When Livvy called Bruno Morelli’s home code a woman answered. Chris had mentioned, after they were introduced, that Bruno had been happily married for over sixty years. Cara, that was her name.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” the pleasant female voice answered when Livvy asked to speak to him. “You do realize that it’s 2230?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Livvy said. “Unfortunately I still need to speak to him. It’s important. Urgent really.”
“But not quite an emergency yet, and you’re counting on Bruno to help prevent one.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Whom may I say is calling?”
“Livvy Hutchins. I’m Chris McGregor’s new partner.”
“Ah, yes. Well, my dear, I’m quite sure Bruno will talk to you,” the voice said, then, in a muffled shout, “Bruno. It’s Chris’ Botticelli Venus.”
“How is Chris?” the voice asked, back on the comu.
“Currently missing.”
“Hmm, and how long has that been going on?”
“Over 28 hours now.”
“I see,” the voice said, and then again, muffled. “Bruno, you might as well get dressed and take the call in the car.
“Hang on. He was in the laver, but if you give him another moment, he’ll be in the car, and you can explain it to him while he’s on his way.”
Twenty minutes later Livvy was in Bruno’s office in the Special Tactical unit. She’d told him as much as she could over the comu while he was on his way. Given the blanket order from the Chief, that wasn’t much. In the end, he knew little more than what she’d told Cara: Chris was missing and hadn’t responded to communication for over 28 hours, and that she and Chris had been working on a major case that had given Livvy reason to be worried.
“Look, I know how LLE works. I’ve been supplying McGregor with bags of tricks for almost 60 years, and never asked a question I didn’t need answered to do the job. But you are one little… “ Bruno said, frowning briefly and then giving her an apologetic smile, “… woman, and most of the guys LLE goes after have plenty of resources, which means brigades of lethally-armed muscle-bound security lugs.”
“Yes, but I’m quick and strong on initiative,” Livvy said. “Look, Bruno, I’m going after McGregor with or without your help, and I don’t have much time.
“If it comes down to numbers, which we can surely anticipate it will, McGregor, or even you, won’t weigh in that much heavier than I do. It’s your tricks and my enterprise. Synergy.”
Bruno assessed her. He wasn’t going to find a nick in her resolve, she thought, which meant that he was worrying about her capabilities. She sat up straight and firmed her jaw, concentrating on projecting the kind of image that would dispel his concerns about her atrophied tactical skills.
“Okay, so we need to start with the basics,” Bruno said finally. “I’m gonna guess it’s been a while since you’ve been on the street in some situations. You know about the reversal implants the pros are getting now? They’re better than ours.”
Livvy nodded.
“These mickey-mouse gangs of security guards most of the rich are hiring get them, too. The guards put it on their friggin’ resumes.
“So. In a take-no-prisoners kind of scenario you want to use duoloads and put two in everyone. They have a short, very fast-acting sop and a much longer-acting one. They’re still considered safe so you can use two even on non-players, but even three is unlikely to kill anyone, especially if they have an implant. Use ‘em if you need to. I’ll set you up with some clips of duoload darts that will work with a standard Stinger.
“What else do you think you’ll need?” Bruno asked.
Livvy put her elbows on Bruno’s desk, rested her chin in her hands, and prepared to pay close attention.
“What kind of bombs do you have?”
Bruno smiled.
When Agnew had called Bedford’s mansion a fortress he had exaggerated. There were no ramparts, canons, or visible guards, other than one man at the gatehouse. There was a complete seven meter tall perimeter wall topped with glass and razor wire with an ironwork gate at the driveway – the old ways were often still the best, especially if one worried about technical failures – and there were undoubtedly security acueyes with comprehensive coverage of the house, inside and out. The rest of the guards would be inside. Not a fortress, a fortified mansion. She parked three blocks away, and resigned herself to waiting. She was so tired of waiting.
During the half hour she’d delayed before confronting Agnew in the bar, she’d accessed 3-D utility maps of all of Bedford’s known properties in the city and narrowed her search down to a few possibilities. By mentioning the bunker, which of course wasn’t portrayed on anything official, Agnew had given her a final direction. She couldn’t confirm; Chris’ comu positioning system was jammed, as it had been all day, but this was her one chance and her best information. McGregor had to be in this house.
“Why should our luck start now?” Livvy muttered to herself. From the passenger seat, Louie wagged his tail hesitantly.
“Yes, Louie, we’re going in to look for Chris,” she said. “Soon.”
She had an hour before the time she had selected for going in, and while she waited she unpacked and repacked her satchel of Bruno’s gifts, reviewing the use, operation, and position of each one. LLE was even more powerful than she’d imagined but she knew she was going well beyond its legal mandate, both in what she was going to do and how she was going about it. It no longer mattered. Later, when she had time, she’d dwell on the twist LLE gave her philosophical question: did this make her a good cop or a bad one?
Chris had warned her: a private little war. Megan and the Chief had unofficially sanctioned it. Bedford had asked for it. At the moment, fueled by rage over Mickey Bedford’s death and Jesse’s kidnapping, she was looking forward to it. Handy thing, rage.
She was counting on a number of factors to make her effort possible: Chris would be in the underground bunker, safe from her first assault and retaliation from the guards. The element of surprise, and the fact that she would be almost alone, would make it difficult for Bedford’s security to respond effectively. And more importantly, Bedford’s guards wouldn’t be calling in anyone from the public sector because the last thing Bedford wanted was regular Enforcement responding to the breach. She was cool with that; secrecy was part of her mandate, and everyone she met would be his private security, and fair game.
And last but not least, they wouldn’t expect that she could be lead straight to Chris’ location. They wouldn’t expect Louie.
Her hour was up. She got out of the car, Louie following, and hefted her pack onto her shoulder, where it settled securely. It was a cool night with a quarter moon and a slight breeze. The only sounds were from a few mechanicals along the distant arterial roads, the whispery scrunch of her shoes on the sidewalk, the crickets, and Louie’s intermittent excited panting. When she got to a point across the street and far enough from Bedford’s property that she should still be out of range of the acueyes at the gate, she paused and dropped to one knee by Louie’s side.
This part couldn’t be helped. She could only hope that Louie was as smart as she believed he was.
“Louie, gate,” she said, speaking clearly and pointing at the ironwork gates 80 meters ahead. “Gate. Sit. Stay now.”
If Louie was puzzled, he didn’t show it, other than to cock his head to one side and look her in the eyes. He sat silently and watched her walk away.
This part of the city was full of mature trees and some of them, fortunately, were close to Bedford’s perimeter wall and probably cherished by neighbors who didn’t share his paranoia. If Bedford was obeying the strict privacy laws enacted at the beginning of the century, and she was counting on his powerful neighbors to compel him to do so, then he’d have no acueyes overlooking his neighbor’s property. On the other hand, Bruno had assured her that those same neighbors would respect her LLE sleeve insignia when they saw it glowing for their acueyes. They would certainly monitor her intrusion like an owl tracking a mouse, he’d said, but would know better than to interfere. She was LLE.
She crept along the outside of Bedford’s perimeter wall a short distance through the neighbor’s yard and approached the tree she had spotted earlier during her drive-by. Using it would allow her to avoid any early contact with the wall, which was probably touch-sensitive, or at least she had to assume so.
Tonight, getting into her first position would be the last time she would be able to hesitate. Once she left there, she couldn’t stop again until she found her partner. As she climbed up and settled into a good place to sit in the lower branches she thought briefly of Robert Maas, and experienced a bitter aftertaste of vulnerability. If there was after all a perimeter acueye capturing her every move, they were just waiting to find out if she was alone before starting to take shots at her, and she would have no chance at success.
Forcing herself to wait one more minute, she took her first good look at the house. As far as she could see Bedford’s house plans and the security plans for the neighbor’s were both precisely matching the plans she’d gotten from the city’s building permit files. She opened her expandable pack, and while she continued to survey the compound with half her attention, she took out the launcher piece by piece and she assembled it by touch. Now, she heard only the crickets, the soft rustling of the leaves surrounding her, and the incongruous clicks of the launcher pieces snapping together. Other than the guard at the gate, she saw no movement.
