by Mike Brooks
Drift looked down at his hands, trying to fight down an unexpected memory of them covered in blood: a doomed attempt to staunch the flow from a stab wound, without adequate medical supplies available.
“She died.”
“Ah, shit, bro,” Apirana said sorrowfully. “I shouldn’t have asked. Your business, I din’t mean to bring up—”
The changing room door opened without warning, and Serenity Chen walked in. The events manager nodded briefly at Apirana as ze walked past him, then came to a halt in front of Drift. “Mr. Pérez.”
Drift got to his feet, pushing the past to the back of his mind as he did so. Rodrigo Pérez was unlikely to be feeling much different to Drift himself right now—on edge, frustrated, and rather apprehensive—so he didn’t feel the need to put too much effort into the persona.
“Mer Chen,” he acknowledged neutrally, glancing past the other person towards the door, which had swung shut again. “Any final instructions?”
“The bookies and the punters were impressed with Mr. Wahawaha’s performance against Kuang Daniu,” Chen said, looking between the two of them before zir gaze settled on Apirana. “Lukas Ivanovic will be beating you in the first round, by submission.” Ze paused for a moment, zir jaw working. “Don’t fuck this up.”
Apirana just nodded, his face a blank mask. “You got it.”
“Provided we get paid now,” Drift added. Chen looked back to him, zir eyes narrowing.
“Out of the question. You’ll get paid after the show, like everyone else.”
“We still didn’t get paid for the last show, or did you forget?” Drift demanded. “C’mon, we’re here; we’ve showed up. You think we’re going to turn around and walk away now? We’ll go out there, Apirana will do what he needs to, and then we’ll be on our way. But we want our damn money now.”
“An’ if that don’t happen,” Apirana put in mildly, “maybe I’ll do my best to punch Mr. Ivanovic’s teeth right down his throat.”
“That would be a very unwise move,” Chen bit out.
“Sure.” Apirana shrugged. “But when they interview the winner afterwards an’ I start talking about how I was told to throw the fight, what do you think’ll happen then? Bad news for both of us, I’m guessing. So I’ll play your game an’ keep your racket sweet, but you pony up first, got it?”
Chen glared at him, then exhaled in frustration, zir nostrils flaring. “Very well. You have an account here?”
“No,” Drift replied with a shake of his head, “but he’ll take plastic.” A universal credit chip would be perfect: Given that Apirana’s fight fees were a legitimate expense, there was no risk to either party from a data trail, and the bank coding would mean Chen couldn’t take it back off them like ze could have theoretically done with cash.
Chen nodded curtly. “Fine. Accounts will have it ready in the next fifteen minutes.” Ze turned for the door, then paused to look back over their shoulder. “You do understand that if you cross me on this, you are unlikely to survive the night?”
“We’re not looking for trouble,” Drift said wearily. “We just want to get paid.”
“So long as we understand each other,” Chen snapped, and exited into the corridor outside. The door banged shut behind zir.
“We’ll only be getting fifteen grand for both, won’t we?” Apirana grunted into the momentary silence that followed. “Seems to me like if I’m gonna throw a fight, I should get more.”
“Don’t even start,” Drift told him. He had an urge to berate the Māori for playing hardball too soon with Chen, but he supposed it had worked out. Besides, they’d be getting off this planet as soon after the event as they could manage, so Chen was welcome to come looking for them later if it gave the events manager any pleasure. “And . . . don’t go public about the fight-fixing, will you?”
“Bro, gimme some credit,” Apirana told him, looking hurt. “I ain’t stupid. You know I don’t want no complications here.”
“Good.” Drift took a deep breath and let it out again. Everything would be fine. They’d get the payment from Chen and go out into the arena, Apirana would commit a short piece of what would hopefully be fairly painless sports fraud, and they’d disappear into the night. No reason for anything to go wrong.
Just so long as everything else went to plan, of course.
