Kinetic solutions, p.2
Kinetic Solutions, page 2
Miguel grunted and released the button. The whole system was internal, with wires because any radio signal could be intercepted. The Service kept its headquarters as secure as possible.
That included recruiting cute redheads at nearby coffee shops to keep watch for any potential enemy agents paying too much attention to Miguel’s own staff when they went for a quick jaunt.
The intercom beeped again. Miguel pressed it.
“Visual confirmation that he has left the coffee shop finally and is headed this way,” Robin said.
“Good,” Miguel replied. “Send Ben in now and Handsome when he arrives.”
Ben Sevier had been Miguel’s executive assistant prior to Robin Hill, before being promoted to Chief of Staff. Head of the paperwork section of the entire building in more ways than one, though few people actually reported to the man directly.
The door opened and Ben stepped in. He was tall and still athletic but starting to get squishy around the middle as he got into his later thirties. Short brown hair and green eyes that didn’t miss anything.
Useful, as Miguel was still cleaning up the mess left by the arrest and subsequent execution of Stansfield Brightmeadow-Gates, Ben’s predecessor in the role who had gone rogue and tried to have Handsome Rob killed to get back at the folks Brightmeadow-Gates had derisively referred to as the Cowboys on Three.
Field Operations. Folks like Rob and his semi-retired, semi-informal mentors: the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang.
Old rivalries and hatreds that had gotten out of hand.
“Sit,” Miguel instructed Ben, pointing to the chair on the left.
Ben had seen the delivery this morning, but it had been marked Eyes-Only-Director, so he hadn’t read the contents. Miguel had, and had set in motion a chain of events that included Handsome Rob flirting with baristas because Miguel had been unwilling to sound enough of an alert to bring the man running.
Others would be watching the building. Would react to a higher state of vigilance and react themselves. That was to be avoided whenever possible.
Espionage, contrary to public opinion and mass media, was a quiet, deliberate thing, taking years to assemble small clues and disparate bits of data into information.
Except when it wasn’t, and you had to rely on wild cards like Roberto Segura. Handsome Rob as trained and polished by no less than Jorge Royo, the supposedly washed up, third-rate-actor best known for a series of comical farce vids that happened to make pretty good money, and let Royo and the rest of the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang occasionally perform missions for the Service.
When all else had failed.
Miguel was just hoping that Handsome Rob alone would be sufficient. One of these days, somebody would figure out Royo’s real game, martini glass and seduction of available women notwithstanding.
Robin knocked at the door, opened it far enough, and ushered Handsome in before closing it.
“Sit,” Miguel ordered the agent, one of his current favorites.
Rob was tall, dark, and handsome. Approaching thirty. Exceptional physical shape. Mentally well-formed to be a killer, though he rarely needed to. Just enough of a sociopath to perform the work without becoming addicted to it, like some of them did.
Almost frighteningly perfect.
“I received a package this morning,” Miguel began, switching his gaze back and forth between the two men seated across the vast desk from him. One hand possessively rested on the documents themselves. “Other intelligence agencies have no doubt received the same, or will in the near future. Somewhere, a timer has started and we need to do something. Rob, you start reading this now and hand pages to Ben as you complete them.”
Both men had as close to eidetic memories as you got in this industry, sometimes able to actually pull up the image of a page years later and repeat it to you word for word. There weren’t many pages here. Printed double space, with a good font and kerning, it only ran to thirty pages, plus a cover letter that had left Miguel cold as death when he read it.
As the men began digesting it, Miguel keyed the intercom, the smell of Rob’s coffee sitting half-forgotten on Miguel’s desk triggering his mind.
“Robin, could you have the kitchen send up a carafe of coffee?” he said when his right hand answered.
“On the way,” Robin replied.
Miguel tried not to fidget as he waited. Mostly unsuccessfully. Coffee arrived and he refilled his mug from it.
Handsome finished and handed the last page to Ben with a grimace.
“Is she on the level?” Rob asked.
“As far as we know,” Miguel replied. “I had the Records Department pull up anything we knew about the woman.”
Miguel pulled another file from the stack and handed it to the man.
“Carlota Rojas,” he informed them as Ben finished the last page. “Probable field name Hummingbird. What we know of her suggests a Salonnian agent who should be in her early fifties now. Reports hint that she was badly injured in the field four years ago, with a year of hospitalization and rehab after that. Apparently, at least according to what she purports to be Chapter One of a new tell-all memoir detailing her career and crimes, they forced her into what she feels is an unacceptable early retirement.”
“And you think she’ll really write the whole book and publish it everywhere?” Rob asked.
“If that’s not a shot across however many bows, I’m not sure what is,” Miguel replied.
“Salonnia will kill her when they catch her,” Rob noted. “Fribourg, too. Hell, the Imperials might not even be polite about it when they find the woman. Lot of collateral damage might be acceptable, if she really knows that much about their operations and is willing to spill publicly. Double or triple that if she intends to have this published everywhere as about as lurid a memoir as you can manage.”
Miguel nodded.