Here we go, she thought. With the launcher set to automatic fire and her entire supply of 30 Spritzer’n’Smokes, or Spritzers as Bruno called them, fit into the magazine, all she had to do was aim so that they landed, one every 2 seconds, in variable positions on the roof. The launcher made only a small puff when the bombs were fired, but they hit the roof and occasionally the side of the house with thumps and clanking that was surely enough to awaken everyone inside. The Spritzers that landed on the roof all rolled off onto the balconies and decks and terraces with which the mansion was generously outfitted, making rattling sounds as they rolled.
When she’d fired off the last Spritzer, she tossed the launcher over the wall into Bedford’s yard and lobed the Basebombs at the windows across the side of the house by hand. They exploded instantly with a louder pop, still quiet enough to keep the noise within the perimeter wall, and sprayed dangerous dissolving liquids over the glass, giving her a choice of entrances. Thirty seconds after landing, the Spritzers began going off with a soft hiss. They were as spectacular as Bruno had promised, sort of a combination of sustained low-key, sizzling fireworks that confounded infrared and motion detectors, and copious thick smoke that not only enclosed the entire two floors of the house, but billowed across the yard with the slight breeze.
It was time to move. She threw her armored tarp over the sharp hazards, tossed her pack after the launcher and jumped, briefly settling on top of the wall. From there, she grasped the lower edge of the tarp hanging inside the wall and swung down into Bedford’s home territory. Her grip on the tarp was enough to let her hang for a second and then she dropped with a soft thump, rolled, and got to her feet in one continuous, unforgiving move.
There was no phalanx of gunmen rushing like apparitions out of the engulfing smoke and the sustained flaring of the Spritzers, so she wouldn’t need to drop her pack, throw hands in the air and pretend she’d made a wrong turn. They hadn’t spotted her approach, and now, the acueyes had to be in a three-way daze. Cloaked in the sensory confusion, she should be essentially invisible.
First Louie. Since she was as blind as they were, it was a matter of vectors of planned movement, using the house for orientation. A 50 meter rush to the house through drifting smoke and the sparkling light show she’d created, then a turn towards the gate, tossing some pure Smokes through the dissolved windows as she picked up speed passing along the side of the house. Her advantage approaching the gate was that she knew where the gatekeeper had been standing. She ran towards that spot out of the smoke, already aiming, and hit him with two duoloads without slowing down. He went down like an axed tree.
Louie was there before her, bouncing on his forefeet with pent-up urgency. The lock plate for the pedestrian gate was conveniently labeled so she hit it with her Masterkey and had the satisfaction of watching Louie wiggle through while it was still opening. With her faceplate down, she couldn’t talk to him without shouting, but he fell in at her side and they ran back together into the smoke and erupting flares towards the house.
It was a strange sensation after so many years doing only investigative work, to have her world narrow down to her weapons and the house, with whatever remaining guards it held, and her firm objective. In Tactical, she’d been part of a team. Tonight, she had Louie.
She wanted no one at her back, so she chose the last set of French doors at the back of the house and paused only long enough on the outside to lean close to Louie’s ear and say distinctly “Find McGregor. Louie, find Chris.” He leapt in over the ruined glass and wood smoothly and disappeared into the smoke-filled room as Livvy scrambled through after him. Immediately, she sidestepped to brace up against the adjacent wall. A small table went over with the loud crash of what was probably a priceless Chinese vase. The smoke still made normal vision impossible so with her back now to the Spritzers, she toggled her faceplate to infrared and looked around. There was Louie, crouching with his head down on the other side of the room just as a human figure appeared at what had to be a door. It was embarrassingly easy to eliminate the man with two Stinger shots but she didn’t delude herself into thinking that they would all be so simple. Quickly groping her way through the room, she used her hips and knees to locate the obstacles so that she could have her hands free for her Stinger. She’d have bruises tomorrow.
Louie was waiting for her when she got to the door. She tossed one of her Smokes through but couldn’t wait for full dispersal because Louie was picking up speed as though he had picked up a scent and was half way down what was apparently a long, wide hall when she went through. There were two men running towards her at the other end of the hall, and she barely had time to scream “Louie, down” before she dropped and rolled, aiming and firing as she moved. She got the first man as she went down, before he got off a shot, but the second sent two missiles – silenced bullets she thought from the sound – that impacted a wall above and behind her before her duoloads caught him. Four. How many more guards did the old man have?
Louie was already up and moving again – a dog on a mission now – and Livvy pushed herself to her feet to follow. He stopped in front of a door under a stairway. Livvy had time to register that they were standing beside a grand stairway that lead up out of an impressively marbled and chandeliered entryway when the fifth man poked his gun around the corner of a doorway across the room and started spraying her with more bullets. Most of them ricocheted off the lovely oak balusters but one of them hit her shoulder, above her sore arm, before she could duck.
“Hell,” she said. Despite the armor, it hurt.
Louie, sensible Louie, crouched at the side of the door, keeping his head down.
Livvy decided she couldn’t wait. She opened the door and followed Louie through, with a quick command to him to wait. This stairwell went down between more oak-paneled walls to a broad landing, then turned towards the front of the house at a ninety degree angle. Two stairs down Livvy turned, toggling back to photopic. Very little of her smoke had wafted down the stairwell. She was a highly visible target at this point and she couldn’t go past the corner with Guard Five at her back. Feeling trapped, she’d whispered “wait” seven more times to herself inside her helmet, when the fool opened the door just above her and she shot him twice at point blank range. Five fell forward down the stairs.
Louie was waiting for her just above the landing, staring straight down towards the lower floor. She bobbed her head to check and saw Guard Six crouching behind the Newell. He shot at her but she’d already ducked back and the bullets dug into the paneling behind her. Okay, I’m in armor, she thought. She stepped out and fired twice. One of her darts caught him in the face just below the eye. Possible permanent nerve damage, they always warned, but she couldn’t summon any regrets. Six went over and she took the lower stairs at a two-at-a-time plunge and put a second duoload in his chest.
Even down here the floor was smooth marble so Louie scrambled doing a hairpin turn at the base of the stairs until he found his traction again and took off down another long hall towards the back of the house. As Louie went passed it, a door near the base of the stairs opened. Guard Seven had certainly heard all of the prior shooting and must’ve heard and glimpsed Louie dashing by, because he came all of the way through the door and leveled his gun at Louie’s backside. Livvy got him with two duoloads in the back before he could shoot. The easiest yet. She did a quick sweep of the room before she moved on. There were no windows down here, but the walls and ceiling had numerous small light sources. All of the other five doors behind her stayed closed and she left them alone for now.
The sixth door, the one that had attracted Louie’s attention, was at the end of the hall. Superficially, it looked like any other of the heavy wooden doors on this level, but when she got closer she saw that it had been retrofitted with a simple palm lock. She pulled out her Masterkey and pressed it against the lock just as Guard Eight, who had apparently bided his time before come out from behind one of those other doors, started firing at her from behind the same damn Newel. The door swung open to a cacophony of falling metal and Louie yelped, then darted passed her. This man’s aim wasn’t any better than any of the others but she was standing still and neatly outlined against the door. As Livvy turned to face the shooter the repeated painful impacts basically propelled her through the door and into the room. Just inside the door, she stumbled then fell over a chair and what appeared to be a collection of pots and pans.
Chris woke up around 3 AM. He was still in what he was starting to think of as “the room that never gets dark.” The muted sound of gunfire which had awakened him ended abruptly. It had appeared to be coming from above him. A short silence, and more rapid, muted gunfire, lasting longer, again from above, further away, and abruptly silenced.
After the second set he moved as quickly as he could to the door and started dismantling his crude trap. The sleep had only stiffened his sore muscles and made his ribs throb with every breath. The third distinct set of gunfire came from the same level as the room he was in. He hadn’t been able to get his trap fully dismantled by the time the fourth set started, apparently right outside the door. Whoever it was, they were moving quickly.
