by John Ringo
The wait seemed longer than it really was. Adrenaline had already caused her sense of time dilation to kick in. She could feel her heart beating in her chest and already she felt that mission sensation of being just that extra bit more alive. The colors in the room were richer and more intense than they'd been a few minutes before. Mingled with the pet and air freshener odors of the apartment she could smell the tea the mistress had been drinking in the kitchen. She could hear the slight hollow tone to her own breathing as the sound damper tried to compensate for the noise.
It wasn't long at all before she heard the key in the old-fashioned lock. She forced herself to stay loose and perfectly still, balanced on the edge of the moment, as the handle turned and the door began to swing inward.
He walked in with less situational awareness than a two-year-old, who would have at least been interested in his surroundings. As he shut the door behind him with one hand, he turned expectantly towards the kitchen. Cally doubted he even saw her out of the corner of his eye as she padded up behind him, simultaneously grabbing his hair and kicking the back of his knee sharply, as she pulled backward.
As his knees buckled, bringing his head below her own, her other arm snaked around his throat, the bone pushing into his windpipe, the hand in his hair sliding smoothly to hold the back of his head, giving him nowhere to go for air.
Unfortunately, his drive for survival finally kicked in and he began thrashing frantically, trying to break her grip.
The easiest way to respond would have been to drop down and finish the neck break. Taking a capable person, and Petane marginally qualified for that category, alive was always harder than a simple kill.
She didn't know whether it was conscious design or instinct that made him try to kick out towards an end table full of fragile-looking knick-knacks, but leaving signs of a scuffle in the apartment would be bad, very bad. As would accidentally strangling the guy. And dammit, I've lost count!
She backed around and dragged him to the middle of the floor where his thrashing couldn't reach anything, and watched the second hand on the wall clock for what she hoped was the amount of time left, lowering him to the floor a few seconds after his struggles stilled.
Lousy instincts—he didn't even hesitate on the threshold. She sighed with relief as she found a pulse. Having to do CPR on the prick would have been annoying.
She worked quickly to secure his hands and feet with plastic ties before grabbing the chair and pantyhose. There was a strong risk that securing him to the chair would bring him around before she was finished. As it did today, of course. She had barely gotten his wrists secured and the plastic removed—too likely to leave marks—when he came around and started yelling and thrashing again and tipped himself over.
She ignored him and secured each leg to the appropriate chair leg before setting the thing upright again. He was still yelling, of course. What a moron. "Look, you idiot," she explained. "Hear that hollow sound? It's a damper. Nobody can hear you outside the room, you're just scratching up your throat."
She would have liked to light a cigarette and have a smoke while he wound down, but leaving stale smoke lying around a scene just wouldn't work at all. So she just tilted her head to the side and watched him, waiting. He ran out of steam sooner rather than later, thank God.
"You're probably wondering why I called this meeting." She smirked, and then sighed. "Look, Petane, we are doing a comprehensive review of the information you've provided, checking it for the record, including what you say now, measured against how you've reported it in the past. The sooner you spill it, the sooner you can get back there and give your girlfriend some stimulants to wake her up and get on with your night." She shrugged, "Look, mine not to reason why, mine just to get these fucking interrogations out of the way so I can get back to real work."
"Geez, you guys have totally compromised me, you know that? Or as good as. Why the hell did you take the risk of meeting me here? Why not just ask for a meet at the dead drop and give me time to set it up righ . . . oh. Counter Intel." His shoulders slumped. "Are you Fleet Strike, or Army?" His voice had the dead, hopeless tone of a man who really didn't expect to live until morning.
"Very astute of you." She grinned ferally. "But you can still be useful, Colonel. We just need to catalog how much damage you've done and then tell you what we want you to tell them. You should be a happy man. If we can make you useful enough, you may just get to live."
"Wait . . . I . . . I wanna see some ID," he said.
"Oh, so you ask for ID. So you knew who you were dealing with when you decided to become a fucking traitor." She practically spat the words at him.
