John Ringo - Cally's War

Okay, Fiek and Worth were almost certainly linked, which meant they disappeared after six forty-five p.m. on May tenth, when a boy remembered delivering a pizza to a man at Fiek’s apartment. The pizza boy had picked Fiek’s face out of a slideshow of images, after he handed him a half dozen twenties.

Fiek had no known reason to have a particular grudge against Worth, and vice versa. More to the point, the Darhel had checked their local bank accounts, and their personal numbered bank accounts in discreet countries, that each man had set up secretly, and their money was untouched since Worth had drawn out a modest amount of cash on the morning of the tenth. It was almost inconceivable that someone who would work for the Darhel would run without their money.

If he’d just had to guess, he’d have said whatever happened was at Worth’s Chicago apartment. Fiek lived in the same building, and although Worth didn’t actually live there most of the time, he frequently used the place when he was in town. He’d searched both apartments himself, along with a cousin who used to work in the sheriff’s department in Silverton. Bobby had said that Worth’s apartment looked a little too clean to him, and pointed out the lack of dust and fluff, especially below the wall with the kinky crap bolted onto it. And what his dead boss had done with that, Johnny hoped he’d never have to know. At least, not unless it was just business.

Getting his cousin set up had been the kind of thing he’d taken this job for in the first place, and it made him proud. A man liked to be able to take care of his kin. And after Bobby got himself fired for being high on the job, Johnny had seen the opportunity in the situation and had helped Bobby out, getting the nanodrugs to get the monkey off his back as well as getting him an income his ex-wife couldn’t get her hands on. That was a situation he was glad to fix. Brenda was a two-bit whore and that was Jimmy Simms’ kid, not Bobby’s, and everybody in town knew it. The judge just also knew Jimmy was a worthless drunk who still lived with his momma and so had stuck poor Bobby with the bill for the cheating bitch’s brat. Johnny liked kids as well as anybody, hell, he’d do anything for Mary Lynn and damned near had, but a thing like that just wasn’t right.

So anyway, Worth and Fiek got done in his apartment sometime over the weekend of the tenth. And that was all he had. Worth had changed his appearance and changed his pattern so often that normal search techniques to see where he’d been and who’d seen him last just wouldn’t work with him. And that meant that unless Johnny could pull a good story out of the air on short notice, his ass was in a crack.

“Okay, Leanne, give me a file on each of them, in print where you’ve got it, on my desk top, with all we know about each man’s death.” No women. That was funny, but then a lot of their field people were guys, so it could be just coincidence. All right, before weeding through the small stuff, he’d get a big picture.

“Leanne, gimme a map of the world, about so big.” He spread his arms, watching a holographic illusion of a large flat screen project in the air in front of him.

“Put a pin in it where each guy died. Waitaminute, is that three? Magnify Chicago. Who’s that third pin?”

“What third pin, please?” The AID sounded confused. They were pretty smart, but sometimes they didn’t track too well.

“Which one of the organization deaths you listed for me, besides Fiek and Worth, was in Chicago?”

“Petane, Charles.”

“Well, isn’t that something. Thanks, Leanne. Go to standby.” There was a trick to managing the AIDs that a couple of old veterans had brought home after the war. The big point was if you were planning anything to keep your thoughts to yourself. They recorded everything, all the time, but so far nobody had found a way as far as he could tell to read a man’s thoughts. So the trick with something like this was to keep all his thoughts to himself, read everything in the file, connect the dots, even if they didn’t strictly speaking go together, and then lay out his case talking to the AID, making it sound like thinking aloud. When you could record a whole hell of a lot, it was easy to forget about the things you couldn’t record. Besides, who knew, maybe he’d find something.

Okay, Petane was the drug overdose. That was good. You could always make something suspicious out of a drug overdose. Bad was that it wasn’t another disappearance, but he could just argue that “they” were crafty enough to change methods. Coroner had ruled it an accident, but that didn’t matter. First thing would be to have his own people get hold of any stored tissue samples and run them for anything he could use. Found in his mistress’s bed. Had to be hard on the wife. Mistress had been drugged, cops figured by him, was unconscious while he died next to her. And, not to put too fine a point on it, forensics said he hadn’t come. Well, didn’t that stink to high heaven. Good. No telling who had really offed the puke. Could have been the wife. Unlikely as hell to have been anything to do with the Darhel. He had only done something useful once and it had been thirty years ago. Still, make the story good enough and it was a whole lot better than reporting in empty handed.

They were in the same conference room as Thursday for their final pre-mission check. The cheap folding conference table and bare Galplas walls didn’t improve with familiarity, but the coffee was good, and the corn muffins were… well, they were at least predictable, anyway.

“Okay, people, one more time through. Cally, you first.” Papa O’Neal, with sandy brown hair and looking rather strange without his usual wad of tobacco, spitting absentmindedly into a mug, nonetheless.

“Baggage check-in at six, security around six-forty-five, in the women’s room across from the gate Sierra-six departure lounge by seven-oh-five. Once there, if I didn’t see Granpa and Tommy on the way in, I send an ‘arrived’ text message so you know I’m in place. I wait until my PDA tells me that the target is in motion, then when she enters, I inject her with my handy-dandy tranquilizer, trade clothes with her with Tommy’s help, go back out and catch the shuttle to Titan Base, et cetera,” she said, pointing to Jay. For the insertion, her silver-blond hair was unkempt, and the white sweatpants and oversized men’s sweatshirt with horizontal blue and white stripes made the most of her figure, most very definitely being the word. Contact lenses muted Sinda’s cornflower blue eyes to a nondescript grayish hazel. Cheap, zero-prescription glasses were fitted poorly enough that they kept sliding down her nose a bit, and she pushed them back nervously, furtively nibbling at a candy bar now and then.

“Hey, how come she gets chocolate and we get these?” Tommy said, staring disgustedly at one of the muffins.

“It’s a prop,” she responded haughtily, and harrumphed, wiggling a bit as if settling into a new suit of clothes as she got back into character. “Go on, Jay.” But she surreptitiously slipped Tommy a candy bar from her purse.

“At five-forty-five, I go through baggage claim and check a dummy bag. By six-fifteen I’m headed through security. By seven, I’m at the S-six departure lounge, seated, with a cup of ice water from one of the snack counters. When Makepeace enters the lounge and sits, I move nearby. I take a brief video capture of the target and her location and forward it to the team so Cally knows where to sit and which stuff is ‘hers.’ If the target doesn’t go to the ladies’ room on her own by seven thirteen, I make a klutz of myself and spill my drink in her lap. I apologize profusely, and as soon as she heads for the door I hit the button on the screen of my PDA which alerts you three. When Cally comes back out as Makepeace, she touches her right ear to confirm the switch. I proceed to the rendezvous with Tommy and O’Neal, arriving no later than eight-thirty. I change clothes, we return to the port by the freight entrance, board the freighter, and take off for Titan at eleven-fifty. Tommy?”