“Not in the least. Remember, I am the bank.”
The Count’s smugness just didn’t play well on him, but Enzo had never been able to take the man seriously. The increase in his fortune had barely changed him. He did dangerous business in a luxury hotel with six guards now, but Enzo still regarded him as a meek suburban bookkeeper. “Come on then, what do you know?”
The Count looked like he might play hard to get, but he had so few confidantes, and he’d been holding onto it for ages. “The right hand of Sierra gives money to the rebels to buy weapons, which the left hand is selling.”
Enzo laughed. “And all the money is still with you, you skinny bastard.” Enzo could imagine the reclaiming of Alena was not going to be as straightforward as King Remius imagined. “I suppose the militias are armed for urban warfare?”
“President Pavlović and General Marič just got bent over the knee of the clergy and repeatedly buggered by the royal house.” The Count was still smiling with secret knowledge. “Who knows what they are up to?”
“I’m guessing you do. Now tell me your secrets.”
“Tell me yours first. Where is that redheaded fiend of yours? I’m not going to believe any longer you don’t know.”
“Why do you care? She only ever freaked you out.”
The Count rolled it around his face. “Yes and no. Meh. Let’s say I miss her creepy stare.”
“No.” It was not the sort of thing anyone would miss. “Sell me something else.”
“You’re walking around with a great deal of money and no protection. I keep telling you to take one of my guards until she returns.”
“No, that doesn’t fit either.” Enzo knew the man too well. “This is about money, but not mine. What did she do? Who does she owe?”
The Count turned his head and pressed his mouth together tight before admitting, “Bad, bad people, my young friend, very bad.” He walked away saying, “And I’m afraid this is a secret monster the bank has to keep under the bed.”
~~~~~~
Pressured by Sierra, members of the World Security League wanted to send turbines and technicians to repair Alena’s coal power plants, but quietly Laudin suggested Erentrude would reduce production and raise the price of lithium. The political secretary assured the world’s most powerful countries that Alena would soon be connected to Erentrude’s power grid, making the turbines superfluous to the country’s needs.
While the King and his advisors crippled Alena into submission, Sable continued to stay in her rooms to prevent pulling the General away from the effort. Remy couldn’t guess what she was doing in her mind to repair, and in many places to simply recognize, the territory, but he found her at all hours cross-legged or kneeling on the floor, focused inward and not always serene. He would press her to talk, but she would only speak ambiguously, saying, “Such strange memories.” And once, when he caught her still half in a daze, she offered, “We never should have trusted Orrick,” but that was old history from the War of the Nobles four hundred years ago.
The first month of winter had been too hectic with managing the revolution for dinner in the hall, but as events settled, the advisors and company resumed their places.
The General was accounting for all the knives near Sable when Remy’s visiting cousin remarked, “You must find your freedom from the convent exhilarating.” Francis meant to continue with an invitation to travel, but Sable looked aghast. Her lips parted in gaping disbelief before she could think to hide behind the blankest stare.
Struck with a reality most of those present were well aware, Sable felt too self-conscious to speak the lies the evening required.
While Sable struggled to reappear as congenial, Catherine diverted the table’s attention with, “Francis, I believe you have just returned from the far north? The winter this year looks set to be cold.”
And Francis, unaware of how she had offended, was glad to take hold of any hand to help her out of the frigid water. Well versed in the innocuous dialogue of the weather, she replied, “The fields are completely frozen over. Soon we will see those wonderful images of skaters on the lakes.”
But Sable wasn’t recovering. Her exchanges remained tense and unnaturally forced with a smile meant to appear warm, but the result only served to chill the receiver.
When the taxing evening was over, Sable stopped in front of the door to her rooms, telling Remy, “I will join you tomorrow.”
But he replied, “Come speak with me now, and if you still like, you can leave.”
In his rooms, she kept space between them, choosing a chair at the edge of the seating arrangement.
He said simply, “Tell me what you are thinking.”
“Free of the cloister, yet I cannot be trusted to walk alone.”
Remy was thoughtful, considering how to appease without sacrificing any precaution or safeguards. “If there were some time without incident,” he offered with hope, “perhaps then,” and he left the idea open.
“I am not so much aggrieved by the conditions of it as the need for it.” She was remembering something painful, which she winced to repel. “I should be glad that I have any mind left to lose. I am angry and hold the Cloitare responsible. Perhaps, as you say, with time.” But her expression was slowly turning ever more murderous.
Remy recalled the images Catherine had shared many months previous of Sable walking the halls, checking the antique weapons to find them all—each and every last deadly one of them—securely fastened to their racks and now bolted into the wall. For the first time clearly, Remy realized Sable was truly not sorry for anything, and if she was, it was only that she had not gone far enough. He told himself house arrest was a blessing because if she was anyone else, she would be in jail; but then it occurred to him, no, in reality, she wouldn’t.
There had been no reason for Catherine to share with him every assignment entrusted to the Guard Dog, and because it had not greatly concerned him, he had not retained each detail that was.