A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE
“Good,” Tamara Rourke said, looking over the four bodyguards surrounding Roman, who was playing the part of Sergei Orlov for this exercise. “You’ve got the spacing about right, I think. Close enough to protect, not close enough to crowd him or limit his mobility.” She stepped up to one, a man called Grigori. “If you just—”
Her hand whipped towards his armpit holster midsentence, but he snatched her wrist with his right hand and drew his left back for a punch. They both froze for a second, then Rourke gave a satisfied nod and stepped back. “Very good.”
She’d realised over the last two weeks that several of Orlov’s security team had a habit of becoming complacent, of only being ready to react when they thought they needed to be. That was, of course, not the point of being a bodyguard: You had to be ready at all times, at least while you were on duty. So far as Rourke was concerned, while she was training them, they were on duty, and if they could learn to jump out of the mind-set of an attentive trainee and into that of a vigilant protector in a split second, then they would be as ready as she could make them for the real world.
“They’re getting good,” Larysa commented, stepping up beside her.
“They’re not bad,” Rourke agreed. She’d never felt that training was her forte, but trying to avoid being killed by a mob boss was a powerful motivator. “How long has Leon been in the car?”
“Seventeen minutes,” Larysa replied with a glance at her chrono. “Time for a drive failure?”
“I think so,” Rourke said, nodding. The other woman tapped a button on her pad, and an alarm went off on the other side of the gymnasium hall that Rourke had commandeered for their training sessions. A genuine limo aircar sat on the floor there, albeit with some modifications. One of them was an alarm system that could be remotely triggered, indicating to the person inside that the antigrav drive had failed. Since it was easy to react to something if you were ready for it, now they’d gone through the initial drill, the bodyguards would sit inside for randomly determined lengths of time before they were required to act. Occasionally, it wouldn’t go off at all, just to mess with them.
One of the doors flew open, and Leon leapt out, dragging a weighted dummy with him. He smacked a red button on the dummy’s chest and then a corresponding one on his own, simulating the release of a parachute and stopping the clock.
“2.34 seconds between drive failure and parachute activation,” Larysa said, her eyebrows raising as she looked at her pad. She raised her voice. “Well done, Leon! The boss is almost certainly still alive! And you probably are too.”
Leon gave them a thumbs-up, although he didn’t quite meet Rourke’s eyes. He and Andrei had suffered from the reflected ignominy of Sacha’s failure, and he was quite clearly uneasy around her. Rourke wasn’t sure if that was due to resentment towards her over Sacha’s fate, embarrassment at the knowledge that she’d played all three of them, or simple fretting over the fact that it could have quite easily been him going face-first into a washbasin. However, she couldn’t fault his application in the training sessions.
The hall door opened, and she looked around to see Orlov walking in, with Andrei and Nicolai at his shoulders. Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to watch the boss, with the exception of Roman. He let out a groan and collapsed: Much to Rourke’s approval, two of his “guards” threw themselves down to cover his body with theirs, while the other two drew their weapons—not loaded, of course—and scanned for theoretical threats. Roman tapped the two on top of him on their shoulders a second or so later, and they helped him back up again.
“What was that?” Orlov asked, crossing the hall to stand
beside her.
“They were reacting to you collapsing as though you had been shot,” Rourke told him. “Roman was being you.”
“But I’m here,” Orlov pointed out, with a slightly puzzled smile.
“In this context, sir, you’re a distraction,” Rourke said briskly. “They need to be ready to protect the person they’re guarding at a moment’s notice, in spite of distractions.”
“Even when I’m somewhere else?” Orlov asked.
“They could be protecting a body double,” Rourke said with a shrug, “so they’d have to look convincing. Getting them focused is the main thing.”
“You seem to have done an admirable job,” Orlov remarked. He looked over at the limo and the weighted dummy, and frowned. “And that?”
“Getting you clear of a midair drive failure,” Rourke explained. “We work on the basis that you may not be able to get out by yourself.”