The shooting continued as the heavy door swung open, the chair and its remaining burden of pots and pans went over, and Louie yelped sharply and dashed past. Immediately behind Louie, a smallish figure in an armored tunic staggered backwards into the room, floundered briefly in the scattered remnants of his trap, and went down. The door started to swing shut.
Chris slid the chair into the door gap and grabbed the Stinger from Livvy’s hand, thumbing it to rapid fire mode. Standing behind the door, he aimed the Stinger in the location that he imagined for the approaching shooter and sprayed the duoloads across the hall in a fan pattern, while behind him, Livvy scrambled to her feet and started groping through the contents of a small pack she was carrying over one shoulder.
Chris put a finger to his lips and Livvy froze. There was an interval of disconcerting silence during which they gazed at each other while listening for sounds of approaching footsteps.
Chris started to poke his head out to check but Livvy forcibly tugged his arm and, frowning, pointed to her faceplate and took his place at the door.
Guard Eight was sprawled across the hall. Livvy put another duo-load into his hip just to be sure.
When she tried to step over the chair and back into the hall, Chris put a hand on her arm and held her back. She opened her mouth to tell him it was clear, but he put a finger to his lips again.
He opened her faceplate and asked very softly, “You okay?”
“I’m wearing a vest under the tunic, and I’m damned warm,” Livvy whispered back. “Shouldn’t we be leaving before someone shows up or wakes up or something? Wait… did Louie get hit? I thought I heard him get hit.”
That’s when they both noticed the blood. There were drops of it starting at the door and scattered across the room to the area near the kitchenette, where Louie was cowering under the small mahogany table.
“Louie, come,” Chris said, and held his breath.
Louie crawled out from under the table and over to Chris, who had him lie on his side so he could get a good look at the wound. He was bleeding from a deep furrow on his rump, but he had walked with only a minor limp.
“It’s not too bad,” Chris said, still talking under his breath. “Wait here. You might hear some shooting. I’ll be right back.”
“What…” Livvy started to say softly, but Chris put a finger to his lips a third time and disappeared into the hall, leaving her to rummage in her pack for a packet of clotting agent/antibiotic powder to use on Louie’s wound.
From further down the hall, there was the sound of an automatic weapon firing repeatedly.
Within moments Livvy, cursing under her breath, had pulled Louie with her and braced against the wall behind the door.
“Hutchins, you can come out now.” Chris called from the hall.
“What the hell?” Livvy said, stepping over the chair in the door opening and putting her hands on her hips.
“I just took out the equipment in the Security Room. LLE…” Chris said.
“Naturally. It’s the way LLE handles it. Camera shy. Destroy any record of its activities. Avoid publicity at all costs. I get it.” She kicked a pot out of her way.
“It’s not just to destroy the record of your raid, which might, with narrative supplied by a skilled legal monkey, be misinterpreted. There are probably remote feeds, and wherever Bedford is, I want him blind.”
“Understood. But you could have warned me. I mean warned me better. I thought that there was another man. Never mind. You know what I thought.”
“I… sorry,” Chris said, surprising her.
“You aren’t used to a partner. I get that, too,” Livvy said, relenting. They were both tired.
“What are we going to do with all of these guards?” she asked. “Please don’t say we have to take them in.”
“The guards? Take them in for what? So they can sue LLE for putting Stingers in them while they were just doing their jobs? No, we don’t want to take them in,” Chris said. “I wasn’t conscious when they brought me in, so I have no idea of who knew what. Besides, the fewer…”
“The fewer people involved, the better. I get that. LLE hates to actually arrest people or even acknowledge that they are fighting crime. I do get that,” Livvy said. She’d found a fresh clip full of duoloads and handed it to Chris.
“Yes, but you have to be able to work with it,” Chris said, exchanging the fresh clip for the spent one in the Stinger Livvy’d given him.
“Louie, stay close,” Chris said as Louie clambered over the chair that was holding the door jammed open and into the hall. His wound had stopped bleeding.
By now wisps of smoke were drifting down the stairs and lending the whole place an eerie atmosphere, especially around the sprawling forms of the three fallen guards.
When they had stepped over the first body, Livvy touched Chris on the arm again and, holding his attention, said soberly, “Mickey Bedford and her bodyguard were killed last night. Jesse was kidnapped.”
Chris met her eyes, his expression grim.
“Hell. The bastard did it. He actually did it. We need to find Jesse. Now. Even though I think we may still have some surprise on our side, it’s going to be daylight. And unless I’m mistaken, the man himself will be there. Your obviously well-honed ninja skills,” Chris said, looking her over, “aren’t going to be enough.” He lost the brief trace of a smile. “That cold-blooded, arrogant son-of-a-bitch.”
But as much as they wanted to, and Livvy was quite sure that Chris wanted to head directly after Bedford at least as much as she did, they couldn’t leave right away. They searched the rest of the rooms in the basement, finding staff quarters, which they ignored, and a hotlab, which they totally demolished. Then, on the slight chance that Josephson and Jesse were somewhere in the house, they searched room by room, counting on Louie to let them know if there was someone lurking behind a door or the drapery.
If the underground level had been eerie, the ground floor and upper floor were downright creepy. Disturbed by drafts from the windows Livvy had destroyed across one side of the house, the smoke was drifting over marble floors and opulent furnishings and wreathing the fallen forms of the guards like mists on a moor. Louie stopped and sniffed each sleeping man’s face, as though he was creating a record for his own file, but he didn’t alert them to anyone still active in the house.
“That was creepy fun. A haunted house. I kept expecting one of those guys to reach out and grab my ankle,” Livvy said as they walked out the front door.
A few of the Spritzers were still sputtering out on the lawn and in the flower beds, and there were some pink clouds in the east. Although the perimeter wall was too high to see it, the sun had come up while Livvy had been inside.
“Do we worry about the neighbors? Bruno said they wouldn’t even call.”
“Bruno’s right. They’re either with us, and glad to see us doing our job, or, sad to say, all too anxious not to draw attention to themselves,” Chris said.
“Even if they didn’t pick up your badge, they’ll assume that if it was anything other than LLE, or at the very least, if Bedford had nothing to hide, that his security would call it in. If they know Bedford at all, they’ll dismiss it as a raid on a hotlab.”
For Livvy the strangest sensation yet was walking out the ornate front gate as though they were revelers departing after a very long night. Now that they were on the street they could see the sun, a brilliant yellow with an orange halo easing into red highlights under the few clouds. A new day, her sixth in LLE.
“Where are we going to start?” she asked as they approached the car. “Bedford has three more properties in the immediate area, another one in D.C. proper, and two in Adams Morgan. These are his high-end apartment buildings. Then there are the warehouses and retail properties which, as far as I could tell from the official records, are all currently leased to active enterprises. Of course, he could have easily falsified some of that information. He also owns a horse farm out near Lexington, which he appears to use as his private country residence.”
Chris was already on the new comu Livvy had given him, studying a map as he walked. When Livvy mentioned the horse farm, he looked up.
“That’s where we go first,” Chris said. “Bedford’s been paying Josephson for years. He needs someplace isolated and pleasant where he can maintain another hotlab and keep the doctor happy and where he can live in safe and comfortable seclusion while he stages the identity switch. A nice place in the country where he’d be less likely to be spotted accidentally.”
“Do you think he’ll have a lot of guards?” Livvy asked plaintively.
“If Josephson and Jesse are there, probably at least as many as here. How many clips did you bring for the Stingers?”
They’d reached the car. Louie jumped into the back and Livvy set her pack on the floor in front of her seat so she could rummage in it.
“I’ve got plenty of duoloads and I saved some Smokes. By the way, you need to tell your friend Cara, the next time you see her, that I am half in love with her husband. Bruno thought of everything.”
“He does that. I guess you’ve had a long night,” Chris said, easing into the driver’s seat.
“I’ll be okay. Just a little tired. Missed some sleep. Psyched a coworker. Dodged some bullets. You know the kind of thing.”
“The thing is, Hutchins,” Chris said, and shifted in the seat, “I’m not sure I can do this without you.”
“McGregor. You took two 45’s at point blank range. You’ve probably got broken ribs and you’re moving like an old man,” Livvy said as she watched Chris try to get comfortable.
