by Mercedes Lackey; Cody Martin; Dennis Lee; Veronica Giguere
He nodded. “Like something out of a spy movie.”
“A lot like that,” she replied. “Sometimes I will even be able to disable alarms and unlock doors remotely or run distractions. This isn’t just computer hacking, Mr. Tesla. This is magic-based computer hacking. There isn’t anyone in your organization who can do this. I want to be a full and valuable Op, but I also want to make you never ask me to leave my house again.” She took a deep breath. “What I want, sir, is nothing more, and nothing less. Now, give me a team. Give me a test.”
* * *
In the monitor, Bulwark tried on his headset. Djinni had already gone somewhere out of sight to remove the red wrappings that swathed his head, neck, and shoulders and put the headset on underneath. “This is rather melodramatic, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I can cue the Mission Impossible theme if you want melodrama,” Vickie replied. Bulwark was looking into the security cam of what was laughingly called the “briefing room” on the Echo campus—laughingly, because, like just about everything else there at the moment, the room was in a portable office building trucked to the site. “How comfortable is that?”
“Very,” Bulwark replied, which was pretty much as Vickie expected. The Echo-tech headsets were practically invisible. They should be comfortable. They were what some of the higher level Ops had used in the pre-Invasion days on their crime-fighting sessions. “I’ve never needed to use one of these before.”
“Is this thing on?” Djinni did not appear in the monitor, but Vickie hadn’t expected him to.
“As soon as you put it on, yeah,” she replied. “Here’s the fast tour, full disclosure, Djinni. You’re on an Echo-tech comm unit, one each. It’s powered by you; uses your body heat. I can’t actually see you unless you are in view of a camera I can tap. I can’t see what you’re looking at unless you also wear the minicamera that goes with the headset. Yes, it has something like a GPS so you can be tracked with it. That’s so I know where you are so I can scout for you, by using security cams in whatever area you’re in. Right now you’re on an open feed, so you can hear and be heard by the whole team. You can elect to talk only to your team leader, and you and I can also talk privately.”
She knew where he was going to go with that before he opened his mouth. “So, does that mean you wanna talk dirty to me, Victrix?”
She was in her safe place, and it wasn’t the fear-paralyzed neurotic that answered him. “That’d be five cents a word, and my agent would get fifteen percent, Djinni. I don’t think you can afford my rates.”
Bulwark’s mouth twitched and his eyebrows arched. While he took a moment to be amused, Vickie switched to private mode on the Djinni’s pickup. “I know what’s going through your head. It runs on your body heat and the kinetic energy generated by movement. Do the math. You can shut it off just by taking it off, or making it cold, or just doing your shifter thing and giving it no heat. But remember, if you shut it off, that means not only won’t we know where you are, it means I can’t help you. This isn’t another control thing. I just want to be your eyes in the sky.”
Before Bulwark could notice or Djinni respond, she switched back to open channel. “Most of Echo isn’t going to need this system, only the people going covert.” She wasn’t entirely certain why she had told Djinni how he could disable his system. Maybe it was honesty. Maybe it was because she knew from his new Echo file how much he hated having a leash on him. If he saw it as a lifeline rather than a leash, if he was in control of it, maybe he’d be less inclined to dump it. “Which would be you, obviously.”
Djinni still wasn’t going to like this, but he would probably put up with it . . . she hoped.
Bulwark’s mouth twitched again. “Maybe you ought to cue up the Mission: Impossible theme then.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Bull,” Djinni drawled, in a tone of voice that practically promised trouble. “I think the first thing we should do is take in a little entertainment.”
* * *
Djinni and Bulwark settled into the cramped and primitive passenger seats of the Echo cargocraft; the sight of those skeletal contraptions in Bull’s headcam made Vickie’s back ache with sympathy. As they were strapping their gear down and themselves in, she gave in to a whim.
