by John Ringo
Bart was not a stupid man. Trusting, but not stupid. "Would you ladies like to join me?" he asked hopefully, willing to try his luck. Of course. Cally's smile was genuine as she snagged an empty chair from another table and sat, a second behind Sands. It was nice when the mark cooperated. No reason to relax, but still nice.
It wasn't hard at all to manipulate him into taking them back to his apartment with the old excuse of coffee. Present a fictitious roommate who had her boyfriend over and he was all theirs.
When he started trying to come up with an excuse to ditch her, Cally decided she didn't really want to be ditched, and the vibes coming off him were right. He was not particularly interesting, but in a purely professional call, Sands was doing okay, but Cally wasn't about to leave her alone in the field yet with the stakes this high. Sure, this was a milk run—but how many times did a milk run turn into anything but?
"We do everything together," Cally smiled at him, catlike, putting a hand over Amy's possessively. Her eyes focused into his with unmistakable meaning, which her partner supported by leaning into her arm, not taking her own eyes off Leibowitz. Was he biting? Oh, hell yeah was he ever.
At Sands' suggestion, they made another restroom stop before taking off. "Was I screwing something up?" she asked blandly while reapplying her lipstick.
"Not until now," Cally answered. "Talk later." Oh, geez, yeah, break character on a mission. Um, how about "no"?
"It's a set-up," a voice chimed from Cally's hip pocket as she bent to adjust a tight spot in the ankle strap of one shoe.
"Not you, too." She rolled her eyes.
"I'm just saying he was too easy, believing he had a chance with two hot chicks. I mean I would have taken you home, sure. Her shoes just scream 'screw me,' but I really like you better in the red ones with the cute lit—" it began.
"Shut up, buckley."
"Right," it paused. "And bobby socks. You're adorable in—"
"Shut up, buckley. And turn down your emulation a notch . . . uh . . . make that two."
"Spoilsport."
"Buckley . . ." she threatened.
"Right."
"Doesn't that get a bit annoying?" the other woman asked.
"Later. Let's go."
Chapter Eighteen
Bart's apartment was a little thing, high up in a building with good lines and large windows, covered by heavy drapes. The first thing he did when they got in the door was lead Sands over to one of them and draw the curtains back, revealing a view of the city lights that was impressive as hell.
The living room was done all in grays and browns. Cally would have expected boring colors from a bean counter, anyway. What she had not expected was the pictures on the wall—brilliantly colorful acrylics with track lighting focused to really make them pop. She could see from here that the pics were actual paint layered on real canvas. Originals, and done right here, judging by the faint paint and solvent smells. Her inner sense of direction put the pieces together as she realized that, although the man could obviously afford a bigger apartment in a better neighborhood, this one was oriented to get excellent natural light through those large windows. The drapes obviously protected his finished pieces from the sun when he wasn't working. Wow.
She began to uneasily credit buckley's warning. What if he was gay after all? They hadn't thought so, but . . . Her already alert senses kicked up another notch.
"Okay, ladies. The act is up," he said.
Cally could sense Sands focusing in on the target to terminate and extract. She just hoped the girl would have the sense to stay out of her way.
"How much is it going to cost me for the two of you? I'd rather pay you than have you knock me over the head or drug me and try to take it. I'm not carrying much, so it's in your best interests. What's the price?"
She and her partner looked at each other, tension levels dropping ever so slightly.
"Seven hundred," Amy said sweetly. "And if you're not carrying it, how do we know you've got it?"
Good. Good job of sounding mercenary. Hookers. That explained why he believed their offer.
"Hell, make it eight," he said genially. "I'll even give you half in advance. But here's the deal. I'm buying one screw from you." He pointed at Amy. "Period. If you go for anything more, it's freebie or not at all. Got it?"
The two women looked at each other. What the fuck? Was this guy a weird asshole, or what? There he stood, though. Hair spiked with too much hair gel and showing the reason why, as it still tried to go every which way. Freckled, short. Nice green eyes, but his ears stuck out just slightly, and his adam's apple protruded prominently. He wasn't exactly homely, but he wasn't ever going to star in holodramas.
