Shadow Child

by Graeme Smith

  Now. It doesn’t matter what you do, but pretty much every kind of work has its own language. Like, I could say I needed some talent to sucker a mark while I reefed his leather. And if you were the type of contact I’d actually say that to, you’d know I needed some cute chick with lots of cleavage and a habit of forgetting buttons to walk by some guy so I could lift his wallet while he was busy looking elsewhere. Or I could say the best way to pop a Bailey cherry was a rim job – but then I’d have to stop your gutter mind dropping below street level and tell you Baily makes some of the best safes in the world, but a good way to crack most of them open is to pack the gap between the door and the walls with epoxy putty, but not so packed you don’t leave space all the way round. You leave a little hole at the top, let the epoxy set, and pour in enough liquid nitro to fill all that nice space you left all around the door under the epoxy. Then get a good ways off and light up the nitro. Rim job, see? But it’s all just trade talk. So when CG told me Mom wanted this one Loud but Invisible, I knew what he meant. Because Loud meant anyone in the trade would know someone had done something. But Invisible meant even people in the trade weren’t supposed to know what that something was. And I had a week.

  * * *

  One week later

  BOOM!

  When you want Loud, nothing really beats Semtex. Well, there’s Octanitrocubane – but while it looks good in the lab, even the Organisation hasn’t actually been able to make enough in one place to put bang in its boogie. So it’s still experimental. And there’s always HMX – but the military keep a pretty close eye on that. So when a girl’s gotta boom, Semtex and C4 are generally the ways to go. Easy to get hold of, if you know the right street corners, stable – and you can mold both of them like play-putty. But Sem’s a little tougher for electronics to detect, so it’s generally the ‘eek’ I’m most likely to put in my ‘plast’. And it’s reliable, as the two storey block of rubble that used to be the eight storey office block Maggie Spencer worked in – and I hoped ‘used to work in’ - was doing nothing to disprove. But like Mom sometimes says. ‘Hope’s a dope’. So I grabbed my Emergency Services jacket and ID, and went into the rubble. It wasn’t that Maggie Spencer had had a weight problem – but fat or otherwise, I had to make damn sure this lady wasn’t going to be singing ever again. Or buying any lottery tickets. Or the whole of the last week would have been wasted – and since the Organisation wasn’t big on failure, the next thing to get wasted would probably be me.

  * * *

  One week ago

  If you read just about any military manual on the planet, it’ll tell you the most powerful weapon you have is knowledge. Which is fine until you’re down a dark alley facing three guys with knives. In that type of situation I’ll see any page in the encyclopedia you want to offer and raise you a short skirt, six inches of thigh and a Glock the punks aren’t expecting. But by and large, the whole knowledge thing is righteous. So if Jethro Tull wasn’t going to have to write some track called ‘Gettingyourheadblownoffbyyouremployerforscrewingup in the past’, I was going to have to get to know a damn sight more than was in even Mom’s files. Which meant leg work, and not the kind I showed guys with knives. It meant tails, stakeouts, hanging out in bars and all the other joys of what we in the trade call being a ‘pavement artist’. In Maggie’s case, the bar work was mostly optional. I didn’t need to grab any fresh DNA, so I didn’t have to talk her into any hotel rooms. What I did need was number two and three of the Holy Trinity. Motive I was fine on – most days Mom stopped at ‘because I said so’. But if I was going to take care of business, Method, Opportunity and I needed some quality time together.

  With wet jobs there are generally two approaches. You can try to get the target on their own – which is what most civilians seem to think is best. And sometimes it’s even the right way to do it, though a lot less times than you might think. Or you can do the job while the target’s surrounded by people, which is good a lot more often than you might think if you do it right. A nudge on a crowded subway platform and a mark can end up under a subway car without any camera able to prove a thing. Down a dark alley you’d be surprised how often there’s the one set of eyes you never planned for. But this job wanted Loud. The subway wasn’t going to work. So I needed somewhere predictable, somewhere part of a pattern Maggie wasn’t easily going to break. And I was lucky – until Lady M won the lottery she wasn’t going to win, she was just another Jane Schmoe at another office desk. An office desk on the fifth floor of an eight storey office block, where she found reasons folk in trouble, who thought they had insurance because they’d been paying premiums like, forever, weren’t going to cost the insurance company she worked for a red cent. Hell, even if she hadn’t been on Mom’s list I might have done her just for fun.

