Honor of the Clan (38 page)

"The driver of the car. He left the tire marks of his
personal
vehicle and a cigarette butt at the scene."

There were several snickers in the room, mostly from the direction of field teams.

"We have high confidence that that is the total number of participants in the Beadwindow murders."

"Next to the Coacher murder." She waved the pointer and a man's head appeared with a large red X in front of it. "Cullen Wayne Foster, deceased. Thank you, Team Bowie."

Again the room growled. The difference between its prior anger and its present satisfaction was palpable. A number of growls came out "hoo-rah!" Variations echoed from people who had a more specific service history and felt the need to be heard.

"The Maise murders. For the sake of the family present, I will be brief." Thomason had obviously prepared for this specific contingency. Four heads appeared in the tank at once. "From the top left, Robert Mitchell, again. Rahab Graber Bender, aka Candy Leighton." The aging, bleached blonde was no Marilyn Monroe. Not quite over the hill, but compared to the fresh-faced juv girls in the Bane Sidhe ops teams, late twenties looked a bit past the cheap whore's sell-by date.

"Below, Gordy Pace, no middle name, and—" The man on the lower right had a satisfying red X over his face. "—Reginald Erbrechen, deceased. Thank you, Cally."

The thanks had a note of irony, and Cally O'Neal got more than a few accusing looks. There had been a number of people who had devised creative ways for the captive to die, and were very disappointed not to be in on carrying them out.

The other woman's only response was a minuscule nod of acknowledgment, as if killing the man had been a minor administrative detail. Which, of course, it was. Smart way to play it, though. Just a professional matter. Bootleg copies of that segment of the holo were circulating widely, and provided some salve on the disappointments from not doing it personally or protractedly.

"The Swaim murders are the last we have. So far," Charis sighed. They were really going to have to hustle and take out Billy-Bob, which was the collective name she privately assigned to the duo. Their deaths should at least create an operational pause in the kin murders.

"Horton Huey Scout," she said, changing the image to the next perpetrator.

"I'd wanna kill somebody, too," someone mumbled from the back.

"Horton Huey Scout," she repeated. The man was a short, much-freckled redhead. "No, he's not a relative," she said. "Buckley footage of the scene, forensic accounting. He's guilty as hell. Next."

"Bradley Willard Farris." This one was tall and rangy, of indeterminate ethnicity. "We only had approximate height and weight from our footage, but he picked up the money with Scout, has known him for awhile, and footage from various cameras places him in Orlando at approximately the right time. Since he's from Topeka, that amazing coincidence is enough that we're confident ordering his execution. I somehow doubt anyone here has a problem with that.

"That's it. We know who they are, we know where they are. They each stand condemned by the security council and are on the execution list as priority targets. We will be sending teams to carry out sentence. Are there any questions?" The last was meant to be rhetorical.

"Comment," Cally said.

"Yes, Cally?" Charis replied.

"There have been . . . discussions regarding this mission," Cally said. "One of the problems with sending out half the damned Bane Sidhe, Clan O'Neal and DAG on seek and destroy missions is that if the Darhel don't know where we are now, they're probably going to figure it out. One way to avoid this is to just give all the information to the police and let them handle it."

The muttering that accompanied that statement was the sort of mutter Captain Bligh heard on the
Bounty
just before he got tossed in a rowboat.

"But let me explain," Cally said coldly. "No, let me summarize. One: Chain of evidence is broken. Two: The Tir will make it all go away even if it's not. He may make the patsies go away, permanently, but that's not the point. Three: Oh. Hell.
No
.

"For years," she said, striding onto the stage and walking back and forth, "we have been fighting in the shadows. For centuries among the Bane Sidhe. For most of my own life and that's been a long-damned time. We have taken hits. We have had teams taken out. We have lost too many good people. But there was a code. No Darhel, no military and
no dependents
.

"Because it was fight the good guys, us, or go into the cold, DAG went into the cold," Cally said. "O'Neal and non-O'Neal, no muss, no fuss, no bitching, they dropped
everything
they had built in their lives and went into the cold. Because they believed in what we are fighting.

