Hostile Territory

by T. L. Knighton

  “What’s so funny?” Tommy finally asked.

  “Oh, only that their getaway was not as clean as they would like to think,” she answered.

  “How so?”

  “You were not watching the trackers, were you?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  Michelle laughed. “If you had, you would have seen mine leading away from the building before these two did,” she said, gesturing to Harley and Cody.

  “Oh?” Tommy said, wondering where she was going with this.

  “When I fought the blonde sooka? I slipped my tracker on her,” she said, a playful smile on her lips that instantly made her look like she was about fourteen-years-old.

  Tommy’s own grin answered. Oh, how he loved having competent people.

  “Alright, let’s see where these chafers are and figure out a plan.”

  Chapter 6

  Kane held the ice up to his jaw. He’d heard Dane was tough, but damn. The man had a punch like an anvil, but it was more than that. Far too many big guys like Dane relied on their size and ignored technique. It worked often enough that there was no reason for that school of thought to change.

  Unfortunately, Kane faced a big man who also knew how to fight.

  He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. “Next time, I’m going to bloody well shoot him and call it a day,” Kane half-muttered.

  “You should have,” answered Nat, a flip of her blonde hair revealing the scratches around her eyes. “And that little sooka with him, while you were at it.”

  Nat Kelly was good at her job, namely gaining entry into places that didn’t want her in there. Lean and lithe, she could have had a good living as a contortionist, but instead she’d taken a different path and made a lot more money.

  A brawler, she wasn’t, though.

  “No need to fret, love. We have what we were contracted to get and Reilly’s crew doesn’t have a bloody clue where to find us,” he boasted. “We’re in the clear.”

  The woman nodded.

  “Should have taken me,” interjected a deep baritone. The speaker was a mountain, standing half a head taller than Dane had, and as thickly muscled with ebony skin that bore the scars of a tough life.

  Kane fought the urge to roll his eyes. Marcus Mariola was good at what he did, but he wasn’t one to do a lot of forward thinking.

  “And just why would I have done that?” Atticus fired back. “How were we supposed to know they would get there so quickly and thus need your services?”

  The big man shrugged. “Just should have.”

  “So, I should have been prescient to the possibility that Harley Dane—who we didn’t even know had Marceaux’s name, much less address—happened to be there despite the fact that you stand out more than anyone else on this planet that has, maybe, ten people with your particular complexion?”

  He shrugged again, a gesture which infuriated Atticus under the circumstances since the other man believed it constituted an argument.

  Atticus sighed and went back to focusing on how the ice seemed to be helping his aching jaw.

  “We should still bust the bloody thing,” Nat offered.

  Kane suppressed another sigh, though he knew where the woman was coming from. If their employer’s concerns were exposure, destroying the data would have her covered just fine. Unfortunately, he was being reminded why this crowd needed him around. None of them had the brains to run this operation.

  “Because,” Atticus answered, “that’s not the job. What our beloved employer wants it for is none of our concern. We were contracted for a specific job, and it wasn’t to destroy a data chip. Maybe she wants to blackmail someone with it, I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  In the corner, the youngest member of the crew cleared his throat. “Why don’t we use it for that? I can burn a copy easy enough.”

  From him, Atticus found himself less annoyed at the question. Grissom—he’d refused to give more of a name, apparently thinking it made him cooler just to have one name—was new to this particular group. The hacker had managed to steel millions of bits from one of Kane’s secret accounts.

  At first, Kane was as furious as anyone else. However, once he’d found the young man, it hadn’t taken much to get the money back in his account. Rather than end the potential threat to his financial solvency, he had a better idea. He’d offered Grissom a job.

  This was someone who had the brains to run a crew someday, but he lacked the necessary experience at this point. When he asked a question, he wasn’t expecting it to be taken as a suggestion like the others. Instead, he wanted to grasp the thinking behind it.

  “Because, it’s a matter of integrity. If we decided to freelance with the blackmail, and our employer intends that for some point down the road, we become competitors. That’s bad for the rep, and that means it’s bad for business.”

  Grissom nodded his understanding.

  Good, Kane thought. Remember this moment when you have a crew of your own. You’ll need to deal with morons who think they know more than you about anything and everything.

  “Then what do we do now?” Nat asked.

  “I’ll quancom our employer’s man after a bit. He’s likely asleep at the moment, after all. We’ll let him know, he’ll have one of his meet me, and they’ll be on their merry.”

  “And we get paid,” Marcus added.

  “Yes,” Kane replied with a sigh. “We get paid.”

  That was sufficient for the big man who nodded, then turned to go back to whatever he had been doing before.

  The rest seemed to accept his description of future events as gospel. Having a track record of being right about things like that certainly helped in that regard, of course. So why was he having this nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right?

  ** ** **

  Tommy slid his Capella into the concealment holster he’d placed between his pants and the small of his back, then slid on the brown leather jacket he hoped concealed it well enough and left his cabin.

