Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

Chace's smile grew a fraction, and she shook her head. "No, it won't, you and I both know that, Boss. Military action would require that another sovereign nation be held responsible, and if it's the HUM, we're not about to invade Pakistan."

"If that's where they're based."

"Farooq Kashmiri isn't anti-West as much as he's anti-India, isn't he?"

"If Kashmiri is still running the show. And that precludes confirming that it was the Abdul Aziz faction that we're dealing with, in which case we're now talking about invading Saudi Arabia, and that will never happen, as we both well know."

"More likely it's AA, then. Killing Londoners on the Underground, that doesn't really help to liberate Kashmir, does it?"

"No, it doesn't."

"So it's someone else. HUM-AA."

"Perhaps."

Chace shifted in the chair, brushed more hair back behind an ear. "If we're talking a job on foreign soil, I'm going to want Poole to back me up. I don't want a repeat of St. Petersburg."

"I just had this conversation with C. There is no job yet."

"But there will be."

"And again, I say perhaps." Crocker turned the cigarette in his fingers, knocked more ash into the tray, appraising her. "You're worried I won't give it to you."

The smile came back, almost sheepish.

"You don't have to worry," Crocker told her. "If there's someone we need to kill, you'll be the one to do it." • Chace's office, which she shared with the two other Minders, was near the end of a long and dull corridor in the first sublevel of the building. Also on the hall was a lavatory, a storage closet, three archives, and a very large, very secured room that housed perhaps one-quarter of the data-storage and computer servers used by the in-building network. As in the rest of the building, the rooms were marked in exactly the same fashion, with black plastic rectangles mounted to the left of each doorframe, declaring-as cryptically as possible-what lay within.

The plate beside the door to her office read "SB-01-213-S-Ops." Nowhere was the word "Minder," and nowhere was the word "Pit." Once, nearly four years ago, Kittering had decided to change that. Spurred by a fit of boredom, he'd come to work with a box of wax crayons and spent the better part of a very slow morning coaxing what few artistic skills he had onto paper. When he was finished, he had a multicolored cartoon of the three Minders at the time-himself, Chace, and Wallace-in a deep dark hole, over which, in ragged and bloodred letters, he'd inscribed the words "The Pit."

The cartoon had survived on the door of the office for almost a week before the Deputy Chief, on one of his walk-throughs of the building, had caught sight of the sign and torn it down himself. He'd then delivered an angry, if brief, lecture to them all on the need for departmental security and discretion, before heading back upstairs to complain to Crocker. They'd received a memo from the latter that afternoon reiterating the point.

Chace stopped at the door, hand out, ready to open it, remembering, and felt the echo of sadness swell briefly in her chest. She hadn't thought about Ed in a while, in almost six months. No, that wasn't quite true. If she was going to be honest with herself, she thought about Ed Kittering quite a bit; what was more accurate was that it had been almost half a year since the thinking of him had caused her pain.

Standing in the empty, anonymous hall outside the office, the pain was back, and it surprised Chace with its intensity. They'd carried on the affair out of the office, with as much discretion as they could muster, knowing that Wallace knew and disapproved, afraid that Crocker would know and bring the hammer down.

On the floors above, tandem couples-personnel involved with each other-were permitted, even encouraged. It made awkward questions easier when both parties knew what the other did for a living, when both parties knew the boundaries of their secrets, of their work. If analysts were sharing a bed, well, at least Internal Security, not to mention the folks at Box, knew who everyone was sleeping with, and as a result-to beat the metaphor to death-everyone could rest easier.

Not in Special Operations. Not when the two people creaking the bedsprings at night might be called upon the next day to parachute into northern Iraq, for instance. Not when one might be required to leave the other behind or, worse, leave nothing behind at all. In Paul Crocker's book that translated to an operational liability, and the Minders had enough of those already; he wasn't about to countenance personal feelings jeopardizing the job as well.

When she'd ended it, she'd known that Ed was in love with her, and was deathly afraid that she'd fallen in love with him. She'd tried to be precise and quick, to limit the pain for each of them, and of course had failed utterly. For the three months following the end of the affair, their interactions had been confined to tepid pleasantries in the office and almost no contact outside of the job.

Almost.

Exactly six weeks after she'd ended it, Chace had spent a Saturday in Camden, visiting the market, killing the day slowly by herself. Off Kentish Town Road she'd stopped in a pub for a pint and an early dinner, and there had been Ed, at a table in the corner, his back covered, a black-haired and far-too-young pretty thing half in his lap, her tongue alternately in his mouth and his ear, or so it seemed. Ed had seen her immediately, and for an infinite second they had stared at each other, caught in one of fate's crueler little bear traps.

Then Tara had left, and they had never spoken of it, and nine days later Ed was sent to Caracas to back up the station on a surveillance job, and two days after that he was discovered dead in his bed in the Caracas Hilton. There'd been no sign of foul play, no sign of violence, and when the autopsy was completed, cause of death was attributed to a cerebral aneurysm, to natural causes.

Chace shook the memory off, wondering why it had come back now, wondering if it was the death of the day or something else that was making her remember things she'd rather forget. She had a stack of folders beneath her arm, courtesy of D-Int by way of Kate, everything that could be scrounged up on HUM and its associations and activities, and it was brain-time now, not heart-time.

And she would be damned if she'd let Nicky Poole and Chris Lankford see their Minder One looking anything less than ready to do the job at hand. • "We were starting to think you'd been eaten," Poole said as Chace entered.

"And a tasty treat I'd be," Chase responded.

The Pit was aptly named, a cube of a room, dead-white cinderblock walls with no windows and poor ventilation, gray carpet that utterly failed to diminish the cruelty of the concrete floor beneath it. Each Minder's desk faced out from three of the walls, so that the Minder Two desk faced the door from the hall, and the Minder One desk, on the left as one entered, faced Minder Three's. The remaining space was occupied with two metal filing cabinets, a coat stand by the door, and a file safe, on top of which sat the go-bags, one for each agent. Inside each small duffel were the bare essentials-toiletries and clean underwear and socks. The only decorations were, above Minder Two's desk, an old dartboard, and above Minder Three's, a map of the world that had been printed in 1989.

Chace dumped the folders she carried onto the already cluttered surface of her desk. "The Boss was in with C when I got up there, kept me waiting for most of an hour."

"Are we on, then?" Lankford asked.

Chace began sorting the folders, speaking without looking up. "It's going to be a while, Chris, if there's going to be action at all."

"How long a while?"

"Days? Weeks? Months?" Chace finished breaking down the folders into their stacks, then picked up the stack closest to her and walked it across the room to Lankford's desk, handing it over. "Maybe never. Crocker says the response might be military."