Honor of the Clan

Chapter Five

Johnny Stuart sat behind his cheap plastic desk, one that looked a lot more like wood than its forebears of nearly a century ago, and surveyed his cousin grimly. It was a good idea. It was just the kind of plan he’d asked for. It was also damned cold. He felt ghostly tugs at the remnants of a conscience he didn’t know he still had, and couldn’t help picturing his daughter, Mary Lynn, as one of the victims. The pang was fleeting; he did have a job to do.

“How are you going to prevent early discovery of the bodies? Or news reports of the disappearances?”

“It’s not that hard. People generally don’t fight the first day or two of a missing persons case when the police are insisting on waiting. Oh, they bitch, but they don’t go all out calling the media and lawyers. If a seemingly kind cop or two is surreptitiously checking things out despite the rules, or appears to be, families think they’ve won something. They bitch, they panic, they’re pissed — but no calls to the media or lawyers. In other words, over the time span we’ve got, we pick the right targets in the right order and we can keep a lid on the hits until January first. Then the various anonymous tips make sure everything breaks at once. Families don’t want to give up hope until they identify the body. Right targets, right order, and we’re golden,” Bobby assured him.

“Take the first hit. It’s a beloved niece and the twin brother. The girl’s a coed — has a habit of taking off on road trips without telling anyone where she’s going. If they can’t reach her, they’ll take awhile before they get too worried. The twin brother will have a very convincing car accident — convincing until the evidence gets dropped in the cops’ lap, along with the location of the niece’s body. It’s first because it has a long lag time, but not best because it’s a more peripheral relative. As we get down to the wire, we can do targets that are a lot more significant because we don’t have to hold suspicion down for as long.” The killer shrugged. “It’s all in the timing.”

Johnny was sometimes a little nauseated at the way his cousin’s mind worked. Only a little, though. It was business, and this kind of thing was why he kept Bobby on the payroll in the first place, “Okay. How about an extra month’s salary for every hit?”

His cousin nodded. “Per body, and half of it in sales-tax-free goods. Plus, of course, you pay all the expenses, including the cost of hiring extra help.”

“Done,” Johnny agreed. It was fairly cheap for murder for hire, but partly because Bobby could count on a steady salary and kick-ass benefits. The tax-free goods was a smart idea, because with the high prices, and some kinds of consumer goods rare, hookers would usually take all or part of a fee in barter. High-end whores would do almost anything for real French perfume or cashmere. With Bobby’s tastes, that was a necessity.

“Why don’t you and the kid come out for dinner next weekend, after we’ve got off the first round of this thing? Help me celebrate my bonus a little,” Bobby said.

“Great. I’d like that.” A free meal was a free meal, and Mary Lynn could use the cheer of a meal out. “Hey, Bob, if you bring a date, could she be a, well, a discreet one?” He didn’t want to piss off his benefactor, but he didn’t really want his baby girl watching a whore climb all over Uncle Bobby all evening.

His cousin’s lips tightened a little for a long second, but finally he shrugged. “Sure, Johnny. Whatever. Guess it would be a bit much for the kid. I guess I can have one meal without the entertainment.” He actually grinned, as if the idea amused him.

This grin actually reached his eyes and Johnny suppressed a shudder. That little glint always reminded him of the Tir for some reason.

“Oh, and Bobby?” Johnny decided to keep the other man happy; offer something in exchange for the request about the whore. “Don’t let it fuck up your holiday, okay. You’re already off through the 27th, right? If you start Monday, can you get it all done by New Year’s?”

“Sure, whatever,” Mitchell shrugged. “I could have fun with a little time off.”

“I told you it’s impossible,” buckley said. It obviously believed it, because it had that smug tone again.

Cally stared at the layout it was projecting over her desk and shook her head, pushed a stray strand of hair back behind her ear and took a jerky swig of coffee. It was goddamned frustrating was what it was.

Papa’s cryptic and encrypted message had sent her on a scavenger hunt of digging up bits of data the professionally paranoid old man had hidden over half the island and a good bit of the internet. In some cases literally digging up, as he’d apparently been stashing PDAs on the island since the term was invented.

What she had finally come up with was the basics of a very sweet smuggling scheme.

There was a big pocket of aluminum in Venezuela that nobody was mining. Panama was producing excess food. Cuba produced steel and and had facilities for processing aluminum. Panama needed both.

