Berringer was troubled by all the allusions to the occult he had already seen, and now the soldiers were saying the Queen map-hacked. “Gaming cheats to see the enemy,” the commander had explained.
To Catherine, the General said, “What I’m hearing is you want to do this before Remy wakes up.”
“Let’s just show him to her and then see what you think.”
~~~~~~
Lieutenant Fallon sat in his shorts on the edge of a chair with his hands bound behind his bare back and a blanket thrown over his shoulders. The three people in the room had put on balaclavas before dumping him from the rug and then shocked him into a twisted wreck when he fought to escape. He’d stretched the burning tingle from his muscles to find himself on an unpolished wood floor, taped at the wrists and ankles, staring at an unfamiliar word carved by knife in the elaborate base molding. Above it in ink, there was more graffiti, all of it squiggled with crescent moons, little rivers, and strangely placed apostrophes. He’d rolled his eyes and groaned, knowing it was Sierran.
He’d been lifted by the largest of his abductors to sit in a chair with threadbare upholstery, and then the man withdrew to rejoin his companions in the corner of the room, arguing over a piece of paper and whether to show it to him. The whole loopy exchange was convincing him they were just one clown short of a circus.
“Fuck, I don’t know why none of us has a picture of her, but this will do.” The girl had an accent from someplace farther east than Sierra.
Fallon rolled his neck, taking in the high ceilings plastered in decorative details. The wide, intricate crown molding spoke of a past that had been confident with its wealth, but the wallpaper was sloughing off the walls and the paint beneath was peeling. The sheets tacked over the windows spoke of lasting poverty.
The girl in black was insistent. “It looks like her.”
But the thin one who had first dosed and volted him disagreed. “It doesn’t even look human. Did you draw her hair with my marker?”
“Well, it is red,” the large one nearly laughed.
“It’s just going to confuse him,” was the point of the thin one’s argument while the girl asked him to do better.
Fallon said, “You might as well let me see and decide for myself.”
The girl pushed through and held the drawing to his face. “It’s a girl,” he observed, “with a fountain of blood spewing from her head.”
“Those are braids. Red braids,” she defended.
“Have you seen her?” the big one asked.
“You hauled me here to ask that? You could have asked that at my door.” But they weren’t amused. “No, I’ve not seen this creature.” But he knew he had. The Cloitare had brought her to the plane in Eudokia.
~~~~~~
The eight captured men were scattered in offices throughout the base with soldiers standing guard. In front of the open door of one office, General Berringer watched a man shift against the constraints that held his hands to his waist and then adjust the chain that led to shackles at his ankles. As though the new clothing chaffed, he pulled at the shirt to get the Clementyne bull away from his heart. He could not sit still, but if he mistook it for anxiety, it could not be helped. The slick wooden chair had its front legs cut shorter than the back and he continually slid forward, making him appear to squirm in his seat.
Catherine found Sable in a medical room near the surgery with the King’s close guards. They were all quiet and waiting. Everywhere was evidence they had been in the cabinets of bandages and had treated each other. Only Sable was unharmed, but she still wore the blood of the King and his men.
The sight of her made Berringer nervous, but she merely glanced at the captive before taking his phone from the General. For nearly an hour, she paced through the hall with it, scrolling through every call made and received, the messages, texts, and applications.
“You don’t need me to talk to him,” Sable finally told Girard. “Everything you need to know is on his phone,” but she didn’t give it back.
Wanting to fully see him, Sable took the few steps that would place her beside the General.
“You were quite sure of yourself to bring your real phone,” Sable told his lowered head. “Not that it would have made much difference, but you didn’t encrypt it, you didn’t even lock it.” She shook her head rather sadly. “What were you before you decided to become a rebel?”
“I am a free man with Free Alena,” he raised his chin but spoke directly ahead to the wall.
“You are not a free man,” Sable corrected. “You’re a prisoner and you’re also a fucking idiot.”
The voice startled Catherine as much as the words, but Berringer was unmoved. It was the same street accent that had once called him a motherfucker and threatened to brawl.
“Your name, Mark Ansel, your address, your bank details, your mother and father—god help them, you are a bad son for dragging them into this—and your pretty married lover, among others indiscretions, are all over this phone. But what would make you a dead man rather than an imprisoned one are these contacts you stored.” The phone clicked out sounds as Sable brought up the first thing to annoy her. “I am so tempted to call Radimir.” The prisoner’s head shot to the side then back down. “No, you weren’t so stupid as to write his name.” Sable passed the phone to Catherine to look at the number. “You remember scary Radimir? I can’t speak for you, but those pictures I sent of his work made me rather pale.” To the General, Sable explained, “Radimir is the first link in the supply of weapons. He delivers for General Marič.” She looked back to the man wriggling in his chair. “And I bet Radimir knows all about your family. Doesn’t his fondness for the blade alarm you?” Paging through more screens, she pulled Catherine next to her to say, “But none of this proves anything if it were not for this peculiar number.” Passing it to Catherine, she said triumphantly, “The Count.” To the slack-jawed face the rebel gave her, Sable pressed her lips into a kiss. “As I said, you don’t need me to talk with him. Two slaps and he’ll squall a hurricane of information. Here, I’ll even start it.”
