by Nina D'Aleo
“It’s all I could get quickly,” Rocco said.
“No, this is great,” I said, ripping off the wrapping. “Totally. Thank you.”
I started devouring the sandwich, then noticed he wasn’t eating anything. “Do you want some?” I held it up to him.
He shook his head.
“Do Shaman eat?” I asked. He raised his eyebrow at me and I said, “Well, I haven’t seen any of you eating.”
“We eat,” he said. “In fact we need a higher intake of food than humans. This is the suburb … ” He turned the conversation back to the task at hand.
“How did you find his house?” I asked as we drove.
“We traced his wife and found it through her.”
“Really?” I said, surprised. “You’d think being who he was, he would have hidden their tracks better than that.”
“No offense,” Rocco said, “but in my opinion C11 agents, even those who rank highly, are little more than glorified office personnel. None of you have ever seen any kind of real combat, and I mean battle, not just surveillance and pick-ups.”
“I guess it depends on your definition of battle,” I said, feeling slightly insulted. “I’m guessing you’ve seen some pretty serious action, judging by your scars. What were you?”
He glanced at me, his eyes evaluating, analyzing, maybe deciding if he could really trust me, then he said, “I trained with various …” he chose the word “… groups and ended up in a special operations taskforce.”
All of which gave me exactly no information about him. “What sort of things did you do?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Whatever we were ordered. Everything that couldn’t go on record.”
“Like what?” I pressed him. “Just an example.”
He narrowed his eyes. I was asking him to give out classified information. I expected him not to talk, but he surprised me.
“Have you heard of the Stasi Romeos?”
I shook my head.
“When East and West Germany were divided, the state security service of the East sent men known as romeo agents to develop relationships with, sometimes even marry, West German women, who they used to gain access to government information. I was involved in a similar operation in the Middle East.”
“You were married to someone?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not me personally, but I was part of the general operation.”
“Didn’t you feel sorry for the girls—thinking they’d found the love of their lives only to be—deceived?”
“The targets weren’t women this time,” he said. “The targets were males and the operatives were females.”
“So it was men getting used?” I said.
He nodded. “Does that make it any less offensive?”
“Not really,” I said. “I still feel sorry for the men if they thought they were in love.”
“Maybe some of them were in love,” he said. “Maybe some of them weren’t. Not everyone marries out of love. Sometimes it’s more complicated—calculated.”
“No doubt,” I said. “Not that I’d really know. I’ve never been married. According to Dark I’m not marriage material.”
Rocco glanced over at me. “Sounds like he’s afraid to lose you.”
“Maybe—but he’s a pretty literal guy. It’s more likely that he actually thinks I’m not marriage material.”
“Whether you are or not would depend on who you were marrying.”
“Have you ever been married?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “On duty I moved around all the time. I never had the chance to form any long-term relationships. I don’t think I wanted to.”
His words brought a question to my mind.
“You’re a Shaman,” I said. “C11 would have had you registered. How did you avoid surveillance and break-thru without them knowing? Your brother said Omen hid all the others, but you weren’t already in contact with Omen when it happened to you, were you?”
“No I wasn’t,” Rocco replied. He was silent for some time before he said, “I was pronounced dead.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Again he took a while to respond. “I had a disagreement with my commanding officer. I’d done unacceptable things in the past, but the closer I came to waking up, the more I realized who I was—and who I wasn’t. I couldn’t do what he ordered any more, but you can’t resign from a job like that, so … They thought they’d killed me. I would have looked dead. C11 registered me deceased, closed my file and pulled surveillance. In the morgue, I woke up and regenerated. I stayed low.” He turned into a well-lit suburban street and said, “Passing Masekela residence on the left.”
I looked out his window and saw the house—a white, two-story split-level design squashed in on a narrow block. We did the neighborhood circuit, then doubled back and parked across the street.
Rocco narrowed his eyes at the building as he said, “He’s got surveillance everywhere in the house, except his office, and the bathrooms.”
“Well, I can’t imagine his family would agree to being filmed in there,” I said. It made me think of the walts, about their privacy stripped down to the most primary function.
“How could I have ever thought it was all right—what we were doing?” I asked Rocco.
“You thought you were doing it for their sakes, and if it makes you feel any better, Chapter 11 monitors all their agents as well—twenty-four/seven—everywhere in every way. Marco has been splicing in old feeds of your house since the night you joined us.”
A wave of disquiet washed over me. “No chance. I swept my house for bugs almost every day and I never found anything.”
Rocco gave me a look. “How do you think they maintain such strict secrecy?”
I just sat there for quite a few minutes. He must be right. I’d been such an idiot. I’d thought I was so smart, keeping my secret life so tidy. And all the time I was the one being deceived. “No—it doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said, feeling dizzy and remembering some sincerely embarrassing moments in life I really hoped hadn’t been recorded.
Rocco took out a small laptop and opened it between us. He tapped the keyboard and brought up a house floorplan in one half of the screen; and in the other he opened up live surveillance footage of inside the house.
“He’s got almost everything covered, but Marco has identified a blind spot in the rotational scope of the cameras. If we time our movements to coincide with that, we can go unseen.”
