Too Wylde (13 page)

"Hyatt Regency, please."

The middle eastern man -- Somali? -- leered
at her in the mirror and said, "Yes, very quick, miss. I will get
you there."

She ignored him and stared out the window.
Lake City was pretty. Lots of trees and parks and greenway, though
the traffic from the airport to the hotel downtown sucked. Glad she
wasn't driving. She wasn't a really good driver, but why drive when
she could afford a driver? It felt GREAT to be out doing her thing
in the world, operating, just like a real deal operator. And she
was looking forward to meeting Double D Bodacious later for drinks.
She'd had a Cosmo before, but it wasn't really great. She'd looked
up cool drinks on the Internet and thought she'd go for a classic
Margarita, with salt, served in a tumbler instead of a margarita
class. Some famous dead writer liked it that way. It sounded
cool.

The driver pulled up in front. She paid him
in cash, tipped him way better than he deserved, and thanked the
cute Mexican bellboy who took her bag to the front desk.

Nice place.

She checked in, collected her key and
followed Cute Boy up to the room. He let her in with a flourish,
collected his tip with a smile and the hint of a wink, and she
smiled demurely behind her sunglasses, then laughed with delight
when she tossed herself back on the bed.

Oh, My, God. This just so fucking rocked.
Every girl would be so green jello over this.

She took out one of the three cell phones she
carried, all iPhone Gen 4 Siri, all with the cool encryption
packages she liked, each one in a different name, her own portable
girl posse. She turned one on, checked her texts, saw that Double D
had sent one:

You in yet?

Dash of fingers: Yep. In the room.

A few moments later: Want to go out for
drinks and a dance at a hot strip club.

Kiki's eyes grew huge. OMFG! Hell to the
yeah!

I'll come by and pick you up at 8:00 p.m. in
front of the hotel. I'll be driving a black Lexus; I'm blonde!

I'm in black! C U then!

She hugged the phone to her thin chest. OMG.
My life so fucking rocks.

She unpacked her computer gear, powered up
her box, connected to the hotel Wi-Fi (they ran through a proxy,
nice, but not enough for her, she did a VPN and set up her own on
top of her encrypted wireless transmission complete with spoofed
FECN ID) checked her e-mail drop box. Downloaded what she needed
onto a 8GB flash drive and it was good.

Now it was time to get some room service, a
nap, a shower, and get dolled up for the night out with the real
player...

Mr. Smith, AKA Hank

Large hotels, lots of turnover, lots of
exits. That's what Mr. Smith liked. You want to be hidden in plain
sight, stay in a place where the faces change every day, where you
don't talk to anyone, where you don't engage in conversation, where
you don't linger, you just come and go like everyone else...drive
an anonymous car, don't draw attention to yourself.

Kinda hard to do when your whole head is a
scar, and the very act of walking through a lobby becomes an
exercise in display. So he went whole hog the other way: a small
cheap motel, where the Pakistani owner took cash and asked no
questions, never met your eye, denied everything and anything to
the Feebs that came by looking for terrorists or people of
interest, where the Hispanic maids took a tip everyday and a few
quiet words in fluent Spanish helped them to understand that taking
his money meant keeping their mouths shut, where he could park his
car under the watchful eye of a camera and not worry about some
eager beaver coming and sticking a GPS under his wheel well, and he
could surf the internet on his well secured laptop fairly sure that
he was just one more blip in the bandwidth.

So a Motel 6, where he could work
undisturbed, where the maids gave plenty of notice before they came
in and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was honored (though in good
Machiavellian fashion -- "The only means of security which are sure
and proven are those you see to yourself" -- he made sure and
backed it up with his hidden micro-cams and checked them often from
his smartphone) and the unspoken but very clear message was "Leave
me alone."

It really was a wonderful day in the
neighborhood.