"Okay," Cally shrugged. It wasn't like he was going to get all the way through that fuck, anyway. In a way, the half he was giving in advance was fair for what he was getting. She held out her hand as he put four crisp ones in it and tucked them into the front zip pocket of her jeans.
"But if you do want to play, too, I might tip," he said.
Cally met his eyes and shrugged again. Strange. He made no protest as she stripped off, but wanted to take Sands' clothes off himself, and get the same. Whatever. What to do now? Rub his back and nibble on his neck, she guessed. She had a needle tip built into one of her rings, but the other woman had the same loaded with Hiberzine. Let the rookie take him down.
Five minutes later Cally reflected that he sure was taking his time getting down to business for a john. It wasn't as if he wasn't already hard, either. Sands was also taking her time. Drug the guy already and get it over with. She suppressed a sigh, reminding herself that it was the girl's second time in the field, a stressful kind of assignment, and it wasn't as if the delay was doing any harm. In fact, it might even be a conscious tactical decision, since several of the interrogation drugs were known to interact with the brain chemistry of sexual arousal without actually knocking him out. There was a potential benefit to loosening a subject up for his interview. It was a bit overboard for a subject who was likely to be very easy for soft interrogation, but it was the kid's first mission of this type. Don't jostle her elbow and screw with her confidence. Bad enough to decide to tag along, but the older assassin had stayed alive this long by learning to trust her instincts.
More than fifteen minutes in he finally rolled her over to doggy style and started his actual screw. Cally rubbed up against him, faking like it was doing something for her. Professionally, she was slightly embarrassed, because Amy was doing a much better job of acting than she was. Unless . . . Those shudders and moans looked awfully damned real. She suppressed a growl, pressed the stud on the ring with a thumbnail, and hit good old Bart in the neck with a needle full of Pacizine, easing him off her wayward charge as his muscles collapsed.
"Did anybody ever tell you you have lousy goddamned timing?" the girl asked her, rolling over with slightly glazed eyes, still catching her breath.
"Shut the fuck up, you," Cally bit out icily.
"What? He's primed for—"
"Shut up."
"Okay."
"What's your name?" Cally asked the dazed and naked man, who was still half-erect. She tossed a sheet over his hips. It changed nothing, and cost nothing.
"Barton Elwood Leibowitz," he answered. "My dad insisted on the name from an old pre-wa—"
"That's enough, Bart. What's your job?"
"Enterprise Resource Manager for Tirdolco, Incorporated. The name's redundant, and my job title's bullshit, what I really am is a glorified babysitter for the AID that does the real—"
"That's enough, Bart. How many of the company employees do you know by sight?"
"Uh, I don't know. There's Larry, and Bill, and Jennifer, and—"
"Give me an approximate percentage."
"Uh, less than one percent, but that's if you count the whole company instead of just the ones who work in the building, then I'd say I know them all except that if I didn't know somebody who worked there, how would I know I didn—"
&nb
sp; "That's enough, Bart." Cally walked out of the bedroom and back to her jeans, pulling out her buckley but not bothering to dress. She turned to find Leibowitz had wandered after her, with Sands trailing him and not a clue what to do, apparently.
"Would you like to hear about my paintings? I like to talk about my paintings. I did this one right after my wi—"
"That's enough, Bart," Cally said, to his evident disappointment. "Go back to bed."
"Sure. Are we going to have more sex, because I didn't get—"
"Go back to bed, Bart." Cally rolled her eyes and followed the now obedient man back to the small bedroom, dwarfed by a king size bed that he was evidently happy to get back to. All right, so it was funny. She couldn't laugh in front of Leibowitz or Sands, especially since she was going to have to give the latter one serious ass-chewing. In the present circumstances, well, ick. Scold her, then.
"Buckley, display a holo of Mr. Mitchell."