“Like I said…”
“You’re welcome,” Livvy said.
When they’d gotten onto the glassene on their way to Lexington, Chris prompted her, “The coworker…?”
“Agnew, in a moral quandary.”
“Well. Williams is his partner.”
“That seemed to be the focus of the quandary, although no doubt he is eaten up with worry about you somewhere deep inside, too. He said he didn’t really know anything, but he gave me the address, which, strangely enough, Williams visited openly one day while they were together.”
“So we have some strong evidence against Williams. A Forensics investigation into his finances would probably do the rest,” Chris said flatly.
“But you knew already, didn’t you?” Livvy asked.
“No,” Chris said. “He was my only suspect, that’s all. There’s a difference. We still don’t know.”
“Actually, we do.”
“How? I don’t remember seeing who shot me,” he added, “or who took me to Bedford’s, but I owe him. What made you sure that Williams is in Bedford’s pay?”
“As I said, he lead Agnew to the mansion. But he let slip that he knew about the bunker. Is he a stupid man?” Livvy asked curiously.
“No,” Chris said. “Not at all.”
“I didn’t think so either. It was pretty obvious.
“What happens to him? Williams? Agnew should come out okay. At least, I did what I could.”
“Good. He has potential,” Chris said. He grew thoughtful. “So Williams gave himself away, and not unintentionally.”
“Either he wants to get caught, which is what I suggested to Agnew, or it’s a trap somehow. I’m too tired to decide.”
They had reached the section of glassened highway that ran through the countryside. The road had some low spots that were holding a thick fog and the trees on either side were more verdant and lush in the dawn light than anything Livvy remembered from coastal California. She stared out the window, wondering if she could hold up for another skirmish.
“Livvy.” Chris sounded almost apologetic. “I need to hear if there is anything new on our prisoners and that finger.”
Livvy yawned and leaned her head against the window so she could watch the countryside. “Don’t worry, you’re not asking for much. Nothing. Not a thing. Maas still won’t talk, and our two pros, assuming the finger came from a pro, are still anonymous. It takes deep pockets to achieve that kind of… obscurity.”
“It’s another reason for the hotlab. It’s part of the compensation package for assassins on retainer. Free, undocumented resets so they can continue to stay off the grid. Goes a long way towards creating loyalty to an employer. Dust that. They’ve had their last,” Chris said from a long way away.
Chp.15 Combat Escalation (Saturday)
Livvy jerked awake, aching just about everywhere.
“Get enough sleep?” Chris asked without raising his head. They were pulled over by the side of a road just off the highway and he was studying a map again on the new comu Livvy’ had given him as they left Bedford’s mansion.
“Where are we?” Livvy asked, rummaging in her pack until she found a pair of energy bars. She handed one to Chris and, started opening her own.
“About 25 kilometers from Bedford’s place.”
“Please, please don’t tell me you want us to run the rest of the way from here to preserve the surprise.”
“Could you?” Chris asked, lifting his head and looking at her as though to assess her conditioning, then suppressing a smile and turning back to the comu. ‘No, you’re not ready. Too many years in Homicide. We can’t afford the time, and it would put me way ahead of you”
Livvy stopped eating. “Either I’ve just been doubly insulted or you’re not thinking clearly yet. We’re not splitting up again. You’re practically incapacitated. We’re going in together and getting Jesse out.” She started pawing through her pack again.
“Bruno gave me a few more tricks,” she said. “Of course they’ll all be awake even if they haven’t been alerted to what happened in the city, so the advantage I had at the mansion…”
Chris put a hand on her arm and when she stopped and looked at him, he said seriously, “Here’s our problem. I took three Stingers, which means it was too much for my reversal implants and I was out for hours.”
“It could have killed you.” Livvy said.
“Not likely. The point is, whoever shot me probably has access to everything LLE uses on a regular basis, and they had plenty of time to inject a tracer. The tracers LLE uses are unjammable. We have to assume he knows I’m coming.”
“Slick,” Livvy said. “Well, we have to think of a way around it. There must be something…”
She took another bite of her energy bar. When it hit her, she quickly swallowed. “You know Williams is out here and that he tagged you because it’s what you would have done. What you did! You did the same to him. When? How?’’
“Two… no three days ago. His shoes. I set it up in a barbed spike – one of Bruno’s toys – near his desk and he obligingly stepped on it.
“It’s one reason I was so sure we should start in Lexington. I should have been able to pick him up in town if he was at any of the other properties you mentioned, although it was always possible that he’d just go home – he lives in Davie – which would put him off the grid as well. Or worn different shoes, I suppose. I just confirmed that Williams, or at least his shoe, is here in Lexington. Which makes us either right on target or on our way into a trap. What are the odds, do you think?”
“Or Williams is here with his shoe and knows we’re coming, but hasn’t told Bedford. We should start an office pool. You tell me, since you’ve known him longer, would keeping it secret from Bedford appeal to him?” Livvy asked. “Perhaps he’s had it with Bedford and his ego.”
“It’s where I’d put my money,” Chris said agreeably. “Playing the wild card. William’s favorite role.”
“I like my poker pure. So we’ve narrowed it down: Bedford knows we’re coming, or doesn’t,” Livvy said. “This will be fun. We’ll need to be quick and pack efficiently.” She pulled a clip belt out of her pack and started putting it on.
“We’ll go in simultaneously from two directions,” Chris said.
“Don’t you think we should stick together? You’ll need some cover.”
“No. It wouldn’t help. They may know I’m coming. I’m also not in any shape to be jumping fences, as you so kindly pointed out,” Chris said. “You’re another matter. You aren’t tagged.”
Livvy sighed. “All right. Give it to me. You know, you’ve had a nice long run but I haven’t a clue how, and I’d really like to know,” Livvy said. “Breathing,” she added when Chris looked at her quizzically.
“You get to stealth your way in the back way, neutralize the guards, and find Jesse. I walk in the front door and distract Bedford and talk to Williams.”
“Uh huh. Like I said.” Livvy folded her arms. “My partner, who is straddling the line between merely gimpy and totally laid up, wants to walk in and confront the people I just salvaged him from. You working on a dare, or do you just have this driving need to haze the LLE rookie? Williams is corrupt, no matter what kind of game he thinks he’s playing. In the end, he knows that unless he kills you, and probably me, his career is over and he goes to prison.”
Chris was silent.
“Doesn’t he?”
“LLE handles things differently.”
“I get it, I do. And I’ll never forget it, as long as I live.”
“And more importantly, at the moment, Williams knows it as well.”
There was a longer silence.
“I know LLE reveres the Laws with a capital ‘L’ but operates one step away from anarchy, in secrecy. I understand that it’s all to save everyone else from chaos. But you guys are still all brainsick. Mickey Bedford and her bodyguard are dead, and Bedford has Jesse, and Williams is definitely a bare-bellied snake,” Livvy said slowly.
“Hutchins. Stowe the outrage, or at least focus it. We can’t know that Williams anticipated Mickey’s murder.”
“No,” Livvy admitted, “we don’t know what he anticipated. Williams might have his head where no head should fit and he only heard about Mickey and Jesse when Enforcement did, and he may not be in on the big plan. But he’s out here now, and we think Jesse is too, don’t we? So he has to realize…”
“As far as Williams is concerned, it may have slipped away from him,” Chris said. “All of this, before Mickey died, could fit in with a rich man’s determination to preserve his personal hotlabs and relationship with Josephson. Even what he did to me could fit in with that. Williams may have some inkling now that it’s much more than an issue of some hotlabs, but feel he’s in too deep. He’s probably feeling like a tiger on a leash. I can fix that.”
“Jackal. That’s jackal on a leash,” Livvy said distractedly. “I know he’s LLE, but you have no idea how Williams will react. He may shoot you, really shoot you, not just with Stingers, on sight.”
“I’ve worked with him ten years.”
“He doesn’t even like you,” Livvy added, meeting his eyes.
“I’m aware. It’s mutual. But I know a little about what matters to him,” Chris said.
“Maybe less than you realize,” Livvy said, with a worried look on her face. “You don’t think like him.”
