Kinetic Solutions, page 17
“Has anyone warned you that they’ll blow up your warehouse or anything silly like that?” she asked.
Imperial Intelligence wasn’t known for subtlety. Salonnia could be worse, except that most of those warehouses would be owned by some Syndicate who would need to be mollified afterwards.
Or at least warned so they could have an insurance fire.
“We’ve specifically engaged folks outside our usual suppliers,” Constanz nodded primly.
As if that would matter, given the explosive nature of this book. Which was exactly why she was mailing copies to so many places.
Only Salonnia and the Fribourg Empire would have any interest in suppressing it. Others would titter behind polite hands, while perhaps buying excess copies just to drive it onto bestseller lists. She could see smugglers bringing in pallet-loads later for the black market.
Oh yes, Carlota understood how this game was played.
“Excellent,” she said, rising stiffly, still in character. “I expect that I might mail off all the copies on the same day for the last chapter, but not use the slow post for yours. I might even just drop it off again. Until then.”
Carlota had happened to be facing in the direction of the open door as she said that, so of course she’d had to speak louder, so that Constanz would hear her. As well as everyone else.
She stepped into the open and noted which folks had retreated back into their offices. Who was on a handset, versus who was actually working.
Which folks might be making spare cash on the side as various intelligence agencies slipped bills into their pocket against today.
Carlota moved quicker than the old woman as she made her way back out, exited, and hit the stairwell with a smile nobody else could see.
Somewhere, fires were being lit under various asses.
Angry fires. Pique at being taunted so boldly in broad daylight, when she was certain that most of the watchers were too busy watching each other to have even noticed her down on the street.
Down she went, but exited a rear door onto the alley. Carlota paused to look up and spot the pulley that Rob had used to get into the building the first time, when he’d been uncertain what he would find.
A panel van was parked nearby. The door slid open as she turned that way and Erika smiled at her.
“How are we doing?” Carlota asked as she suddenly sprinted over and jumped in like a much younger woman.
Erika slammed the door behind her and Rob started driving.
“All hell is breaking loose,” the younger agent monitoring things said, beaming. “Slowly, though. Inertia is an utter bitch after this long.”
“Nobody would believe I’d be dumb enough to do something like this?” Carlota laughed as the van rumbled out the back of the alley and turned into mid-day traffic.
“Professionals are predictable,” Erika laughed with her. “The amateurs are the ones that mess everything up. And that was about as amateur a move as we could come up with.”
Carlota grabbed a seat and strapped herself in as Rob turned another corner, moving with a sure certainty in his hands and motions that she was certain would translate later into other things.
“Okay, I have the first alert,” the younger analyst called. “Police are being summoned and given the old woman description with an all-points notification.”
“What about the goons?” Rob called from the front.
“Yankov’s people, if they are his, are in a complete tizzy, and talking on a channel that’s not encrypted. Low-use channel. Open dialogue. Someone is reading them the riot act.”
“Let me hear,” Rob ordered.
The woman pulled a headset and the back of the truck was filled with his voice.
“Yes,” Carlota said. “That’s Yankov.”
“Recording this for later?” Rob asked from the front.
“Absolutely.”
“Good.”
Rob went back to driving and Carlota reached out to take Erika’s hand. Who could have imagined that a strange, black box theater filled with an alien musical would lead to all this? More than once in the last few days, she’d wondered if her personal atheism needed to be modified slightly.
Someone, somewhere, seemed to have decided that they liked having her around. Lincolnshire’s Service wasn’t that powerful, so they had some pull with some entity.
Erika smiled at her, as if reading Carlota’s mind.
“Now, the fun starts.”
34
Emil would have liked to take a layer of flesh off someone for this, but he was alone in his office. It was an unprepossessing place. Front area for a receptionist he had brought with him from St. Legier, an office for him, a pair of conference rooms with maps and pictures, plus a small kitchenette and bathroom in the rear.
Homey, without his people having to be any more exposed to outsiders than necessary. Technically, as Imperial agents, they were supposed to be operating with the cooperation of the locals, but Emil trusted those fools about as far as his old bones could throw them on a good day.
That might have bit him in the ass now.
He slammed the handset of the comm down hard enough that it probably cracked under his hand, but Emil was past caring.
He rose from his desk.
“Conference room!” he roared. “NOW!” and stomped that direction.
Lunch time, so it was him, the young woman who handled communications and reception, plus only Sergey, who had been doing something instead of having a martini.
“Alert everyone,” he said to Sergey. “Get them down there immediately. With descriptions. Start passing out bribes to random passersby. Flash fake badges if you have to. Flood the area and find me something. Go!”
Sergey took off like his tail was on fire.
Emil turned to the young woman. Katherine, though he rarely thought of her in those terms. Young as an agent, but smart. Possibly another Hummingbird, another Carlota Rojas, another thirty years down the line when she was no longer pretty but still brilliant until some fool came along and forced her out of the field.
