Beginnings: Worlds of Honor 6, page 28
part #6 of Worlds of Honor Series
Unless, of course, Ardmore’s . . . enthusiasm was likely to lead him to kill the girl too soon. Worried or not, Benton-Ramirez y Chou wasn’t going to continue committing treason if he wasn’t convinced his sister was still alive to suffer if he didn’t.
“I think if he wants to have any chance at all of ever getting her back alive, he’ll geek to at least the first couple of demands,” he replied after a moment. “I doubt we’ll be able to string him along forever, though. Once he realizes he’s not getting her back, he’ll pull the plug.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure what he’ll do at that point. He could try something really stupid if he thinks he’s figured out where she is, but that’s not going to happen. Why?”
“Because I don’t think he is,” Ardmore said, and licked his lips slowly, his expression ugly. “I think no matter how hard I work at convincing him to be reasonable, he’s not gonna cough up the information more than maybe once. And I’ll lay you odds he’s not gonna give us accurate info even the first time. I’m looking forward to that.” He released Allison’s hair with a flick of his fingers that bounced her head limply, and looked at Manischewitz with eyes that glittered hungrily. “I’m really looking forward to it. ’Cause when he sees what happens to his darling little sister in glorious HD, I think what he’s gonna do is put a pulser dart through his own brain.”
Manischewitz nodded slowly. That was his own estimate of Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s ultimate response when he hit the limit of what he could—or would—deliver and realized how agonizingly his sister had died because he had. Still, the Beowulfer was a tough little bastard; it was possible he’d refuse to kill himself and dedicate what remained of his life to the pursuit of vengeance, instead. Manischewitz had taken that possibility into consideration when he planned the op, which was why Benton-Ramirez y Chou was scheduled to die on his final information delivery. A nice, nasty little bomb hidden in the dead drop and remote-detonated would see to that, without anyone ever being stupid enough to take the chance of letting Benton-Ramirez y Chou into range of a live human being.
“Just don’t get carried away,” he told Ardmore. The other man’s expression tightened, and Manischewitz shook his head. “He’s going to need a little more convincing even after he coughs up the first data dump, so don’t worry. You’ll get your chance to ‘convince him.’ But if we push too hard, too fast on the very first date, he’s likely to balk or try something desperate the next time. These things have to be handled properly, Giuseppe. And”—he looked directly into Ardmore’s eyes—“if I were you, I’d be careful how much time I spent on camera with her myself. You know what cyber forensics can do with visual data, no matter how carefully we camouflage things.”
“Don’t worry.” Ardmore smiled and stroked the neural whip as if it were some treasured pet. “All he’ll see is her and the end of this.” He stroked the whip again. “And I’ll make sure he gets a really nice close-up of her eyes.”
* * *
“Christ, Jacques!” Colonel Sean Hamilton-Mitsotakis stared at the small, slender man standing in his office. “Allison? Right here in Grendel?”
“Why not?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou asked harshly. “God never promised me a cloak of invulnerability for my family. I should’ve remembered that. I should’ve made her take more precautions! But I didn’t, and whatever happens to her is my fault.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Hamilton-Mitsotakis snapped, shaking himself back on balance. “You did warn her, and unlike some of the other members of your family, Allison always had a pretty damned good idea of what you do. And you know as well as I do what kind of escalation this represents. They’ve never tried something like this right here on Beowulf any more than we’ve ever mounted an op against one of the Manpower families on Mesa, and you know why.”
“Well, they’ve sure as hell changed their operational parameters this time, haven’t they, Sir?” Benton-Ramirez y Chou retorted, and Hamilton-Mitsotakis nodded.
“Yes, they have, and there’s going to be hell to pay for it, I promise you that,” he said harshly. Hamilton-Mitsotakis was the CO of the BSC’s Special Actions Group. That meant, among other things, that he was the man who assigned assassination targets and planned the operations to carry them out, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou knew all about the folder of high-level Manpower executives and shareholders tucked away in the colonel’s files.
