As soon as she was gone, O’Reilly called his assistant and asked for some aspirin. He had developed a killer headache.
Chapter Twenty
The minute she stepped into the room for their final mission brief mid-morning, Harrison could tell that there was something. It wasn’t exactly something wrong with her so much as it was different. For one thing, she was late. Their team lead was never late. He could see apprehension combined with a terrible excitement, the kind of buzz she’d get in the final day or so before she was sent on a hit, in that adrenaline high that started ramping up before she shut down emotion and channeled everything into single-minded focus. This kind of mission didn’t typically spike her. It was a property extraction, not an assassination. Either their plans had changed for the top, or she had changed hers. At T-minus damned little, either option worried him.
“Okay, people, the good news is that we only have one change. The bad news is that it’s a major, fundamental mission change,” she said.
I knew it, the fixer thought. From the look on his face, his brother was just now registering the rising “oh shit” level in the room. It wasn’t that George was any slower to pick up on emotional cues than the rest of them, just that he hadn’t worked as much with Cally as the rest of them had.
“The change shouldn’t affect anybody but Harrison and me. We’ve got a second mission with a rush on it. It has to be tomorrow morning and it has to be me. The good news is it’s uncomplicated and I should be able to handle it with no help but a driver.”
“What the hell do you think you’re talking about?” O’Neal, Senior, drawled. He was without his usual plug of tobacco this morning. Probably only out of a rare inability to find a cup. Harrison winced. Nicotine withdrawal tended to make him… volatile. “There is no mission that could possibly justify haring off—”
“Pardal.” She dropped the one word into the room like a stone. The kind of stone that might explode if you breathed on it too hard.
“A Darhel?” Papa was on his feet now. “Are they out of their tiny minds? No mission prep, no backup, and they drop it on us now? After telling us all these years why the precious Darhel were above all possible retribution, they drop this? No way. No fucking way. Sure, we’ll kill him, if they’re finally taking the damn gloves off. But after, with full prep, full backup — we’ll do it the right way and not go in half-assed and not only miss the target but get you killed besides. What in the hell are they thinking? Scratch that, what the hell are you thinking? Why didn’t you tell them to shove it up their ass?!”
Harrison honestly didn’t know if he preferred Papa shouting or dead quiet. Either way was usually not a good sign. Right now, the O’Neal’s Irish skin was somewhere between broiled shrimp and steamed lobster. His own stomach grumbled, and he realized that his choice of metaphors probably had something to do with skipping breakfast. Which was a bizarre thing to be thinking about given the turn the mission was taking.
“Papa, I’d like to hear the mission constraints and plans, if you don’t mind, since I’m the lucky boy slated to share this little gem of a buggy ride,” he heard himself say.
The older man harrumphed, which wasn’t nearly as effective when done by a peach fuzzed juv instead of a grizzled geezer. He did, however, sit down and quit shouting. Harrison leaned back, arms crossed, and quirked a sardonic eyebrow at the stacked brunette. He really had done a great job with her hair.
“The reasons are easy enough, but they don’t go outside this room. If I didn’t think it would shake you out of peak efficiency to worry about what’s going on, I wouldn’t figure you three had a need to know.” She inclined her head towards his teammates.
O’Neal, Senior, started to puff up, but Harrison forestalled him with a raised hand.
“Fine, we’ve all got need to know. And?” He knew that in the military he’d have been bordering on insolence, or worse, but despite certain similarities to some special warfare units, this wasn’t the military, and the proposal was so harebrained he’d sure like to hear any reasons that could justify it.
“The Tchpth commissioned his elimination, and they specified me.” She took the trouble to get the awkward word out as close to correctly as she could.
“They wha — ?” Harrison was surprised his own mouth opened first. “Cally, this is a bad time to joke.”
“Okay, all of you. Shut the fuck up and listen.” She was fairly impressive when her temper started to kick in.
“Aelool and O’Reilly, both, met this Crab, know who he is, and are convinced that this is coming from the highest levels of whatever functions as their government. Aelool is convinced. That’s all I need to know about authenticity of the orders or permission or whatever you want to call it. Frankly, I’d dance across a tightrope thirty stories up, backwards, if it meant I’d finally get to kill one of those poisonous little pricks, and any of you would, too. Now we get to the timing.” She grimaced.
“I told O’Reilly it had to be tomorrow because, Pardal being into the dirty crap of our other mission up to his pointy ears, the security walls will go up on the other target if we don’t hit them damned near simultaneously. The truth is, I’m afraid if we delay it, the Crabs will change their bouncy little minds. Tell me a chance to take out one of the fucking Elves themselves, finally, isn’t worth a damned big risk. Besides, I can do this and get out. I figure eighty percent or so. Second, I’m the most expendable operative on the main mission. I’m along because I’m good in a tight situation and you didn’t dare leave me behind. Tell me I’m not right.”
They were all quiet for one of those timeless gaps when everybody’s preconceptions get sucked into a contemplative bog.
“If this wasn’t the dumbest, most dangerous stunt I’d ever heard of — just supposing for a minute — how would you kill him?” Papa growled.
“The most deniable way. I’m gonna piss him off.”
“Yeah — you might want to rethink. Wild rumors aside, you got any idea how hard that is? Or, how fucking suicidal? I’ve seen video of a Darhel after pushing the button to kill a Posleen globe — before he hit lintatai. The entire Indowy bridge crew, those who hadn’t found other places to be, were casualties. I’ve watched the old Bane Sidhe’s debriefings and clandestine recordings of what an enraged adolescent Darhel can do in the moments between when he cuts loose, before he goes catatonic with lintatai. A terminally pissed off Darhel takes the ‘dead man’s ten seconds’ to a whole other level. One clip has two adolescent Darhel ripping each other limb from limb in about the time it would take you to tie your shoe. Those teeth aren’t for show,” George said.
“I’ll be watching all of that material, and more, tonight. Lintatai is the only possible way to kill him without making it obvious someone killed him. We don’t know enough about their metabolism to poison him undetectably. Amend that, we could shoot him up with Tal if we had Tal. We don’t. I’m not sure the Indowy even know how to make it, and the Crabs didn’t conveniently volunteer any. So he rages around the room and I stay ahead of him. I may be stuck in this ridiculous body, but I’m still upgraded, and people move even faster in the first few seconds after the brain cocktail in Provigil-C hits, if they aren’t dead tired to start.”
“And the reason we don’t use it as a battle drug for the speed is its tendency to give people who are already awake such a bad case of the shakes that for the next thirty minutes they’re next to worthless in combat.”