The Valkyrie Project (5 page)

The headmistress kept an eye on the children while the Valkyries talked to the teacher who had been in charge of the students when the Senator's son was taken.

"They were just playing outside. I usually watch the perimeter, but they added some new toys to the playground this year that are—I would say—too close to the edge. He was over there. There were other kids with him. They came running to me as soon as he'd been taken."

She was composed for someone who'd just lost a child for whom they were responsible, but her voice wavered and quaked near the end of longer sentences, resulting in a fairly staccato description of the event. Ana guessed her regular speaking voice was normally a few notes lower, and that her eyes weren't usually so watery. But she managed to get the story out
, including the few details she could remember. There were other details, of course—an infinite number really—that the Valkyries would have noticed had they been present. But most people didn't notice a lot of available details. How the mind loved to simplify through abstraction and generalization. Even if the teacher had more information stored in her brain somewhere, she probably wouldn't recall it until after the shock subsided.

Marisol spoke in a low, compassionate voice. "It's okay. It could have happened to anyone," she reassured
her. "If they wanted to get him, it would have happened soon or later."

The teacher nodded, closed her eyes, and looked back at them, questions in her eyes, fear of further interrogation.

"We're going to need to speak with the kids, preferably all of them, but at least the ones who were nearest where the kidnapping occurred," Ana said. Her comm buzzed and she stepped away from the group, down the hallway.

"Aerin,
any intel for us?"

His face already told her the answer was no. "I'm afraid not. Looks like some shortwave pulse weapon took out all of the security cams that would have caught anything during the time of the kidnapping."

"Seriously?" she replied, then muttered, "So fucking generic. Come on!" Then again to Aerin, "So we're definitely dealing with professionals."

"Oh yeah. Taking out the government-encrypted cams at the school and a few of the nearby
operated by the police was not something an amateur would be capable of. At least, not as cleanly as it was done today. I mean, these guys went in like a surgeon who washed his hands with anti-bacterial soap, used vacuum-sealed rubber gloves and instruments sterilized with bleach and fire and stored frozen before excising any piece of video that might have been used to identify said surgeon, then washed his hands again and destroyed the gloves with sulfuric acid."

"Thank you for that. I got it. Professional surgeon."

Aerin looked down, bashful, self-conscious.

"Yeah, that's about it."

"Okay, thanks."

"Yeah. Um, good luck with the kids."

Ana went back to the group.

"This is it
, guys. Aerin has nothing. They wiped all the security cameras. Hopefully they didn't wipe the kids’ minds."

A look of concern passed between the four of them.

--

Inside the classroom, the three Valkyries took a child each to a corner to interview them in semi-privacy. Ana had suggested it even though Marisol wanted to bring them out in the hall.

"It'll make them more comfortable," Ana had reasoned. "Those kids probably only get pulled out here when they're in trouble. They'll be intimidated. Inside they can see we are talking to all of them, and keep an eye on their peers around the classroom."

Marisol was not one to object to a good idea just because she didn't think of it. So they took the children aside three at a time, and talked to them, hoping the youngsters would be able to pony up some sort of clue.

The breakthrough came in the form of a cadre of precocious children who managed to piece together the ID number on the back of the vehicle from their collective memories.

Back out in the hall Ana said, "They have to have wiped it by now. I mean, you really think whoever did this wouldn't have thought of that?"

"Well, yeah," Marisol responded as she punched her comm. "But what else have we got?"

Justin shrugged. It was an accurate assessment.

Marisol contacted Aerin and gave him the vehicle ID they'd constructed from the fragments of the children's memories.

"So, now w
e just have to wait?" Ana couldn't hold back a sigh as she ended the question.

"Ana, you know the check on that ID is going to come back in less than five minutes."

Ana sighed again, a bit less melodramatically. It wasn't that she hated the waiting. It was the complete lack of control. Granted, she was never totally in control of anything—her own life included—but at least she had some influence over things that happened. There was always something to do, if she wanted. Something.

Right now, that something was waiting. So, as much as it made her blood jam up in her veins, she did.

It was approaching ten minutes when Aerin's face appeared on all three of their buzzing comms.

"Okay, guys. We got it."

Ana stifled a cheer and instead shared a look of relief with Justin while Marisol remained focused on her comm.

"Lucky break," Aerin continued
. "Some cop remembered seeing the van just a little while before we put it out on the wire. Says he remembered it because they were driving pretty erratically, and did a quick nosedive off into the warehouse district on the West Side. The address is in your comms."

--
 

They flew a once-over in the hovercar, and saw nothing in the parking lot but a black van looking not at all discre
et by itself in a lot designed for a hundred or more vehicles.

"No heat sig in the van. She's empty. Looks like
three inside the warehouse."

"The kid?" Marisol asked.

"No, too big."

Only
three. Ana wasn't holding out much hope. The van had probably been ditched there to throw them, or whoever the kidnappers thought would be chasing them, off the trail. Not as professional as the rest of the plan if they thought that leaving the van in plain sight would really fool anyone.

