Too Wylde

by Wynne, Marcus

  There. With a keystroke, she'd siphoned off money from an account in Dubai through a server she'd entered in Belarus and then spread it across five different accounts in five different banks, disguised as a recurrent payment and below the radar for the IRS software (out of date as it was) to pick up, so the funds were then set up for a wire transfer from each bank to arrive at staggered intervals at an account set up for face to face access in --

  -- Lake City, Minnesota.

  Hmm.

  She opened a new screen, checked out the distance and the flights. She could get a direct flight from here to there, and be on the ground in a few hours. She'd have to get a driver to take her around. Maybe a cute bodyguard-driver?

  Kiki grinned into her knee, her leg pulled up like a crane's as she looked up driver and escort-services in Lake City.

  Never know. A girl could get lucky on a little visit.

  Nina Capushek

  "What the fuck?" Nina said to Fabruzzi.

  The detective's bull pen overflowed with plain clothes and uniformed cops; radios turned up were filled with traffic sending ambulances and fire trucks and the National Guard over to St. Paul. She recognized a couple of the Feebs from the JTTF over in a corner, and a bunch of other obvious Federale types not known by face.

  Fabruzzi shook his head. "Still getting the picture, Nina. We've sent over all the off-duty who came in to help out. We've cranked the whole city up to full terrorist alert status. We got our hands full covering what we got."

  "They blew the fucking Capital up?"

  "No," Fabruzzi said. He lowered his voice. "The non-suits over there?" He inclined his head at a much older man with a full white beard and head of hair sitting with two very fit guys dressed in the tactical dirt-bag combo of Arc-Teryx and Levis that meant some kind of military or para-military operator. "OGA."

  "Like somebody's not supposed to know CIA?"

  "Whatever. The word is that what got fucking blown apart in the first explosion was an off-the books CIA facility. The Feebs claim they were never informed that facility was there, and it's not affiliated with the one they've got over here. The second blast took out the first tier of first-responders in St. Paul; they lost something like three trucks, all the firefighters, two ambulances and EMS, the fucking Command and Control Van and about a dozen cops and squads. Whoever did this was not fucking around."

  "Damn."

  "Yeah."

  "So who you want me to kill?"

  "Did you ever meet up with that ATF guy?"

  "Not yet. Was busy."

  "Well, he's over here somewhere." Oozy scanned the room, then yelled: "Le Fronte? Come over here!"

  Nina turned and stopped dead in her tracks.

  "Oh, you've *got* to be fucking kidding me," she said.

  "What?" Fabruzzi said. "You two know each other?"

  Le Fronte walked up, extended his hand, and said, "Nice to meet you in person, Detective Capushek."

  Nina ignored the hand. "Oozy, I have a problem with this."

  "Deal with it. I got marching orders for you two. Wait here."

  He slid off the desk, shouldered through the crowd and spoke to the old white haired man surrounded by his war-dogs.

  Nico was the first to speak. "Look, we..."

  "Shut up. Seriously. You're a fucking asshole and incompetent to boot. I won't work with you. Don't say another fucking word."

  "You don't have a choice. You fucking deal with it."

  Nina rose up on her toes, settled back when she saw Oozy gesturing at her. Le Fronte crossed his arms and stared off into space.

  Oozy walked up to them and said, "You like movies?"

  "What?" Nina said.

  "You two remind me of Casablanca. 'This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'"

  Jimmy John Wylde

  The big screen TV showed the same footage over and over again. A couple of Japanese tourists had been shooting video of their family on a visit to St. Paul when the building went up, and they kept filming and then got that footage right over to the first arriving TV truck. In between the footage of the building going up, the constant update of casualties from the two blasts, and the arrival of every kind of heavy duty counter-terror organization, the news was pretty much non-stop St. Paul, St. Paul.

  I had a stale beer in front of me. Thieu kept shaking her head.

  "No good, Jimmy. Things very crazy right now. War, terrorism, now this here. I'm happy my family was not hurt."

