Rogue-ARC (20 page)

They all looked amused.

“We have a principal for you to work around, so the important thing is to make sure you can match gaits. Looks aren’t going to be the tell, the giveaway. Movement and mannerisms are. You need to match him, and each other.”

I got more nods.

“So Sayina Meluki will take over on choreography.”

She smiled and waved and said, “We will be at my studio each morning.”

They were all signed on nondisclosures, which I gathered from my past experience were pretty binding. This place was clannish, and they didn’t care much for word outside the clan, but they knew when someone might deliver divine retribution. They’d been hired by someone apparently with money enough to travel between stars for marketing concerns, and they were from different factions themselves. It was easy to imagine vengeance if they reneged.

I’d rented a bus, and we piled in. I took the front, Silver sat next to Meluki. It was clean outside, rattly inside, like so much of this planet. But, it was functional. The clean was a fresh coat of paint, done semi-professionally.

We dropped off a block early and I made sure the driver got a tip and went back to the office. We walked the rest of the way, while I called Schinck and explained what I’d done.

“Give the driver another ten and tell him we’re through for the day,” I said.

“Will do,” he agreed.

True to form, the first item on the agenda was tea. Meluki had an assistant, a cute little thing perhaps fifteen Earth years and disturbingly flexible, who had tea and honey and rice cakes ready. She also swept the studio, which was converted warehouse space with bars, mirrors, chromakeys and some basic vid gear.

You can’t rush them and I didn’t. I had some tea—quite good. It does well in their soil and light, and is more complex than Earth tea but lighter. Some of them knew each other, and chatted a bit. As actors, they were used to working with women and didnstay aloof of Meluki or Silver, but I knew they would resume the charade in public. That was part of the problem for Mtali. Even those who didn’t care for the outdated theopolitics went along for safety and tradition. They didn’t have any problems with their sects here, either. Outside, the fighting continued.

The tea done, they changed into suits and got to practicing walking and stance.

They worked hard all day, and definitely were much closer to his gait, our “standard” gait, by dinner. I made a note to boost the pay slightly. They all thought this was a professionally listed gig. It was a put-on all around. A few extra dinars should fix it.

The next day I had a tailor fit them for matching suits, after which they did another four hours practice. Meluki and I pronounced their presentation excellent.

“You won’t quite fool his father,” I said, without saying whose father it was. They all smiled. Then I had the caterers roll in a cart with braised lamb and accessories. Actors get paid in food as much as in money.

I turned to the skillful Sayina Meluki and thanked her.

“It was a fun project, sir. I’m eager to see how it turns out.”

So was I. If we were correct, Randall was fairly going to shit himself.

“Watch the vid and you’ll see.”

I wasn’t going to key the actors in until show time. They were going to be impressed by the notoriety, though, for good or bad.

In retrospect I feel guilty. I’m sure some of them were harassed or otherwise affected by the event. Just because I needed to do it doesn’t make it right. However, I hoped any trouble they had would be trumped by Alrab’s survival, bastard that he can be.

It took a lot of people for this distraction. I called and reserved rental vehicles. I got a Lincoln van and a Maruto carrier plus a classic, classy Mercedes. I’d drive that, Silver the Maruto, and one of the actors the Lincoln. Once in the area, Silver and I would bail. They’d continue.

I was still taking a bet, but I was confident. This man was the big fish in the area. He was the only one someone would spend large amounts of money to hit, and he was going to be making a very public presentation, then dealing with several bureaus for a lot of money.

Still, I wasn’t positive. Every intel agency in the universe was monitoring these assassinations. If they came up with a coherent analysis, they’d move to interdict and intercept. Was there a political tie? Some economic benefit to each one for a particular nation? We hadn’t found it; no one back home had contacted me with anything. No one else was moving, or indicating they knew. So everyone was keeping quiet and looking for leads.

So far, he was doing a very good job. No MO, except “Exotic.” No connection between targets, except rich and powerful.

