Pacific force, p.8
Pacific Force, page 8
There was a map covering the ring roads around Birmingham. Another showing the smaller downtown area that was being rebuilt. One with all of England, marked with obscure red symbols: crosses, circles, squares, starbursts.
Grant couldn’t find a legend anywhere but supposed that he didn’t rate that sort of security clearance with these people. He could have told them otherwise, but that had been several years ago and, he didn’t know anyone in the present space except for Steve.
The Undersecretary made a production of checking his watch as he turned to spear Grant with the sort of hard eye the man probably usually reserved for the dessert cart.
“Where is he?” the Undersecretary demanded.
Grant pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and checked the time. And to see if he had any voicemails or texts from anyone who might have remembered something or told a friend.
The web of connections he had was huge. Usually passive, but at a time like this he had thrummed it pretty hard in order to nail down a bombmaker in London with bad friends.
There were others out there.
“You told him seventeen minutes from now,” Grant replied politely.
He already knew how pissed Jake was, just from the previous phone call. And for knowing the guy since they were fourteen.
“I expect better service,” the Undersecretary huffed.
Steve happened to be standing beyond the man. Behind him in such a way that Grant and a few others could see the grimace of pain that flashed over the spy’s face at those words.
But the Undersecretary didn’t live in their world. He lived in a place where tea was predictable, and you could be assured of the proper dill pickle wedges perfectly chilled and possibly hand-dried before serving.
Grant hadn’t even had time to get a pasty from the corner shop before Steve and friends had showed up for him this morning, but he wasn’t going to say anything just yet.
If anything, he might need to play good cop with what was coming up.
Or not.
“Sir, we’ve identified their vehicle,” a woman spoke up from a table that had been partly hidden by map stands. Army green jacket with her hair pulled back in a bun. Quite cute. “Inbound. ETA three minutes.”
Grant just smiled politely, rather than suggest any sort of ‘I told you so’ with his body language.
There was a coffee urn close. One of those nasty, upright silver trash cans that held coffee long past the point that it was still viable. Grant ignored everyone and went for coffee. And donuts in a picked over box that was probably for the field techs.
Grant was certain that the Undersecretary’s favorite biscuits were in an office somewhere nearby, along with a proper tea service. Possibly had a butler or a batman along supervising. Everyone else wandered off to whatever they were doing as the Undersecretary took a seat at the head of a conference table that had been installed.
Steve approached and grabbed a paper cup for his own coffee as Grant finished filling his.
“Sorry about all this,” the man murmured under the sound of soldiers and folks being proactively busy with bosses around. “How’s Jake?”
“How close to your pension are you?” Grant murmured back as he added powdered milk and sugar substances to adulterate his sludge. He smiled at the man.
“Ouch,” Steve said with another wince.
“Is there any way of getting that twit off high-center before tomorrow?” Grant asked.
“I don’t know,” Steve offered. “I ran it up my food chain, and it got that far when the Permanent Undersecretary apparently decided that he was the man to take charge of the investigation.”
“He got any experience with something like this?” Grant moved to one side and let Steve work.
The cute woman in green was across a table, glancing at him right now, but otherwise keeping up a steady chatter over a headset. She’d been the one that had announced Jake and the team.
Grant smiled at her.
“None,” Steve answered. “I wonder if he thinks this catapults him into the upper reaches of the Ministry. Or even a knighthood.”
“Anything is possible,” Grant offered ambiguously.
Pacific Force was not a group that sat around warehouses briefing officious twits about how investigations were running. They had Steve’s people for that sort of thing.
Grant should be running down leads in London and talking to people. Jake and the others should be getting into position to intercept Nathaniel and his hooligans as soon as any clue emerged from the fog.
Now, all of them were going to be spinning their wheels in a three-ring circus in Northampton.
Charming.
One of the garage doors opened and Rik blasted the Rover in, not quite side-skidding it to a stop next to the Suburban Grant had traveled north in, but close. Still showing off.
Grant stayed put here. Jake was in the front seat looking perfectly composed and elegant in such a way that suggested that A) butter might not melt in his mouth right now, and B) he might in a mood to verbally eviscerate someone and then piss on their corpse afterwards.
Steve took his cue from the way Grant was sitting on the edge of the work desk with his back to the woman and joined him. They were at least well away from the Undersecretary and the fireworks Grant could smell coming.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Hollyanne managed to bail out of the Rover before anyone else could. Moving quickly, she got into a position in case she needed to intercept things. Jake had fallen utterly silent for the last ten minutes of the drive, and Hollyanne knew how close he was to losing his temper.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anything that they might do at this point unless the Undersecretary decided to relax some of the information security he was sitting on and letting Pacific Force know more about the inner workings of the Department than normal.
Fool over there looked smug, like he was going to stonewall them. That much was obvious just from the way he was sitting. Demand that they sit around here at his beck and call until something happened and then try to blame them for not stopping it, regardless of the fact that he had demanded they wait on him.
