Honor of the Clan

Chapter Twenty-Three

They couldn’t use a conference room for the meeting. None of them were big enough. The atrium, however, had multiple advantages. For one thing, it could accommodate all thirty of the combat-ready DAGgers. including Maise. Then there were the operations teams, which had a certain overlap with some of the DAG troops who had been training for small group covert ops, urban and otherwise, Bane Sidhe style. Then there were the cybers and forensics people who had been instrumental in tracking down the killers and, lastly, the support staff — the cleaners, the cover prep people, the psyops profilers, the general intel weenies. Cally even noticed that a couple of the food service people had managed to snag themselves a spot on the list.

It was natural. Everybody wanted to be in on this. They had, they believed, identified every individual who took part in the murders of DAG dependents and other loved ones. There were red noses and eyes here and there. The strangest case of hay fever had seemed to sweep through the base personnel and temporary residents all at once.

Charis Thomason was a lovely black woman. She was no juv, and she was carrying about fifty pounds more weight than she should, but she had a vitality that was at odds with the intel stereotype. Her mahogany complexion held a glow, and her coal-black eyes sparkled as if life was a joke only she seemed to get.

Tonight, she had abandoned her normal good humor, and her glow radiated another emotion entirely. She stood beside a high-quality, nearly new holotank, a big one, gripping a fiberglass pointer across her front like a sheathed sword.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it’s seven now, so I’ll get started. First of all, I’d like to thank Team Isaac for bringing in the AID of one John Earl Bill Stuart,” she said, tapping the pointer into the tank’s projection area like a magic wand, and a head shot holo of the man appeared, triggering a palpable wave of hatred in the room. “This device was the key piece of evidence that allowed us to pull all our other information into a cohesive picture of who and how many.”

She paused while people looked around to Cally’s team, who were sitting together towards the back. The clapping was rhythmic, fierce, but it stopped quickly as everyone was focused on the information, not the kudos.

“I’d also like to thank all the teams who brought in all the forensic evidence, of all kinds,” she said gravely. At another smattering of applause, she held up her hands, “Please, people. There’s more than enough people to thank, but I think people want to know what the end game is.”

This elicited a growl.

“Our first murder was Cordelia Beadwindow, niece of Sergeant Kevin Adams. We have two perpetrators. Robert “Bobby” Mitchell is Mr. Stuart’s direct contractor, and we believe is the architect of these attacks. We do not have his location. He hired all amateurs. He, of course, was using them as stalking horses and intended for us to find them. He does not wish to be found himself. We will find him. As the saying goes, he can run, but he’ll just die tired.

“Sarah Andersen.” The display broke into a block of nine images, a head shot in the center of a very pretty, even beautiful, blond girl. The other images showed a number of images of the kind people posted on the internet of themselves. Bikini, drunken partying, prom dress, even a nude, as well as a security cam image of the same woman, light brunette. “Miss Andersen was a brunette for the crime, but usually wears her hair blond, and has returned to doing so. While she has no criminal record other than one count of underage drinking, I’m sure it will surprise no one that the little charmer socially terrorized her high school until she graduated two years ago. Envy driven sociopath, but obviously, money will do.

“Miss Andersen lured Cordelia Beadwindow over to Mr. Mitchell, who did the killing. His DNA was found at the scene, Andersen’s was not. We do not believe she participated in the actual killing. Not that we care.”

The intelligence department’s VP tapped again, changing the scene to a middle-aged woman with her husband, apparently at a barbecue or picnic. She was laughing and looked nice, her straight, light brown hair cut in a gentle pageboy, sans bangs. “Leellen Beadwindow. The bastards took over her car, ran her into a bridge, and then to make sure she was dead, they set off an incendiary charge under the wreck. Civilian autopsy indicated that she was killed by the fire.”

Another tap, and the picture changed to an older man with weathered, wrinkled skin — the kind that indicated he didn’t laugh much.

“The driver of the car. He left the tire marks of his personal vehicle and a cigarette butt at the scene.”

There were several snickers in the room, mostly from the direction of field teams.

“We have high confidence that that is the total number of participants in the Beadwindow murders.”

“Next to the Coacher murder.” She waved the pointer and a man’s head appeared with a large red X in front of it. “Cullen Wayne Foster, deceased. Thank you, Team Bowie.”

Again the room growled. The difference between its prior anger and its present satisfaction was palpable. A number of growls came out “hoo-rah!” Variations echoed from people who had a more specific service history and felt the need to be heard.

