Andrea looked at Penny. ‘And you didn’t spot that?’
‘I saw the doodle weeks ago, and I didn’t hear the name “Ghostfire” until a while later.’
‘My boss reminded me about the notes today,’ June explained, ‘and I remembered the doodles, and then I made the connection.’
‘You said something about a list of properties?’ Twilight asked.
June picked up a sheet of paper. ‘I checked the account Thorpe was working on when he made those doodles, and it’s mostly about management of various different properties around the city. I know you’ve had no luck with the petty criminals you’ve been taking down. I figure, if this is something to do with Ghostfire…’
‘I suspect it’s a safe bet,’ Andrea stated.
June gave her a timid, slightly proud smile. ‘If it is, then maybe these places are bases of operation.’
Andrea took the sheet and her gaze flicked down it. ‘There’s an outlier, a warehouse at the Solomon Airfield. That place gets used for various private flights, mostly by the rich types out of North Beach.’ She looked up at Penny. ‘We could fly down there tonight and scout the place. If it turns up anything we can try the other addresses.’
‘Okay,’ Penny said, climbing to her feet, ‘I’m up for that.’
~~~
Solomon Airfield was named for Solomon Island Road which provided the land-side access to it. At close to midnight there was not much going on from land or air, aside from the two women who flew in low over the perimeter fence to land beside a well-maintained building which was supposed to be one of Ghostfire’s bases.
‘We really want to get in without them noticing,’ Cygnus said as she set her partner down. ‘I mean, if this is just a legitimate business…’
Twilight reached to her belt and produced a small, rolled-up pouch. ‘I have that covered. Sometimes porting in isn’t possible.’ Crouching beside the nearest door, she unrolled the pouch and set to work with a set of lock picks.
‘So you learned burglary techniques?’
‘I’m a woman of many talents. I’m an ace at indexing comic collections too. Now shut up, this isn’t as easy as they make out in the movies.’
Cygnus paced, supposedly keeping watch, while Twilight worked on the lock, grumbling every so often. Then there was a click and the black-clad heroine said, ‘Two minutes, not exactly my personal best, but not bad.’
‘Alarms?’
‘Nothing I can see.’
‘Well… let me go first. I can see in the dark.’
‘Uh-huh, and if there’s an automated machine-gun turret, you’re bulletproof.’
Cygnus opened the door and poked her head through. ‘Thanks for that.’
There was no hail of bullets. There was not much of anything. Part of the large, open space had been partitioned off into a couple of offices, there were a few crates, and there was a light aircraft. Penny had little clue about planes, but this one seemed to have big fuel tanks set into the wings.
‘I think it’s clear. You want to check out the offices? I’ll take a look around that plane?’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Twilight agreed, taking out her penlight and starting toward the offices.
The plane looked like it was some sort of conversion of a fairly large, twin-prop light aircraft. Cygnus found a plate which said it was made by a company called Beechcraft, which she had never heard of. It looked like someone had stripped out seats to make room for cargo, and installed the underslung fuel tanks after the thing had been shipped. How far could something like that fly? Central America certainly. They had taken a lot of cocaine off the dealers in Friendship.
Floating up to peer in through the cockpit window she noticed a few other modifications which looked like they were not standard fittings. Someone had bolted an additional control panel in beside of the seats. She could see ‘ECM’ printed over a bank of switches. Another section read ‘Flares.’ Definitely not what you would expect to see on a normal civilian aircraft.
When she dropped to the floor again, Twilight was crouched in front of another door, working on the lock. Walking across, Cygnus heard the grumbling and looked down to see the broken pick lying on the ground beside the pouch.
‘This one’s tougher,’ Twilight said, ‘or I got clumsy, but I think I’ve…’ The lock clicked and she straightened up. ‘The other room was being used as a break room, and this one’s locked.’
‘Sounds good,’ Cygnus said, opening the office door and stepping inside.