  "That's good."

  She shook her head. "This is like what my father say last days in Viet Nam were like."

  "It's the last days of something, Thieu."

  My cell phone rang. A local number, one I didn't recognize.

  "Hello?"

  Slight asthmatic wheeze of someone with difficulty breathing. A voice I didn't want to recognize.

  "Jimmy John, Jimmy John, where do you belong?"

  "Who is this?"

  "You know, brother. You know. Busy? Thought we might take a walk in the park, like the old timey time days."

  "Hank?"

  "The Artist Previously Known As. Maybe."

  "Where?"

  "Remember how you used to tell me the story about Lake Harriet and the Lakota holy lands? That little hill there, the one where you ran off that rapist a long time ago."

  Those words filled me with a dread so deep and cold I couldn't speak. Only Hank would know that.

  "Yes. I remember."

  "Start there and walk down to the Lake, turn counter-clockwise and walk against the flow. I'll find you along there."

  "Why you running SDR on me, Hank?"

  "Even paranoids have real enemies, bro. You and me got that class on the same day at the same time. Courtesy of Uncle Sugar. Say, a quarter past two? We can have a nice walk in public, won't attract a lot of attention that way, you figure? Looking forward to catching up, Jimmy John. Maybe we can figure out where we both belong."

  "I...."

  "Don't say a word, Jimmy Jay. Nothing to be said right now. See you quarter past. And don't get your friends involved. You still got friends, right?"

  "Hank..."

  "The Artist Previously Known As. Later, gator."

  Click. Nothing.

  I shut the phone.

  "Jimmy?" Thieu said. "Who that? You okay? You look sick, you sick?"

  Lizzy Caprica

  Lizzy sat crossed legged in an elegant lotus position on the worn leather couch in the dancer's lounge in the backroom warrens of The Trojan Horse. The other dancers were all gathered around, draped over chairs, perched on chair arms, or on the floor leaning against one another's knees watching the big screen TV Lance T had installed in the lounge for them.

  "This is awful," one of the girls said. "How many killed?"

  "They don't know yet," one of the others said. "Couple of hundred for sure."

  "Anyone we know?" Lizzy said.

  "No," Gina, one of the senior dancers with Lizzy, said. "Not that we've heard. Everyone's okay."

  "I think Marie's boyfriend is a St. Paul firefighter," Lizzy said. "Has anyone heard from him?"

  "He's okay. They were in bed when it happened; he got called in."

  "Thank Goddess," Lizzy said. "I think we should all pray and offer thanks."

  Several girls muttered under their breath and moved away; most of them, and all the senior girls, gathered closer to Lizzy.

  "Say it, girl," said a tall black girl muscled like a gymnast. "Say those words you say."

  They all held hands, and Lizzy opened the prayer with the words she intoned daily: "Father, Mother, Creator God, Holy Spirit, Great Spirit, Goddess...hear our prayers...."

  Lance T

  Lance watched the girls pray on his wall mounted camera monitor. He had one monitor set on the girls and another monitor on the news.

  It was a hard day in Lake City. This was going to cut into the good, and he needed the good to keep coming. It cost a lot to keep things up, keep people happy, the doors open, the
green flowing.

  He had opportunities to branch out, but he steered clear of those entanglements. There were more than enough entanglements for a business owner in the Twin Cities, especially one in the business he's in, and there were more than enough people sniffing around him already. Naked women and booze brought in the bad with the good, and men drunk on liquor and/or sex tended to talk. Secrets had a high price to the right people.

  Something Lance T knew too well.

  Costs a lot to keep a secret.

  He tapped on a key on his desktop computer, pulled up the real-time accrual in the cash registers. He could keep a second by second accounting of what came in through the electronic registers (and change it himself, if he so needed to, with a custom designed program provided to him by some investors....) and graph it all out. He knew the peak hours for booze, the peak hours for certain dancers, the lows and the highs, he had it all.

