by Dan Moren
“Tap, getting one person in is going to be exponentially easier than three.”
“If you get into trouble, we won’t be able to help you.” Tapper made no attempt to conceal the exasperation in his voice. “I like a good game of unstoppable-force-versus-immovable-object as much as the next guy, but getting in between the two of them seems like a good way to get crushed.”
Kovalic smiled to himself as he eyed his subordinates. Not for the first time, he found himself struck by the stark contrasts between the two men. In the twenty years that Kovalic had known him, Tapper had never been one to hide his emotions—and right now he was annoyed, more than a little bit angry, and most of all worried. Page, on the other hand, was consistently composed, perpetual blackout curtains drawn across his soul. Every once in a while a hint of emotion would peek through a crack, but even then it didn’t stick around.
“You know the deal. This is what we have to work with, so we roll with it.” He crossed his arms and locked his gaze on Tapper. “I expect your cooperation, sergeant.”
The sergeant bit his lip, but training won out over consternation. “Yes, sir.” Above all else, Tapper was a soldier. There’d been a time when he’d been the one giving orders to a young, freshly enlisted private, but he’d taught that smooth-faced kid a thing or two about following—and giving—orders.
“Good. Let’s get this done.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Given that it was about a thirty-minute trip from the embassy to the café he’d picked, Kovalic had been prepared to wait until about quarter after seven, so he was a little surprised when at five past a young black woman entered and calmly sat down across from him, as though she’d been explicitly invited to do so.
He chastised himself for not paying better attention, but his eyes had been on a wall-mounted vid-screen displaying one of the planetary news feeds. The top story this morning had been an early-hours fire at an awfully familiar warehouse in Leith; the video showed it burning merrily away in the darkness, another loose end tied up by the Black Watch. He tried not to think about Wallace and the two men that they’d left there. “Collateral damage,” some would argue; not an ideal to aspire to in Kovalic’s opinion. The fire would hardly ruin the Emperor’s Birthday festivities, but it didn’t exactly do much for his appetite. On the upside, concealing the Commonwealth’s involvement in the Black Watch’s plot had hopefully just gotten a lot easier.
Kovalic took a sip of the tea he’d ordered—coffee hadn’t been agreeing with his stomach this morning—and inclined his head to the woman who’d taken the seat opposite him. “Hello.”
“Hello,” she said, returning the nod.
He took her in at a glance: dark skin, sharp features, carefully coiffed hair, and an air of unquestionable confidence.
“I got your message,” she said. “Thought I’d bring the package to you.”
“Thanks. How’s Walter?”
“He’s good. Told me to tell you he’s still not happy about Haran.”
Kovalic relaxed slightly. That sounded like Danzig. Then again, he was never happy about anything, was he? “And you are?”
“My name’s Sarah. I work for Walter.”
Station number two, likely. She’d have a certain level of clearance, then, even if it wasn’t as high as Danzig’s. “Nice to meet you, Sarah. You can call me Fiel—”
“Mr. Fielding, I know. Pleasure to meet you. I’d like to say I’ve heard a lot about you but, well, I don’t have a high enough security clearance to even lie about that.”
Kovalic grinned. “Fair enough. I presume you weren’t followed.”
“You can check behind my ears if you want.”
“What?”
“They’re dry, I meant. I know how to ditch a tail, Mr. Fielding. You might want to tell your backup to take a refresher though.”
Kovalic raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Either you didn’t ditch your tail, or your backup is over by that lamppost doing a rubbish job of reading that billboard.”
“What makes you think he’s mine?”
“Well, it takes most people about five seconds to read a billboard, but he’s been standing there since I came in. Also, he keeps looking at me.”
“You’re an attractive woman; I’m sure lots of men look at you.”
She gave him a skeptical look; she’d caught his deflection but didn’t abandon course. “Please. I’ve been doing this job long enough to know the difference between someone checking me out and someone, well, checking me out, if you know what I mean.”