"Do you know this man?" she asked their unfortunate victim. Well, actually he was quite fortunate, because even though he was lying here naked and . . . interrupted . . . he wasn't particularly bothered by it, wasn't going to die, and wouldn't remember a damn thing. Probably for the last two days or so.
"No . . ." Leibowitz trailed off and Cally's shoulders sank.
"I don't know him know him. I see him with Johnny Stuart sometimes. That's enough for me. You don't fuck with Johnny. People who do—I think he kills them. I don't want him to kill me. I stay the fuck away from the little bastard. I think that guy—" He stared blearily at the hologram. "He's some kind of cousin of Johnny's. He's scary as shit, too. I don't go anywhere near them. I see them coming, I disappear to the john all the way on the other fucking end of the building. I've got no reason to talk to Johnny, or that guy. Damn, you're pretty. Can you come back to bed now? I'd really like to get my hooks into you, even though your friend's cuter. Do you realize I've got a twenty-three percent response rate for freebies from hookers? And twenty percent, okay, nineteen, come back for even more. It's the greatest scam ev—"
"That's enough, Bart." She looked over at Sands, who simply shrugged and backed past her towards the open door. Good, she wasn't turning her back on the subject. Oh, what the hell. This had to be one of the weirdest interrogations she'd ever done. Except for the one in the teddy bear factory with the—stop it.
She got back to business. "Go to sleep, Bart," she said. She hesitated to leave him there as he rolled over. Ah, hell. "And Bart? Have good dreams. You're having the best fuck of your life." She watched his lips curl upwards in a dreamy grin. What a weird run.
Sands was already dressed when Cally came back to the living room and pulled on her clothes. "You're still not off the hook. You don't ever get emotionally engaged with the target. Ever." She could hardly keep lecturing the other woman out the building and down the street. Shut up until after extraction. "We'll continue this back at base, Miss—" Long habit stopped her before her partner's real name tripped off her lips. Extract, then correct.
"I'm not going to apologize for chewing you out," Cally said neutrally.
Wonder of wonders, they'd gotten the good conference room again. Somebody had changed the fake window to look out on some kind of tropical beach. It was so incongruous with Indiana in winter that it was impossible to think of the scene as anything other than a holoscreen on the wall. Still, it was relaxing, and Cally couldn't resist walking over to it and looking out the window. That was the advantage of a holographic window over the old 2-D televisions. It was something to do with ray tracing or some gobbledegook she didn't understand, but what it meant was you could put your head right up against the side of the window and look out, so that you had almost a hundred and eighty degrees of vision of the scene. More in an artificial bay window, or gazebo. The Bane Sidhe, alas, did not have these luxuries. From the real palm trees, it was definitely south of Edisto. No telling when it had been recorded. A live feed would have not only been prohibitively expensive, but suicidal as well. At some point, this view would loop and begin again.
The air smelled salty, but perfumey. She looked around and spotted the air freshener plugged into the wall. Nice try, but it didn't even remotely capture the real thing. She walked over and unplugged it. She and Sands were both early, but the girl hadn't said more than good morning to her since she walked in.
"What you did was dangerous as hell," she continued. "Yeah, so it's one of the three typical reactions to a first sparrow job. I don't give a shit. Each one of them is wrong, because it can get you and your teammates killed. Welcome to why sessions with Vitapetroni are mandatory. That was your rookie mistake in the field. Fine. Now you get to have your shit together. Got it?"
"Yes, ma'am," Sands answered just as neutrally.
Cally looked her over carefully. A poker face was probably good. If she was being sweet, it would be cause for worry.
"In case you hadn't figured it out yet, sparrow jobs suck," she said. "Besides, if you were going to have a freeze-up reaction, I guess it's not surprising you had that one. The guy gets his jollies seducing prostitutes. Who knew?" She paused. "Come on, was he really that good?"
"Let's just say I'm glad we didn't have to kill him," Amy said, shrugging. "Would have been a crime against womankind. But you know, in retrospect, he was a complete asshole. He sees those women as things, not people."