She wondered how long until Jake called someone at the Palace and blew this entire situation into a billion pieces. She tried to smile at him, but the smile she got back was brittle and angry.
The Undersecretary was seated at a conference table. Hollyanne fell in next to Jake and walked over. Grant and his contact were over yonder, watching. Rik and Spencer had gotten out of the Rover, but not gotten any closer, leaning against the nearest front fender, both with hands in pockets.
Around them, half the staff were technical agents, on the phone, on the comm, or moving paper around and updating boards. The other half were the field teams, dressed in the sorts of gray camouflage that worked well in a city at night. There were guns, but they were all racked for now over against a wall for need.
She got more than one half-smile from the soldiers, but most of them probably knew her on sight. She only recognized a few from previous operations, but Pacific Force had hung it up two years ago when Nathaniel was captured the first time.
Jake was not going to make the obvious play and sit at the far end of the table, directly across from the tall, fat man in the expensive, silk suit, so Hollyanne did. Technically, last night had been her operation, and she was Jake’s Second-in-Command most of the time anyway.
She sat and faced the man. Jake was closer to her end than his.
Hollyanne composed herself and rested her forearms on the table, looking at the man down there. Fifty, perhaps. Badly aged, like milk left out. The suit should have been retailored again, as he’d put on a stone or so since the last time it had been let out. Special tie, related to some organization he belonged to. An American politician would be wearing a fraternity tie to cover the same ground.
Hollyanne was in her favorite gi pants. Faded from black to a charcoal, and the elastic around her ankles was old enough that she’d probably have to replace it again soon. White T-shirt tucked in over a sports bra made with enough Kevlar to turn a knife in close. She’d left the rest of the gi at the house and worn a blue, denim jacket she’d originally bought in Aberdeen a few years ago.
Jake was in newer blue jeans. Buttoned-down Archer shirt she’d gotten him for Christmas, medium blue with thin red stripes. Charcoal trench coat, also lined with Kevlar, but warm against wind and rain, and lots of pockets inside and out.
Casual, in face of official.
The Undersecretary wore steel-blue wool. Single-breasted with two buttons and medium lapels. But the government these days was Tory, so that was not out of the ordinary. Stark white shirt. That ugly tie that was going to become the man’s entire shorthand description, one of these days.
Hollyanne refrained from checking the shoes the man wore. She and Jake both wore dark three-quarter-tops, designed for running, jumping, and kicking, as well as with soles that would stop a nail and aluminum toes. Not as good as steel. Not as heavy, either.
Grant looked a question her way, but Hollyanne shook her head. Let him stay over there, just like Spencer and Rik were staying by the truck. This was going to be a clash of the titans over here. The Undersecretary was already stewing. Jake was stewing.
But this was her op, so fuck you people.
She considered letting things build to a head by out-waiting the man, but decided that doing that would endgame things badly.
“What have you learned from the prisoners we turned over to you last night?” she asked in a bright and innocent voice.
Not only accusing them of having all the cards, but perhaps reminding them as well.
The Undersecretary blinked. Blinked a second time.
Not the game he’d been expecting, perhaps? Or perhaps he was English, and she was a Persian-American woman, technically a princess, depending on who you asked and how you framed the question.
Short, dark, and feminine. But then, the PM was female these days. And a Tory.
Not that Hollyanne would accuse the English of a tendency towards polite racism. If anything, they were more classist than racist, though she could look down on a mere civil servant from a dizzying height if he wanted to go there with her, too.
She settled for a smile.
“I was expecting you to brief my team about the terrorist,” the man finally huffed.
“Which one?” Hollyanne asked.
“What do you mean, which one?” the Undersecretary demanded.
“We captured a mercenary bombmaker, an assistant or boyfriend, and perhaps a complete stranger who just happened to be dropping in for a spot of tea,” Hollyanne continued, still smiling. “We turned them over to your team for interrogation more than twelve hours ago and left. You demanded that we attend you here in Northampton rather than continuing our own investigations into things. At present, we have a theory that your intelligence assessment is wrong, and that Nathaniel Hoestler never left this island. However, we have no proof and are not in a position to investigate any of the leads we have worked up. At present, we expect you to provide that information, one way or the other.”
Hollyanne leaned back now, aware that she had braced her feet under the table as if she needed to flow immediately into combat. The table was too heavy to throw, although Jake might be angry enough right now to flip it, but she could always jump up on it and run the length in a hurry if she had to.
She smiled to convey that to the man down there. Someone off to one side snickered so quietly that it would have been missed, had the entire space not dropped to the silence of a tomb.
The Undersecretary flushed, but she couldn’t tell if that was embarrassment at being called out, or rage for the same. Either way, she hadn’t voted for the current government, and didn’t pay any taxes to support it.
They could ask her to help. Politely.