“Fascinating,” Orlov murmured in Russian, then raised his voice and returned to speaking in English. “When you have finished here, come to my office. There is something I need you to do.”
Rourke nodded. “Yes, sir.” She’d left the Grand House several times now on various errands and trips with Roman, Larysa, and on one occasion Orlov himself. She was still living out of the same hotel room at the moment, but if she ended up working for the gang boss, then she’d have to find her own accommodation. She suspected it would come as something of a shock after living in a luxury hotel for six weeks.
Assuming Ichabod doesn’t come back with the money. Her stomach tightened. There were two weeks left before Orlov’s deadline, and no way of knowing if the rest of her crew would be back in time unless and until they actually turned up. She was working on the basis that they wouldn’t: She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Orlov that she had every faith that Drift would do his best, but wasn’t entirely sure he’d succeed.
Something occurred to her. “You didn’t come here just to ask me to come and see you later, did you, sir? You could have called me for that, or sent a message through someone else.”
“No,” Orlov admitted, and gestured at the room. “I wanted to see what you were doing. If you’re going to such lengths to ensure my safety, I felt I should find out what measures you are employing.”
Rourke looked at the dark eyes studying her and nodded slowly. He still doesn’t completely trust me. Nor would I, in his position, but that doesn’t help me live for longer than another two weeks. “I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve seen, sir.”
“Very much so,” Orlov said with a nod. “But we shall discuss this further later.” He turned and walked away, flanked once more by Andrei and Nicolai.
“Somebody’s in trouble,” Larysa murmured in a singsong voice from beside Rourke. Her spoken English was broken, but the other woman could understand the language well enough.
Rourke shot her a glance, her pulse suddenly jumping. “What?”
Larysa blinked, then laughed. “Oh, calm down. I’m just joking.”
Rourke glared at her. “Yes, well, don’t forget that I’m still living on borrowed time right now. I think I can be forgiven for being a bit jumpy.”
“The day I see you actually jump at something is the day I eat my own foot,” Larysa said with a grin. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the sparring mats. “Come on, you said you’d show me that shoulder lock.”
An hour later, when the training session had ended and Rourke and Larysa had left each other aching and exhausted, Rourke grabbed a shower and then made her way to Orlov’s office. Unlike his penthouse, the casino owner’s office was on the middle floor of the building, albeit in a section only accessible to casino staff. That still covered quite a lot of different people, of course, but Orlov was adamant that he wanted to be able to walk out of his office and access the casino quickly instead of being shut away behind a private elevator. Still, Rourke had convinced him to have two guards on his door at all times.
It was Nicolai and Andrei, at least both of them nodded cautiously to her as she approached. Andrei had tried to exact some not-too-subtle revenge for Sacha in the unarmed combat sessions, and Rourke had needed to choke him unconscious twice before he realised exactly how stupid an idea that was. Since then his attitude to her had been sullen but respectful.
“Gents,” Rourke said to them. “Is Mr. Orlov available?”
“He said for you to go straight in,” Nicolai said, pressing a button on the wall behind him. She noticed that he angled his body as she walked past so she wouldn’t easily be able to reach the gun in his armpit holster. Good: He’d learned his lesson well.
She pushed the door open and entered the office. It wasn’t huge, but was easily spacious enough for one person. “Sir?”
“Ah, Tamara.” Sergei Orlov looked up from his desk and gestured to the seat in front of him. “Please, sit down.”
She sat in the chair and waited while he closed down whatever file he’d been working on at his terminal. He killed the screen with a swipe of his hand and sat back, looking at her over steepled fingers. Rourke had a sudden image of him as some middle manager in a company somewhere, and her as a ground-level employee. She imagined what it was like for a normal person to be called into the office by their boss. Probably nerve-wracking, depending on the boss and the situation. But probably unlikely to be potentially fatal.