The General stepped before Sable to block her move through the door, but she was smiling in angry jest, never thinking she could get away with it. He motioned they would be going to the conference room down the hall.
Berringer didn’t know who Radimir or the Count were, but he knew all about General Marič.
~~~~~~
Enzo pushed Nika’s silly picture away. “The army picked up a redhead in Eudokia. Where is she?”
“Listen, dude,” Fallon tried to reason, “I don’t know anything about your redhead. I’m just a low rank soldier at a desk.”
“But you were in Eudokia.”
“Never heard of the place.”
“Mission Retrieve?” Enzo cocked his masked head. “Heard of that, Lieutenant Fallon?”
Fallon’s face rose with surprise before furrowing into confusion that such obviously inexperienced, to the point of embarrassing, people could possibly know about Mission Retrieve, but still he maintained, “No, I’m not the sort to get sent on missions.”
Clinching his hand around something Fallon couldn’t see, Max accused, “It’s in your file.”
“Stop lying,” Nika advised.
“Dudes, seriously,” Fallon put on his best face of sincerity, “I don’t know anything about a redhead or what you’re talking about.”
The Lieutenant jerked away as Max lunged at him, and he stayed tightly flexed as Max stepped back out to bounce between his two feet, flexing his hand, preparing to do fuck knew what. Having seen the boy in action with a sedation gun, Fallon trusted him least of all. He leaned to the side to see what he was being threatened with but couldn’t make it out. Talking to the jumpy balaclava, Fallon tried to get him steady, “Just calm down, dude. I’m obviously not going anywhere. No need to get twitchy.”
Enzo looked around to see what Max was doing, wondering what he had at his side, then the ceiling seemed to crash down on him with Max’s
unexpected war scream. Gargling high-pitched notes in the back of his throat, he made Fallon’s eyes go big and Nika scream in sympathetic terror. Enzo saw Max’s arm swinging down with black enamel sticks gripped in his fist, but not one graceless thing about it looked anything like Marlow.
Before the points could touch, Fallon pushed back in the chair, half stood and then fell forward to drive his shoulder into Max’s gut, shouting, “Not that, dude.”
Nika was running in place still screaming when Max hit the ground with Fallon on top, all three of them now yelling at the other to stop.
The noise was too much. Enzo didn’t understand why any of it was happening.
The taped and constrained soldier was pushing his joints against Max, insisting, “Calm the fuck down,” while trying to pin his attacker with his weight. But Max was crawling backward, kicking himself free and wildly slashing long scratches into Fallon’s bare skin.
Enzo went in to separate them. He grabbed the soldier by the arms, trying to swing him around, but missed the next stab of the sticks. They slid down Fallon’s chest leaving bloody welts in his flesh before Enzo could snatch them away.
“God-fucking-damnit.” Fallon was incensed. Hot stinging streaks covered the top of his body.
But Max was baffled he had not really hurt him. “How the fuck does she use these things?”
Staring at the blood on his chest, Fallon snapped, “Tell me she doesn’t make a habit of this shit.” Then setting his jaw to growl at himself, he didn’t need to look up to know he had their concentrated attention.
~~~~~~
The roles were shifting again. The Queen Mother was once more the Guard Dog who had not shared with her handler all she knew. “I didn’t want you destroying their lives,” she said.
Berringer was cross and flummoxed, “The moles in the tunnels?”
“Or the Count?” Catherine demanded.
“Neither. And for one, I am truly sorry,” she told the General. But it was to Catherine she needed to explain. “The Count is the bank. Perhaps I should have mentioned him, but he was never a threat to Remy and he still isn’t.”
“Is that what’s required for you to share what you know?”
Sable looked at the General blankly, saying flatly, as though it were obvious, “Yes.”
Catherine already knew this. “The bank, how does it work?”
Berringer watched the two women at the table talking over the rebel commander’s phone and wondered how they had ever worked together. Catherine demanded complete control and absolute loyalty, and Sable gave what she wanted.
“This is the program that let the commander contact the bank.” The phone clattered with the sound of shivering teeth.
Catherine was obviously insulted. “Chatter?”
“Yes,” Sable would have been amused if Remy were with them.
“A network free phone system,” Catherine told the General.
“Voice over IP. Done correctly, it’s nearly impossible to trace.” Sable didn’t lift her head. “Here is Mark Ansel’s account and this account belongs to the Count. Ansel gave this PIN to verify he had money with the Count. But don’t send it again. You can tell by the suffix it’s a throwaway, not meant to be used more than once.” Sable gave the phone to Catherine to inspect. “If you’re big and important, like President Pavlović or General Marič, a permanent PIN will take you directly to the Count. If you have cash to deposit, he will go to you, or if you’re transferring funds, he will provide an account number. The rebel commander was not considered important, so he was waiting to get a message back.” Sable leaned into Catherine and opened a file in the program. “If he were depositing cash and were trusted, he’d get back a location to meet. But Ansel was receiving money from one of the Count’s customers.”