“The Maise murders. For the sake of the family present, I will be brief.” Thomason had obviously prepared for this specific contingency. Four heads appeared in the tank at once. “From the top left, Robert Mitchell, again. Rahab Graber Bender, aka Candy Leighton.” The aging, bleached blonde was no Marilyn Monroe. Not quite over the hill, but compared to the fresh-faced juv girls in the Bane Sidhe ops teams, late twenties looked a bit past the cheap whore’s sell-by date.

“Below, Gordy Pace, no middle name, and—” The man on the lower right had a satisfying red X over his face. ” — Reginald Erbrechen, deceased. Thank you, Cally.”

The thanks had a note of irony, and Cally O’Neal got more than a few accusing looks. There had been a number of people who had devised creative ways for the captive to die, and were very disappointed not to be in on carrying them out.

The other woman’s only response was a minuscule nod of acknowledgment, as if killing the man had been a minor administrative detail. Which, of course, it was. Smart way to play it, though. Just a professional matter. Bootleg copies of that segment of the holo were circulating widely, and provided some salve on the disappointments from not doing it personally or protractedly.

“The Swaim murders are the last we have. So far,” Charis sighed. They were really going to have to hustle and take out Billy-Bob, which was the collective name she privately assigned to the duo. Their deaths should at least create an operational pause in the kin murders.

“Horton Huey Scout,” she said, changing the image to the next perpetrator.

“I’d wanna kill somebody, too,” someone mumbled from the back.

“Horton Huey Scout,” she repeated. The man was a short, much-freckled redhead. “No, he’s not a relative,” she said. “Buckley footage of the scene, forensic accounting. He’s guilty as hell. Next.”

“Bradley Willard Farris.” This one was tall and rangy, of indeterminate ethnicity. “We only had approximate height and weight from our footage, but he picked up the money with Scout, has known him for awhile, and footage from various cameras places him in Orlando at approximately the right time. Since he’s from Topeka, that amazing coincidence is enough that we’re confident ordering his execution. I somehow doubt anyone here has a problem with that.

“That’s it. We know who they are, we know where they are. They each stand condemned by the security council and are on the execution list as priority targets. We will be sending teams to carry out sentence. Are there any questions?” The last was meant to be rhetorical.

“Comment,” Cally said.

“Yes, Cally?” Charis replied.

“There have been… discussions regarding this mission,” Cally said. “One of the problems with sending out half the damned Bane Sidhe, Clan O’Neal and DAG on seek and destroy missions is that if the Darhel don’t know where we are now, they’re probably going to figure it out. One way to avoid this is to just give all the information to the police and let them handle it.”

The muttering that accompanied that statement was the sort of mutter Captain Bligh heard on the Bounty just before he got tossed in a rowboat.

“But let me explain,” Cally said coldly. “No, let me summarize. One: Chain of evidence is broken. Two: The Tir will make it all go away even if it’s not. He may make the patsies go away, permanently, but that’s not the point. Three: Oh. Hell. No.

“For years,” she said, striding onto the stage and walking back and forth, “we have been fighting in the shadows. For centuries among the Bane Sidhe. For most of my own life and that’s been a long-damned time. We have taken hits. We have had teams taken out. We have lost too many good people. But there was a code. No Darhel, no military and no dependents.

“Because it was fight the good guys, us, or go into the cold, DAG went into the cold,” Cally said. “O’Neal and non-O’Neal, no muss, no fuss, no bitching, they dropped everything they had built in their lives and went into the cold. Because they believed in what we are fighting.

“And now the damned Darhel are going after their families? Their children?

“If you’re a DAGger, you’re an O’Neal, dammit,” she growled, voice dropping so low it was almost a whisper, every word distinct. “These dead, your dead, are our dead, too. Your blood is our blood. We know who they are, we know where they sleep. For DAG and the honor of Clan O’Neal, these fuckers are going down — and right the hell now.” Cally O’Neal’s eyes burned like live coals, a fiery witch-blue that promised debts paid in full.

“DAG and Clan!” someone shouted it, and it erupted into a roar that echoed through the atrium, rafters to floor.

The complication of this job was that Sarah Andersen had moved from her crappy dorm room into a nice apartment in a gated suburb. Normally, this would have presented a trivial matter for a cyber to deal with, hardly more difficult than tying a shoelace. Unfortunately, it was currently trendy to have a gatehouse with a real live guard manning it.

