next question was, who was the other child on the floor? He shook his head and lifted the boy out. The waking child jerked and whimpered a plaintive, "Mommy . . ."
"Shhhh. Pinky, I know, but you have got to be very quiet a little longer. You know how to be quiet, right?" Caspar kicked himself—what a stupid thing to say. Of course the boy knew how to be quiet—he was alive. Well, more likely it had been fear, but it was still imperative he remain quiet now. He pulled a PDA out of his front pocket. "Rafael," he addressed the machine, "Transmit Lisbon, Berlin, Caracas, Taipei, Bristol, Paris."
The code words had no symbolic meaning whatsoever, and changed regularly. They were a few of a menu of simple code words, never used in any drill. This particular one meant, "Security compromised, fatalities, enemy not in contact but presume continuing observation, survivors but no injured, key intelligence, request immediate extraction with maximum evasive action." Well, perhaps the last one did have a certain symbolic meaning, he acknowledged. However, there were times to run, and this was one of them. He cursed himself, wondering if the fatal tradecraft slip had been his.
"You're a spy, too," the child whispered, almost as if he should have expected it. Caspar noted absently that the surviving Maise boy was far brighter than he appeared. Correction—than he chose to appear. He himself had apparently missed a lot.
He nodded as the PDA repeated the series of dead cities' names back to him, setting the boy down a good distance from the blood. "Stay there a moment, Pinky. I just have to get some things from my workout gear."
The heavy bag was filled with sand, as was what appeared to be a boxy, vinyl bench set against the wall. Andreotti grunted with effort, despite his own rigorously maintained physical strength, as he moved the two items over to give them some cover at an angle with a good view to the stairs. Digging underneath a pile of mildewing junk in one corner, he pulled out a rifle and a couple of decent pistols, a can of magazines, a couple of helmets. The bottom of the trunk yielded a couple of vests, so far down that they weren't even damp. They didn't smell so great anyway, and were only kevlar, but were a lot better than nothing, and likely to stop anything the enemy would fire in a basement unless he was stoned, stupid, or very well armored himself. Ricochets were a bitch.
He slapped the five-year-old's hand away when he reached for one of the pistols. "Not today. Sorry, son. Your hands are too small, and you're wound up—you just might shoot our rescuers by mistake. Don't pout. Strap on the helmet as best you can and get under this."
He didn't mention that if the enemy decided to blow up the house, or burn it down, they were fucked. He hadn't seen explosives or incendiaries in his cursory inspection of the place, which didn't mean they weren't there, but he hoped if they'd intended to demolish the house, they already would have. Besides, they went to special trouble to leave their warning. They'd want it noticed, and for word to spread.
He noted that whatever else the enemy was, he was apparently stupid. Or expected the warning to have the opposite effect to the one normally intended. Sorting out that mess was above his pay grade. Right now, his job was to keep his remaining charge alive for the pickup. Pinky was far more important than he was.
He wanted to ask who the other body was, sure that the child would know, but the little kid was showing amazing composure for his age, and Caspar wouldn't risk breaking it. The boy had already winced, understandably, when he had called him "son."
"Tell me the truth about my daddy."
Andreotti jerked. "Alive, with the rest of DAG—most of them—somewhere else." He reflexively told Maise's son the truth. Yet another breach of his training.
"Fighting?"
The boy was no longer surprising him. This time the safe house operator considered before answering, "Not to my knowledge, but I'm not sure they'd tell me. Alive is all I know for sure, and I haven't seen any clues that anything with as much firepower as your dad's unit is out there raising hell."
"Okay," the child who was more than a child replied gravely, accepting the answer.
It was a long five hours, with him creeping out once to steal food and a large glass of milk, before returning down to feed and wait with Pinky. The basement had a bathroom, thank God, and he'd been able to grab some dirty clothes the boy had left on his living room floor. They were streaked with mud in places, but at least not peed in.
"If they saw you come in, aren't they going to be suspicious that everything is so quiet?" the five-year-old—genius, apparently—asked.
"Quite possibly. Or, they may decide I've somehow skipped out in fear and slipped past them. Either way, if I was here, I'd have to call the police, and I can't do that with you here, can I?" Caspar Andreotti was getting used to treating his charge at his mental age, not his chronological one. Or was it?
"When do you think they'll get us?" the boy asked. "I mean our rescue, not the police or other guys. Whoever you called for."
"Soon now," the house man answered. "Pinky, are you five, or are you just small for your age?"
"Do you think Joey—" His voice broke on his brother's name. "Do you think Joey would have agreed to say he was six, even if he didn't blab, if he was older?"
"No, Pinky, I guess I don't. So why did you hide how very smart you are?"
"What, and piss off Joey that bad? Or get stuck in school early, or up a couple of grades and be the punching bag of all the bigger boys? Or treated like a freak?" The last contained a note of hurt mixed with bravado—whistling in the dark—that told Andreotti that feeling like a freak hit way too close to home for the child.
"You are smart, aren't you? Never be ashamed of being smart, Pinky. It just saved your life." The grown man, closest thing present to a father, made sure he was both serious, respectful, and above all approving.
Talented and deserving
of respect, or freakishly different with the need to keep hiding for self-preservation. Those were the stakes. If Pinky was "scary smart," which he was, then he needed to grow into a whole, functional "scary smart" guy. The Bane Sidhe needed those. Caspar hadn't missed the note of hero worship in the boy when he'd said "spy." In many people, that would be a red flag of unsuitability. This child was a natural. The organization's problem would be in deciding where to place him to do the most good.
The kid was never going to enjoy New Year's Eve again. Come to think of it, Andreotti figured they had that in common.
"Just one more question," Andreotti said.
"What?"
"How in the hell did you find out my combination?"
Mueller had almost enough sense of self-preservation to avoid eyeing the O'Neal women. Married wasn't always a problem on a distant deployment, but this wasn't that. It was still a separation, with his wife and kids up in Indiana, underground with the people running this whole conspiracy.
A hundred miles away or a thousand, it still wore on a man. The girl with the damned gorgeous heart-shaped ass had to be an O'Neal. She had this kind of light brownish-red hair with blond streaks. The red on female islanders, he had been warned, was like the red of mushrooms or tropical fish—a danger signal. Still, as she turned, the sweater she was wearing gave him a good silhouette of the top rack. She caught his eyes and smiled, before walking away to wherever she'd been going. She looked back over her shoulder at him, briefly, as she went. He got another smile.
He also got a thwack upside the head from Mosovich, whom he hadn't noticed coming up behind him. Situational awareness versus pretty girl was no contest. Especially in his condition.
"Forget it. She's a widow," he said. "No, don't get any ideas that means 'available.' She's a very recent widow. Like, of the action a couple of weeks ago."
He didn't have to say "off limits." The code was clear. Her departed husband had to be in the ground for a decent interval of time before she became available—and then he'd have to compete with all the guys who had also noticed her ass and tits, and a face that was distinctly not bad. A married guy with kids wasn't going to be—shouldn't be—high on her list.
