by John Ringo
“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 had 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.
“Right.” The head of operations stood up from the back of the room, blessedly cutting off their briefer. “I think that’s quite sufficient for the team to start planning their operation.” He nodded towards Cally and the rest. “I’ve sent you all a memo detailing your specific ROE, and we’ll leave you now to your specialty and quit jostling your elbow,” he said.
Their briefer looked very disappointed about being signaled to shut up, and in no uncertain terms. He trailed out behind his boss like an unhappy duckling.
After he was gone, the team members looked at each other and grinned, all equally glad to be rid of the IW, an acronym usually pronounced as a short “eew.”
Wilson was okay as a boss. He knew when to keep his hands off, and was not unduly sensitive about his top team interacting directly with the Father Nathan, Aelool, and of course the O’Neal was directly on the team. While he was understandably uncomfortable about the latter, he had a rare ability to shut up and soldier while still being a decisive leader whenever necessary. As a manager, he was a treasure. Over the years, Cally and the others had seen enough to appreciate how good he was, even though — or perhaps especially — because he made it look so easy.
In this case, he’d increased their time efficiency enormously by getting the over-eager IW out of their hair.
“So. Let’s look at the map and start with insertion routes. Buckley?” Cally set her PDA on the table, and a three-dimensional tabletop display of Chicago’s north side projected onto the conference table.
Mary Lynn Stuart sat at her vanity and contemplated her dark roots with displeasure. Her hair was currently a bright blond, with blue shading into fire engine red at the tips. She and her friends absolutely ruled the seventh grade with their just peachy-sweet collection of mod rooster combs. Right now, her hair was down for bed, but the left-over hairspray had it flopping every which way like a haystack. She leaned forward and popped a zit, tracing a little line of artificial, anti-germ skin over the tiny wound. Damn it, she had forgotten her acne cream, then forgotten she forgot, and Daddy had some weird belief about the vaccinations causing Torgensen’s Syndrome.
He told her that the cream worked if she used it, and that nobody noticed the artificial skin if she forgot, anyway, but Louise Alexander always noticed and teased her incessantly. Bitch.
Mary Lynn detested the muffled noise the husher gave to her music, but Daddy was already asleep and would have her hide if the loud, popping, urbie-drill chants penetrated through the walls to his room.
It had been really nice of Daddy to switch and give her the bigger room. He had said he wanted the window. Mary Lynn was just as happy with an artificial window that looked out into Lothlorien of Middle Earth rather than a real one that looked out into the dismal Chicago winter. Besides, if she plugged her PDA into the window, as now, its AI could supplement the window routine so that virtual elves walked by and climbed into the tree houses and stuff, going about their business.
The window was great, but she was going to have to badger Dad to get her wallpaper done. Pink stripes with trailing roses had been great when she was a little girl, but now it was downright embarrassing. Her disco-ball overhead light and wall of band T-shirts from concerts she’d attended were sweet as shit, but the damn wallpaper just ruined everything, and Daddy wouldn’t listen. No, he had to spend money on stupid, paranoid crap like his “home invasion escape route.” For god’s sake, nobody, in her whole grade, had ever had a home invasion. It was Daddy being weird. He could afford to install that stupid trapdoor and drive her batshit with “drills,” even on school nights, but he couldn’t afford a little stupid wallpaper? Parents were just fucking morons. Okay, effing morons, she corrected herself silently, leaning into the mirror to see if that was another damn zit.
As the wall blew in, shards of the mirror impacted the girl as the force of the blast knocked her backwards into the doorway. The concussion overloaded the husher, knocking it out, but did not faze the PDA, which kept pumping the Leedos’ latest hit, “Die Like the Animals,” into the air. On a wall to the side, an elf in an ethereal, leaf-green and gold dress strolled languidly by the now-canted window.
Johnny was awakened by a muffled thump from his daughter’s room, followed by the blaring of the infernal music she seemed to have chosen just to piss him off. “Laura, what time is it?” he asked.
“It is two thirty-four a.m., Mr. Stuart.”
He blearily glared at the wall and ranted to himself about Mary Lynn’s current junior high stage of brat. He flat didn’t need this on a work night. He swung himself out of the tangle of covers, scratching his ass through his pajamas as he stumbled out the door to go yell at his wayward child.
Her door was practically next to his, the door along a wall at right angles. A door which was canted off its hinges, showing his baby girl in a heap on the floor, blood everywhere.
