Greg Rucka: Critical Space

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. You and Skye were so good together."

"Shut up and drive." I tossed the paper back behind the seat. "Did something happen?"

"No idea. The SAIC just told me that the Backroom Boys wanted to see you again, and could I get you into the office this morning. I told him I'd try."

"That's it?"

"If I knew anything else, I'd tell you, Atticus," Scott said. "Probably more of the same. Somebody somewhere found something someplace and they're hoping you can shed light on it."

"Here we go again," I muttered.

"Here we go again," Scott agreed.

We parked in the garage, and then Scott led me up into the Federal Building, where I got my visitor's pass and was escorted past the metal detectors, then into the elevator and up to the Bureau offices. What had once seemed a maze of corridors and turns had now become familiar, and we went past the pictures of the President, the Attorney General, and the Director, walking along floors carpeted in gray and blue, passing agents and secretaries until we reached the same conference room as every time before.

They were waiting for us inside, already seated, six of them this time, which was the most who had been present for quite a while. There were five men, three of them at the table, two seated with their backs against the far wall, and one woman, also at the table. The man at the head of the table was Hispanic and in his fifties, with a stack of file folders to one elbow, and I pegged him for American before he spoke, either CIA or NSA or State, though the odds were he wouldn't identify himself as such. To his right sat two more men, both Asian. The woman was to his left, black, perhaps shy of fifty, and when she spoke, her accent was South African. The men seated at the back were both white, but the lights were dimmed for the presentation, and I didn't get a good look at their features.

These were the Backroom Boys, and so far they had never been the same group twice. This was the sixth time I'd been summoned to appear before them in the last eleven months, and I was resenting it like hell right now. The first couple of times hadn't been so bad; there'd been a novelty value, and I'd been eager to help the cause of international law enforcement, to offer what small insight and experience I could. Now, even if the cast kept changing, the parts didn't, and I knew all the lines by heart.

The man at the head of the table rose and said, "Thank you for coming, Mr. Kodiak. My name is Marietta. I work at the State Department."

"Sure," I said.

Everyone except Scott put their eyes on me for a moment, taking stock. I was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt and my Army jacket. The butterfly sutures I'd put on my forehead the previous night had come off, and I hadn't had time to shave. I imagined that I looked pretty sordid, less a professional security specialist than some thug who had wandered into the wrong line of work.

Fine by me. If everyone was going to play a part, I'd play one, too.

Marietta indicated the woman, introducing her as a representative from Interpol's headquarters in The Hague. The two men on Marietta's right worked for the South Korean Intelligence Agency. He ignored the men behind him, and from his manner I assumed that all of us present were to do the same. Which meant they were probably spooks.

When the introductions had been completed, Marietta started the presentation, using a sleek black laptop linked to the LCD projector on the table. He directed his speech to the three at his end of the table. The rest of us might as well not have been there.

"Mr. Kodiak is a personal protection specialist based here in New York. Almost a year ago he headed the protection detail surrounding a man named Jeremiah Pugh. Pugh had been targeted by a member of The Ten, by the assassin now referred to as Drama. What is so remarkable about this, aside from the fact that Mr. Kodiak kept himself and his principal alive, is that he had personal contact with Drama on multiple occasions, mostly by telephone, but including three physical contacts, one of which was a conversation that occurred in his own home."

Everyone at Marietta's end of the table looked at me again. I raised my right hand and gave them a small wave. What Marietta wasn't telling them is that before Drama and I had chatted in my apartment, she'd stripped me to my underwear and that she'd held a gun on me the whole time. There was still a bullet hole in the couch from where she had fired a warning shot.

"As of this date," Marietta continued, "Mr. Kodiak is the only individual known to international law enforcement and intelligence to have had contact with Drama and survive. He is considered to have unique insight into the workings of The Ten…"

I tuned him out, mostly to keep from registering my disgust. I am an expert on The Ten the way Scott Fowler is a member of the Beach Boys. Drama had been hired to kill the man I'd been hired to protect, and the fact was, I didn't like talking about her, and neither did any of my partners. We'd miraculously survived the experience without harm, without losing life or limb. Mentioning her name at times seemed a little too much like tempting fate, as if she might be summoned from the depths where she slept to wreak havoc on all of our lives once more.

The Ten were stone-cold killers, ghosts of the modern world who murdered without pause or flaw, without politics or emotion to cloud their judgment. They did what they did for money, and they were good enough that they commanded millions for their services. Nearly nothing was known about them but for a handful of code names, a cloud of rumors, and a few very anemic and dubious facts. Even the name "The Ten" was misleading, since it referred to a theoretical ten best, and nobody in their line of work was particularly interested in providing an accurate census. There could be three or five or fifty of them, for all anybody knew.

People don't like to admit it, but death and killing have long been part of how power travels, how governments do business. The Ten were the logical and inevitable result of that; each had undoubtedly been trained by governmental or military programs, had learned his craft in service to a country or agency before going rogue. Which meant that, in some cases, the organizations hunting members of The Ten would be counting on the same people who had created the members of The Ten; and if the data those people provided wasn't accurate, or forthcoming, or useful, that was hardly a surprise. It made The Ten all that more dangerous, because in the face of total lack of knowledge, the few facts that might be discovered would almost always be viewed as suspect.

Worst of all, most of the time you never knew one of The Ten was coming until he or she had already gone, until the body was cold, and even then, maybe not. Got a witness you need to keep from testifying? Oh, look… he had an AMI in his sleep, how convenient. Member of parliament making things difficult for your business? Wouldn't be that same Right Honorable Gentleman who was found dead in his apartment, naked, with the body of his young lover, would it? Car crashes, fatal falls, mysterious illnesses, unexplained disappearances, tragic fires… The Ten could create them, it seemed, on demand.

Drama was one of them, and she scared the shit out of me. The only reason that Dale and Corry and Natalie and I hadn't blown town and taken to living in shacks in Antarctica after our encounter with her was that we knew it wouldn't do us a damn bit of good.

If Drama wanted us dead, we were dead.

Just the same, in the first weeks after protecting Pugh, all of us lived in perpetual paranoia. Natalie went to France for a month, saying she'd been meaning to get back to Paris ever since she'd lived there her junior year of college. Corry took his wife and son to visit family in Ecuador; Dale and his lover, Ethan, spent four weeks driving cross-country "in search of America." I stayed in the city, trying to pretend that everything was normal.