Tommy wondered if the target had been smart enough to choose this kind of neighborhood because the gate was a strategic choke point for trouble, in which case she might have it electronically monitored and run through a buckley for analysis, or if she just chose it because of the fad. Conspicuous consumption, Fifties style.

Either way, they’d be bypassing it.

The nice thing about places like this was their marketing. Any security features they had that were useful were a selling point for the apartments — so they were all in the brochure on the net. No dogs, no internal camera system out of concerns for the residents’ privacy, just a big brick wall and a manned front gate.

It would have been easier if the target’s apartment was in a building next to a wall, but no such luck. After they went over the wall, they’d have to walk inward to get to her building.

They’d be using the easiest, most trite ruse in the world to do that. Lovers. He and Cally would be a pair; Sands and George would be a pair. Costuming had forced George into elevator shoes for this, and the team had given him no end of shit for it over dinner. Even though Sands was only five-four, the cover people had thought he’d look more authentic if he were a couple of inches taller. If “authentic” wasn’t too clumsy a word, George probably would have found himself stuck with a new nickname.

Lovers as an insertion ruse was trite because it was so damned effective. Since the Bane Sidhe liked to have at least one female per team, they had it down to an art.

The art was slightly marred when Cally slipped going over the wall and ripped a small hole in her jeans, skinning her knee. That wasn’t good. He made a mental note to tell the cleaners about it as he wrapped his arm around her shoulder and kissed her in the darkness. First thing you did on insertion. Lovers were often furtive. If anyone had noticed them being furtive, they’d assume the reason.

Despite what he’d said to George, it was not like kissing his sister. He was a normal guy, not impervious to her charms, nor she to his, which was a damn good thing. If there was no spark at all, it was hard to pull this off convincingly. Fortunately, they’d worked together long enough that just because there was the normal chemistry you’d expect didn’t mean they were going to turn into raging lust bunnies over each other. Part of the job. They’d done it before, they’d do it again.

It was a little like kissing the chick you took to the movies when you were interested in her friend but couldn’t get anywhere. Nice, yeah. The obvious turn on, yeah. He was just glad he was rarely paired with George.

Sands was nice. She was also obviously practical as all shit. Not a romantic bone in that girl’s body. When Papa got back and Sands was on some other team, he might nudge her to see what she could do for George. Fellow operators made good playmates. Everybody was a juv, everybody understood the job, everybody understood the risks, but you didn’t do incest in your own team. Mostly, they kept it to no strings play.

Of course he went for the wandering hands, to give Cally something to slap with visible insincerity. Whoa. That one was real. He winced, making a mental note not to do that again.

“Ow,” he muttered against her lips.

“You’re lucky it was just a slap. Here’s our building. Shut up and kiss me,” she whispered, stopping just in the shadows away from one of the streetlamps.

He forbore to mention that she was the one talking, not him. Logic didn’t come into it, and his hand stung already. After a few minutes of sticking to acceptable transgressions, she grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and tugged him to the front door of the building, managing to stay all over him on the way.

Cally picked the lock on the door, backwards, one-handed, while pulling off her coat, as quickly as if she’d had a key. After thirty years in the field, some things got automatic. If any long-time resident happened to actually know who their neighbors were and recognize that the two didn’t belong, they were already marked down as harmless. Lovers didn’t usually consider burgling to be a hot date.

She propped her ass against the stair railing, feet spread, and he stepped between them to continue the charade of people who were about to go upstairs and have wild monkey sex. God, was he ever glad Wendy couldn’t see this. She’d have his guts for garters.

George and Amy came in hand in hand, looking young, sweet, and glowing. To look at Sands’ lively, cheerful eyes, you’d never suspect what was behind them.

Upstairs, after her buckley indicated no IR source close to the apartment door, Cally shrugged and picked the lock. She and Tommy were through, fast, splitting to each side. Tommy was on the hinges side, so it was Cally who slapped a husher onto the wall next to the door.

Sands and George were through the door between them as they split, passing through to the kitchen as Tommy and Cally finished clearing the living room.

“Clear,” Tommy said as he and Cally hit the hall leading back to the bedrooms. It was a two bedroom, two bath floor plan.

“Clear.”

Cally and Tommy heard George say it through their ear dots. It had the hollow sound of words spoken near an active husher which, of course, it was. Per SOP, as soon as they hit the kitchen Sands or Schmidt would have slapped a husher on the wall. Probably both of them. Sands hadn’t had a chance to get that sixth sense about your teammates — where they were, what they were doing, where they were going to be next — nor had they with her.