Jake took this moment to lean his chair back, roll it a few inches backwards, and literally kick his feet up on the table like a man behind a desk, crossing them at the ankles.
Hollyanne wasn’t sure you could more perfectly insult a Permanent Undersecretary to his face.
She wasn’t fooled by Jake’s supposed insouciance, or the carefree way his hands were laced behind his head. He was as keyed up for potential violence as she was, but his was entirely political.
“Now you see here, young lady…” the fat man started to bellow, but she turned to Jake and ignored the diatribe starting to roll down there.
“Sushi or curry for lunch?” she asked in a quiet enough voice that only someone reading her lips could tell.
Back home, they’d get Chinese take-out or a couple of pizzas delivered, but this was the English Midlands. Totally different culture separated by a language called English in both places.
The Undersecretary ran out of steam like a pricked balloon when he realized that the only people looking at him were the ones in his employ.
Hollyanne gave him a look like a Headmistress with a tardy child. Then she ignored him and looked around at the civilians and soldiers around her. Anyone not wearing Army green in here was some sort of spy.
A clock on the wall read 1:07 pm.
“Did anyone actually interrogate the prisoners?” Hollyanne asked the room. “Or just threaten them enough to shut them up without telling you anything?”
Several faces fell and nobody would make eye contact with her at that point, not even Grant’s primary contact.
She turned back to the Undersecretary and scowled at him. Watched the man shrink just a little from the animated bellicosity that he had been all set to pursue earlier.
“We’re here because you demanded it,” she announced, in a voice verging on suggesting that the man was an idiot without—quite—painting him all the way into that corner. “This is now your operation. What will it be?”
Under all that bluster, the man finally seemed to come to understand that he was a peon, as far as she and Jake were concerned, but he’d done that to himself, demanding instead of asking. Northampton instead of Solihull.
Lots of little things.
“You people are the experts on Hoestler,” he finally managed in a more restrained voice. “Nobody in my department knows him like you do.”
“Nobody on this planet knows him like she and I do,” Jake spoke for the first time in almost half an hour. “I will presume, looking around the room, that you either didn’t choose to bring the experts you did have on staff, or didn’t bother asking after the folks that helped us capture him the first time. There is only one face here I recognize here, the gentleman over there using the cover name Steve.”
Hollyanne nodded to herself and leaned back.
Jake looked ready to own the game board finally.
Maybe without setting it on fire first.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Jake considered keeping his feet up on the table like a rude teenager. That sort of insult transcended oceans, even if the target of his ire was probably clueless about such things. But the Undersecretary represented the past.
Pacific Force was, in many ways, the future, if only because Jake doubted that the UK government was any less corrupt than anywhere else. Money and power. They just dressed in fancier attire than some of the places he’d been.
Everywhere he had looked, money and power had formed oligopolies intent on retaining control. In the democratic nations, they paid lip service to swapping parties on a regular basis, and in doing so usually managed to advance civilization haltingly.
But you still needed free agents with money, willing to put themselves and their fortunes on the line, to really make the world a better place.
This Permanent Undersecretary was apparently the sort of fool who had started believing his own press releases.
“Yes,” Jake continued into that vast, hollow silence that had fallen. “We know Nathaniel Hoestler better than anyone, because the five of us went to private school with the man, twenty years and more ago. We’ve fought him any number of times, mostly stopping his little games without ransoms being paid or hostages getting hurt, because he does play by a set of hard and fast rules, however odd you might interpret them.”
Jake rose from the chair and rolled it under the table as a mechanism to keep himself from getting angry.
Angrier.
Idiot fops in expensive ties, making power plays they didn’t understand.
How badly did he wish to burn the British government today? Jake wasn’t sure. But he’d never been treated like a servant by them before, either.
“We presume Nathaniel is involved, without any concrete evidence,” Jake said. “Mikhail Ivanov was one of his inner circle, and the man was beaten, killed, and dumped in Battersea without any follow up or crowing, like you might expect if Hoestler’s enemies had done it. Then a bombmaker started working, at a time when most of those folks had been quietly negotiated into an abeyance of their craft. Being left alone for behaving, as it were. She’s your prisoner. We suspect that a bomb was set to be exploded in Birmingham’s core, but don’t know when. Have you blown that operation apart by putting fifty men and women, uniformed and undercover, into the area?”
He’d been pacing as he spoke. Now, he found himself just behind Hollyanne, so he put a hand on the back of her chair and rested there for a moment, like a raptor waiting for the mouse to flush from cover.
The Undersecretary turned to Steve now and nodded the man to the table so hard he might have pulled something. At least Steve was a professional.
That spy detached himself from the table where Grant was and approached the center of things.
“We have one team on the ground, and a sniper team in a discrete spot for oversight,” Steve explained.
“So you’ve probably been seen,” Jake replied, letting his voice come down to conversational instead of confrontational. For a while.
Steve shrugged.
