Kinetic Solutions, page 15
The words drew her eyes back to this Rob person. Carlota found her mouth saying the word manufacture without any noise.
“That’s right,” he nodded, still serenely in control. “When your introduction and first chapter arrived on Ramsey, the boss called me to read it and then asked if I thought we could do anything about it.”
She watched him, intrigued. His smile was engaging, and not the false smile of a torturer playing a long game of good cop.
“I manufacture my luck,” he repeated, nodding over his shoulder to Erika.
Rob looked thirty. Erika was Carlota’s age, give or take, so old enough to be this pup’s mother. And yet, they had a casualness—a respect—about them that suggested more-than-occasional lovers. Most men that age had no clue how to treat a mature woman.
Did this Rob fellow know what he was doing?
“I told my boss that I needed Erika,” Rob continued. “That she would be able to think like you. Act like you. Get inside your head and see things that none of the others out there chasing you would see. And I also had luck handed to me.”
“How so?” Carlota asked, even more intrigued.
This was absolutely nothing like an interrogation. More like three friends having tea. She could stretch that to include Erika. They’d been…intimate.
Never with Rob, though Carlota could see where he was studying her like an attractive woman, and not as another asset. Or a prisoner to be wrung dry and discarded.
A woman. A dangerous woman, from the carefulness of how he moved around her.
Respect.
“Fribourg sent Emil Yankov to chase you,” Rob said.
Carlota flinched at the thought of the Grand Old Man of Imperial Intelligence himself coming after her. How had he missed so far?
More of Rob’s manufactured luck?
“Aquitaine sent Wraith, a gentleman known usually as Madison Volante,” Rob continued.
Again, big guns hunting her.
Some of her confusion must have shown.
“If I suggested both men were hopeless male chauvinist pigs, I don’t think I’d be doing them a proper justice,” Rob laughed. “They go far beyond that level into truly petty. Probably on a par with your former boss Grendel Montague.”
She couldn’t help the growl that escaped. Rob was obviously a fairly senior spy for Lincolnshire to know those names and be able to use them casually in conversation.
What did he want from her?
“What about you?”
“I saw Erika on that page,” Rob sobered. “In that first chapter. She could have written it. She could have been in your shoes, but for some of her own manufactured luck. And mine, when she saved my life the first time.”
First time? That suggested more than once. Were they partners in addition to being lovers? Lovers in addition to being partners? Both seemed to describe the two of them.
Erika had a male partner who respected her. Trusted her. Relied on her publicly.
Carlota had a bunch of pigs she intended to burn.
Rob’s smile got broader as her face grew confused. She couldn’t help that. This woman had gotten all the things that Carlota wanted.
Including respect.
“I asked the boss to let me bring Erika, because I figured that she could track you better than any of the men they sent,” Rob said calmly. “When the two of you stumbled into each other, she raised a red flag and we started digging into who you might be. Until just now, I figured that you were another Erika that somebody else had brought along to help understand their quarry, but I think that everybody else was just after any woman of close to the right age to hunt. So we’re back to the first question, Carlota. How does it all end?”
He wasn’t threatening to shoot her this minute. Or turn her in. It almost felt like an academic question, because he really didn’t care all that much.
How could he not?
“The game has rules,” she found herself saying, calmed by the man. “Each week, I’ll send out another chapter, now that everyone is here and chasing me.”
He nodded, pensive but not interrupting as she spoke. Yet another point in his favor.
“The ones off-planet are sent priority,” Carlota continued. “Local are send fourth class, so that they all arrive around the same time. How did you find Yankov?”
“He walked right into the office of your local publisher and apparently threatened the man,” Rob said. “Then, to play good cop, is paying him enough cash to hire a temp for the next couple of months, even though they only need her one day per week. He came in to pick up the most recent copy and I was able to make him.”
“Just like that?”
“Nobody around here knows me,” Rob shrugged in a cute way. “And I wasn’t trying to find you so that I could stop you. It was easier to track everyone else because they never considered that they might be prey here.”
Smart move. More manufactured luck, she supposed.
“Back to you,” he volleyed the conversation expertly. “What happens?”
“Eventually, I mail the last chapter,” Carlota breathed heavily. “And I win.”
“Then what?”
Then what? The question that had been plaguing her for days.
What was there to say? Then she tried to hide and eventually somebody recognized her and they killed her. If she was lucky.
There were worse fates at this point. Being held captive by a pair of Lincolnshire agents rated high.
“Can I share a thought?” Rob asked, not waiting for her to nod before continuing. “I am willing to bet that you never thought you’d make it that far. Am I right?”
She nodded, unable to speak now with the deadly accuracy she’d seen the man evince.
“The big players want you, dead or prisoner,” he said. “Salonnia will kill you for this. Fribourg probably as well, though Yankov might want to crack open your skull to dredge out everything he can get. Aquitaine is in that latter category.”
“What about Lincolnshire?” Carlota demanded quietly.