Unlikely, but had he won some lottery and was satisfying a personal agenda?

My mission consisted of intel gathering, protection of victims when possible, interdiction of Randall’s logistics, to be followed by execution when possible. They all would have some effect. The more he was hindered, the less marketable he was, and the greater his overhead.

To be fair, if he’d been some petty mercenary or assassin of factional assholes on this planet, and never left the surface, we’d likely have never known and not cared. He could have made a quite adequate living here, too. There were some nice areas.

That fit his persona, though. He’d always wanted to be more. He needed feedback and attention, as reassurance. In this case, headlines and money and offers of further jobs reinforced his belief in his competence.

So I’d keep attacking that.

***

We needed recon on site, and there were several ways to do it. Of course we ran into issues over it.

The first thing we did was send a coded message to the embassy, citing an authorization number and requesting a drop of supplies.

We actually got a one word response of “Denied.” No reason was given. The code was good or they wouldn’t have replied at all, or else queried for further bona fides.

Denial meant one of several things. It could happen if they were short of resources due to some other mission. I’d gotten nothing informing me of that. It could happen if our mission conflicted with one of theirs, but they’d not been told the nature of our mission, and our coding overrode anything less. I hated to think it was due to some self-aggrandizing cock-holster clutching at power for an egoboost, so it was probably some petty little reg-wanker hoping that by enforcing “procedures” he’d make a name for himself.

That still left us without said supplies, especially advanced drones we wanted. However, this was Mtali, and I had a standard map and one of the specialized algorithms taught to Special Warfare officers, that let me mark the location of several caches. One of those would have what we needed, and then some.

We were sufficiently in place I was able to rent a small unitized coordinate excavator. I drove to the cache I needed, which was not the closest, and was a little tougher to reach and therefore less obvious. It was in an outlying park in a copse of trees. With a coverall and some traffic markers, which were obligatory even if unneeded, I managed to dig unhindered, with only a man and his two young sons stopping briefly to watch the machine scoop and scrape and dig. I nodded and smiled, let them watch a few minutes, then gestured from within the rumbling roar that they should keep moving. The man smiled and waved, and I returned it.

Once I had the box exposed, I grabbed stuff from within. I took a standard ruck with a variety of tools and weapons, the container marked for recon and a small, heavy satchel with bullion and readily convertible documents. It didn’t hurt to have more money. I noted mentally so we could inform the embassy as we left planet, in courtesy they’d not extended to us. I replaced the lid, filled it in with the digger, pulled the markers and drove back to down.

That evening we moved to set things in place early. There was a juggling act of service life of the devices, detectability to other intel agencies who were certainly monitoring the events, placement and the moment when the cordon would be too tight for us to deploy them at all.

In addition to scatterable pebble sensors, we had two small drones designed to mimic generic birds, the kind humans took most everywhere. They had biomimetic muscles of memory spring, effective and visually passable brown feathers, small camera eyes and an energy cell good for several divs of operations with a half div (two hours) of flight time. They had limited payload capacity, and transceived on a high speed scramble that was supposed to be hard to locate and crack. The birds’ payload was more pebble sensors.

Silver kept getting better. With a local robe and a wicker basket of laundry she walked right through an office building two squares away. She ripped the locks in the accessways, ascended the roof, pulled on gaffs and scaled the rampart wall on the top level. It was 0300 and she was all but invisible on the ledge, a good hundred and fifty meters up. I drove past the plaza in the van, detouring around some construction, and keeping a tiny swivel camera focused on the forum.

I heard her ask, “How about over the entrance, in that cornice? There’s a spot that could easily hold a nest if it doesn’t now.”

“I see. Concur.”

“Light, please,” she said.

I tagged it with an IR laser for a fraction of a second, which is not easy to do while swerving through traffic. I managed after several tries, and she said, “Operating.”

She let it fly on autonomous for most of the way, then joysticked it for about ten seconds, flaring, hovering and settling. I couldn’t see but could imagine this artificial bird landing, strutting into the nook, settling down and greatly confusing any real bird that was homesteading there.

