Fiddleback Trilogy 2 - Evil Ascending

  The little man nodded appreciatively. "You did an excellent job, Mickey. Your forms were all correct. You have studied well." He squatted down and watched the bruising on Mickey's knee disappear. "Your recovery rate is fantastic. You are perfect."

  Mickey smiled broadly. "Now I go home? Now I see Dorothy?"

  The little man rested his right elbow in this left hand and tapped his teeth with a finger. "Soon, Mickey, very soon. There are only a couple more things you have to do, then I shall return you home." He smiled, and Mickey's disappointment vanished. "And, believe me, everyone will remember your homecoming for a long, long time."

  The maelstrom of emotions swirling through the room made Rajani feel dizzy. "Please, stop it, all of you."

  Sin and Colonel Nagashita both looked up from the map over which they had been arguing. Behind them, Kazuo and Bat both looked surprised at her outburst. Only Hal, standing near the street map with a Silva rolling map scaler, appeared to understand what had made her angry. Natch looked up from cleaning her pistol, and Jytte remained at the computer terminal in the corner of the room.

  Sin frowned and wiped his sweaty brow with his shirtsleeve. "What's the matter, Rajani?"

  She got a feeling of genuine concern and care from him, which made it easier for her to speak. "You are all working at cross-purposes." She pointed at Nagashita. "You resent Sin's planning because you believe this is a problem your command should have been given to handle from the start. You also don't like Mr. Takagi and his people being brought in on this. You are purposefully ignoring the gravity of the situation."

  Sin nodded, then froze as she glared at him. "And you, Sin, you are just as guilty. You are angry because of having been shot. You also resent Colonel Nagashita because you think he's trying to take over this operation. You are ignoring the fact that he and his people have had vast amounts of training in this sort of thing, especially after the incident in the Olympics two years ago. You are pushing the use of the Yakuza as a diversionary force for the most part because it will work, but a little because their presence needles Colonel Nagashita."

  Rajani let her own anxiety filter into her words. "You, Mr. Takagi, want to help because of your sense of duty to the imperial family. You are also thinking that this could give your people an entrée into Kimpunshima and perhaps even a chance to destroy the bosozoku group that has been annoying your uncle."

  She just looked at Bat and shivered.

  Sin looked down at his shoes in embarrassment. "You're right, Rajani." His head came up again as he looked at the IDC leader. "Colonel, let's table our problems until we have Ryuhito out and safe."

  "Hai." The small, sharp-eyed man nodded curtly and unfolded his arms. Kazuo Takagi nodded in agreement, and Hal smiled. Only Bat remained untouched by her appeal.

  "Then, if this meets with your approval, this is what I propose." Sin pointed on the map of the Galactic Brotherhood Institute at the patio from which he had left the grounds. "We have a wall breach here, which they're going to have to devote a lot of attention to. Kazuo, your people need to arrive here and put on a big show of force. Be aware they're armed with some heavy weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, LAW rockets and even some SAWs. I don't know where they got them, but I've not got a hard time imagining a network of true believers within all sorts of corporations around the world. Be careful, and, if/when the shooting starts, you head in here."

  Kazuo nodded. "Wakarimasu. Colonel, is that acceptable to you?"

  Nagashita nodded. "Having you attract their attention is good. Your people, when they come in, will wear blue armbands so my people will not shoot them, yes?"

  "Hai."

  "Good." Sin shifted to the front of the GBI building. "This is the weakest spot in the GBI defenses. The public lobby has lots of glass, and the auditorium is clear, so even if an alarm is sounded and help arrives, the defenders won't have any place to hide. Aside from the book kiosks, there is no cover. We will get in quietly.

  "Now this door here," he said as he tapped the map, "leads straight into their secure area. This is their spine, and it gives us instant access to the rest of the complex. I can get us through the door, then we have teams locate Ryuhito, secure him and get him out."

  Colonel Nagashita's eyes nearly closed as he frowned. "I do not like the fact that our strike into the complex is predicated on your being able to breach this secure door. You said it has a Tojicorp Hogosha security door and palmprint reader. I think it we will have to blow it."

  Sin shook his head. "Rajani, toss me that room service menu, please."

  She took the laminated menu from the table and brought it over to him. Sin flipped it open to the room service section and smiled. "Kobe's finest. We're in, trust me."

  Jytte hit a key on her console. "By retrotracing through the Lorica system, I have penetrated the GBI computer system at the most basic levels. They are in the midst of notifying the people who were scheduled to show up for a meeting tonight that it has been postponed."

  "Good." Sin looked over at Colonel Nagashita. "This plan will work, trust me."

  "I am afraid any trust I might have had for you vanished three years ago, Mr. MacNeal." Nagashita pulled himself up to his full height and gave Sin a stare harsh enough for Rajani to feel it. "However, I serve one who trusts you. Your plan has merit, and we will employ it."

  "We're cooking with microwaves now. Jytte, can you access any higher computer functions from here?"