“Possibly,” Chris said, “but I’ve had a lot of experience trying to communicate with people who don’t think like me. I still need to talk to him. And since we can’t do an all-out two-pronged attack, we need the distraction. If I wasn’t already tagged and in no shape for running I’d flip you for it. Hell, you’re a walking billboard for distraction. Hopefully, we were successful at maintaining some secrecy at the Potomac Falls house and they won’t even be watching for you, even after I show up.”
“Billboard?” Livvy said distastefully, then noticed that Chris appeared to be staring at her chest.
“What?” she asked, annoyed, and looked down at her tunic, which she’d already toggled back to off-white. It should make her less visible than the black she’d used last night.
“I was just thinking. We’re too urban. You really should be in camouflage. I’m going to suggest you spend a few moments rolling in the mud before you get close to the farm,” Chris said. Livvy opened her mouth, but not a word came out.
“If Bedford succeeds, he’ll never let us live,” Chris continued without a pause. “We know too much and I suspect he’ll be unhappy with what happened in his home in the city. For the moment, he still wants to find out where his weaknesses and leaks are. He wants to know what we know and how we know it. For now, that’s leverage. But the longer we wait, the less protection it buys us, because he’ll see that nothing else is happening, and then he’ll realize the only people that may be able to tie anything to him are the two of us. The fact that it is unusable in court won’t matter. He’ll want us dead.”
“I’m beginning to understand,” Livvy said cryptically.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Meanwhile, Jesse is in Josephson’s hands,” Chris added as the clincher after a very brief pause.
“All right,” Livvy said. “You drive in and poke at the lion and his dog – jackal – in his own den. I trot in cross-country. Just try to get me within trotting range, please, and don’t get killed until I finish dealing with the hired help.
“And McGregor, some advice,” Livvy added succinctly. “Don’t ever call a woman a walking billboard again, especially when you’re trying to get her to agree to something.”
Livvy was furious. Her feet were soaked. Her 25 year-old-body, normally taken for granted, was sore and exhausted. And there was no one within range at whom she could vent her dissatisfaction. In thirty years experience, she had never faced this sort of ordeal. She was keen to find a target for her fury, and she had three in her figurative sights. Williams. Bedford. Josephson.
She had adroitly – she thought – slipped out of the car when Chris had done a quick stop about two kilometers from Bedford’s horse farm. She had climbed over the white rail fence, rolled in some handy mud, and started resolutely jogging, occasionally slogging, through the orchards and across the pastures. The terrain was soaked with dew and harboring low spots with shallow puddles from an overnight shower.
Their plan was to position her in the woods behind the farm, with the house between her and the road, while Chris drove up and walked up to the front door. He had made it sound simple and inevitable, which she supposed it was, especially since he was in no shape to be jogging and slogging and they probably knew exactly where he was at any time anyway. If he didn’t come to them now, they would eventually find him anyway.
No doubt Bedford had legions of ruthless assassins holed up in a secret basement. Chris believed that if he walked in voluntarily they not only wouldn’t kill him immediately, but that they would stop everything else to deal with him and find out what he was up to, especially if they thought he might be ready to give them the information they wanted. While she thought he was right in so far as Bedford and Williams were concerned, she doubted that the assassins would be all that interested in what he had to say. She suspected she was going to end up battering her way through a troop of them to find Jesse.
She was glad she was furious. Her fury was keeping her on her feet and moving quickly, although her mind was racing and she needed to focus. It had been years since she had experienced this sort of sustained adrenaline boost, but she remembered that it could be a tricky master. If she kept thinking about Jesse and Mickey, it should be enough to see her through.
Her first goal was directly ahead, a large building she’d been watching ever since she’d been dropped off. Given that it was huge, windowless and set back from the road behind an orchard, she figured it was a barn, which made it a good place to start. She and Chris had discussed the fact that they were going in blind as to the number of security personnel and extent of remote imaging, but they’d concluded that they had no real choice. As with the last skirmish, she had to go in fast and keep moving and hope they stayed lucky. Sprizter’n’smokes weren’t going to help them here in the open country during the day. At least she still had a tunic; Chris was going in, by choice, with only his vest.
Her approach brought her to the rear of the barn, and from there she eased around the corner to the side away from the house. It smelled of dried grass and dirt and seemed entirely too innocent for the evil she expected to confront somewhere ahead. There was the sound of a non-glassened vehicle getting louder, and when she stuck her head out away from the building she could see it approaching along a gravel road from the direction of the rest of the farm buildings. A small tractor pulling a wagon and driven by one man.
She pulled her head back. He didn’t look like security, and he didn’t seem to have noticed her. A civilian, then, but as Bruno had said, this was a “take-no-prisoners” operation, which meant that she had to treat this guy like anyone else she didn’t want behind her.
The tractor and wagon pulled into the barn and the engine noise stopped. Staying close to the side of the barn, she took her first step in a move to follow the tractor, only to pull up short without putting her full weight down. Her shoes emitted a loud squelching noise. She’d been listening to it since she’d hit that first puddle in her walk through the misty glades and fields, but out there it hadn’t seemed to echo so loudly. In the city, dry, her shoes were perfect. They were favorites, with grip and support and fit that facilitated climbing trees and scrambling across polished marble floors. Apparently, water was their weakness. Soaked, they were entirely inappropriate for a covert operation in the countryside.
She quietly kicked them off and pulled off her equally soaked stockings.
After that it was easy to tiptoe to the front of the barn and pause at the entrance. Muffled sounds of someone moving around inside reached her. She pivoted around the corner into the entrance and pointed her Stinger in the direction of the sounds. The poor man never knew what hit him, but at least he landed in clean straw. She checked the rest of the barn for people: nothing. It was, as far as she could tell, full of hay and straw and probably a few non-human rodents. Only a barn.
She moved on, leaving her shoes in the mud.
So far Chris’ reception was all that he had expected. Two security guards relieved him, a little roughly, of the Stinger Livvy had given him and the knife he had appropriated from Bedford’s bunker kitchen. It had been a long shot but being thorough had been for so many years a matter of self-respect; now it was habit. For example, they let him keep his armored vest, which was a relief. He wasn’t looking forward to struggling out of it, and much less so in a hostile environment. Either they didn’t realize he was still wearing it or they didn’t care.
Escorted down the long hall to a library paneled in more of the beautiful woods Bedford favored, Chris considered that if he was going to design a traditional country haven for himself, this one would be close. Like Bedford’s Potomac Falls mansion, the house was at least two centuries old and full of antiques. It was even more elegant than the mansion, perhaps because it was less ostentatious and there were more books. Also, Chris liked horses and dogs, so he could appreciate the numerous oil paintings hung on the walls. He wandered around a little, examining the books, then selected one and sat down in an oversized leather armchair facing a wall of French doors that opened onto a flagstone terrace.
Beyond the terrace, magnificently dominating the center of the courtyard, a huge oak shaded some stone benches and a table. A gravel drive circled the oak and split off to a 2-story, six-car garage on the right, and on the left, some well-tended flower gardens divided the courtyard from the manicured front lawns of a pair of small cottages. A bunny hopping through would add to the serene imagery, but not much.
Looking beyond the oak Chris could see a man carrying feed buckets and armfuls of hay from a wagon to horses waiting in a long row of box stalls in the stable that formed the back boundary of the quadrangle.
Chris’ best guess was that the guard office was over the garage, and that there were acueyes all over the property. In such a setting guards might well be ordered to stay inconspicuous. He hoped that the beguiling summer morning, unmarred by alarm following his arrival, was lulling the guards as much as it was him.
As Chris watched, the stable-hand finished feeding the horses and drove the tractor and wagon back towards the right and around behind the stable.
“What in hell are you doing here, McGregor? How did you get out?” It was Bedford, entering the room with an impatient stride and standing over Chris.
“I came to take that boy out of here, Bedford, and to talk to Williams.” This was a bit of a risk. If Williams was watching, it tipped their hand, and he might decide Chris had become too much of a liability. Chris was counting on Williams’ essential dislike of authority and the fact that he had probably been chafing under Bedford’s self-importance. If Williams was watching, even if ordered to stay out of sight, Chris figured he wouldn’t be able to resist a small act of defiance especially if it meant facing Chris.
