Honor of the Clan (39 page)

One of the team walked over to the bed and methodically smashed in Ludlum's brains with a tire iron. Another stood on the opposite side of the bed, leaning down to inject the Hiberzine antidote. The dead man's heart would keep beating long enough to ensure he bled out and stayed dead. Not much chance of revival with his brains smashed like a rotten tomato, but professionals made sure.

The executioner dropped the tire iron on the bed as the easiest way to dispose of it. The others had begun policing up the hushers as soon as the second target dropped. The last man out injected the mother with the Hiberzine antidote and the medically prescribed dose of tranquilizer, for her age and condition, to knock her out until morning. That she'd never met the doctor who prescribed it was of no moment.

It would have been better to have burned him, but impractical. It didn't matter that much; he'd be burning now.

The team driver, as soon as they piled out of the building and into the car, didn't glance back as she began her E and E work. "Go okay?" she asked.

"Like a fine Maserati."

It was snowing in Topeka. Team Bowie was coordinating with Team Fairbairn, as their targets lived very close together. Buddies who worked at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant and drove to and from work together. The plan was for Bowie to stake out a necessary part of their route home, and Fairbairn to set up observers closer on the route to their target's home. Access to and from Farris's home had very limited routing, and they thought they could set up observers without their observers being observed. The enemy's people were almost certainly watching for the actual hit. They were unlikely to be watching every fast food restaurant or strip mall along the way. Particularly, they were unlikely to be watching the Dairy Queen where Bowie had parked.

When Farris arrived, if he didn't leave with Scout—Bowie's target—he was going nowhere. They could regroup and take him at night. Bowie would give advance warning, then use the timing to make verification of their target's presence at home quick and unobtrusive.

Luke Landrum had armed the Reardon girl with no reservations. The driver needed to be armed, and it didn't matter a damn that she was thirteen. She was an O'Neal. Tramp and Kerry had gotten used to her age. They'd seen on the first op that she was one hell of a combat driver—a natural. With a wheel in her hands, she had the agility and cunning of the fox that made the dogs cry. They tried hard not to patronize her. It didn't seem healthy.

Right along after quitting time for second shift at the plant, here came Mutt and Jeff's car. True to plan, as soon as they'd buckleyed in the update to Fairbairn, Reardon gave the targets about a minute's head start and pulled out of the DQ to get them to point B.

That was peachy until up ahead they saw hazard flashers through the heavy snow at a green traffic light.

"Turn off, turn off," Landrum ordered.

"Where?" Reardon asked.

The windows on the car were all frosted up, protecting them further from view. Thank God for small mercies. It wasn't enough to stop him swearing, but Bowie's team lead at least swore silently. That he was still swearing could probably be seen from the steam pouring out of his ears.

Then the light turned red. Jenny Reardon came to a careful stop on the icy road.

Sensing help had arrived, the targets walked over to the driver's side window and Mutt, their driver, knocked on it.

"Boy, am I glad to see you!" Jeff said as Jenny rolled down the window.

"Ditto," Jenny said with a smile. Two rounds into each body had them on the ground and twitching. She had to sit up in her seat to put one round into each head. They entered under the chin and more or less took off the top.

"Blood on the door," she said as the traffic light turned to green. "And it's freezing.
That's
gonna to take some clean-up."

"That was
not
the plan," Landrum said angrily.

"What were we going to do?" Jenny asked. "Give them a lift to their place and then cap them? Like our DNA wouldn't have gotten on the bodies? Cap them in the car and then deal with the bodies? Plan was
blown
."

"Luke," Tramp said. "She's right. You're just bitching because she aced us out of a kill on those scum. I'm pissed, too. But it was quick thinking and it was clear. Now let her get us out of here."

"We are
so
going to talk," Landrum snarled.

About three miles down the road, as she negotiated a nasty turn with a smoothness that really amazed him, he sighed.

"How you doing? First kill."

"Me?" Jenny asked with a thoughtful frown. It cleared quickly. "I can't
wait
to tell the kids at school! 'I got to cap a bad guy! I got to cap a bad guy!' They're going to be
green
."

"I hate O'Neals," Kerry muttered.