He raised his hands. “All right, all right. Yes, that’s my backup. He’s a little—” he glanced over at Tapper, who was indeed standing outside, staring at an advertisement for some fizzy non-alcoholic beverage as though the secrets of the universe were contained therein, “—rusty.”
“Uh huh.”
“Now that we’ve made our small talk: You said you have my package?”
“Indeed,” she said, removing a small yellow envelope from her jacket. “We weren’t sure which side you were looking for, so I brought one of each. I can take back the other one if you’d like.” She slid the envelope across the table.
Taking it, Kovalic cracked the seal and looked inside: two ID cards—one Commonwealth, one Illyrican. Staring back at him from both was the same picture that he’d used for his ID to get on planet. Danzig must have hacked into Illyrican Customs to snag it; then again, where else would he get a picture? The chance of even a station chief having access to Kovalic’s personnel jacket was slimmer than the Illyricans waking up tomorrow and deciding to abandon Earth.
The Commonwealth card was, unsurprisingly, letter-perfect; the Illyrican was as close as it could reasonably be in such a short period of time. It might not stand up to an exhaustive investigation, but it didn’t have to—in fact, he was kind of counting on it. His eyes drifted down to the names on the cards: the Illyrican one read “John Rousseau” and the Commonwealth’s said “Michael Montaigne.” His lip quirked.
“Why Walter,” he muttered. “You do have a sense of humor—who knew?”
Sarah gave him a curious look, so Kovalic shook his head. “Nothing. Tell Walter thanks for these.” He waved the papers. “And let him know I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“He’ll know.”
Kovalic drained the rest of his tea and stood, extending his hand. “I’m sorry to rush, but I really must be going. Nice meeting you, Sarah. I look forward to working with you again sometime.”
She shook his hand, but her expression was dubious. “Whatever you’ve got planned, I sure hope for your sake that there is a next time.”
Tapper joined him a block or two away from the café. “How’d I do?”
“You could teach a master class on sticking out like a football hooligan at a nun’s funeral.”
“So, according to plan, then?”
More than anything, covert work was all about misdirection. Even the best operatives got seen sometimes, so the trick was to give the other side something to see. If your backup was just obvious enough, then people patted themselves on the back for having spotted it—and, more importantly, they stopped looking.
“Far as I can tell. She didn’t seem to make Three.”
“Hell, I knew where he was supposed to be and even I didn’t see him. Where’d you find that kid again? Raised by ninjas in some remote mountain fortress?”
“Genos Province, Terra Nova, actually,” said a voice from behind them, so close that Tapper had already gone into a defensive posture and even Kovalic’s heart rate did an evasive somersault.
It was impossible to tell exactly when Page had caught up with them, but Kovalic guessed he’d been waiting in the shadows for them to pass by, then calmly melted out and followed along, just as casually as if he’d happened to be a complete stranger heading in the same direction.
“Christ,” said Tapper. “We’re going to have to put a bell on you.”
Kovali
c ignored him. “Any unwanted company?”
Page shook his head. “She looked clean. I presume she checked out.”
Kovalic raised the yellow envelope she’d given him. “Walter was uncommonly accommodating.” He pulled the ID cards out and handed them to Page. “You know what to do.”
About to fold up the envelope, he noticed something else at the bottom. Tipping the envelope over, a data chip slid into his hand. Another present from Walter? Frowning, he popped it into his comm and turned his attention to Tapper.
“You take care of our travel arrangements?”
“Course. Give me a little credit, boss. Not like you asked me to pilfer a luxury groundcar or anything actually difficult.”
“Next time, maybe.” He glanced back down at the reader again, flipping back through the information, which bore a header reading “Top Secret. Caledonian Security Agency.” Right; he’d asked Walter for all of CalSec’s information on the Black Watch. Well, better late than never.
A name in bolded type caught his eye as he scrolled past it, and he froze and paged back up to it: De Valera. The head of the Black Watch.