  She shook her head in response, giving off waves of frustration. "This level allows for some administrative functions, presumably so field representatives can make appointments and add people to schedules from remote locations. I have tried to gain upper-level access, but they may have a cut-out system in place to prevent tampering."

  Rajani frowned. "Cut-out?"

  Jytte gave Rajani a quick, mechanical smile. "Data transfers from this basic system to the higher-level system may require an operator to physically move a storage medium, like a WORM disk from one network to another. For orders going down from higher to lower, the higher system can always call the lower on the same sort of access line as we are using."

  The blonde woman closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough that Rajani caught no impressions or emotions from her at all. Jytte's fingers drifted to the keypad, then began hitting keys in short, sharp bursts. Her whole body stiffened for five seconds, and no one in the room so much as breathed. Then she typed another, longer sequence into the machine and sat back.

  "The key to WORM disks is that they hold far more information than even the most busy system could ever handle. WORM means 'write once, read many' and this disk in the drive currently has been in use for the past month. To make their system ultrasecure, they should destroy the disk after each transfer, but financial analysts do not see that as economical. I will read all the data and see if there is a mention of upper-level access."

  "Good hunting." Sin looked over at Hal. "You and Jytte will be our logistics coordinators. You'll come in with the second waves of Colonel Nagashita's men and take up a position in the GBI executive offices. You'll have the job of keeping us all pointed in the right direction. You'll also be the ones to get Ryuhito out when we find him."

  Hal nodded, and Rajani sensed in him welcome relief at not being asked to actively engage in the assault. This did not surprise her, given his recent brush with death and the loss of his wife, but Rajani knew his abhorrence of violence ran deeper than that. Hal clearly believed violence was one of the root causes of the world's problems and, while he might have acknowledged that some people fervently needed killing, the collateral damage done by violence was far too high a price to be paid easily.

  Sin glanced at Bat, got a stony stare in return, then looked at Nagashita again. "You can have your people in place and pick us up here in an hour and a half?"

  "Hai."

  "Is that workable for you, Kazuo?"

  "Hai."

  Rajani turned away and slid the door open onto the hotel balcony as Sin e
scorted the two Japanese men to his elevator. She stepped out into the night and shivered, but shut the door behind her instead of returning for a coat. The new pair of jeans and thin, white cotton blouse with short sleeves did nothing to stop the humid air from chilling her, but she didn't care. It felt right to her to feel cold.

  She tried to sort through everything she had experienced and learned over the last four hours. The shock of having sensed her father nearly overpowered everything. She had always hoped he had survived the years, but when she was put into stasis she had been told that the chances of that were slim at best. Her father had impressed upon her the absolute necessity of what she was doing and told her how proud he was of her for accepting that burden.

  Leaning against the balcony railing, feeling the cold steel against her belly, she stared out at the imperial palace and the forested oasis surrounding it. Her father, in that brief contact, reminded her much of that building. He seemed as remote as ever, but also changed. He was not the same as a medieval palace in a modern world, but he struck her as more guarded and primal. He had changed as much as she had.

  She also realized she was continuing to change, but not in the focused manner in which she had during stasis or before. Dr. Chandra and his aides, even the loathsome Nicholas, had been strong personalities, but they faded to insignificance in comparison to Natch and Bat and Sin. Moreover, her entire life had been one of learning and experimenting instead of actually living. She realized that, as nice as Dr. Chandra and his people had been to her, as much as they accommodated her, she was really just a large lab rat to them.

  As much as it had embarrassed her to have the AKM's recoil knock her off the wall, she had reveled in it. Dr. Chandra and his people had taught her about the concept of equal and opposite reactions, but that was a practical demonstration of the principle. That was a lesson she would never forget, but it was delivered in a manner that no one would have ever allowed in the old days.

  More importantly to her, though, she had actually done something. Deep down she knew that making the trip from Area 51 to Flagstaff with Dorothy and Mickey was an accomplishment in and of itself, but there she had help because the kids knew where their home was. In going out to rescue Sin, she had operated on her own. She knew that her action had been impulsive and even foolish, but she had no choice, and her inaction would have meant that Sin died.

  She found that was the last thing she wanted.

  As much as she liked the surprise Bat had shown when Sin explained about how her shooting had caused the man with the antitank missile to shift his aim-point to the wall, the gratitude coming from Sin made her feel even better. She liked his laughter and even didn't mind when he joked that he would have had her drive the getaway jeep, but he feared her marksmanship with a car would have been even worse than that with a gun.

  The people she had known in the lab were much like Bat in that they had a single focus that dominated their lives. Sinclair MacNeal struck her as a personality with multiple facets. His mind always raced on, looking for a use for something or an angle on it or a relationship of it to something else he knew about. He also cared about people, not just as resources, but as people. When he tipped the concierge for bringing her a new set of clothing from the hotel store, he did it with genuine thanks in mind instead of a desire to impress the other people in the room.

  "Hey, kid, you going to be up to this tonight?"

  She spun around and brushed strands of gold hair back from her face. "Sin! I didn't hear you."

  He nodded. "You seemed pretty far away." He held out a blue windbreaker. "I thought you might need this. Thinking about your father?"