Cally and Tommy turned into the first bedroom as Sands took the bathroom across the hall, George covering the hallway itself.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

Down the hall, the door at the end was to the master bedroom. As he and Cally took up positions on each side of it, he heard a cough and saw Cally’s arm jerk, blood welling. He registered it in an instant, as Sands kicked the door in and he and she entered, automatically splitting for halves of the room, but Sands got the prize.

A woman, the target, screamed, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t know—”

Tommy heard two sharp cracks as Sands nailed the target’s center of mass.

“—what he was going to do,” she trailed, as Sands’ pistol came down the second time from recoil.

It cracked again, and a red hole appeared in the target’s forehead, brains and blood blasting out the exit wound to splatter on the wall behind her.

“Yeah, but you knew what he did,” Sands said grimly.

“See? Lesson one. Don’t talk until after the target’s dead.” She grinned brightly at Tommy.

“I knew I liked her,” Cally grinned at Sands from the doorway where George had divested her of her coat and sleeve and was finishing a field dressing.

“Noise?” Sands asked, then her eyes fixed on the husher stuck just inside the door.

Tommy saw it register with her that the sound did have that hollowness.

“I got it. You looked a bit busy,” Cally said, stepping in to take a better look at the body. “Damn, Sands, that was as near perfect as you can get. Surgical. Nice.”

Team Kemuel was pure Bane Sidhe, and had been around long enough to develop its own traditions, one of which included a motto, “Justice flies on swift wings.” They also had a tradition of planning their ops in a poetic direction whenever it absolutely would not interfere with the mission. Operational requirements were first and always, but Kemuel’s pride was applying enough creativity to their planning to do both, without getting too cute.

They had asked for this target specifically. Adam Marcus Ludlum, a fence now, wheelman in his younger days, he lived with his aging mother and had elected to do one last wheel job because the money was right. It was his last wheel job, all right. Participating in the murder of Leellen Beadwindow had been a very bad choice.

It was three in the morning when they picked the lock and let themselves in. The nature of this mission was in speed rather than subtlety. The four of them had slouched in, walking, from two different directions. Leaving would be simpler. Straight out the front door, which faced right onto the street, into the car and out.

They cleared the rooms with brisk efficiency, popping the old mother with a Hiberzine dart, and darting the target as well. It was as easy as a bullet. Easier, as a dart gun had no recoil.

One of the team walked over to the bed and methodically smashed in Ludlum’s brains with a tire iron. Another stood on the opposite side of the bed, leaning down to inject the Hiberzine antidote. The dead man’s heart would keep beating long enough to ensure he bled out and stayed dead. Not much chance of revival with his brains smashed like a rotten tomato, but professionals made sure.

The executioner dropped the tire iron on the bed as the easiest way to dispose of it. The others had begun policing up the hushers as soon as the second target dropped. The last man out injected the mother with the Hiberzine antidote and the medically prescribed dose of tranquilizer, for her age and condition, to knock her out until morning. That she’d never met the doctor who prescribed it was of no moment.

It would have been better to have burned him, but impractical. It didn’t matter that much; he’d be burning now.

The team driver, as soon as they piled out of the building and into the car, didn’t glance back as she began her E and E work. “Go okay?” she asked.

“Like a fine Maserati.”

It was snowing in Topeka. Team Bowie was coordinating with Team Fairbairn, as their targets lived very close together. Buddies who worked at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant and drove to and from work together. The plan was for Bowie to stake out a necessary part of their route home, and Fairbairn to set up observers closer on the route to their target’s home. Access to and from Farris’s home had very limited routing, and they thought they could set up observers without their observers being observed. The enemy’s people were almost certainly watching for the actual hit. They were unlikely to be watching every fast food restaurant or strip mall along the way. Particularly, they were unlikely to be watching the Dairy Queen where Bowie had parked.

When Farris arrived, if he didn’t leave with Scout — Bowie’s target — he was going nowhere. They could regroup and take him at night. Bowie would give advance warning, then use the timing to make verification of their target’s presence at home quick and unobtrusive.

Luke Landrum had armed the Reardon girl with no reservations. The driver needed to be armed, and it didn’t matter a damn that she was thirteen. She was an O’Neal. Tramp and Kerry had gotten used to her age. They’d seen on the first op that she was one hell of a combat driver — a natural. With a wheel in her hands, she had the agility and cunning of the fox that made the dogs cry. They tried hard not to patronize her. It didn’t seem healthy.

