by John Ringo
She tapped her buckley, unnecessarily as it was listening. “Buckley, call Sands. Transmit ‘coffee.’ ” She offered the code word without waiting for the call to pick up. “And leave the connection open.”
She and Sands were both wearing ear dots. They hadn’t dared put any on George, as there was the slimmest possibility those might be noticed.
“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,” she heard Sands say as if talking to the room. “I’d really hoped we could be done before my partner came back, Mr. Cane.”
That meant there was a hitch. Uh-oh.
“I want my lawyer,” Cally heard George say in the background. Then he started making a credible fuss.
“I’ll take you where you can call one,” Sands said. “Just a little walk.”
The latter was code among law enforcement for a little corporal persuasion of a reluctant suspect. It was a prearranged ruse designed to separate the other two operatives from any local cops who got clingy. Okay, now that she had some idea what the problem was, Cally proceeded to the exit and around the side of the building, adrenaline starting to sing as she heard a blurred mumble in the background.
“Oh, you really don’t have to come along, Chief,” Sands said. “Mr. Cane might be more comfortable the fewer people are present when he calls his attorney.” The words were couched to communicate to the police chief that he need not be involved or culpable in the beating of the suspect.
Another mumble.
“Okay, if you’re really sure you want to come along,” Amy’s voice had developed a slightly sweet note, and Cally filed the information away as a “tell” for when Sands was getting annoyed.
On the other side, the door appeared unlocked. The reason was immediately apparent from the collection of cigarette butts all over the ground. Made sense. The chief was using the suspect’s walk as an excuse to grab a smoke.
“After you, of course, Chief,” Sands offered politely, letting Cally know the man would be first out the door. She palmed her second Hiberzine. Unless it was absolutely impossible, she never went in on an op without half a dozen of the things tucked away somewhere or other.
They featured prominently in her standard go-to-hell strategies, and did not fail her now. Looking down to tap a cigarette out of his pack, he never even saw her before Cally had him injected. George’s hand was wrapped around from behind, covering the man’s mouth in case he got out a yell before going down. Cally suppressed a twinge of pique that he didn’t think her competent enough to take care of one man herself. Didn’t George ever lighten up?
They were in the back of the building, about ten yards from the tree line. “Leave him,” she ordered as he and Sands emerged through the doorway.
George laid the man down against the wall and the three sprinted to the corner of the building and stopped. Cally peeked around the corner and ducked back, turning to plant a fist squarely in George’s left eye, followed by a solid gut punch.
“Ow!” he yelped.
“For effect,” she hissed. “Limp a little.”
They turned the corner and walked briskly back to the car, Sands and Cally again flanking George, only this time Cally reached out and shoved him forward a couple of times before they got to the vehicle and climbed in. There was nobody in sight to witness this playlet, and no windows on this side of the building.
“What the hell was that for? Nobody was looking,” George protested as they drove off.
“Well, they might have been,” Cally said defensively. It had absolutely nothing to do with the implication that she couldn’t handle one damn guy by herself. It didn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Tuesday, January 5, 2055
Michael Sunday Privett, also known as “Cargo,” walked into Nathan O’Reilly’s office, took one look at the skinny brunette girl and shook his head. “Oh, no. Fuck no. Father O’Reilly, with all due respect, sir—”
“Hush, son. Just come in and sit down,” the priest ordered him.
As he walked in awkwardly, he looked curiously around the office while trying to get as solid a grip on his professional dignity as he could. At the age of twenty-three, he’d been operational for three years, and he was dead certain he was going to need all his professionalism to deal with this situation. The brunette was wearing contacts and was made up and everything to look about seventeen, but he knew better. Cargo had spent most of his teenage years with little Denise Reardon following him around adoringly and hanging on his every word.
She was a smart kid, and she was damned cute, but the last couple of times he’d been home he’d been all too aware of how precocious little Denise was. She might be skinny, but the kid had a full load-out of hormones and he felt goddamned ridiculous dodging a seventh-grade girl all over the island.
