Vilhjalmsson explained—in Redmond as good as hers—that the attack on OneLane’s premises had interrupted a sting, and the team following them should remove themselves before they totally ruined it. He provided further codes, good enough that the Redmond carrier climbed high with a burst of speed and disappeared over the city.
“It won’t hold them long,” Vilhjalmsson said. “Redmond doesn’t share information about lines or line experiments.”
It was long enough for Radko. “We’ll find somewhere public to drop you off. The parking lot at SevenWays Plaza,” to van Heel. It was the largest shopping center in the city.
Van Heel set the controls.
Radko motioned Vilhjalmsson’s hands away from the controls with her blaster. He put them on the table, facing up. Empty. “I’ll buy the report off you.”
She laughed at him.
“Shopping center coming up.” Van Heel landed the aircar neatly.
“No?” Vilhjalmsson turned for the door. “I appreciate your not killing me this time.”
He winced and almost fell. Radko let him right himself. “Young Chaudry is right. I would have liked more leave.” He climbed out of the car like an old man.
“Vilhjalmsson. Catch.” She tossed him the spear. “You’ll need a weapon.” She didn’t trust Vilhjalmsson not to have put a tracer on it somewhere, and she didn’t have time to investigate, which was a pity because Vega would have liked that weapon. She turned to van Heel. “Go, before he shoots us all.”
Van Heel took off in a vertical lift.
They were five minutes in the air when Radko realized the comms she thought she’d rescued from OneLane’s dead hands was a military-style comms. The brand favored by Roscracian military.
Back in their rooms, Radko tossed the comms across to van Heel. “See if you can hack into that.”
Vilhjalmsson’s comms would be like their own. Provided especially for the mission and nothing personal on it.
“He seemed so nice,” Chaudry said. “And he was injured.”
Radko couldn’t work out if the niceness was supposed to prevent an assassin from stealing things, or if his injury was. She didn’t care. She wanted to shoot him.
“He must have swapped as we picked it up.” OneLane’s comms hadn’t been out of Radko’s pocket since. Or the comms she thought was OneLane’s.
She had to admire the cleverness of it. If she’d known he had picked up the comms first, she would have demanded it from him at blaster point. Instead, he’d offered to swap his comms for this one. She should have taken him up on his offer and seen him wriggle out of it.
“We didn’t see him swap it,” van Heel said. “Are you sure this isn’t the report?”
“Hack it and see, van Heel.”
Half an hour later, van Heel admitted, “There isn’t much on here. A code I can’t read. A ship booking from Roscracia to here. A restaurant payment for last night. He ate at a place called Sahini’s. He’s staying at the Grande Hotel.”
Radko would bet he wasn’t staying there anymore.
Like her own comms, there’d be deeper information if van Heel hacked further, but nothing to incriminate Vilhjalmsson, and it would wipe itself if they tried to discover more. One thing was certain. The comms with the report on in wouldn’t have last night’s dinner bill on it.
She dug into the tools on her belt. A tiny screwdriver. A metal knife. Some wire. She unscrewed that back of the comms, pressed the knife into the wiring, and wound the wire around the knife. She wound the other end of the wire around the screwdriver.
She was about to jam the screwdriver into the other end when she stopped. This would short the comms. There was a tiny piece of line five in each comms. She was about to destroy a line. Or a piece of one.
Could she do it?
She looked up to see all three of them looking at her.
“Are you okay?” Han asked. “You look green.”
Comms lines weren’t intelligent like a ten-line ship, but all the same. Was it murder?
“I’m fine,” Radko said, and jabbed the screwdriver down.
Ean would have told her the line had disappeared. All she got was the smell of burned plastic and hot metal. And a tiny wisp of black smoke.
When did lines become sentient, anyway. Surely all the small pieces of equipment weren’t. They didn’t seem to think until there were ten of them together and they were much larger than a single sliver. Maybe she should think of the tiny piece of line in a comms as like regenerated skin, being grown to match a human DNA. Not alive in a sentient way.
She tossed the comms away. Vilhjalmsson wouldn’t be able to track it anymore. Although it would be like him to bug something else.
“What if you were wrong about which comms it was?” Han asked.
“Then I’ve destroyed plans we were prepared to pay a lot of credits for.”
The trick to a successful operation, covert or otherwise, was not to think about what-ifs like that until after the operation, when you worked out what you could do better next time.
There were other what-ifs she had to think about now. Like, what if Vilhjalmsson had bugged them?
“We should all change,” she said. “Everything. Even our shoes if we have others. We may be bugged.”
Han followed her into the room she shared with van Heel. She didn’t see any signals, but van Heel lingered outside. “It’s not such a big deal,” he said. “Losing the comms, I mean. They can’t expect newbies like us to be a hundred percent successful first time around.”
What was he trying to tell her? “Han, with that kind of attitude you’ll never make it in covert ops.”
“I never planned for covert ops.”
Neither had she.
“I like my job. I like that I can go home every break.”
“I like my job, too,” Radko said. She missed her job. She missed Ean. And she didn’t have time for the small talk. “Tell me what you’re trying to say. I like honesty.”
Han looked at her.
“We don’t have time for you to muck around.”
He hesitated. She waited.
“Maybe you shouldn’t take it so hard. Losing the report. It’s okay to destroy his comms, but don’t you think this bugged business might be going too far.”
No wonder Vega liked him, but the Yves Han who’d burned his tutor’s arm wouldn’t ever offer advice like that.
“Humor my paranoia this once, Han. I know this man.” A lot better than she had two months ago. “Let’s all get changed and see if he has planted any bugs. I hear what you’re saying, but I am your team leader in this. I’m not doing it because I’m upset he stole the comms from me. I’m doing it because I think he’s bugged us.”
“And that business with the comms before?”
“That is a totally different thing. I don’t like destroying lines. Not even comms lines.” She pushed him out. “Go and get changed.”
Afterward, she checked their clothes. On the back collar of the business jacket she had worn as Tiana Chen was a tiny receiver.
Van Heel took it from her fingers. “Finest grade,” she said approvingly. “Do you know how much a device like this costs?”
Radko was sure Vilhjalmsson hadn’t worried about the price.
She tossed her jacket into the recycler, and got the others to dump their jackets as well. She sent the bug down with it.
“I can’t believe I let him do that.” She should have known better.
“He did save our lives,” Chaudry said.
“Chaudry, he’s a professional assassin.” Who’d probably kept them alive because he wanted to hear more about the line ships and their plans.