He sucked a breath in through his teeth; Tapper was the first to notice it, a frown creasing his already weathered face.
“What’s wrong, boss?”
Kovalic shook his head as he reread the sentence again. “We’ve got another complication: It looks like Eli Brody is in way over his head.”
Eli felt his stomach begin to turn well before they reached Westenfeldt Base. As much as he would have liked to blame it on the bumpy Caledonian roads, the transpo bus ride was surprisingly smooth. They skimmed through the barren scrublands, a virtual reverse of his trip from the spaceport just two days earlier. Jesus, I can’t believe that was just two days ago.
After five years of keeping his boots on the ground, the past week had already seen him survive an interstellar trip involving multiple wormhole jumps. Still, he really didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for leaving solid earth again quite this soon. Not that he wanted to stay on this damn planet, either; after everything he’d been through with Fielding and Eamon, two days here had been just enough time for him to get, well, whatever the opposite of homesick was.
Eli had tried to strike up a conversation with Gwen a few times, but the redhead had kept to herself during the trip, staring out the window or nervously flipping her comm open and closed. He was a little worried that asking too many probing questions would make her suspicious or, more likely, irritated. Asking Eamon wasn’t any better: he was sitting next to Kelly up front, and somehow Eli didn’t think any questions raised in the scarred man’s presence would be terribly productive.
So he’d had little more to do than think. Thinking had turned into dwelling, and dwelling had done nothing to help the condition of his stomach. It had started to feel a bit like he was treading ice-cold ocean water, but rapidly running out of the energy to do so. And there were sharks circling him. Hungry sharks.
What was worse was that the entire experience was overlaid with feelings from the last time he’d made this trip. It had been nine years, but retracing the same ground was like running a finger over an old scar. He remembered his parents and Meghann seeing him off at the transpo station as he’d boarded a bus not unlike this one, filled to the brim with other nervous, excited kids. And kids they had all been—eager to leave the old dirtball and change their lives forever. He wondered how many of them had died at Sabaea or in some other battle; hell, even training had taken its toll. How many were still alive? How many posted to some godforsaken outpost at the far edges of the Imperium?
Those that had graduated the academy with him would be just about at the end of their five-year tours by now. Some would stay on; others would leave active service with all the benefits offered to Illyrican veterans: moving on to new lives, new careers. Did any of them ever think about Elijah Brody and what had happened to him? Or did they all just assume he was dead, like everybody else involved in the Sabaean invasion?
And what about those that had survived? His breath caught; he hadn’t thought about that. There had been others who had lived to tell the tale of the battle of Sabaea, though not many. Most of them wouldn’t know Elijah Brody from a hole in the ground, but a few just might. Those were people he’d served with. Frankly, he’d rather they thought him dead than having betrayed them all.
Because that was exactly what he’d done.
The familiar sheen of cold sweat was filming over his brow as they drew closer to the Westenfeldt perimeter. He rubbed his palms against the rough fabric of the navy blue jumpsuit and wished that Eamon had given them something to wear that was even slightly more comfortable. He looked over at Gwen again; her mouth was set in a firm, thin line. She had to know what exactly they were doing, but he couldn’t think of a way to ask her.
What would Fielding do?
The thought was just there; he didn’t even remember thinking it. But once it stuck in a crevice of his mind, he found it a particularly difficult idea to excise. The man seemed to remain calm in any situation no matter how much the odds seemed to be stacked against him. Eli didn’t know if it was luck or skill or divine fortune, but whatever it was he could use a little bit of it right now.
He leaned sideways as the transpo bus banked into a turn that would lead it up toward the military base’s entrance. The bus slowed as it approached the perimeter guardhouse and Eli peered out the window, but there wasn’t much to be seen from this angle.
“I love what they’ve done with the place,” he said to Gwen. “Military-industrial chic is a bold choice.”