Bedford actually laughed. “You’re unbelievable. This is my home.”
“Believe it, Bedford. Give it a minute and it may sink in through that thick conceit of yours.”
The door opened again.
“So much for surprising you. When did you finally figure it out? And where’s Hutchins?” It was Williams, coming into the room and getting right to the crux of the matter.
“At City Central with a shattered knee. That last thug in the basement of Bedford’s Potomac Falls mansion got lucky. She made it through most of them but she won’t be walking for awhile,” Chris said, dividing his attention between the two men facing him, although he took care to appear as though he was ignoring Bedford.
Bedford had frowned when Williams came into the room but didn’t protest when he selected one of a pair of side chairs facing Chris’ armchair, turned it around and sat in it facing Chris over the back. Bedford sat in the other chair.
“Too bad,” Williams said. “But it will keep her out of trouble.”
“Not lucky enough,” Bedford said curtly. “I gave you your warning. Unless you’ve thought better of it, and come to discuss… “
“Are you impaired in some way, Bedford? I told you I didn’t come here to talk to you. I thought I made it clear the last time we met that I have nothing to say to you,” Chris interrupted. He held Bedford’s eyes just long enough, and then turned away from him as though dismissing him from consideration.
“You know what he’s doing here?” Chris asked Williams directly.
Williams stared at him without answering, although Chris thought he’d seen a flicker of approval at one point while Chris was addressing Bedford.
“Jesse Bradford is 18 years old. Is this guy your idea of a good choice for an immortal overlord? Is this the world you want, Williams?” Chris asked, looking around. “It’s a very pleasant one, I admit, if you ignore having to get froggy for a cold-blooded son of a bitch who’ll discard you like a worn muppet when he doesn’t want something from you.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“You always were a self-righteous bastard,” Williams finally said.
Bedford smiled. “Why shouldn’t those who can afford it and their friends have comfortable lives and as many children as they want, and give their families resets every year, and still live to 200 or even more?”
Chris ignored him. “How are Becca and Sonya?” he asked, staring at Williams, and only Williams. “You see, I know what drives you. It’s what the Laws were designed for, to at least grant everyone the opportunity to watch their youngest child grow up, and get to know their grandchildren. It’s the best people hoped for, what drove them for thousands of years before Longevity came along.
“Do you think Bedford cares about any of that?”
“Save your propaganda for someone who’s weak-minded enough to fall for it,” Bedford said. “It’s still about a commodity. One that some can purchase for themselves and their loved ones, and others can’t. We will never be able to make it available to everyone, nor should we. We live on a small planet with limited resources. That doesn’t mean the best and the brightest should be denied the benefits of what they’ve built.”
Chris ignored him; didn’t even glance at him. “He’s so far from human already, after only 100 years, that he can’t even remember where he came from. You heard about Jesse and Mickey. Is that what you bargained for? Is this the world you want, Williams?” Chris asked again. “Is it what you want for your children?”
“Better than the little mediocre world you’re trying to hang onto,” Bedford said.
Still focusing on Williams alone, Chris said, “I haven’t talked to the Chief about you. Hutchins knows, and Agnew suspects, but there is no reason your role can’t be resolved within LLE. You know it could be arranged.”
This was a risk. Admitting the extent to which Williams’ involvement was known gave Bedford a strong indication of the limits of his own exposure.
Bedford smiled again. “My friend here has been assuring me that without incontrovertible proof, LLE would be reluctant to arrest me no matter what happens. And you have no proof, do you?” He moved behind the gleaming wooden desk, opened a drawer, and brought out a large handgun. “I’ll give you one more chance to answer my questions. Otherwise, it’s time I stopped worrying about loose ends, and started eliminating them.”
Leaving her first victim sleeping behind her, Livvy went back under cover of the orchard that bordered the road to the barn and moved from tree to tree. She felt a little silly, since this crude precaution wasn’t likely to achieve much except give Bedford’s security a good laugh if they had acueyes trained on the orchard. It was unnerving, but she and Chris had discussed her chances in the car as they approached her drop-off point.
“These guys are hirelings, not fanatics, and are assigned to a country estate. No doubt they have all the bells and whistles of an excellent surveillance setup, but not motion detectors or the local wildlife would be cast as the boy who called wolf. It’s human nature: they will let the equipment be vigilant for them, while they take themselves off watch and put themselves on call.”
“In other words, you’re giving me better than 50:50 odds,” Livvy said. “I’m encouraged.”
“Closer to 70:30 if you add some good camouflage to that armor.”
Livvy had given him a withering look but followed his advice. It seemed to be paying off. Maybe a century of observing human nature did yield some useful insights.
The orchard ended, there was another fence to climb over, and then she took her fate in her hands and dashed for the back corner of a two-story building she suspected was the garage.
The stable was to her right. Most of the horses were at their stall doors on this lovely morning, and several of them turned their heads in her direction. They looked peaceful.
She couldn’t see the house but she knew it was beyond the garage and further to her left, towards the road. Ahead, across the open courtyard with its splendid oak centerpiece and driveway and gardens she could see two small cottages. For now, they became her ultimate goal, but she had to clear the garage first.
From above her, out of an open second-floor window, came raucous voices raised in conversation followed by a man hooting. She distinguished the voices of at least three men. Security or chauffeurs or mechanics, it didn’t matter. The longer she waited, the more likely she’d be discovered. So far, she’d been lucky, which probably meant that on this pristine country morning either someone wasn’t watching the acueye screens as diligently as they were supposed to, or they knew right where she was and they were waiting for her. If the latter, the men were doing a good job of covering it.
She reminded herself that these were men were hirelings. It was even possible that they didn’t like their boss, and weren’t above taking advantage of him on a Saturday morning.
There were convenient stairs to her left. She took them silently, two at a time while she formulated her first rule of engagement: no hesitation, especially when you are in an exposed position in enemy territory.
The external door at the top was unlocked and quiet, and then there was a short hall to the open door from which the loud voices still sounded.
The guards in this tranquil country setting were indeed in a different frame of mind than the ones in Bedford’s showy mansion in the city. Of the three sitting at the poker table, only one even noticed her at the door, and that one got two duoloads before the other two saw his startled expression and turned. She shot the next two while moving diagonally and rapidly into the room, and neither of them got off a sound other than the typical paired grunts as darts hit them. It was so nice not having to face alert men shooting guns at her. She loved the country.
She’d been lucky indeed. The poker room appeared to be the actual security center. One wall was covered with monitors and equipment, all of it functioning perfectly. With wonderment, she saw the monitor that showed an expansive view of the acueye covering the orchard, the route she had just taken to reach the garage. In both modes, photopic and infrared, despite her mud camouflage she must have been captured by the sensors as she threaded her way through the trees. She looked back at the table. The three now-sleeping players were all still flush with chips, to variable degrees, although two of them had scattered their piles as they fell. The quadrant of the table occupied by the fourth chair, the one that faced the monitors, was clear. Someone had lost early, and left the game.
Livvy grinned. She loved poker, too.
Remembering Chris’ admonition, she went over to the wall of monitors and equipment and proceeded to use her Attach’n’smash to access every panel. Exposed quantum CUs were supposed to be very vulnerable to decoherence, and although she knew even less about that than she did molebiol, she did know that stale potato chips, peanut butter cups, and warm beer weren’t good for anything, so she sprinkled them liberally over the exposed CU innards. The mixture should be as effective as Chris’s gunfire, and it was a lot quieter.
She blamed her fatigue for what happened next, because otherwise she wouldn’t have made the easy assumption that the fourth man at the table was sleeping it off somewhere, and she certainly never would have set her Stinger down on the table so she could work with both hands unencumbered. She heard the man’s voice first, just an instant before he came around the corner of the door jam. He was securing his fly as he entered the room.