The Sub-Urb door was one of the originals. Normally, GalTech stuff didn't break. It wasn't designed to resist people breaking it deliberately. But this one still worked, which made things easy. It was supposed to make a programmed sound on opening to cue the resident to entry. Trivial work for even an incompetent cyber—which was probably why people tended to break and replace their doors. Candy hadn't.

The door slid open soundlessly, and a man known to the community as "Sevin" slapped a husher on the wall inside. He used his off hand, of course. His strong hand remained on his pistol as he and his buddy split the room.

"Clear."

"Clear."

The other two men on Team Ka-Bar were moving almost before the second all clear came. For this mission, it didn't much matter that they were all DAGgers, not Bane Sidhe. It was a textbook op of how to take out a personality. Capture not necessary or desired. The op was so simple it would have been insulting if it weren't for one key detail: this bitch was one of the motherfuckers who did the Maise massacre.

Charlie Maise was a fellow DAGger. The whole unit wanted Candy Leighton dead with a passion beyond words. It was DAG's right to take vengeance, and their own privilege to be on the team that got to do so. They'd all fantasized for long hours on creative ways to off the bitch, but in the end they'd kill her like the professionals they were. Get in, accomplish the objective, get out.

In operational mode, they were all instantly aware of little details like the target's revolting slobbiness, all the more glaring to military men, accustomed to strict neatness. The men's clothes scattered across the floor told them what they'd find in the single bedroom. One of the initial entry pair gathered up the clothes as his buddy, their team lead, covered him.

One of the second pair glanced in the bathroom in the short hallway on the way past. "Clear."

They were through the bedroom door, the man on the jam side emplacing another husher as they entered. He demonstrated why DAGgers practiced shooting one-handed, putting a bullet cleanly between the eyes of the woman in the bed. Her fuck for the night had his head between her legs, and was out of the way.

He held his fire for the follow-up shot, since there was no telling what the guy might do. He and his partner had their guns trained firmly on the guy.

This room was a mess, too. It smelled like a men's locker room.

"Be very, very still. Did you piss or shit?" the shooter asked.

The gray-faced, naked man shook his head.

"Good," he said.

The back-up shot the guy with a Hiberzine dart.

"Make sure there's not a trace of him," the team lead said.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Indianapolis Sub-Urb West owed its present condition to the enlightened benevolence of the Indiana legislature. Indiana was not Illinois. Indiana had far less money to waste on dry wells like social programs for Sub-Urb residents.

Sub-Urbs were simply not economically sustainable communities. Indiana's post-war economy was much like its pre-war economy. Manufacturing and farming, the former spread through a network of smaller cities, with the latter obviously distributed out as well.

The problem with Sub-Urbs was they concentrated people in places where there weren't enough jobs to employ them all. People in Sub-Urbs generally weren't too good about going onto the surface to look for jobs. Manufacturing jobs still tended to concentrate in the hands of union members, anyway, meaning multigeneration hoosiers. Sub-Urbs became slums of multigenerational losers, who were a drain on resources. The hydroponics systems in the basement that had once fed them had become, if not exactly broken, fouled to the point of same by mishandling. In the multigeneration brain drain that followed the end of the Postie War, competent hydroponics techs had found better paying work elsewhere, as had the other competent people who had kept the systems working as a captive audience at slave wages.

The Indiana legislature had decided it was better to pay a bit more for Sub-Urbanites once and get rid of them than it was to keep paying, and paying, and paying. They had a vigorous program of job training for careers that, coincidentally enough, would take the graduates someplace other than Indiana. A condition of training being vacating the Sub-Urb upon graduation, Indiana was slowly emptying the behemoths with a view to eventually shutting them down.

Indianapolis West Urb, home to one Gordy Pace, was about half empty. Gordy's own hall was even emptier than that. The man lived alone in three-bedroom quarters intended for a family. He'd had one, until he came home one day to find his wife had taken the kids and skipped off with a freshly trained bounty farmer wannabe. He supposed he could've smacked her less when he was drunk, but the woman had been damned irritating sometimes, and the kids loud. He didn't miss her at all, even though the place seemed kinda empty and he cooked worse than his ten-year-old daughter. He ate the crappy food in the crappy mess hall and tried to ignore his crappy life. Except that was all changing now.

