The stairwell from the above-ground building did not go into the subbasements. His only close call was when one of the uniformed external security guards passed him. The woman’s eyes focused on him briefly, but saw only the uniform and badge of someone who belonged there. Lucky, that.
The door to the below-ground stairs was the first real test of his pre-scripted cracking. He swiped his badge, thanking Sunday silently when the door clicked and showed a green light. Before entering subbasement B, he double checked to make sure he had the right cell and that his teammate was still in it.
Halfway down the hall, he was faced with his first situation. A man and a large, hulking woman were half-carrying a shivering teen, in a thin, orange jumpsuit, towards him. The jumpsuit was as wet as the kid’s hair. He didn’t give them time to get a good look at his face, just turned and swiped the nearest door, opening it enough to stick his head in.
“Quiet down in here, street trash!” he barked.
Past him now, the other guards chuckled and kept moving.
The cell he needed was all the way at the fucking far end of this hall, but he made it without further incident. Opening it, he looked across the room into his friend’s face. “Come on, toga boy.”
Schmidt could have felt sorry for the other three men if they hadn’t looked so relieved that he’d come for somebody else.
“Couldn’t you have brought me something to fucking change to?” the cyber hissed.
“No could do. Sorry.”
“I wanna talk about that after action,” the big man growled.
“Fine, now shut the fuck up.”
A guy with a weaselly mustache stepped out of the break room at just the wrong time. “Moving the big one, huh,” he said. His forehead creased in bewilderment. “Hey, do I know — ?”
His hesitation had given them the few seconds needed to cross the intervening distance. George had the door closed and his hand tight over the guy’s mouth before Mr. Mustache had time to say more than, “Wha?”
Mustache’s neck was now bent at an angle where it had never been intended to go. The guy was a kicker, so he rolled him across his arm to Tommy before the bastard had time to, god forbid, kick a door or something. Keeping a damp toga on while holding a dying guy off the floor and away from everything was apparently not an easy task. After what felt like an hour or three, but was probably well under a minute, Mustache stopped kicking and hung, limp, from the war veteran’s massive hands.
George could almost feel sorry for the pathetic sack if he hadn’t seen the cube of all the horror that these guys were part of or at minimum made possible. There were some jobs that just earned you what you got.
“George,” the other operator hissed, “what do we do with him? There’s no place to put him.”
“Hang on a sec.” The assassin pulled up the floor plan, biting his lip. “We got two choices. One floor up, there’s a maintenance closet about fifteen meters down the hall. The other choice is two floors down, we’ve got the bottom of the staircase. Oh, and gimme,” he said, unbuckling Mustache’s belt and holster. The guards who walked through his own floor hadn’t been armed, not while he’d worked here. Mustache had just done the last, and possibly the first, good deed of his life.
“Stairs.” Tommy looked like he would have thrown Mustache over his shoulder, but, after going through the normal post-death bodily processes, the very fresh corpse was beginning to stink. He put it down long enough to rewrap his sheet and picked it up with one hand, dangling the malodorous burden at arm’s length. He kept his other hand on the damn sheet.
Three flights down, the smaller man decided they were in a very bad place to leave a body. There was no under the stairwell nook here — just solid Galplas. The only door had a diamond shaped window at about head level, for an average man. George’s eyes barely crested above the bottom of the frame.
“There’s nobody out — wait.” The double-height hall was empty, but the creak and slam of a door above said they were no longer alone on the staircase. “Come on!” He pulled the giant man, corpse still dangling from one hand, into the hallway of level C, careful to ease the door closed behind them. Just outside the door, next to a freight elevator, stood a huge, blue, steel bin. Someone had stenciled the word “recyclables” on the side in yellow. Even with wheels, that must be a mother to push. He climbed the steel rungs built into the side and looked in to see a cargo of cans and bottles, rising to about half a meter shy of the top.
“Gimme,” he whispered to Sunday, wedging his feet firmly in the gaps of the rungs and holding out his arms. Removing the coverall from the body rendered the corpse more safely anonymous, given what they did here — but only a bit less smelly. The hard part was settling it in amongst the discarded drink containers without a lot of loud clatters and rattles. Piling it in as gently as he could, the refuse shifting under Mustache’s weight still sounded, to George, like a twelve-year-old with a drum set.
His partner was obviously unhappy to be holding the coverall. George took it from him and scooted to the men’s room door. “Keep watch,” he said.
The toilets in the men’s room were the old porcelain kind, with the tank in the back. In the second from the end stall, Schmidt turned off the water and flushed, stuffing the coverall in the now-empty tank. The smell would draw little investigation there, at least for awhile. Nobody wanted to investigate men’s room smells too closely unless it was his job to clean up the mess. It was safer than anything else he could think of, anyway.
When George emerged, already moving for the stairs, Sunday looked ready to kill him.
“Keep watch? Keep watch?” he whispered furiously, gesturing to his own sheet-clad form. “Do I look like somebody who ought to be keeping watch?”
The assassin motioned him quiet, listening for noise in the stairwell before they began their ascent. “Wah,” the little man said to him, earning a glower.
Once they got back to the main aboveground stairwell, and the big man was able to ditch the sheet for a coverall of his own, his mood seemed to improve. A lot. It fitted him perfectly, having been made in the Bane Sidhe wardrobe department.
George tried to mollify him a bit more by handing him the pistol taken off the guard. “You’re the better shot, anyway,” he said. “Hey, listen, Tommy,” he went on seriously, “there’s something I need to tell you about Cally.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah, well, probably. Short version. All this time that James Stewart guy has not been dead, the two have been carrying on a secret marriage, Aelool knew, Papa just found out, Stewart just dumped her.”
“What the fuck? You’re shitting me.” Tommy shook his head to clear it. “Uh, as earthshaking as it is, can’t the gossip wait until after the mission?”
“I wouldn’t be telling you if it could. She got dumped, by e-mail, almost publicly, this fucking morning. She may be… off her game.”
“Oh, fuck. What genius decided to crap on her with this right before a mission?”
“Papa. It’s all fucked as hell, I don’t know why he… just, you need to keep an eye on Cally, okay? She’s probably at least going to be volatile.”
“Cally. More volatile. Great.” Tommy shook his head as they tried to climb the stairs otherwise silently, muttering, “oh, fuck,” again under his breath.
“Look, I haven’t known her as long as you, but I had three girl cousins growing up, close to me as sisters. I know from nursing girls through breakups. I know what to say, and she’ll either lock into gear or kill me on the spot. Just, either way, don’t you get involved. If she ends up pissed, she’s liable to carry through the mission okay just so she can kill me later.”