“Sir, I don’t know wha—”
“I said hush, Privett. Sit.”
“Yes, sir.” Cargo sat unhappily on the front half of a chair, back straight, unconsciously drawing on “proper” bearing to get through what he anticipated was about to become a very uncomfortable — more uncomfortable — situation.
“I know you know Miss Reardon, Sergeant Privett. What you may not know is that Miss Reardon is a candidate for professional school.” The head of the Bane Sidhe focused a grave stare on him, as if waiting to see if he needed to be shut up again.
“There is no way, at all, Miss Reardon will be assigned onto a team at her age and without full training. However, just now she has a skill that is very useful. She’s a damned good driver, has a peerless sense of direction—”
Boy, did she ever, Cargo acknowledged. The kid had some kind of weird intuition or something, because she always seemed to guess where he was going next and get there before him.
“—importantly, her, um, tracking skills are exceptionally useful in this case, because she can get you back without a tail more reliably than anyone I’ve got on base. I believe you have the personal experience to appreciate it when I tell you that she is one of the individuals able to effortlessly transfer simulator experience in this type of task to real life.” O’Reilly held a poker face, but Cargo had the uncomfortable certainty he was being laughed at.
He felt an unholy glee as the girl blushed brightly. She deserved a little discomfort out of this, the little brat.
“I have teams, son, but I don’t have them sitting around idle. Even pulling in what I can, with this sudden work increase, I am pressed. I will be putting together a team from our operatives in, and new recruits from, DAG. I will be sending that team on a vital mission. That mission will be directed at killing one of the individuals responsible for one of the dependent murders. Miss Reardon will be that team’s driver. Would you like to volunteer for this mission, Sergeant Privett?”
Cargo suppressed a sigh. Completely suppressed it. Acting anything less than the complete professional he was would only make him look bad in front of God’s right-hand man and encourage the brat.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Good. I’ll send the details to your buckley. You’re dismissed,” the priest said. “Not you, Miss Reardon. Stay a moment.”
Not for anything would he let either of the two of them see any of his relief that little Deni — Denise — couldn’t follow him. God, even his wife thought she was cute.
Cordovan Landrum wished his parents had picked a different way to honor his mother’s surname of Brown than to name him after a shoe color. Since nobody had asked him, he had picked one he liked better out of his favorite series of the weird two-Ds that his dad watched obsessively. At the age of five, he had begun the practice of beating the crap out of any boy who would not call him “Luke,” and finding other ways to get even with annoying girls, whom he couldn’t beat up. Not and survive his dad.
Luke looked at his team roster and winced a little at the driver’s name. He wasn’t supposed to know her age, but Cargo had clued him in. He had made the executive decision to keep the information from Tramp and Kerry so as to not make them nervous that
the kid was driving. As Bane Sidhe, he knew a bit about how the O’Neals ran their place. That kid would have been driving motorized go-carts as soon as she could reach the gas pedal, progressing to dirt bikes and cars, again, as soon as she could reach. If O’Reilly was sticking him with a gal this young, the girl could drive like a bat out of hell.
She was sitting across from him now. He’d gotten the gum out of her mouth by the simple expedient of looking at her like the seventeen-year-old she was supposed to be — i.e., like fair game — and telling her huskily that she looked about twelve when she did that. She’d swallowed the gum so fast she’d almost choked. And blushed like hell. But no more gum chewing to give her age away to Kerry and Tramp.
Even in a good cause, it had felt kind of icky to know he was making eyes at a thirteen-year-old, although she sure didn’t look thirteen. She looked like an O’Neal. It was less a matter of facial features and more something the family seemed to carry on the inside.
The head of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe had told him she’d taken an assassin’s audition and passed. More importantly, a month later she still wanted the job. He didn’t like having a kid driver, but he’d take the top guy’s word on the competence of this one.