“In the meantime, though,” Hamilton-Mitsotakis continued, “we’ve got to get her back. I assume since you’re talking to me that you’ve got at least something in mind?”
“Not very damned much,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou admitted bleakly. “They’re using her com to make sure I know they’ve really got her, and because there’s no way a trace could lead back to anyone besides Alley. But they’ve disabled the locator function—trust me, I already checked—and they’re bouncing it through at least a couple of hundred intermediaries before they get to me. Not to mention the fact that Allison has the best privacyware on the market.” He grimaced. “In fact, I helped her pick it out. There’s no way anyone’s tracing that signal, and that means they could be anywhere on the frigging planet. For that matter, they could be off-planet; the delay with all the intermediate relays could be hiding the signal lag.”
Hamilton-Mitsotakis nodded. Beowulfers took their civil liberties seriously, and the system constitution had established hard, definitive limitations on electronic surveillance from the very beginning of the colony. Citizens had an absolute right to the best privacyware—not just encryption software, but software to disable locator functions and tracking techniques—without government-mandated back doors and workarounds. In general, the colonel approved of that state of affairs, but it could be a pain in the arse for law enforcement . . . or for the Biological Survey Corps on the very rare occasions when it operated on Beowulf itself.
Which opened another can of worms.
“I don’t suppose you’ve cleared a waiver of Prescott-Chatwell?” he asked.
“No, Sir, I haven’t.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou looked at him levelly. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Prescott-Chatwell was the law which specifically prohibited the BSC, which was not a domestic police agency, from mounting ops in the Beowulf System, and violation of it was punishable by up to thirty T-years in prison. It could be waived under special circumstances, but that required a signoff at the level of the Planetary Board of Directors. Getting that sort of signoff was a time-consuming business, and time, unfortunately, was something Allison Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn’t have a lot of.
Now Hamilton-Mitsotakis looked into Allison’s brother’s eyes for a long, still heartbeat or two and then smiled slowly.
“Problem? Why should I have a problem? As far as I’m concerned, given the information these bastards want you to hand over, this is obviously a direct attack on the BSC. As such, it’s clearly my responsibility to respond immediately in order to contain the damage. There’ll be plenty of time to sort out any minor jurisdictional issues once the immediate threat’s been contained.”
There was a moment of silence, then he shook himself.
“So if we can’t track them, what do we do?” he asked.
“All I can think of for right now is to play for time, Sir,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou admitted flatly. “I think they’re going to want a physical drop, because they’ll be too afraid of what I might piggyback onto an electronic transfer. I doubt they’ll be foolish enough to arrange the delivery anywhere near their actual base, but the problem with a physical drop is that somebody has to pick it up. Our best bet—and it’s not much of one—is to set up surveillance of the drop and follow whoever collects the data. It’ll probably be a drone, somebody who doesn’t know squat, but eventually that information has to reach them if it’s going to do them any good. All we can hope is that Alley survives long enough for us to follow the breadcrumbs to somebody I can . . . convince to tell me where she is.”
He met his superior’s gaze levelly, and his eyes were bleak and cold. Cold with the promise that anyone who knew where his sister was would tell him in the end; bleak with the knowledge of how little likelihood there was that he’d ever have the chance to find her.
* * *
Alfred Harrington climbed out of the taxi and closed the hatch behind him.