Could he change that?
Doubtful. Karl VII was a well-intentioned man, and Emil had heard good things about the crown prince, but Fribourg was far more than those two men. It was a great river that would take generations to change, and Emil suspected that too many people—after he was gone—would draw entirely the wrong lesson from Rojas.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
“You will take charge of all communications,” Emil decided, elevating the woman in his own mind, for what little good it might do tomorrow. “Do not wait to contact me with questions. You know the policy as well as I do. Use your best judgment, understanding that speed is more important than accuracy.”
“Sir?” she asked in a gaspy, surprised kind of voice.
“A good plan today beats an excellent plan next week,” Emil quoted from an ancient admiral whose name he had forgotten. “I will be in the field, trying to chase Rojas down. You will handle everything here. Questions, Katherine?”
She paused for long enough that she was rifling through various scenarios and ideas in her head.
“No, sir,” she said after a moment, transforming somewhat into a more confident woman.
He supposed that was also his fault, having had so little interaction with her, though she was trained equal to the man around here, lacking only experience.
Had he screwed up there as well? What might a woman’s perspective have given him, in chasing down a much more dangerous woman?
Emil made a note to explore that question much later.
Right now, someone had finally located Rojas. She was either taunting him directly, or had tired of the game and just wanted someone to kill her so she could be done with it.
He would be happy to oblige.
Emil rose and took a step before stopping. He turned back to Katherine.
“Alert local military and gendarme forces,” he instructed her. “Use my credentials to inform them that this might turn into a chase, and that she might finally try to escape the planet, having been trapped for so long.”
“Their response, sir?” Katherine asked.
“Kill her,” Emil said simply, turning back for the door.
35
Rob had been taught combat driving by the Service. How to use a vehicle of this mass and power offensively when needed. Today, it was just traffic hemming him in. That had been the risk, but any earlier or later in the day and it would have been worse.
And a ground vehicle was much easier to hide. Salonnia had their share of repulsor-equipped vehicles, but Rob hardly trusted most people moving in two dimensions. Adding a third was generally an invitation for trouble.
He glanced up at the women in back. Alicia was plugged in to every comm channel possible. Mac and Carlota were holding hands and watching.
It was his game.
“Police status?” he asked.
He had to remember not to speak Alicia’s name out loud, so he was looking at her in the mirror.
“They’re starting to review the same camera footage I’ve been using for weeks,” Alicia said with a grin. “Slower than I expected, but they’ve found someone who saw Helen emerge from the rear and get into a van. Our description is so generic that I’m tempted to hack in and update it in their records.”
Rob laughed. Professionals insulted by the amateur hour happening back there. Salonnia had never been a serious threat to anyone, because the Syndicates didn’t like the thought of a well-organized, well-run government. They just wanted the kickbacks and grift.
“We can afford to wait at the far end,” he reminded her. “I’d rather be too early than too late. We are playing high-stakes poker here.”
Carlota reacted to that, but Rob had only gotten snippets of her game that had won her so much money that she’d had to just carry it around in bricks, unable to launder that much by depositing it. Not without questions. Legal, official questions.
He turned down a side street at the first chance, then ducked the van into an alley. They were tight for a vehicle this size, but he had insured it on rental. Always a smart move when somebody might be shooting at you later.
They made better time, even cutting across stalled traffic. Right up until they hit a garbage truck coming the other direction. Neither of them had lifters. Traffic had closed up behind him.
“Mac, out and spot me backing,” he ordered, then remembered that he was supposed to call her Erika.
Of course, it wasn’t like Mac was her real name either. Just the gun-toting badass chick he hung out with occasionally. The one who taught doctoral-level courses in mathematics and cryptography on the side.
She slammed the door open and started walking aft.
“Comm security?” he asked, eyes alighting on Alicia.
“Chickens minus heads, but there is a young woman on the line currently issuing orders in Yankov’s name,” Alicia said. “She’s got her shit together, too. Expect them to start quartering outward soon.”
Crap.
Rob hadn’t been counting on Yankov deciding to abandon his home base to take charge in the field, but either option would have hobbled him. Nothing Rob had seen had led him to expect Yankov to hand things off to a woman agent who stayed back while the old man took charge forward.
They weren’t screwed, but the walls were going to close faster now.
Mac had gotten far enough and was gesturing for him to back up out of the garbage truck’s way. She even slid out into traffic as he got close enough, blocking those folks and giving Rob space.
Then red and blue lights began to flash.
Shit.
At least they were on the ground. A cruiser rolled up to Mac, then cut across two lanes when he realized why she was standing there.
Rob held his breath and motioned the other two women to vanish. It helped that the back of the van had no windows.
