by Dan Moren
“Mr. Danzig is quite busy and I don’t think he’d appreciate being disturbed!” the man protested, hands raised as if trying to shore up a collapsing wall. Kovalic pushed through him and slammed open the door.
The blond man surveyed his surroundings in surprise, as though not really sure how he’d ended up in the office, then squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. “Uh, Mr. Danzig? Mr. Fielding to see you.”
Danzig had just been squaring away the last of his papers; pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he waved his free hand. “Thank you, Lawson. I’ll take it from here. And please, close the door on your way out.”
The assistant scurried out, carefully and quietly closing the door behind him. Without a word, Danzig opened his top drawer and pulled out the small black ovoid in it, then placed the object on his desk. At the touch of its single button a light hidden below the surface began to pulse red.
Kovalic raised an eyebrow as he seated himself across from Danzig. “That’s CID’s top of the line baffle,” he said, jutting his chin at the device. “You’ve upgraded since our last meeting.”
“Nothing but the best for you, Mr. Fielding,” Danzig replied, his voice bone dry. “I don’t have to tell you its active anti-eavesdropping is virtually unbeatable.”
Kovalic’s lips shaped the word “virtually.” In his experience dealing with engineers, that just meant nobody had cracked it yet. “It’ll have to do.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Straight to the point, Walter. I appreciate that. I’d like to see your ledger, please.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your ledger.” Kovalic nodded at the cabinet that contained Danzig’s secure safe. “The one where you record your meetings, comings and goings, other sensitive information.”
The laugh that slipped out of Danzig was of the polite variety: a short, disbelieving chuckle. “I’m afraid that’s quite out of the question. That ledger contains a wealth of sensitive material.”
Kovalic smiled in apology. “Oh, sorry. I can see where you might be confused—poor choice of words.” He leaned forward in the chair, letting the good-natured look slip off his face. “Give me the ledger, Walter.”
The key to threats was always in the imagination of the person being threatened. Honestly, there was nothing Kovalic could invent that would be as terrifying as what the other person thought he might do.
But he had to admit that Danzig held up better than he’d predicted. The older man swallowed hard but didn’t collapse into a mewling puddle. Somewhere in the man was a core of steel, even if it was surrounded by layers of bureaucratic bullshit.
Smiling tightly, the man came to his decision. “All right.”
Internally, Kovalic heaved a sigh of relief. It wasn’t as if he wanted to do anything to Danzig. The man had a ten-foot pole up his ass, but ultimately he was doing his job. Kovalic respected that.
Standing, Danzig walked over to the cabinet and opened the wooden doors, then scanned his retina and punched in his code on the keypad. With a heavy clank, the safe opened and he pulled out the familiar slim, leather-bound volume. He carried it back to the desk, clasped firmly to his chest like a protective mother.
“May I ask what you’re looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.” Kovalic reached out with an open palm, beckoning.
Teeth tightly clenched, Danzig put the ledger down and reluctantly slid it across the desk.
Kovalic flipped it open, thumbing through the pages. “Organized by date, I presume?”
Danzig gave a curt nod. “Most recent entries at the back.”
“Are the entries encoded?”
“Of course,” said Danzig stiffly. “I’ll thank you not to question my competence.”
Kovalic grinned and went back to flipping through the book. “Never, Walter.”
Encoding the notebook was standard procedure—and for good reason. For one thing, it was easy to do. For another, it made it practically unbreakable. An entry that read “Delivered flowers to grocer” might mean that an assignment had been passed to a specific operative, but there was no way of knowing unless the person in possession of the book had another data point to correlate with: surveillance of the ledger’s author, for example.
Unsurprisingly, Danzig had taken the time to put his records in a well-constructed code. There were repeated entries that might have signified regular assignments, contacts, or drops, but as far as Kovalic could tell they could just as easily have been records of Danzig’s dry-cleaning. Even the dates had apparently been shifted by an arbitrary amount, giving the impression that Danzig was planning ahead for appointments he’d be having in the months to come.
After a minute of paging through the incomprehensible records, Kovalic sighed and tossed the book down on the table. “All right, Walter. I don’t really have the time to deal with this shit. Let’s say you and I work together on this one.”
Danzig, who had remained calmly in his chair, hands folded, while Kovalic had perused the notes, now leaned back in his chair and eyed him with an appraising glance. “We might be able to come to some sort of arrangement—provided, of course, that I get something out of it.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with politicians. What do you want?”
“Besides you never having darkened my door?” Danzig sighed. “Whatever operation you’re on here, I want a share of the credit.” Kovalic opened his mouth to say something but Danzig plowed on through. “And I want a formal apology from your commanding officer for the mess on Haran—on the record.”
Kovalic waited, but the desk officer had run out of steam. “That all?”
“That would suffice.”
“Done.”
“Just like that?”
“You want to argue about it? I haven’t got all day.”
“What kind of guarantee do I have?”
“You have my word.”
“Oh.” Danzig cleared his throat awkwardly. “Very well, then.”
“Now, if you don’t mind, could we get on with the matter at hand?”
