Honor of the Clan

Chapter Fourteen

Michael Sunday Privett, also known as “Cargo,” walked into Nathan O’Reilly’s office, took one look at the skinny brunette girl and shook his head. “Oh, no. Fuck no. Father O’Reilly, with all due respect, sir—”

“Hush, son. Just come in and sit down,” the priest ordered him.

As he walked in awkwardly, he looked curiously around the office while trying to get as solid a grip on his professional dignity as he could. At the age of twenty-three, he’d been operational for three years, and he was dead certain he was going to need all his professionalism to deal with this situation. The brunette was wearing contacts and was made up and everything to look about seventeen, but he knew better. Cargo had spent most of his teenage years with little Denise Reardon following him around adoringly and hanging on his every word.

She was a smart kid, and she was damned cute, but the last couple of times he’d been home he’d been all too aware of how precocious little Denise was. She might be skinny, but the kid had a full load-out of hormones and he felt goddamned ridiculous dodging a seventh-grade girl all over the island.

“Sir, I don’t know wha—”

“I said hush, Privett. Sit.”

“Yes, sir.” Cargo sat unhappily on the front half of a chair, back straight, unconsciously drawing on “proper” bearing to get through what he anticipated was about to become a very uncomfortable — more uncomfortable — situation.

“I know you know Miss Reardon, Sergeant Privett. What you may not know is that Miss Reardon is a candidate for professional school.” The head of the Bane Sidhe focused a grave stare on him, as if waiting to see if he needed to be shut up again.

“There is no way, at all, Miss Reardon will be assigned onto a team at her age and without full training. However, just now she has a skill that is very useful. She’s a damned good driver, has a peerless sense of direction—”

Boy, did she ever, Cargo acknowledged. The kid had some kind of weird intuition or something, because she always seemed to guess where he was going next and get there before him.

“—importantly, her, um, tracking skills are exceptionally useful in this case, because she can get you back without a tail more reliably than anyone I’ve got on base. I believe you have the personal experience to appreciate it when I tell you that she is one of the individuals able to effortlessly transfer simulator experience in this type of task to real life.” O’Reilly held a poker face, but Cargo had the uncomfortable certainty he was being laughed at.

He felt an unholy glee as the girl blushed brightly. She deserved a little discomfort out of this, the little brat.

“I have teams, son, but I don’t have them sitting around idle. Even pulling in what I can, with this sudden work increase, I am pressed. I will be putting together a team from our operatives in, and new recruits from, DAG. I will be sending that team on a vital mission. That mission will be directed at killing one of the individuals responsible for one of the dependent murders. Miss Reardon will be that team’s driver. Would you like to volunteer for this mission, Sergeant Privett?”

Cargo suppressed a sigh. Completely suppressed it. Acting anything less than the complete professional he was would only make him look bad in front of God’s right-hand man and encourage the brat.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good. I’ll send the details to your buckley. You’re dismissed,” the priest said. “Not you, Miss Reardon. Stay a moment.”

Not for anything would he let either of the two of them see any of his relief that little Deni — Denise — couldn’t follow him. God, even his wife thought she was cute.

Cordovan Landrum wished his parents had picked a different way to honor his mother’s surname of Brown than to name him after a shoe color. Since nobody had asked him, he had picked one he liked better out of his favorite series of the weird two-Ds that his dad watched obsessively. At the age of five, he had begun the practice of beating the crap out of any boy who would not call him “Luke,” and finding other ways to get even with annoying girls, whom he couldn’t beat up. Not and survive his dad.

Luke looked at his team roster and winced a little at the driver’s name. He wasn’t supposed to know her age, but Cargo had clued him in. He had made the executive decision to keep the information from Tramp and Kerry so as to not make them nervous that the kid was driving. As Bane Sidhe, he knew a bit about how the O’Neals ran their place. That kid would have been driving motorized go-carts as soon as she could reach the gas pedal, progressing to dirt bikes and cars, again, as soon as she could reach. If O’Reilly was sticking him with a gal this young, the girl could drive like a bat out of hell.