“You’ve made several suggestions since you began advising me on security matters,” Orlov began. “I must admit, they have all made sense, and I have decided to enact most of them. Some of them I’ve ignored, because as you once pointed out, I will never be truly safe. And I felt they would overly limit my ability to enjoy my life.”
“That’s your prerogative of course, sir,” Rourke said.
“I’ve noticed a difference in my security staff as well,” Orlov said. “I can see that the training you’ve been delivering has had an effect. I’ve been getting reports of what you’ve been doing with them, of course, but I wanted to drop in today to take a look for myself. It was impressive.”
“I’m glad you think so, sir.”
Orlov studied her for a second. “I’ve noticed that you’ve never asked after the GIA agent we . . . apprehended.”
Rourke kept her face smooth with the ease of long years of practice. “Not my business, sir.”
Orlov sighed, looking down at his desktop. “He was not, sadly, particularly informative. We didn’t even really get anything that my contacts in the politsiya could act on.”
Rourke nodded. With any luck, Wong hadn’t dragged the rest of his team down with him. They didn’t deserve to suffer for his hotheadedness. Or her cold-bloodedness.
“Tell me,” Orlov asked, looking back up at her. “Did he give any indication as to why he chose to approach you? Surely it can’t have been simply because you were a fellow North American?”
Here we go. She’d already decided that telling the truth was the best policy if this situation arose, but couldn’t pretend that she was completely calm about the possible ramifications. She raised her left hand and willed her electat into visibility.
“Because it appears that he studied under me at one point, sir.”
Orlov didn’t react to the sight of her old GIA badge, which told her all she needed to know about his motivation for asking. Wong had let slip about her identity, and this had been a test of her honesty.
“You didn’t mention your previous career with the GIA,” Orlov said mildly, those dark eyes watching her closely.
“I don’t make a habit of it, sir,” Rourke replied quietly, closing her hand again and dropping it to her lap. “I flew with Ichabod for a decade before he found out.”
“And was he angry about you keeping this information from him?”
“He took it surprisingly well, sir.” Mainly because we were all neck-deep in shit at the time, and it gave us a possible way out.
“You must admit,” Orlov said in that same mild tone, “it seems a strange coincidence that an agent train
ed by you would just happen to make contact with you here.”
Rourke tried to keep herself focused, and alert for the slightest noise. She didn’t think that Orlov would be stupid enough to confront her in his office and then try to get Nicolai or Andrei to jump her from behind, but you never knew.
“Not particularly, sir. I trained a lot of people in combat techniques in a fairly short time at the academy, and they were all to be agents working in Red Star space. That’s where I was stationed for most of my active career, and all our training sessions were conducted exclusively in Russian. The students needed to learn to use the correct language even when under physical or mental stress, in order to maintain their cover.”
Orlov raised his eyebrows. “The sort of thorough approach I would expect from you, having seen you at work. So your GIA career in the field consisted mainly of protecting dignitaries and the like?”
“No, sir,” Rourke said, “not really. You might say that I’ve reverse engineered most of this.”
“So you were an assassin?”
“I needed to know how to eliminate hostile elements on occasion,” Rourke said carefully, “but no, sir, I wasn’t a dedicated assassin.” She didn’t mention her time spent destabilising governments, just in case Orlov decided that she must have had a part in the chaos on Uragan.
Orlov nodded slowly, as though considering. “So if I were to tell you that there is an element who is hostile to me that I need eliminating . . . what would your response be?”
Rourke looked at him, her throat suddenly tight. “I’d tell you to hire a hitter.” She pushed down an unpleasant memory. “The Laughing Man, if you can find him. He’s the best at what he does.”
“I thought he’d killed one of your crew a few months ago?” Orlov asked.
“He did,” Rourke said grimly, trying not to think of Micah van Schaken bleeding to death from a pair of throat wounds in Glass City’s street market. “He’s still the best at what he does, my personal opinion of him aside.”
Orlov nodded. “And if I asked you to take care of this element yourself?”
