by Ani Fox
Cities become states and states become nations. Without control, those nations are run by tyrants petty as they are cruel. Global North Korea but with less fearless leadership and more random dying. In short, if we wanted television, antibiotics, and some modicum of democracy, we also got my kind stealing electronics patents, swapping placebos with real drugs, and rigging elections.
Live in the real world for a while and you forget how the real-politick of The Web works. On the BBW, there were fewer illusions, fewer constraints. Here, individuals measured what they could do by what response they might receive, morality entirely absent except as imposed by the agent themselves. Action, reaction; call it Newton’s Law of Absolute Power.
I had been outside that world, making rye bread and linzer tarts for long enough to not matter to my opponents. My contacts had gone quiet, my network taken over by others, my friendships fading as survival took precedence. Likely there was paperwork that now said I owned none of the BBW; and I realized with sudden clarity, I no longer had the clout to force a claim. Unless I wanted to wage all-out war on my own allies, I had become a one man army again. That was fine by me. I had never much liked accumulating and keeping a network of agents at my behest. It took the kind of effort I found morally taxing and mentally draining.
More importantly, by relieving me of the need to consider my network, Oslo and her ilk had just made me a free man. A rogue agent without constraints in a world ruled by tit for tat. With Arkady, Olga, and Sonia gone, there were no tats with which The Web could tit. I watched quietly as Ace and Pina continued their dialogue until Ace saw my face. She must have cottoned to my line of thought and what she saw made her suddenly stutter. Pina turned and seeing me, frowned.
She rarely made mistakes. Revealing her new found power was, in retrospect, very much an indiscretion. She had tipped the whole of her hand to me without a word. More than that, she had inadvertently backed me into a corner. I already knew I could kill everyone on the dock. Harv, bless him, had tried to keep his shooters on point, but cider trumped safety. Ace had disarmed Pina’s entire crew without lifting a weapon. Which meant Pina had been both indiscrete and careless. Or she was sending Ace a message.
It made me curious. I turned slowly and spied Harv behind me, sipping his cider and watching me with a burning intensity. In his left hand he held a XM1060 grenade, without the pin. We just call them bunker busters. They’re a thermobaric weapon that will light everything within reach, then shatter it all with a force wave exponentially larger than a typical grenade. He gave me a wan smile. His eyes told me the whole story. He had seen Pina’s mistake and while he couldn’t stop me, he could make the price lethally high. I especially liked him in that moment, that he’d sacrifice his life for his job. I gave him a very subtle nod and smiled back. He just took another sip and watched. Harv, at least, didn’t dare underestimate me.
Pina coughed. “Perhaps we should talk?”
I found a crate and sat down, took a sip of my cider. “Okay, let’s talk.”
She frowned again. Her eyes swept the dock. The Norwegians continued smoking and futzing with the zodiac, offloading equipment. At a nod from Ace, they killed the music. “We could use the bridge.”
I shook my head. “Let’s do it here.” I waved at Harv with my mug. “Harv has reserved us a nice spot here and, frankly, I’d like to stay on his good side. You’ve taken enough risks today to give him an aneurysm.” I didn’t mention how much she’d lied to him or, at the least, kept him in the dark about her plans and capabilities.
She nodded and sat down, rather primly, on a crate. A moment later one of the Nords brought a green blanket and she rose as he made a seat for her. Then she sat and stared at me. If she saw the grenade or Harv’s shooters put down their mugs, she didn’t show it. Then we waited.
It was her show. When I say we waited, I mean it. We sat, sipping cider and staring unflinchingly at one another. Ace walked around with a steaming pitcher and refilled our mugs. Those of us still drinking. Then she sat beside Pina and stared at me, her face imploring.
Finally, Pina spoke. “Oslo owns the majority share of this ship.”
I looked at Ace. “And my share?”
Ace shrugged. “We kind of …”
“Took it and handed it out to the crew?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We didn’t think you’d be back.”
“And now you sold enough to Oslo that you can’t pay me back. Right?”
She sighed. “It was a hard couple of years.”