She was sitting across from him now. He’d gotten the gum out of her mouth by the simple expedient of looking at her like the seventeen-year-old she was supposed to be — i.e., like fair game — and telling her huskily that she looked about twelve when she did that. She’d swallowed the gum so fast she’d almost choked. And blushed like hell. But no more gum chewing to give her age away to Kerry and Tramp.

Even in a good cause, it had felt kind of icky to know he was making eyes at a thirteen-year-old, although she sure didn’t look thirteen. She looked like an O’Neal. It was less a matter of facial features and more something the family seemed to carry on the inside.

The head of the O’Neal Bane Sidhe had told him she’d taken an assassin’s audition and passed. More importantly, a month later she still wanted the job. He didn’t like having a kid driver, but he’d take the top guy’s word on the competence of this one.

When his other three guys came in, Cargo nodded to her and just kept quiet, glaring at Kerry and Tramp when they tried to get friendly. The other two men, of course, chalked that up to entirely wrong reasons and would have gotten more enthusiastic if Luke hadn’t taken them in hand.

“Okay, just to go over the crap I know you guys will have already studied, this is the scumbag on the menu for the evening. Linda, display scumbag,” he instructed his buckley. “This is said scumbag’s house.” The buckley obligingly changed the holo it was projecting above the table. The table and conference room were complete pieces of shit, but he’d grown up in the Bane Sidhe and only noticed it from the difference between the facilities here and at Great Lakes.

“This is the route to scumbag’s house.” The buckley switched to a street view, projected as if they were looking at a sand table, with the route outlined in red.

Landrum looked up at Denise to make sure she was paying attention, focused in, whatever. She was.

“This is our kind of mission. Scumbag’s house is a little isolated. Got a vacant house on one side, an empty lot on the other. We go, we kick in the door, we kill the bastard, we come back. Standard building clearing, don’t hit the no-shoot targets. Wife and kid. Any questions?” The latter was the rhetorical question that traditionally ended all mission briefings. There were never questions.

“Why are we killing him? Or does it matter? To the mission, I mean,” the girl asked.

Luke carefully avoided being either terse or patronizing. If nobody had told her, it was a damned good question. Why the hell hadn’t anybody told her? “He killed Shark Sanders’ grandmother,” he said. When the kid’s eyes widened then narrowed coldly, he gave her a couple of points. She actually looked a bit scary, considering.

“We know because he obligingly left a bit of his DNA—” The kid wasn’t stupid or naïve, and she was clearly getting the wrong impression. “Blood. He stuck himself on a pin.” The girl’s shoulders relaxed fractionally, but the chill in the room from all five of them was arctic. When you murdered a harmless old granny at her quilting, you just didn’t get any brownie points for what you didn’t do.

Snow was falling heavily, and the wind was squealing too loud to hear the clank of the chains on the tires as they drove out from their staging area, a dinky, ugly little car repair shop. The car, which Reardon had spent at least twice as long checking out as he would have, would be carrying them from Fort Wayne to Cincinnati.

She had grudgingly agreed to let the four DAGgers share the driving to Asheville, but Landrum noticed she was real uncomfortable that Privett was driving.

“Have you ever driven in snow before, Cargo?” she asked.

“What? Of course I’ve driven in snow. We’re — were — stationed up in Great Lakes!” He sounded indignant.

“And you know the first rule of driving in snow, right?”

“I can drive, Deni.” He rolled his eyes.

“I’d feel better if you slowed down about ten miles per hour,” she said.

Landrum looked over Privett’s shoulder at the speedometer, which was holding on sixty. He looked out at the road and the weather. It was a little faster than he would have driven, considering.

“There can be ice under this shit that you don’t see,” Reardon insisted.

Privett sighed exasperatedly, but Landrum felt the car slow.

“You can get some sleep while you’re not driving, you know,” Luke told the girl, who was sitting in the middle of the back seat, between him and Tramp.

She looked at the back of Cargo’s head suspiciously, then down at her buckley. “Maybe later. I think I’ll read for now.”

Tramp looked entirely too happy about the seating arrangements, which prompted Landrum to shoot him a dirty look over the back of the kid’s head. His buckley vibrated softly, and he touched the screen to bring up the text.

“What? Are you calling dibs?” The message had Tramp’s user icon in the corner.

