by P. S. Power
He signaled to the waitress, a fairly average looking woman of about twenty-something and change, who was wearing a tight shirt, most likely hoping it would increase her tips. It probably worked too, from the way the drunk guy at the bar kept trying to feel her up when they spoke.
“Beer please, sweetie? Whatever’s on tap.” The man looked to his right, at Reyes and gave a nod.
“Hoover, thanks for arranging this. The whole thing is… I’m over my head here people. This is way the fuck out of my league and you all know how I hate to admit crap like that.” He gasped for breath, sweating harder than seemed warranted by a friendly meeting of old war buddies and finally looked around as if he wasn’t sure it was safe to speak.
It could mean a lot of things from major health problems to having run to get to the meeting on time. It could also be situational stress. She started to go on alert, which Reyes missed, but Lancaster caught instantly. Then, they worked together more often than not anymore.
The fat guy huffed for a bit then stopped talking as the waitress brought his drink, sucking down half of the large mug before setting it down, not even acknowledging the woman that handed it to him.
“So, Weathers, Harpo and Mic are missing. I don’t know why, but they’re totally dark. I got a single hit on their credit cards; a friend looked for me, each from three days ago each in or more exactly around the edges of Miami. Each one for nine dollars and eleven cents. Then they went silent again. That and the fact that since I’ve been here, I’ve been being watched constantly is really all I have. I know, it’s probably over the top to get you all here just for that, but I don’t know enough to know what’s really needed at all. Weathers' wife is really worried and Harpo’s girl, his daughter, is freaked. He wasn’t set up to go anywhere at all. Mic is a loner, but, well, you get the idea.” He stopped talking and knocked back about half the remainder in his mug. It was impressive drinking, but a bit too fast to be a casual thing. It had the feeling of a person that drank a lot, regularly.
Lancaster stared at the man, not blinking for a long while, with and expression that was so blank it had to freak the other man out just a bit. It always did Marcia when it got turned on her at least.
“We can run a search for them, using some advanced techniques, and go to the locations of their last credit purchases, but other than that, I’m not sure what we can do that you haven’t. We aren’t in intelligence anymore. Not directly. Even if we were, if those guys don’t want to be found they won’t be, none of us would. Making those purchases seems like they have enough freedom to escape most likely, if they wanted too. Most captors wouldn’t let people out to buy things in stores or wherever. Not former special forces like those guys. Plus the purchases sound like part of a plan. Something organized by a group.” He threw back a tiny sip of whisky to emphasize his point.
Marcia had to grimace though.
“Unless they, or their cards, are being used as bait in a trap. I can’t imagine why that would be, or… Well, I can, if it was directed at us and not anything else, but…” She glanced at the other two, trying to will them to remember what she said about Alpha Squad earlier and Braid. They had people that could control those men so well that they might be doing things like that and not even know they were involved. For that matter they could all still be at home and look like they were missing only on computer or any of a hundred other things. That might be a long shot, of course, so they needed to check everything out carefully, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t something potentially real.
It was a cluster fuck on a level she didn’t know they could beat. Before she could say anything to the effects, the man at the counter, the watcher, turned and pulled something from under his shirt. Even with her speed she didn’t do more than stand, her chair flying out from behind her, when man dropped, slumping to the floor with a crash and a wet thunk.
“Got him!” Penny sounded a bit out of breath herself, but not in shock from doing whatever it was she had.
Walking quickly, Marcia got to the man in a few seconds, to find that what he had in his hand was only a camera. It was small and in black and silver, which was a bit of a mistake, given the people he was trying to capture for the record. Picking it up she ran through the last pictures taken. It was just filled with pictures of people from her team, with a lot of them focusing on Prime and Tobin, but Mark and Warren were well represented too, as well as a few other people she didn’t recognize but who were pretty good looking. So a paparazzi, or someone trying very hard to make it seem like they were one?
“Is this someone working for you Cal?” She asked softly, waiting before making a decision about what to do.
“Fuck no. Never seen him before at all. Looks like a ghoul. What the hell is this about? Related to what we’re talking about you think?” Cal was many things and a good liar was definitely one of them, so him denying knowledge of the man didn’t mean much.
They needed to get him to wake up and answer some questions without realizing the he’d just been assaulted by an IPB operative then. That wouldn’t be hard though, would it?
Marcia started calling for a doctor. No one came forward, but she managed to get a cold compress from the waitress and mopped the man’s brow a bit as everyone else in the place stared at them. About thirty seconds later the man woke up and then promptly vomited. That probably meant a concussion. Penny had cold cocked the man hard. Probably with the butt of the weapon she was carrying.
“Are you all right? Are you on any medication? How much have you had to drink tonight? Do you want an ambulance?” She inundated the poor guy with questions, not letting him answer at all. It was meant to confuse him, so that when she asked her real questions, he’d be more likely to glom on to those in his confusion and just answer honestly.
“What’s your name and who do you work for? I think you might have a concussion, so that’s important to tell us, in case you pass out again.”
