“Also check out fine restaurants?”
“Less likely. He complained about the food a lot less than I did.”
“It might be worth doing. He wouldn’t have a secret lair, but he might be building a retreat somewhere.”
“I don’t recall he had a favorite planet, or that he’d been anywhere other than Grainne and Earth. It would fit him to pick a planetoid, though. It seems like his kind of exotic. Otherwise, hard to say.”
“This will take more embassy work.”
“Which I hoped to avoid, but I don’t think we can.”
“Well, there are discreet ways to ask,” she said.
“Another thing occurs to me,” I said. “We’ve blown through most of a million credits so far, between hotels, vehicles, food, ID changes, ship fare. This isn’t cheap for him, either. I can’t imagine he gets more than a million per job, even for such high placed personages. So he’s not rich. Well to do, but not flush.”
She said, “I’ll get three nanotransponders. You find me something to hide them in. We hit a third party auctioneer.”
I nodded. “Makes sense. Meantime, let’s get out of this hide before someone comes looking for us.”
“Oh, right,” she said, looking a bit sheepish.
We packed up our “luggage” and went back to the apartment. I’d have to make a trip to recover the rental vehicle and other gear, later.
The final irony was that our stunt did serve to promote Alrab’s announcement. I should have billed him for the service. All the doubles were released without charges and unharmed, with all of them repeating that they’d been hired for a publicity stunt. I’m sure the company I claimed and his own promoters had a fun time trying to chase down just who might have run such a program unannounced.
That, and the explosive actually had come in on our ship. He should have used locally available stuff. Not as reliable, but harder to ID. Silver started searching for its source and end user data.
CHAPTER 13
It took some looking, but Mtali does have some neat stuff. I found my first item at a collectible bookstore, and it’s a good thing I can read Arabic. It was a printed book, from Earth, on historical blades, published in the Pan Arabian States a hundred years earlier. I found several likely items.
I perused a bazaar for a local hour, asked a few questions, went to a little stall a few streets over, then into a dark, musty cellar, which had me rather disturbed, seeing as the last time I was here it was to kill people. An enclosed space with me surrounded by this group was not good for my mental well-being.
I had four locals in close proximity, and I was obviously an offworlder. I wasn’t comfortable, but I tried to control it, while being polite through tea made with water of questionable potability. I hoped it was fully boiled. The hassocks were dusty and worn, but thick enough.
However, this craftsman did have lovely local jambiya and a small, curved beltknife. He did work in gold and Mtali lapis and horn for the handles and sheathes.
I brought out the book and showed him a page.
“I want one of those, as exactly as you can make it, aged to be two centuries old.”
He accepted the book and squinted.
“I can make one like new,” he said.
“I don’t want new. I want it to look old, for my collection.”
“I can do that,” he said. “That will cost extra.”
“Of course. I also don’t want anyone to know it’s not original. I have a style to maintain.”
“I need a month,” he said.
“I have to leave in a week. I don’t mind paying.”
What I asked for would take more tools than I saw here, but a skilled craftsman can make things move. He probably had modern tools elsewhere, and it couldn’t be the first time someone had asked him to make a fake.
My main concern was proper alloy, though I didn’t want to come out and say so. I was an art collector, not a crook. However, he’d probably get it right, and the deception didn’t have to last long, if all went well.
Silver got out and around, too. With a change of styles and her skin tones, she could pass as Turkic or Asian in ancestry at a reasonable distance or with a scarf. She drove sometimes, rode and walked others, and managed to bring in video of the blast area. Then she had to analyze it.
When I got back to the apartment, Silver was in the middle of a call. I walked in, she held up a hand, I paused.
“I don’t mind if it hasn’t been displayed,” she said. “Can you describe it? Yes? Oh, that sounds precious. Is it a royal blue? Dark and rich? Yes, I know the pattern you mean. That’s woven in? Oh, yes. Can you give me video? There we go. Yes, I’m sure that’s what I want. Please send it at once.”
She offered a receiving address that wasn’t our residence, and arranged payment through an escrow house. Once done she closed camera and turned to me.
“I found a beautiful display case for a dagger. How big is the piece?”
“Thirty-five centimeters.”
“Perfect, this is forty.”
“Can you tag them all?”
“Easily. They should withstand most scans.”
“Excellent. Do we have more video for this morning?”
“Some. I went to the library and used a public download.”
“Good.”
She brought up files and I leaned back on the bed, screen across my knees and studied.
Ideally I wanted a close up, high-res pic of the blast area, running video from two angles with a time count, and super slow frame rate in several spectra. What I had were news feeds with buried adlinks and an horrific angle with a lot of shake. Only two cameras had been nearby, only one pointing in the right direction.
I didn’t get much from it, but it was definitely the construction zone I’d passed twice and I could now see the blended edges over the millimeters-thick charge, which he’d even filled with tumbled stone and rolled out. He’d lost some effectiveness, but gained amazing concealment and the blast was disrupted just enough to roll and twist the vehicle instead of blowing it straight up. I couldn’t tell if that was intentional, and I hoped it wasn’t. If so, it was very sophisticated. I was betting on luck, but only because there was no reason for it not to be so. It could have been a failure with a little more disruption. The car was tough.