Gordy was smart with his money. He had a brand new car, a union spot for the steel mills up north, and money to buy himself someplace to live that he could afford. Someplace out of this crappy hole in the ground. Only reason he wasn't gone yet was because he had had to get it all set up, and it wouldn't have been any fun without partying around a bit in front of friends, acquaintances, the sanctimonious bastards who got him kicked off the force, and the two bit whores who had been too good for him until he got himself his ticket out. And not to no shitty bounty farm.

He sure as hell wasn't putting off the trip out of any love for this goddamned rat hole. Hell, he was still tripping over the kids' discarded toys and crap.

Tonight, he was taking a break from crowing it up to have a quiet evening watching the latest blockbuster holo and downing a six pack or two of beer. Same as he'd done last night. Tomorrow he was really going to have to start packing up his shit. He stretched and noticed his T-shirt was tight. Good thing he was buying new clothes. There was a downside to being able to afford more beer.

The money had come in exchange for a really nasty piece of work, but if he had it to do over again he'd do the same. It was a ticket out of here. Life was unfair, and when bad things happened, it was better if they didn't happen to him.

Team Jacob specialized in the trickiest short-term cover assignments. Each of them was a seasoned operator, slabbed over ten years ago. They all looked perfectly ordinary, yet different enough to not be attention-getting identicals. Medical had carefully balanced their DNA changes to pass cursory examination of the commonly typed DNA factors as ninety-nine plus percent certainly a single, individual. Charlie Smith had a well-constructed record as a jobless, alcoholic laborer in Minneapolis, a sad victim of homelessness. The females typed as first degree relatives of the males.

They were the best team for a Sub-Urb hit, and frequently performed same. Old jeans, old sneakers, and a faded, dark blue T-shirt were as invisible as they themselves. Team Jacob had the lowest cover and costuming overhead in the whole organization.

For this job, they used a standard four-man entry team, their two female field operatives playing lookout. Since they couldn't and shouldn't be strikingly attractive, team members were scintillatingly charming and witty—but only at will. Charisma from someone who wasn't too good looking was effective on both sexes, depending on how they played it. The women stood lookout, invisible until and unless they needed to divert someone away from the action.

If there was any trace DNA at all, the "crime" would have been committed by one man, acting alone. Ex-cops always had enemies.

The entry team took the subtle approach on Pace's wooden replacement door—they kicked it in, not even bothering with hushers. The hall was half vacant, and the crime rate in the Urb tended to cause residents to conspicuously mind their own business. Sub-Urb quarters had no front windows to peek through. Noise would keep the other residents in their quarters better than silence.

Sometimes building clearing went quicker than others. This time was as quick as you could get. The bastard was in his easy chair in front of the HV. Cap him beyond repair, and get the hell out.

"Done," the team lead dropped the single word to his PDA, its only transmission, getting the instant receipt codes that told him the message got to both lookouts unjammed.

Getting into a Sub-Urb for a mission, even undetected, was easy. Out . . . not so much. The watching opposition would find it easy as hell to shut down the elevators and exit.

Agent Kacey Grannis retreated to the nearest public lounge and grabbed a table. She typed a single word into the virtual keyboard of her AID and her tiny foot in the door to the Sub-Urb's system expanded to complete control. She had to have the AID. The opposition sure as hell would have one, if they were any good. Parity made this a matter of skill. The mission hung on the bet that Kacey would be better and luckier than the competition.

Unfortunately, measures, countermeasures, and counter-countermeasures were a neverending arms race. She had to stay at her post until the rest of Jacob was all the way out, then hope her final run of hacks held long enough to get out herself. She had prepared herself mentally and physically in case she wasn't good enough or lucky enough. This time. Many a cyber had learned that you didn't tell a Bane Sidhe AID to purge beyond possibility of retrieval unless you
really
meant it. Virtually indestructible, it did the person capturing it little good to have a machine scrubbed all the way down to the hard-coded OS and blank personality. Unless the first guy to get his hands on it happened to want his own AID.