“Wha?” The man sounded befuddled.
“Um, Hal… Hall Kemp. I… Freelance. Pictures.” He searched for his camera, which Marcia still held. She gave it back, since nothing on it seemed too bad really. It wasn’t illegal to take pictures in public, just annoying at times. Of course if he wanted her picture he probably had some idea of who she was with, if nothing else, but as long as she was nice about things, that probably wouldn’t connect in his mind. Their invisible operative was just too hard to keep in mind for most people to come to the conclusion that she’d been the one to do something to them.
It seemed like it was all a dead end then, but Penny spoke, the sound softer than was needed, considering no one could hear her at all unless they had the special time delay ear buds in.
“Guys… the man in at the bar, the one that looks drunk? I don’t think he is. He has… At least two guns on him and… Yeah, he’s leaving. I don’t know what’s going on, but is that normal?”
Marcia looked up as the man staggered past, his movements rough and sloppy, but Penny was right, he wasn’t drunk, he was faking. Real drunks didn’t move that fast if they were that far gone. He was making a controlled bee-line for the door.
Great.
She sighed and saw Lancaster looking at the guys back. It would spook him if they tried to follow, but if something was really going on, knowing who he was and where he was going might just break the whole thing wide open. If it was real at all.
She whispered, not knowing if she’d be heard since the invisible girl could be anywhere in the room.
“Penny, follow him. Try to find out everything you can about him. Don’t get too far away though; we don’t want to lose you.” The range on the ear buds wasn’t great after all, about fifteen feet, twenty-five if the girl yelled loud enough. They didn’t have any way to track her mechanically either, if she got lost or hurt, the only person they had that could find her like a regular person was Proxy and he was probably fast asleep like all good little super-agents should be at this time of night.
“Got it then. Following n
ow. Meet me in the room in an hour?”
“Sounds good.” Lancaster spoke instead of Marcia. It made sense. In the field Cellophane didn’t go it alone, she had a handler and that person was always Daryl Lancaster. She wouldn’t trust anyone else for some reason. Not even Brian, though that could just be due to the fact that he normally didn’t leave the base at all. Otherwise that would have been about the perfect team.
Marcia helped Hal stand up, then immediately sit down again, since he wasn’t up to the task yet.
“Wow, you must have hit your head hard when you blacked out. Does this happen to you often?” She tried to sound concerned, but felt distracted. What Penny was going to really do didn’t make sense, but hopefully she’d get something.
Otherwise they were back to square two on the whole thing.
5
It was a mess getting everyone back into the room, because it was occupied and they didn’t really need the chef and a fifteen year old girl in on their plans yet. Penny had a key card for the room though, and other than pound on the door she’d need to be able to get in on her own. Otherwise they’d have moved to the agents’ room.
Impulse met them at the door, standing with her hands in front of her, tiny fists locked into a combat stance, ready to protect Warren from all comers. Cal saw it and laughed, but the other men just gave him a look that was sour enough to get him to stop pretty quickly. It did look kind of cute, Marcia had to admit, since the girl was so very small and was dressed in an oversized t-shirt with a cartoon character on the front. That was of a little girl wearing a cape and a superhero outfit.
The man sounded amused as he spoke.
“What? She’s going to go all Danger Debbie the super girl on me or something?” He started forward only to have Burke grab his arm firmly enough to stop him instantly.
The agent looked blank as he spoke, but the annoyance he felt was clearly visible in his stiffened shoulders and back.
“Mr. Morris, this young lady is Bridget Chambers; class five Infected and IPB agent. I’d suggest you don’t give her ideas.” He didn’t say anything else but the fat man just shrugged. It was a problem with some of the older guys from the special forces. They weren’t really trained to handle Infected, so they tended to think they were equal to a class three or four in a fight, if not superior. It wasn’t all of them anymore, but Cal had come up in a time when the average soldier was taught to trust his weapons against every threat. It normally worked and was still the best they could do most of the time, so it was still pretty much what the governments of the world went with.
Except France, which was the only place that had Infected integrated with normals in the military. Luckily they had problems coordinating everything, thanks to conflicting first modes, or they’d probably be the world power of note already. As it was no one really wanted to try and run operations against them at all. It was too risky.
Lancaster patted Cal on the back, since he knew the man from back in the day, and spoke softly moving them all into the room.
“No shit. If she starts kicking your ass, I suggest begging. She’s tough, but tends to give in, if you cry enough.” He wasn’t kidding and it showed on his face, but it was clear the new guy wasn’t convinced.
“OK, sorry. I’m just a bit giddy from lack of sleep I guess. So, what’s the plan?”
“I agree, a bit of a heads up would be good. If this is an impromptu orgy, we might want to take it somewhere else. Bridget’s a little young for that, isn’t she?” Warren had stood by his bed, in actual pajama’s, but just the bottoms, his upper body thin and hairless. With his hair thinning on top like it was, he kept it pretty short, so he looked a lot shaper than someone that had just woken up normally would. Bridget tilted her head and relaxed her stance, the look on her own face echoing the question.
