S Hunter - Longevity

“Billboard?” Livvy said distastefully, then noticed that Chris appeared to be staring at her chest.

“What?” she asked, annoyed, and looked down at her tunic, which she’d already toggled back to off-white. It should make her less visible than the black she’d used last night.

“I was just thinking. We’re too urban. You really should be in camouflage. I’m going to suggest you spend a few moments rolling in the mud before you get close to the farm,” Chris said. Livvy opened her mouth, but not a word came out.

“If Bedford succeeds, he’ll never let us live,” Chris continued without a pause. “We know too much and I suspect he’ll be unhappy with what happened in his home in the city. For the moment, he still wants to find out where his weaknesses and leaks are. He wants to know what we know and how we know it. For now, that’s leverage. But the longer we wait, the less protection it buys us, because he’ll see that nothing else is happening, and then he’ll realize the only people that may be able to tie anything to him are the two of us. The fact that it is unusable in court won’t matter. He’ll want us dead.”

“I’m beginning to understand,” Livvy said cryptically.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Meanwhile, Jesse is in Josephson’s hands,” Chris added as the clincher after a very brief pause.

“All right,” Livvy said. “You drive in and poke at the lion and his dog – jackal – in his own den. I trot in cross-country. Just try to get me within trotting range, please, and don’t get killed until I finish dealing with the hired help.

“And McGregor, some advice,” Livvy added succinctly. “Don’t ever call a woman a walking billboard again, especially when you’re trying to get her to agree to something.”

Livvy was furious. Her feet were soaked. Her 25 year-old-body, normally taken for granted, was sore and exhausted. And there was no one within range at whom she could vent her dissatisfaction. In thirty years experience, she had never faced this sort of ordeal. She was keen to find a target for her fury, and she had three in her figurative sights. Williams. Bedford. Josephson.

She had adroitly – she thought – slipped out of the car when Chris had done a quick stop about two kilometers from Bedford’s horse farm. She had climbed over the white rail fence, rolled in some handy mud, and started resolutely jogging, occasionally slogging, through the orchards and across the pastures. The terrain was soaked with dew and harboring low spots with shallow puddles from an overnight shower.

Their plan was to position her in the woods behind the farm, with the house between her and the road, while Chris drove up and walked up to the front door. He had made it sound simple and inevitable, which she supposed it was, especially since he was in no shape to be jogging and slogging and they probably knew exactly where he was at any time anyway. If he didn’t come to them now, they would eventually find him anyway.

No doubt Bedford had legions of ruthless assassins holed up in a secret basement. Chris believed that if he walked in voluntarily they not only wouldn’t kill him immediately, but that they would stop everything else to deal with him and find out what he was up to, especially if they thought he might be ready to give them the information they wanted. While she thought he was right in so far as Bedford and Williams were concerned, she doubted that the assassins would be all that interested in what he had to say. She suspected she was going to end up battering her way through a troop of them to find Jesse.

She was glad she was furious. Her fury was keeping her on her feet and moving quickly, although her mind was racing and she needed to focus. It had been years since she had experienced this sort of sustained adrenaline boost, but she remembered that it could be a tricky master. If she kept thinking about Jesse and Mickey, it should be enough to see her through.

Her first goal was directly ahead, a large building she’d been watching ever since she’d been dropped off. Given that it was huge, windowless and set back from the road behind an orchard, she figured it was a barn, which made it a good place to start. She and Chris had discussed the fact that they were going in blind as to the number of security personnel and extent of remote imaging, but they’d concluded that they had no real choice. As with the last skirmish, she had to go in fast and keep moving and hope they stayed lucky. Sprizter’n’smokes weren’t going to help them here in the open country during the day. At least she still had a tunic; Chris was going in, by choice, with only his vest.

Her approach brought her to the rear of the barn, and from there she eased around the corner to the side away from the house. It smelled of dried grass and dirt and seemed entirely too innocent for the evil she expected to confront somewhere ahead. There was the sound of a non-glassened vehicle getting louder, and when she stuck her head out away from the building she could see it approaching along a gravel road from the direction of the rest of the farm buildings. A small tractor pulling a wagon and driven by one man.

She pulled her head back. He didn’t look like security, and he didn’t seem to have noticed her. A civilian, then, but as Bruno had said, this was a “take-no-prisoners” operation, which meant that she had to treat this guy like anyone else she didn’t want behind her.

The tractor and wagon pulled into the barn and the engine noise stopped. Staying close to the side of the barn, she took her first step in a move to follow the tractor, only to pull up short without putting her full weight down. Her shoes emitted a loud squelching noise. She’d been listening to it since she’d hit that first puddle in her walk through the misty glades and fields, but out there it hadn’t seemed to echo so loudly. In the city, dry, her shoes were perfect. They were favorites, with grip and support and fit that facilitated climbing trees and scrambling across polished marble floors. Apparently, water was their weakness. Soaked, they were entirely inappropriate for a covert operation in the countryside.

She quietly kicked them off and pulled off her equally soaked stockings.

After that it was easy to tiptoe to the front of the barn and pause at the entrance. Muffled sounds of someone moving around inside reached her. She pivoted around the corner into the entrance and pointed her Stinger in the direction of the sounds. The poor man never knew what hit him, but at least he landed in clean straw. She checked the rest of the barn for people: nothing. It was, as far as she could tell, full of hay and straw and probably a few non-human rodents. Only a barn.

She moved on, leaving her shoes in the mud.

So far Chris’ reception was all that he had expected. Two security guards relieved him, a little roughly, of the Stinger Livvy had given him and the knife he had appropriated from Bedford’s bunker kitchen. It had been a long shot but being thorough had been for so many years a matter of self-respect; now it was habit. For example, they let him keep his armored vest, which was a relief. He wasn’t looking forward to struggling out of it, and much less so in a hostile environment. Either they didn’t realize he was still wearing it or they didn’t care.

Escorted down the long hall to a library paneled in more of the beautiful woods Bedford favored, Chris considered that if he was going to design a traditional country haven for himself, this one would be close. Like Bedford’s Potomac Falls mansion, the house was at least two centuries old and full of antiques. It was even more elegant than the mansion, perhaps because it was less ostentatious and there were more books. Also, Chris liked horses and dogs, so he could appreciate the numerous oil paintings hung on the walls. He wandered around a little, examining the books, then selected one and sat down in an oversized leather armchair facing a wall of French doors that opened onto a flagstone terrace.