by Blaze Ward
An agent in the field would have wardrobe and gear delivered by the Research and Development Inspectorate. Miguel had probably had a team of tailors working all evening to get him and Mac prepped, as the mission took shape. Rob was looking forward to the updated briefing pack, plus whatever other surprises Miguel or Dolf had come up with.
A woman rose as he approached the lounge his driver had sent him to. She had been reading something on a tablet. Or at least given that appearance.
She was so fantastically bland that Rob’s perfect memory for faces knew it would have a hard time recalling her in three days, so he understood that she was one of them even before she spoke.
“M sent me,” she said as they shook hands.
If he was in character, Handsome Rob would have been busy trying to figure out how to seduce the woman, even in the ten minutes they might be associated, but he had too many other things on his plate right now.
He could always make it a side mission when he got back from wherever. Hell, he didn’t even know where they were going yet, not that it mattered.
He was just the kinetic part of the solution. Mac would handle the operational aspects.
It had been her case, and she hadn’t screwed anything up, from his read of the file. Miguel was just paranoid enough that he’d managed to rescue her before the trouble erupted and she had to trigger her alarm.
The woman took him through a door that was mostly behind a pillar and a planter. Not invisible, but you had to walk right up to it to know it was there. Rob was certain that people with badges and guns would have been there to have a chat with you if you did.
Now, they were in a different lounge. First class passengers sort of place, but it was empty and sterile, like much of Rob’s life.
She took him through another door, less hidden but not obvious, and down a hallway to another closed door.
“You’re to go through here after I depart,” she said, turning and walking away without another word, or any indication that she wasn’t some bizarre robot from a science fiction vid or something.
Still, he gave her to the end of the hallway before he put his hand on the little security palmprint scanner on the left.
A light came on. Something beeped.
“Segura, R. Two-Five-Three-Seven-One-One,” he said into the microphone.
The door clicked and he pushed it open, emerging into a less luxurious room than before. Miguel was there at a table, as was a woman Rob didn’t know.
And Mac…
She’d gone off and dyed her hair a dark silver with soft zebra-like stripes instead of joining him for dinner. It made her look her age now, especially with the subtle things she’d done to her makeup that added softness and lines where they hadn’t been prominent before.
It also upped her amazing beauty several more notches from what it had been ten hours ago.
Wow.
“I take it you like?” she asked in an offhand, fishing kind of way.
Rob wolf-whistled at her. They were good enough friends that she wouldn’t punch him too hard. Probably.
She nodded and turned back to Miguel. Rob sat down beside her and everyone gathered around a table that wasn’t set for dinner, but could have been.
“Handsome Rob, this is Alicia Sepeda,” Miguel introduced the other woman. “Cryptography. She’ll handle data acquisition and decryption on the flight, as well as anything you come across in the field.”
Rob studied the woman a little closer. Short, dumpy, and out of shape, from the way her breath rasped and wheezed, so she must be really good to miss physical fitness requirements. Black hair in a boyish bowl cut. Sharp black eyes a shade darker than his. Dressed in grays and blacks that masked her silhouette and probably made her vanish into any crowd she entered, but that would be social introversion rather than field agent training like he used.
The eyes didn’t miss anything, and if Mac was happy with her, she was probably smarter than he was. Than both of them.
Current mission didn’t call for a seduction, so just another field agent on Mac’s team.
“Your gear is being loaded, but you’ll be operating without much of a support network when you arrive,” Miguel continued. “Not a lot that we can do about that, except send along another vessel in a few days with whatever updates we have managed to unlock. Expect them a week behind you.”
“Where are we going?” Mac asked.
It was her case. Her operation. Rob was just along to kill things. Or people, but he’d still only ever killed one person, even after today.
You didn’t have to put someone in the morgue to destroy them, after all. Jorge and the rest of the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang had taught him that lesson. Honestly, shooting someone usually indicated a complete failure of creativity.
Or so Jorge believed.
“Shravishtha Prime,” Miguel explained. “It’s nominally a Bergier world in Salonnia, at least the government at the planetary level is controlled by that Syndicate, and we have reason to believe that your target works directly with them.”
“With?” Mac asked. “Not for?”
Miguel nodded to Alicia to speak now. Rob listened to her tones and vocabulary as a way to understand the woman better.
“One of the databases we secured this afternoon suggests that your target is actually from Corynthe originally,” Alicia explained in an accent that suggested some level of schooling in Aquitaine originally. It was over a Ramsey burr, but someone had taken a verbal metal file at some point and rounded her vowels differently enough that she sounded like a toff, though not necessarily in the worst way.
Rob’s lower-middle-class roots still twitched a little.
“We have a codename: Lonelyman, for what it’s worth, which is not much,” Alicia continued. “It does suggest a male, but is not definitive. There is also a record showing an address at a galaxy-class resort on Shravishtha Prime. Whether our target lives there permanently or used that for meetings with Guadarrama and his people we don’t know yet. I’m hoping to find more in flight and be able to assemble a more complete picture for you.”
