Kinetic Solutions, page 11
The kinds of dirty dealing that would compromise a lot of folks.
Make them extra angry.
And what was she going to get out of it? Fame? Some. That just made her a bigger target.
Money? She had a stupendous amount stashed away. And the ability to score more from a variety of things if it got tight. With Armand’s help, she’d made enough to live quite comfortably for at least a year, just in one night.
And what had it gotten her?
Hiding in a hotel. Sneaking out in disguise and seducing complete strangers. Or letting them seduce her. Armand and Erika had both been wild cards in her planning that just showed Carlota how much the rest of her life had gotten bland and almost banal.
She wasn’t living. She was marking time.
Until what?
Until when?
What was her endgame?
She came to almost a violent stop as it dawned on her. They were going to kill her.
Worse, she’d set the rules of the game such that she’d drawn all the hunters to Borlait so she could thwart them personally. There was no way off this planet, she was guessing, short of somehow smuggling herself out. Or stealing a ship and surviving making a run for it.
Did she kidnap some woman cop who was trying to watch the starport and use her credentials to escape, pretending to be the other woman long enough to get gone?
She didn’t want to die.
And looking back, that had been the implicit outcome. She’d gone into this with rage and it had gotten her here. Trapped her.
Death wish. Make them kill her because they couldn’t stand that she was better than they were.
Passively suicidal. Death by cop, or death by agent. Same difference. Because she didn’t have anything else she could do but be a spy.
Did she?
She had been trained as a card sharp by a man who understood that a pretty woman at the table altered the equations at what was frequently an all-male endeavor.
Carlota certainly didn’t want to find some sugar daddy to take care of her. Worse, none would, because she’d be competing with perky, little bimbos half her age, willing to do anything for that brass ring.
Which was exactly why some men chased them, because women like her didn’t have any fucks left to give at their behavior, so they had to find someone dumb enough, green enough, desperate enough, to put up with them.
Creator willing, Carlota would never be that put upon.
Which left strangers and random couplings. Was that all she wanted out of life?
No.
Worse, she didn’t want to die right now by her own stupidity, and had no good idea how to slip out of the trap that she had created for herself.
Carlota wasn’t even sure that she could escape, or if the rules of the game would demand her head on a stake in order to complete everything.
She’d made a monumental error at the beginning. Baked it into the project, because her subconscious mind had been preparing to die, and wanting to go out in a blaze of glory.
And she suddenly didn’t want to die.
Carlota physically shook herself, feeling almost like a wet dog as she emerged from whatever terrible place she’d walked herself into. She looked around, but the streets were much thinner with foot traffic than they would be later in the day, when the sun came up.
A few joggers. A few folks going in to work. A few, like her, stumbling home from a too-late night that had hopefully turned out as fantastically awesome as hers had.
Or at least close enough.
Carlota pulled out her comm and opened it with shaky fingers.
She wanted to live, and was surrounded on all sides by angry folks who had nothing to lose by chasing her with ever-escalating firepower and deniability.
Worse, she was truly outlaw now, with all that entailed.
She called a cab, because she needed to get someplace quiet to think.
There had to be a way out of this.
Right?
19
Rob studied people. Jorge had known how the Service trained couriers and agents, and generally approved, but he’d also had some choice observations over and above that. Seasoning the pan, as he had called it one night when they were both alone and a little drunk.
Good, cast iron skillets should never be fully cleaned. You left some of the old grease in place to flavor things, layering them over the years like sedimentary rock.
Most agents were bright, clean pans, polished nicely, with nothing stuck to them. To a man like Jorge Royo, they stood out because normal humans didn’t ever look like that. Most agents and agencies never saw that, though. They saw other agents, all alike.
All standing out.
So Jorge had suggested a small library of books, a couple of classes, and several weird, late-night-high-end cable channel movies—a few of them his—each of which had been found to contain some really interesting observations about human nature.
Rob had been walking liesurely, sliding seamlessly in and out of the slowly-building morning foot traffic. Not a lot of people, but enough to hide him from his target. Enough that he wasn’t really visible to his target. This was a job where agents tailing someone might show up as anomalies to an aware person.
She came to a stop so suddenly he was certain he’d been made, except that she seemed to be staring at the horizon. Rob found a nearby donut shop and considered slipping in to buy himself one, but that might take too long if she’d spooked. He wanted to keep her in sight, so he watched her out of the corner of his eye in the glass front over the cases as though arguing with himself about diet or something.
Seasoning the pan. That woman appeared to be having a sudden crisis. Emotional, most likely. Moral, maybe, but there weren’t any morals in this game. Hardly any ethics other than to protect your side, regardless of what you thought of them individually, while doing dirty to the other side, no matter how polite and friendly they might be when you weren’t on an opposing operation.
No, she was suddenly staring at metaphorical oncoming traffic as she stood paralyzed in the crosswalk of the universe, about to be a bug on a windshield.
