"Ringo,.John.-.Posleen.05.-.Cally's.War.-.Cochrane,.Julie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)
"That would be an interpretation consistent with the Tir's request."
"Yeah. Okay. He's the boss. Thanks, Leanne." And I hope you report that polite answer to your real boss soon, you spying bucket of bolts.
* * *
Charleston, Tuesday, May 14
Cally spent Tuesday morning shopping for the extras she'd need in her pack and case. While most seafood going inland was canned or frozen at the big Greer's processing plant, monopoly pricing made it barely affordable for a small fleet of vans carrying live delicacies like fresh crab, scallops, and oysters to make a reliable profit selling to restaurants for the wealthy, well-connected, or families enjoying the occasional special occasion. While technically a violation of the National Emergency Food Supplies Act, the trade survived and even thrived largely because federal inspectors liked fresh seafood as well as anyone. Their share didn't really add more overhead than the old prewar health inspections had, anyway. It was a perfect way to travel anonymously.
She could take the bus, but the middle seat in a live crab van was not only more discreet but would be cheaper, especially for someone who was young, pretty, and friendly. Not that money was a problem, it just made a good excuse for preferring a fishy van over the bus.
The bright, new beach T-shirts and some garish souvenirs fit the picture of an inland coed who'd spent too much on vacation.
After lunch she found a pay phone and dialed the number Shari had provided.
It answered on the first ring, "Cally?"
"Hi, Granpa."
"You're a bit late," he reproached. "Trouble finding a phone?"
"I'm late?" she choked. "Yeah, five minutes, not three hours and forty-five minutes."
"Um . . . yeah." He cleared his throat and was silent for a few seconds. "We had no idea the damned Elves had that kind of jammer deployed with any of their human people. I know he was modest about it in the debrief, but the algorithm our largest friend put together on the fly to filter out the false images was nothing short of geniusЧuntil then, you could have been anywhere in the city as far as we knew. You would have found us before we found you. If it's any consolation, you improvised brilliantly."
"It's a living. What did you want to talk to me about? And why a telephone, of all things?"
"People do still use them, you know," he said wryly. "It's still the most popular means of talking over a distance."
"And insecure as hell. Quit dancing, Granpa, what's up?" She added suspiciously, "This doesn't have anything to do with Wendy and Shari cornering me for purposes of matchmaking, does it?"
"Well, not ex. . . ." He stopped and started again, "I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to see some great-grandkids before I die."
"Talk to Michelle."
"You know damn well why I can't." He sighed. "I just don't know what the problem is. For awhile I thought if I just waited . . . and you seem to like kids well enough. Honey, I just don't have a whole lot of wait left."
"Well, I'm sorry," she sounded a hair more indignant than sorry, "but I just haven't found the right man. What I do have is a job, an important one that not just anybody could do, and I'm damned good at it!"
"You can't let a job take the place of a life!" She could hear him take a deep breath and sigh, "It's eating you up, and it's not good for you. There are plenty of fine men out there, and plenty of places other than bars to meet them."
"Now wait just one fucking minute, I may look twenty, but I'm . . ."
"Cally, I don't want to fight," he interrupted. "I know you're a grown woman, and I love you. Just . . . think about it, okay?"
"Okay, fine." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Actually, I'm taking a vacation for a week. I've got our next mission brief, can't share, but we'll have more than enough time to put it together after my trip. In fact, you take care of rounding everybody up and meet me at the wind farm at eight a.m. on the twenty-third. I love you. I'll be in touch, okay?"
"I haven't decided. I'll decide each day as I go," she reasoned. "If I had to plan it, it wouldn't be a vacation. Are you clear on meeting me?"
"Yeah, yeah, eight and twenty-three. You're really not going to tell me where you're going, are you?" He sounded a bit put out.
"Nope. Love you, Granpa. Bye."
She hung up the phone and grinned at the receiver for a minute before picking her bags up off the sidewalk and taking them to the car. Her mouth tightened for a minute. Okay, so it's a working vacation. I can't believe they've been protecting the son of a bitch. Hell, yes I can. Fucking pragmatists. Okay, so I'm no dewy-eyed idealist, myself, but there have to be standards.
She spent the rest of the afternoon and evening cracking the public records of Sinda MakepeaceЧDMV, credit, frequent shopper cards, the property-management files for her apartment complex, internet postings. Jay and Tommy would do a more thorough job next week, but since she couldn't brief them in yet, she might as well get a head start on the easy stuff now.
A couple of hours with the buckley running pattern analyses and she had a tentative character profile to start building the role.
"So, do you think you could manage to do a full backup on me before we go off on this mission? No reason for both of us to die, is there?"
"Shut up, buckley."
"Right."
Next came the prelims for her vacation mission. The target was not much of a player, so it should be an easy job, but Cally was habitually thorough in prepping for a mission. It was the main reason she was still alive.