“You really don’t want to do this to yourself,” Catherine had warned, but he had insisted. A quarter of the way through the file, he retrospectively agreed and set it aside. He had been awake beside Sable with a chest full of power when he finally went back to it. Flicking through the pages on the screen, he would pause to look at the small movements that played across Sable’s face while she slept, distressing dreams he would softly talk away. At first he assumed the nightmare images that haunted her were from the Cloitare, but the further he read, the more he wondered. He knew Catherine was incapable of feeling remorse, and she had used the Guard Dog with punishing callousness for remaining anonymous. Sable would have been seventeen when she first made contact with Catherine, and the spy chief had used the five years of their involvement to test the limits of the Guard Dog’s usefulness.
Sable had come to Catherine with rumors from the streets, and the spy chief had returned the favor by taunting the unknown informant to do better. The first year had seen Catherine simultaneously ridiculing Sable while throwing scraps of praise, encouraging her to form an ever widening and eclectic chain of contacts until Sable was turning over confidential reports from Alena’s senate. But Catherine wasn’t satisfied. Remy read the exchanges as his chief of intelligence provoked ever greater acts of fealty, deriding the agent she called pup for their hesitance to kill. Within two years, Catherine was alternately calling her agent a guard dog or a lap dog, depending on how aggressively they responded to her calls to protect the realm from its enemies. Only in the last years had Catherine finally curbed her criticism as Sable provided secrets from Sierra’s military and wordlessly murdered according to her handler’s demands.
Remy had scanned the report from the beginning to the end again, seeing clearly how Catherine had pushed Sable to acquire more skills to be recognized as valuable, and all the while Catherine was learning how to motivate and manipulate her agent. Yet from the start, Sable had jeered right back, full of certainty she was capable of anything the spymaster could imagine, bu
t unless Catherine gave a specific threat against his life or the realm, the Guard Dog would dismissively refuse to act. And there was proof on every page that Sable’s smug arrogance was justified. It was the reoccurring detail that most troubled Remy at present: somehow Sable was able to go damn well anywhere she pleased. It was obvious any restriction of her movements now was only because she permitted.
It might have sounded like it came out of nowhere when Remy asked, “What happens when there is someplace you are determined to go but I do not agree?”
Sable thought of the several ways the conversation could go and felt sick to tell the truth. “If I can’t persuade you, then I won’t go.”
“If you are sincere, this is perfectly fair, but you look even more miserable than before.”
“It is many things, Remy, but it is certainly not fair.” Dispelling the long night of discontent, Sable rose to press her body into his, deliberately misleading him when she said, “I can be more persuasive than you realize.”
Rebellion
The Erentrude embassy reopened in Sierra with an extraordinary number of diplomats. Laudin thought Girard was destroying the credibility of the ambassador. For every agent she had working out of the embassy, she had a fifty more that had never left the streets.
Between Alena and Sierra, Catherine had no veteran agents to spare for non-critical surveillance. When the deputy chief of intelligence brought her the report with video of what had transpired that morning inside Erentrude, she insisted on speaking to the agent who had witnessed it.
Since the pilot’s unexplained disappearance, Catherine had been following the entire suspicious lot from the prison, everyone from the major now posted on the border to the guards scrubbing floors at the foothill military base, but of particular interest to her was Lieutenant Fallon. Of all those present when the aviator vanished, only Fallon had any history with Sable.
Catherine put the inexperienced agent in front of a laptop with the video he’d taken paused on the screen. Starting on a frame of two men carrying a large rug, she said, “Walk me through it,” and then sat down beside him.
“This is one of the off-base apartments popular with the army stationed here,” Agent Mitchell told Girard. “There was no sign of reconnaissance. These two just showed up at the lieutenant’s apartment.” They were dressed in blue mechanic’s overalls with floppy summer hats and knitted winter gloves. The time stamp playing on the video marked it as just minutes after sunrise, so the mirror sunglasses were an especially absurd element of their disguise. Beyond an open stairwell on the apartment’s second level, the video started with them dropping the rug outside Fallon’s door.
Interference crackled in the long distance recording as they spoke, “I’ll call him.” Catherine watched his breath steam the cold air.
“Are you fucking serious?” The larger of the two parodied the expected conversation, “Hello, soldier? Uh … can you come outside?”
They looked at the second apartment behind them and then back down the stairs across the frost covered lawn to the full parking lot where Agent Mitchell was concealed behind a darkened back window. After several lost moments where it became obvious they had not planned very thoroughly, one struck out with inspiration to knock on the door.
When the door opened, they stood for so long unspoken, Fallon had to ask, “Yeah? So what’s this about?”
“Your carpet,” was offered and then silence.
Catherine could imagine Fallon was taking in the picture before him and finding it off. Finally, she heard him say, “Not mine. You’ve got the wrong place.”
“Can you check it to make sure?”
“Dude, that’s not my rug.”
“But we’re supposed to give it to you.”
“Says who?”
The question hung in the air until the larger one figured out to say, “It’s here on the tag.” Catherine watched him bend to make out something cryptic on the hidden side of the rug. “Says … Mom. I think it’s from your mom.”