“Placed. Second. Opposite,” she said.

I drove around the entire square, swung the assembly, zoomed in and panned.

“I want that spot behind the roof buttress,” she said.

“Ready.”

“Tag.”

I splashed it with the laser and she slapped the second one on its way.

“Done,” she said. Good. I didn’t want to orbit too many times. It would get noticed. I proceeded straight out along the current street, gave it three kilometers, turned, paralleled back and pulled into the alley behind the office block. Sections were fenced, barricaded and fielded against intrusion, but there was enough room to drive, and the rough and rutted ground surface encouraged that travel to be slow. Shortly, a figure in black materialized from the shadows, with a basket of laundry. I stopped, she hopped in, and I was in motion again five seconds later.

“I need a d-drink,” she said, and started shivering.

“Devout Muslim women don’t drink,” I said.

Her voice was sharp. “How nice for them. I was on the edge of a building looking down to a very hard ground under a bunch of debris, spiky posts and angled protrusions. Please get me a fucking drink.”

“Got some at the flat,” I agreed. “You did well.”

“I did well by not thinking about it, until it was time to come down. I was absolutely stiff and still managed to steer. Do you have any idea what the ground looks like from that height?” she asked.

I stayed uncomfortably silent. We were in our neighborhood anyway, and I pretended I was busy driving. I recalled hanging on a rope between two vertols, one with failing bearings, a thousand meters up while hostiles shot at me. That was in the nonsecure part of my file and she might have read it.

“Sorry,” she said, and I could feel the heat of her blush.

“Just because I know what it’s like doesn’t make it less of an accomplishment. Very few can do that.”

“Thanks. Stressed,” she said.

“So let’s get you upstairs and medicated.”

Once inside, she kicked off her shoes and threw off the robe, leaving her in a snug body brief. I made one note to remind her that even underwear needed to be local for best cover, and to ignore how well it hugged her form.

Three stiff shots later she sprawled prone on the bed, legs parted and hair a cascade over the pillow.

I grabbed a spare pillow, a seat cushion and a blanket and picked a spot in the corner to crash in. I didn’t want to get anywhere near her when she looked like that, and she needed the rest.

I was unable to get the image out of my mind. I did take the time to note our progress on a coded sheet. Three stiff drinks later, I got to sleep, too.

CHAPTER 12

We booked a hotel room
and stowed our recon gear in it. It overlooked the plaza from 760 meters. That was close enough for good visibility, far enough for discretion, I hoped. It was flagged for privacy, and Silver had bypassed the lock from the outside so housekeeping couldn’t get in. The manager key would work, but no one should need to use it.

That night we drove through the plaza for an advance recon. Already, large areas were cordoned off. I had a strictly passive camera and let it run steady video of our pass. We probably weren’t the only ones scattering tiny sensors in the gutters, and I expected most of them to be swept up by some cleaner. Some would survive in cracks. Little bits of data all helped.

She said, “The birds are still in place, so no one has done a manual check of the façade. It’s possible they’ll throw a shield, a jammer, some kind of override or just an EMP of course.”

“Yeah, it depends on how they perceive the threat level. I’m torn between wanting them to be as good as possible, and being slack enough we can do what we have to unhindered. What do we have on DNA?”

“Nothing too specific. He could have been suited for a few hours. There are minuscule traces that are probably him, but could be false positives.”

“I like that. It’s easy to get caught up in ubertech and miss the obvious.”

“It’s all part of the process,” she half argued, half agreed.

“So let’s head back and get ready.”

I pulled out of the square a different way than previously. The unremarkable van shouldn’t arouse any attention. It looked like a thousand other faded, distressed vehicles in the city, and there were lots of legitimate reasons for us to be there.

“We need to keep an eye on all this construction,” I said, counting the crews at work. “I wonder if they’ll be clearing them out in a few hours. Some are working late.”