The problem with the second floor was that it contained one of the observation decks for a central double-floor demonstration area. It was very likely the place from which Michelle’s spy had filmed their initial cube of enemy operations. This meant that the route across the second floor to the necessary freight elevator was more than three times as long as any of the other floors. That one freight elevator was the only access to the loading dock through which all routine supplies came in, and all innocuous trash traveled out.
Cally stopped, up ahead, and started backpedaling towards the rest of them. The old man tensed, then relaxed into a certain boneless looseness — the kind of looseness that in cats and warriors presages a flurry of preternatural speed. Weight forward on his toes, he could feel the air singing between the team members, buzzing with channeled adrenaline, as their point faded back, just in front of Tommy and himself. He heard voices around the corner, voices of the guards that had caused her to stop.
“Are you cold? I’m freezing. Here’s a couple of bucks. Why don’t you go back down to the break room and grab us each a cup of coffee while I finish the loop of this floor?”
The mumble that followed was unintelligible.
“That’s why they have us in pairs, right? Nah, it’s okay. Have a cup on me. Yeah, meet you back at this floor’s lobby, all right? Good.”
The first guard’s voice was friendly, decent. Too bad the guy was probably about to die. The team waited, standing silent.
Then Cally was moving forward again, motioning them to follow, then stay. She walked ahead to the corner, peered around, nodded, and motioned them forward again. There was something… different. Still, he’d trained her since she was a child. His confidence in her field abilities was absolute.
As they turned the last corner to the freight elevator, he understood. Leaning against the wall, out of their way, waited a large, dark-haired soldier in the uniform of U.S. SOCOM and Fleet Strike’s Direct Action Group for Counterterror. He stood, silently, as they approached, pausing only to touch the front of his cover with one hand as they passed.
“Hi, Aunt Cally,” he said. “Dad,” he nodded as Tommy wheeled by.
The Bane Sidhe agent watched them safely onto the elevator, team and cargo together. As the doors closed, Papa saw the young man resume his patrol, down the hall and away from them. Always a pleasure to see a well-grown, respectful, young man.
Tommy had had a few seconds near enough to George to, after watching Cally go all misty and then snap right back into gear, hiss, “I give the fuck up. How?”
Their rear guard shrugged, keeping his words quiet enough that he hoped she couldn’t hear him, when she’d gone up ahead. “Kick the hardest guy hard enough and he rattles — in a guy way. Kick a hardass woman hard enough and she rattles, too. Give a token soothing to the little girl, and you’ve got the operative back. Cally was hung up in a rare, girl moment. She’s better now,” he said.
Sunday nodded. “No shit.”
Just for a moment, Papa looked suspiciously like the side of his mouth was trying to quirk upwards. Then the rest of the team was past the moment, too.
“Whaddya wanna bet she kicks his ass?” the deadly little man muttered.
“No bet,” the ACS vet and long-married man muttered out of the corner of his mouth as the subject of their clandestine conversation beckoned them forth, shooting them a darkly suspicious glare.
Chapter Twenty-Three
General Robert Foxglove, a one-star staff officer within SOCOM, had been less than thrilled to get a call from an AID outside the service. Particularly an AID he had to listen to, like the one belonging to the Darhel Pardal’s pet mentat. Foxglove owed a lot to the Epetar Group. One thing in particular was the ability to live comfortably on his own salary while his ex-wife enjoyed the life to which she had once become accustomed. The counter-intel guys didn’t twig to it because the money wasn’t coming to him. His ex-wife was merely too occupied with a conveniently rich toy-boy to bug him about money for alimony or to support his ex-kids. Nobody suspected a man was being paid off merely because he lived within his own salary. He was just a guy lucky enough to have an ex who wasn’t a platinum-plated, grasping bitch. She was, of course, but the Epetar Group had long insulated him from that reality in return for a few discreet favors.
The favor required, in this case, was going to be a royal pain in the ass. He had tried to confirm it with the Darhel himself, in the hope of getting out of it. Unfortunately, his own AID had been typically snippy about getting that august personage on the line — even more so than usual. The general interpreted the silence to mean discussion of his alien master’s instructions, delivered by proxy, was neither necessary nor desired. The humiliation stuck in the man’s craw, but he was, by now, used to the myriad small humiliations and indignities that the Darhel heaped on their minions.
The bitch of it was that the favor would have been easy if that asshole, Pennington, would only play ball. Unfortunately, the commanding officer of DAG was a starchy bastard who had chosen to get sticky about deploying troops under his command to the strictly temporary, necessary effort of providing supplemental security to an important Epetar Group project. Okay, so they had reason to be miffed at Epetar right now, maybe, but that shouldn’t matter because the facility didn’t have any open links to the Epetar Group. None of the men would know of any connection, anyway. And it wasn’t as if DAG wasn’t pulling the cherries of one Darhel group or another out of the fire every other mission, whenever the perpetual rivalries or petty piracy resulted in one kind of violence or another against the aliens’ legitimate business interests.
Pennington had a real corncob up his ass about this one, though. Foxglove had had to pull in an important, and rare, favor from one of the Joint Chiefs to get the original orders to come down through the appropriate chain of command and force the uncooperative bastard’s hand. Even then, he had only gotten the most grudging, limited assistance available for his clandestine masters — a paltry two squads. His Darhel associates — as he thought of them, though they would have said masters — hadn’t been happy. He thought the other general might be having a fit of idealistic pique over that Epetar-Gistar mess at that mine in Africa. Dammit, the modern world couldn’t afford those kinds of juvenile temper tantrums over necessary expedients.
Anyway, his present problem was that Pennington had extended his complete unreason to a flat refusal to order reinforcement of the security detachment in question without direct orders from above. It wasn’t as if the other general couldn’t have done it, entirely legitimately and within his orders, on his own initiative. It wasn’t as if Foxglove himself didn’t have a firm reputation for returning favors, and for having the ability to do so. No, the man just had to be an asshole about it.
Which put Foxglove between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He couldn’t go back to the well with the Joint Chiefs. His capital was burned up there, as had been made painfully clear when he’d called in the initial favor. He had to get those troops. Epetar had him by the short hairs, dammit, and the Darhel didn’t react well to failure.
The best way to handle it, he had decided, was to follow the old adage about it being easier to get forgiveness than permission. He couldn’t get Epetar’s active assistance before the fact, damn Pardal’s power games in refusing to take calls. However, he was too damned convenient to them for them to leave his ass swinging in the wind. His only choice was to take a few risks now and rely on them to cover for him after. At least the mentat’s AID had been willing and able to help. Using its master’s authority, it had convinced Pennington’s AID to conveniently ignore incoming calls, and experience “technical difficulties” with outgoing calls for the next eight hours. He hoped it would be enough.