It was certainly an office. There was a desk, and filing cabinets. A radio sat on a table in one corner. There were no windows, so Twilight closed the door and put the overhead light on as Cygnus began checking the desk drawers.
Only one of the filing cabinets was locked, and that was with a fairly standard lock which took Twilight all of thirty seconds to open with a single pick. She pulled out a drawer and flicked through the contents.
‘I got nothing,’ Cygnus said.
‘I’ve got… shipping manifests. Didn’t one of the dealers say there was a shipment coming in this week?’
‘Uh… Yeah. He was hanging by his ankle over a five-storey drop though. He could have just said it to get me to put him down.’
‘Let’s assume for a second that he was telling the truth. According to this there’s a shipment coming in from Bogotá day after tomorrow. “Agricultural samples.”’
‘They could be agricultural samples.’
‘Yeah, they could. We could come back when they’re supposed to arrive and check.’
‘Hit somewhere else tomorrow, while we wait?’
‘It’s a fairly long list. Might as well keep checking.’
26th November.
The building was marked down on the business records Penny had checked as a photographic development laboratory. That, in itself, had set off alarm bells; Penny was not sure anyone used real film anymore, but she guessed there were still purists. Enough to run a business from? Well, maybe.
There were three doors to the place: the front door, which was a non-starter, the fire door at the back, which Twilight said was certainly alarmed, and a door on the roof. Grumbling all the while about her lost pick, Twilight set to work on the lock of the roof access. The lock gave a click, but she paused, wedging something into the gap between the door and frame before she let Cygnus open the door. Some tape secured the alarm switch in place.
‘Shoddy work,’ Twilight commented as she pulled the door closed again. ‘I shouldn’t have been able to get past that.’
‘I’m glad they got the lowest bidder then.’
‘Huh. Still, keep your eyes open. There could be motion sensors or…’
‘People,’ Cygnus said. ‘I can hear people on the floor below.’
Twilight frowned. ‘At this time of night. Little late to be developing negatives.’
‘Maybe it’s a rush job.’ Cygnus lifted off the floor and floated down the stairs to the next landing where the voices were clearer. Twilight followed, quickly, but silently.
‘Can you make out what they’re saying?’
‘No. Two men discussing something fairly loudly.’
Twilight pressed her ear to the door, but all she could make out were a few words. ‘Merchandise.’ ‘New shipment.’ ‘Processing.’ Cygnus had obviously managed to make out the same words.
‘That sounds… interesting.’
Twilight looked up at her and grinned. ‘I think we should check on the health and safety of the staff, given that they’re working with dangerous chemicals late at night.’ She pushed the door open and a buzzer sounded loudly from just above their heads. The conversation stopped.
‘There goes the element of surprise,’ Cygnus said, pushing forward ahead of her partner. Two .38 slugs met her chest as the door swung open, flattening against her skin.
‘Oh shit, Ultras,’ one of the shooters said. They were men, presumably the ones who had been talking. The one who had spoken was in jeans and a T-shirt, and had lon
g, black hair which straggled around his face. The other wore a suit and looked more like a lawyer, or a mobster, though Cygnus was not sure there was a qualitative difference. She did not pay them as much attention as they deserved, really, since her gaze was immediately drawn to the room behind them.
There were benches, sinks, and people in lab coats. It was what you would expect to find in a laboratory, in fact. She was fairly sure, however, that you did not need the glassware she was seeing to process film. This looked more like distillation equipment and she was not sure whether she was looking at a drug lab or some sort of illegal alcohol-making facility, but she was fairly sure it was not above-board given they were shooting at her.
