Returned, p.16
Returned, page 16
She looked around. Chelsea had hard eyes, but Joie was familiar with the look. Wanting to prove herself in the field with an agent many had once considered the best. Joie honestly didn’t know if she had what it took these days, but as Kehoe had pointed out more than once, she really didn’t have any options.
Take Carter down once and for all today, so she could get back to looking for the woman who had been her best friend in the world until Joie slammed a door in her face.
She thought that Romana would like Ernesta, once they got to sit down and have tamales and margaritas some time.
Nobody spoke.
“See to your portion, then,” Joie ordered.
She was in charge here. Everyone else offered advice and knowledge, but the orders to kill Carter had her name on them.
She’d warned that silly goofus a time or two, but he’d started to believe his own press reports eventually. And the world would probably be a better place without him in it, though she didn’t like to admit that, even to herself.
Joie had learned a lot about herself over the last several months. Amy had become her family when she’d driven everybody else off. And was still available if Joie wanted to just call and talk, though that had to take second place to operational security right now.
Instead, Joie had had to build a new network of friends. Of family. Of people she trusted.
Everyone was rising and starting to file out. She caught Ernesta’s eye and held the woman back with a look.
Quickly, they were alone.
“We trust Chelsea?” the woman asked quietly with a hard leer.
But then, she’d heard the noise, too. Joie wasn’t going to complain about what Mitch did in his spare time, and it had moved Chelsea from a true outsider to someone with one foot inside. One foot still outside.
“As far as necessary,” Joie answered. “It will be three of us going in, all in vests, but watch your back. I intend to have her on point, with you on my flank like in Argentina. Carter might not know her on sight like he would you and I, so that gives us an extra moment or two of surprise before he’ll erupt in violence.”
“Not taking him in?” Ernesta pressed.
“They’d just shoot him in the head on delivery,” Joie shrugged. “Bouchard’s done. If the man was smart, he’d be running like hell for someplace obscure instead of staying around here. Best he can get now is that we hit the wrong place and he does run.”
“Is he looking for Romana?” Ernesta asked.
“Knowing Carter, this started out that way, and he got too wrapped up in all the shiny things that came along,” Joie said. “He’s probably seeing this as down payment on help, without considering the repercussions as everyone else outside gets pissed. My concern is that the Russians find him at the same time we do, and we end up in a three-way gunfight. Carter’s smart enough to run at that point. At least I think so.”
Ernesta nodded. Joie wondered if the woman was having second thoughts. She’d put her business in the hands of her lawyer and accountant sharks while she had what some folks might see as a mid-life crisis or something, but Ernesta also seemed far more alive than she’d been on that day when Joie Daring asked for an audience.
Joie could certainly say the same thing about herself.
Would Kehoe and Bouchard require her to stay in harness forever at this point? Or a long time? Or would they see Ernesta Hernandez as a good place to park a former agent in retirement?
She needed to find Romana. And kill Carter, much as she found herself pained at the thought.
In that way, she wasn’t the woman who’d taken him down two years ago. Maybe she’d grown up some? Found the value of Human life that had been trained out of her before?
Joie Daring had always been the lone wolf. At least until she found that she needed friends.
Weird as that was to admit.
“We have a mission,” Joie said, as if that summed it up.
In her old life, it had.
Ernesta nodded again. And surprised her with a fierce hug. Except that it didn’t surprise Joie when she thought about it. Ernesta really was like that.
What surprised Joie was how much she needed it.
CHAPTER 41
Mitch had mentally locked himself in his room.
Chelsea had made her point. And possibly left her scent all over him, depending on how you wanted to look at it. But she’d also let her guard down enough to do that, and picked him as an ally.
Or something.
He would laugh in anybody’s face that suggested love at first sight. Or even a hard burst of lust.
No, this was entirely strategic, rather than tactical. So he’d treated it as such, even as he’d approached it with all the tactical planning of his old life.
Now, he needed to analyze. To find patterns in chaos that told him truths.
The pay sucked, but the perks had so far been pretty damned good.
Knock at the door caused him to scowl.
Mitch closed everything down and stood up, stretching. At least today he’d had lunch, so nobody had an excuse to bring him takeout.
Or whatever.
He opened it enough to see Captain Konicek, standing there with a fist closed over something. Probably a data chip.
Mitch stepped back and nodded the man in. Closed the door behind him.
Hopefully, the man was entirely heterosexual.
Konicek held out his hand, open and palm up now. Chip in hand.
“Latest data from the field spotters,” he said simply.
Mitch took it but stared at the guy.
“One attacker dead,” he said. “Do we know where the body went?”
Konicek started.
“No,” he replied. “Does it matter?”
“Three attackers, if the reports are true,” Mitch offered. “Two men along with Mithras sounds like babysitters, since they didn’t bring anything heavier than pistols and didn’t initiate a bloodbath. I presume Mithras hauled the body back to friends and family, but then the people in charge would want to put Faulkener off to one side while they investigated how he died.”
“Mithras killed him?”