“Welcome to Echo Atlantic City Flight Two-Eleven,” she said, in her best stewardess voice. “Please stow your carryons under the seat or whatever looks most like an overhead bin. There is no meal or beverage service, but feel free to scavenge for whatever crumbs or dropped items might have been left by the previous passengers. Your inflight entertainment will be me. In the event of an emergency, figure out where is a good place for an exit, because that’s where you’ll be putting one. In the event of a water landing, this thing floats about as well as a boat flies. If the cabin depressurizes, it will be important to know how long you can hold your breath, because it will take the pilot ninety-three seconds to drop to breathable altitude. If the passenger next to you is a child or acting like one, feel free to cold-cock him. At the conclusion of the flight, please stow your flight attendant in the upright and locked position. Thank you for flying Echo Airlines.”
After a moment of surprise, Bulwark grunted what passed for a laugh and even Djinni unbent enough to make a sound that might have been a chuckle.
“I meant that about the inflight entertainment,” she added. “You two got any preferences, musicwise?”
“Doubt you’ve got it,” Djinni grunted. Victoria smiled to herself and gazed fondly at the multiterabyte storage stack that was music only. “Try me,” she challenged him.
“Apoptygma Berzerk,” he said. Smugly.
Stump the DJ, hmm? She cued up “Welcome to Earth” and sat back. In the window that showed Djinni’s headcam, she could see Bulwark’s face. He looked pained. She switched the feed to Djinni’s personal freq, and cued up Miriam Stockley for Bulwark. His eyes registered surprise, then amusement. He closed them, and settled back in the dubious “comfort” of the seat.
“This might not suck,” was all Djinni said. The rest of the flight passed in silence from both of them.
The target was in Atlantic City, and—as was to be expected, considering that this was a petty criminal—the target was not in a nice part of Atlantic City. Vickie ignored the buttonhole cams for the most part, as Djinni and Bulwark took their rented beater past the new casinos and the Triumph Tower and all the rest of the frenetic glitz, tracking them by the innumerable security cams, getting used to switching from cam view to cam view. She had an ace in the hole if she lost them: two more of the elaborately folded spell-packets plugged in via USB cables.
The “bit of Bulwark” had been easy; she asked for a couple of hairs, told him why, and he obligingly gave them to her.
Djinni, however, was not someone she wanted to approach for a “sample,” and he was surprisingly careful. She had resorted, at last, to Jenson, Bulwark’s superior. Jenson didn’t like Djinni. Jenson would do everything he covertly could to put Djinni back behind bars. And Jenson didn’t know her from Adam. So using her old FBI credentials, she’d gotten Jenson to get her something of Djinni’s when he and Bulwark were out on a recruitment. Something personal. And what Jenson had brought her were books.
The Count of Monte Cristo, and Franny and Zooey. The former was marked with margin notes in a tiny, precise script; both were paperbacks so often read that the covers were soft. She photographed the notes and took tiny scrapings from the covers of both, then had Jenson return them to their proper places. She hadn’t studied the notes, but the scrapings and one of the note pages were in Djinni’s packet.
It wasn’t only that she wanted an arcane way to track them, it was that she couldn’t work actual magic for them at that far a distance without a magical connection to them.
The books themselves, the fact that they were something he read over and over, said a lot about the man. Add to that, the notes—she was not sure she wanted to know that much about him.
Well, right now, as they dr
ove deeper into the seedier part of Atlantic City, it was moot. “Where exactly are we going?” Bulwark asked, as Djinni finally parked the car in front of a boarded-up storefront.
“I told ya, we’re gonna take in a little entertainment.” The glee in Djinni’s voice made Vickie close her eyes and count to ten. He was going to try to do something to punish her for this. Never mind that what she was doing would be useful and might even be life-saving—
“You have bogeys at your eight o’clock,” she said softly, as the security cam in the parking lot showed her movement behind them. She zoomed and clarified the image as much as she could. “Three, males, large, weapons. I see a pipe and a baseball ba—”
Djinni moved. Fast. He was beside the three before they could blink. “Hello boys,” he said, genially. “Out for a stroll?”
The widest of the three cursed and started to swing; the tallest grabbed the pipe before it had moved more than a few inches. “Yeah, bro. A stroll. Fresh air, good for ya.”