“What I need you two to tell me, literally off the cuff here, is if you think it might be worth jumping in with all the other hounds and trying to track her down,” Miguel said. “It is the longest of longshots, but we have to play those occasionally.”
Miguel leaned back and watched the two men cogitate. They knew hardly more than he did, other than the markings indicating that it had come from a trusted source. He kept folks on the payroll who worked for major publishers for exactly this reason. Money well invested, because more than once they had sent along a note.
Never had something this explosive come up, though.
“Are we trying to rescue her, or simply cause Fribourg and Salonnia an immense load of grief while they’re trying to find her so they can shut her down?” Rob asked cogently. “Blow their budgets and maybe snag a few of their folks when nobody is looking because we want to be assholes?”
Miguel had spent an hour considering the exact same question. Other agents could cause havoc. Few would look beyond that for the chance to out or capture Fribourg agents for whatever information they might have or trade value.
“Salonnia will spare no expense trying to track down one of their own gone rogue,” Ben spoke up. “Fribourg as well, with, as Rob noted, a willingness to play extremely rough as they go. She sounds as though she knows more about Fribourg than Aquitaine, at least from the first set of accusations here.”
“Will the Republic bite?” Rob chimed in. “We’re their allies, however junior partners we are in the affair. What will they do?”
“I don’t care,” Miguel said. “If they got her, I doubt we’d learn any more than if the Fribourg Empire took her into custody. Possibly less. Rob, going back to your original question, if we could rescue her, I would consider that a coup for all the ages. Just being able to assemble better dossiers on agents from Salonnia, Fribourg, and even Aquitaine would be an exceptional win for us, because that gives us better visibility into what all our neighbors are up to. Corynthe might even send someone, but I doubt that the pirates care that much.”
“Well, just sitting off to one side with a sniper rifle and a camera would be easy enough,” Rob said. “Any of your agents could handle something so prosaic. I assume you want more from this operation?”
Miguel nodded.
“Find her, if possible,” Miguel said. “Bring her in if you can. Turn her. Something. There is a wealth of information in her head beyond what she’s threatened to spill to everyone with this book. What more could we learn.?Failing that, capturing enemy agents or just burning them covers the price of your admission, Rob.”
“What are the operational limits involved?” Rob asked.
Yet another reason Rob was among the very best. He didn’t suffer any sort of executive paralysis. Never got bogged down in theoretical questions. Simply found the edges of the sandbox itself and went to work.
“You’ll be operating at extreme distances, Rob,” Miguel said. “Communication will be impossible, because you can’t know any of our normal operatives in place, lest they become unmasked in the soirée about to unfold.”
The agent nodded. Assassin was a mindset as much as it was a job title. Frequently, they were alone at the sharpest edge of the spear. Rob excelled there, too.
“At the same time, I don’t think I can put any meaningful limits on a field of battle almost entirely covered over in the fog of war, so you’ll be working with as close to a blank check as I’ve ever signed, Handsome,” Miguel continued, watching both men flinch in surprise.
Ben knew better than Rob what that meant, because any mistakes the field agent made would come up in hearings with Miguel’s bosses, including the Privy Council and a few functionally invisible organizations within Lincolnshire’s government.
“Going to have to travel fast and light,” he mused, eyes locked on a point over Miguel’s right shoulder. “Normally, I’d say alone, but if I can’t tap resources when I get wherever, then I need to carry them along with me.”
He paused and made eye contact, asking the obvious question.
“Are Mac and Alicia available for a fire drill?” Rob asked.
“They are,” Miguel replied, nodding. That had been the first thing he’d checked on, after sending a note to have Rob come in today for a previously unscheduled meeting on what should have been his day off.
Not that the Service kept banker’s hours, because his agents were constantly training, studying, qualifying, something. They still needed breaks to keep whatever sanity they had held onto for however long.
“How about an armorer?” Ben asked next, causing Rob to look that way.
“Nigel’s on tour with Longbow and his band, last I checked,” Rob said.
“Indeed,” Miguel agreed. “Currently playing in one of the nearer sectors of Aquitaine, so we could get a message to them in a week or so, but nothing sooner.”
“Too long,” Ben said. “He needs to fly tonight if we’re serious. Get ahead of the bow wave of the information if possible.”
Bow wave. A measure of how quickly data could be carried between two points, as shown on a standard deviation curve. If you could move fast enough to be on the leading flat space, you could do things before folks were prepared for you to know anything about a project. Ben was right about the need to move immediately.
“I’ve put Widowmaker on standby, just in case,” Miguel said. “Same yacht you took last time, to Shravishtha Prime. There have been a few upgrades added since then, based on your after-action reports. Awkward for four crew, but doable. Or we could find something larger, though not as fast.”
“Speed kills,” Rob said, sounding exactly like Jorge Royo when that man said it. “Crowded on a ship for a week isn’t a problem. But I don’t want to have to break someone in on the fly. Can you load me up with as much gear as you might send on a normal mission? I’ll dig into my stuff and add some things. Make sure you ask Mac and Alicia what they’d bring, given a blank page. I’ll need a copy of Hummingbird’s folder, both paper and electronic, plus a few others. Whoever are the key players for Fribourg and Aquitaine operating in that sector of Salonnian space, plus the ones that know Rojas herself.”