“As we’re putting this together on the back of a cocktail napkin, so to speak, I do appreciate that things are a bit loose at this stage and you’ll tighten them up in flight,” Miguel took up the thread. “Mac and I spoke earlier and she’ll be playing the rich widow, Rob, while you’ll be the latest boy toy as a cover. Alicia will remain with the ship, a small courier I’m sending you in, more of a yacht than anything. She’ll pretend to be the pilot after you arrive, but that’s just to protect the ship. It’s small and fast, and Rob will handle the flying. It’s in your qualification range, and Nigel Phipps suggested some of the less obvious upgrades.”
Oh ho, they listened to the redneck on this one? Rob liked the ship already. Research and Development had a love/hate relationship with Nigel, not that Rob could disagree. The man had been an honest-to-Vishnu cowboy with Aquitaine’s Fourth Saxon Legion before he retired to Lincolnshire, like so many of them did, and ended up working for Jorge Royo as the man’s personal Research and Development redneck.
Meaner, too. He’d assembled the tactical bags that had kept Rob alive. And the newer one Rob was bringing.
“I assume Mac and Alicia have all the information I’ll need later?” Rob asked, looking at each of the three of them in turn.
All nodded. It probably wasn’t much, and Rob figured they would end up pulling some sort of grifter scam mixed in with a caper by the time it was all done. That was why they had Rob along, instead of just sending Mac by herself as a pot of honey to entice bad men into underestimating the woman.
The Service had used the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang for this sort of thing in the past, but most of them were too famous for certain operations. And too expensive to hire on a mercenary basis all that often.
Miguel still kept them in the rolodex, but Rob had the impression that he was being groomed to replace them in a few years.
Maybe he needed to start appearing i
n some of Jorge’s future movies, just so he could be That Guy with strangers. A face they had seen but couldn’t place.
That way they never realized that he was a killer.
4
Mac felt like she’d almost turned back in Esmeralda this evening.
For most of her life, she’d left her hair long and straight, ever so slowly turning gray in stripes starting when she was about forty-seven. She had still been able to pass for much younger.
Dying her hair strawberry blond had made it so she could pass for twenty-five when she did her makeup right.
But going silver with a few black stripes had been how she had expected Esmeralda to look in another few years. Once it all started to come in that color, instead of just a few places.
But she wasn’t Esmeralda any more. If she was a man, she supposed that it could have been called a mid-life crisis. Miguel had needed someone he trusted to go out into the field to rescue Handsome. She’d just happened to be the one handy.
And competent.
And Rob and Ahmed had turned her into a stranger named Mac. One she rather liked, after decades of earth tones and expensive wines. Brunch with distant relatives or relative strangers.
Entropy, if not ennui.
So she had become a field agent. Kept the payscale of a Director and the Service seniority, but lost the prestige and became another one of Dolf’s Cowboys on Three.
They were in a blank-sided transport truck now, hidden from anyone who might happen to see something that could give the operation away. Alicia was seated on a bankers box of honest-to-goodness paper files, reading. Miguel and Rob were heads down murmuring on something that didn’t look like it impacted on her mission. Mac had herself focused on all the little details that she had spent six months accumulating.
Deep cover penetration of Guadarrama’s gang via his bookkeeper. Stalking that elusive prey and then letting him catch her, thinking all the while that it was his idea.
Most men were that foolish, after all.
The entire case could go down now as a fantastic success. Ramsey police officials might not have been able to ever take the man down, but they didn’t have the resources or the authority of the Service. Nor the willingness to break a few eggs.
Mac always assumed Guadarrama had his own spies inside the police, and those folks had kept him one step ahead of the law. Once she had that chip with all the data, the man was done.
Except that Alicia and her team had found more. And now, instead of a welcome night off-duty, being herself again, she was about to board a fast courier and run like hell for Salonnian space to try and roll up the entire network.
That wasn’t how espionage was done. Or law enforcement.
But then, that was why her old department used to call Dolf’s people cowboys. Worse, she had Rob Segura with her now, so they were verging over into the abject insanities that the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang used to pull when all else had failed.
Had all else failed? She didn’t think so. Miguel had just been handed a golden ticket to utterly disrupt an arms smuggling network, or at least cut off the tentacle reaching into Lincolnshire space.
Simply too good to pass up.
Worse, was Miguel building up a new generation of the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang? She was older than Mrs. Jones, but much newer as an agent. And not a mercenary. At least not yet. Handsome was at least four decades younger than Jorge Royo, so it was an option. And Alicia gave them all manner of options when it came to cryptography, to go with Mac’s deep knowledge of data analysis.
They just needed a medic like Longbow and a redneck engineer like Phipps and they might be there.
The audacity of it took her breath away.
But then, such brazenness had always been Jorge Royo’s signature move.
She looked over at Rob and caught his eye, still deep in conversation with Miguel low enough that they were just tones, not words.
But he nodded, like he could read her mind right now. She wondered if he could. Royo had trained the man over and above the Service teams. And Mrs. Jones had made sure he understood and respected women far better than a man that young ever should.