They did it again. One round hit the doorframe, the other her right arm as she put it up in front of her face. The guy in the suit was a better shot, and less panicked, than his companion. She could see a couple more men responding to the noise, running toward the partitioned off area they had come out in…
Except that they were no longer in it. Twilight sprang out from behind a bench, her leg snapping around in an arc which ended in one of the guard’s stomach. He went down hard and Cygnus heard a gun clattering across the floor. The second guard turned at the sound, unsure where the trouble was. It also distracted the hippy and Cygnus decided it was time she joined the party. She darted forward as the mobster’s finger tightened on his trigger. This time his shot missed, but her punch caught him squarely on the jaw. He went down, his eyes glazing over and then rolling back. There were gunshots from the lab, and the sound of shattering glass; Cygnus ignored it as she focussed on the hippy, who had just realised he was in real trouble now.
‘Shit!’ the man squeaked and his gun went off.
Cygnus felt the impact in her stomach and said ‘Ow,’ and then she punched him where he had just shot her. The hippy made a strangled retching noise as her fist embedded itself in his stomach, and then he doubled up over her arm before sliding to the floor.
There was a louder crash of shattering glass and Cygnus looked up to see a guard lying sprawled on one of the benches. The lab staff had not even escaped their initial shock yet, so she doubted they were going to be a problem.
‘You okay back there, partner?’ Twilight called out.
‘They were just handguns,’ Cygnus replied.
Twilight actually laughed. ‘Nothing serious then.’ She raised her voice, speaking to the room. ‘All right everyone, you will remain here. Any attempt to leave will result in my bulletproof colleague having to stop you, and you don’t want that.’
Cygnus grinned, spotting a phone on a table nearby. She picked up the receiver and dialled. Now this, this was going to get Ghostfire’s attention.
~~~
‘Someone talked,’ Ghostfire growled.
‘None of the ones they arrested knew about that lab,’ Kopf pointed out calmly. ‘A street informant, a lucky guess. None of our people will have talked to them.’
‘Possibly, but Foster knows too much.’
‘I have already initiated a damage limitation exercise. He will not be a problem.’
‘When can we go ahead with neutralising Cygnus?’ Ghostfire asked. He was never big on praising initiative. ‘Those two are becoming more of an inconvenience than expected.’
‘Soon,’ Kopf replied, trying to keep his exasperation out of his voice; his protégé had never learned patience. ‘Containment is almost ready. Conrad has arranged everything for the capture. You’ll need to talk to Heartbreaker. She is… reluctant.’
There was a grunt from the space the invisible man occupied. ‘I’ll talk to her. She’s in the apartment Conrad’s set up?’
‘For the plan to work it is best that she appear to be nothing more than a new tenant. She moved in yesterday. What about Twilight? She is, perhaps, proving more trouble than she is worth.’
There was silence for a second. ‘When Cygnus is taken out of the picture, Twilight won’t be such a problem. We’ll see what happens. If she continues to be an issue then we’ll eliminate her. Or move up the timescales. She’s such a perfect patsy for Tonaldo’s murder, it seems a shame to waste her.’
27th November.
‘Does it seem to you like there’s more security here than before?’ Cygnus asked as they looked through the perimeter fence outside Solomon Airfield.
‘You mean, there is some?’ Twilight asked in reply.
‘True, but also more than you might expect for a few plants.’
‘I suppose that depends on the plants.’
‘Huh. Anything on the radio?’ They had been watching for a little over an hour, not knowing exactly when the shipment was going to arrive.
‘The tower just gave landing clearance for a plane with the same registration as the one we saw on Monday.’
‘Show time?’
‘Let them taxi the thing over here. I know the layout of the room so I can port in there and check the place out. We’ll go in if it does look dodgy.’
‘You won’t have your shield…’
‘I was doing this when you were a secretary,’ Twilight reminded her.
‘I’m still a secretary.’
‘And I’m still doing this.’
~~~
The two offices in the warehouse were prefabs, fairly light construction on a metal frame, bolted to the floor and nowhere near the height of the building they were housed in. Twilight reformed out of the darkness on top of them, checked her position, and then belly-crawled across to the edge to peer over.
