The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  “The Concierge’s concierge. It’s an interesting gig. In fact, I’ve never heard of the Syndicate having one before.”

  Roger puffed up. “There’s never been one before.”

  “Your idea then?”

  He gave me a savage smile. He thumbed back at Littman. “Was Harv’s really; well something like it.” When I didn’t react he continued. “I refined it, sent out the invites.”

  Sometimes I get little flashes of insight. Small things add up. The way Roger held onto the words, his eyes moving to the left, his hands just a little too clenched. The change in Harv’s pacing. Pina looking briefly away and licking her lips, almost a nervous tick. Something was up. Something major had shifted in her world and they needed a new skill set. But Roger had not invited me; Harv didn’t recognize me. Which meant either another player had yet to reveal themselves or Pina had put me on the list herself.

  I ran through my known activities, the public resume as it were, among various agencies, families and cartels. What could she want? Counterintelligence? Harv looked like he knew enough to get her an expert. Pennant style sabotage and infiltration? The Karkova sisters had a reputation for doing solid work and they were almost certainly on the payroll.

  What do you get the person who has everything? You get them insight and distance. She met my eye. “Angola?”

  She gave me a genuine smile and I felt myself warm. Wow. “No. Amherst.”

  Until two days ago, I had owned a small bakery in Amherst, Massachusetts, specializing in artisanal breads and European pastry. Baking calms me down and it helps control the headaches, which are frequent. And I’m good at it. It requires steel nerves, precision, a keen sense of the environment plus a healthy dose of inner certainty. What the hell would bread baking be worth to the Syndicate? Unless she needed me to go undercover.

  I shrugged. When you don’t know, don’t bother trying to head fake someone as smart as The Concierge. She’d see it as surely as I saw her people were in a panic. “I really don’t understand, ma’am.”

  Roger looked like he was about to speak and she placed a hand upon his knee. He leaned back and closed his lips. His eyes burned. It must be killing him to have me in their private viewing room. Ron and the Commis had the next applicant interviewing. Littman had one his line officers watching.

  She got up and poured herself a small neat dose of brandy. She did not offer the bottle around. “Six years ago you were a top operator on the global stage. And then you quit. Moved to nowheresville and started making bread for a living.” She sipped the drink. “And more than that, you actually lived off what you made and kept an admirable low profile. No former associates, no side jobs, no good old days, drinks and reminiscing. Clean. Your money unspent, every request and assignment turned down. Out.”

  And then I got it. Most people in my world grow too addicted to the challenge, to the speed and rush. They gamble with lives not their own. Arkady and Olga had never even known what I’d given up and I sure as hell never planned to tell them. They abhorred Sveta’s life and her flashy blood money toys. Loyalty. The Concierge needed loyalty. And a steady hand with god knew what.

  Me un-retiring required a lot of dead family members. Roger was the kind of guy who set that up all the time. It’s part of why I disliked him so much. All evidence pointed to a random drunk crossing the highway divider. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong. Kill my family to get me back in? Eventually I’d trace it to them and then… Then nothing would stop me from burning The Syndicate to the ground. A guy like Harv would know this. But Roger? I could taste how close I was to the answer.

  She met me halfway and her smile gave out. “I’m sorry about your cousin and his family. We keep tabs on people.”

  “The invite came before he died.”

  She nodded. “I had to try. None of us thought you’d come.” She met my eyes. “You did turn me down twice.” Me. Hmm. Either she could lie better than anyone I’d met or she was telling me the truth. As she knew it. Didn’t mean Roger, Harv or any of her crew hadn’t done it behind her back.

  I switched gears. “So who’s tops on the list? Assuming I hadn’t come.”

  Roger yawned and got up. “Pina, pour me one too please.” He waved at some glasses on the shelf. “Yip Li was tops. Then maybe Mika French.”

  It made sense. NID had worked with Li for years and Roger would know what he could do inside and out. Probably his choice. Mika French was the former terrorist Mika Unpronounceable Algerian Name from France. Last time I’d seen her, she gotten God and was trying to repent for her sins. Which included several busloads of children. No one serious discounted her but I always felt her new crusade made her weaker. Off balance, perhaps. Prone to assign motive and dismiss facts. Too hot, too involved, too attached to a certain truth. Dangerous. Neither Li nor French had my skill sets and, to some degree, I did not have theirs. It made me the odd choice.