Mr. Smith flipped through a medical software
program on his laptop, a present from a concerned counselor that
worked for the private corporation that fronted for the private
corporation that fronted for the OGA that actually funded things --
a long way from the alphabet soup that everyone else was so fond of
throwing hints about. He was studying potential new faces. The
baseline was a 3-D rendering of his face as it was; the program
allowed you to try on different features, just like clothes on a
model, to see how you look. The program would only allow those
features that were actually medically possible according to the
staff of surgeons who worked to create it; Mr. Smith knew some of
those surgeons worked for his particular flavor of OGA as
contractors when it was necessary to, well, completely disappear
someone without actually "disappearing" them.

Amazing what you can do with modern surgery,
if cost is no object and access to the best is a given. Some of the
other things: gait, bone length, all those things biometric ID at a
distance looked for, you could compensate for that with
prosthetics, lifts, training. Facial bone structure, now that
required some pretty dramatic work, or else a lot of time with a
make up kit, though the magicians in Technical Services Division
could do that if it were called for.

He looked up at the TV screen above the table
where he worked, at his reflection, the white ghostly blob of his
head and face in the dark glass, lit from below by the computer
screen.

Scary.

As hell.

Casper the Unfriendly Ghost. He grinned at
that. Unseen In All The Worst Places. He wondered if anyone else
would remember Null's motto in a few years. Ken had been the first
guy to really work with new age plastics and polymers, but to hear
these young assholes go on, they were the only ones who knew the
ins and outs of kydex.

Young. He'd been a young asshole; according
to the few that he touched base with (the ones that lived, anyhow)
he still was an asshole. Guess you needed a fan base to tell that,
and most of his fans were long gone and occasionally lifted a glass
to his memory if they weren't.

He touched his face. Memories of women...he
didn't want to go there. It had been a long time. Forever,
actually, in this new life. And he doubted all his works would
function in the clinch, assuming he found a hooker who could handle
him and his medical needs. Though that would be a great way to go
out; dead between the legs of some stone gorgeous $5k a night
hooker, and the Coroner trying to figure out who the hell he was.
That would keep the OPSEC/DISINFO boys and girls working long
hours.

He laughed at that. Try to spin a story to
cover that shit: long dead special operator discovered dead --
again -- with his face and fingerprints burned off, teeth replaced,
between the thighs of a five thousand dollar a night hooker. He'd
have to work some fine single malt Bushmills into it, though either
of those pleasures would kill his ass.

It was just a matter of time.

He looked over at the stacked Pelican cases
in the corner.

Would make more sense if he went out with a
bang.

Of some kind.

He clicked off, eased up out of the chair,
felt the various adhesions snag and stretch throughout his body.
Went and dropped fluid into his eyes till they ran pink tears. Gave
himself a shot, checked his blood levels, took a few pills. Sat
back on the bed and flipped through channels till he found a rerun
of SOLDIER OF FORTUNE INC. It was from the first season, and man,
he still had a hard-on, or at least the memory of one, for Margot.
Reminded him of that Ukranian girl he'd met working in that pub in
Chelsea when he was seconded to the SAS for training; same dark
hair, blue eyes, sharp boned face, lean and muscly, a little tiger.
What was her name? Didn't matter. Was fun while it lasted. She
wouldn't kick him out, though, as long as he had money. Which was
the problem. It was all about the Benjamins.

He couldn't watch the rest of the show,
flipped till he got to the news. Shooting at local gun store. He
turned up the sound. Frowned. Deon Oosthuizen. Now, that's a known
player on his social network analysis. Three Somalis?

He took out his cellphone, tapped out a text
message. Waited. The phone rang a moment later.

"Somebody freelancing on me?" he said without
preamble.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Recent unpleasantness with some former
residents of the Mog. Close to home. Again, someone freelancing on
me?"

"No."

"Check."

"I..."

"Check."

A sigh. "I'll do that and get back to
you."

"A simple yes or no in text will do."

"All right." He paused.

"Always check."

"Yes, sir."

He disconnected, turned off the phone, tossed
it on the bed.

Bullshit. There's no such thing as
coincidence.