Her sideways look was sour, but he thought he detected a touch of amusement. If I do say so myself.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you find that making jokes actually makes you less nervous?”
“Let me think about that—nope, still pretty goddamn nervous.”
Her head cocked to one side. “This doesn’t really seem like your scene.”
“Yours either. Unless there’s a call for slapping people around.”
“You’re never going to let that one go, are you?”
“Not bloody likely.”
She sighed. “Look, I just want the Illyricans out of Caledonia, okay?” But there was something unconvincing about her tone—there was more to it than that.
“Who doesn’t? Heck, I’d like to see them off with a wave and a smile, but you don’t see me joining up with—well, okay, I guess you do see me joining up.” He trailed off, frowning blankly at the seat back in front of him. He’d agreed to help Eamon, but if he was going to be fair to himself he’d done so in a moment of weakness and without really asking what was involved. Then again, ignorance was no excuse, as his father had been so fond of saying. Usually at great volume.
“Yes, well, I’ll get right on to standing for the Caledonian Parliament,” said Gwen. “Then I can sit back and let the paychecks roll in while I do absolutely nothing.”
“It’s a sweet gig.” That was pretty much all the Caledonian Parliament was good for: a punchline. The Illyricans allowed the body to continue operating to maintain the illusion of autonomy, and while it kept the trains running and the water flowing it had no real political power. That all belonged to the governor-general, who was appointed directly by the emperor. And though there may not have been a formal placard on the door, it was hard to miss the implicit sign that read “Caledonians need not apply.”
“So, here I am,” said Gwen, raising her hands.
“On an Illyrican military base,” Eli said as the bus started up again; apparently they’d all passed muster, which did little to assuage his concern about what they were up to. If nothing else, it abolished any lingering, foolish hope that maybe Eamon had gotten a reputable job doing some sort of extraplanetary maintenance. He felt ridiculous even thinking that; it was like suggesting that a regiment of Illyrican shock troopers had been deployed to rescue a kitten from a tree.
Small huts and low dwellings skimmed past their window,
along with a number of people dressed in red uniforms going about their daily business. It made Eli’s pulse do the fandango. He’d seen other soldiers since he’d been back; they’d been patrolling the spaceport as well as sprinkled throughout the streets of Raleigh City, but the concentration here was overwhelming. Surely, they’d know him for what he was just by looking at him: a traitor and deserter. Someone who’d taken the same oath they had and then done everything short of spit on it.
A light touch descended on his arm. “You okay?”
He glanced at Gwen and half-smiled. “I’ve been better, I’m not going to lie.” He patted her hand. “You’re too nice for this line of work; you should get out while you still can.”
Her face fell and she withdrew her hand. “It’s too late for that. Alea iacta est, as they say.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“‘The die is cast.’”
Eli’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t say anything. His gaze drifted toward the front of the bus where he could only see the red top of Eamon’s head. Where’d you find this one, Eamon? Or was it the other way around?
His attention wavered as they stopped in front of a low-slung gray concrete building; the rest of the bus’s inhabitants had risen from their seats and were filing toward the front. There was little for Eli to do but follow along and try to blend in.
It was early enough that the weather was still cool, but the heat was coming—Eli could smell it in the air. The second he stepped out of the bus, his hearing was assailed by a loud rumbling blast that made him wince and cover his ears. He looked up in time to see a transport climbing rapidly skyward, a shimmering eddy of heat and exhaust trailing in its wake. Bile rose in his mouth, but he forced it back down.
The work crew filtered into the building where they were greeted by an Illyrican security checkpoint. The urge to run was filling Eli’s chest, but he ignored the blood pounding in his ears and stepped forward when the officer in crimson gestured to him.
Eli was ushered into a small booth with glass doors on the front and back that slid closed when he stepped in. A current of warm, dry air blew down on him, matting his hair to his scalp, and red lights skimmed over his face and body, even as the booth started to whir like a microwave oven.