  As did a certain investor.

  That was life in Lake City.

  But today, he had to think about other things.

  Dee Dee Kozak

  Dee Dee swung her 10kg kilogram kettlebell through her 199th hinge swing. Sweat poured down her neck down the deep V of her breasts in her new Athleta top, darkening the fabric down her back and all the way to the flat hard expanse of her belly, flexing with each careful swing all the way up to 250 a day, just like clockwork. She checked her form: eyes straight, chin up, gut in, and thrusting from the hips and lower core, elbows pinned to her side and letting only the deep core work, honing those muscles so useful in a fight or fuck situation. Lord knows she enjoyed both, sometimes at the same time.

  She grinned. It's good to be Dee Dee.

  She paused, took a deep breath and gutted out the last 47, grunting deeply, nothing sexy about that except to the right man, of which there were damn few left, at least one in this lovely little burb, but when she saw him last, he was debating whether to kill her or to fuck her, and that was how she preferred to leave it -- leave 'em laughing when you go, if they were still breathing. Which was a rarity among her work-related sexual encounters.

  Deon, Deon. Her exotic South African. She'd never had one of those before. And know that she had, she considered taking a long vacation down there. Sun and fun and hard-bodied killers who didn't wake up apologizing for being born with a penis, like most American metrosexuals these days.

  Too bad she'd have to kill him if she saw him again, and she'd better be sure she saw him first because that boy was definitely Top Shelf when it came to the world of dealing out death and destruction up close and personal.

  She set the kettlebell down, wiped her face down with a Dior exercise towel, dropped down to do push-ups. Four sets of 25 regular ones, and then four sets of 25 each Hindu push-ups. Her boy-toys liked those.

  She was glad for the work-out, and glad for the privacy. Irina had settled down once she'd seen what Dee Dee had done with the money online; settled down enough to send her out on her own to spend a little cash. Major operational faux pas, but at this point, it was just as useful to see what she was going to do as it was to keep her under wraps.

  Hell, as long as Dee Dee had her money, she could do whatever she wanted.

  Dee Dee flexed through the final Hindu-pushups, flopped on her back and caught her breath. Her body burned in the pleasant way it did after a serious workout, and Lord knows she needed to keep that up; getting old is not for the weak, even though as far as she was concerned, she was in her prime. As a shooter, hell yeah, and as a woman well into her best years. As an earner? Hell, boys, she was on top of the heap. And might have to raise her prices after this one.

  After a long vacation.

  She lay there in Sarvasana, the Corpse Pose, let what remaining tension there was drain out of her. Maybe she should go find a yoga class somewhere; she loved her hard muscle work outs but her flexibility was suffering, and a little power yoga might suit her well. No shortage of yoga studios around, and it was extremely unlikely she'd run into any of those pissed off shooters tooling around in a little low-key yoga class somewhere.

  Mental note to look it up in the Internet, when she checked on the arrival time of her Best Friend Forever, Neo Death God. Though what the fuck was she going to do with a 13-year old, precocious or not? Sure as hell wasn't going to get her laid or drunk. Dee might be an assassin, but she had morals. That would be corruption of a minor.

  Probably best not to try and entertain her; just pay her and get her in the game, treat her like the player she was on-line. Had to say, this kid had moves. Dee Dee had seven hackers in her personal go-to list, and Neo Death God just bumped everybody out of the #1 position, previously held by a sullen 19 year old boy who'd been paid with a video tape of himself getting a Dee Dee blow job (face obscured, of course) and would do anything for her, though his self-destructive swirl was increasing. Hence her non-contact, though she tracked his whereabouts with the help of another junior hacker she was raising up.