Right along after quitting time for second shift at the plant, here came Mutt and Jeff’s car. True to plan, as soon as they’d buckleyed in the update to Fairbairn, Reardon gave the targets about a minute’s head start and pulled out of the DQ to get them to point B.

That was peachy until up ahead they saw hazard flashers through the heavy snow at a green traffic light.

“Turn off, turn off,” Landrum ordered.

“Where?” Reardon asked.

The windows on the car were all frosted up, protecting them further from view. Thank God for small mercies. It wasn’t enough to stop him swearing, but Bowie’s team lead at least swore silently. That he was still swearing could probably be seen from the steam pouring out of his ears.

Then the light turned red. Jenny Reardon came to a careful stop on the icy road.

Sensing help had arrived, the targets walked over to the driver’s side window and Mutt, their driver, knocked on it.

“Boy, am I glad to see you!” Jeff said as Jenny rolled down the window.

“Ditto,” Jenny said with a smile. Two rounds into each body had them on the ground and twitching. She had to sit up in her seat to put one round into each head. They entered under the chin and more or less took off the top.

“Blood on the door,” she said as the traffic light turned to green. “And it’s freezing. That’s gonna to take some clean-up.”

“That was not the plan,” Landrum said angrily.

“What were we going to do?” Jenny asked. “Give them a lift to their place and then cap them? Like our DNA wouldn’t have gotten on the bodies? Cap them in the car and then deal with the bodies? Plan was blown.”

“Luke,” Tramp said. “She’s right. You’re just bitching because she aced us out of a kill on those scum. I’m pissed, too. But it was quick thinking and it was clear. Now let her get us out of here.”

“We are so going to talk,” Landrum snarled.

About three miles down the road, as she negotiated a nasty turn with a smoothness that really amazed him, he sighed.

“How you doing? First kill.”

“Me?” Jenny asked with a thoughtful frown. It cleared quickly. “I can’t wait to tell the kids at school! ‘I got to cap a bad guy! I got to cap a bad guy!’ They’re going to be green.”

“I hate O’Neals,” Kerry muttered.

The Sub-Urb door was one of the originals. Normally, GalTech stuff didn’t break. It wasn’t designed to resist people breaking it deliberately. But this one still worked, which made things easy. It was supposed to make a programmed sound on opening to cue the resident to entry. Trivial work for even an incompetent cyber — which was probably why people tended to break and replace their doors. Candy hadn’t.

The door slid open soundlessly, and a man known to the community as “Sevin” slapped a husher on the wall inside. He used his off hand, of course. His strong hand remained on his pistol as he and his buddy split the room.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

The other two men on Team Ka-Bar were moving almost before the second all clear came. For this mission, it didn’t much matter that they were all DAGgers, not Bane Sidhe. It was a textbook op of how to take out a personality. Capture not necessary or desired. The op was so simple it would have been insulting if it weren’t for one key detail: this bitch was one of the motherfuckers who did the Maise massacre.

Charlie Maise was a fellow DAGger. The whole unit wanted Candy Leighton dead with a passion beyond words. It was DAG’s right to take vengeance, and their own privilege to be on the team that got to do so. They’d all fantasized for long hours on creative ways to off the bitch, but in the end they’d kill her like the professionals they were. Get in, accomplish the objective, get out.

In operational mode, they were all instantly aware of little details like the target’s revolting slobbiness, all the more glaring to military men, accustomed to strict neatness. The men’s clothes scattered across the floor told them what they’d find in the single bedroom. One of the initial entry pair gathered up the clothes as his buddy, their team lead, covered him.

One of the second pair glanced in the bathroom in the short hallway on the way past. “Clear.”

They were through the bedroom door, the man on the jam side emplacing another husher as they entered. He demonstrated why DAGgers practiced shooting one-handed, putting a bullet cleanly between the eyes of the woman in the bed. Her fuck for the night had his head between her legs, and was out of the way.

He held his fire for the follow-up shot, since there was no telling what the guy might do. He and his partner had their guns trained firmly on the guy.

This room was a mess, too. It smelled like a men’s locker room.

“Be very, very still. Did you piss or shit?” the shooter asked.

The gray-faced, naked man shook his head.

“Good,” he said.

The back-up shot the guy with a Hiberzine dart.

“Make sure there’s not a trace of him,” the team lead said.