But he nodded.
Shit. What had she gotten herself into?
5
Rob didn’t like it, but he understood it. Hit them hard and fast before a message could arrive, warning someone to tighten up physical and social security because the cops were about to raid the joint.
He’d done the same thing less than a year ago when his cover got blown by asking the wrong person the wrong question. Jorge and Mrs. Jones had led the assault teams onto that airless moon, shattering the defenses before anybody woke up.
Now he was going to do it again. With a different team.
Audacity. The signature move of the craziest, most dangerous secret agents, because it went against everything you’d been trained about how to operate in the shadows.
Was there a place beyond Assassin? Was he already there? Other men and women just shot hapless targets that needed to be removed from the playing field. Or kidnapped them for trade back after their minds had been broken and poured out on the table.
The truck came to a stop and shut down, after turning and backing. The rear hatch rolled up and he was looking at an entry airlock of some sort. Rob grabbed his bug-out bag and stepped forward to drop it in the airlock before keying the interior hatch and drawing his pistol.
Miguel started to say something and quickly subsided at Rob’s hard glare.
Never, EVER, enter a strange starship trusting. Jorge and Raef had pounded that home time and again. It was why she had never left Valencia del Oro alone for long, even staying aboard when everyone else had luxury suites in town.
Standard design. Airlock to port, debauching into a kitchenette with a small table and entertainment screen on the wall. Rob looked left and noted the hallway didn’t go far. He glanced back as he crossed the room, nodding at Mac as she had come to the door with her own pistol out, holding the other two back and protecting them if a firefight broke out.
He looked in the bathroom and noted the shower stall.
The hatch forward put him on a bridge that spanned the seventeen foot interior width of the ship as it narrowed down to a prow. Two seats, but space for a dozen close friends to stand.
Roomy.
He reversed course and headed aft, sticking his nose into a pantry long enough to assure himself it was full of food and sundries. Past Mac, down the hall, first door let him into a pilot’s bunk. Tiny. Fold-down single bed for someone tall. Built-in closet a few feet wide for clothes. Jumpseat if you wanted to sit someplace else.
He nodded and continued aft. Rob was familiar with the class and the overall design. As Miguel said, he was qualified to fly it. The other room was larger. Sixteen feet lengthwise by about ten wide. Big Murphy bed that could fold down, in case your passenger needed space for a wife or mistress. Bigger closet. Fold out chair. Fold-down desktop. Compact.
Aft again, and he was in the engine room. Two big pushers behind him. Probably an auxiliary power reactor tucked in between, in front of the JumpDrive unit. Nigel had always said this class was underpowered. Machine shop space he stuck his nose in. More storage. That was it.
Rob shook his head ruefully and wondered, but it wasn’t his mission.
He turned and headed forward.
“Clear,” he called as he got back into the hallway.
Mac immediately slid a box into the airlock. Miguel appeared a moment later with one as well. Alicia right after that. Rob holstered his pistol and they emptied the back of the van rapidly.
“And now, children, I will leave you to your mischief,” Miguel smiled down at them. The man was tall, in spite of appearing shorter and rounder than he was. Spy. “Contact will flow through the usual Operations channels, but be unanswerable, as expected. Dolf is assembling a team that will follow, but again, expect them a week behind you. Questions?”
Rob shook his head. He’d already aske
d Miguel the one thing he needed to know: prisoners, bodies, or chaos?
It was almost frightening when the man fixed him with those dark eyes and just smiled.
“Whatever does the most good, Handsome,” he said again and left it at that.
They were alone. The boxes could be stored later. Every second they were on the ground now gave the bad guys time to get away.
Rob headed to the cockpit and settled into the pilot’s seat. Someone had taped a note to the dash with his ship’s callsign—Widowmaker—written in a felt-tipped pen, next to the actual checklist. Rob didn’t find it all that funny, but he was an assassin and it more or less fit, so he grabbed it and started toggling switches.
He would have liked to say she snuck up on him, but he smelled her perfume as soon as she entered. Didn’t interrupt, though. Just moved to the other chair and sat. After a moment, she buckled herself in as well.
Watching him. Never commenting. Just watching. Her eyes had weight on his skin, like sunlight.
“Traffic control, this is Widowmaker in bay fifty-seven,” he called over the comm. “Flight plan has been filed. Requesting outbound lane.”
“Bay fifty-seven, you are cleared for immediate launch,” a woman’s soothing voice returned so quickly that Rob knew they’d been briefed already. “Flight vectors transmitted. Safe journey.”
Rob closed the channel and brought the engines to power. He opened the intercom.
“Alicia, buckle yourself in while we launch, please,” he called and then shut it before she could answer.
If she was a pro, she already knew the drill. If not, better to find out now.
He lifted off softly, pivoting in place while he was still below one hundred feet elevation, and tilting the nose of this beast back.
Nigel had suggested some improvements?
Rob had already seen the bigger-than-normal engines when he was back there. Probably burned through fuel faster, but speed was always useful if someone else was paying the bills.