“You think they’ll send her friends to kill her?” Ben asked.
“I think that they’ll send people who know her, the better to get into her head,” Rob countered. Miguel shared the assessment. “That woman doesn’t seem to have friends, at least from what she’s writing here. Or she’s intent on burning them all and doesn’t consider them friends anymore. The other side will need folks who might know how she thinks. Those will be the ones closest to her, so we can estimate who that might be. Nothing more.”
“You are priority alpha, Rob,” Miguel said. “Until you clear the atmosphere, you have a blank check for personnel, equipment, or intelligence, so you need to tell us what that is. I’ll round up Mac and Alicia. Do you want to brief them?”
“No, you handle that,” Rob said. “Tell them to pack for a sudden mission, given the planet in question, and meet me on the ship for details. I need to wander down to the canteen and figure out what I’ll need to carry with me, and what I can find when I get there.”
The man rose and moved to the door.
“Anything else right now?”
“Not at the moment,” Miguel said. “Cover identity papers and legends will be worked up as you have lunch. Everything else will be in motion.”
Rob nodded and left. Ben had remained seated.
“Think he can do it?” Ben asked.
“I don’t think anybody else can, Ben,” Miguel answered.
Not the same thing, but at least it was honest.
Was the galaxy really ready for someone to air all the dirty laundry they might know?
That was the real question.
What lengths would Fribourg or Salonnia go to, in order to silence the woman, before anybody else could pick her brain?
3
Esmeralda MacTavish. Generally known around the building as Mac. Today, she was aboard the yacht Widowmaker. Reading in the kitchen.
Formerly, Head of the Service’s Data Analysis Inspectorate, before a taste of field operations had convinced her that she liked it more than the dry numbers of advanced, applied mathematics. She’d worked directly with Rob twice, as well as training with him in a variety of tasks.
Miguel kept her on the active agent roster to use as an older woman who could provide a solid cover for Handsome, as if he was a clueless boy-toy she’d brought along. There weren’t many older men still working, once you got beyond Jorge Royo. But the game worked exceptionally well, since she was still almost the same size she’d been as a model thirty years ago. Gray hair in stripes natually these days, except that she’d been instructed to turn it all dark blond now for a mission that had come out of the blue.
Completely out of the blue, even, as she’d been scheduled to teach an advanced class in analytics programming to some of the newer staff later in the week. Alicia could have taught it as well, but was also packed and ready to move.
Fire drill, as they said on the operations side of the building. Miguel says jump and everybody asked how high on the way up.
She looked up as the main hatch opened and Handsome Rob stepped in. They’d been lovers professionally, under cover of a legend on a mission, but never spoke of it when they were home. Might be time again, but she wasn’t sure.
All Miguel had said when pulling her in was to pack and be ready to leave the planet in eight hours.
And here she was.
“Alicia is bunking in the pilot’s cabin,” Mac said as he dropped an overnight bag and an extremely heavy duffel bag next to the table where she sat. “At least for now.”
That gave him the option to take the pilot space for himself and put the two women together if he wanted. Or needed. He was nice to snuggle with, but this was a blank piece of paper and it felt like Rob was making everything up as he went.
Something had gone very desperately wrong.
Again.
“Good enough,” he said, nodding and kneeling.
She watched him pull a big folder out of the overnight bag and hand it to her.
“I’m going to do preflight and then take off while you read this,” he said. “Have Alicia do the same.”
Then he was gone forward.
Mac listened to the ship make new noises as Rob did all his piloting things, but that was background noise.
She read.
Carlota Rojas. Salonnian spy probably once named Hummingbird. Angry at her fate and striking back, from the tone of the cover letter and Chapter One of the new book she was mailing to various places. Willing to share everything she’d learned in thirty years of espionage, just to get even.
“Stand by for lift off,” Rob said over the intercom, followed by the ship shivering as he got everything in motion.
Rob was as good a pilot as he was lover, so she wouldn’t even have spilled any of the coffee she had, even had it not been in a sippy cup for zero gravity. Alicia emerged and Mac handed her pages to read.
Eventually, she finished the documents. Wasn’t all that much, but it was about as damning as it got, especially if Rojas was serious about naming names behind various assassinations and acts of what might not have been random terrorism.
Fribourg was an empire and wouldn’t care all that much if the truth came out, but Aquitaine would still like to use that to drive wedges into the general population over there. And it wasn’t like anybody had clean hands.
“Shit,” Alicia muttered when she finished.
Mac studied the woman. One of the smartest folks in the building, a physics major with a secondary specialization in cryptographic mathematics. Once upon a time, she had been short, dumpy, and just at the edge of failing various regular physical fitness qualifications that the Service maintained. The data nerds spent most of their time staring at screens in dark rooms, rather than running obstacle courses like Rob.
Alicia Sepeda had found that she liked the field work she’d done last year with Handsome. She was by no means slinky, to say nothing of as slender as Mac, but Alicia had set up a treadmill at her desk and routinely walked a minimum of twenty thousand steps in the course of a single workday.