When his other three guys came in, Cargo nodded to her and just kept quiet, glaring at Kerry and Tramp when they tried to get friendly. The other two men, of course, chalked that up to entirely wrong reasons and would have gotten more enthusiastic if Luke hadn’t taken them in hand.
“Okay, just to go over the crap I know you guys will have already studied, this is the scumbag on the menu for the evening. Linda, display scumbag,” he instructed his buckley. “This is said scumbag’s house.” The buckley obligingly changed the holo it was projecting above the table. The table and conference room were complete pieces of shit, but he’d grown up in the Bane Sidhe and only noticed it from the difference between the facilities here and at Great Lakes.
“This is the route to scumbag’s house.” The buckley switched to a street view, projected as if they were looking at a sand table, with the route outlined in red.
Landrum looked up at Denise to make sure she was paying attention, focused in, whatever. She was.
“This is our kind of mission. Scumbag’s house is a little isolated. Got a vacant house on one side, an empty lot on the other. We go, we kick in the door, we kill the bastard, we come back. Standard building clearing, don’t hit the no-shoot targets. Wife and kid. Any questions?” The latter was the rhetorical question that traditionally ended all mission briefings. There were never questions.
“Why are we killing him? Or does it matter? To the mission, I mean,” the girl asked.
Luke carefully avoided being either terse or patronizing. If nobody had told her, it was a damned good question. Why the hell hadn’t anybody told her? “He killed Shark Sanders’ grandmother,” he said. When the kid’s eyes widened then narrowed coldly, he gave her a couple of points. She actually looked a bit scary, considering.
“We know because he obligingly left a bit of his DNA—” The kid wasn’t stupid or naïve, and she was clearly getting the wrong impression. “Blood. He stuck himself on a pin.” The girl’s shoulders relaxed fractionally, but the chill in the room from all five of them was arctic. When you murdered a harmless old granny at her quilting, you just didn’t get any brownie points for what you didn’t do.
Snow was falling heavily, and the wind was squealing too loud to hear the clank of the chains on the tires as they drove out from their staging area, a dinky, ugly little car repair shop. The car, which Reardon had spent at least twice as long checking out as he would have, would be carrying them from Fort Wayne to Cincinnati.
She had grudgingly agreed to let the four DAGgers share the driving to Asheville, but Landrum noticed she was real uncomfortable that Privett was driving.
“Have you ever driven in snow before, Cargo?” she asked.
“What? Of course I’ve driven in snow. We’re — were — stationed up in Great Lakes!” He sounded indignant.
“And you know the first rule of driving in snow, right?”
“I can drive, Deni.” He rolled his eyes.
“I’d feel better if you slowed down about ten miles per hour,” she said.
Landrum looked over Privett’s shoulder at the speedometer, which was holding on sixty. He looked out at the road and the weather. It was a little faster than he would have driven, considering.
“There can be ice under this shit that you don’t see,” Reardon insisted.
Privett sighed exasperatedly, but Landrum felt the car slow.
“You can get some sleep while you’re not driving, you know,” Luke told the girl, who was sitting in the middle of the back seat, between him and Tramp.
She looked at the back of Cargo’s head suspiciously, then down at her buckley. “Maybe later. I think I’ll read for now.”
Tramp looked entirely too happy about the seating arrangements, which prompted Landrum to shoot him a dirty look over the back of the kid’s head. His buckley vibrated softly, and he touched the screen to bring up the text.
“What? Are you calling dibs?” The message had Tramp’s user icon in the corner.
“She’s underage,” he typed back.
“Not by much.” He and Tramp were both typing by touching small typewriter keys displayed on the lower half of the screen. They were only there when the buckley was in text mode, but they did help with brief, silent communication.
The girl sat between them, reading whatever she was reading, or playing a game or something. Oblivious, anyway.
A new icon, a snowflake, flashed onto his screen, the word “conference” blinking in the corner. He tapped the button to accept, wondering.