“She’s underage,” he typed back.

“Not by much.” He and Tramp were both typing by touching small typewriter keys displayed on the lower half of the screen. They were only there when the buckley was in text mode, but they did help with brief, silent communication.

The girl sat between them, reading whatever she was reading, or playing a game or something. Oblivious, anyway.

A new icon, a snowflake, flashed onto his screen, the word “conference” blinking in the corner. He tapped the button to accept, wondering.

“Too much for you. Get it?” the message said. The snowflake turned into a curvy twentieth-century poster girl who blew a kiss before winking out.

Landrum shot a look at the girl, who had a small quirk at the corner of her mouth, and just about fell out of his seat laughing.

“Something wrong?” the kid asked, pushing the bridge of her nose like someone used to wearing glasses.

“Nope,” he said.

On the other side of the car, Tramp Michaels looked a lot less cheerful and a bit more glum. Luke just couldn’t resist throwing him a big grin.

They drove through the night, stopping to change cars twice before getting to Asheville. It had been a bit of an experience for Kerry and Michaels to insert by something as prosaic as a road trip. So much so that they’d joked along the way, calling it the frat-boy hit.

Between one thing and another, it was the wee hours when they pulled into Knoxville. The weather was fine, and the roads dry, with forecast of more of the same. Operational necessity frequently required doing without sleep, but contrary to popular belief, proper rest was something you planned for if possible. The best guy in the world still performed better rested than fatigued. They found a cheap hotel and he sent Cargo in to set them up.

The hotel was a grayish brown, not intentionally, but because its white bricks and doors had been without a fresh coat of paint for so long they were grimy and stained. It was the kind of dive where half the “guests” rented by the week and could more accurately be described as residents.

It was the kind of place where it was safe to stay — if you were twenty-something, one-eighty-something pounds, male, and made of muscle.

It was Landrum’s turn driving, so he looked at Privett when he came walking back out across the cracked and faded parking lot. “Where’s the room?” he asked.

“Rooms,” the other man said shortly. “Around the other side, ground floor.” He pointed, turning to the back seat to toss the girl a key. “Here’s yours, Deni,” he said.

The kid took it without comment, and since he couldn’t see her face, Luke had no idea what she thought of it. What he thought of it was that he was uneasy putting a thirteen-year-old girl in a room by herself in this kind of shit heap even in broad daylight.

“You’re not staying in a room alone, Reardon. I’ll take the floor,” he said.

Being on the floor would suck, but there was no way he was going to stick Tramp or Kerry in there ignorant of the girl’s age. He’d still rather not pass on that bit of information; the only other guy who knew was Cargo, and putting him in with the girl was a no-go for obvious reasons.

She looked a little nervous. No, make that a lot nervous. Make that as if she expected to be a virgin sacrifice in the name of the job. Eew. If he didn’t know her age, he might have been fooled by the way they’d fixed her up, but knowing it, he looked at her and saw “kid” and… um… fuck no.

After shooting him a suspicious look that Landrum returned with his own patented “don’t be stupid, asshole” expression, Cargo just looked relieved.

As Luke carried her pack and his inside, the kid was looking anywhere but at him, and clearly trying to look as if she went into sleazy hotel rooms, alone, with an adult male, every day of her life. He shut the door behind himself and set the bags down by the chair.

“Quit worrying. I know you’re thirteen, and my baby sister is older than you. Get some sleep, Reardon,” he said. “Mind tossing me a pillow and the bedspread first?”

The look on her face was priceless.

They went in at night.

Leaving Knoxville in the late afternoon let them get through the mountains before it was quite dark, but by the time they hit Asheville, their headlights led them along a highway almost deserted after dark.

Asheville’s geography left many areas that could support homes unsuited to the kind of flat clusters of houses that squatted throughout midwestern suburbia. Towering ridges and folds in the Earth — huge to a man who’d been raised on the Great Plains — were sprinkled with a dusting of lights like stars, shining from the windows of rows of houses along the switchbacks.

Reardon was in the driver’s seat. She’d driven from Knoxville, putting her foot down and explaining that she would not get anything but an ulcer from riding in the car — she patted the hood of the drab-bodied old Crown Victoria possessively — with any of them driving. Her tone said, with the disdain only an adolescent girl can muster, what she thought of their gifts in the area of ground vehicle operation.