He’d had it deposit him four and a half kilometers west of his destination, on the far side of a ridgeline from the people he was interested in. Hopefully, they wouldn’t notice it, although he couldn’t be positive they hadn’t already picked him up. It all depended on the sensor systems they might have installed, and given the fact that they clearly wanted as small and unobtrusive a footprint as they could get, they were probably relying solely on passives. That would tend to limit the amount of reach and definition they had, but there was no point pretending that if they’d been watching, they wouldn’t have seen the taxi fly over them, then swing to the northwest and—hopefully—disappear. The AI had been willing to come in to his present position at what passed for low altitude, but before he actually told it to land, it would never have agreed to violate the minimum hard floor of two hundred meters mandated by Beowulf’s safety regulations. He was lucky it was prepared to wait for his return . . . and it had agreed to that only because he’d left a signed, thumbprinted authorization for it to keep the meter running against his card. At this rate, he was going to owe the cab company a solid month’s worth of his lieutenant’s pay.
It was possible he’d be making use of that taxi again. That was the plan—such as it was, and what there was of it, at any rate—although he wouldn’t have cared to bet anything important on the likelihood. The best he could hope for was that before he’d cut back to the south, his approach had circled wide enough that the ridgeline had cut off any of the bad guys’ sensors’ line of sight to the taxi’s actual approach and landing. And that by keeping it on the ground, he could prevent it from doing what it would normally have it done: lift straight up on counter-grav before heading back to Grendel for another fare. Even if he’d gotten in undetected, that would have been a flare-lit tipoff to any half-awake lookout.
This is insane, he told himself almost calmly as he made his way through the dense, unfamiliar Beowulfan trees. He might not know the names of the local species, but he’d spent enough years hunting and hiking in Sphinx’s forests and the dark-bellied clouds were sweeping in from the east. He could smell the approaching rain, and a steadily freshening wind tossed the limbs overhead and filled the woods with the sighing song of dancing leaves and branches as they were flung about. A sense of motion and energy and life filled the air about him, and the scents of leaf mold, bark, and damp earth filled his nostrils. For the first time since his arrival in Grendel, he was actually in his element again, and in other circumstances he would have enjoyed the hike.
Not under these.
That other presence—Allison—was in front of him. He’d located her by the simple expedient of flying almost due north from the city, directly on his bearing to her, until suddenly that unerring sense of her presence was behind him again. The taxi had just crossed what appeared to be a nice-looking, remote hunting lodge, and as it had circled away to the west, he’d felt the bearing shift. There was no question in his mind. As preposterous as it sounded, he was certain Allison Chou was in that hunting lodge.
And if she is, what are you going to do about it, hotshot? he asked himself harshly. You’re not a cop. You’re not even a Marine anymore. And even if you were, you’re not a Beowulfer. You’ve got exactly no authority or jurisdiction on this planet, idiot! And even if that weren’t the case, what’re you going to do? Just shoot the first poor bastard you see?
He grimaced, but he also reminded himself of the Marine Corps’ motto: “Can Do!” And of the mantra of every Marine noncom who’d ever lived: improvise, adapt, and overcome. If there’d ever been a time and place for both of them, that time and place were here and now. And it wasn’t like he’d never had to do it before.
A flicker of fear went through him with that thought, and he felt his hands begin to shake. He stopped in the dense shadow of a towering, vaguely oaklike tree and held those hands up in front of him, clenching them into hard-knuckled fists.
Stop that! This isn’t Clematis!
Maybe it wasn’t, but he was the same man he’d been on Clematis, and that was what really frightened him. That he was the same man, with the same monster deep inside, eager to get out.
He stood there for long, dragging seconds, trapped between the memory of what had been and the fear of what might be again, and panic pulsed at the base of his throat. He couldn’t. He couldn’t let it out again. He just couldn’t.
But then his head snapped up, his eyes wide. She was aware once more, and she was frightened—terrified. And then a dreadful, jagged bolt of anguish ripped into him. Not his—hers! The mere echo of it went through him like a vibro blade, and his teeth clenched. His hesitation disappeared.
There was a time for monsters, he thought.
* * *
Tobin Manischewitz heard the scream through the closed door and shook his head. He supposed it was unreasonable to expect anything else, and Ardmore did have a point about the need to record something suitably motivating for Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou. But there was no need to start in on the girl this early.