“Too much for you. Get it?” the message said. The snowflake turned into a curvy twentieth-century poster girl who blew a kiss before winking out.
Landrum shot a look at the girl, who had a small quirk at the corner of her mouth, and just about fell out of his seat laughing.
“Something wrong?” the kid asked, pushing the bridge of her nose like someone used to wearing glasses.
“Nope,” he said.
On the other side of the car, Tramp Michaels looked a lot less cheerful and a bit more glum. Luke just couldn’t resist throwing him a big grin.
They drove through the night, stopping to change cars twice before getting to Asheville. It had been a bit of an experience for Kerry and Michaels to insert by something as prosaic as a road trip. So much so that they’d joked along the way, calling it the frat-boy hit.
Between one thing and another, it was the wee hours when they pulled into Knoxville. The weather was fine, and the roads dry, with forecast of more of the same. Operational necessity frequently required doing without sleep, but contrary to popular belief, proper rest was something you planned for if possible. The best guy in the world still performed better rested than fatigued. They found a cheap hotel and he sent Cargo in to set them up.
The hotel was a grayish brown, not intentionally, but because its white bricks and doors had been without a fresh coat of paint for so long they were grimy and stained. It was the kind of dive where half the “guests” rented by the week and could more accurately be described as residents.
It was the kind of place where it was safe to stay — if you were twenty-something, one-eighty-something pounds, male, and made of muscle.
It was Landrum’s turn driving, so he looked at Privett when he came walking back out across the cracked and faded parking lot. “Where’s the room?” he asked.
“Rooms,” the other man said shortly. “Around the other side, ground floor.” He pointed, turning to the back seat to toss the girl a key. “Here’s yours, Deni,” he said.
The kid took it without comment, and since he couldn’t see her face, Luke had no idea what she thought of it. What he thought of it was that he was uneasy putting a thirteen-year-old girl in a room by herself in this kind of shit heap even in broad daylight.
“You
’re not staying in a room alone, Reardon. I’ll take the floor,” he said.
Being on the floor would suck, but there was no way he was going to stick Tramp or Kerry in there ignorant of the girl’s age. He’d still rather not pass on that bit of information; the only other guy who knew was Cargo, and putting him in with the girl was a no-go for obvious reasons.
She looked a little nervous. No, make that a lot nervous. Make that as if she expected to be a virgin sacrifice in the name of the job. Eew. If he didn’t know her age, he might have been fooled by the way they’d fixed her up, but knowing it, he looked at her and saw “kid” and… um… fuck no.
After shooting him a suspicious look that Landrum returned with his own patented “don’t be stupid, asshole” expression, Cargo just looked relieved.
As Luke carried her pack and his inside, the kid was looking anywhere but at him, and clearly trying to look as if she went into sleazy hotel rooms, alone, with an adult male, every day of her life. He shut the door behind himself and set the bags down by the chair.
“Quit worrying. I know you’re thirteen, and my baby sister is older than you. Get some sleep, Reardon,” he said. “Mind tossing me a pillow and the bedspread first?”
The look on her face was priceless.
They went in at night.
Leaving Knoxville in the late afternoon let them get through the mountains before it was quite dark, but by the time they hit Asheville, their headlights led them along a highway almost deserted after dark.
Asheville’s geography left many areas that could support homes unsuited to the kind of flat clusters of houses that squatted throughout midwestern suburbia. Towering ridges and folds in the Earth — huge to a man who’d been raised on the Great Plains — were sprinkled with a dusting of lights like stars, shining from the windows of rows of houses along the switchbacks.
Reardon was in the driver’s seat. She’d driven from Knoxville, putting her foot down and explaining that she would not get anything but an ulcer from riding in the car — she patted the hood of the drab-bodied old Crown Victoria possessively — with any of them driving. Her tone said, with the disdain only an adolescent girl can muster, what she thought of their gifts in the area of ground vehicle operation.