“Are you following this?” Berringer asked Girard.
When she agreed, Sable spoke to the General. “This is what would have happened: President Pavlović sent his PIN to the Count who learned he wanted to make payment to the rebel commander. The Count gives Pavlović a transfer number which would show payment to … oh, some aid fund for food or medicine in a developing country, but it would actually belong to the Count. Pavlović gives the temporary PIN to the rebel commander and he confirms the money is present and then gives the Count the account number to pay it to for weapons. Now the money goes to General Marič who sends Radimir to make the drop.”
Catherine knew Berringer was slowly putting it into place. She told Sable, “Tell him about General Marič’s grand plan.”
“I imagine little has changed in the last year?” Sable asked the spy chief.
“Nothing to transform the big picture.”
“President Pavlović and General Marič obviously don’t have the relationship you and Remy share,” Sable told Berringer. “But the malice General Marič has for Pavlović is not known to the wider public. We could practically go straight to him to sell out Pavlović for this attack.”
“It’s President Pavlović that wants Remy dead, not General Marič,” Catherine said.
When Berringer showed skepticism, Sable continued. “If they were working together, the rebels could have gone straight to Marič for weapons, but they had to pay. Now, if General Marič had wanted the King dead, with what we saw today, we can assume he would have sent his own snipers. But Marič wants the King alive, and he wants him mad. There are a lot of things Marič could have sold the rebels, and we’re alive because he didn’t. He’s been looking for a way to slow lithium production for years, counting on the cascade effect it will have on Erentrude’s wealth, and here these moronic rebels come giving him the perfect solution.”
“Did you know Marič’s been supporting the royalist for some time in Alena?” Catherine asked.
“He wants the King in Alena,” Sable assured. “And he’d be more excited to think we could tie the weapons back to President Pavlović.”
“If we only expose this as Pavlović’s work, we’ll be facing a military dictatorship in his place.” Catherine smiled at the General’s obvious doubt.
The General was hearing wild conspiracy theories straight out of Girard’s fantastic PIT. “And how do you know all this?”
Sable glanced for Catherine’s consent before answering. “Radimir recorded General Marič discussing it.” She looked again at Catherine. “And you’ve sort of used the Count before, you just didn’t know it. The payment for that recording is still locked in trust with the Count. I had to drop that whole exchange to go change out the soil report, so adding to the mayhem of the train wreck, Radimir never got paid.”
~~~~~~
“You, get the fuck over there,” Enzo shouted Max into a corner. Propping Fallon against a wall, he took wet towels from Nika and dabbed at the soldier’s blood. “I’m real sorry about that. He was never properly socialized.”
“He attacked without warning.”
“Yeah, he had a bad role model. So, who is this she you referred to?”
Fallon shook his head in tired exasperation, “Dude, seriously? Do you think I am just going to sit here and fall apart because your lunatic friend tried to stab me?”
“He’s all but admitted they have her.” Nika was done. She pulled out her phone and took a picture of Fallon looking irate. She passed the phone to Max and demanded, “Send it.”
Enzo was still trying. “Were you guys really at the hospital to get the King’s cousin?”
“You got it,” Fallon winked.
“Heh, that’s bullshit. You were there for the Bound Bride.” Enzo thought he had him.
But rather than sinking with admission, Fallon furrowed his brows with the deepest confusion, saying, “Wow, to know so much, you people really don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.”
~~~~~~
The General was still trying to get his head around the idea that Sable, as the Guard Dog, had sent Catherine video of General Marič actually putting his grand plan into words when they were interrupted by a soldier at the door of the c
onference room. In his hand was the General’s common phone, a nuisance with its public number, Berringer left it with others to answer.
The General glanced at the phone’s screen and became very still. “Leave this with me for now,” he told the soldier. Face held rigid, he handed it to Catherine who burst loud with spontaneous laughter before passing it back.
Sable didn’t like the way the General was studying her. “What?” She pointed at the phone wanting to know what had happened.
“I’ll show you.” Catherine was full of suppressed glee.
She pulled her laptop from the center of the table where it had been left and again started the video of Fallon’s abduction.
At first, Sable forgot she had the defenses of a nun. Recognizing something familiar in the postures, she squinted to focus the image, thinking she might know the people on the screen. Then they spoke and she went wide-eyed paralyzed. When Fallon emerged and the sedation gun hissed compressed air, Sable pushed back from the table. For just a moment, she found the mask to become impenetrable Cloitare, but next they stunned the neighbor, and she raised her hand to cover her eyes, but still their frantic voices reached her. Exhaling in disbelief, she peeked through her fingers to confirm it really was as bad as it appeared. “Oh, please stop,” she pushed the laptop to Catherine, begging, “Can we just skip to the part where you prove I know these ridiculous people?”
Catherine forwarded the video to pause on Nika in an ugly beast of a plane, which Sable refused to recognize, so Berringer handed her the phone with Fallon looking cross and the message demanding, “Release the redhead.”
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 22