Two men were unloading crates from the Beechcraft guarded by six men. These guards were not like the ones outside, who had side arms and nightsticks. These were packing P90 sub-machine guns, fairly state-of-the-art military weapons out of Europe. The muzzles were fitted with sound suppressors too. It seemed like Ghostfire had decided to beef up security, and he wanted it kept quiet if anything went down.
Pushing backward, Twilight sank into the shadows and reappeared lying on the grass beside Cygnus.
‘And?’ Cygnus asked.
‘It’s nothing legal.’ Twilight got to her knees. ‘They’ve got six men inside with auto-fire weapons. Latest thing, nine hundred round-a-minute, fifty rounds in the magazine, and they normally fire armour-piercing rounds.’
Cygnus shrugged. ‘Pulya was using AP rounds.’
‘All right, Miss I’m So Hard I Scratch Diamonds, I’m going to take out the guards outside, quietly, and then you can go in the front, noisily.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
‘I thought so,’ Twilight replied with a grin, and then she sank into the shadows.
Twilight had never really worked out what her mutation was. Deep down, somewhere in a part of her mind that belonged exclusively to Andrea, she had speculated on some sort of Cheshire Cat effect. Alice in Wonderland had never appealed to her especially, though she had enjoyed one of the films she had seen recently, perhaps because of the insanity of it, and the Zenescope comic version had been… interesting. Andrea felt it unlikely that that could have been an influence on how her powers had manifested. Whatever had, she was made for stalking: stealthy, flexible, with good night vision and the ability to slide between shadows with a thought… She loved it.
She took her time, picking the guards off one by one as they strayed too close to the shadows of the building they were watching over. Each was flanked, silenced, and then lost consciousness as she closed off the blood to his brain for just the right amount of time. They were all going to wake up with lousy headaches, but they were going to wake up. She was not sure all the men inside would.
‘Ready?’ she asked as she slid out of the darkness next to Cygnus.
‘I should probably say something like, “I was born ready,” but you’ve seen how I was born.’ Flashing a grin, the blonde took off for the other end of the warehouse while Twilight vanished back to the roof of the offices.
Penny contemplated Cygnus’ entry into the building for five or so seconds as she flew over. Twilight would be at
the back, handling things there, so she wanted to go in noisy. There was a small door within the much larger one they took the plane in through. The big one was not going to budge because it needed motors to shift it, and the smaller one was likely to be locked. She decided that detail did not matter. Stepping up to it, she lifted her leg and kicked. There was a loud bang mixed with the shriek of complaining metal, and the door was catapulted inward, ripped from its hinges.
‘US Customs Inspector,’ Penny said brightly as she walked through into the warehouse. ‘We heard you boys were bringing in a sample of potatoes from Columbia and those Columbian potatoes are just rife with blight. We have to inspect every single…’
The term ‘raining bullets’ was not something Penny had ever thought of as real, but it seemed to accurately describe what happened to Cygnus. The majority of the slugs being fired in her direction peppered the door behind her, but she felt ten or so impacts, one under her right eye which was probably going to leave a bruise. She heard someone drop a crate and was not sure whether that was Twilight hitting the box-carrier, or a reaction to the gunfire.
Picking the nearest target, she ran forward and punched him in the guts, winding him enough to drop him, though she thought he was still conscious. More bullets ploughed into her, adding a second bruise over her right ear, but none of the armour-piercing rounds were penetrating. They were less than bee stings to her; more of an annoyance than a threat.
‘They’re not stopping her!’ one of the men yelled.
‘Where’s Jacks gone?’ someone else yelled out. Twilight was busy too.
‘There’s another one!’
Cygnus took off, gliding the five paces to her next target and driving her fist into his solar plexus. He let out a grunt of pain and collapsed, not even twitching.
‘Put your guns down!’ Cygnus yelled. Apparently she still needed to work on that.
But now there were only two people firing at her. More gnat bites as she closed on her last target and saw something black and fast appear behind the other. Her target yelped as her fist glanced off his ribs. The bullets hitting her stomach refused to stop and she hit him again, and again…
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