“Michelle? Michelle’s there?” He started to turn his head and turned it back as he felt the car begin to drift.
“Was. She seems to have figured out the trick of getting places without crossing the space in between,” Cally answered drily. “She left before I did. Vanished, actually. Either a very good cloak of some sort or teleported.”
“You’re joking,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“About my sister?” Cally asked. “Or her vanishing. Neither. That girl has some answers to cough up.”
“What did she want that was worth breaking cover after this long?” Papa asked. He looked surprised and puzzled. No wonder. This was the first personal contact any of them had had from Michelle since they “died.” Cally couldn’t sort the rest of the jumble of emotions out from his face. Hell, she was having trouble sorting out her own.
“She wants to hire us. I don’t know what for. I’m supposed to talk to her again tomorrow night. Did you know she’s apparently rich as Croesus?”
“What, she’s talking about personally hiring us? To hell with that. How is she?” Granpa asked.
“She’s… very Indowy. But seems to be healthy and everything. Could use some extra food in my opinion. She was in mentat’s robes, like always.” They had gotten a hologram a year through Indowy sources until the split seven years ago. Since then, it was more like a hologram every two or three years, whenever the O’Neal Bane Sidhe — and she still winced at the organization’s new name — could get an operative close enough, on some other business, to sneak a picture. It didn’t really matter. They could just replay the old holograms. She never changed.
“My stuff?” she prompted Harrison again.
“All the gear’s in the trunk,” Tommy said.
“But you got my shoes out, right?” She dangled the high heels from their straps. Her look spoke volumes.
“Uh…” Tommy hesitated. His experience of women frustrated with painful shoes had taught him that he usually wanted to be far, far away. Women did best with cute shoes when they only wore them long enough take them off — or at least didn’t walk on them much.
“Sorry, darling. Forgot. I always find the grav belt a tad awkward.” Harrison looked like he really was sorry.
“You wouldn’t have had to wear them in the first place if you’d gone out the same way you went in,” Papa O’Neal grumped.
“I told you, Granpa, I flew the friggin’ thing way up to the top of the damned building, and I didn’t trust it not to give out then. No way was I gonna do it twice if I had a choice. What kind of moron thought it was a good idea to fly around hanging from some stupid belt?” She examined the shimmering pink nails of one hand. “Besides, you know I hate heights.”
“The only fatalities flying the belt have been either from sabotage or a direct hit in combat.” Her grandfather shrugged, apparently wise enough not to say anything more on the subject.
Cally regarded it as a mark of extreme dedication to her job that she’d let them talk her into this mission at all. Never again. And it was high time she thought about something, anything else.
“Excuse me, y’all. I’ve got to check in or Morgan and Sinda will pout at me.” She looked down at her PDA to dial, but the phone on the other end was already ringing, reminding her that she really needed to turn the buckley’s intelligence emulation level down before it crashed itself.
“Buckley, you didn’t call directly, did you?” she asked.
“What do you think I am, stupid? No, when they catch us all and kill us, it won’t be my fault. Can I give you a rundown of our current tactical vulnerabilities?”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“Ri—” It cut off as hundreds of miles away a phone was answered.
“Hello?” A soft female voice answered. Cally still marveled that the voice didn’t sound even a little bit harried.
“Hi, Shari. I’m done for the evening and thought I’d call in. How are the girls doing?”
“Sinda’s out like a light. She really wore herself out in Aunt Margret’s dance class. Morgan’s almost finished with her homework. I’ll get her.”
Seven minutes later, the limo turned into the parking lot of a vintage car dealership, pulling around back to park. Its four occupants piled out and into the building, taking the hidden elevator in the back of the broom closet down to the tunnel. In the small antechamber at the bottom, they carefully hung their dress clothes on the cleaning rack and racked their shoes and equipment. Cleaning was no longer a euphemism for precautionary destruction — not always. Things tended to be figleafed with a new look and reused as much as possible. It wasn’t terribly safe, but then it wasn’t a safe business. She tucked the small evening bag inside a pocket of a larger purse that had already been prepped.
Cally and Harrison got the makeup table to themselves for a few minutes while Tommy ran the standard post-op checks, downloads, and scrubs on the surveillance equipment and Papa dictated the post-op report into his PDA. By the time they were ready for their own turn at the table, she and Harrison were through. She smiled gratefully as he ushered her over to a stool and went to work on her neck and shoulders. Certified massage therapist was not on the list of desirable secondary skills for operational team members. It should’ve been, and Cally was personally grateful for the luck of the draw that had put Harrison available for field assignment just when Granpa was filling the vacancies on the team left by her sabbatical and Jay’s timely demise.
She knew the rest of the team, while glad to have her back, still missed George Schmidt. She could understand that. George was a damned good assassin and field man. Unlike his more flamboyant brother, he could blend into a crowd easily, either as a shortish, nondescript man or a teenage boy, if he chose. He had needed the brotherhood of being part of a working team to pull him through that awkward and painful grieving time after losing his father-in-law to the enemy, and then his wife to a sudden and severe infection bare months afterwards. Everyone agreed that her grief had weakened her system, and in the immediate aftermath of the organizational split of the humans from all but a small remnant of the Indowy and other galactics, the O’Neal Bane Sidhe had discovered quite unpleasantly just how much their internal emergency medical services had relied on access to the slab. Sherry Schmidt had been one of the casualties of the chaos.
It was good for George to have had Harrison to get him over the hump of anger, where you just wanted revenge and wanted to kill any and every enemy culpably connected with your loss. Assassination was one job where you couldn’t be impersonal forever and stay sane, but you couldn’t let it get too personal, either. It was like walking a razor’s edge all the time, while accepting horrible danger and risks of loss. Not many people could do it. She’d never figured out if she was supremely lucky or supremely unlucky that she could.
By common consent they let Tommy and Papa leave first. Harrison didn’t follow baseball, and she wouldn’t have been able to stay for the game, anyway. Seventeen minutes after they left, she slid behind the wheel of her ancient, primer-colored Mustang. One of the things she liked about Harrison was he understood her need to drive her own car now and again. A natural gearhead, he had restored, enhanced, and carefully tuned the car so that it had more power than your average police interceptor, but had artistic rattles and clinks. The ever-so-slight smoke out the exhaust that implied (falsely) that it would soon need a ring job was the perfect finishing touch. The best part was that she could turn the special effects off, taking her baby out on a nice open stretch of road to listen to the engine purr. She didn’t get to do it often enough, with one thing and another. Still, she could feel the power under her right foot, and that’d do for now. They drove out of the city in silence, watching the stars come out as they got beyond the smog belt. In Indiana she turned up a dirt road between two cornfields and followed it around to the back of a grain silo, where she hit the garage door opener and drove into the vehicle elevator.