Djinni nodded. “So they tell me. Well, you boys keep on strolling.”
Red turned his back to them and moved away, whistling. The thug with the bat made a gesture to follow, but the tallest held him back, shaking his head. Pipe boy cursed and turned away and the others followed. Djinni didn’t look back and favored Bull with a chuckle as they continued across the lot.
“Preventative action?” Bulwark asked dryly, as Vickie’s sophisticated sound analysis picked out most of what the would-be muggers were saying. The first continued to swear but the second silenced him. “—was a meta, you idjit. You wanta mix it up with a meta?”
“Something like that.” Djinni was unwrapping his face. “There. Anything showing?”
In Bulwark’s camera view, Djinni was wearing a face she hadn’t seen before. It might have been pleasant, if it hadn’t been marred by a couple of scars. He evidently wasn’t going to bother with a hairpiece this time. She looked for the throat mike, the wire for the earpiece, and realized with a shock he’d grown skin over them both to conceal them. Oh, smart. “No, nothing,” she replied. “Not even a lump.”
“Good.” Oh, she didn’t like that grin. “All right, Jarhead. Let’s go take in the nightlife.”
The seedy-looking bar he was heading for was the only establishment showing any signs of life on this street. She already had a sinking feeling, and when the sign managed to flicker on long enough for her to read GENTLEMAN’S CLUB, she knew what he was planning to do to try to shock her.
She shook her head as they paid the cover charge and passed the bouncer, emerging into a barely lit room throbbing with pounding music. There was a runway-type stage with three poles; a very limber girl with patently artificial enhancements was twined inelegantly around one of them. Djinni sat down at a table near the stage, right in front of the middle pole, and ordered a beer. Bulwark did the same.
“I hope that girl didn’t pay too much for those bazookas,” she said dryly in their ears. “In ten years they’re going to be hard as rocks and she can rent them out as paperweights.”
Vickie was doing her job; seeing if the club security cams were running on wireless. They were; within moments, she had them all. “Eight wireless cams,” she said. “Four in the main stage, one in each of two private rooms, one in the office and one in the dressing room. In the main stage area you have one in each corner. They have fish-eye lenses, so there’s not a lot of blind spots. There’s two people in the office, none in the private rooms and four more girls in the dressing room. Besides the bouncer at the door, there’s another one down behind the DJ, and the bartender has a sawed-off at each end of the bar.”
Djinni gave the slightest of nods to show he’d heard.
The girl with the artificial chest untangled herself from the pole. “Let’s give it up for Brandy!” said the DJ, with staged enthusiasm, to a spattering of bored applause. “And let’s hear it for Kara Kane!”
The replacement was met with some real response; it was easy to see why. If her boobs had been pumped, it had been by someone who knew what he was doing. She was long-legged and long-haired and looked like a head cheerleader that you just knew was as active under the bleachers as in front of them. She was also a much better dancer than Brandy, who was making the rounds of the tables until she found someone who would “buy her a drink.”
The new girl was concentrating on her dancing, right up until she switched poles to the one that Djinni had parked in front of. As she finished her first swing around it, she got a good look at him. Her eyes widened. In recognition?
If so, Djinni gave no sign, other than tucking some bills in her g-string. And she didn’t linger at “their” pole, but she didn’t hurry the routine up, either.
But when her place had been taken by a woman who looked and danced as if she ate men alive on toast, Kara Kane managed to sidle her way to Djinni’s table. She meandered through the crowd, giving her clients devastating and winsome looks full of promise. Seemingly on a whim, she stopped by Red and Bull.
“Hey, handsome,” she purred breathlessly, planting one hip on the table and bending over so that her chest was just about eye level. “Buy a girl a drink?”
“Actually my friend and I were lookin’ for a private dance, darlin’,” Djinni drawled before Bulwark could say anything. “Think that can be arranged?”
“You just follow me,” she replied.
What the hell? Vickie thought.
“Djinni—” growled Bulwark over the channel. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
“Come on, Jarhead,” Djinni said genially, slapping Bulwark on the shoulder and propelling him forward into the private room. “Time for you to loosen up and have some fun.”