“Okay.”
Ace looked at me with surprise. “Okay?”
“Sure. I never much liked the business anyway. So okay. You took my shares. Am I prisoner here?”
Ace looked as I’d slapped her. Pina smiled. “Not exactly. But it does not seem that I much need you at this point.”
The prospect of death didn’t much fuss me. “Okay.”
Pina’s face went inhumanly blank. “Really. Just like that?”
“Sure. It’s how it is right? Harv’s covered your screw up here and he’s got a pretty good chance of getting you out of this little bluff alive.” That got her attention. As if I’d been fooled by her bravado. She had to know I could cut her throat before she could spit. “And I’m not spoiled for options. We’re so far into the Atlantic, what can I really do without some help?” Nothing. For now. I could commandeer the ship but it would alert Section 22 and that was a quick death certainly.
“All true, but I expected some kind of…protest.”
I smiled at her and even Pina, heartless fearless Pina Karthago, seemed to react. “If I were to protest, there’d be a large mess. You lied to my face, double-crossed me. It happens. It’s pretty typical for The Syndicate. Harv saved you. Again. So you’re going to get away with it because I like Ace and I like Harv and neither of them deserve to die just so I can make a stupid point.”
She nodded. “Do you mind that I lied to you? That I was able to fool you?”
Did I mind? Not especially. I sat there and considered. In our business it happens often and usually there’s more going on. Here I wasn’t quite sure whether Pina had some kind of test running or simply had decided to stop playing nice. It didn’t much matter for what happened next.
“Look, Pina,” I took a sip and collected my thoughts. No need to be rude just because they were threatening me. “You can’t kill me. If you try, I’ll take you, the ship, and the Syndicate’s hope of beating Ess Twenty-Two with me. So you need to be, at a minimum, civil. But you have my phone and that means Eddie will have my network hacks processed in a few hours. You have what I collected plus control of the ship itself. Don’t need me? Okay. Then leave me be and I’ll be on my merry way at the next port of call.”
I doubt anyone ever dared speak to her that way. In truth, she might very much need me but Pina Karthago had an arrogance to her. Most geniuses are blinded by their own capabilities and intellect. As Oslo, she had accumulated power and now, as the Concierge she was going to wield it with ruthless effectiveness. That’s different than killing someone like me. If I needed to teach her that lesson I would, but it might cost me more than a splinted arm. Plus, I had promised Nadya I would watch over Pina and while the Concierge might not be good to her word, I am. Always. As long as they offered me no overt violence, I’d try to help the woman despite herself. She might be the best hope we had for keeping our own version of peace. Long term. Right now she and the other Powers had declared war.
“Deal.” She offered me her hand and I shook it. Why not? I didn’t feel any more bound by the deal than she did, but it calmed the folks on the dock. I felt the tension ebb and then Queen was back rocking and Harv politely escorted me to a set of cabins aft of the lower tween deck. He counted them and when we got to the fifth door among a set painted goldenrod, he opened the hatch and motioned me inwards. It was a largish sized cabin for a ship with a longer bed, a desk, and some books on a shelf. Most potboilers and military sci fi. Proper trash for killing time. We both knew it was a
cell. He shrugged and made as if he might apologize. I shook my head and that made him nod. We both were pros. This was business.
He gave me his hand and I took it. As we shook he said, “Thanks, Spetz. Thank you for her life.”
I gave him a sharp, formal bow with my left shoulder then released his hand. “You’re welcome. For what it’s worth, Harv, I enjoy working with you.”
That made him smile. Then I motioned to the door and started to close it. As I did I tossed him the spoon pin for his thermal grenade. Without it inside the device he held an inert paperweight. His face was priceless. I gave him a wink and shut away the outside world. As I said, I’m not a strategic kind of person but I do know tactics like the back of my hand. Harv had few choices on the airship and I made sure Nadya and her goons showed him the thermal grenades, which I had left on purpose. After disarming all of them. They’d be used to lend explosive evidence to the future tiltrotor crash in Halifax, covering the interior with enough heat intensity as to prevent proper evidence collection. They’d count bodies and search for teeth.