Marcia just held a finger in front of her lips, which amazingly got everyone to go quiet for a few seconds, and then Bridget nodded and stepped back, so everyone could come in. She waved with her left hand, then hurried across the room to Marcia’s bag and started pulling out the equipment to check for bugs or monitoring. It was the right thought to have, but Marcia didn’t really like the fact that the girl just opened her stuff. Of course she’d probably gone through everything earlier, being both curious and having a hard time controlling impulses like that. Marcia knew it was one thing for Bridget to fight for control on some specific issues, another for her to do it all the time. It wouldn’t help to blame the girl for being who she was.
On the good side, everything was there, and it still worked correctly. At least as long as no one had altered it in some fashion. To give false readings or ignore certain types of input. That was possible, but unlikely. Anyone smart enough to do that would realize that she’d be doing a physical check at the same time, and might catch their work anyway, making her way more wary than she already was. The easiest thing to do would be to get the room next to hers, or above or below and drill partway through, using a physical pick-up for sound. It was the high tech version of holding a glass to a door to listen to the conversation on the other side. It was the problem with unsecured situations like this.
If someone wanted to really hear what you said, they could. No widows in the room at least, so those couldn’t be used as listening devices.
She swept the room carefully, then, on a whim, decided to check Cal too. The man made the device in her hand light like a Christmas tree. He blinked and looked worried for a few seconds.
“I can explain that, I…” It was a device taped to his chest, or possibly in his shirt pocket. Marcia couldn’t feel anything through his shirt with her hand, but that didn’t mean anything. Carefully she lifted the shirt, and found the device, a flat pad with a membrane on the top, like a doctors stethoscope. It was about the size of a silver dollar and three times as thick. Much larger than what she was used to seeing. Most bugs were just tiny anymore. That meant it was probably something a lot more high tech than she suspected. Meant to listen to them and monitor his heart rate perhaps? It was stuck on with a bit of adhesive she thought, and started to pull it off, but Cal screeched.
“Fuck! Stop that you stupid cunt, it’s super-glued on. Kind of burned the skin underneath too. It’s just… in case.” He mimicked writing, pretending to do it on his hand. Bridget got him a pen from her own gear and a pad of paper. It had unicorns on it.
Cal scribbled on the paper, looking down the barrel of three guns as he did. IPB agents had special training that caused them to shoot as soon as they drew their weapon as a rule, or to be really ready for it at least. That none of them had fired was half miracle, half something else that Marcia wasn’t sure she really got. It was a close situation though, that was for certain. Cal was about to die, if he did the wrong thing.
What he wrote got passed to her first, and did come pretty close to being good enough to save the man. The pad just had one line on it.
It said, “they have my daughter.”
That was all. No details provided at all. He hadn’t had a lot of time to convince them though, so that might be forgiven, to her mind he’d bought some time for himself.
Marcia didn’t bother writing, just mouthing a single word, “wait”, as the others got showed the pad in turn, including Bridget and Warren. Leaving people on the scene out of the loop was insane and had cost more missions than it had ever saved. It pretty much meant that they were in on things now, at least on paper, and had to be treated as such, but they were both solid, in their own way. She hoped so at least.
The chubby guy took the paper back and wrote carefully, then showed the others the sheet.
He didn’t know, but he suspected it was one of the three they were looking for that had grabbed his daughter. It took a while but it was clear he couldn’t remove the device on his chest. The voice on the phone had told him that if he did, if he warned them, the girl would be killed. Not that she was some child, being twenty already.
That Cal had a daughter that old made her suddenly feel anci
ent. It was out of place, but it hit pretty hard for a few seconds. She had to have been born at about the time that Marcia had popped Infected then. That was probably why she hadn’t known about her. She’d been a little busy at the time after all.
What were they supposed to do? That answer took a while to get at, but it seemed they were supposed to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to the others, if possible. Starting with those no doubt phony credit and bankcard purchases. It took a while to work out why Morris though that the whole thing might have something to do with the missing men. The answer was simple enough. Weathers had hired him to do some work just before he vanished, which was why the man’s wife had known to get with him to see if it was an unplanned trip.
The next day the others vanished, then a day after that, his daughter. Right from her college dorm room. One of the men that took her sounded a lot like Harpo, with his fluffy mane of golden hair. Whatever was going on it was certainly related.
Somehow.
For the time being though it meant that they couldn’t discuss anything with Morris in the room. If it was Braid and her crew, they wouldn’t have bothered with a listening device. They didn’t need it. That meant it was slightly more likely to be someone else doing this at least. That wasn’t a hundred percent, of course, since Braid was famous for plans so complex that no one could see them happening at all, but those worked perfectly for the most part. It was her power, a kind of extreme precognition that was almost impossible to really understand. As the Director had put it, she got results with it, but other than that, it was a cipher.