  To be honest, a habit Mom had beaten out of me a long time ago, generally explosives are a really bad way of killing someone. I mean, they’re pretty good at killing someone. Put the bang into boogie in any building round town, or some car by the side of the road, and there’s a pretty good bet the next day’s paper will be needing extra copy space for the obits. But when it comes to killing someone – when you’ve got a specific target who has to go in some place without coming out – not so much. If you do their car, was it them? Or was it the parking valet at their hotel? Or maybe a ‘jacker who was gone in a lot less than sixty seconds when they hot-wired the wrong four-wheels-and-Semtex-to-go? If you do a building – their house, their office – was it maybe the cleaner who opened the closet door with the trip wire? Was this the day your mark called in sick, and the infra-red switch in their desk drawer said goodnight Irene, or in this case Maggie, to the office intern and a bunch of collateral nobodies? Could be. Of course, there are ways to make it more specific. Trigger the Sem with, say, the signal from the mark’s mobile phone, but only at short range. Or reef their pass card, lift the keycode, and set things to blow just for that particular card. But every one of those runs the risk of there being some little piece of rather too specific circuitry left around for some smart-ass with more curiosity than was good for me picking it up and wondering what it was for. Still, Sem fitted the job too because it wasn’t just loud. If I did it right, there’d be a whole bunch of collateral for Maggie to get lost in, or what was left of her at least. So one glamor ring, and ‘Sam’ made some purchases even Wal-Mart didn't sell. And he went into his bank, and made a transfer of pretty much every cent he had to the account of a guy called Tony Warren. The rest was straight out of the book - Mom’s kind of book, anyway. I spent a lot of nights on the roof of Maggie's building. Well, me and the passcard I'd lifted from Tony, or would lift from Tony in a month's time, did. The card and a set of night camo let me scope out the building and the way the guards did their thing. Turned out Tony always did his roof check just before shift change. It looked like an easy job – but I knew something was wrong. Real wrong.

  * * *

  The night before

  Most building security is designed from the bottom up, and the top down. Like, you lock the front door, and you put out rent-a-cops. But you figure most people can’t fly, so even if you put locks on the maintenance doors to the roof, and maybe a camera, the cops stay downstairs. Apart from when they’re on patrol. And if a camera sees a rent on walkabout – who cares? Especially if you pick your time. See, most building security, the biggest thing they care about is not being fired. And the best way not to get fired, is to make sure the paperwork’s done. So every shift change, you got the new crew going over the old crew’s reports while the old crew are still busy writing them up. Watching screens? Not so much. And it’s really easy to find out when shifts change. I hadn't even bothered to ask CG. Nobody notices one more bag lady on the street, and it doesn’t take long to see the handover. Maggie’s building, shift change was six AM. So I figured I had from midnight to maybe six thirty. I'd hung out on the roof a few nights, and I knew Tony did his roof check around five AM. That gave me time to pay a last visit to Sam. Of course it was
my first as well – but who's counting. I set up an email on his home computer explaining everything. How he didn't want to live no more now his wife was gone, but the fucking insurance company who sleazed out of paying her insurance weren't going to get away with it. I rigged his machine to send the email to the newspapers just before noon. Then I grabbed Sam. I’d already killed him, but he still had a job to do. He had to wear my hat.

