John Ringo - Cally's War

“Like, are you sure this is gonna work, Janny?” he bleared, tugging a shirt loose from one arm, then the other.

“Best I can think of. These bitches won’t remember a thing, probably since lunch. Dump ’em sixty-nine in a corridor, douse ’em with beer, dump their clothes in the incinerator, the force’ll be too busy covering up to ask too many questions. If they’d had the brains to tell anybody where they were going, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” She shrugged helplessly and set a couple of cheap beers on the floor next to the blankets. “Just don’t douse ’em until we get ’em there, okay, Reef? I don’t want my apartment smelling like spilled beer for the next week.”

Cally backed against the futon muzzily, bumping the backs of her knees and sitting down, hard, still holding her head.

“Um, can I go back to sleep?” she muttered.

“Uh… sure.” Janet blinked at her a couple of times, but seemed to dismiss her from her mind as Cally rolled back into bed and pulled the other pillow over her eyes.

Without tourist money to sustain them, many Caribbean island nations had suffered something of a population crash and a certain consequent degradation of environmental assets, to put it kindly, during and after the Posleen war. Nevis and St. Kitts had been fortunate. Or wise, depending on your opinion. A strict policy that allowed immigration before and during the war only in exchange for FedCreds or large sums of dollars had enabled it to stock enough mainland food and Hiberzine to maintain both the original citizens and the select few new ones.

Regrettably, a hurricane that had struck the island had destroyed one of the facilities of Hiberzined patients. It was believed that not even Hiberzine would save a person who had been swept out to sea. Certainly not after the sharks had gotten through with them. The authorities had thus been left with large amounts in hard-currency deposits in the local banks with no next of kin to claim them. Under the circumstances, neither the locals nor the revived patients from the other two Hiberzine facilities had objected too strenuously when the government had poured the largess into postwar capital improvements designed to revive the island’s tourist industry. There might not be much tourism in the post-Posleen world, but what there was of it Nevis and St. Kitts wanted, and largely got.

None of this was on the mind of the trim and balding, but otherwise young-looking, man in a speedo, lying under a beach umbrella, enjoying the salt air and a mai tai with one of those little paper umbrellas in it. His mind was instead occupied, as it frequently was, if truth be told, with money. Specifically, with the challenges of acquiring more of it while simultaneously keeping his primary employer safely ignorant of both the source and very existence of his extra funds.

His present location had a lot to do with meeting those challenges. He liked fast cars, big houses, and designer clothes as much as anyone, but those would have been a dead giveaway in his daily life. Instead, he had worked out a compromise that allowed him to use some of his moonlighting income while continuing with other little luxuries he’d come to enjoy. Breathing, for example. So in his daily workaday life, he lived on his inadequate, in his opinion, salary. Then, once or twice a year on his vacations, he dropped off the map. As far as work was concerned, he was a hiking buff who enjoyed roughing it in out-of-the-way places. Actually, of course, he would end up in places much like this one, where he could wear expensive clothes, eat expensive foods, stay in expensive hotels, fuck expensive women, and generally live in the style he preferred. At the end of his vacation, the clothes had to go in some charity bin, which bothered him not a little bit, but it was one of the temporary sacrifices he would just have to make until he could afford to retire. Very anonymously, of course.

A pair of very definitely male legs suddenly blocked his previously entirely satisfactory view of a slim brunette in a monokini. She didn’t have much in the way of assets, but what she had was attractively distributed. He squinted up in annoyance at his unwelcome visitor.

“Mr… Jones. Fancy meeting you here,” the other man said. He was slightly built and dressed in swim trunks, but something about his haircut and bearing suggested either a law enforcement or military background. With dark hair and eyes, he looked almost like a late teenaged or early twenty-something kid, but the old eyes marked him as a fellow juv.

“Mr. Smith. Our appointment wasn’t supposed to be until tonight.” The balding man’s voice had a slight edge to it.

“Let’s just say I was impatient for your scintillating company, Mr. Jones.”

“Well, have a seat, then.” Mr. Jones gestured at the sand beside him, favoring the other man with a rather reptilian smile. Impatience could mean money. Money meant beautiful, long-legged women in much more intimate arrangements. He could make time for Mr. Smith.

“Your other information checked out, as I’m sure you knew when you checked your bank balance. This raises the prospect of more business, of course. We would be prepared to pay handsomely, for instance, for an organization name.”

“I’m a big believer in job security, Mr. Smith. Too much too soon renders me too replaceable. Or worse, disposable. How about another agent name where you’re penetrated?”

“We’d pay one hundred thousand FedCreds for that.”

“What?! That’s only half of what you paid for the last one.”

“They don’t know anything, Mr. Jones. As you doubtless know. We want a little more. We want something in your organization, Mr. Jones. Oh, we’ll pay for the names of more agents in our organization. Have to do the housecleaning, after all. But we’ll pay far more for, well, more. More , Mr. Jones. But one hundred thousand FedCreds is a lot of money. Of course we’ll understand if you’d rather play it safer and settle for less.”

The balding man gritted his teeth as the military man smiled at him. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile. It had a knowing element to it that was rather offensive.

“I’ll have to think for a bit about what I can offer you in that line.”

“I can understand that, Mr. Jones. Just remember that we will pay more for more. And less for less.” The man stood and brushed sand from his swim trunks, as if he wasn’t used to walking around in clothes that were less than immaculate. “Until tonight, Mr. Jones.”

Cally sat bolt upright in bed, searching the room as an unknown voice cheerily boomed, “Dude! Rise and shine. Surf’s up and it’s gonna be a righteous day!” Reefer groaned and tried to hide under his pillow. She stretched across him and shut his damn PDA off, getting back off of him quickly. At least part of the sleeping deadhead knew it was morning.

“Hey, Reef, convoy time.” She shook his shoulder and took his pillow away.

He opened his red-rimmed eyes and bleared at her, blinking, before swinging his legs over the side and pulling on his jeans.

“Morning,” he pronounced, “is an unutterably egregious thing.”

She tilted her head and looked at him assessingly, pondering the wisdom of riding in a vehicle driven by this man.

“Provigil?” she offered brightly.

“Shit, yes, if you’ve got any,” he said.

She rummaged in her pack a minute and came up with a tablet, pressing it into his hand. His eyes widened when he saw the “C” inscribed in the center of the sky-blue pill.

“You’ve got some good sources.” He dry-swallowed it then grimaced and chased it with some beer left in a bottle from the night before. “This shit’s mil-grade.”