He turned on his side, eased himself up and
out of the bed with the long practice of someone who had spent a
lifetime in a hospital bed. Limped to his bag, reached in and
brought out his pistol. Full size Glock 17, grip trimmed, a
silencer front post sight and a Dawson rear and a Trijicon RMR
milled down into the slide to co-witness, Dawson magwell and the
baseplate of a Dawson extension giving him a full 26 rounds of 9mm
goodness in a handful cut down just for him. One of the CAG
operators did all the work for him; they were a good bunch, and his
standing in the Yellow Shooting Glasses Generation gave him the
courtesy and respect others wouldn't understand.

Jimmy John got it.

Mr. Smith hefted his 17, pulled out a MCI
Glock trigger sheath and looped it around his belt, clipped the
Glock into place and tucked it down into his waistband. Good to go.
He grabbed two additional magazines and shoved them down into his
left hand pants pocket, another double mag carrier and shoved it in
the right hand pocket of his oversized oilskin canvas upscale
shooting jacket and checked himself out. Back in the bad old good
days, he'd have tucked some knives in there, but he was too fucked
up to engage in hand to hand, and knife was always at least close
enough to be hand to hand, so it was shooting. He was still more
than a little handy, though long sessions wore him out, and the
red-dot RMR rig on his pistol certainly made his life a lot easier
when it came to sight acquisition.

Maybe a late night drive and a burger would
be good. Who knows, maybe someone would try to jump his ass and
lighten his load of boredom.

Which was a good way of disguising what was
really on his mind, which was Jimmy John, and this current
assignment, and the subsequent phases of said assignment. He wasn't
one to go for body counts, and some part of him rebelled at the
fact, plain and simple, that the bodies he'd put in bags earlier
were all US citizens, most of them .gov employees, and the fact
that they were off the reservation, or so he'd been told, didn't
really make it any more palatable, even with an original signature
kill order/Presidential Finding shoved under his nose. Who'd a
thunk it, that we'd come to this in his lifetime? Maybe he should
transport some RDX into the White House the next time they gave him
one of those "here you go, look at it and then kiss it good bye"
decorations and letters. At least an Intelligence Star they let you
look at once in awhile. Not that he was in it for the ribbons.

No.

He was in it because this was what he did and
this is who he was. What else could he do? He was dying anyway. At
least this way he was of use.

Damn. Sad thing for a man like me, going out
for burgers instead of a Budweiser and a blow-job, but that's just
how it played out.

He blew air kisses at his reflection, and
limped out the door, locking it behind him, and got into his
Cherokee, gunned it up, and drove off into the dark night of Lake
City.

Lance T

Lance sipped a twenty year old cognac and
thought about indebtedness. Owing. Not something he enjoyed. When
he was pro, he had a contract, but a contract, while indebtedness
defined, had a start point and an end point, had a dollar figure
attached to it for buy out. In this business, indebtedness or at
least the appearance of it was an ongoing thing, and frankly, it
bugged the shit out of him.

There were the cops, of course, to keep them
off his back and to look the other way -- most of that was settled
with pussy and free drinks, though the older and more seasoned ones
wanted their taste of the good in cash; and a certain amount of
payroll and kickback from the girls went to that; there's the City
inspectors, the liquor distributors, the doctors he kept on the
side for the girls, the girls themselves and then, of course, his
investors, whose investment often showed up in satchels full of
cash from their lucrative cash rich enterprises and required, well,
a turn in the laundry that was a cash-driven business like the one
Lance ran, and then he had to take a certain amount of that and run
it through his own laundry, all the while finding ways to get that
cash into a good ol' electronic format so that it can be shuttled
around and then returned, say, as a installment check from a
investment firm, or a series of rents from empty houses.

So instead of paying back a debt, he was
transformed into a continuing enterprise, which had its benefits,
monetary primarily, though there were other resources available to
him should it become necessary. Not that he needed that. He had his
own and maintained them.