"Team. We have to pick that team with more than usual care. Howell and Cross are busy setting the mission up; that's why Seth isn't briefing you himself." A finger tapping against his teeth, as though the ritual and not his thought processes generated the pause. "How well do you get along with Ted Quantrill?"
Under the little man's deceptive mild gaze, Sanger had to force her eye contact. "As well as with any rover. We've teamed on several missions — but you know that." Taking a risk: "We get along; he doesn't talk my arm off. He's a surly little bastard but he doesn't have many weaknesses."
"Not even in bed?"
"I've had that pleasure," she said evenly. "Also with Ethridge, Graeme Duff, once even with Howell, which I won't bore you with. I might have it with you, if the occasion ever arises." The spots of color on her cheeks did not suggest that it was very likely.
"Why thank you, Sanger; though I ah," with a dusty cough of self-deprecation, "wouldn't want to bore you with that." Pause. "I'm asking as politely as I can: do you think any of your liaisons — with Quantrill, for example — left emotional bonds?"
She made her laugh loud enough so that it wouldn't come out shaky. "Basic T Section stuff, Lasser!
Going soft on another member of a hit team is a deadly mistake." Her grin was as feral as she could make it: "I don't have many weaknesses either." Sanger, however, knew that her responses to stress were not as controlled as Quantrill's. At the moment she hadn't the strength to kick a sick whore off a bidet and she knew it.
Lasser, studying her, at last said, "Good," and picked up the thick file. "Howell will give you details but I can tell you now that this will be touchy work. You have to take your man out without killing him, if at all possible. We have a lot of questions we need to ask him."
"Soporific slugs? Hypospray?"
"Hypospray might not be fast enough, but you'll get a canister just in case. You'll probably have to use your chiller. Just don't hit a vital spot; they don't care if he loses an arm. He won't be needing it again."
Not worried, but perplexed: "So how do we get a bleeder back here alive?" She was thinking of Calgary.
"Sprint chopper. He doesn't know we're onto him but when he does, you can expect some good moves."
She took the file from Lasser, glanced at the first page, and then realized why that file was so thick, why Howell and Cross were setting up the mission. Seth Howell and Marty Cross had more single combat experience between them than any half-dozen rovers, and they would be her team members. No wonder Lasser had been so gentle, so careful.
The file she held was Ted Quantrills.
CHAPTER 29
So this was the way her world ended, thought Sanger. Inside, she was whimpering. She'd spent far too much time trying to figure a way to warn Quantrill, and not enough time steeling herself for her decoy duties. Quantrill was pulling sprint chopper maintenance at Dugway, on the Utah side of the Nevada border. How simple it might be to ask Control, through her critic, to patch her into Quantrill's head. And how fruitless; for Control would not let her say a dozen words of warning, and she'd be cancelled forever. What would she say anyway? Run for it? They'd only zap him with his critic detonator.
Whatever I must do now, I love you beyond all reason? He probably knew it anyway, and it wouldn't keep either of them alive.
Sanger stared out the polymer port of the sprint chopper, ignoring the wiry half-Cheyenne, Cross, in harness near her. Howell was not as good a pilot as he was a killer — but there was no great hurry as he guided them past the Oquirrh Mountains.
Quantrill had not seen fit to tell her (oh God, why not? Hadn't he known he could trust her?) he'd funked a mission, turned rebel beneath her nose. But neither had she told him the real story about his friend Raima. How Sanger had left a printed warning for Dr. Cathy Palma two hours before she was expected to disappear the woman in Abilene, Texas. God damn that man, refusing to ask her help! Now she could not give it and hope to live. Marbrye Sanger did not want to die, and didn't intend to. The best thing for her was to expunge Ted Quantrill from her memory; to bleed her soul of him. He'd made his single bed and now he could die in it.
CHAPTER 30
Quantrill only half-noticed the approach of Howell's craft as he lay supine on the mechanic's creeper.
Three similar craft squatted outside the maintenance hangar five hundred meters away, and Quantrill lay above hot concrete beneath the nose of the fourth, which Miles Grenier had flown to the alignment pad.
Old-timers still called these secluded spots 'compass roses'. Grenier sat in the cockpit, checking out the avionics and calling out the results of Quantrill's simple remove-and-replace operations with numbered modules. It had never occurred to Quantrill that rovers might be kept deficient in electronic theory.
Perhaps it was the continuing buzz of the distant sprint chopper that first suggested a break in routine.
Usually the pilot set his bird down quickly to avoid spreading dust across the flight line. This one hovered, half concealed by the hangar.
He heard Grenier's audio buzzer. From sheer curiosity he pushed the stowed nose flotation bag aside; listened through the thin inner bulkheads. Grenier spoke normally at first. After a pause he spoke more quizzically but Quantrill could not hear what he said. The rover wiped late morning perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his odorous work coverall. He had time to damn the heat of the turbines whistling in the fuselage; they weren't loud but while checking the bird out you wanted them idling.
A vagrant breeze wafted warm exhaust back to Quantrill, pungent with expensive fuel. Quantrill decided Grenier was going to take all day on his comm set, cursed, rolled back on his creeper and slapped the nose hatch shut before sitting upright. The hovering sprint chopper in the distance, he noticed, backed from sight without landing.
Quantrill was only a little surprised to hear the turbine whine rising, but very much so to see the wingtip shrouds swivel into takeoff position. If that goddam Grenier was heading back for an early lunch he wasn't going to leave Quantrill to leg it alone back to the hangar.
He lay back on the creeper, grasped handholds and shot himself backward to the belly hatch, punching the skin detent as he passed it. The hatch opened and Quantrill snagged internal handholds, legs driving him vertically as the craft began to lift and turn.
"What is this, Grenier; trick or treat?" Quantrill lay on the narrow walkway and stared angrily forward at the pilot.
Grenier did not hear him over the turbine scream, but evidently heard something in his headset. He chopped back the power too quickly, flicked off all systems while struggling up from his seat. And the glance he flicked at Quantrill was rich with fear and suspicion.
"Abandon ship," Grenier shouted, waving Quantrill out the still-gaping belly hatch, and following him with almost a rover's speed. Grenier backed away, not looking at the aircraft but at the rover. "Quantrill, get away," shouted the pilot. "We've got a problem with the bird!"
Quantrill trotted after the taller man, saw past him to the flight line. Five minutes before, there'd been several people currying their birds. Now the place was deserted. At the periphery of his vision was a charcoal-black mass, skating ten meters over the deck, and now Miles Grenier was running like a deer.
The hurtling mass was a sprint chopper, arcing in between the two men. Isolate your hit, said a well-remembered voice in his memory. The voice had been that of Jose Marti Cross, the same man that Quantrill now saw peering from a side port in the approaching aircraft.