He was still glaring at her sideways after he was fully dressed, while they were wheeling for the stairwell. The elevator trick wouldn’t work twice.
“It’s not my fault,” she said, tugging a pistol and holster from the bottom to the top of the goodie bag. The magazine belt caught on the button of the fucking decoy and she had to reach under the heavy mother to get them loose. She hoped she hadn’t damaged it — at least not anything that would show. She might not be able to put the belt on yet, but she wanted it within arm’s reach, dammit.
“Who planned this op?” he prompted.
“Me, but—”
“The elevator’s the other way,” he observed.
“It’s secure. We can’t use it,” she said.
“You couldn’t at least have swiped a badge by now? How long have you been mobile?” he asked.
“I’d have had to kill somebody for it,” she said.
“So when have you gotten squeamish, Granddaughter? Besides, you could have grabbed me his gun.”
“I’m not squeamish!” she protested. “I just didn’t want to have to hide a body. Somebody’d smell it or something. And you’re the one who refused carrying more than one gun in.”
“Uh-huh.” He gave her a skeptical look. “You didn’t have to lift that damned thing. And the pistol’s a go-to-hell backup, anyway. In case we needed one before somebody had a chance to acquire one for us. You’re getting soft.”
Cally shrugged and stuck to her story. Besides, they were at the stairs. She didn’t wait to argue with him, just took a quick peek through the window, pulled the door open, and went on through. She picked up the front end of the cart and started moving, assuming he would come along, thereby forcing him to grab his end and start climbing, instead of standing around grumbling.
Just past the door to the fourth floor, her enhanced hearing picked up another door closing, way down below. Not even her hearing would have picked it up out of background noise if the stairwell didn’t magnify sound. Evidently Papa had heard it too, because she felt the cart drag a little behind her, as if he was slowing, maybe thinking of hiding on the fourth floor and waiting a few.
“Come on. We’ll stay in front of them,” she said in a low voice.
“We’ve got three flights before we get out of here.” He took care to avoid the loud hisses that would accompany a whisper.
“Then pick up your feet,” she said, climbing a bit faster. She knew she could set the pace, because he didn’t dare risk dropping his own end. The feet on the steps below were catching up with them, within a couple of floors, when they finally got to the top. For the last two floors, she and Granpa had been slowed by having to hug the wall and stay well out of view of climbers below.
With the cart back on its own wheels, she could tell from the flush on Granpa’s face that he was just itching to chew her out. She forestalled it by opening the men’s room door.
“In,” she said. Boy was she ever going to catch hell after this op.
He kept scowling at her as he tucked himself into a stall and lifted his feet. She began pretending to clean, sprinkling scouring powder in a sink and giving it a few casual scrubs to spread the green powder around. Like any mom, she had plenty of experience watching people — namely her girls — pretend to clean. She could hear the feet in the stairwell and made sure her back was to the door. It gave her a good view of most of the area behind her in the mirror, while letting her mostly conceal her face by just a small turn of her head.
She heard the door open and scrubbed harder, bending over the sink, waiting. They were stopping, behind her. Two of them, faces just out of her field of view.
“Ma’am, I need to see some ID,” a bass voice barked.
Her fist, the one that was suddenly flying towards the larynx of the voice’s owner, stopped in midair, caught in a hand only slightly bigger than her own.
“Hi,” George said, he and Tommy beaming at her.
“You’re dead,” she hissed. “When we get out of here, you’re dead.”
“If you’re through playing, children…” Granpa could put a wealth of disdain into a single sentence when he wanted to.
Cally hadn’t been dicking around, but she wasn’t going to argue, either. If George was stupid enough to clown on an op, it had needed to be said. It must have been one hell of a relief to get Tommy out of the shit-hole below, though. She wrote it off to endorphins and focused back in. Or tried to.
“Hey, Cally. Seriously, Papa told me,” the other assassin said. “Look, I know I’m in your business, but any schmuck who’d leave you alone with the kids for seven years—” He held up a hand when she would have interrupted him. “This is damned important before we go farther in. You didn’t need that schmuck anyway. I know you don’t—” He held his fingers over her lips to silence her, and to her complete surprise, she let him. “I don’t care what you think your part was. Any guy who leaves his kids like that is a schmuck. You didn’t need anybody like that. In a couple of hours, when we get out of here, we’re all gonna go out together. We’ll get you roaring drunk, we’ll get roaring drunk with you, and we’ll get you home. You didn’t need that guy, you got us. We’re gonna put this mission to bed. Then we’re all gonna go out and get plastered together. You’re gonna be okay. Okay?”
“You’re right. You’re in my business,” she snapped. She was having to fight misting up, but no way in hell was she going to let him know that. She had no idea what the fuck was wrong with her. She took a deep breath. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it. Okay, so it helped. He still needs to mind his own fucking business, and Granpa has a big mouth. Enough. But it was enough, and she dialed back in. All the way back in.
As they jogged down the hall to the secure room, she heard Granpa clap the other man on the back. “I knew I liked you,” he said. In any other circumstance she’d have been thinking what the fuck? Or contemplating killing someone. And later, she might even decide to wring Granpa’s neck. But that would be later. The only thing in her head right now was: mission.
They had done something right with their security. There were no dedicated guards on the door to make the room scream out, “Place Where There Is Something Interesting, Valuable and Important!” Unfortunately for them, but through no fault of their security people, the team already knew what it was, and where it was, so the lack of extra guards was going to bite the bastards in the ass. Too many places arranged their security in such a way as to announce, “This way to the secret documents.” If he hadn’t gotten a couple of breaks, it would have taken George several more days, at least, to find the device with this setup. There was another thing they had done right: there were very few groups and no individuals, that she knew of, who were capable of subverting an AID.
Epetar and Winchon wouldn’t have given the security people a better view of the risks. None of them had any idea Michelle O’Neal had anything like these contacts, resources, or any will to use them. All they would have expected to face was garden-variety industrial espionage — played according to a Darhel-style version of hardball. For the kind of threats they thought they faced, and within the constraints put on them by the bean counters, the security people had done their jobs right. They would probably get the blame, anyway. Cally felt almost sorry for them. Almost.
AIDs had a real bad habit, hard programmed in. The Darhel were so confident of the AIDs’ ability to infallibly record and transmit their data load that the AIDs wouldn’t scream for help on their own initiative, they just transmitted their load on the prescribed schedule, and “talked” when tapped from a higher authority than their user, or when told by their user to call someone or send something. If an AID was left to secure something, it was enough that nobody could, theoretically, go in and mess with whatever it was guarding without being caught on the next upload. The Darhel were frighteningly smart, and more deadly than even Cally had expected. They just had some real odd blind spots, one of which included being slow to change and update.