"Yeah, let me warn you about indulging in morality in this business. Don't. It's a luxury. It's a treat other people get to have. You gave it up when you signed on. Right and wrong, on the other hand, are a whole different thing. Takes a while to even start to learn to distinguish the two."
"Aren't you Catholic?" the rookie asked her.
"Yeah. But I lapse now and again." Cally shrugged, palms up, then looked down and kicked at a smudge on the floor with a toe. "You'll also find the modern church is highly forgiving of expedients that are strictly necessary in this service. 'Mission from God' just about sums it up. They should have told you in school that all our kills of specified targets are church sanctioned executions for serious crimes against innocent people."
"They probably did. I'm not religious," Amy said with a tight grin. "The nuns weren't always happy about that."
"Just as long as you paid close attention on the practical shit. Granpa's not religious, either. Particularly after folding in the Cybers, the Bane Sidhe got a lot more secular. Don't worry about it."
"That's what they told us."
"Yeah, but they were probably grudging about it. We operators are not nuns, priests, or saints. Your beliefs are your own. At least I don't ever expect to be canonized—except maybe with a real cannon," Cally added with a laugh.
Sands laughed, too, and they were okay. She could say this for Vitapetroni; he was peerless at patching them back up for work.
After a minute or so, the others entered with such alacrity that Cally suspected eavesdropping. It was a constant hazard with this organization, and she was going to have to not only warn Amy, but have a serious talk with her buckley. Come to think of it, Amy or Tommy might be exactly the people to have the conversation with. Yes, her system had to have some overrides for safety, but she also wanted to sharply limit access to as few people as possible.
The beginning of the briefing was a short recap of their interrogation of Leibowitz. Sans the lurid details, of course. Then it got interesting. Cally noticed Bryan Wilson, the head of operations, ducking into the back of the room and taking a seat out of the way, against the wall.
"John Earl Bill Stuart," the intel weenie said, pulling up a holo of a short, dark-haired man above the conference table. "We had, of course, known of him for the past seven years as the Darhel's dirty tricks boy. Ever since the last one met with—an appropriate fate." Here, he let his eyes rest on her.
Cally gave him a predatory grin. Seven years ago she had dispatched Tir Dol Ron's head of security. Charles Worth had gotten a little too good, and a little too close to things the Bane Sidhe didn't want him into, so the Organization h
ad marked him for execution and sent Cally and her team out to carry out sentence. It had been satisfying beyond belief to personally kill Charles Worth. The bastard had tried to have her and Granpa killed when she was eight years old. The would-be assassin back then had been her first human kill.
"While we have, naturally, kept a watch on Stuart since he acceded to his present position, he has recently moved and had done a fairly good job of covering his tracks. That is, until we became more motivated to find him." He tapped the screen of his PDA, evidently having set up his presentation in PowerPoint. The holo changed to a large granite-faced apartment building.
"Johnny Stuart's home. More precisely, he lives on the third floor in a custom apartment that takes up half the floor. That's how we found him. He likes to rent two apartments and combine them. Contractors keep computerized records of their jobs, just like everybody else.
"There is a complication. Mr. Stuart has a daughter. The mission is a snatch and grab, but we have to pick him up first, while he's at home, and second, while we can predict where the child is and she's out of the way.
"To that end, this is your standard night mission, but you will not go through the door. Your rules of engagement have considerably more latitude than in the past as to the amount of exposure our ops have to civilian awareness. In this case, Mr. Stuart's bedroom borders on the hallway, and you will breach the wall. There's a minor risk of more than trivial injury to the designated personality in this process, which is yet one more reason one of you will be carrying a Hiberzine dart pistol. Upon breach and target acquisition, you will Hiberzine the target and extract. Get his AID for forensic analysis if you can, but do not linger to search for it."
Cally suppressed a yawn. Other than the ROE clearance for the wall breach, the rest of it was all a complete duh. She was paying close attention; he might say something vital. Yeah, in with all that obvious crap and talking to hear his own voice.