“Shoot the kid, dammit!” he heard a female voice bark out, and saw Mary Lynn jerk suddenly. So much blood. She couldn’t possibly still be alive. He realized he was completely unarmed, and facing a team of strangers coming in through the wreckage of a wall. His heart clenched as his body did the next logical thing, processing the situation instantaneously. He dived for the emergency exit, hand reaching under the pocket in the floor to trip the quick release. The door popped open like a jack in the box, and Johnny was head-first down the chute behind it, before said door even reached full extension. He heard a shot behind him and a wheet as something went by, thankfully missing him.
The chute, a grown up version of a child’s covered slide, took him first out to the outer wall of the building, and then next on a diagonal slope down to one floor below ground. He slapped the activating button on the wall next to the shoot and said, “Capricorn Omega.” The chute was hot now. Nobody would be following him down that route.
“Alpha Aquarius.” The door with the broken exit sign gave an audible click as the bolt slammed back. He ran through it without slowing, throwing the bolt manually behind him and pelting down the hall, whose lights came on in response to his body heat.
A forty-five degree turn ran him diagonally under a street intersection, where he emerged in the bottom stairwell of a parking deck, whose exit was on the far side out from the apartment building. His back-up car responded to his voice, and less than eight minutes from rolling out of bed, Johnny was driving out of the deck onto a one-way street going exactly his way. Away from there. His heart was pounding like a hammer, bashing at the door of the numbed, shocked place at the back of his brain.
Chapter Nineteen
“Sorry to throw you in at the deep end again, Sands,” Cally apologized for about the fifth time as the black car purred quietly through the Chicago streets. “They’ve got to put together some new permanent teams with some of the DAGgers as soon as possible, and they’re all guys. Trained female agents are at a premium. Gotta have at least one for a well-rounded—”
“Urban-capable team. Yes, Cally, I know. We really did cover this shit in school. I’ll be fine,” Sands reassured her.
“Don’t get overconfident,” George reminded her seriously. “No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that goes double for our kind of ops.”
He wasn’t going along on what would normally have been his kind of job, but instead was staying outside to cover exits with Tommy. Cally found it amusing to watch him having kittens over a job that she really needed minimal backup for herself. Backup was nice, but she had done a number of these jobs over the years as the sole shooter inserted, simply because sometimes a woman could go where a man could not, could obtain intel which would not have been available to a man. Which was, again, the reason every team, if at all possible, had one female agent. Sure, they could be assigned around on an as-needed basis, but the lost unit integrity was a cost that outweighed any benefits. That might change now that they didn’t have the slab to upgrade female agents to a physical level mostly on par with the men. Poli
cy for now was to continue the standing practice while trying to get the slab back.
Harrison crunched across a layer of rock salt as he pulled up to the curb in front of the gray building. Lighting shot up from the foot of the building, angled in to illuminate it.
Cally and Sands got out of the car with their big shoulder bags slung over their shoulders. Beneath their coats showed dark, patterned tights and high heels nobody sane would wear in Chicago in winter. Nobody, that is, but a prostitute. In their case, they were dressed high end. Visiting girls, as long as they weren’t too obvious, were completely unremarkable.
Blessing a building management that either couldn’t be bothered to change the pass code, or wouldn’t bother the tenants to do so, Cally punched in the security access code for the door. Building management could have put in a more sophisticated entry system, but few did. The more awkward it was for residents to get their friends and pizza delivery in and out, the less likely potential renters were to choose that apartment. With supply outstripping demand, landlords needed every edge they could get, and when it got down to cases, residents just wanted the feeling of security.
Amazing that someone like Johnny Stuart didn’t have a better sense of self-preservation and had lasted this long in his job. His run of luck triumphing over stupidity was about to run out. Hitting the stairs, the first thing that Cally and Sands did was ditch the impractical shoes into their bags, freeing up the rubberized soles of their tights to get a good, nonimpairing grip on the floor. The stairs, of course, were rubber treaded — landlords hated getting sued — but the stairwells and the surface under the treads were the same rough brick-red tiles as the hallway. The walls here, also like the hall, were not Galplas. However, in an attempt to look more expensive, the builders had tried to counterfeit the appearance of that substance. All the edges where walls met each other, floor, or ceiling were slightly beveled, as tended to happen with the real thing. The strip across the top of walls and stairways that would have glowed was frosted glass with diffused lighting behind the panels. Silly, but it probably raised the rent they could charge.