Fallon emerged shirtless in shorts to inspect it. He rubbed at his face to wake up and then leaned over the rug to read a tag that was evidently not there. Aware the other man was circling to get behind him with his hand behind his back, Fallon challenged, “What the fuck is this?” He knew the whole scene was wrong, but it was so illogical to his morning mind, he watched in dismay as a sedation gun was jabbed at him.
“Fuck off, man.” Fallon leapt aside so the injector failed and discharged compressed air.
Without further hesitation, the larger one grabbed Fallon behind the neck and tried to pull him to the ground.
The agent spoke to Catherine, “They’re going to dance around in a circle like that for a while.”
Fallon and his aggressive visitor each had a hand locked on the back of the other’s neck while their free hands battled to twist the other under control. Tripping every attempt to sweep the legs out from under their opponent, the rug was being shuffled around the landing.
“Dose him for real.” The one fighting was getting angry.
They slammed into the neighbor’s door while the person holding the sedation gun lunged wildly in and out of the fight, discharging the gas canister with a hiss as evidence he had not struck flesh.
“Fucking inject him with it,” was the insistent demand.
“No, fucking don’t,” Fallon returned, still trying to wrap his arm around the other’s.
The two circled the upper landing, bodies bent at the waist as they forced each other down.
The neighbor’s door opened and then angrily among them was another half-awake soldier in boxer shorts, questioning, “What the hell?”
In a shriek of terror, the uncertain attacker pressed the sedation gun to the man’s neck. The high pressure discharge of sedatives was silent, but it engaged the secondary immobilizer so that Girard and Mitchell heard the electric arc of volts. Mitchell tightened his eyes, wincing as the soldier stiffened and bounced off the wall before dropping outside his door; and over it all, the attacker repeatedly screamed, “I don’t want to do this!”
“Well, do it anyways,” the other one growled, as he started to lose his grip and the battle.
“Five seconds, five seconds.” He applied the gun to Fallon, hysterically counting over the popping static, “One, oh god, two, blessed three, he’s falling!”
Releasing Fallon to the ground, the one who had been fighting rose to tell the other off. “You’re a fucking halfwit when not at a computer.”
Catherine and the agent watched the two arrange and then rearrange the bodies to get space to unroll the rug. Dragging Fallon to the carpet’s edge, they struggled to start the roll with the Lieutenant’s weight. “Turn, fucker, turn,” and below that was the sound of a distressed moan.
“They get there eventually,” the agent sat back, grimacing at the rough handling while the two tucked and pushed at the carpet until they stopped it against a wall.
The second soldier was trying to draw his legs to his chest when the angry one hit him again with a second dose and an extra current for good measure.
“Yep,” the agent affirmed what she already knew, “they’re just going to leave him there on the landing.”
“Their tactics are fascinating,” Catherine mused.
With great and unexpected trouble, they tried to hoist the roll onto their shoulders, gripping at the ends, then dropping and trying again to shift the weight at Fallon’s hidden knees and arms. They made it no further than their hips before giving up and moving off. Held under their arms, they fought each other for balance down the stairs, bending the soldier crooked with every step.
The camera moved away from their progression across the lawn to film the moving truck’s license plate and other identifying numbers. The two reappeared to heave Fallon in the back with one disappearing behind the rolling door while the other drove away.
“I thought they would move him to a safe house,” the agent said with apologetic regret. “I had no idea they wo
uld take him to an airfield.”
The video showed the truck beneath a battered cargo plane with Ellis Dee, the General’s missing pilot, standing impatiently at the open back. “I was still waiting for command to tell me what to do when they took off.”
They had used a fraudulent copy of Fallon’s bankcard and military ID to rent the truck, but the taunt that annoyed Catherine the most was the false flight plan they’d filed, mapping a route into Alena with intentions to land at Eudokia Field.
It was noon before Girard called the General. He had already learned about the abduction, but he had problems far more serious to contend with.
five hours earlier
Sable was gaining control over her dreams again. She put her subconscious mind on its knees and then held it silent while she guided the disconnected fragments back to their former alignments. The practice this time was proving more difficult than when she was a child. Just recognizing the act of dreaming while it occurred could elude her, but once she identified the violent madness as sleep, she could subdue the deceived mind, convince it there was nothing to be battled, and then once it was settled, she would focus on the shattered landscape, methodically fitting the jagged edges against their matching parts.
In the silence of the dream, someone called out to her for help. For a moment, it was clear, but then the electric spark against the skin took her back. She woke someplace between fighting and screaming. The pulse in her hand from Remy’s neck made her stop.
She was abruptly shocked into stillness hearing him say, “You’re safe. You’re with me.”
She watched him lying beside her, no concern for his own welfare despite knowing he had an assassin’s grip on his throat. Lightly now, she brushed her fingers over the veins to coax back the color, tired herself of hearing the words I’m sorry.
But he was not worried. Pulling her close, he pressed her against his body and felt her exhale, and with it came the power. She inhaled and again, with a tremor in her throat, she gave him strength he felt in his chest.
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 20