No need except that it’s how he gets his kicks, anyway, he thought.
Another scream, this one shriller and higher than the last, came through the door, and he grimaced. He thought about opening the door and telling the other man to lay off, but he didn’t think about it very hard. In the end, it was no skin off his nose what happened to her before they disposed of her once and for all, and there was no point pissing Ardmore off any sooner than he had to. But he wasn’t going to get any work done with that racket going on next door, so he gathered up his computer and headed down the stairs.
Yet another scream followed him.
* * *
Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou sat in the small, anonymous office. He knew all of the thirteen men and women assembled in the ready room on the far side of the borrowed office’s door, completing the final checks on their gear. None of them were members of his own team, but he’d worked with several of them before, and all of them were good, solid people. Good, solid people who wouldn’t have been noticed by anyone who was watching his own teammates as they drew ammunition and climbed into their armored skinsuits.
It was unlikely he was going to have anything for them to do, but if he did—if the bastards who had Allison gave him even a hint of where to find them—he was prepared to drop the entire world in on their heads, and screw Prescott-Chatwell’s provisions. The only chance they’d have would be to go in quick and dirty, rushing the Manpower thugs who had to be behind this. The odds were frighteningly high that Allison would be killed in that kind of confused firefight, but her chances would be infinitely better than if the people who had her were given even a few minutes to kill her or turn her into a human shield.
Now all he could do was sit here, waiting for the synthesized voice to contact him over his com and tell him where to take the data he’d been ordered to steal.
* * *
Alfred Harrington reached the fringe of the cleared area around the hunting lodge and made himself pause. It was hard—one of the hardest things he’d ever done—and the waves of terror, the jagged bursts of agony, coming to him over that impossible link battered at him. He didn’t know if she would have been able to sense his proximity the way he sensed hers even under normal circumstances; the possibility that she could sense him now, through the maelstrom of her fear and her pain, had to be vanishingly small. She couldn’t know where he was, yet her frantic, silent plea reached out to him, gripped him like fiery pincers. He had to get her out of there! Yet if he simply charged in, he would succeed only in getting both of them killed. He knew that, but he also knew he might be running out of time. They were hurting her deliberately—terribly—yet he had no idea why.
The one thing he clung to was that the entire operation had been far too elaborate if all they’d wanted was to kill her. A pulser dart from a passing air car would have sufficed for that. It was entirely possible they wanted, for whatever sick reason, to take their time, make sure she suffered enough to satisfy them first, and that thought dried his mouth with a terror he’d never felt for himself. Either way, they were unlikely to kill her immediately, though. He couldn’t know that, but the cold focus he’d forced upon his thoughts told him it was more likely than any other outcome . . . and that if he simply went crashing in in some sort of berserk charge, they would kill her.
The good news was that since he’d been planning on spending the day in his apartment, catching up on Dr. Mwo-chi’s notes, he’d been in civvies, not uniform, so at least anyone who saw him wasn’t going to automatically assume he represented some official law enforcement or military agency. That probably meant they were unlikely to just shoot him and be done with it instead of trying to fob the nosy neighbor off with some cover story. Presumably they’d be perfectly ready to kill him if it looked like they couldn’t fob him off, but he ought to have at least a few seconds before they started trying to.
The better news was that even though he was no longer officially a Marine, some habits died hard. That was why he’d paused to collect the contents of his closet safe, and he reached inside his windbreaker to touch the butt of the pulser in the holster under his left armpit. Bewoulf’s laws on weapons and the use of deadly force were less . . . understanding than the Star Kingdom’s, which was why it had stayed safely locked up in his safe since he’d arrived at ISU. Beowulfers weren’t totally unreasonable about guns the way some people—Old Earth came to mind—were, however, and he was a military officer, even if he was on-planet as a medical student. That created a certain gray area . . . and under the circumstances, he wasn’t all that worried about a misdemeanor weapons charge even if the matter ever came up.