He blanched.
"So, Colonel, why did you turn." It wasn't a question, but a demand. "I want to hear you say it, you worthless son of a bitch."
"I couldn't help it! They were gonna kill me!" Any vestiges of calm the man had had collapsed. "I got into this fix protecting you guys! You said you were gonna take care of me and then you were nowhere when they came for me. What the hell was I supposed to do?"
"I suppose it never crossed your mind to die like a soldier," she said coldly.
"Yeah, you try it sometime." His voice was bitter and low.
"So, from the beginning." She sat down on the couch and gestured casually with one arm. "Let's just start with you 'getting into this fix' as you put it. Start there. Don't leave anything out. We know most of it. So, needless to say, you really, really don't want to leave anything out. I'm not a very nice person when I'm pissed off." She flipped open the PDA and tapped the record button. She was well inside the record zone.
"Okay, the beginning. So I was a major when I got recalled from the reserves at the beginning of the war. I'd had a couple of jobs with . . . unappreciative CO's and been passed over for promotion and retired before the war. But for a staff command, I wasn't high on the rejuv list and the drugs started running low before they got to me. But I was on the list, dammit." He squirmed a bit and rubbed his chin against his shirt to scratch an apparent itch.
"Look, do I have to rehash the whole damn thing? You guys know this part. I was pretty high up in the local lodge. I was a Mason, my dad and granddad had been Masons. And they were good guys, and I trusted them and they trusted me, but then you guys from counter intel came down the pike . . ."
"And bought you."
"Yeah, well, you guys came around asking about clubs and fraternities and secret societies and all, and I wanted to help out and everything—"
"In exchange for . . ." she prompted.
"Yeah, all right, I appreciated you guys righting a wrong there by making the efficiency report by that self-righteous asshole disappear, okay? And you guys always wanted to know stupid things, and everybody knows this secret society paranoia about the Masons is so much bullshit. Anyway, then you guys wanted to know, you know, anywhere lodge members from out of town stayed whenever they came through. And I wouldn't have known, except for a younger lodge member thought I was so high up in the lodge I already knew, and let something slip. And yeah, I guess I was pretty ticked that there was crap going on in my own lodge that nobody had told me about."
"And what did you think we were going to do with that information?"
"Look, I didn't speculate, okay, if that's what you're thinking. It wasn't my business. What had the lodge done for me? They sure as hell hadn't offered me anything like rejuv for me and my wife, and things were getting kinda tough at home, and we were supposed to get it anyway, but I appreciated you guys speeding it up. I knew it wasn't my place to speculate about your business, okay?" His face wrinkled up in sudden bewilderment for a moment and he stopped talking, blinking a few times.
"Hey, how come you're carrying a buckley instead of an AID?" he asked.
"The rejuv would be for the same wife you're cheating on right now?" Her gesture took in the entire apartment.
"Hey, I love my wife," he protested, "but high-powered, dominant males were never wired for centuries of monogamy. It's just someth
ing about guys that women just aren't wired to understand, if you know what I mean. Men are what we are, all of us. But I do love my wife. And you still didn't say why you're not carrying an AID." This last was said with the smug expression of someone who has cleverly gotten the upper hand.
"You really are a pathetic schmuck, aren't you? I'm asking the questions."
"Look, why get all pissy over it? You guys always showed me ID bef—"
She saw his face freeze as the penny finally dropped, and his lips clamped shut. What an absolute fucking moron. A whole team burned because of this idiot and the other morons who tried to cover up their opsec mistakes by recruiting him.
"I'm not saying another word without ID," he said.
"Of course you are," Cally said conversationally, "because whoever the hell I am, I'm still the damned scary bitch who has you tied to a chair under a sound damper."
"Hey, babe, there are worse things than being tied up by a beautiful woman," he smirked.
Cally was a blur of motion coming off the couch, her heel impacting his groin with such force that he blacked out.