Or something like that.
Rob watched the woman almost literally walk herself through the clinical stages of death. Eerie. He did that occasionally, but only late at night, in the privacy of his secured flat and his mind.
Never on a street corner in front of God and everybody.
She shimmied. Turned around to look at everyone, without once alighting on him.
Rob watched her reach for a comm in her pocket ,so he stepped to the door of the donut shop, pulling the door open as the woman did something.
He pulled out his own comm and dialed. Now was not a good place or time to do this, because there was always a chance he would blow his cover if another agent had gotten the munchies this morning.
At the same time, he didn’t have much choice.
Alicia answered instantly.
“Yes?”
“Down six blocks, at the corner of Madison and Fourteenth,” he said quietly. “She might be summoning a ride. I need you to track her from this moment if she is.”
“You certain about the cab?” Alicia asked.
“Gut instinct,” Rob replied.
Looking out the window, the woman was standing there holding her comm like a divining rod seeking water.
Or salvation.
“Okay, I have a request call from that location for one rider,” Alicia said. “Now what?”
“She’s yours,” he said. “I’m out of the game, so I’ll grab some donuts and walk back in a few minutes. Make sure Mac is awake and down with you when I get there.”
He hung up and got into line with a few other bleary-eyed folks. A dozen of various things would be nice, though he’d already eaten.
Something strange had just happened and he didn’t know what.
It did not fit the pattern of a field agent doing field agent things, but he needed to talk to Mac to understand what had happened last night. And this morning.
Something wasn’t right.
20
Alicia had broken herself into the public transport network early on. Lots of folks didn’t own private vehicles on this planet so they rode the subways out to resorts or around one of several rings. Or they called taxis for short-term things when they could afford it. Tourists and locals with money for the most part.
Mac’s date had triggered a call. Alicia might have noticed it just looking around, but Handsome nailed it right down, so she watched as a driver was dispatched, drove up, and got himself a customer. Individual cars were too difficult to access, but the overall system involved a lot of unencrypted chatter going back and forth.
Quickly, Alicia had the destination, as well as the name of the credit account that was paying. She pinged Mac as she watched the screen.
“Good morning,” Mac said. “What’s our status?”
“Handsome was tracking her, but she just called a cab,” Alicia replied. “He’s headed back here and bringing donuts. Asked me to ask you to be here because I’m watching her now.”
“Be down in five,” Mac said, cutting the line and leaving Alicia alone with her technological toys and her thoughts.
She focused on tracing the cab as it wended its way into one of those weird, little cluster neighborhoods where an older, upper-middle-class space had somehow remained intact, even as blue collar filled in seven-eighths around it. Probably a place with political connections, back in the day.
One older convention center, anchoring a neighborhood that might have been an outer suburb at one point, before Bennan reached out and swallowed it. Several restaurants. A couple of museums. Bunch of separate houses with old yards instead of towers of flats.
Mac arrived first, freshly everythinged and lovely. Getting laid like that would put a smile on anybody’s face in the morning.
Handsome showed up about the time that a Bevel Harri, at least that was the name on her credit accounts, got dropped off at one of five hotels in her destination neighborhood. Alicia didn’t own any of the security cameras in the vicinity, so she couldn’t be sure that the woman actually walked in, but it gave her a starting point.
“What do we know?” Handsome asked.
He’d brought a box of fresh donuts and a carafe of coffee, so Alicia would be willing to forgive him for almost any sins today.
“She went directly to a hotel from here, out in Harnaby,” Alicia said. “Name given as Bevel Harri. Haven’t had much time to track her down past that, but we have an opening.”
Both of them turned to Mac. Alicia watched the woman blush profusely for a moment before drawing a deep breath.
“She one of us?” Handsome began.
“That was the feeling I got off her last night,” Mac said. “A falseness that felt like another agent. At the time I wondered if somebody like you had been smart enough to bring someone like me along to get inside Carlota’s mind.”
“But?” Handsome asked.
“But she reacted wrong that way as well,” Mac said.
“How so?” Alicia interjected. “You two seemed quite copacetic.”
Oh, wow, that was a blush and three-quarters.
“She seemed to really react to me, but I’ve been so deep inside Carlota’s mind that I’m not sure she wasn’t picking up on all that hunger and need,” Mac finally sputtered. Then her voice almost down to a whisper. “What if that was Carlota?”
Everything went quiet. Both of them stared at Mac. Alicia wondered if the look on her face mirrored the horror that Rob seemed to be experiencing.
“What?” somebody asked.
“I’ve been trying to identify her by identifying with her,” Mac said carefully. “Getting inside that particular rage of a woman who’s been wronged and cast aside in favor of younger, smarter, prettier. Something-er. We’re about the same age. The same in a lot of ways. She specifically struck me as having all of the physical and social characteristics we look for in field agents as you’ve described it to me. How many other fifty-year-old female field agents do you suppose there are?”