“The boss sent me to take pictures of enemy agents,” he grinned. “To ruin their careers as spies. I didn’t think anybody would find you except by the random luck of a stringer on some street corner happening to recognize you walking by and calling someone. I didn’t bring those sorts of resources to Borlait. That you and Erika ran into each other is one of those legends that the old farts can’t tell the kids because nobody would believe that it wasn’t an old fish story.”
“So you aren’t here to take me in and torture me?” Carlota asked, at once insulted and also maybe relieved.
She could enjoy the memories with Erika and not sully them as being part of an operation. No more than they had been. A most pleasant one.
“Actually, I’m here to ask if you want help,” Rob said. “If not, I’ll head home eventually. Maybe after you’re done. Maybe sooner, if Yankov or someone gets lucky.”
What?
“What?”
“On the other hand, if you wanted help, we’re here to offer it,” he said, nodding back to Erika. “What can we offer?”
“They’ll kill me when they find me, Rob,” Carlota reminded the man.
“Not if you’re already dead,” he smiled.
Carlota blinked, shocked to silence at the concept. The man had the audacity to smile at her.
“Go on,” she managed to whisper.
Was there a way that didn’t involve needing that second grave?
So he explained it to her.
Carlota listened, rapt.
31
Mac followed Rob back to the room that he and Alicia were supposedly staying in. The woman had been listening to the entire conversation silently while recording it.
“Will it work?” Mac asked as the door closed.
She hadn’t been willing to confront him in front of Carlota.
Rob shrugged.
“A lot of it hinges on her, but I think she wants to survive,” he said. “She might pack up and run as soon as we’re out of sight, in which case I will retract my offer and we go back to identifying everyone else on the gameboard for Miguel. Eventually, they kill her. She can’t run far enough to escape the sorts of shit that they will unleash on her when those last two chapters come out in print.”
“And you’ll just let them?” Mac found herself demanding.
Alicia glanced up at the tone of Mac’s voice. Rob turned to face her, stepping close enough that Mac could punch him if she wanted.
“She’s here because nobody respected that woman’s brains, savvy, competence, or deadliness, Mac,” he snarled quietly. “The only thing I can offer her is that respect. To let her go out as a professional. Anything else and I’m taking something critical away from her. That I’m telling her I don’t think she’s good enough to be an agent in the field anymore. At that point, I’m no better than Yankov or Montague.”
She recoiled from the sudden vehemence in his voice. Then she placed it. He saw Carlota in the exact same way he looked at her. Or Roxy. Mature women who most men overlooked because they were dumb-asses. Would discount, because her boobs weren’t as perky as they used to be. The skin wasn’t as fine. The curves were more solid.
They only saw the shell.
Rob had assumed everything inside the woman was at least as good an agent as him.
Respect. That had been the word that Carlota had loaded with the most emotion as they spoke. The one Rob just repeated.
Mac blinked. She relaxed and smiled.
Then she stepped fully into the man and kissed him, which served as the best surprise, feeling him flinch as her arms came up around him to pull those muscles against her.
“Hey, if you two are going to need the bed, we’re getting a second room,” Alicia called out.
Mac felt herself blush hard as she stepped back. Rob was almost as flustered. They both turned, one arm around the other, to look at Alicia.
Mac felt like a teenager who’d just been caught making out by her parents. Alicia’s smile didn’t help. Mac felt the blush darken even more.
“So, I don’t have any indications that she’s about to bail on us,” Alicia said. “What’s next?”
“You need to sit in the middle of your web here tonight,” Rob was saying to her. “I can sleep on the floor so you two can have the bed. Tomorrow, hopefully we’ll hear from Helen what she wants to do about it all. Right now, I think I need a glass of wine to unwind from all that. Did you want to join me or have room service?”
Mac squeezed his side and waited for Alicia.
“I’ll get something delivered,” the woman said. “Can you two take it somewhere else for a while? I feel like your mom or something equally icky.”
Mac laughed and turned back to the door.
If Carlota went for it—Helen as everyone had agreed to keep calling her—then tomorrow a whole new operation would start up. One at least as good as anything that Jorge Royo had come up with recently.
Something as memorable as the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang.
32
Rob had broken into a lot of strange places in his time. Committed all manner of crimes getting into and out of government buildings. This one had to be in the top three for overall weirdness.
He turned to Mac as they studied the place over there. Right now, they were just sort of trespassing after dark in a public park. Two lovers maybe looking for a little privacy, although anyone looking at how they were dressed would call the cops immediately.
Dark gray and mottled in such a way that you turned invisible when you stopped moving in dim light. Knit caps, with her hair braided under double first. Armed not quite to the teeth, but more stunners than you really needed for something like this.
He had the class four under his arm because he’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
“You ready?” he asked her.
Mac grinned, leaned in and kissed him, then nodded. Rob grinned back and moved out of the last line of trees to the cyclone fence that marked the edge of the forest where it backed up against the city government complex.