Unfortunately, as he was coming around, she heard, very faintly through the damping, the doorbell and a voice calling something that sounded like it might have been, "Acropolis Pizza." She glared at Petane.
"Ow," he winced, glancing at the doorbell and cringing away from her as much as the chair would allow.
"Fuck. Goddam Murphy really hates my ass today." She grabbed a couple of bandannas out of the briefcase and gagged him quickly, dragging the chair into the kitchen. She couldn't tell whether the doorbell had rung again or not by the time she moved the briefcase behind the door, grabbed her wallet, and answered it.
The pizza guy's eyes darted across her tousled hair and slightly smudged makeup and immediately came to a wrong but convenient conclusion, and his eyes had a knowing twinkle as he checked the amount on the ticket.
"Got a pizza for 'Charles' at this address. That'll be fifty-four ninety seven."
She peeled off a few bills and traded him for the pizza, giving him her best ditzy sex-flushed smile. "Thanks."
She watched him bop down the stairs, whistling. The smile didn't leave her face until after the door was closed and re-locked.
After dropping off the pizza and retrieving Petane from the kitchen, she pulled the gag out and sat back down.
"Okay, asshole. Get back to talking." She put her face down about six inches from his. "Oh, and by the way, do not ever imply that I would even consider doing anything sexual with you. You really do not want to do that. Understand?"
He nodded rapidly.
"Please don't kick me again. I . . . I . . . And don't make me talk or kill me either. Please? These guys play for keeps. You can't be a Mason, and I guess you're not counter intel, so I don't know who the hell or what the hell you are but those guys play for keeps. As far as I know, I'm the only one of that lodge or the original counter intel weenies who's still alive. Please, lady, you can hurt me, but I can't talk to you or I'm gonna die. Please don't kill me." He started to shake.
"I wish to God all this had played out differently, but I can't change it now. For over thirty years I've lived each day just trying to see another one. If you're going to hurt me, or kill me, I can't stop you, but please God don't."
The sound of her slow clapping broke the silence that had fallen for a moment after he finished.
"You're about thirty years too late, Colonel. How many people didn't get another day for thirty years because of you? Do you even know? How the hell did you even get out of basic?" She cut him off before he started, "No, don't answer, I might puke." She reached down into the bag and pulled out a zipper pack.
"Look, I'm tired of dicking around with you—and don't go there." She rifled through the pack and pulled out a syringe. "Are you immune to sodium pent, Colonel? Let's find out."
The look he turned on her reminded her of a scared cocker spaniel, and she sighed as she injected him in the arm.
Three test injections later she found an interrogation drug he wasn't immune to. It was one of the standard ones Fleet Strike had access to.
"Gee, they never did plan to tell you anything really sensitive, did they? Some vital source."
It took three hours to debrief him. She normally wouldn't have eaten while working, but she was going to have to dispose of the pizza somehow since none of it would be in the mistress's stomach and putting any in his stomach wouldn't match. The delivery was a loose end, but if it ever turned up, she'd be wearing a different face in a different place, anyway. Sometimes, there was just nothing you could do. God, this day sucks.
Finally, she had gotten as much information out of Petane as he had in his brain. As Robertson had said, none of it was of a magnitude that would justify leaving a traitor alive for thirty years, and if nobody in the Fleet Strike establishment had bothered to immunize him against the higher level interrogation drugs, he never would be trusted with anything sensitive enough to be really useful. He wasn't alert enough to refuse when she offered him one of the plain wine coolers, and drank thirstily from the glass she had found in a cupboard.
Time to clean up the mess. I really think less of Team Hector for going along with this. Another syringe in the pack had a very small amount of a dye that biodegraded quickly but, used skillfully, created very sincere needle tracks.
Unfortunately, it only decayed properly if the subject was still alive, so she had to listen to his whimpering as she stabbed his veins in the appropriate places and released just a tiny spot of the dye. At school, practicing this skill on each other had been less than fun. It had gotten her over a minor nervousness around needles, but the dye did tend to sting a bit.