Landrum and Privett, afraid that her attitude would make Kerry and Tramp twig to her age, readily agreed that of course she could drive. Besides, with Luke riding shotgun, both other men were out of arm’s reach of her. They were starting to favor him with knowing looks, though, and he didn’t like that at all.

The house they were looking for was about halfway up one of the mountainsides. Vacant neighboring house, empty lot, terrain unfavorable to clusters of homes. It was nicely isolated.

Reardon pulled into the driveway of the vacant house and cut the lights, leaving the engine running. As they got out, they could feel the cold wind scraping against their tilted faces, not buffered much by winter-bare trees. The cold bit them with all the fierceness they knew from winter trips into Chicago, but Luke hadn’t expected to find in one of the Southern states.

At shortly past midnight, the lights were off in the Tyler household. Landrum thanked God that they had somehow managed to loot their own gear and take DAG’s supply of such nice items as modern night vision goggles with them. He knew from other gear that there was no telling what shit the Bane Sidhe were sticking operators with these days. Genuine DAG goggles meant everybody was seeing like daylight in a black and white movie. Luke’s dad had lots of those. This was like “Leave it to Beaver,” if the Beave had lived in a big, falling down piece of shit house that had obviously once been a nice place, probably for someone wealthy.

He had heard houses referred to as “falling down” before, but this one actually had the porch roof propped up on one side by a series of warped, hammered-together two by fours. The only thing to indicate the windows had once had shutters was the one window that had one shutter. Two other windows were boarded up. The very small front yard sported a scattering of toys and junk.

They kicked in the front door and went in two by two, clearing the building according to their training, just as they would have in any other hostile environment. They heard the screaming of the mother and child.

Tramp and Kerry found all three cowering back in the parents’ bedroom. The wife and boy were on one side of the bed, the scumbag du jour on the other.

“Wait, wait! Not in front of my wife and kid! Okay, I’ll go, I’ll go if you want, but not here, not like this…” the man pleaded.

Still in the process of pleading for his life, he moved suddenly to bring a shotgun to bear on the DAGgers. At least, he tried. Kerry nailed him before the gun had even cleared the top of the mattress.

The screaming of the wife and kid sounded far away and horrendous, and the mother fought viciously, gouging Luke’s arms deeply with her fingernails as he pulled her onto the bed and pinned her. The boy was pounding on his back as he fished a loaded syringe out of a leg pocket and hit the woman with a shot of Recalma Plus.

Behind him, he felt the boy go limp and get peeled off his back, turning to see Privett laying the unconscious kid out on the bed beside the mom.

“I only gave him half a shot,” Cargo said.

“Right. Cover that with a sheet,” Landrum indicated the corpse. “Grab the boy, I’ve got Mom, we’ll dump them on the couch so they don’t wake up in the same room with him.”

It would be impossible to spare the two civilians the grief and horror of losing their scumbag father and husband this way. They’d wake up and find him, dead. However, the Recalma did more than get them quiet without killing them. It disrupted neurotransmitters in the brain in a way that prevented long-term memories from forming. Completely. The vision of seeing Tyler killed right in front of their eyes wouldn’t be repressed. It simply wouldn’t be there. At all.

A long time ago, there had been a saying that you couldn’t un-see things. Modern medicine had a cure for that, if you got there right on the spot. These two wouldn’t remember the last one to three days. There were several drugs that could do it. Recalma had the advantage of being fast, complete, and neutralizing all the adrenaline and related stress hormones and effects.

It was easier to get men to take the shot when they knew that any civilians watching could unsee it, after all.

While they’d close the door as best they could, it might get pretty cold in here before morning. They piled all the blankets and stuff they could easily find on top of the two survivors, placing them right next to each other for shared body heat. On the top, Cargo put a red and blue patchwork quilt with rocking horses that he’d found in the kid’s room. He noticed absently that it looked like good work — something Grandma Wendy would like. The boy was lucky somebody had cared enough to make it for him.