Having memorized Petane's facial features years ago, when she was young and eager and fully expected to be handed the mission, it was a simple matter of self-hypnosis to bring the details back to the surface. He could have been changed, but if he had been it was likely that Robertson would have said so. If Robertson's telling me the truth and not playing his own game, that is.
A three-D facial modeling application let her put the face into a form the system could use. From there it was a simple hack to download the bank camera records for Chicago ATMs and set another little utility sifting through the images for matches. Normally, she would have left a bank hack to Jay, but she hadn't been in this business for thirty-plus years without learning a few tricks outside her own specialty. Sure, she got a load of false positives first run-through, but she was able to identify one true hit in the first dozen and fed it back to the facial app, modified it and ran it through again. That eliminated half the hits. Going through those for a few more true positives and refining the app again got her down to a couple of hundred true positives, from which she weeded a handful of false positives and doubtfuls by hand. Loading those into a database and running a third app, telling the buckley to assume a standard Monday through Friday daytime schedule localized his work to a probable area of a few blocks and his home to one of two possible areas. One was probably the home of a girlfriend. A quick look at a map made the probable work location the Fleet Strike Tower. Well, Robertson was telling the truth about that much, anyway. The scumbag sure doesn't look dead to me. That's fixable. I'd love to crack his accounts for a full profile, but there's way too much risk of leaving tracks. I would really prefer for my bosses to get used to the idea of Petane being dead before I fess up to the hit. If I ever do. Hrms. Isn't that interesting. He was never taken off the Targets of Opportunity listЧjust automatically flagged inactive when he was entered as dead. She took a risk and hacked the Illinois tag database to get the make, model, and tag number of his car, and downloaded the analysis results and raw hits onto a cube, setting it not to erase after the first reading. It was a calculated risk, but in a pinch her own stomach acid would destroy the cube as effectively as the more usual glass of vinegar.
"Congratulations! You've come up with a fabulously inventive new way to get us killed. Have you even considered the possibility that this might be a really bad idea?"
"Shut up, buckley."
"Right."
* * *
Under a cornfield in Indiana, Wednesday, May 15
Indowy quarters were about a fourth the size of quarters for a normal human. It wasn't that they were agoraphobic, exactly. It was just that they felt much more secure in groups. Still, Aelool had made the sacrifice of having a room by himself because of the necessity of occasionally entertaining humans. Even in Chicago Base, most of the Indowy would rather not deal with carnivores unless the meeting was necessary, except for the few human children apprentices in Sohon whose families had been carefully selected even among the Bane Sidhe for adaptability. The human children were vegetarians. It wasn't exactly their fault that they had been born in a species that hadn't abandoned its carnivorous roots yet.
His solitary quarters also seemed more comfortable for human visitors, who tended to be okay in duos or small groups, but had an unfortunate tendency to react badly to crowds. The few scholars who had studied their history, despite a natural distaste for the violent subject matter, were about evenly divided, after observing human behavior in crowds of their own species throughout history, about whether humans were pathological loners or closet xenophobes. He tended to lean towards the former hypothesis, and acted on it. It had worked well for him so far. Honestly, so long as you kept them out of crowds, many humans were basically okay people.
At the moment, he was preparing for his most frequent visitor, Nathan O'Reilly, who had been entrusted with the care of the main base of Bane Sidhe operations on Earth. Although most information gathering and other operations were best handled through a cell system, once you got above a certain level of complexity, a certain bureaucracy was inevitable. O'Reilly's particular philosophical discipline required that he not marry and bear offspring, so he had no clan to speak of, but his learning and position equated to a sort of senior elder. Aelool respected him. They had a mutual passion for logic games, and Father O'Reilly had been teaching him chess. It would take at least a century to master. Perhaps then he could return the favor and teach his friend aethal.
Proper hospitality towards human visitors required the ritual preparation of a bean broth highly prized among their species. He had learned the art from the best expert he could find. A perfectly clean pot and apparatus, a tiny pinch of salt, run the beans, which could be purchased dried and preroasted, through a coarse grinding machine, bottled spring water, add the components to the right parts of the machine, and it prepared the soup perfectly every time. He did not understand how water could have a season, but when he ordered it from Supply, they always knew what he meant, so he chose not to argue.
Aelool had learned that some chess sets were more abstract than others. The one he had chosen had pieces of wood, carved in intricate detail. He liked the horse. He had met them a couple of times. They weren't quite sophonts, but he would like to have one in his quarters-group some day, if they could be bred small enough.
When everything was ready for his guest, he sat quietly for a few minutes, working on the design for his latest project. When the light shifted slightly yellow-ward, announcing the scholar's arrival, he put the project away quietly and keyed the intercom.
"It's open," he said.
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