  Used to be cyber-stuff was the province of the .gov types, but now, even a run of the mill hired killer had to have *someone* qualified to surf the Net and take care of cyber-business. Maybe it was time to have a full-time partner in that. Young Kiki was the right age and, most important, the right gender (at least as far as Dee Dee was concerned) to make a good partner. She'd raise her from a pup. Lots of advantages to having a younger partner -- freedom from the same kind of prosecution, good cover as a mother-daughter team, and the ability to play the Older Wiser card to her advantage.

  She sat up, leaned forward to stretch her hamstrings. Okay, first a long hot shower, then some computer time, then check out some yoga studios and take it from there. Let Irina roll...though she should check on her whereabouts. Young Kiki the Death God was tracking Irina's new cell phone, and the woman couldn't take a shit without having it within arm's reach.

  Always good to keep an eye on your friends, and a closer eye on your enemies.

  Irina Komorov

  "It's very easy to track someone by cell phone," the frail looking boy said to her. "There are commercial services, some providers have it as an option, and law enforcement can track any phone now."

  "What if you take out the battery?"

  The boy shrugged. "Depends on the phone. Most of the new phones, and the smartphones, have an internal battery to maintain memory; it gives off a signature that can be identified. Older phones, not so easy. Without a power source, there is no signal; without a signal, there is no tracking. Once you power it up, you will have your location registered with the provider -- at the very least to the cell you are in when you call, depending on the phone, down to a meter or so from your actual location."

  "So what can you do?"

  "Realistically? Either plan all your movements as though someone were tracking you, or else power it down and put it in a lead lined bag like they sell for transporting sensitive medical film. Harder to find these days since everything is digital. I have some I can sell you, if you like."

  "Can you find out who is tracking?"

  The boy, his name Mullen, considered that. "Yes. Not easy, not cheap, but it can be done."

  "The cost, it does not matter."

  "I need a grand, cash, up front, nothing larger than $50 in non-sequential bills."

  "I will get it for you later."

  He shifted, shot a look at her low-cut blouse. "Or we could maybe work out some barter or something. Depends on what you're into."

  "Keep it business," she said coldly. "We'll see what you can actually do before we start making any *other* kind of deal."

  Mullen blushed. "I'm good at what I do."

  "We'll see," Irina said. "Then perhaps we can find a way to amuse one another."

  He looked down at the ground. "Okay. Money?"

  "This afternoon. I'll bring it here."

  She waved one hand around the cluttered electronics store, a privately owned repair and consultation business for all things electronic.

  "Done."

  She turned a
nd walked out. Mullen watched her ass in skin-tight black tights tucked into knee high leather boots under a black leather short jacket. OMG, he thought. I better get my cameras set up.

  Outside, Irina took a deep breath. Somewhere deep down inside her, the wounded child who'd grown into the wounded woman twisted and turned, cried out, missed her husband, drowning in fear and complete uncertainty brought on by a complete dependence on a sociopath who could not be controlled, only influenced by the things she prized: money and autonomy.

  Irina required revenge to feel safe. Irina required revenge on anyone who tried to control her. Irina required revenge on anyone who hurt those she loved, those few, and those men had taken from her the only man she loved, and the only semblance of security she'd had.

  So she had to work with what she had, which was money and sex. But then, what else would she need? It had worked for her her entire life.

  Except for Dee Dee Kozak. She was unknowable. The most dangerous person she had ever spent time with. Working with her was like holding a tiger by the tail. She couldn't let go. Not yet.

  She looked up at the sky, then at her new Rolex. Almost two o'clock.

  Jimmy John Wylde, meet Mr. Smith

  Technology was a wonderful thing.

  The Old School Way to set up a meet was to set an entry point, with all avenues of approach covered by living eyes on foot and mobile, connected by covert encrypted radio, for the person invited to the meet to move into. They'd arrive at the designated time (and in case they were savvy, the meet-up was covered hours in advance, sometimes before the invitee was invited) and then walk their route, and all along the route static posts would watch their trail, spot any likely subjects, call them out to the walkers who would check them out, and all of this was relayed in real-time to the case officer, who would make a decision as to whether the meet was a go or a no-go.