“I doubt it, if the man went to the effort to retrieve him,” Mitch said. “You never leave one of yours behind, do you?”
“Never, sir,” Konicek replied automatically.
“So I assume Faulkener saw him as one of his unit,” Mitch nodded. “Outsiders might not. So you tuck him in someplace quiet without people coming and going who might include vengeful cousins. If you were hiding him inside one of your facilities, you could feed him. But if not, then maybe you separate him out entirely and put him in a cheap hotel somewhere with a lot of takeout food. Or regular deliveries. Remember, the man has to eat for four people, the way his metabolism runs. Have we looked for that?”
Mitch wasn’t surprised by the light bulb he saw come on in the guy’s eyes. West Point trained exceptional officers, but it took a while for them to develop the sorts of sneakiness Mitch took for granted.
Like a whole department that could be functionally eliminated as dead weight from a new acquisition, once you carefully and lovingly transferred out that one man or woman who had been the rock star responsible for most of the upside. Vest them with golden handcuffs to stay around a few years, letting their mojo rub off on others, or to train the next kid coming up.
“Find me someone who knows about food deliveries. I need enough data to find if we have one where someone has had to hit a single hotel room several times in the last six hours, presumably because they had a whole mob of folks too busy partying to go out and get food themselves,” Mitch said. “There are probably several, given what people have told me about Hanoi, but that lets me start narrowing the search more. Is that likely to be in this data?”
“I doubt it, but anything is possible,” Konicek nodded. “This was a data dump from a variety of sources, looking for anomalies. Other anomalies, sir.”
“Get on it,” Mitch ordered the guy, seeing him out the door now.
He held the chip in one hand and supposed that this was exactly why Kehoe had sought him out on a mountaintop. That magic he brought that had caused so many places to hire him as a temporary gunslinger.
Pity if it got that tall asshole killed finally, but Mitch had a job to do.
He went back to his laptop and brought it all live again so he could see what Konicek had brought him.
And whose life he might end because of it.
CHAPTER 42
Ernesta liked Hanoi, after spending a little time wandering around. She couldn’t pass for a local, but she also didn’t stand out nearly as much as Anglos like Kehoe or Mitch. Enough people around here spoke Spanish or English to get by, since she didn’t speak Vietnamese and hadn’t tried her Mandarin, for fear of being seen as Chinese.
The locals were generally friendly to anybody they encountered. Except the Chinese. Old, bad blood going back a ways.
Right now, she was on her balcony, looking out over the city as the sun set somewhere off to her left. Noisy with people and cars, so it almost reminded her of Guadalajara back home.
A sound on her right caused her to look over. Mitch had slid open his door and was stepping out onto his patio, separated from hers by a railing and about thirty centimeters of gap.
He started when he saw her standing all of about two meters away.
“Sorry,” he said. “Needed a break and some air. Should I leave you alone?”
“You’re fine,” Ernesta decided, taking time to study the man as he joined her outside and put his weight on his own rail, showing a profile.
Attractive man, in that way that would grow more rugged and handsome as he aged. Thin, brown hair kept corporate short. Dark eyes. Pale skin. A little younger than Joie. Or Ernesta’s oldest.
He glanced over at her after a moment, then turned to study her in return.
Ernesta wouldn’t say she felt left out, to be the only woman who hadn’t taken him to bed, but Joie hadn’t complained about anything. And Chelsea Vanlaere had certainly seemed to enjoy herself.
Still, probably way too young for her.
“What?” he asked.
Not quite exasperated, but he’d mostly been face down on a computer screen doing things to track Mithras since she met the man. Doubly so today, since it was likely Mitch’s call which place they went after. And if anybody got hurt in the process.
“Wondering why you took the job,” Ernesta answered.
She shifted around until she was facing him and leaning on the side rail. He did the same, but stayed out at the corner where she might just be within arm’s reach.
Mitch Graydon looked like a man about to leap backwards, expecting her to come at him with claws.
Not that she would, but it was nice, keeping people nervous.
“I needed something new,” he explained.
Quietly, because they weren’t all that far apart physically.
Leagues, emotionally, but that was a different question.
“New?” she asked.
“Yeah, I realize that being an analyst for Kehoe isn’t all that different from what I used to do for other people,” he shrugged. “But that was honestly just destroying lives in the name of greater profits. Hopefully, what Joie is doing makes the world a better place.”
“You have your doubts?”
“Not about her,” Mitch laughed. It was a pleasant laugh. “Never about Joie. Some of the other folks…Who is to say what right and wrong are? There was an old saying that one man’s freedom fighter was another man’s terrorist, back in the twentieth century. Faulkener is certainly a bad seed, but who made him? Who trained him to be like that? He needs to go down. Joie is probably the best person I know to handle that.”
Ernesta was still impressed with the man. Mitch had apparently tried everything he knew, but run headlong into the wall that was Joie Daring. Lots of people would bounce off. He’d persisted longer than most, from what Joie had said.
“What about Romana?” Ernesta asked.
He grimaced. That spoke volumes.