“But why don’t you just get Marco to cut in old footage here as well?” I asked.
“I will if it’s completely necessary, but the less interference the less suspicion we raise. Ideally we don’t want him knowing he’s been hacked. If he checks his security, which we have to assume he will, and sees himself doing something he didn’t do tonight—it’s a problem. There’s a difference between monitoring millions of people and one person.”
Rocco pressed the keyboard, flicking from one room to the next. We saw Masekela’s wife was in the kitchen, his teenage daughter watching TV in the living room, his son playing video games in the media room. Rocco raised the footage to the second floor of the house and then to the third, searching for Goliath himself. He jumped down toward a closed door—the footage stopped there.
“I’m guessing he’s in his office,” Rocco said. He squinted up at the house and added, “Yes, he’s in there.”
“How can you …?” And then I remembered, Shaman had X-ray vision. I supposed it worked in a similar way to the halo-vision installed in Dark’s car. The car Pope now had, along with everything in it. If we survived this, Dark was going to kill me for sure.
I studied the open blueprint on the laptop and said, “We’ll have to enter through one of the bathrooms.”
“I’m thinking here,” Rocco pointed. “We can go through the garden, in through this bathroom window—move along the hall, up the stairs and into the office. We’ll upload his entire hard drive to this,” Rocco held up an external d
rive.
“You’re prepared,” I said to Rocco. “You knew I wouldn’t get anything, didn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be working with you if I thought you couldn’t do this,” he said to me. “Every operation needs a contingency plan—always.” He glanced back to the house. “He’s left his study—we’re moving now.”
Rocco opened his door.
And before I’d had the time to fully comprehend the insanity of the mission, it had already begun.
27
We stayed low and kept to the shadows as we crossed the road and headed toward the front fence of the Masekela house. I started to slow as we neared, but Rocco sped up. He grabbed my arm and leaped. We cleared the twelve-foot stone wall without a scrape and thudded down on Goliath’s premium lawn.
A snarl ripped from the shadows beside us and a Doberman Pinscher, with its mouth curled up around a jawful of sharp teeth, rushed us. I cringed back, but Rocco stood his ground. The guard dog’s growl softened into a whimper and a wag. It dropped down, crawled on low haunches to Rocco’s shoes, and rolled over on its belly for a scratch. He patted it and said, “Good girl, Biscuit—stay here.”
“Biscuit?” I whispered to him as we crept around the side of the house. He gave a faint smile. We stopped halfway down the side path and Rocco pointed up to our point of entry, the bathroom window. When he’d said we were entering there, I’d assumed it was on the first floor, but the window sat at a high second level. We had no rope or any kind of grappling hook. I was about to ask the obvious when Rocco grabbed me again, slung me half over his back and started to scale the sheer vertical wall.
He climbed it unaided, like Spiderman, though obviously without the costume or the hero complex. I felt uncomfortable being held like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder, so as soon as we made it to the window, I scrambled up onto the sill while Rocco grabbed hold of the security bars. Without much perceptible effort, he dragged the whole frame out of the window and pushed up the glass. I slid in onto cool tiles beside the toilet and Rocco followed, using one arm to maneuver in while keeping grip of the security frame with the other. Once in, he pressed the bars back in place and I glanced around the room, lit by the streetlamp outside. It was immaculate and floral fragranced, and there was even an elaborate crystal chandelier. Rocco turned the handle and inched open the door. He peered out, keeping very still, waiting for the cameras to shift their focus. Eventually he gave me the nod and pushed the door wider. We slipped out and I followed him along the hall toward the staircase to the third floor, toward Masekela’s study. We passed a door with light spilling out from underneath and Rocco pointed to it and mouthed, “Goliath. Bedroom.”
My nerves twanged, but we made it past and to the stairs. There Rocco stopped us again—waiting. I clenched my hands into fists to stop them from shaking. We were in a vulnerable position—in full view. If Masekela came out, he’d see us immediately. I could hear the television sounds and the clink of plates downstairs.
Rocco finally gestured again and we continued moving, all the way up to the third level and along the landing to the office. Rocco knelt in front of the closed door doing something while I stood guard. When he was finished, the door clicked and swung open and we entered the room. The rest of the house was pleasantly warm, but the office was running a few degrees below even the chilly outside temperature. That suggested to me there was major electrical equipment in here that he was keeping deliberately cooled, though I couldn’t see anything much through the darkness except for shadowy shapes.
I heard Rocco crossing the room.
Light shone onto his face as he powered up the computer. He plugged in his storage device and started the transfer. I peered back out the door, keeping watch on the hall and stairs. We sat in silence until Rocco whispered, “Silver, he’s coming.”
“What?” I hissed. There was no one there. Then I heard a door open and close on the bedroom level and seconds later saw Goliath wearing boxer shorts and nothing else heading up the stairs.
My heart seized up. I spun back to Rocco to find him directly behind me.
“Geez!” I hissed.
“Shhh.” He pressed his hand over my mouth. “Listen—I’m going to change you into his wife. You need to distract him.”
“What?” I asked.