  Securing the door behind him, he started when a voice seemingly came out of nowhere.

  “You know you probably should sit this out, right?” Harley asked.

  He spun around and glared at his first officer. “You scared the crap out of me.”

  The big man shrugged. “The point stands.”

  “I’m not staying here. Not this time,” he answered and strode forward, brushing past the other man.

  Behind him, the heavy footsteps told him he was being followed.

  “You’ve never done anything like this,” Harley quipped.

  “Neither has Cody.”

  “Cody volunteered.”

  “So did I,” Tommy fired back. “And since I’m the captain, I get final say. Deal with it.”

  “Look,” Harley said, grabbing Tommy’s arm and spinning him around. “We don’t know what we’re going to deal with when we get there. None of us may come out of there. That guy might have a dozen hitters in there with him. We don’t know.”

  Tommy nodded. It was true, they were clueless, and about ready to go off halfcocked.

  “Alright,” he began, still furious, “but then no one is going in.”

  Harley began to interrupt, but Tommy raised a hand to cut him off.

  “We’ll find out what’s waiting for us first. You and Cody, see if you can get some kind of transportation, something that can get us there and back quickly and is big enough for all of us if needed.”

  Harley nodded slowly, his mind already at work. Tommy knew the big man would see the logic. After all, isn’t intel the thing you need before planning an op? “Okay, we can do that without leaving the docks, probably.”

  “Good. I’ll get Michelle to see what she can dig up on their current location while you keep an eye on them for a bit. Feed us all the intelligence you can and I’ll try and come up with a plan.”

  The big man chuckled. “One mission and now you’re a mastermind? In case you forgot it, the bulk of the plan was the crew’s
work.”

  “And the same this time around. Someone on the crew knows how to do something that we’ll need, right?”

  The big man seemed unconvinced, but still answered, “I guess so.”

  Tommy smiled and said, “And we’ll patch you and Cody in via your pads, so be sure you have them with you.”

  Harley nodded. “Was already planning on it.”

  ** ** **

  Cody drove the decrepit ground-effect van as it crept into the neighborhood and pulled up in front of the house next to their target. The van had cost them far more than it was worth, but they needed it. Dianne swore she’d reimburse them when the job was done, but that didn’t make anyone feel good about dropping ten thousand bits on a piece of deermo that might not make it back to the docks.

  Yeah, Cody knew he could fix it, but there hadn’t been time and there wasn’t much reason. It was a glorified rental. An expensive, glorified rental.

  Harley had his pad up and pressed the screen.

  “Pics?” he asked the first officer.

  “Infrared.”

  “That’ll speed things up.”

  The taller man simply nodded.

  “So, when we going on?” he asked.

  “We’re not. Not until the captain gives the word. Told you that back on Sabercat.”

  Cody smiled and quipped, “Yeah, but that was so he’d stay on the ship, right?

  Harley glared at him in response.

  “You were serious?”

  “He’s the captain,” was the response.

  He shook his head, not quite believing the big man had drunk the Kool-Aid and bought in so completely.

  “I get it that you owe the skipper. We all do by this point, but it’s not like he has a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He’s the captain. You sign on, you sign on for it all.”

  Cody sighed. “What if he wants us to do something stupid?”

  “He won’t.”

  “How do you know that? You know what he used to be like before. I heard stories, we even knew some of the same folks back in the day. He got plenty stupid back then.”

  Harley chuckled. “You didn’t know the kid. He’d been coddled all his life, told he wasn’t capable, he was just the third in the family. A complication, in a lot of ways. Deep down, I think he knew he was smarter, more competent than his brother and probably a match for his big sister, and he acted out of frustration. Yeah, he got stupid back then, but today?”

  “What’s different?” he asked the first officer.

  “Everything.”

  ** ** **

  Michelle sat at her computer, eight screens feeding her information that came so fast she only grasped it at what looked like an instinctive level from the outside. Instead, she knew what to look for and could read fast.

  The most important piece of data was how few devices where in the building with the tracker. It still moved around from time to time, enough so she figured it hadn’t been found.

  While the lack of pads was important, it wasn’t he most impressive thing about this group they were working against at the moment. No, that was the security on that one device.

  Data pads weren’t computer workhorses. Oh, they dwarfed even the quantum computers of the 21st century for raw power, but they were still limited compared to a dedicated system like Michelle’s.

  Yet this particular pad had layer upon layer of security—well beyond what it should have had the storage for. Every time she pealed one back, another took its place. She could hack it, but…

  Then something on the top left-center screen grabbed her attention and caused the corner of her mouth to curl up and an almost feral grin.

  So, someone has a pad, but has it powered down much of the time, eh? Well, now, isn’t that interesting?

  While the previous pad was encrypted well beyond anything she’d encountered, this one had nothing. Nothing at all. No security or anything besides the default anti-virus that came on several brands of pad.