I’d told Pina the truth. I liked Ace and Harv. Only psychopaths enjoy killing people. I might be good at it but that doesn’t make it excusable or easy. In time, someone would come visit me and I’d decide then how much more I’d tolerate the heavy handed tactics. The Syndicate had been top dog in The Web for so long, I didn’t know if they had the intestinal fortitude to take a proper fight to Section 22 or whomever was backing them. How Pina and company handled the next few hours and days would tell me what I needed to know. Because, regardless of how this played out, I was coming for Hans and Cassandra. I was going to kill them and wipe out their little cadre of fanatics. To the best of my now unleashed abilities.
Chapter 6
It Takes a Village in a Bag…
As it turned out, no one came for me for quite a while. I got in a very nice nap, four sets of military calisthenics adjusted for the size of my cell and my busted arm, read half of something Lois Bujold flavored, and had gone through their cache of candy and granola when Eddie popped open my door and motioned me out. I grabbed my go-bag and followed. He frowned some, but let me keep it. I reckoned they’d let me stew some fourteen hours all up. Eddie wore rhinestone studded blue cowboy boots, a punked out party dress with skull pins and zombie Hello Kitty decals, and a beret of purest raspberry cashmere. Plus a lot of eyeliner, done in proper Egyptian cat-eye augmented by some raspberry-ish glitter. Such a flirt.
We gallumphed to his command suite, where Eddie’s cadre worked and lived. I had built the original crew with some prescience. Eco-terrorists are a fickle group; firstmost, they are terrorists, people who don’t mind killing civilians to make what they consider to be the most important point: that sooner or later the planet will kill us all unless we stop killing it. Terrorists have agendas and no two sets of greenies share a true accordance. So they form cadres and Ace keeps them from killing one another with a combination of brutality, family bonding, and constantly identifying a more hated common enemy.
Gay Eddie owned hacking on every level for the BBW. He also owned the commo team that connected the ship with The Web. There were other teams, with other communications avenues, and an official commo team. But Eddie was BBW’s eyes and ears, her voice and her early warning system. His cadre of fifteen represented a loose affiliation of techno-anarchists and green futurists who supported transhumanism, electronic liberty, and some aggressive forms of population control. They were utopians of a sort, invested in the belief that at under a billion humans, Mother Earth would breathe easy and give us proper succor. Some of his team wanted to move the dial quickly, others felt that simple contraception and a one child policy would solve the problem within a lifetime. They would have loved to get hold of the biologicals Hans had just perfected.
So it came as no surprise that Eddie wanted to ask me questions about it, about the surgically modified Roger, the security set up as I observed it. My phone camera and sensors could only tell him so much. We made chit chat as a meal was served and I ate along with his transhumanists. The Hackers were by vote pescetarians and tonight we were having some kind of sardine stew with fava beans and a green bitter herb I didn’t recognize. Sounded awful and tasted amazing. I think they added lime and coconut to it, perhaps some curries. I had fourths along with some Syrian bread and smoked olives. Apparently transhumanists like ice cream because we had a large helping of pistachio.
I answered questions and made sure they felt I was duly cooperative. I was out of the mid hull, near plenty of equipment and exits, well fed and in possession of my gear. Eddie suggested we play cards, which sounded relaxing enough. Someone set up Canasta for us on the poop deck outside the suite and we played by lantern, looking over the dark Atlantic chop. Night was giving way to dawn. I had spied a clock in the commo center that claimed it was nearly 4 a.m. Inside, Eddie’s collective was alert, monitoring traffic on channels most people didn’t know existed.
Throughout dinner they had been chatting in French Polari, the chosen argot among them. From that I gleaned that the Americans had chased down the tiltrotor and someone enterprising had put a missile through her less than two klicks from Halifax airport. The ensuing fiery crash blew apart a suburban neighborhood, scattering propaganda, bodies, biological weapons, and debris. On private nets, the governments of the free world celebrated destroying what appeared to be weaponized Anthrax sufficient to wipe out a few hundred thousand people. The thieves were identified as a loosely affiliated version of Algerian Al Qaeda, which was unexpected. By dessert, the CIA had backtracked the Algerian’s purchase and system cracking to a small Chechen cell within Belarus. And gotcha. The search was on, every Russian, every communist being vetted thrice for potential contacts.