Kara closed the door; in a remarkably short period of time, Djinni was in a chair, she was grinding her pelvis into his lap and her natural endowments were filling the screen in Djinni’s button cam.
“Djinni, what the hell is going—” Vickie kept her voice as even as possible.
“Say hello to Miss Nagy, Kara,” Djinni said in a throaty whisper. “Right now she’s got the best seat in the house.”
Vickie was aghast. “Jesus Cluny Frog!” she sputtered. “You just want to go out and announce to everyone that you’re wired?”
Djinni chuckled. “Just Kara. Or, actually, Ms. Barbara Kronstein, to use something besides her stage name. This is our target, Victrix.”
“Red? This is you, right?” The girl’s tone of desperation was at complete odds with the way she was “dancing.” “Red, I can’t believe you just showed up; it’s like you knew I needed help! Please, you’ve got to get me out of here—”
Bulwark interrupted. “Victrix. Audio?”
She’d already checked. These guys were cheap. “Nothing. No audio monitor in this room. But tell her to keep dancing, the camera is hot and the guys in the back are watching.”
“Eyes in the sky, darlin’, keep making the customer happy. Tell me what’s going on, and give ’em a show. Bull, pull out that stack of bills. As long as there’s money on the table, they’ll leave us alone.”
The girl pulled her long hair up on top of her head and shimmied. Vickie opted to watch the other cam feeds. “There’s this creepy guy.” Kara’s voice was strained. “He bought into the club about six weeks ago, right after the Invasion when no one was coming in and Jimmy really needed the money. Now he’s here all the time, and Red—” there was an edge of panic in her voice “—Red, I think he knows about me! He keeps dropping hints about my talent, and how he knows a better use for it, it’s not the regular kind of come-on!”
“Blacksnake?” Bulwark asked, alarmed.
“This isn’t their approach, they just come in and make a direct offer,” Djinni replied, sounding remarkably detached for a man with a pair of mammaries a centimeter from his nose. “Besides, I know their recruiter.”
“Who, then?”
Kara leaned back and did a belly-dancer-type undulation. “He kind of slipped once. He sounded German.”
“What is it you actually do, miss?” Bulwark asked carefully.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” she said plaintively, as she somehow did a fast reverse on Djinni’s lap and the mammaries changed places with a shapely derriere. “It’s nothing—weapony. I just turn sound into light.”
“Oh, hell no,” Vickie said again, aloud this time, aghast. “A pocket amplifier—”
“Or a convenient source of a lot of sound,” Bulwark agreed, grimly. “And you have a living flashbang.”
At just that moment, on one of the main stage cameras, Vickie caught sight of something that set all her internal alarms ringing. A man had just come in, and the bouncer was showing him deference. Quickly she froze a half-dozen frames as he turned, and ran them through her facial-recognition program. The answer set her nerves on fire.
“Oh, bloody hell, no! Bull, Djinni, get out of there now,” she snarled, fingers flying over the keyboard to look for exits. “Your girl’s mystery date is out in the main stage area and I am pretty sure it’s Doppelgaenger, ’cause whoever he is, he’s wearing Doc Bootstrap’s face.”
Bulwark was quicker at remembering what kind of an asset she was than Djinni. “Exits?”
“Checking.” She called up the plans from the last Health and Safety inspection. And meanwhile she started futzing the feed on the cameras—all of them, to put suspicion off for a few more precious moments. She told the wireless signal to drift; on her monitors she could see the feed start to get static. “Out the front, the way you came. Both bathrooms have a window big enough to squeeze through if you break it, but take the women’s if you have a choice; the girls have their own and it’s likely to be empty. Fire exit directly left as you exit the room. Roof access—pop the panel in the center of the room you’re in, it’s a hard ceiling, crawl ten feet south and there’s a hatch.”
“Don’t leave me!” Kara begged. She froze on Djinni’s lap.
“Tell her to keep dancing. I’m screwing with their feed but it’ll take a minute.”