“Will someone grow some balls and start betting their hand before…”
The very young-looking, slight man looked up to see his fallen comrades and a second later spotted her. Fortunately, although his mouth fell open he didn’t shout – which she took as a sign that there was no one left within earshot – and he didn’t go for a gun – another good sign – but he did take off at a healthy speed. She grabbed her Stinger and took off after him for the same reason she had removed her shoes earlier. Another rule: if you are counting on surprise, gotta preserve it.
He made it down the stairs and out into the open in front of the stable before she could get her Stinger to bear, although in desperation she sent three darts after him that missed. He was well into the courtyard before she got her focus back and hit him with two duoloads, at which point he stumbled into one more step then fell forward and skidded for a foot before he stopped.
She’d had no choice but to follow him, but she knew enough not to waste time looking around before she rushed over to him and dragged him quickly into a box stall. Her shoulders tensed from the expectation of a challenge, but none came. Talking softly to the nervous horse, she listened. No shouted challenges, no running footsteps. No time to dwell on her luck. Her original plan had been to finish in the garage building and then circle behind the stable to get to the cottages, but there was no point in backtracking now.
As she left the box stall she picked up something in her foot, a piece of sharp debris, and she had to stop and pull it out. Very bad for the horses, she thought. She missed her shoes.
Chris had been focusing on Williams intently but when Bedford got up and walked over to the desk his attention was caught by movement within the idyllic scene framed by the French doors. Bedford was already at his desk and turned back into the room when Chris caught sight of a man running into view from the direction of the garage, with Livvy about six meters behind him in full-out pursuit, gaining ground. Several of the horses that had been looking out withdrew their heads. She had her pack still slung over her left shoulder and her Stinger in her right hand, and in the few seconds Chris was watching she aimed on the run and presumably shot, because the man finally went down. It was just seconds, Chris knew, but it seemed to take an inordinately long time.
Chris stopped looking directly and kept his gaze directed at Bedford, but out of the corners of his eyes he watched her efficiently drag her victim into a stable box. When she came back out, she started running across the courtyard towards the cottages, but almost immediately skipped for several steps, favoring her right foot, until she stopped completely and picked up her foot to check the bottom. Chris noticed she was barefoot and covered in mud, and he forced himself to keep his face expressionless and stop watching. When he looked again, she was gone.
Chris glanced back at Williams. He’d seen. Having turned to watch Bedford get the gun from the desk as well, he’d probably seen the whole thing. He did not, however, continue to track Livvy’s progress. When Bedford looked up again, Williams had turned back to Chris and was staring at him with an enigmatic smile. With his back to the window, Bedford returned to the side chair and sat back down. He was carrying the handgun and pointing it squarely at Chris.
Livvy was behind schedule, or to put the blame where it was due, he had not been able to think of anything that new or interesting to say to temporize. He’d made his point with Williams; to belabor it would just irritate him. He’d apparently irritated Bedford beyond the limits of his tolerance. Chris tried to think of something to say that neither of them hadn’t heard many times before. He was very tired, and the arguments were very old, and no one ever seemed to listen anymore.
Livvy must be exhausted.
Thinking of Livvy, he tried again, ostensibly addressing Bedford, but targeting Williams. “You’ve never killed someone before, have you Bedford? At least, with your own two hands. You’ve used your tools. It’s not as easy as you might think.”
“In your case, I expect not to have too much of a problem with it,” Bedford said. “It helps to think that it’s retribution for your pest of a wife as well.”
Williams glanced at Bedford and then looked away quickly.
Chris got angry, which helped. He tried to use the anger to think of something to say that would buy them some more time.
“Once you start, you’ll do it again and again whenever anyone puts a roadblock in your way. And you’ll get caught. Homicide doesn’t mind publicity.”
“Bedford, wait. He’s right.” It was Williams. “Not here. LLE may ignore and even conceal a lot to avoid cases getting to the media, but the murder of an LLE detective in your own home… If McGregor disappears and is eventually found murdered, LLE would never let up. There is too much we don’t know to be able to eradicate all evidence of his presence here, besides the fact that you must have one or two staff members on the premises. I mean, besides your security? No matter what happens with LLE, Homicide loves publicity, he’s right about that, and if you kill him here, there will be witnesses.”
“Not necessarily,” Bedford said, turning the gun towards Williams and shooting him in the chest.
He was moving the gun’s muzzle back towards Chris’ face when Chris pushed hard with his feet and threw his weight against the back of the heavy chair, sending it tipping over backwards. He continued the roll and then scrambled sideways, using his hands and knees, to reach the fireplace. It was excruciating, nauseating really, but he grabbed the poker deftly enough and used his extended arm like a spear thrower to launch it at Bedford, who had moved forward to get a clear shot. The poker hit Bedford on the right arm and shoulder hard enough to make him drop the gun and grunt, but it missed his head.
Bedford was cursing and reaching towards the gun on the floor when Chris made another awkward dive to reach Williams. The other LLE detective was lying on the floor where he’d been thrown by the impact of the bullet hitting his side, but he’d been able to draw his Stinger and he was trying to bring it to bear on Bedford when Chris grabbed it out of his hand and fired.
A Stinger dart could hit anywhere and have an almost instantaneous effect, which was part of its charm. The dart hit Bedford in the leg just as Bedford’s groping hand curled around the gun, and he folded before he could aim it. The report of the gun sounded loud in the quiet of the library, and the bullet went off into the fine cherry floor, splintering it.
By then the two guards, no doubt attracted by the first shot, were at the door and Chris had all he could do to shoot cleanly from the floor around the chair legs, hoping that their instincts to focus on a human target and fire were less finely tuned than his. Mostly they were. The first guard through the door got off one wide shot before going down with a duo-load in him. The second got off two poorly aimed attempts, one of which hit Chris in the shoulder and the other, like Bedford’s, went into the floor as the duo-load took effect.
Chris waited another minute, braced on the floor, but no one else came through the door.
“As far as I know,” Williams said harshly, “he only has the two in the house.”
Chris glanced at him. He appeared to be breathing strongly enough, but there was a spreading bloodstain on his side.
“You have a comu?” Chris asked, using a chair to lever himself to his feet. “Call it in to medical. I’m busy. Here, use this. Put some pressure on it,” he added, tossing Williams a silk pillow.
Williams was fumbling with his comu when Chris walked carefully over to each of his three victims, collected their weapons, and put a second dart in them. He shoved Bedford’s gun into his belt and headed for the French doors.
There was a sort of a pop and flare from the direction of the cottages. Chris thought he recognized a firebomb, and lengthened his stride. As he passed Williams, he glanced down. The wounded detective had finished with the comu and was using the pillow to good effect.
“You’re still a… self-righteous bastard,” Williams said, “but you had… good point. About Bedford. One sorry… son-of-a-bitch.”
“I think the house is clear. I’m going after Livvy. If she doesn’t make it,” Chris said, “then neither will you. Other than that, you look reasonably good.”
As he reached the doors he heard gunfire from the direction of the cottages.
Running gingerly on the balls of her bare feet, Livvy raced across the rest of the courtyard into the cover of the smaller cottage, the one furthest from the house. She had been easily visible from the house for a long time. She could only hope that the fact that her assault had been largely silent and that she had just taken out the guards that were probably responsible for acueye surveillance of the exterior would be enough to preserve the element of surprise. If someone had seen her from the house, she might have just killed Chris, and they’d be coming after her with everyone they had. Stop thinking about that, she ordered.
No one came out of the first pretty little cottage. The soft grass around it and the flagstone path up to its front door were a relief. The door yielded to her Masterkey and she went through it braced, sweeping the interior. There was no one in the main room, which appeared to be a hotlab, and no one in the bedroom, bathroom, closet or kitchen. Totally empty.
She moved from window to window, peeking out each, and couldn’t spot any guards rushing to surround her. Nemesis must be playing poker, too, she thought.
The hotlab created a small dilemma, and she paused for the first time, standing in the middle of the neat little interior. She was still running on cold fury. She really wanted to destroy Bedford’s and Josephson’s little private reset facility now, before someone stopped her, but unless she succeeded here otherwise, it would be only temporary, and therefore futile in the long run. Also, although Bruno had given her some nice little firebombs, she didn’t know how things stood in the main house. One of these bombs would draw a lot of attention, and destroy the remnants of their blindside.