“Yes, yes. Give me that.” He snatched the ledger from Kovalic’s side of the desk, a child retrieving a favored toy. “What dates concern you?”
Kovalic rubbed his chin. “Bracket the dates that Andrews was active as an operative. I’m looking for regular diplomatic courier deliveries that you would have sent to a warehouse in Leith.”
Licking a finger, Danzig paged gingerly through the ledger, tracing down the columns in the page, his lips moving silently as he translated his own code. “I sign off on a lot of diplomatic shipments,” he said off-handedly as he scanned the entries. “Hold on.” He paused, finger holding a place, then waved at Kovalic. “There’s a Raleigh City map over there, on the end table. I encoded the shipping destinations by their map-grid coordinates.”
Kovalic retrieved it and folded it open on his lap. It was an older map, made out of waterproof plastic sheets, with the city divided onto several different pages. “Try page 31,” said Danzig. “Grid reference A4.”
Turning to the appropriate page, Kovalic lined up A4. His finger ended up in an outlying area of Raleigh City, about as far from Leith as you could get. “Nope. Try again.”
Danzig hmmed to himself, leafing forward a few more pages. “Page 17, reference F8.”
That one was closer, yielding a side street off West Highland Avenue, but still a mile or so away from Leith. Kovalic shook his head.
“There’s one more recurring set during that time period,” said Danzig. “Several shipments via diplomatic courier to page 23, K12.”
Kovalic turned to the appropriate page, his finger tracing down from the K column to the twelfth row, all the way down in the far corner of the page. That was more like it. He tapped at the page, then looked up at Danzig.
“Can you pull up a map on the terminal?”
“I think I can handle that.”
Kovalic slapped the map on the table and
turned it to face the other man, his finger pointing out the buildings in question. “I need the listings for these two structures.”
Danzig keyed something in on his desk and a holographic screen appeared, facing them both. It zoomed in on the grid in question, overlaying street information on the satellite imagery. Reaching out, Kovalic tapped a finger on the first building and another overlay appeared, displaying the building’s directory information. “Donan Import/Export,” he said, shooting a questioning glance at Danzig.
“I believe that we’ve used that to stockpile certain humanitarian supplies. Medicine, food, and so on. We try to provide aid to a number of non-profit agencies operating on-world.”
Kovalic raised his eyebrows, then touched the second building, highlighting it in yellow. The overlay read “MacDougal Shipping Incorporated.”
“Son of a bitch.” Kovalic exhaled, leaning back. “Good on you, Brody.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He eyed Danzig. “Now you’re going to tell me exactly what’s in those shipments.”
Danzig shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“Oh, come now, Walter. I thought we were past this.”
“They were sealed!” he protested. “I had my orders, and they did not include prying into the contents—just shipping them on to their final destination.”
“Which, it might interest you to know, is a front for the Black Watch.”
“The Black Watch?” Danzig echoed. The color had started seeping out of his face.
Kovalic smiled, leaning forward. “Yes, that Black Watch. The group the Illyricans consider terrorists, and would be very displeased to find out we’d been supplying with, well, pretty much anything.”
Danzing shook his head. “I knew nothing about this! If that was part of Andrews’s operation, I wasn’t briefed on it.”
“Goddamn it, Walter.” Kovalic rubbed his forehead. “You’re an intelligence officer. Would it kill you to show some fucking curiosity once in a while?”
Danzig shot him a sour look in return. “This is protocol, Mr. Fielding. And while you and your cavalier band of cloak-and-dagger … cowboys may have no respect for it, I assure you that CID takes it very seriously.”
Kovalic raised his eyebrows, slowly mouthing “cloak-and-dagger cowboys” to himself, then shook his head. “Walter, we’re on the same side here.”
“If we’re on the same side, why does your boss feel the need to dispatch one of his bloody black-baggers to interrogate me?”
Pressing a finger to his temple, Kovalic sighed. “Look, I know we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but trust me on this. Something’s rotten in the state of Caledonia, and I’m pretty sure it’s as much in your interest as mine to clear the air. I’m not here to give you orders or boss you around.” He took a deep breath and tried a different tack. “I’m here because I need your help. And I think you could use mine.”
Danzig took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “Very well.”
“Okay. Good. First things first: I need more information about this Black Watch. Members, organization, known areas of operation. I take it we don’t exactly have a full dossier on them?”
“No.” Danzig grimaced. “We’ve remained uninvolved with them—well, up to now I suppose. Our intelligence isn’t very developed.”
“Great, just great.” Of course Danzig wouldn’t have gone an iota beyond his brief. Fine. The station head either hadn’t had the resources or the interest to surveil the Black Watch.
But, as Shankar had mentioned, there was someone else who did.
“I don’t suppose you know anyone at the Caledonian Security Agency?”
“Well,” said Danzig, removing his glasses and buffing the lenses, “as it happens, I have a very good working relationship with CalSec’s Deputy Commissioner.”
“Why, Walter, I didn’t realize you were part schmoozer.”
Danzig flushed. “As far as I can tell, CalSec’s always looking to cultivate new friendships. They’re kind of the unfortunate stepchild here: the Illyricans left CalSec jurisdiction over planetwide law enforcement, but they barely trust the agency to run its own affairs—and despite the fact that they only employ native-born Caledonians, most people consider them little more than Imperial stooges.”