“She punched me. On an op. For no damn reason. Twice!” George Schmidt danced around the court, dodging Tommy Sunday to land a nice shot through the hoop. “Nothing but net,” he crowed.

The gym they were in only had enough light to see clearly because it had a lot of high-up windows, many of which gaped, empty of glass. The shards scattered around the edges of the court revealed that the breakage had come from outside. The stray rocks lying around suggested its cause. Someone, or someones, had been awfully bored. That the vandalism was old, or had at least started long ago, showed from the water stains down the cinderblock walls and the warped and rotting edges of the floor boards under the breakages. George had taken one side of the room, Cally the other, when they arrived, just to make sure that every breakage was old. The gym was in one of many post-war ghost towns. Farming continued in the open land around the town, but large agribusiness had gotten larger with the post-war hybrid technologies. Hectares of waving wheat went from seed to harvest without a single human setting foot on the fields. Smart machines and engineered seed took care of all that.

In the heartland, the breadbasket of the world, agribusiness ruled. Where you could really see it was in the scores of ghost towns dotted all over the Midwest. The disadvantage of a ghost town for dropping any tails was that any car turning off a route or highway stuck out like a sore thumb. The advantage was that because cars back in town were so rare, it was hard for a tail to hide.

He could watch the roads into and out of town, but he could not watch every little tractor and truck trail the farmers used to use. The plan was to loop around and hit a road some small distance out from the town. Their tracks would be found, of course, but by then they hoped to have confused the trail and slipped away.

Meanwhile, Harrison and Sands were out in an ancient utility shed in the backyard of the slowly collapsing house next door repainting the car. Cally was making lunch on an ancient Coleman camp stove they had found, unaccountably half full of fuel, in said shed. She had appointed herself cook on the grounds that Harrison was the only other team member who could fix a decent meal from their box of supplies in the trunk. She had declared that she wasn’t going to eat sandwiches twice in one day if she could help it.

Hence, George and Tommy were free for a little quick PT with an old ball that it had taken Harrison about five minutes to repair, and George was free to vent about his beaut of a black eye.

“What had happened just before that?” Tommy asked, shooting carelessly over the short man’s head. To his chagrin, he missed and his opponent recovered on the rebound. He concentrated more on the game while Schmidt filled in the details of their heroic egress from the Greenville Police Station.

“Oh. So she was taking a guy down and you inserted yourself to help. Yep. That’d do it.” Tommy intercepted the ball in the air and shot again; this time he made it. “What the hell is it with you two?” he asked.

When George started to say something, Tommy just shook his head, grinning. “I know James Stewart,” he said. “You do not want to let him catch you cuddling up to his wife.”

“Cuddling up to her? Half the time I want to strangle her,” the other man said.

“You two are so junior high.” Tommy missed the grab and watched as the ball dropped through the basket from another of Schmidt’s seemingly effortless shots. Schmidt was good enough, despite his height, that the game of one on one wasn’t nearly as mismatched as it might have seemed.

“You want to fuck her. Join the club. You can’t. She thinks you’re cute, so it’s worse. You still can’t. End of story, grow the fuck up,” the big man said, but he said it in such a matter-of-fact tone that it was impossible to take offense.

“She thinks I’m cute?” George echoed.

“Dude. James Stewart’s wife. You’re damn good, but he’s better. I wouldn’t. And she won’t, anyway.”

“But she thinks I’m cute.” The little blond man missed his shot by a mile, letting Sunday recover the ball for an easy lay-up.

“You’re hopeless,” Sunday pronounced. “Just find somebody else to screw and behave yourself until it wears off. And if you don’t, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He focused and dropped another one right in. “That’s ten. My game.”

“What do you mean ‘join the club’?” Schmidt asked suspiciously as they walked off the court.

“Don’t look at me. You’ve seen my Wendy. There’s a club, all right. I didn’t say I was in it.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t.”

Tommy set the ball down by the door to the old locker room, which, unlike the gym itself, was dark as hell. They just had to go through there to get to the lobby of the building. “Hopeless,” he repeated.