"And now the damned Darhel are going after their
families
? Their
children
?

"If you're a DAGger, you're an O'Neal, dammit," she growled, voice dropping so low it was almost a whisper, every word distinct. "These dead, your dead, are
our
dead, too. Your blood is
our
blood. We know who they are, we know where they sleep. For DAG and the honor of Clan O'Neal, these fuckers are going down—and right the hell now." Cally O'Neal's eyes burned like live coals, a fiery witch-blue that promised debts paid in full.

"DAG and Clan!" someone shouted it, and it erupted into a roar that echoed through the atrium, rafters to floor.

Saturday, January 30, 2055

The complication of this job was that Sarah Andersen had moved from her crappy dorm room into a nice apartment in a gated suburb. Normally, this would have presented a trivial matter for a cyber to deal with, hardly more difficult than tying a shoelace. Unfortunately, it was currently trendy to have a gatehouse with a real live guard manning it.

Tommy wondered if the target had been smart enough to choose this kind of neighborhood because the gate was a strategic choke point for trouble, in which case she might have it electronically monitored and run through a buckley for analysis, or if she just chose it because of the fad. Conspicuous consumption, Fifties style.

Either way, they'd be bypassing it.

The nice thing about places like this was their marketing. Any security features they had that were useful were a selling point for the apartments—so they were all in the brochure on the net. No dogs, no internal camera system out of concerns for the residents' privacy, just a big brick wall and a manned front gate.

It would have been easier if the target's apartment was in a building next to a wall, but no such luck. After they went over the wall, they'd have to walk inward to get to her building.

They'd be using the easiest, most trite ruse in the world to do that. Lovers. He and Cally would be a pair; Sands and George would be a pair. Costuming had forced George into elevator shoes for this, and the team had given him no end of shit for it over dinner. Even though Sands was only five-four, the cover people had thought he'd look more authentic if he were a couple of inches taller. If "authentic" wasn't too clumsy a word, George probably would have found himself stuck with a new nickname.

Lovers as an insertion ruse was trite because it was so damned effective. Since the Bane Sidhe liked to have at least one female per team, they had it down to an art.

The art was slightly marred when Cally slipped going over the wall and ripped a small hole in her jeans, skinning her knee. That wasn't good. He made a mental note to tell the cleaners about it as he wrapped his arm around her shoulder and kissed her in the darkness. First thing you did on insertion. Lovers were often furtive. If anyone had noticed them being furtive, they'd assume the reason.

Despite what he'd said to George, it was
not
like kissing his sister. He was a normal guy, not impervious to her charms, nor she to his, which was a damn good thing. If there was no spark
at all
, it was hard to pull this off convincingly. Fortunately, they'd worked together long enough that just because there was the normal chemistry you'd expect didn't mean they were going to turn into raging lust bunnies over each other. Part of the job. They'd done it before, they'd do it again.

It was a little like kissing the chick you took to the movies when you were interested in her friend but couldn't get anywhere. Nice, yeah. The obvious turn on, yeah. He was just glad he was rarely paired with George.

Sands was nice. She was also obviously practical as all shit. Not a romantic bone in that girl's body. When Papa got back and Sands was on some other team, he might nudge her to see what she could do for George. Fellow operators made good playmates. Everybody was a juv, everybody understood the job, everybody understood the risks, but you didn't do incest in your own team. Mostly, they kept it to no strings play.

Of course he went for the wandering hands, to give Cally something to slap with visible insincerity. Whoa. That one was real. He winced, making a mental note not to do
that
again.

"Ow," he muttered against her lips.

"You're lucky it was just a slap. Here's our building. Shut up and kiss me," she whispered, stopping just in the shadows away from one of the streetlamps.

He forbore to mention that she was the one talking, not him. Logic didn't come into it, and his hand stung already. After a few minutes of sticking to acceptable transgressions, she grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and tugged him to the front door of the building, managing to stay all over him on the way.