But might
a professional leave the van there while hiding inside, knowing that agents would find it, search the building, find nothing, and cross it off a list of options? It certainly would put more time between them but required a lot of faith in their ability to remain undiscovered on the first pass. Ana knew it had been done before, not in a mission undertaken by the Valkyries, but it had been one of the cases they'd studied. All of the Valkyries had been, and still went through, rigorous mental as well as physical preparation. They weren't just hired muscle. Their brains collected, processed, and organized more information in case study sessions than the top minds in all the other Agency projects combined. That was why they were the Valkyries.

Ana's mind delved to a second level of problem-solving
, but even if they were dealing with a double red herring, there was still only one way to find out.

They set down well clear of the discarded black van, but close to one of
the warehouse entrances. They exited the vehicle and snapped to the outside wall of the warehouse. Marisol and Ana flanked the door while Justin checked the lock.

"Interesting." It sounded like it wasn't supposed to make it out of his head, but it still drew the attention of the other two. Their eyes were on him.

He was already in full-on inspection mode. Ana leaned in, searching for an answer to her unspoken question. Nothing immediately stood out, forcing her to ask, "What's up?"

"
Well, it's not biometric but it's pretty secure considering the number of broken windows I noticed when we dropped in."

"So, should we scale a wall and use those then?"

"It would probably be faster. But more conspicuous."

Marisol chimed in, "I'm thinking we stick with plan A for now. If we scale the building we will get a lot more exposure to the skylanes up there. Down here, I doubt anyone will even see us."

Justin attached a lock cracker and numbers began spinning rapidly across the digital display. Ana and Marisol waited and kept guard. There wasn't much else any of them could do while the hacker tried to guess the encryption method through reverse engineering, deduced maximum allowed entries, and whittled down the lock's security measures to something that a human could handle without years of specialized training. The three of them—and all the other Valkyries—were trained in many things, but when it came to tasks a machine could do just as well, their training time was much better spent learning to maximize skills that only humans could do. Humans were good at visualizing a desired outcome and improvising when said outcome stopped being plausible.

The cracker worked for what seemed like hours stretching into days, while the three Valkyries were left in a mutually understood radio silence. Alone with their thoughts. And just as Ana's started to drift off-mission
, across the city to try to guess what Jrue might be doing at that moment, the lock flipped open.

Marisol made a few quick hand gestures and the team slid through the door as smooth as water down a drain. They all knew there were
three larger heat signatures inside, so the odds were even should it come to a fight, but it also meant that rescuing the Senator's son was not part of their immediate plans. They could only hope to find a clue that would lead them to where the child was taken.

The warehouse
teemed with crates, grouped together in stacks of six or seven. Ana felt no need to discern the organizing principle; it was probably just a random assortment of cover for the people who had kidnapped Senator Dilger's son.

The Valkyries took only a moment to locate two
of the guards on the ground floor and fanned out to capture them. Marisol headed up an aisle through the middle with Justin out to her left and Ana on her right. They crept between the large wooden crates, using them for cover. Ana closed in on the guard on her side of the warehouse. They'd have to take at least one alive if they wanted to figure out where to go next. Ana had a gun on her hip, but if she could separate the guard from his, she'd have an easy time subduing him for further interrogation.

Background noise from the ventilation overhead provided more than enough cover for her light footsteps. In a moment she was behind the guard. Just as she reached out, a yell came from the other side of the warehouse. Nothing more than a startled utterance, but it was enough to make her guard turn.

She sprang for him, but he was able to fire a shot before she collided with him. Luckily it was a traditional slug round, and only impacted her shoulder, crushing into a tight weave of durosteel. The momentum behind her leap sent him sprawling, and in a single motion she knocked the gun from his hand and kicked it back across the concrete floor.

Ana was kneeling on his solar plexus while she deflected wild blows that came from her sides. Her forearms parried him over and over until she could grab one of his wrists, pin it to the ground, and use some torque on it to roll him to his stomach.

"I don't really care to hurt you," she said, very close to his ear. He jerked his head back trying to hit her, but she pulled back and drove her knee further into his lower back. "Easy there. I just want some information, buddy. You can do that, right?"

He probably would have given her a defiant prisoner spit-in-the-face if he could have. Instead, he just huffed and squirmed.

"I'll get right to the point. The black van outside, where did they go?"

"I don't know about any black van outside."

Ana pulled his arm tighter behind his back, the leather around his arm creaking like the door to a warehouse that had actually been abandoned. The guard winced and tried to buck her off. Ana laughed quietly at the effort. She'd been on top of broncos a lot stronger and rowdier than this one.

Ana heard a similar scuffle on the other side of the warehouse. Good. Both guards down.

She called out, "Ana, check."

The guard squirmed again, and Marisol was there before Ana could begin a real interrogation.

"Anything yet?"

"Come on, I just got him down. And I don't think he's going to be very cooperative. Are you
, buddy?"

The guard gave his stand-in-for-spit-in-the-face huff again. Then he growled as he tried to wriggle away.

Marisol grabbed the hair on the back of his head and pulled back. Ana was sure it hurt, but she could also tell Marisol was being gentle.

"Who was in the black van outside, and where did they do?"

"I already told your bitch I don't know about any fucking black van."

"Whoa there. Let's watch our language around the ladies."

This time the guard did spit, but it landed short of where Marisol knelt in front of him.

"Look, we're not going to kill you or anything. But the people in the van kidnapped someone, and we need to know where that someone is."