It was almost like all of it was happening to somebody else. He was still frozen, staring through the crack, when more popping went off, a lot louder. Jenny’s brains blew across the room. Then three men and a woman clomped down the stairs, looking all over the basement. Their eyes skated right across his trunk, and Pinky knew, just like somebody else was telling him, that it was a good time to play the calm game. A spy — a spy — is always calm under pressure.
Pinky breathed real slow and quiet. How weird that everything was happening so slow, like ketchup out of a bottle. He blinked twice, noticing that light was coming in through a round hole in the side of the trunk. His heart pounded loud as he realized the bullet must have just missed him, and he hadn’t noticed it. Maybe while they were shooting Jenny. Maybe it was even the bullet that hit Jenny. He swallowed hard.
The murderers looked around so much that he got a good look at all of their faces. Finally he heard some guy yell from upstairs, “Status!”
“One target down, down here. Got the younger kid,” the brown haired man yelled back up the stairs.
It dawned on Pinky that they thought Jenny was him. As they clomped back up the stairs, he knew they weren’t looking anymore for him because Jenny was dead on the floor, right over there. A whimper escaped his throat, finally, but nobody came back.
Too scared to climb out of the trunk, and deeply ashamed of it, Pinky cried himself to sleep. That was where Uncle Caspar found him four hours later, when he came home from work.
“Oh my God! Pinky?” Caspar Andreotti stared in shocked disbelief at the five-year-old asleep in his document chest. All of the material was old, paper or textile, and relatively nonsensitive. It also all had at least a little significance to his family’s multigenerational work in the Bane Sidhe organization, and had strong sentimental value. The stink of urine, quite unremarkable in the circumstances, told him that restoration of anything he kept would be necessary. He dismissed the thought, irritated at the irrelevancies that always sprung to mind in the worst circumstances.
Coming home to find his house drenched in blood, with a pair of clenched fists painted in black on his living room wall, and the people who embodied the very raison d’etre of his safe house — he laughed at the bitter joke — dead in pools on the floor, counted as “worst circumstances.” The use of the mafia revenge symbol was an ironic misdirection. The Darhel collaborators used the legends of his own ancestry to hide their message in plain sight. In a Chicago suburb, the implication that he and the murders were connected to old-fashioned organized crime guaranteed the police would give the matter only a pro forma inspection. This — keeping the cops out — was good for everyone, but it made him want to puke. As if the bodies themselves didn’t.
But now, miracle of miracles, the youngest of his charges had somehow survived. The next question was, who was the other child on the floor? He shook his head and lifted the boy out. The waking child jerked and whimpered a plaintive, “Mommy…”
“Shhhh. Pinky, I know, but you have got to be very quiet a little longer. You know how to be quiet, right?” Caspar kicked himself — what a stupid thing to say. Of course the boy knew how to be quiet — he was alive. Well, more likely it had been fear, but it was still imperative he remain quiet now. He pulled a PDA out of his front pocket. “Rafael,” he addressed the machine, “Transmit Lisbon, Berlin, Caracas, Taipei, Bristol, Paris.”
The code words had no symbolic meaning whatsoever, and changed regularly. They were a few of a menu of simple code words, never used in any drill. This particular one meant, “Security compromised, fatalities, enemy not in contact but presume continuing observation, survivors but no injured, key intelligence, request immediate extraction with maximum evasive action.” Well, perhaps the last one did have a certain symbolic meaning, he acknowledged. However, there were times to run, and this was one of them. He cursed himself, wondering if the fatal tradecraft slip had been his.
“You’re a spy, too,” the child whispered, almost as if he should have expected it. Caspar noted absently that the surviving Maise boy was far brighter than he appeared. Correction — than he chose to appear. He himself had apparently missed a lot.
He nodded as the PDA repeated the series of dead cities’ names back to him, setting the boy down a good distance from the blood. “Stay there a moment, Pinky. I just have to get some things from my workout gear.”
The heavy bag was filled with sand, as was what appeared to be a boxy, vinyl bench set against the wall. Andreotti grunted with effort, despite his own rigorously maintained physical strength, as he moved the two items over to give them some cover at an angle with a good view to the stairs. Digging underneath a pile of mildewing junk in one corner, he pulled out a rifle and a couple of decent pistols, a can of magazines, a couple of helmets. The bottom of the trunk yielded a couple of vests, so far down that they weren’t even damp. They didn’t smell so great anyway, and were only kevlar, but were a lot better than nothing, and likely to stop anything the enemy would fire in a basement unless he was stoned, stupid, or very well armored himself. Ricochets were a bitch.
He slapped the five-year-old’s hand away when he reached for one of the pistols. “Not today. Sorry, son. Your hands are too small, and you’re wound up — you just might shoot our rescuers by mistake. Don’t pout. Strap on the helmet as best you can and get under this.”
He didn’t mention that if the enemy decided to blow up the house, or burn it down, they were fucked. He hadn’t seen explosives or incendiaries in his cursory inspection of the place, which didn’t mean they weren’t there, but he hoped if they’d intended to demolish the house, they already would have. Besides, they went to special trouble to leave their warning. They’d want it noticed, and for word to spread.
He noted that whatever else the enemy was, he was apparently stupid. Or expected the warning to have the opposite effect to the one normally intended. Sorting out that mess was above his pay grade. Right now, his job was to keep his remaining charge alive for the pickup. Pinky was far more important than he was.
He wanted to ask who the other body was, sure that the child would know, but the little kid was showing amazing composure for his age, and Caspar wouldn’t risk breaking it. The boy had already winced, understandably, when he had called him “son.”
“Tell me the truth about my daddy.”
Andreotti jerked. “Alive, with the rest of DAG — most of them — somewhere else.” He reflexively told Maise’s son the truth. Yet another breach of his training.
“Fighting?”
The boy was no longer surprising him. This time the safe house operator considered before answering, “Not to my knowledge, but I’m not sure they’d tell me. Alive is all I know for sure, and I haven’t seen any clues that anything with as much firepower as your dad’s unit is out there raising hell.”
“Okay,” the child who was more than a child replied gravely, accepting the answer.
It was a long five hours, with him creeping out once to steal food and a large glass of milk, before returning down to feed and wait with Pinky. The basement had a bathroom, thank God, and he’d been able to grab some dirty clothes the boy had left on his living room floor. They were streaked with mud in places, but at least not peed in.