Laurajean had an auto, the records showed, a mauve-colored Delvin sedan suitable for his entire family. Sula wondered if he drove it to work or left it at home. His wife didn’t have a driving permit, she found, and Laurajean himself had been granted a parking permit for use at the Blue Hatches facility.
She rose from her desk, stretched her limbs, and walked to the kitchen, where Spence and Macnamara chatted while pouring iarogüt down the sink, flooding the small room with the sinus-stinging herbal scent.
“We’ll take him today,” she said. “Before they decide to put guards on him.”
They looked at her in surprise, then Macnamara laughed. There was a wild look in Spence’s eyes. They’d caught Sula’s mad, defiant spirit.
Fuck caution.
Because the arrangement had worked the first time, they decided that Sula and Macnamara would be the shooters and Spence the lookout. Macnamara got weapons out of storage and cleaned, assembled, and loaded them, while Spence rented a small, gray six-wheeled cargo van under a backup identity. Sula polished her essay one more time, sent out the third edition ofResistance while public indignation was at its height, then began researching the Blue Hatches prison and its immediate environs, maps of which were in the Records Office computer.
A problem existed with the rented van, the workings of which contained computers that regularly reported their location to the Office of the Censor. When a crime was reported, any vehicles in the area could be pinpointed.
When it had originally been equipped, Team 491 was given a Hunhao sedan with the ability to switch this feature off. The Hunhao was an ideal getaway vehicle, and Sula wanted to use it for the escape, not for the assassination itself.
All put on gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. Spence turned the van over to Macnamara, the best driver, and herself drove the Hunhao down the main artery beneath the Apszipar Tower, where she parked four streets away from the prison. She then jumped into the van—Sula was in the back, with the weapons—and the van headed for the prison secure behind its azure ceramic walls.
Team 491 had been tense during the Makish killing. Now they were casual almost to the point of mirth. Sula’s fey spirit had spread to them all. Two killings in the period of a day—why not? The first had been overplanned, and now the second wouldn’t be planned at all. They were throwing their months of training to the winds, and the relaxation of discipline was like wine in their veins.
There was chaos outside the prison, with swarms of grieving next-of-kin milling in a anxious mass, waiting for the chance to claim their relations. Sula noted the big main gate, the large garage attached to the administration block by a ramp. The van edged through the crowd and dropped Spence off at the fringes, where she wouldn’t stand out amid the mourners. Macnamara swung the van through a series of turns and parked so they were ready to intercept Laurajean on his way home. He and Sula sat in the front, the windows open, and waited through the long hot afternoon.
They were in a Lai-own neighborhood. The tall, long-limbed flightless birds went about their business, too busy or too hot to pay attention to strangers. A pungent scent drifted toward them from a nearby restaurant—the Lai-own protein sauce heated in the great iron pans and ready to cook meat and vegetables.
A young male Lai-own strolled to the door of an apartment across the street, urinated copiously on the doorjamb, then adjusted his clothing as he walked away.
“Ah, young love,” Sula said. Macnamara gave a snicker.
No volleys echoed over the prison’s featureless wall. Sula turned her hand comm to the punishment channel and found that it was showing the executions all over again.
“This is the fate that the wicked saboteurs and assassins have brought to the people of Zanshaa,” the narrator intoned. Sula snorted. Hadn’t he read the third edition ofResistance?
Whose bullets struck them down?
There was a roar from the front of the prison, hundreds of throats together. Spence reported that an announcement had just been made that the first twenty families could enter to identify and claim the bodies of their kin, and the bereaved were crowding together by the gates.
“It’s him!”Spence said, in sudden surprise. “He’s in his car, with a couple of his pals. Heading your way!”
Laurajean had taken advantage of the crowd clumped around the main gate to leave unmolested through the garage exit. Macnamara pressed the throttle lever and the van’s electric motors surged, bringing the vehicle silently into traffic. Sula slipped into the cargo compartment, crouched on the black composite floor as she first readied her weapon, then placed Macnamara’s gun on the passenger seat where he could reach it.
“There he is!” Macnamara called, and Sula knew her luck was in. She’d beenright to follow this wild impulse. A feral joy filled her heart at the certainty that nothing could go wrong for her today.
Just in case, for caution’s sake, she called Spence to ask if there were any sign of another vehicle following, perhaps with guards.
No. The Naxids had left their killer without protection.
Sula readied her rifle. “You’ve got to catch him before he gets to the expressway,” she told Macnamara. Vehicles on the expressways were required to surrender control to a centralized computer system, which would never let them get close.
“Easy,” Macnamara said, and power surged to the motors. “They’ll be on the left side.” His window powered open and he shifted his stubby machine pistol to his lap.
The van swerved, then swerved again. The motors surged once more, then braked back.
“Now,”Macnamara said. Sula touched controls, and silent motors rolled the big side door open. Hair whipped across her face in a sudden blast of hot wind. The mauve-colored Delvin was right there, almost close enough to touch.
There were three Terrans in the car—two women and Laurajean—all in lawn-green uniform tunics. Laurajean was driving. They were laughing at some joke, and Laurajean was gesturing expansively with one slim hand. Exhilaration still radiated from his face.
He was still rejoicing in his unexpected celebrity, unaware that his starring role on the punishment channel was about to be canceled. He glanced to his right just as Sula put the rifle to her shoulder, and his puzzled squint showed he hadn’t quite worked out what he was seeing when she fired.
The rifle used caseless ammunition that was nearly recoilless, and cycled it very fast. Sula put over a hundred rounds into the car in less than two seconds. Macnamara, firing through the window, emptied his own smaller magazine.
There was the sound of a score of hammers beating metal. Parts of Laurajean’s car seemed to dissolve, the glass spraying outward in crystal fountains that glimmered in the sun, the resinous composite body simply disintegrating. The Delvin swerved, and Macnamara quickly dropped his gun into his lap in order to concentrate on his driving. Sula pressed the control that slid the side door shut.
Peering out the back window, she saw the Delvin slowly cross three lanes of traffic and come to rest on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a startled Daimong pedestrian.
Macnamara made a few turns, then found a legal place to park. By then, Sula had the weapons broken down and in their cases. The two quietly left the van, walked down a baking street, turned a corner and met Spence, who had paralleled their route in the Hunhao.
In a few hours they would call the rental company from a suitably anonymous location and tell them where they could pick up their van. If its transponder hadn’t happened to report within a few minutes of the assassination, there would be nothing to connect it to the killing.
To the team’s strange spirit of impulse and madness was now added another dimension—that of relief. They babbled with frantic good spirits as they left the Apszipar Tower behind. They were as cheerful, Sula realized, as Laurajean had been with his two colleagues. Like children who had gotten away with something naughty.