  Just after midnight I did my best Spider-chick up the side of the building to the roof, courtesy of some mono-molecular finger pads fresh from the Organisation’s Special Projects Division. They clung to just about anything. That, or they were magic. The walls I’d climbed didn’t seem to care, but I was still happier with the building roof under my feet than thin air. Climbing with Sam hanging from a rope under me had been a bitch. The way I had the job laid out, no smart ass Medical Examiner was going to be able to tell he'd been dead a while – not even if they found all the bits of him he'd be in by the time the job was done. But I still needed him as a hat-rack, so he got to play dead-weight in more ways than one. Once I was up on the roof I wired him with a vest, using some of the Sem 'he'd' bought on the street. I rigged the vest with a radio transponder and I put the trigger for the transponder in his hand. It was dead, but it looked convincing and it was going to end up in bits anyway. The maintenance door had a lock my kid sister could break – even if I don’t have a kid sister. It popped like a cheer-leader's cherry. I started working the stairs, making sure I stayed out of camera sight. It wasn't time to be seen yet. But I wore Tony's uniform and his glamor ring just in case. The glamor ring made sure any cameras just saw Tony. CG had tried to tell me how it wasn't actually like that. How the glamor ring just put a morphic field on the recording so anyone watching it saw Tony. I told him I didn't give a shit provided they didn't see me. He muttered something about stupid girls, I put a slug in his shoulder. We'd probably have called it flirting if he wasn't, like, eight years old.

  When I'd checked over the fire stairs, I went back to the roof. Waiting's always the hard part. Killing time's a bitch – even for my Glock. But eventually the door opened and Tony came out for his roof check. He was right on time. Or rather, he was late. At least he was once I'd put a hole in his head with the gun 'Sam' had bought yesterday in a back-street, no-questions dive. I put Sam's fingerprints on it and dropped it near Sam's body. One glamor ring and uniform later, and 'Tony' went back down the fire stairs. At the bottom, 'Tony' opened the street exit and slipped a plastic shim over the door bolt so it would close, but not lock. Then I made my way to the front desk, and filled in Tony's paperwork for the night. 'Tony' left the building, heading for home. A change of glamor ring, and 'Sam' walked up to the fire stairs street door. I was wearing Tony's uniform, with the cap pulled down over 'Sam's' eyes. I made sure the camera saw me, but not for long, and went in. Up the stairs, onto the roof, one spider-chick down the wall and I was on the street. A glamor ring, a change of clothes, and 'Tony' came back up the street in civvies, heading for the exit door. I let the camera see me, and opened the door. The tapes would show Sam going in, and his 'accomplice' Tony following him, so them both being on the roof would make sense. On the roof I changed back to Sam and worked the stairs. If you can call wiring the length of each one with packets of Sem at carefully spaced intervals 'work'. At every door, under the top of the banister, I put a sensor rigged to trigger when three people had passed it, and added a little secret sauce to the fire alarm. Then I went back to the roof and did another spider-chick down. I still had the feeling there was something I was missing. Something nasty. But good or bad, it was time to boogie.

  * * *

  BOOM!

  The thing with offices is, folk do as they're told. They follow patterns. Round about eleven, the little old bag lady nobody ever notices remotely triggered the fire alarm. The folk on the second floor started to evacuate. The sensor there waited until three of them had gone by, and told the sensor on the third floor to wake up. As soon as the third person passed that one, it woke the sensor on the fourth. Which meant that by the time the sensor on the eighth woke up, the stairway was full. Full, and the fifth floor would be empty, and Maggie still going down. The Semtex wired to the stair rail just changed her direction about a hundred and eighty degrees, even if only for a little while. The radio transmitter sent a signal to the roof, and Sam went all to pieces over his wife. Once the email went out people would stop asking questions about who did it, and nobody would be looking for the girl who was never there. Miss Maggie wasn't going to be buying any lottery ticket on the way home and nobody was going to think of her as anything more than a cheap-side city funeral nobody would go to. Loud, and invisible. It was as close to a perfect job as I'd ever done.

  Which didn't explain why something was still nagging me.

  I had no idea what it was, but something wasn't right. The little old bag lady hung round where the building staff were gathered, to make sure Maggie never came out, and she didn't. An Emergency Services jacket went in, and I confirmed one particular body was part of the count. I had my head on a swivel, like I was checking for a tail – but I knew I hadn’t been followed. I’d been checking my six, five and a few numbers that weren’t on any clock you’d find on a wall. I was clean. Definitely. Absolutely.