  I looked at Roger, who was swallowing his drink as if it would wash out a bad taste. “Yip’s your choice and Littman suggested Mika?”

  He nodded. He poured himself another. Interesting. I hadn’t heard he had that kind of problem. Nightmares getting to you, Roger? No one spoke and Pina had a kind of wild gleam in her eyes. Something was going on here I couldn’t pinpoint. Now we were on her script.

  “Roger doesn’t like me.”

  Pina nodded and sipped. “Is that a problem?”

  Of course it was a problem. But I wondered if she meant it literally. “Depends on whether Roger stays as your Chef.” His eyes turned to slits. Bingo. Behind him Littman gave an involuntary smile.

  She just gave me another high wattage smile. “And if he stays?”

  “You’d be a fool to hire me. I’d undermine him, we’d fight over everything. I’d be advising you to remove him.” Which translated means, I’ll kill him the first week whether asked to or not.

  She appeared to give it some thought. “You mean Roger would be a fool to allow me to hire you.”

  “No. I meant what I said. The mistake would be yours.”

  Her face did something amazing. She simply stopped looking quite human. It froze in a kind slack emptiness and the cold intelligence I knew lurked behind all that eye candy came out like guiding stars. She sat again and got closer, a gesture that would have been intimate had she not looked like she’d just as soon eat my steaming heart as speak to me. “Explain.”

  I drank a little coffee and composed my thoughts. The interview had begun in earnest. “What you have here is an Anarchists’ Sewing Circle.” A false front or false flag operation. Sleight of hand on an operational scale. She gave me a small nod. “To what end, I don’t know. Maybe to get to a conversation like this where we all know that we all know.” She nodded a little again.

  “So, now, we all know. Why come then?”

  I shrugged. Something made me tell the truth. Maybe because I had so little to lose. I had buried all the people I’d ever love just a few hours before. I liked Pina despite myself and she had a kind of halo about her, a gravitational pull. Once I had finished my business with her people, maybe I would consider her job after all. “I thought it’d make my headaches go away for a while.”

  She turned to Littman who shrugged. He had switched to a H&K submachine gun without me noticing. Smooth. Roger was the one who spoke. “It’s not in his file, but Medina told me he suffers from cluster headaches.”

  Fool. Never ever withhold information from your principle. Manage it, yes. Control when and how they get it, certainly. But keep something critical out of a common file. Bozjemoi, the man was incompetent. “When I don’t work, I get them. Three or four times a week.”

  She leaned closer. “And the baking?”

  I sighed. “It helps a little but I still have them. At least a couple of times a week.” In truth the baking had barely helped. But I kept hoping. On the human pain scale, childbirth is supposed to rate nine out of ten with certain cancers and kidney stones, a couple of injuries and burns
topping it. Drilling into your teeth only rates an 8. Cluster headaches start at 10 and have their own scale to rate how unendurable they are. And they last for hours or days at a time.

  I’m built to stomach them but I can’t pretend they’re pleasant. They provide excellent practice resisting torture. Vigorous torture. I can work while I have them but not well. It has made the occasional stab wound laughable. Not that I’d had many knife fights over the last six years.

  Pina had a strange light in her eyes. One might indelicately term it demonic. “When you work, the headaches…” She trailed off and gestured with her rather large hands.

  Why bother lying. “Disappear entirely.”

  “Any work?”

  No, not any. Not Pennant style assassinations and sabotage. Intellectual work. The Sherlock Bond stuff, half investigative razzle, half world class spy dazzle. “Concierge style work. Internal matters, finesse, persuasion, mysteries.”

  Littman smiled. I knew then that he knew. That he’d seen the master file. And he’d played that so straight, looking clueless when the information Roger had hidden escaped. I reviewed my memory. He had shrugged and looked at Karthago. I assumed it was ignorance. I had taken his bait. Well played.