The gym at the base had water fountains on two sides. Miraculously, the chiller on one of them even worked. Aluminum bleachers stood collapsed against the walls on each side of the basketball court. The curtain at the far end of said court was open, leaving a good view of exercise machines, a free weight section, and a compressed obstacle course. All were in use, as was the matted martial arts area. The DAGgers on base, even the ones who were Bane Sidhe first, coped with their enforced idleness in a way that kept them fit, busy, and not coincidentally, together. PT was a near religion for them and, like people turn to faith and each other in times of trouble, the DAGgers immersed themselves in PT schedules that were frankly brutal, raising protests from the medics who they kept busy with over-training injuries. Bane Sidhe sports medicine, as a result of decades of Tchpth patronage and lack of Darhel interference, was leagues ahead of their prior experience. With fear of injury greatly reduced, the men took full advantage of their extended envelope. They did, at least, readily share the facilities with the permanent denizens of the base and the dependents.

The Bane Sidhe field operatives, however, made it subtly clear that they were sharing their facilities with DAG. With the large number of DAGgers who had started as Bane Sidhe, and the others having witnessed the performance of the upgraded field operatives, especially the women, this didn’t cause the friction it might have. There was respect between professionals. Rivalry, but it was a bit hard to get used to cute chicks who could and would run you into the ground or kick your ass, situation depending. Not that they were that far ahead of peak male athletes. They didn’t always win. It was still a novel experience for those who hadn’t previously encountered upgrades.

News that the equipment that achieved these results was no longer available was greeted with intense disappointment, a sentiment that was, of course, completely unrelated to the new tendency to overtrain and screw the transient, readily reparable injuries. Like stress fractures. The clinic director was beginning to scream about his budget.

Even though the gym was fairly crowded, the basketball goal on the far end had some space around the four people playing an energetic two on two, they having indicated a desire to be by themselves this time.

Cally paused as Tommy came in, and missed a catch.

“Hey!” George protested as one of the intel geeks they were playing snagged the ball out of the air and made a seemingly effortless shot that dropped it through the net.

“Time,” Cally called.

“Okay, but it still counts,” Boyd said as George snagged the rebound. The investigator’s usually proper rows of hair spikes were limp with sweat, and he wiped his face with his already soaked T-shirt as Cally walked over to her teammate.

“Finished with your debrief?” she asked.

“Remind me again why I do this job?” Tommy asked. The large, open space of the gym seemed to be letting him breathe easier. She knew a lot of places he went were just plain cramped for a man his size.

“That bad, huh?” She adjusted the faded red sweatband that was holding her hair out of her face.

“Apparently our ‘hunting trip’ and ‘cross-country jaunt’ delayed us from getting the goods in and caused us to commit the gross sin of being later than the e-mail and the cleaners’ fingernail,” he said grumpily. “At least, that’s what the little REMF bastard implied.”

“Yeah, never mind we had orders not to worry about how long it took to get in but put security absolutely first. Never mind that sending said fingernail in by itself was an incredibly dumbass risk of interception and or having it followed right in. Never mind that the damn deer was a piece of blind luck,” Cally sighed. “He’s probably just jealous he didn’t get any. Or a militant vegetarian.”

“Anyway, the status on the investigation is this: the fingernail was great, but she had two guys’ DNA under there which either means she was attacked by two men, or that she’s a healthy young co-ed with a social life and forgot to scrub under her fingernails. We don’t want to whack an innocent boyfriend. They only got partials on the two guys — enough to identify if we had a match, but not enough to put together a holo. They’re still analyzing the DNA we got, but it should flag one of the two as definitely guilty, and hopefully complete his code,” she said.

“Hey, Cally, are you playing, or what?”

“Yeah, just a sec,” she called over her shoulder, then turned back to Tommy. “There probably is a second baddy, but she’s female. A couple of students noticed the niece walking off with a woman they hadn’t seen before. One of her friends thought it was odd that she didn’t smile or wave when they passed each other, but just assumed she hadn’t seen her. But she noticed the stranger female, so they got a pretty good description of her.” Cally pointed over her shoulder at the investigators.

“Hey, I gotta go. Bottom line, they’re closing in on identifying us some targets, so cheer up!” Her grin was predatory as she clapped Tommy on the shoulder, and there was an extra bounce in her step as she jogged back onto the court.