  Probably…

  No. The hell with it. It really was a clean job. I was just going field crazy. But no matter how often I told myself that, I still knew it wasn't. Something was fucked, and I had a feeling it was me. Still. Mom was going to be waiting for my report, and waiting is one of the things she's really not very good at. It was time I got horny, and I already hated the stuff. I grabbed my bottle, and I did what any good girl does – I swallowed.

  Sonata

  Sviluppo - Tertio Movimento

  BOOM!

  The man in the black leather duster stepped back behind the corner. As jobs went, it was clean. A bit careless – there'd been twice when the girl was scoping the building when she'd been caught by the cameras as the guard while the guard was on camera somewhere else. But Jack had snatched the disks. The guy with the limp had taken care of them, and made sure there was only one Tony Warren, then Jack had put them back. She’d been looking for a tail, which would have been good if she was on Jack’s side. She hadn’t seen him - which was better, because she kind of wasn’t. And she hadn’t seen the kid either. Otherwise, the girl hadn't done bad at all. Which meant someone had spent a lot of time on her, because nobody got that good by accident.

  Finding the girl had been easy. Jack wondered if it had been too easy. On the other hand, finding her hadn't been the problem. Unicorn Horn took care of the When. The Where – Jack had never had much trouble with the Where when he was Dragon. But that was when he had a soul to track, or at least scraped off bits of one, even if he didn't know what he was doing. This time the target didn't have a soul to scrape. So he didn't look for one. He just looked for the hole where a soul should be, like looking for a tear in a map even when you couldn't read the street names. Finding it had been easy. Two easy – because that's what there was. One hole, and two problems. The hole was the girl. The tail stuck to her butt like used gum coming off a park bench was a different story. Because he had a soul – but there was something off about him. Something wrong.

  It had taken a while to see him. Maybe too much of a while. Jack wondered if he was getting old. Sure, the tail had been Shifting. A guy with a briefcase, a kid on a skateboard. But it wasn't a Shifter. Not like P, anyway. Once Jack had caught it, he'd seen the ring thing. So the tail was a mage. And a pretty dumb one – totally fixed on the girl. Never even glanced Jack's way. Which didn't fit – dumb mages didn't last long enough to be a problem. Before Jack could show the mage just why, the girl had used a ring too. Which made the mage maybe a partner – or maybe a contingency plan. Either way, it was too soon. So he watched. He was watching when the dumb-ass mage dropped one of the rings he was switching. So he was watching when the dumb-ass mage turned out to be the kid he'd se
en blow the girl's head off after she shot Jack. Which was about three bullets too many, and one bullet too few - the bullet Jack was going to put in the mage's head.

  But not yet. Not yet, because the other thing he'd watched was the girl laying the job out. And everything about how she did it was every way Jack would have done it. Because she did it the way Jack had been trained – and that meant Dragon.

  Except there shouldn't have been any Dragon way. Not this time. Jack had taken care of that. It just looked like someone, somewhere, hadn't got the memo. Jack figured he'd take care of delivering it. Maybe he'd wrap it round a fifty cal. Hellround. Because someone knew way too much – and maybe the Dragon hadn't been Barbas' idea after all. Or if it had been once, maybe it wasn't now. Jack winced. He could feel a headache coming. Mostly he left those to Haures, but mostly those didn't involve a kid who could put a bullet in Jack's head. Especially one Jack wasn't allowed to kill. No, scratch that. Jack knew he'd get in front of any bullet headed her way himself if he had to – he just didn't know why. And not knowing what was going on tended to have a price. A price people often wanted to be Jack, but one Jack made sure someone else paid. Jack figured it was that time again. He smiled - cold enough to give an ice-berg an inferiority complex. He did it again. It had been way too long since he'd had any fun anyway.

  Following the girl had been a bitch. Not so much the following – that was just following a hole where a soul should be. It was the tail made it harder, but it made things easier too. When things got cramped, Jack could drop back and follow the tail instead. That way, if the tail turned out to be a problem, Jack would know exactly where to put his next slug. But the tail never made a move on the girl. All he did was take a glowing red stone out of his pocket every now and then – and talk to it. That was when things started to make sense. Because that made it...