  So. Littman and Karthago. Which meant this was also an interview for Stenwaite. An exit interview perhaps. Littman to take his place and bring in someone like Mika as the Sous? It would solve so many problems. Did they expect me to kill him?

  She leaned forward and her face looked, if anything, less human. Oddly, it made me admire her a bit more and I felt a rush of life whisper back into me. That something just beyond reach touched my skin and all the tension of six years eased for a moment. “So, Spetz, I have something you might want.” Her smile became electric, her face again a mask of urbane humanity.

  “Which makes me question what you want from me.”

  Roger finished his drink and banged it on the bar a trifle too hard. The room echoed. “What the hell do you think we want?” We. He didn’t know. Didn’t cotton to his situation. Or was buying time.

  I gave a mental shrug. Bernard San Valentin, the present General Manager of the Syndicate, seemed the only heavyweight absent. “Bernard having doubts about the value of the position?”

  Roger gave a nasty laugh. “C’mon, Spetzie. He took a second look at Pina’s ass and gave her whatever she wanted.” He came around the bar and sat in a stylish metal and leather chair. Throne might be a better word. “Pina put you on the list because you are that rare combo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Unkillable, incorruptible, and apparently lacking in ambition.” In a manner of speaking that wasn’t all that far from how I saw myself. But I certainly didn’t advertise. Or thought I hadn’t.

  I looked at Littman whose face was a mask of studied composure. Then at Karthago who let passion and fascination play across her. But the eyes were still cold stars. They were offering me all the answers I wanted if I would play their game. “I see your problem.” Then I did what should have been remarked as a curious thing. The combat detail let me, the fools. I got up and sat next to Roger, casually stretching a bit and now in a position to crush his throat or pin his legs. My Pennant instructor would have called it Combat Position Four.

  “But not mine, right?” Roger continued looking unhappy and poured himself another two fingers. Up close he looked tired, his face a bit sagged and, under his eyes, a hint of yellow jaundice. I took a careful sip of the coffee and started squinting at a spot to his rear left. Naturally Stenwaite turned and gave me a glorious view of the staple scars behind his ears. Right. The headache building since the funeral simply faded away and I felt, dammit, glorious.

  Littman came around from pacing behind the bar and sat on a nearby chair. At last. He had realized his miscalculation. But I had the room if I wanted it. And now Littman had put his own jugular within my reach. I did a quick survey of the remaining people. Whose were hers and whose Roger’s? “No Roger, I see your problem very clearly.”

  He looked at me and his eyes focused for a moment. “And what’s that?”

  I doubted that I’d be able to know which gunsels would throw down until we got to the trigger pulling part of the evening. I tried taking the initiative. “You’ve been home three, maybe four months. Away from along oversees trip for The Syndicate. Somewhere with lots of jungle and bad satellite phone reception. I’d venture Congo or Brazilian rainforest, maybe working diamonds for guns or investigating something plutonium flavored. Then there was an accident, you were hospitalized for a week, had some vocal damage and now you’re back here, a little disoriented, maybe with a tin ear, or a limp or some such issue.” His face had gone ashen. “How’m I doing, Roger? That `bout right?”

  Littman nodded. “Brasil. Four months ago, and there was a fire on the compound, killed twenty. We suspected the Triads. Roger had some bad blood with the Fujianese these last few years.”

  “But you had doubts, and then Rog here puts up Yip Li, who’s been officially dead for the last three years,” I was out but I still had my sources, “becomes his top choice. And your little security guest list, it’s got all these red flagged people on it. None of whom happen to be working today I am guessing.” Stenwaite had stopped breathing, his eyes suddenly reptilian in their intensity.

  Pina got up and, lifting the bottle from the table, poured herself another small drink. “Correct. Just Roger and his kill team.” She waived to a group of four commandos in the corner who looked ready to eat sharks. They smiled in grim self-adoration.

  “So the problem, Roger, is really simple. You missed something.”

  Stenwaite blinked. “Impossible.” We both knew it was so and he’d dropped the pretense. “The briefings were exhaustive.”

  “San Valentin is gay.”