When she had enough tracks to be convincing, she waited five minutes and retied his feet and hands to each other, rather than the chair. The interrogation drugs were wearing off, but he was still drugged enough to offer little resistance as she maneuvered him over her shoulder and carried him into the bedroom. As always, the weight didn't present much problem to her upgraded musculature, but the leverage took some managing—particularly as he was not quite dead weight and tended to twitch.
In the bedroom, she did the distasteful but necessary things to set the scene up for the forensics people and gave him his final injection, prepping a second glass with the mistress's lip marks and drugged wine and leaving them on the nightstand next to the bed. She poured a second plain wine cooler down the drain and had two clean, empty bottles for the kitchen trash.
She was putting the assorted debris—used ties, gag, syringes—away when she had the sudden unexpected need to make a dash for the bathroom. She was violently sick in the toilet, and swore weakly as she cleaned her face with toilet tissue afterwards, making sure every bit of the unwelcome evidence got thoroughly flushed and scrubbing out the toilet afterwards. It would not be out of character for the mistress to have cleaned up a bit for her date, and the cleaning smell would go unremarked even if it was noticed.
Of all the damned times to start catching a stomach flu. I can't even remember the last time I was sick with something. And I sure as hell am not pregnant, thank God. She stalked into the kitchen and resumed the careful scene clean-up.
"You can stop recording, buckley. Save it as . . . call it 'Hector Archive.' "
"We've got to run for it now, don't we? Not that it's any use."
"No, buckley. I'm just about through here. You can set AI emulation back to level two."
"But . . . but . . . but . . . oh all right . . ." It trailed off. The buckley was never as enthusiastic when things were going well.
* * *
Home before eleven. Cally looked at her watch and unbuckled it from her wrist. For a solo mission, that part at least wasn't so bad.
The briefcase with all the incriminating evidence came into the hotel room with her, as per SOP when a crew wasn't available. She'd carry it in herself when she reported tomorrow and hand it over to the cleaning department. She'd given considerable th
ought to how to handle any stress with her bosses over her vacation and had decided to brazen it out. She wanted to discuss the priorities that had left a traitor who had caused the death of a whole team of agents alive for a few decades after that act. This should effectively open the conversation.
She took her makeup off slowly, oddly tired this evening. Well, that's absolutely, finally, unquestionably the last of my personal better dead list. I'd thought Worth was it, but okay, so it was Petane. Yay. Rah. I'll have to celebrate that sometime. She shook her head to clear it a bit and grabbed a clean teddy to sleep in. Not up for a night on the town? Me? I definitely must be coming down with something. Ah, best just get an early night.
She looked at herself in the mirror as she changed, running a hand through the brown curls. They'd likely be gone by this time tomorrow. Sinda Makepeace was so silver-blond and fair she looked like the stereotypical Swedish ski bunny. It wasn't often she had a cover with lighter coloring than her own. I'm about to start brooding again. Geez. I must be really tired. To bed.
She grabbed a washcloth without thinking about it and plonked it on the night table, turning off the alarm clock and then the light.
She would have liked to linger in bed in the morning. It had been such a wonderful dream. She would have sworn she had actually tasted one of the delicious conch omelets and even a slice of fresh key lime pie. She had been sitting in Mom's lap, and Dad had just brought a fresh glass of limeade, tart and cold with ice.
The ice in the drink wasn't the only thing that was cold. Out of reflex, she reached for the washcloth with one hand as she wrestled herself free of the sodden and clammy sheets. They stank of sour sweat and she stripped off her nightclothes and left them in the floor as she made a beeline for a hot shower to clean up and warm herself. Huh. Must have had a fever break in the night or something. I hate being sick.
* * *
Tuesday, May 21
After checking out, she got out her phone and called a number, "I need a cab." She gave the address.