Cally picked the lock on the door, backwards, one-handed, while pulling off her coat, as quickly as if she'd had a key. After thirty years in the field, some things got automatic. If any long-time resident happened to actually know who their neighbors were and recognize that the two didn't belong, they were already marked down as harmless. Lovers didn't usually consider burgling to be a hot date.

She propped her ass against the stair railing, feet spread, and he stepped between them to continue the charade of people who were about to go upstairs and have wild monkey sex. God, was he ever glad Wendy couldn't see this. She'd have his guts for garters.

George and Amy came in hand in hand, looking young, sweet, and glowing. To look at Sands' lively, cheerful eyes, you'd never suspect what was behind them.

Upstairs, after her buckley indicated no IR source close to the apartment door, Cally shrugged and picked the lock. She and Tommy were through, fast, splitting to each side. Tommy was on the hinges side, so it was Cally who slapped a husher onto the wall next to the door.

Sands and George were through the door between them as they split, passing through to the kitchen as Tommy and Cally finished clearing the living room.

"Clear," Tommy said as he and Cally hit the hall leading back to the bedrooms. It was a two bedroom, two bath floor plan.

"Clear."

Cally and Tommy heard George say it through their ear dots. It had the hollow sound of words spoken near an active husher which, of course, it was. Per SOP, as soon as they hit the kitchen Sands or Schmidt would have slapped a husher on the wall. Probably both of them. Sands hadn't had a chance to get that sixth sense about your teammates—where they were, what they were doing, where they were going to be next—nor had they with her.

Cally and Tommy turned into the first bedroom as Sands took the bathroom across the hall, George covering the hallway itself.

"Clear."

"Clear."

Down the hall, the door at the end was to the master bedroom. As he and Cally took up positions on each side of it, he heard a cough and saw Cally's arm jerk, blood welling. He registered it in an instant, as Sands kicked the door in and he and she entered, automatically splitting for halves of the room, but Sands got the prize.

A woman, the target, screamed, "I didn't do it! I didn't know—"

Tommy heard two sharp cracks as Sands nailed the target's center of mass.

"—what he was going to do," she trailed, as Sands' pistol came down the second time from recoil.

It cracked again, and a red hole appeared in the target's forehead, brains and blood blasting out the exit wound to splatter on the wall behind her.

"Yeah, but you knew what he
did
," Sands said grimly.

"See? Lesson one. Don't talk until
after
the target's dead." She grinned brightly at Tommy.

"I knew I liked her," Cally grinned at Sands from the doorway where George had divested her of her coat and sleeve and was finishing a field dressing.

"Noise?" Sands asked, then her eyes fixed on the husher stuck just inside the door.

Tommy saw it register with her that the sound did have that hollowness.

"I got it. You looked a bit busy," Cally said, stepping in to take a better look at the body. "Damn, Sands, that was as near perfect as you can get. Surgical.
Nice
."

Team Kemuel was pure Bane Sidhe, and had been around long enough to develop its own traditions, one of which included a motto, "Justice flies on swift wings." They also had a tradition of planning their ops in a poetic direction whenever it absolutely would not interfere with the mission. Operational requirements were first and always, but Kemuel's pride was applying enough creativity to their planning to do both, without getting too cute.

They had asked for this target specifically. Adam Marcus Ludlum, a fence now, wheelman in his younger days, he lived with his aging mother and had elected to do one last wheel job because the money was right. It was his last wheel job, all right. Participating in the murder of Leellen Beadwindow had been a very bad choice.

It was three in the morning when they picked the lock and let themselves in. The nature of this mission was in speed rather than subtlety. The four of them had slouched in, walking, from two different directions. Leaving would be simpler. Straight out the front door, which faced right onto the street, into the car and out.

They cleared the rooms with brisk efficiency, popping the old mother with a Hiberzine dart, and darting the target as well. It was as easy as a bullet. Easier, as a dart gun had no recoil.