  He shook his head slowly as the impact of the mistake registered. In my trade there are two things you need to impersonate someone else. First, you need a Legend. Those are the documents, the paper trail that establishes identity, built tier upon tier using a birth certificate and, nowadays, a lot of computer entries backdated to appear sequentially accurate. Then you need a Face, the biological version of a legend. Very few organizations can copy faces, fingerprints, DNA. You see all that mission impossible stuff and think, oh somewhere it’s happened. And you would be right. Genetic engineering, fake fingerprints, face implants, that sort of thing exist. In incredibly limited, insanely expensive supply.

  Hell, John Le Carré nailed how badly a legend can entangle you, just read the Smiley trilogy. Great spycraft in those. A Face is hundredfold harder to pull off and would run someone hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in expense to make happen properly. Of the eight or nine groups globally that could potentially make whoever was pretending to be Roger into what he was, only two had the raw intelligence and muscle to fool the Syndicate’s security protocols. One was ironically, the Syndicate itself. The other, my old friends at the Abschnitt Zweiundzwanzig, aka Section 22, the legally non-existent biological warfare and eugenics unit of the East German Stasi, late from Mengele’s Dresden lab. You didn’t think they firebombed it just for revenge did you?

  That meant that either Valentin had some kind of civil war going on inside his org that was running the tab up into the billions, all to execute some kind of perverse comic-opera, or Dr. Gutlicht had finally decided to make a play for power. Occam’s Razor suggested Section 22. And the way our Roger was looking at me, I sensed he knew me, that Gutlicht and Cassandra had spoken of me. I was, after all, their child, after a fashion. Perhaps despite our differences, a favored son.

  Roger smiled and nodded. “Even Hans makes the occasional mistake. He told me to eliminate you on sight.” The room started to shift. The commando team looked unsettled and I watched as one of the men began to finger a vial on his belt. He’d be the newest replacement, the plant from the Abschnitt. Drugs, nerve gas, plain old explosives? He was the one to kill first.

  I gave him a placid smile while directin
g Harv’s attention to the rogue commando, my index finger pointed below eye level, only in the Sous’ line of sight. He didn’t acknowledge the motion but his eyes shifted and I saw his finger move to the trigger of his H&K. He squeezed off a three round burst, firing through the couch into the man’s head. In the periphery, I saw the body fall. I had lunged for Roger’s mouth, jamming my whole forearm into the jaw, while pinning his arms to his hips. Something hot winged past my head while I jammed the bastard’s head back, arching him against the couch while I got my knee in position to crush his groin. Anything to keep him from biting down on a hollow tooth or armpit capsule. He died on me anyway. He didn’t even shake, he just went horridly limp like a plastic chicken.

  I looked up to see two dead on the kill team, one of them with his pistol in his mate’s mouth, the room in shambles—someone had opened up with an automatic weapon—four large men covering Karthago bodily and Harv, his eyes a cruel shade of empty, staring everywhere at once. I rose slowly, my hands out and level. “He’s dead.”

  Harv gave an all clear sign and the men covering Pina, hoisted her to her feet. Even without the heels, she seemed tall and totally in control. “How?”

  I shrugged. How indeed? His legs were squashed tight. I saw a small trickle of discolored blood near the inseam. “I am speculating here, but I’d say concentrated nerve agent in his testes. Probably attached via a shunt to the femoral artery. It’d be a one-way trip, pretty much kill you while you bleed out and go into shock, maybe even stroke out at the same time. Four times the death, near instant brain damage.”

  Harv came over and sniffed near the body. “Didn’t sphincter. Had to be a major nerve agent. He’s already rigid.”

  I looked over the corpse and saw it had started to hyperextend, like a rigid mockery of a body. You see things like this in Batman comics, whenever the Joker slays someone with his signature gas. I know because Hans really loved the notion. He used to tinker in the lab looking for the magic formula. Sonofabitch seemed to have found a version. That scared me some. I knew my ersatz father’s work all too well. I knelt down and using a ceramic knife, cut open the trousers. He had squeezed his own legs together and I could see the puncture wound where some kind of bone implant had severed both arteries and flooded his system with toxins. He’d been dead before I even touched him. Wow.