  In fact, it was so easy she began to suspect a trap, but went in anyway. The personal risk was minimal—this other group already knew who Harley was, which meant they likely knew who everyone else was and where to find them—so she pressed on.

  A quick check of the cache files showed whoever used this typically enjoyed more adult vid entertainment, and only for short bursts, but that wasn’t a problem.

  She uploaded a program she held onto for special occasions that allowed her to make the pad appear powered down, but it wouldn’t actually turn off until she decided it would turn off. Even then, she could reactivate it remotely if she so chose.

  Sometimes, it’s too easy…and not because it’s a trap, she thought, her smile broadening as she knew she now had a way to listen in on their competition.

  She pressed the intercom, “Captain, I have something.”

  ** ** **

  Cody and Harley’s holographic facsimiles hovered just above the table as everyone else took a seat. Tommy stood and looked at everyone. This was one of those moments he’d heard about when leadership mattered, but did he have what it took? Would these people listen? Just because they did on Ararat didn’t mean they would again.

  Knock it off, he chided himself. You know what to do here. You’re the captain. You damn well better act like it.

  “Alright,” he began. “What’s in the house?”

  “Four. One has to be the female Michelle slipped the tracker on, and there’s one more that might be female. Either that or a pretty slight male. Either way, I’m not thinking we’re dealing with more than two hitters. One is huge, though, and based on the way the one guy fought, I’m not liking this one too much,” Harley offered.

  Tommy nodded. “Don’t blame you. Michelle?”

  “The one you have doubts about is male. He is a technical expert of some sort based on what he is saying. There is the British man from Marceaux’s apartment, the woman, and one other man who does not seem to be very bright,” the Frenchwoman added.

  “Why do you say that?” Tommy asked.

  “Because of his correspondences. They are all older, but his contain horrid spelling. Since this man sounds like he is North American Alliance, it truly is an indictment of your country’s educational system.”

  “Right,” Cody muttered, “because no stupid people graduate French schools.”

  “No, they do, but they can usually spell ‘ecstasy’ without it sounding like the kind of establishment where women take their clothing off for money.”

  Everyone simply peered at her quizzically.

  She sighed in exasperation. “Because he used an ‘x’ rather than a ‘c,’ people.”

  “Ah,” Tommy said, finally grasping her meaning. Made sense, actually, but they were getting off track.

  “In addition,” Michelle added, “is the fact that he is the only one with a pad in the room besides the one they call Grissom, who is the technical expert of their group and his is so secure as to be effectively safe.”

  “You couldn’t hack it?” Cody said with a slight sneer.

  Tommy suppressed the desire to roll his eyes. Michelle simply replied, “I could, but the other was far easier. Grissom’s would have taken more time, and I did not want to spend it if I did not have to.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said, desperate to get them back on track, “so we have two true hitters, one who will scrap, and their tech guy, so we’d best assume he’ll throw down too. What about weapons?”

  Harley shook his head. “Negative on our end. We’re using infrared, and those would only show up if they’ve been shooting them, and I think we’d have noticed in that case. Probably best to assume they have them.”

  Cody added, “If they’ve got them, though, they don’t seem to have them on their person.”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow and asked, “How do you figure?”

  “Folks packing tend to move in certain ways. They favor a side or are always adjusting something at certain points.
Plus, and I’m not proud to point this out, when someone goes to use the bathroom, a weapon on the belt affects how you deal with your clothes.”

  “Bathroom, huh?” Tommy asked, a smirk on his mouth. Cody had given Michelle enough crap on this call, this was the least he could do.

  “Shut up,” he muttered, then became silent.

  “He’s got a point, though,” Tommy added. “No chance of shoulder holsters?”

  Cody shook his head. “That’s just the same thing. If they had them, there would be clues, things my family did back in the day.”

  “I thought you didn’t know what your family’s business was?” Tommy asked.

  “I didn’t, but I knew they were armed a lot of the time.”

  “Fair enough,” he added. He didn’t need to get off track again.

  Tommy looked each of them in the eye, either real or holographic, and looked to Michelle. “Do we have any names to go along with these people?”

  “I do.”

  “Run them. See what we can find out about these guys. Anything at all you can dig up on them. I want to know everything we can about these people before we do anything.”

  She nodded her understanding.

  Tommy then looked to Harley and Cody. “Come on back. We’ve got them wired for sound, so we’ll know what they’re doing. Come on back, but keep that van parked somewhere fairly convenient in case we need it.”

  The first officer nodded and the holographic feed winked out.

  He cast his gaze back to his computer expert. “Keep an ear out for them. If they move, I want to know about it.”

  “Oui,” she replied.

  Chapter 7

  Sitting around the safe house was starting to grate on Atticus. He was used to it, since that was simply how the job worked, but he hated it. He was a man of action, not someone who actually enjoyed sitting.