The car was so tough that even in three pieces, the passenger compartment was largely intact, though Secretary Shandari had lost a leg in the blast and taken frag in the torso. He’d been dead in seconds. However, a few centimeters difference and he might have survived intact.
Sloppy, Kimbo. He’d only had abbreviated demolition training, and specialty improv for mass destruction and disruption. I’d learned how to do anything from crack a window frame without breaking the sheet, disable ships, kill engines on moving vehicles without harming the occupants, and toss debris in a divided cone around a safe zone.
So he was probably behind the curve on that.
I turned off the lamp, shifted a bit to get a better view angle of the screen, and went through it again, this time looking for cues on the witnesses or observers. He or a shill or a camera might have been there to confirm.
We found some possible but nothing concrete. I did grab some faces and compare on my database of known scumbags. None were definite matches, and the only possibles were local. Of course, I hadn’t updated since I left Grainne, and any data on an unregarded dump such as this were bound to be thin and out of date.
I sighed and zoned, running the feeds over and just letting it permeate. Something might jump out at me. Nothing did, and I stared at nothing.
I snapped back to alert when Silver said, “Dan.” I didn’t hear any tone of alarm in her voice. I dropped to normal level and replied.
“Yes?”
“Does my presence disturb you?”
“Are you asking in what way it disturbs me?”
“Yes.”
I sighed.
“It’s easier to list how you don’t.”
I clicked the lamp on and sat up.
She said, “We should have had this discussion already. I was waiting for you to bring it up.”
“Yeah, I don’t do well with people, and I don’t discuss myself well. Partly me. Partly being alone so long. Partly the time I spent on Earth. Feelings aren’t something you discuss. And of course, we were in complete ID cover.”
“If I’m stressing you, we need to resolve it.”
“Okay. You’re about the same age Deni was when I was on Earth.”
“Deni?”
“Senior Sergeant Denise Harlett was a friend, the only real lover I had on and off for a decade, a fine sniper and tech specialist. I chose her for my cell because she was very good, and I knew how she worked. I wanted my deputy to be familiar.”
I sighed, closed my eyes, and said it.
“We screwed up; she got pregnant. That’s where Chelsea comes into this. Deni hid her in the building when they got hit by UN troops. I was out at the time, officially gathering social intel. Actually, I was going irrational from realizing I’d just killed three million people in a morning’s work. So I left her, and Kimbo, and Tyler Jones to die. I feel pretty fucking shitty about that even now, and will forever.”
“You had to save your daughter,” she said.
“Yeah, and that didn’t help with the guilt. I should have gotten the two of them out and made the fuckers pay. You might pick up that I’m not very happy with life.”
“So me being a seventeen-year-old female is the problem?”
“One of the problems, yes. And dammit, I’ve had no romantic partner since then, because I was in hiding, and self-loathing, and don’t have a personality most people can handle when I’m not pissed off, which is constantly. So now I’m next to an attractive woman, stuck to me like a hullsucker, no offense, for the duration. I can’t nail you, I can’t get away to nail anyone else, I want . . . dammit.”
She sat quietly and gave me time to compose myself.
“There was a slaughter on Mtali, too. Partly my idea, partly Naumann’s, but I think he manipulated me into it. Still, it’s my fault. We went around terrifying villages into compliance. I screwed up and let one get the upper hand. The only response possible was to exterminate them . . . all of them . . . dammit.”
I felt nauseated all over again. It had been a total fucking waste, brutal murder, and it had accomplished nothing. I didn’t want to think about it. We’d made sure to destroy all the evidence we found, and now everyone involved was dead, save me and Naumann. I sank my nails into the quilt and twisted.
“So I came back . . . and I was overloaded with stress. I went to the rec center, and I couldn’t . . . I needed release, and I couldn’t, because I needed a human being, and I needed it to be someone compassionate, so I could use them as a tool.
“At that point I found I couldn’t.
“I am an insane sociopath. I see everyone as us or them, and I can do whatever is called for to them—complete suppression of emotion. I can’t do it to my friends. If I were a true sociopath, I wouldn’t care at all. That I care means . . . I don’t know what it means. It means I hate myself for what I do. I’m broken.”
I sat, hoping she’d ask and hoping she wouldn’t. She deserved to know, but nothing would fix it.
“Go on,” she said. Her body language tightened up as she sat back. Dammit, that was bad for our cover.
“Yeah, I’m sexually stressed, among other emotional overloads. It would be unprofessional to grudge fuck you. It would be unfair. It wouldn’t make things better, and I can’t do it. Part of me is overcome with lust, part is fighting it down, and all of me is hating me, and I want the entire universe to die, except I’m the one who should. And it’s possible I’ll need to do something that gets you killed to accomplish this, and it’s between me and Randall and Naumann, and even if you volunteered, you deserve better than to be in this cesspool.”
There was more silence. After a long pause, she said, very softly, “There is nothing I can do to help.”
“I know.”