Food and luxury goods from Panama to Venezuela. Bauxite to Cuba. Steel and forged aluminum to Panama. Repeat. Classic triangle trade.

Which begged the reason nobody was doing it.

Venezuela was simply crawling with Posleen. Fleet occasionally used orbital lasers to burn out God-King settlements that got noticeable. It was that bad.

Anybody who wanted to mine the area would have to get enough premium fighters together, like, say, DAG, to take over and clear the area. The Darhel had tried twice with the usual scum and bounced. It was, in fact, DAG’s original mission: Clearing out tough pockets of Posleen.

Problem being that anyone who got a really good mining operation up and running was going to get tossed out, using one loophole or another, by the Darhel. So the mining operation was going to have to be secret. As was moving the goods.

Papa had plenty of contacts, go figure, among smugglers in the Caribbean area.

Papa had been, from the results of the scavenger hunt, looking at the plan for some time. He needed three things.

A bunch of really premium, highly trained fighters with nothing better to do.

Check.

Contacts in Cuba and Panama to fence the goods.

Check.

A bunchaton of money.

Shit.

“Unless you have something constructive to say, buckley, shut up.”

“It’s a disastrous task. Giving up is constructive.”

“Shut up, buckley.”

“Right.”

The only person she knew who knew shady financial deals as well as Granpa was Stewart. For Cally, her husband was forever tied to his nom de guerre from the war against the Posleen. When they met and fell in love, she’d been on a mission and they’d both been under different aliases — he as Lieutenant Pryce, and she as Captain Sinda Makepeace. General James Stewart had been the alias underneath the Pryce alias, and had forever gotten stuck in her mind as his “real” name. The Asian name he wore now as a mid-ranking member of the Tong fit him as badly as his new face. Oh, he was great at carrying off his cover, it just didn’t seem “right” to her. His Pryce face had at least been his own, original face. Hers hadn’t, but she’d been stuck with it long enough since the mission that she’d gotten used to it. The boobs were still too conspicuous, and she still carried more flesh than she was comfortable with — no matter what the men said. But the face now felt more like it belonged than like a cover. It was kinda creepy.

None of which got her any closer to solving this damn problem. Stewart. That was her next option, and she really hated to call it in. It was not common knowledge in the Tong that Stewart was married to someone in the Bane Sidhe. It wasn’t even common knowledge that he was married, or a round-eye. Sure, a girlfriend, even kids, but then a blond mistress was a status symbol. The picture on his desk of her and the kids was regarded by his colleagues more as a power statement than an emotional relationship. In their minds, of course he hadn’t married the exotic mistress. It would have been a bad career move, and he was a recognized player.

So, out of concern for his safety, she avoided making contact with him. Proper mistresses came when called — they didn’t make demands. She had no choice. Maybe he could make some kind of sense of this mess, but that was the kicker, wasn’t it? For him to sort out the mess, he’d have to see the data. That wasn’t a security problem; Granpa would be fine with it. The problem was there was no way she could send that much information through a covert pipeline without enormous risk of revealing the pipeline. There was also the sticky bit of using her organization or his. The information either crossed to his organization on this end of the pipeline by her paying to send it up — which wouldn’t be cheap — or it crossed to his organization on the far end of the pipeline, with someone Bane Sidhe passing him a data cube. Either way was bad.

She settled for sending him a brief summary of the problem under cover of love letters. It had to be brief. The still holo of her, done pin-up style, only had just so much room for planting an encrypted message, once you accounted for redundancy. Her encryption task was much more complicated than it seemed. The first thing her Tong contact would do upon her buying the postage was compress it and encrypt the compressed file. This would cause a great deal of data loss, which wouldn’t matter a whit if the file were the simple cheesecake holo it pretended to be. Software on the other end would infer the missing data and fill in the gaps. Visually, it would be impossible to tell the difference.

Unfortunately, that data loss would irretrievably garble a message that could otherwise fit quite securely and unnoticeably within a garden-variety still holo. The trick was to include an encrypted message in the holo that had sufficient redundancy to survive the damage in the mail, but was still obscure enough to avoid detection. It cut down the amount of data she could send quite a bit. The more information, the more garbled or the less secure, take your pick. She picked a very short message.