Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

“A compliment, surely. I take it, then, that you won’t need anything further from me?”

Gaul glanced up, pen poised above the document laid out in front of him.

“Not at the moment, no,” Gaul said, looking back down at the paperwork. “You may inform the rest of the Committee-at-Large that I will consider their proposal. Please keep yourself available for potential future inquiries in this matter, Mr. North.”

Mr. North nodded again and turned for the door.

“Certainly,” he said, pausing with his hand on the door knob. “But if I may ask, Director — I was wondering about the boy. He is named Alexander Warner, if my sources are correct. I have heard that he shows some promise, and a rather unique protocol. You never told me, sir, if he turned out to be worth all the trouble.”

Gaul didn’t even look up from the document he was annotating.

“No, Mr. North. No, I did not.”

Traffic was light on Market Street for a weekday; the last time Mitsuru had been in San Francisco, there had been talk about banning cars on Market, and until she was passed by a battered white Dodge van turning onto Spear Street, she suspected they might have done it.

The sidewalks were moderately crowded; it was late enough in the afternoon that the luckiest of the office workers had managed to sneak out early, and they plowed eagerly through groups of tourists and teenagers on summer break on their way to the train station. The sun was bright above the Embarcadero, the clock tower of the gleaming white Port Building also considerably changed since the last time Mitsuru had seen it.

Mitsuru moved with the crowd, along Market and then across the wide pavilion that adjoined the Embarcadero, picking her way through crowds of shoppers from the nearby farmer’s market and clusters of shirtless skateboarders. It was warm, and it felt good to her to be out in the sunlight — something she had taken for granted, once. She had new priorities, these days.

At the edge of the municipal railroad tracks she reversed herself, heading back toward Justin Herman Plaza, with the strange, dry fountain at the far end, which Alistair claimed had been built by a donation from Enron. Mitsuru doubted it, but Alistair often knew strange things like that. For a moment, she considered reaching through the uplink for the answer, but then she remembered that she was on mission, and therefore rigged for monitoring. Not a good idea to let her mind drift, then, given how hard a look Central had been giving her operational logs, in light of her application to Audits.

Today felt good, though — working her way through the crowd, elbowed aside by a tiny Chinese woman clutching a bag of what looked to be lemon grass, noticing a brash smile from a handsome Mexican teenager on a skateboard, and after a moment’s consideration, smiling back. The black static that had been eating at her thoughts since the whole thing in the park had lifted some, this morning, and she felt calm and in control.

She couldn’t understand how she’d ended up on the kill team — Alistair wasn’t one to indulge in revenge. In fact, he considered it a vice, and a foolish one. Debts had to be paid, reputations maintained, and that was it, as far as Alistair was concerned. The important thing to him was that someone had attacked a member of the Audit staff, even if she was only a provisional Operator, and that the rest of the world would be watching, and learning from their response. Mitsuru saw where he was coming from, even though she didn’t subscribe to that philosophy personally.

Alistair had no choice, the way Mitsuru saw it. He preferred negotiation to violence, but in this case, he needed to make it very apparent to anyone thinking about trying the same thing that it would be a very, very bad idea. To be effective, the consequences of such an attack had to be so dire that they would outweigh any potential gains. Alistair had avoided requesting many sanctions since he had become Head Auditor, but he had been up late last night, drawing up the paperwork for the sanctioning of the Terrie Cartel.

Mitsuru had not, by her own admission, been a very good girl. But there she was, nonetheless, a sanction order for an entire cartel falling right into her lap. Maybe, she thought brightly, her luck was finally changing.

It had to be Gaul, she mused, pausing to look at the chalk drawings of the Golden Gate and Marin Headlands displayed by one of the vendor’s stalls at the plaza. Alistair was her friend and mentor, two very good reasons he would not have brought Mitsuru along for this job. She didn’t know what had gotten into Gaul, but she could have kissed him. That Alistair had decided to manage the operation himself, clearly to keep an eye on her, didn’t bother Mitsuru in the slightest. She appreciated his concern, and found his presence reassuring, though she would have never admitted it.

She hadn’t been assigned any wetwork since they’d reinstated her, not since the thing in Bangkok had gone so very wrong. She’d been authorized to use force, on occasion, but she’d only had a few opportunities to do so. Mitsuru wasn’t one to lie to herself. Breaking heads was her favorite part of being an Operator, and until she’d gotten this job, she hadn’t half-realized how much she’d missed it.

She rode the escalator up one level, into the semi-enclosed mall of One Embarcadero, a modern glass combination of condos and retail space. She wanted a cup of coffee, but she was in San Francisco, so she figured she could do better than the Starbucks franchises that she had seen on virtually every block.

The crowd was thinner, on the second level. Outside of a few groups clustered around some round metal tables, the area was moderately clear. She saw the target almost immediately.

She thought of Alistair, then, as loudly as possible, while moving casually across the walkway, ambling in the same general direction as the target.

Mitzi?

Even after all these years, hearing Alistair’s voice in her head creeped Mitsuru out. There was something about telepathy that was so intrusive, even when it was consensual. And the idea of Alistair knowing what she thought about him made her feel very vulnerable.

I’ve got him. I’m behind him now, on the second level of Embarcadero One, heading toward Spear Street.

She slowed her breathing. She forced herself not to look at the mark.

Good job. I’m a couple blocks over. Let me know where you hit street level, and I’ll meet up with you there.

Okay, boss.

Mitsuru hung back, pretending to examine the display of truffles in the shop window in front of her. Behind the window, a bored salesgirl talked loudly into her cell phone. The target, a grey-haired man in his late fifties, wrapped in a dark coat, seemed not to notice her. He was a slow walker, and she found herself struggling to hang far enough behind him to not stand out.

Her disguise was purely Etheric, installed by Gaul before the start of the job. He’d wrapped her in obfuscation and deception protocols, and as far as she could tell, eyes just slid off her. She’d started a subroutine when she’d seen the target, and now, discreetly and at intervals, her appearance shifted. The target was only an E-Class Operator, so he shouldn’t be able to pay much attention to her, not with Gaul’s protocols around her. But it was still best to be careful.

At Spear Street the target descended to street level, and Mitsuru informed Alistair. She waited until he had turned a corner, counted to five, and then went down the same stairwell herself. She hit the street, blinking at the sun, and Alistair caught up behind her after a dozen steps, clearly hot and sweating underneath his heavy black coat.

Alistair had made it clear during the briefing that the Terrie Cartel were probably only the front for the whole scheme — North hadn’t left much behind, when he’d eliminated the Weir, but it hadn’t taken Alistair long to run down who had put out the contract in the first place, there were too many people who owed him favors.