His truck beeped as it backed, this time. They’d disabled that for the morgue to reduce the number of people that might have heard, but he was glad that he’d fixed it today. The road back there was open enough for him to emerge from the alley backwards, bump into the street, and crank the wheel over hard to line up with the flow.
The officer emerged from the cruiser and waved at people. Fortunately, he wasn’t returning their obscene gestures just yet. Having a beautiful woman standing there probably helped.
Rob had his window down to listen. Just the sounds of traffic, plus the men and women in the garbage truck working their way forward slowly.
Rob was clear. Mac started to move to get back in, coming around to the passenger door up front.
The cop waved at them, then paused.
Rob saw recognition of the panel van crystallize in the man’s eyes.
“Hey, you, wait a minute!” he yelled, still watching Mac’s bottom.
It was a fantastic, distracting bottom, in relatively-tight dark blue dungarees, with a gray shirt and a brown leather jacket over that.
Rob dropped the gearbox into reverse, in case he needed to get offensive with this much weight.
They could not be captured like this. It would blow everything, and get Carlota killed. Maybe him, too.
At the least, his usefulness in Salonnian or Imperial space would be greatly impeded if someone got his face, voice, and fingerprints on file as a Lincolnshire agent.
Not good.
The cop was walking this way, hand only resting on his sidearm. Class four, like Rob preferred, rather than the stunner on his off-hand.
Bad design, but nobody asked Rob. It meant that lethal force was the first choice, rather than the second or third fallback. Of course, they were talking Salonnian cops.
Rob had an especially low opinion of those folks, all of it personal.
Mac had paused, but the cop was watching the van. Even made eye contact with Rob.
The only reason that Class Four was still holstered was probably because Mac had been right about Carlota looking old and gray today, instead of mature and smoking hot. She did that, too. Not in Mac’s league, but very, very few women he’d ever met were.
The cop approached.
Rob was about to do something when Mac turned back to him, stunner suddenly in hand, and shot him dead center in the chest. He went down like a sack of potatoes.
Rob slammed the gearbox to park and exploded out of his door, reaching the downed cop almost as fast as Mac did. Thank whatever gods cared that he’d been alone in his cruiser, rather than having a partner back there drawing and shooting at them.
“Grab his feet,” Rob ordered, squatting enough to get the man’s shoulders.
They lifted. Rob backed, carrying them to the curb, then setting him down gently enough. He grabbed the man’s radio and slid it across the concrete hard enough that it fell into a sewer opening and vanished. Still one in the car, but Rob didn’t want to take the time to disable it. That might also sound alarms somewhere.
They had about three minutes before he woke up, minus whatever concerned citizens called the emergency line right now to report what had happened.
“Move,” Rob said to Mac, the two of them racing to the van and jumping in.
Traffic had thinned because of the bottleneck, with only one lane getting through until somebody moved that cruiser.
Rob slammed it into gear and gunned it forward.
Someone would figure this out shortly.
36
Emil wanted to scream.
He’d had a team in place. They’d watched an old woman enter the building. Even taken pictures of her. Then filed them and gone back to whatever they’d been doing before.
He snarled at the two men.
“Find her, or I will abandon you on this planet when I leave, and strike you from the records as employees when I get home,” Emil said carefully, standing next to their vehicle.
There were extra police forces around, which just hindered things, because the cops were a blunt instrument in a delicate situation. Worse, they were backing up traffic every which way. No vehicles could get anywhere.
He needed options.
Emil pulled his comm from his pocket as the two bumbling fools got into motion.
“Rittendorf Imports,” Katherine said brightly as she answered.
“It is Yankov,” he said glumly. “I need a repulsor equipped vehicle as a personal transport at my location. Do we have any handy or do we need to rent or steal one?”
“I already have a rental vectored in on your location, Agent Yankov,” she replied. “ETA ninety seconds. The driver will either remain with the vehicle, or turn it over to you, depending on your immediate needs.”
Emil felt his mouth fall open. She’d already seen the need. Understood it. Addressed it. Found a solution. Implemented it before he’d gotten to the need.
What else had he fucked up? Was he too old for this game?
It happened. One day, the skills had atrophied to a level where the mind wasn’t capable of reacting fast enough.
Should he just retire when this was all done? Kill Rojas and then go home and call it a career?
“Excellent,” he managed to rasp. “Thank you, Katherine.”
Emil cut the line and watched others run around, interrogating random citizens and local workers. Some of them he could see were his. Some Salonnian. At least two belonged to somebody else, but didn’t get close enough to be clearly identified.
This whole intersection was a shitshow unfolding.
A low beeping overhead announced the arrival of a flying car of some sort. There were already two police vehicles grounded, but this was not one. Smaller, for one thing. Two seats at most.
For a moment, Emil considered just taking it and leaving the driver behind, but he was feeling more mortal today, so he approached as it landed in an open parking spot nearby. Emil flashed his own badge to the driver as the man opened the door to exit.