Eddie dealt me a hand and leaned back, his eyes dull in the low light. I looked at my cards and prioritized some moves. Eddie tossed something into the pile. “Spetzie, you look well.”
“Says the man who wore a cashmere beret to impress me.”
He laughed. “Did it work?” I tossed a card.
“Eddie, you know I don’t like boys.” He made a face and then we both laughed. Not that I’d been much into women either. People with trust issues like me have little use for intimacy.
“I’m no ordinary man, Spetz. You should give me one night to prove it.”
I sighed. We’d been having this conversation for a decade. I never really knew whether Eddie was serious. Tonight, it felt like perhaps he was. I wasn’t an unattractive man. To some, my size and sharp features were appealing. Still, Gay Eddie was less a potential lover than a meat grinder dressed up as a date. It wasn’t politic to say so, of course. Instead, I put some cards on the table. “And how could my masculinity survive it, Eddie darling?”
He put down some cards and stopped playing. “Why’d you come back, Spetz? Not that my crew minded giving you the software.” Of course he knew my crackers. Might even have trained them.
“Would you believe I was bored?”
He seemed to consider that for a moment. “No, I don’t think I would. Got a better answer?”
I’m not sure I had a better answer. I came mostly because I was curious. Because having lost what little I had in the world that gave life any meaning, I’d felt no danger in accepting the invite. Given today’s events, maybe that made me suicidal; at the very least unhinged.
“Quid pro quo, Eddie. If I tell you, what am I getting in return?”
“Besides the best night of your life?”
“That would be Berlin, nineteen ninety-eight.” Eddie frowned. He apparently didn’t know what that meant and it concerned him. Good. He’d look it up and it would chill him to the bone.
“I know what Pina wants to do.”
I suspected that I did too, but it was smarter to play along. “Fair. I came because I wanted the job. Everyone gets sick of being out sooner or later. After all, this is the Show, Eddie.” It was what he wanted to hear. That even I had caved. Maybe I had. Who knew?
He smiled. I had confirmed something for him that made him comfortable. I watched Eddie drop me into some nicely fashioned theoretical box and, with it, his guard. He wasn’t afraid anymore. Good.
“Pina will be staying out here for a while. Apparently Oslo owns a sub commander somewhere and he’s coming to visit.” I had expected that. It made sense given her overall plan. She likely had planned to jump from Halifax to a ship like BBW and wait. I’d just delivered a better option and she took it. Or, maybe she was that many steps ahead. I tried not to kid myself. Pina seemed very astute and her reputation was fearsome. Eddie sipped some kind of liqueur. He’d offered me one but alcohol doesn’t agree with captivity. “Your turn,” he said.
“You’ve got great eyes.” That made him blush. Right, he was interested. I filed that away for our next time. “I don’t think Pina will rendezvous with that sub.”
Eddie’s eyebrows rose. “How now brown cow? You know something?”
I shrugged. “Call it a professional hunch. My guess is, Hans and whoever else is out there making world war four, they will go after everyone Syndicate all at once and then, anyone not with us, is by nature dogfood.”
Eddie turned and looked at his crew. “They’d have picked it up on the bandwidth. There’s nothing.”
Talk about naïve. “Eddie, not everything happens electronically. Two Two did things old school. We passed notes and passwords. For a kill order of this magnitude, Cassandra or some trusted commander will have gone themselves.” Which meant that we were a sitting duck. Sooner or later.
He chuckled. “Spetz, you’ve been out of the game too long. We’re safe here. I have the best commo equipment, world class sensors, and an elite crew. Guys like you are outdated.” He stretched out and yawned to emphasize his point. And of course, that’s when the attack happened.
