Greg Rucka - Critical Space

She shook her head. "You can't compare the two, it's not the same at all, Atticus. Keith is apotential stalker. And we don't even know if he's prone to violence. But a professional killer – we know what she's capable of, we've seen her work."

"An assassin is just a stalker who is better at his job, Nat. And at least with Keith there's evidence proving an obsession with Lady Ainsley-Hunter, if not an intent to do violence. With Drama we don't even have that. I don't believe that Drama is after us, and I don't believe that Drama is after Lady Ainsley-Hunter."

Her jaw flexed. "Then why did the CIA feel it necessary to inform you she was in the country?"

It was a question I'd already asked myself, and since I didn't know the answer, I brushed past it, saying, "It doesn't matter. We muddle through, we stick with what we're good at, we protect our principal. If worse comes to worst, we'll shoot a lot of people."

"Or get shot a lot ourselves." She closed her eyes, willing herself to relax, and when she opened them again the last hints of her fear had vanished. "You are crazy, you realize that, don't you?"

"I have never argued that point," I replied. "What did Bridgett say when she called?"

"She's on her way to Philadelphia to interview Keith's brother. She said she'd call later if she found out anything of use."

"Okay, good. See? We're on top of this."

"Oh, yeah, we're all over it." She moved back to the door, then stopped. "Sorry about that."

"Ain't no thing. She scares the crap out of me, too."

She frowned and went into her office. I headed for the conference room. It was dark in there, and I closed the blinds before switching on the lights.

Dale and Corry arrived at six-twenty, apologizing.

"Weekend traffic," Dale told me. "You'd swear they put these drivers on the road just to annoy me."

"Or worse," Corry said. "I thought he was going to run one guy off the road."

"I could have done it, too." Dale puffed out his chest boastfully. "I know how."

"Yes, we're very proud of you, Speed Racer," I told him. "Conference room, if you please. We've ordered dinner."

I waited until they had gone down the hall, then doubled back to the front and locked the door and switched on the alarm. My belief that Drama wouldn't be coming after us was sincere, but the precaution seemed wise all the same, although if she were coming here, our security system wouldn't do much more than annoy her.

Natalie caught my eye when I joined them, and I nodded. Dale and Corry were already seated, digging into Thai food that had been delivered just before they arrived. Natalie was putting the finishing touches on the diagram she was drawing on the dry-erase board, a map of the route we'd take from the street into the Edmonton Hotel, through the kitchen and to the elevator banks. Other maps were spread out on the table, held down with the paper containers of tomyum gai and nue gra pao. Photographs and notes were tacked to the corkboard and taped to the walls.

Corry slid me a soda, saying, "Okay, so why the rush?"

I popped the top, watching the whiff of carbon dioxide that escaped when the seal was broken. "Fowler took me to see the Backroom Boys again this afternoon."

"You learn any cool code names?" Dale asked.

"No new ones."

The sounds of eating stopped.

"Oh fuck me," Corry said.

They took it better than either Natalie or I had done, I thought. Maybe they just did a better job of hiding the fear. Neither of them interrupted me as I repeated what Bowles and Gracey had said.

When I was finished, the debate began as to what we were going to do with this new information, and how we should best proceed. Once more, the question of aborting the op came up, this time voiced by Corry.

"It may be too late," I said. "I tried reaching Moore when I got back here, and all I managed was to leave him messages that haven't been returned. They're already in transit, either on the way to Heathrow or already in the air."

"So we boomerang them when they land," Dale said. "Head to the airfield as planned, just don't let them off the plane."

Natalie said, "Which would be a sound thing to do if Drama is after Lady Ainsley-Hunter."

"You don't think she is?" Corry asked.

I said, "I think the primary threat against her is still Keith. All we know about Drama is that she was in Dallas this morning, that she murdered three men. Extrapolating that she's after our principal – or us – is alarmist."

"We are talking about one of The Ten," Dale said. "And Drama has reason to be pissed off. Havel's book is everywhere."

"She doesn't care about the book."

"You can't know that."

"You think we're overreacting?" Corry asked me.

"I'm not saying we shouldn't worry. But I think we have to put this in perspective, we have to go back to what we know."

"And we know Keith has a thing for Lady Ainsley-Hunter," Corry said.

Dale made a face. "Anything new on that end?"

"Waiting to hear from Bridgett. But we're going to proceed as before on that. No change."

I cleared the remaining food from the table, moving it to the fridge in the coffee room, where I prepared another fresh pot of coffee. Back in the conference room we chased theories about Drama and Keith for a while longer and then, from a little after seven until almost eleven, we went over the plans we'd already drawn up, honing the final details. I set the stand-by call for six the next morning, when we would all gather at the office before heading out to the airport in New Jersey for Ainsley-Hunter's arrival. The four of us together took down all of the paper we had up in the conference room, and while Dale went to store it in the safe and I cleaned the dry-erase board, Corry and Natalie went off to the storeroom. They returned with four vests.

"Kevlar," Corry said, handing one to me. "The gift that keeps on giving."

I did a walk-through of the apartment when I got home just after midnight, switching on lights and checking rooms, trying to remember if the mess I was seeing now was the same mess I'd left behind that morning. Bridgett, I had discovered, was a surprisingly sloppy person, constantly leaving out books and papers and CDs, though the clothes that she kept in my bedroom were always neatly folded and stowed. Between the near-constant work I'd been doing preparing for Lady Ainsley-Hunter's visit and Bridgett's natural entropy, there was a lot of picking-up that needed doing.

Even so, everything looked to be in its place. I got out of my jacket and then the vest, hanging both from the hook in the hallway before entering the bedroom and stowing my weapon in its lockbox. I rummaged through the drawers in the kitchen until I found the set of tiny screwdrivers that I kept for repairing my glasses. Armed with the largest of the flatheads, I worked my way from room to room, dismantling every light switch cover and electrical outlet, checking them all for bugs. When we'd protected Pugh, Drama had bugged the apartment with a mains-powered transmitter hidden in an outlet in the kitchen, the one I used to run the coffeemaker. I doubted the same technique would be used twice, but I wanted to be sure.

I didn't find anything but some mouse droppings and one desiccated spider husk.

After I'd finished with the outlets, I sat down at the kitchen table to start with the phones, then stopped when I caught a glimpse of my hands. My fingernails were chewed and chipped from wrestling with the outlets, and I'd scraped the knuckle of my right middle finger groping around inside the wall. These days, there are hundreds of ways to monitor and intercept phone calls, be they cellular or landline, and almost none of them requires that the device be planted on scene. There wasn't really a point to taking apart the phones: If there was a bug and I removed it, that wouldn't guarantee my calls would be secure; if there wasn't a bug, it didn't mean that the line wasn't being intercepted somewhere farther down the pipe.