“Could she be a stringer for some Syndicate?” Alicia asked, trying to make sure they didn’t go down the wrong rabbit hole. “As you said, maybe someone else wanted to figure out how Carlota would think, so they brought their own version.”
“Either way, we need to know who she is,” Handsome stated. “If she’s somebody’s agent, we need to know who.”
“What if that was Carlota?” Alicia asked.
“Then we better hope that we didn’t spook her,” Handsome said. “Because until we have somebody better to work with, that’s our best lead yet and I intend to follow it.”
“Do we know who else is in play?” Mac asked. “Without assuming anything about Helen? Or Bevel? Or whoever she ends up being. Just the fact that she called herself Helen last night doesn’t condemn her. Maybe she has a husband and that was just a fling?”
“Go out to a show by yourself?” Handsome almost sneered. “Pick up a stranger and go home with them? Did she call and let anybody know not to wait up for her?”
“She did not,” Mac nodded. “And she was hungry for touch. Ravenous, almost. So she wasn’t getting what she needed at home.”
“Good enough,” Handsome declared. “Alicia, you find out everything you can about the woman. I am willing to bet that there’s hardly anything there when you start looking, but now we know why, since she’s not a real human anyway. Then start looking to see if she meets up with others that we can trace outwards and build up some sort of network diagram of whatever agency she represents.”
“And if she has no agency?” Alicia asked.
“Then she might be Carlota Rojas,” he said simply. “In which case we have to figure out what to do with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s a Salonnian agent, Alicia,” he reminded her. “They are going to be after her. Emil Yankov is after her. A lot of people want her. One of them might spook her. Or they might kill her.”
“What about us?”
She didn’t like the way he held up a hand, palm up. Too much unknown.
That meant anything might happen.
“What about that Imperial?” Mac asked. “Yankov?”
“He’s next on my list,” Handsome said.
Alicia couldn’t help the shudder that passed through her body at the deadly look on his face.
21
Emil had just completed the latest visit to Constanz’s office. At least the man was willing to play along, once Emil had offered to cover his expenses. A pittance, in the scheme of things, but paying the salary for an extra body to copy and organize the chapters as they came in, preparing the book for publication, probably meant the difference between profit and loss for the publishing house.
If nothing else, it gave them somebody who could file and organize things the rest of the week. Goodness knew Constanz needed that, too.
Now Emil was heading back to his hotel, a three-ring binder stashed in a messenger-style bag he’d acquired for this. He felt a little silly. Far too old to be mistaken for such a person as a courier, but perhaps he was a lawyer transporting important papers between offices as part of a deal being signed.
Something.
Always be in character in public. Always have a motivation, a style of speech, a walk that is different from others.
Never be you, although after this many decades Emil wasn’t entirely sure who this Yankov fellow might be.
It would not be something he discovered in retirement, either. The layers had been painted on so thick over the decades that he was reasonably certain that the wood underneath had rotted away at some point, leaving only the paint itself.
All good agents ended up like that.
He would wear this same, short-brimmed cap that made him look like a fishing captain, though. Emil discovered that he liked it. It spoke to him.
More importantly, it spoke of him.
That was a starting point for whoever he might be next. Some retired grandpa having a day off from spoiling the younglings. Perhaps headed to get coffee with old friends and tell lies about how good things used to be before the kids these days.
That Emil had no friends was immaterial. He had always had a knack for instantly making old friends. For cultivating strangers in such a way that they joined you for dinner and were telling the really good dirty jokes they knew in only a few minutes.
It was a talent he’d had early, and made the most of over his decades as a spy.
Coffee sounded good right now, for reasons he was old enough to admit had nothing to do with any operation. Just sitting in a public space and people watching. Making up stories about utter strangers. In his old days, that had been a training element.
Sit in public with your handler and identify folks by temperament and personality, from the way they dressed. The order they drank. The way they parted their hair, even.
Yes, coffee. Nobody around him would understand the immense magnitude of the words in front of him as he read the latest installment.
Truth be told, most wouldn’t care. Governments were expected to do these things to one another, and rarely did it matter in the overall scheme of things.
Emil caught himself short of squirreling in down that particular train of thought and found a donut shop that was still open. Possibly transitioning to just coffee at this point.
He made his way inside and noted the crowd. A few young mothers or fathers with offspring, out for a bit of early afternoon sunlight. Two businessmen and a woman who looked to be their boss, huddled around a table furtively muttering about something that was none of his business, once he made sure that they weren’t competitors.
There is a way a person walks that makes most of them stand out. Identifying it had taken a lot of training for Emil. Breaking his own underlings of it took time.
Some washed out over it.
He found himself fourth in line, musing about four decades in the industry and how Hummingbird had gotten herself here. Of course a woman that old had little to offer in the field. Only a small subset of folks ever looked at a woman like that and knew lust. Better to dangle young ones in front of them, the kind that had been carefully selected to look pretty and act dumb.