There was gunfire from the house, and she realized her dilemma was resolved. Stifling her fear over its significance, she went with rule three: utilize distraction whenever offered.
As she headed back out the door, she rolled a triggered firebomb back into the room. It bounced back towards her when it hit a bank of refrigerator units and rolled under a table before exploding three seconds later. The sound of the explosion, muffled by the cottage walls, was relatively soft, but it was still loud enough to echo across the quadrangle. Also, the firebomb sprayed an accelerant liberally throughout the small space and a majority of the room burst into flames quiet satisfactorily. No one was going to miss the fire engulfing the pretty little cottage. Such a shame.
The next cottage faced the road and had a 5-foot-wide white-columned porch at the front. She made a small concession to her abandoned stealth by going around the back to approach the front door from the side away from the courtyard. Braced with her Stinger ready, she ran in a wide arc around the corner of the cottage into its small front yard. There was a man, she could see part of his gun and arm, standing well back in the doorframe. As her arc brought her forward to where she could get an angle for a body shot, her movement must have caught his eye, because he turned jerkily from his survey of the main house and fired straight for her head. He was either lucky or an excellent shot. The bullet hit the center of her faceplate, whipped her head back and jerked her off her feet. Her faceplate spider-webbed but held, and with a considerable painful effort she lifted her head and aimed her Stinger at the door from flat on her back through her bent knees. The man was gone.
The right window in the front of the cottage opened and a bullet ricocheted off the flagstone to her right. So he’d been lucky the first time.
Then it got very serious. An arm at the second window, the left one, swept forward and threw something that looked like a small, spiked ball at her. She didn’t get a good look, but she knew what it had to be: an armor-piercing grenade. Counting to three, she rolled desperately over and over towards the cottage across the soft grass and then, as she’d been trained years ago, flattened out, trying to meld with the ground beneath her. The explosion sent tiny fragments that shredded parts of her tunic and tore into her left leg and arm in several locations with excruciating effectiveness.
Livvy rolled the few meters more that she needed to reach the cover offered by the foundation of the cottage. They knew where she was, and they had armor-shredding grenades, so she was at more risk than she had been at any time since it all started.
No hesitation. Move fast, and move forward, into the cottage, where they wouldn’t be able to use another grenade. She scrambled clumsily to her feet, charged up the steps, and headed across the porch, toggling her faceplate open as she ran. Her charge was awkward, since she was favoring her left leg and carrying her left arm clutched to her side. The shooter on the right was firing at her but she was moving fast and only one of the bullets impacted, painfully, on her upper arm. Her armor held, but she couldn’t risk another grenade. When she reached the door, she slapped it, and the preset Attach’n’smash she’d been clutching ever since leaving the last cottage did it’s magic. The full force of its power blew the door inward. Following it in and going down on her right side, she managed to land on her shoulder squarely enough to keep her Stinger steady and fire twice at the man at the left window almost on impact. There was more gunfire from behind her in the small room, and ricocheted floor fragments hit her helmet twice harmlessly. She rolled over, and found the man at the other window. He was holding a gun but once she was facing him, he didn’t fire. He just sat there with his mouth open. Slow and not very bright, she thought, but there had to be somebody else in the room, because although she got off at least one shot simultaneously with the thought, she felt the dull prick of a dart coming through armor and then acute somnolence overcame her. Stinger. So close, she thought just before losing consciousness completely.
Chris started across the courtyard, throwing excess guns into shrubbery and doing his best to run while clutching his ribcage. He saw the last of Livvy’s assault: the grenade, her roll towards the cottage, and then her awkward intrepid dash. It took his breath away. He heard a few more shots from inside and saw Louie come full tilt around the corner of the cottage, take the steps up to the porch in one leap and follow Livvy inside. He’d had strict orders to stay in the car, but he must have seen Livvy and then found the pop and flare of the firebomb too much. Overcome with excitement, he’d gotten out through one of the open car windows and followed Livvy’s trail.
Chris didn’t call out to either of them; he didn’t have anything to say that wouldn’t distract them and possibly prove fatal, and he frankly wasn’t sure he could take a deep enough breath to project his voice that far.
There was no more gunfire but when he got close enough he heard a man cursing and screaming. There was also a great deal of growling.
Braced with the Stinger he’d gotten from Williams, Chris went up the steps about ten seconds behind Louie. It was a small room, so as soon as he got in and did a sweep for anything still moving he saw Josephson with half of his right forearm obscured by Louie’s fully exposed teeth. There was a Stinger lying at his feet, along with an expanding pattern of blood from his arm. Louie was looking up at Josephson with a fixed expression, growling and tugging on the arm enough to keep him off balance.
Livvy was lying at Chris’ feet. He knelt stiffly to check on her. Although her left leg and arm were bloody, the bleeding appeared to gotten very sluggish now that she wasn’t in full-on attack mode, and she was breathing strongly. Williams should have already called for a medivan, which meant that they’d be there in just a few more minutes.
“Get this vicious animal off me,” Josephson said. He was surprisingly cool, given the fact that he had a 30 kilo dog attached to his arm and was surrounded by illegal armaments and a kidnapped boy.
“Good boy, Louie,” Chris said. He put another duoload in each guard, not caring if it was superfluous. These guards had to know about Jesse, and had perhaps helped kill Mickey and her bodyguard. One had used a grenade on Livvy.
“Where’s Jesse Bedford?” he asked.
“He’s in the back bedroom, under sedation,” Josephson said. “Now get this damned dog off me.”
Chris ignored him, other than to pause and make sure Louie’s hold was secure before going to the first guard to extract weapons. This was the one who’d tossed the grenade; Chris went to his knees to search him. He found two more.
“These are illegal,” Chris said, holding up the grenades before pocketing them. “You might have killed my partner. Mickey Bedford and her bodyguard are dead. You participated in Jesse’s kidnapping. For money, and for your nasty little hobby.”
Chris moved to the second guard and disarmed him. By now, Josephson had apparently realized that struggling caused Louie to grip more firmly. He was standing very still. Chris couldn’t help but be impressed. Louie was still attached to his arm and eyeing him steadily, but the cold-blooded bastard was recovering.
“You think so? My lawyer will keep this tied up in the courts for years. I know the law. You have no proof that you can use in court. As far as the world will know, Bedford himself recovered his injured grandson from the kidnappers. From a series of misunderstandings or worse, outright incompetence, surely in the area of respecting our rights after we rescued the boy, we suffered abuse at the hands of Longevity Law Enforcers. With Bedford’s resources, we won’t spend a day in jail.”
Chris studied him consideringly. “Louie, enough. Out,” he said, snapping his fingers and pointing to the door. Louie let Josephson go with what appeared to be a great deal of reluctance and slowly padded out.
“What a misguided toad you are. Haven’t you heard? LLE no longer tolerates catch and release. My partner and I know too much, Josephson. You’re not going to get away with this like you did with Sara Ann Torkelson,” Chris said. “This time, Forensics will figure it out, and we’ll testify and destroy you in court, whatever the cost. At the very least we’ll deprive you of all your playthings.”
With this last provocative statement, Chris turned away ostensibly to observe Louie’s reluctant progress out the door. Josephson bent down to pick up the Stinger and was bringing it up to aim at Chris’ back when Chris dropped his Stinger and drew Bedford’s gun out of his belt, pivoting and lunging to one side in one smooth, costly move. Josephson was still aiming at the point where Chris’ back had been when Chris shot him three times in the chest with the gun.
It was getting harder and harder to stay erect, but by now just about any other posture was equally painful. Chris straightened up and walked slowly back to stand over the doctor. There was blood pumping profusely out of Josephson’s wounds, and he was coughing up even more.
“Or,” Chris said softly, distinctly. “I can just kill you.”
With impotent fear and rage, Josephson stared up at him, and Chris stared back until the doctor’s eyes unfocused and the bleeding turned to a sluggish seepage. Chris felt for a jugular pulse to confirm it. Josephson was dead.
He stepped over the body and headed for the bedroom, to check on Jesse.