I could hear the hesitation as she said, “I have a question, which is mission relevant, but probably very painful for you. I don’t know how to phrase it.”
“Go ahead,” I said, with my stomach eating its way out of my belly.
“Why aren’t you a contract killer? From what you describe, you fit an appropriate personality. But you’re not, and he is. That’s important to defining his personality.”
That really, really hurt.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I never did and never do. When I have to, I shut down and . . . except I used to have furious hatred. The illogic. I became exactly the things I hated so I could fight them, and I can’t get back.”
“They broke you,” she said. “I’d say it’s not your fault, but that’s not going to help.”
“I’m glad you realize that,” I said.
“I’ll sleep clothed. Should we have space?” She looked serious and professional, her face in stiff lines, and fuck me if that didn’t make her more exciting.
“When possible, just like we have been,” I said.
“I’ll make it possible. I hadn’t realized until we started this mission how it differs from battlefield. Battlefield, everyone’s a unit, and some have different plumbing. This . . . is intimate and personal, even as an act.”
“Acting’s like that, as you saw.”
“No wonder so many celebrities are freakos. We’ve got that, and combat, and politics.”
“Yes, it calls for special people.”
That stern look again. “Please advise me of my performance so far.”
It helped. I knew she was doing it to push me into a useful mindset, and . . .
Wait, I hadn’t told her much, really, since we started.
Crap. Yeah, self-centered is Ken.
“You’ve saved my ass several times directly. Your technical skills are amazing. We have good rapport and work well together, despite my early misgivings—unwarranted—and no lead up time. The problem here is me, not you, in any fashion.”
She flared her eyebrows and said, “Thank you.”
“It’s fair,” I said. “You were right that you could handle it emotionally. You’ve waded in where needed without hesitation.”
“I still get the shakes. A lot.”
“Shakes afterward are normal and expected.”
“Yes, I knew that. It feels different. Then, I sort of retreat behind training when I have to confront people. It helps.”
“I know,” I said. I must have grimaced again. I’d done that retreating myself, to an extreme.
“Sorry.”
She stretched slightly, said, “Try to sleep. I’ll sit up a while.”
“Thanks,” I said. It was a nice gesture, but I wasn’t going to sleep.
Still, I lay down to try, and had to rehash the discussion, even though that would keep me awake. She sat at the cruddy little table, researching more of something she’d compile into the files.
That had been easier, in the sense of a straightforward explanation, and more horrifyingly violating for my psyche, than I’d expected. I could never forget it, because the survivors of what I did could never forget it. I doubted most of them were very forgiving, either.
I half dozed in and out until dawn. Then I gave up and rose. She was asleep, on the far side of the bed. Even dressed, she had an elegant curve to her hip and a pretty face. I sighed.
I promised myself I’d do whatever I could to get her home in one emotional piece.
CHAPTER 14
The jambiya was lovely. It looked and felt centuries old. The goatskin on the scabbard was tattered in spots. The wood was crumbly. The horn hilt even looked bug bitten. Amazing.
“It is beautiful, and you are a craftsman before Allah,” I said.
“You flatter me. Any praise should be to Allah, for gifting me with my poor skills.”
“I am most pleased. It will make a fine add
ition to my collection. It is so hard to find an original.”
We swapped tea and pleasantries and then I made my goodbyes. They don’t hurry in that culture. You must exchange tea and pleasantries. I kept it under a half hour, barely.
Silver was likewise stunned.
“I wonder how it would hold up to genetic analysis of the organic material,” she asked. “I’m impressed.”
“Well, I figure to sell it as ‘provenance unknown.’ Which is accurate. Buyer can make their own conclusions. Now we need a high starting bid to rule out poseurs and locals, but low enough to inspire interest.”
“After I tag it,” she said. “I’ll put microtic xceivers in the scabbard and inside the hilt plate there.”
“Bolster,” I said.
“If that’s what you want to call the hilt plate I won’t argue with you.” She smiled.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“To sweeten the deal I had this belt cut and beaded across town, and it goes with the case I ordered.” She laid that out again. Yes, it was amazing.
“Package listing?” I asked.
“No, separate, and a few hours apart, at three different houses in this area. The idea is to confirm he has at least one of the three.”
“Makes sense. Do you have dealers set up?”
“I do, all on commission. As a minor benefit, we should get better than half our investment back, perhaps more. We also hope to get it from him.”
“I see nothing wrong with that.”
She seemed a bit distant. I could guess why. Covert covers are always messy, or at least, have always been so for me.
We had a two-week hiatus before ships arrived. There were few regular routes, this being a destitute backwater. There were sporadic charters and tramps with cargo, such as we’d arrived on. There were UN-sponsored relief ships, and some contract haulers for industrial stuff. If we could pin Randall down a little, there was a good chance we could intercept him as he left. I had no moral issues killing him in public in front of a crowd. Well, one. My daughter. Still, if it came down to it, she was old enough to manage on her own and Naumann would ensure she had a guardian for whatever time she needed before she declared herself an adult. Then she’d have all the assets I’d acquired. It was also very likely he’d have me sprung before I actually got to arraignment. I could trust him that much.