“Stuck between a rock and an angry populace.”
“Quite. That’s made them eager to work with any third parties.”
“All right then, reach out to your contact and get us everything they’re willing to give—and I do mean everything.” It was casting a wide net, to be sure, but right now they had little better than nothing.
Danzig tapped some notes into his tablet. “All right. Anything else?”
“I’ll need a copy of the list of diplomatic shipments to that warehouse.”
“Certainly. I can ask CID for a full list of shipments.”
Kovalic shook his head sharply. “No.”
“No?” Danzig peered over his glasses at Kovalic.
“You can’t go to CID about this operation.”
“Protocol strictly dicta—”
“Fuck protocol on this one, Walter.” He sighed. “I realize I haven’t exactly given you a good reason to trust me, but come on, you must be able to tell this whole thing smells.” His eyes crinkled slightly, searching for something in the other man’s expression. “Somewhere in there,” he said, pointing at Danzig’s chest, “is the Walter Danzig who signed on to be an intelligence officer—listen to him.”
Danzig had straightened up, steeling for a rejoinder, and for a moment the entire room balanced on a knife’s edge. But after a moment the bureaucrat’s shoulders slumped and a long sigh escaped his lips. “We’ll do this your way … for now. I’ll have Lawson put the shipment info on a data card for you.” He pressed a button on his desk, and then fixed a sharp glare back on Kovalic. “But if you don’t get a handle on this situation in the next twelve hours—or if this gets any worse—then we’re going to need to revisit this conversation.”
Kovalic inclined his head. “That seems fair.” He rose and touched two fingers to his brow, an informal salute. “You’re a reasonable man, Walter—don’t let anybody tell you different. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a warehouse to check out.”
And with that, he strode out of the room, leaving Danzig alone with his thoughts.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was hard to look casual while casing a place, a problem faced by generations of criminals and undercover operatives alike. It was doubly hard when the place you were staking out gave very little in the way of excuses for idly hanging around. And though gentrification may have reached some of Raleigh City’s rougher neighborhoods, there were no shops or cute little restaurants in the warehouse district among which to hide.
Kovalic drew deep on a cigarette and stifled the need to cough. It had been years since his last one; he’d never caught the habit, for which he was profoundly grateful. Nowadays most aficionados had moved on to stronger stuff—many considered cigarettes little more than an affectation, like wearing glasses instead of simply getting corrective surgery.
Still, it provided a useful excuse for loitering just about anywhere, which is exactly what Kovalic was doing now. He’d set up across the street from MacDougal Shipping Incorporated, which was about as nondescript as they came: a two-story concrete block lacking in windows, doors, and any and all personality. It was conveniently located near the waterfront, though fewer and fewer goods were traveling by sea these days. In Caledonia’s nascent days, Raleigh City had relied heavily upon the sea trade to ship supplies to—and resources from—settlements on other continents, but as the colony’s infrastructure had been built up, the spaceports and airports had started taking over the bulk of the traffic.
“Place looks clear,” Tapper’s voice said in his ear. The sergeant had volunteered for the slightly riskier job of checking the warehouse’s perimeter. There was even less of an excuse for that undertaking, so if he got caught it was down to Ta
pper to do some fast-talking—not his strong suit, unless it was the kind of talking that involved punching.
“Got a door?” Kovalic took another drag.
“Yep. Checking for countermeasures now.” Even if this hadn’t been the storehouse of an illegal terrorist organization, there would still be security on the doors: businesspeople protected their interests. With an underground organization like the Black Watch, however, the likelihood of that security being disproportionately retributive was, as Page would say, of a higher order of magnitude.
“Ooh,” said Tapper, his voice appreciative, “a contact spiker. Haven’t seen one of these since my days in the Belt. Pirates used to put them on their weapon lockers—helped keep the crew in line. Enter the wrong code and zap. Crispy pirate.”
Kovalic rolled his eyes and exhaled a cloud of smoke. He’d never found smoking that pleasurable or that calming, despite what its practitioners avowed. Most of all, he had a hard time understanding the appeal of inhaling hot smoke on a planet that routinely reached scorchingly oppressive temperatures during the day.
“Oi.” It wasn’t Tapper’s voice, and that was enough to make Kovalic straighten up. A big fellow, about as broad across as one of the downtown transpo buses, was bearing down on him, with an expression that suggested he wasn’t about to invite him to the neighborhood cookout.
“Uh oh,” muttered Kovalic. “I’ve got company.”
“You need backup?”
“Not yet, but you know the signa …” he trailed off as the man strode up to him. His stomach sank further as he recognized the guy: he’d been one of the two thugs that had been posted outside the Pig and Thistle last night. Assuming a surly expression, Kovalic hoped that this particular brute didn’t happen to have a college degree to go with his impressive brawn.
“Whadya doin’ here?” His voice was thick with what Kovalic had come to recognize as an Upham accent.
Kovalic arched an eyebrow, then mutely raised his right hand, cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, as if that were all the explanation he needed.