  Rajani nodded, then turned back toward the palace. "Him, and a lot of things. And, to answer your question, yes, I'm up to going into GBI. Why do you ask?"

  "You're going to be our early-warning system." Sin joined her at the railing and leaned on it with his elbows. "If Fiddleback was able to summon up that devil-worm just to nail us, imagine what he'll do to hang on to Ryuhito. We'll need to know what and where to react to it."

  He turned toward her, and she read the concern from his face even before she felt it. "I know you can find the fighting tough to take—proving once again you're an intelligent person."

  Rajani shook her head. "Not the violence, but the emotions it engenders. There are some emotions no one should ever have."

  "Yeah, I imagine being around Bat in the bosozoku fight was like being forced to read that old piece of trash, American Psycho. I'm having a hard time here because I'll be keeping an eye out for El-Leichter, Nagashita and Bat to see which one shoots me first."

  "Sin, you don't have to worry about Bat."

  Sin raised an eyebrow. "Oh? He hates me as much as most of Tokyo hates this heat wave."

  "That may be so, but he also respects you." Rajani half-smiled, "It started when you told him about how you got away from Mr. Handy, then it stayed alive when you talked about the devil-worm. What guaranteed it was how you formulated a plan and were able to work around the objections advanced by Hal, Kazuo and Nagashita. I think Bat finds you borderline dangerous now, which is quite an accomplishment."

  "Forgive me if that doesn't make me sleep any easier tonight—if I sleep at all." He smiled at her. "So, can your psychic powers let you see into the future?"

  "No, but they could let me see into you." She shrugged. "I don't think I need to, though, because I watched you in there. You know your plan is good, and you've done everything you can to make sure it works. Fiddleback is your only random element, and you even have him partially covered. It will be dangerous, but it is also necessary."

  "The only way we can guarantee failure tonight is to not do anything." Sin turned around and leaned his back into the railing. "Everything else is a toss of the cosmic dice."

  She nodded and hugged the windbreaker tight around her body. "If only we knew the odds."

  He winked at her. "Naw, if we knew the odds, we'd be smart enough not to go." He looped his left arm around her shoulders and steered her back toward the suite. "Come on back inside, Rajani. I have to call room service and I can add some hot tea to take care of that shiver, it's warm inside."

  "No, Sin, I think I'll stay out here for a bit."

  "Rajani, stay out here and you'll catch your death." He gave her a brief hug. "And that is not something I want to happen."

  An unseasonably cold wind cut at Coyote as he met Mong and the Yidam at the heart of a crowd of monks. He was glad he'd chosen to wear a black turtleneck sweater over his Kevlar vest instead of the T-shirt he'd used during training. His Wildey Wolf rode in the Bianchi shoulder holster, and the two Colt Kraits occupied positions on his hips.

  In addition to the small arms, he carried a short carbine that, at first glance, looked almost identical to the carbine version of the M16 automatic rifle. What differentiated the Armalite AR-12 Stormcloud from the generation of weapons that spawned it was the boxier magazine and larger bore. The combat shotgun fed shells in from a 12-round box, and Coyote had specifically loaded his with sets of three buckshot shells and one Dragonfire incendiary round. He had three clips and, while he had picked the weapon up out of professional curiosity after a conversation with Crowley, the lark struck him as being a fortunate bit of luck.

  His black combat fatigue pants and combat boots, along with the turtleneck, almost looked like street clothes. He assumed he might have to pass for normal when he reached Japan, which is why he also had a nylon satchel folded into a tight little package and stuffed in his back pocket. The guns and spare clips could go into it when they arrived.

  The Yidam, Coyote realized, would present a problem even in the weirder districts of Japan. Four Vietnam-vintage flak jackets had been cut apart and sewn together to provide the four-armed alien with body protection. He wore yak-skin boots that had been specially crafted to fit his clawed feet, and the talons poked through the ends of them like decorations. His arms, legs and head remained bare, but their dark color would help conceal him.


  Concealing the long rifle the Yidam carried on his upper right arm—as if he were a country squire ready for a day of quail hunting—would be something else entirely. I could break that down with a hacksaw, and I'd still not be able to conceal it. Taller than Coyote by a clean foot, it had a bore he could have plugged with his thumb. From the shells distributed in the bandolier slung across the Yidam's torso, Coyote knew the weapon wasn't a shotgun, despite the large barrel diameter.

  "Loaded for bear, aren't we?"

  The Yidam smiled, and Mong patted the gun the alien carried affectionately. "This is an old surplus weapon we thought to use against tanks if they ever worked through our shielding."

  Coyote took another look at the weapon, then nodded. "14.5mm Protivotankovoe Ruzh'yo obr 1941 g PTRS. The Soviets manufactured those to stop German tanks. Shoots a 14.5mm tungsten-cored, armor-piercing incendiary round that it gets from a five-round clip. Semiautomatic fire, hellish recoil." He pointed to a polished wooden grip halfway up the barrel. "You're supposed to have a bipod there, but I guess you don't need it."