“I tried there, too,” he said, obviously understanding what she was really asking. “Didn’t work. Right now, I want to know that she made it home safe, wherever home is. That she’s safe. After that, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll keep at this job and try to make the world a better place. Maybe I’ll look elsewhere. I have the connections to get funding if I ever wanted to go into business myself, but I like being able to put the job away and relax in the evening. Or go up on a damned mountain and paint for six months.”
Ernesta could see why Joie would want a man like Mitch around. And she understood herself, flashing back to her own youth, and a couple of guys who might have been more interesting husbands than the two she’d had, but they’d been on the wrong side of the tracks. The good side. Or the other side of the law.
Sometimes that won’t work out, leaving only the might-have-beens to creep up and surprise you, forty years later.
“What do you want, Mitchell Graydon?” Ernesta asked, feeling more like a mother now, instead of a woman talking to an interesting man.
“If I knew that, I’d be there,” he laughed. “Although, I must say that there is something to be said for being surrounded by beautiful, amazing, dangerous, sexy women all the time.”
“Really?” she asked dryly.
Mitch paused to let his eyes roam over her, like a guy on the street. Joie was much taller. Chelsea about the same height, but much broader shoulders and hips with her wasp build.
Ernesta was a sixty-one-year-old grandmother who happened to be a crime lord in southern Mexico in her other job. And still in pretty damned good shape. The other two were professional athletes, so she wasn’t competing there, but Mitch smiled.
“Yes,” Mitch said. “Really. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to invite you out for drinks and dinner. Not today, for all the obvious reasons.”
“Obviously,” Ernesta smiled back at the man. “How close are you to finding him?”
“Oh, I have his ass dead to rights,” Mitch’s smile turned hard and cold in the blink of an eye. “I just wanted a few minutes to relax before I told Kehoe where to send the assassins. A decision like that should never be taken lightly, you know?”
Ernesta started a little. He had confidence and brains. Good looks and proper manners around a woman. And she had several other women who she knew would speak well of him.
Maybe. Sometime.
But he was right. They had a man to kill first.
CHAPTER 43
Taylor Kehoe hated being out in the field. And yet, he’d done it more in the last four months than the previous three years combined.
They had gathered in Daring’s hotel room. Same group as this morning, but there were a number of subtle changes.
One big bed where Daring sat now with Hernandez next to her. A desk in the corner where Graydon stood. Vanlaere was in the office chair off to one side. Konicek stood by the slider, with Stone next to him.
Vanlaere was far more relaxed that just getting her brains fucked out would justify. She might have gotten better orders from Bouchard when nobody was around. Clearer, at least. If Vanlaere was going to betray the mission, Taylor had at least warned Joie it was coming. And Hernandez didn’t look like the type who needed the heads up.
Hernandez had relaxed as well. It was only obvious that she’d been screwed on a little too tight earlier now by comparison. He didn’t know, and didn’t know the woman well enough to ask for details. Maybe he’d take Joie aside and ask tomorrow.
Konicek was a cipher, but that was nothing new. American-Born Chinese by ethnicity. West Point grad. TRC seconded agent who didn’t have any cyberware that Taylor was aware of. But not that many of them did, as Technology Research Command also experimented with toys in the form of new guns and explosives.
Joie looked like the old days. Deadly serious, emphasis on deadly. Calmness to the point that she didn’t fidget. Most people fidgeted unconsciously. Not Joie.
Stone was stone. Carved from granite and a bit weathered, but that was about it.
Graydon had changed. Grown more serious. Even before he spoke, Taylor knew the answer. All he didn’t know was the address. Mitch had brought his esoteric magic to the table. Had justified the risk Taylor had taken in bringing in a complete outsider, a stranger, and handing him this kind of intelligence data.
Mitch Graydon had turned it into knowledge.
“Using your terminology, I have high confidence in the findings,” Mitch declared slowly, pausing to look at everyone individually before moving on to the next. “Captain Konicek was able to narrow down my scope, once I asked him a few questions, and I believe we have the room where Carter Faulkener, the international terrorist known as Mithras, is currently residing, here in Hanoi. I would expect that he will have moved by tomorrow, so we need to hit him tonight.”
“How did you find him?” Joie asked.
Taylor leaned against the corner with his arms crossed and watched the tides of personality flow around the room. Even Vanlaere was fitting in here, leaving only Konicek the outsider at present.
He wondered if Joie would draw the man into her network like she’d done with so many others. Taylor was willing to admit that Daring’s preferred network seemed to be female, but she would make use of males as she needed them. Like him.
“Food,” Mitch said. “Faulkener needs to eat a gargantuan amount of calories daily. He can’t be seen in public, so I tasked Konicek’s people with tracking food deliveries that were regular and large, cross indexed against rooms with only one person. They weren’t smart enough to put him in a big suite where three couples might all be sharing, whoever they are, so the amount stood out when I shortened down my list based on some of the other underworld connections we know about. I would imagine that it makes Herakles agents stand out in general, if they want to go undercover for long?”