Then I felt the strangest sensation, like cold water inching its way down my entire body, followed by an uncomfortable cramping and pushing on my skin from all sides. Momentarily, I couldn’t breathe, but then it was over and I felt nothing. Except completely, utterly uncoordinated, as if I could barely stand on my own two feet.
“Go, distract him,” Rocco said to me. He pushed me out the door before I could say anything.
I used the wall to steady my walk as I crossed the landing toward the stairs. Seriously, I felt like I was walking in roller skates on ice. My whole body felt out of proportion and unattached. My breath stuck in my throat as I reached the staircase and saw Goliath, paused a few steps down, reading from a newspaper. He sensed me there and looked up. I smiled and to my sincere relief he smiled back. It was a genuine smile, an expression that completely transformed his entire face. He went from scary to boyish—perhaps even cheeky cute. I held the railing and moved down to where he stood. He put his arms around me and hugged me close against his body, completely enveloping me in dark muscle. I tried to remain in the hug while I figured out what the hell I was doing, but Goliath pulled back. He kept his arms linked loosely behind my back.
“Let me look at you, my love,” he said tenderly. “I need to see you and memorize your beauty. All the hours we’re parted have starved me.”
Now why hadn’t any of the guys I’d dated said that to me?
Goliath kissed me and I tried to respond as a wife would—seriously difficult considering I wasn’t his wife or anyone else’s. I started to feel suffocated and had to pull away. I stumbled a bit on my new legs.
“Are you all right, my love?” Goliath’s face creased with concern.
“Yes,” I said, my voice foreign to my ears. “Just a little warm.” I smiled at him. “Do you mind if I get a drink?”
“Of course—I will get it for you,” he said.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Let me get one for you. You can wait for me—in the bedroom.”
A smile spread over Goliath’s face. I led him to the second level and made sure he went into the room. Then I hurried down the stairs toward the kitchen. I entered their lounge room and stood just outside the entrance to the kitchen where the real Mrs Masekela stood talking on the phone. She was a tall and curvy woman with perfect dark skin. Without Rocco’s supernatural insight, I had no idea where the surveillance was located down here: I could have been standing in full view of the cameras. No other options, though—it was stay here and risk the cameras or move and be seen by one of the family.
The minutes ticked by. I wondered how much longer Goliath would wait and how much longer Rocco would take. Desperation was starting to set in when I saw my Shaman companion crouched in the doorway on the other side of the kitchen. He beckoned me urgently. To get to him I’d have to cross over behind the wife and I wasn’t sure I could do that. Then I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and I decided I could. I bent low and made the dash, behind the central counter, across the open and to Rocco. Goliath entered the kitchen from where I’d been standing. He saw his wife on the phone and paused. They smiled at each other. He went to the fridge and poured them each a glass of cranberry juice, then turned his back on where we were hiding.
Rocco tugged my arm. He led me fast through the house to the front door. We paused as he silently disarmed the security and then we were out in the fresh air. We ran across the yard and jumped the fence, Biscuit watching us the whole way.
As we got to the car I said, still in the wife’s voice, “Was it there? Do we have the List?”
Rocco smiled and nodded.
I felt like screaming yahoooooooo, but I held it inside. Rocco touched me and I felt the same strange feeli
ng in reverse and then I was back in my own skin. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“How do you feel?” Rocco asked me.
“Pumped,” I said. He raised a questioning eyebrow and I clarified, “As in adrenalin rushing through my veins—not—anything else. I can’t believe we did it,” I said.
Rocco nodded and I couldn’t help but grin. I had to say, I felt very pleased with our little team of two. It felt as if we’d achieved the impossible.
Suddenly Rocco was lunging at me. I heard a dulled thudding sound and then white hot pain burned up my legs: we were being peppered with bullets. Rocco hauled me behind the side of the car. He started to open the door. We heard a whistling sound and he grabbed me again and ran. The car exploded. We were way too close. Rocco turned and lifted his hands, repelling the flaming debris back toward the assassins shooting at us through the smoke haze. They ducked for cover, and without Rocco holding me up, I tumbled into the gutter. My legs weren’t working, so I dragged myself hand-over-hand toward a parked car as the shooting continued. Rocco grabbed my arm and hauled me up over his shoulder, then took off.
I gripped onto his jacket and struggled not to black out. It had suddenly gone very quiet inside my head. Rocco sped down the street, moving faster than the human assassins could track. He scaled a fence and leaped up onto the roof of a house. He slowed, probably thinking as I was that we were out of range, but then figures materialized from the air around us: four masked Shaman soldiers attacking simultaneously. Rocco had to throw me off his shoulder onto the roof tiles to free up his hands to fight back.
The Shamans’ movements were so fast, all I saw was a blur of grayish black as they hit each other with everything they had. I managed to drag myself back to the chimney and prop myself up against it enough to get my gun out. I aimed it at the fight, but didn’t shoot, afraid I’d hit Rocco by accident. Waves of terrible feelings, strange sounds and disorienting senses swept over me. I saw one of the soldiers stretch himself to gigantic proportions. Rocco gestured, and threw the giant onto his back.
