Rogue-ARC (22 page)

Maybe he was safe.

I watched Alrab’s car turn onto the main boulevard, and relaxed a little more. That vehicle was armored, and now in motion.

Then a car in the fourth entourage back erupted into the air, flipped over in three large pieces like a broken omelet, and crashed in a burning heap.

Naturally, he’d gone for a car bomb, because they were so common here who would question it? He may even have had several set up.

I snapped, “Get a residue trace!” but Silver was already out the door with a camera and a scarf.

I found a channel that showed the route, captured the vid and ran it several times. I couldn’t be sure at this resolution, but it looked awfully like a painted gel. Simple enough. Have a street department truck roll through and lay down gel platter charges, coat with road surface material so it looks like a minor repair, move on. No one would question it. I hadn’t questioned it, because I’d driven past that “construction site” during two recons. The dogfucker.

Only who was the victim? Were we wrong or had he missed?

I watched the news. The fourth vehicle was UN Bureau of Progressive Investment chairman of the Mtali Development Fund, Arman Lee.

Twenty minutes later, Silver was back, with a vial we could hopefully test.

“I will be fucked,” I said.

“Dan?”

“It actually was a faction matter. He was favoring the Amala, who are poor and starving and would be better off dead. The Shia don’t like that. At all. Nor the Sunni for that matter. Either way, one of them decided he was a bigger hassle than Alrab.”

“Trif,” she said. “What now?”

“Got anything?”

“Plenty of trace on the explosive.”

“Confirm. We’re close and hot enough we might get a lead.” I hoped.

“Our drones are down, so are everyone else’s.”

“The caches are all clandestine purchase, usually local. Can’t be traced to us. And the drone swarm was also to ID us. Or at least we have to assume it turned out that way.”

“Is he stalking us now, then?”

“I hope so. That’ll make it a lot easier. More likely, he’ll take any opportunity he gets, but won’t want to reveal the compromise. We might get lucky, though. Keep in mind I trained for this for most of a decade. I trained him for one mission. A very deep mission, but a single approach.”

***

He was gone. I suspected we’d seen the last of the chameleons, though. The gimmick was compromised and he knew it.

Silver was agitated, lip trembling. It didn’t look like fear. It looked a lot like anger or frustration.

“We keep catching the tail end and missing him,” she complained. “Failure every time.”

“Not failure,” I said. “We’re getting closer. We IDed the wrong target this time, and still got close enough for good intel. That’s a positive.”

“In the meantime, people keep dying.”

She reminded me of myself when younger. Such things had made me furious. They violated good order.

What would she say to my position that most of the victims were assbags who deserved it? I objected to Randall making the moral call on people’s deaths, and I understood the risk he generated for the rest of the community, but I had no sorrow for high-ranking politicians and their friends, all of them corrupt, becoming the centerpieces of elaborate funerals.

However, that passion was part of what drove her, so I needed to support it.

“We have managed to help limit collateral casualties,” I said.

Sighing and steadying, she said, “I suppose that’s something. He’s mocking us, though.”

“Part of the game for him,” I said. “Hell, for me too. We ran a hell of a block. He ran a hell of a diversion and shuffle.”

She nodded.

Then I said, “What we need is something he can’t resist, with a nanotransponder. It also has to not be obviously something he can’t resist.”

“You don’t want much.” She looked annoyed, but redirected back to the project from beating herself over failure.

“I’m sure it’s simple. I’m just not sure what it is.”

She asked, “What does he like that’s unique enough he can’t just buy it anywhere?”

“That’s a good line of inquiry,” I said. “He’s getting paid a lot of money for this, we assume, or else he’s an idiot. What’s he doing with that money? It’s not a drug habit. He isn’t the gambling type and could get out of debt by relocating. He doesn’t have a family that’s being extorted. He’s saving it for something or spending it on something.”

“What were his hobbies?”

“He didn’t seem to have a lot. He loved Projects work. Little socializing in his past and none while we were operating. He did read books. He enjoyed the old bound style. Very fond of knives.”

“Would he collect exotic stuff then?” She sat and started twiddling with a touchpad. She wanted to do something productive, or at least make a spreadsheet.

“He might.”

“Would he rent sex?”

“Likely. I couldn’t say what type, though. He made eyes at Deni, but a lot of people did. Tyler didn’t seem to interest him. I recall he liked one of the dancers at Phil’s. A lot. So, he’d probably go for tall women, mixed race.”

She shrugged. “That rules me out.”

I flared eyebrows at that. “While I appreciate your dedication to the mission, you do not want to do that. Not unless you are much better unarmed than your record says.”

She shook and shivered a little. “No, I’m rather glad, actually. I always wondered what the protocol was for seducing someone for the good of the Force.”

“Much like a suicide mission. Volunteers only. Anything else would be rape.”

“That makes sense and reassures me,” she said, with a twist of her head. “So,” she continued, “I could make up a coded nanotransponder, which we can insert in several items and market at auction.”

“That’s possible. It requires knowing the kind of blades he’d be interested in, or the books, and making it desirable without being blatantly obvious.”

“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.”