He considered it fortunate that his target tonight was nowhere close to the regional motor pool. That place was lit up round the clock, bright enough that he could pick it out on the horizon from here. Instead, they were over with the medical offices.
He was pretty sure breaking into the morgue to steal a body would compete with any of the crazy shit he’d done before this.
“Standing by,” he said into the open comm.
The unit was low-powered. Maybe a mile of effective range in the open. He and Mac had placed a base unit back in the trees where it would send a boosted signal, deeply encrypted, to another unit Alicia had had him install earlier on a comm line way on the other edge of the park.
“All signals nominal,” Alicia said.
Even in the open, you spoke in an underhanded code that didn’t immediately alert someone hearing them. She was monitoring a variety of emergency bands for traffic, in case they set off an alarm.
He nodded to Mac and approached the wire itself. Bolt cutters made short work of the wire and didn’t generate any sort of power signature a scanner somewhere might react to. Quickly, he cut three feet vertically and then three across. Mac pulled it back and he slipped through before holding it for her.
A simple plastic strap had just enough strength to hold it closed in place, from any distance looking like it hadn’t been cut.
“Through and in,” Mac said over the comm.
No response was a good one, so they looked over the back yard of the morgue. Bushes in places, but planted to add color rather than to block anything. A concrete slab patio with picnic tables where folks could eat their lunch outside on a nice day. Just enough lights on the outside of the building to see things.
Rob pulled a scanner unit from his pocket and slowly panned it across the rear of the various buildings around here, looking for short-range signals that would notice trespassers. Most places that had them would use one of about three commercial styles, but Bennan was too cheap.
Or they were off right now.
He nodded to Mac and walked forward slowly but upright, like a guy out for a midnight stroll. She walked beside him. Maybe they’d been out back necking, in case somebody looked out a window. Not a threat.
Not an attack. Heaven forbid.
Just two people walking up to the back of the dark building. It helped that all the lights were off inside, save for hallway lights spilling into offices. He led them to the rear door that Alicia’s research had found for him earlier. Not the one into the garage, but storage anyway. Like everything else, it had basic, commercial keypads with a screen where you could move a fob close to be read.
Designed to keep out random strangers and not much more. Who needed to break into the morgue anyway? Well, he supposed folks looking for narcotics they could sell might, but crime and vagrancy wasn’t nearly the problem on Borlait that it was elsewhere.
There were always jobs going wanting, because there weren’t enough people to fill them. If you wanted to work, someone would hire you off the street.
He pulled out a multitool with all sorts of options and got the chisel-tip screwdriver. Perfect to pop the faceplate off the unit so he could get inside. Commercial unit. Lowest bidder deal. Cheap stuff.
He handed it to Mac and pulled a pocket light to study things inside. One quick touch with the metal head and the door buzzed and thumped.
Mac pulled it open then handed him back the plate.
“That’s done,” he said casually to the night.
“All systems nominal.”
Excellent. Their one great fear had been that the security might be wired to an extra alarm. If it went off, Alicia should hear it.
Of course, if they had it directly routed somehow, the first indication of trouble might be a car dropping out of the sky to investigate a door opening.
Likely followed by a shootout of some sort. And a blown cover.
Or at least a ruined operation. Wouldn’t be the end of the world, but they’d have to find a different way to save Helen’s life.
Rob was pretty sure she wanted to live at this point.
As opposed to dragging him down with her. That was always a possibility as well.
They slipped in the building. Just enough lights to see clearly. He let the door close quietly behind him, not seeing any alarm lights flashing inside either.
Mac had studied the building blueprints, so he followed her, both of them with stunners in hand, just in case.
All this was storage on the left, adjacent to the garage, with offices up and around a corner.
Mac moved even quieter today than she had in the past. Almost as silent as he did.
That was good.
They turned the corner and went down a short corridor, to where it opened out into an office bullpen, ten desks pushed together in clusters, but only half of them seemingly in use with those little personalizations people accumulate, like pictures of family or little toys.
All the offices around it were dark. That had been a concern, that one of the inner offices they couldn’t see from across the way might have had someone working extremely late.
“This way,” Mac motioned with her free hand, crossing partway then turning right again.
Rob was a ghost trailing her.
“This is it,” she said, touching a door.
Rob nodded for her to go ahead then turned himself sideways to keep watch.
Just in case.
The door wasn’t locked. She pulled it open and a chill breeze kissed his cheek.
He waited while she went in and then followed.
Now, things got dicey. An ambulance might roll up with a body to deposit. Supposedly, they all had the codes to access the building at night and knew the procedures to follow.
But they might just appear as the bay door at the far end of the room opened, surprising the hell out of him and Mac.
“Checkpoint three,” Mac said next.
“So far, so good,” Alicia replied.
She was also monitoring fire emergency channels, where ambulances got called out. Hopefully, nobody else needed to transport a body in the dead of night.
