A scant minute later she reemerged, stalking back to the table with her head held rigidly high. “He dear johned me? By fucking e-mail! Do you have any idea why I’m getting this third — excuse me, fourth hand?” she asked.
“Something happened to the courier. I don’t know what. Aelool thought it was important enough for you to receive this message that he passed it to me. Apparently, for seven years he’s believed I knew and never said anything because he considered it a private, clan matter. Which it would have been, if you’d just talked to me, you know,” he said.
He looked very worried, which she supposed wasn’t out of place given everything. Not that he needed to be.
“I’m sure we’ll have more than enough time for that, after. Right now, don’t be upset that I know about this. I’m so pissed off at the bastard that it may just give me the rage I need to survive this morning’s appointment. Not to mention one hell of a lot of incentive,” she growled.
“No, I’ll be all right. Really. Especially since the only man I have to be around for several hours is Harrison. Which is probably a very, very good thing.” She waved their openly gay teammate back over to the breakfast table, smiling a cold, brittle smile. She knew Granpa couldn’t miss that she was getting dangerously wound up. He was right, but she’d be okay today. She already had someone to kill, even before lunch. “Dear johned me. E-mail! It’d probably upset the girls someday if I killed him. That’s okay. I’ve got other people to kill today. This is good,” she muttered under her breath.
Harrison was back to hear that last, and was wearing the impression of someone who’d just woken to find himself in a cage with a mother grizzly bear. And cubs. She took a deep breath and deliberately favored him with a cool smile.
“It’s okay, Harrison. Really. Consider it me getting appropriately psyched for the mission. I would say you can pretty much expect this morning to go as smooth as glass, now.”
The man didn’t look much reassured. Right now, that was fine by her.
Back into the earliest periods of human history, missions in the nether realms of politics — the ones carried out in a dark alley or a state bedroom with a sharp knife — had involved a certain amount of gear. The tradition was unbroken. Only the specifics of the gear changed. Cally’s gear had to solve a few problems that simple moxie could not. Problem one was that even though a complacent door guard could be fooled long enough for her to get close to said guard, a human receptionist very likely couldn’t. Security guards mostly served to insulate their masters from stupid criminals, crazies, and salesmen. Their threat meter was very carefully focused in, even for the ones who thought it wasn’t. Nobody could be hyper-vigilant forever. Weeks, months, and years of working in the same building, only encountering a specific subset of threats, inevitably had the effect on the human psyche of narrowing the range of threats the guard even thought of as possible. In the hypothetical realm where one of them would tell you about his job, this wasn’t so. In the real world, it was universal. The most dangerous security guard in the world was the FNG, because he still considered everything a potential threat.
A receptionist, on the other hand, had a much wider threat range from which to insulate her charge. She had to worry about any of the aforementioned nuisances who somehow got past security, plus underlings wasting the boss’s time, plus — only in the case of a human boss — wives and mistresses. The most sensitive problems with the latter usually cropped up after they were no longer wives or mistresses. Some business was not a nuisance and was legitimate. Determining which required very active judgment from a receptionist who valued her job. As a consequence, receptionists were greater threats than security guards for any mission that had to be done discreetly.
Receptionists everywhere had an absolute inability to ignore a ringing phone, regardless of whose ring tones were singing through the air. One of the assassin’s smallest and simplest pieces of gear combined the ordinary sticky-camera with late twentieth-century greeting card technology to provide ding-dong ditch capabilities any ten-year-old could envy.
Her second major tool was not an item of gear, per se, but a hardware enhancement common to all operatives’ PDAs. Cally didn’t understand all the technical gobbledegook, herself. She wasn’t a cyber, and she had her hands full keeping up with her own job. It was enough for her to know that the AIDs’ transmissions back to the Darhel hierarchy’s central data stores were not completely leak free. While intercepting the data itself and decoding it would be quite a trick, a properly equipped PDA within about fifteen meters of an AID could sense whenever the AID started churning out its data upload. The uploads were on a regular schedule. It was possible to get around an AID’s all-seeing eye by just waiting until its upload went off and either rushing the machine or working quickly. The gap was a bit more than twenty minutes — ample for most purposes. The trick was that the more time the AID recorded before one muffled its senses, the more you had to jimmy with it to cover your tracks. A few seconds or even minutes could be forcibly erased, but it took about three times as long to erase as it did to record. This created a diminishing returns situation where, after about eight minutes, it was faster to dump the whole load of the old AID into fresh AID hardware and hope nobody noticed the hardware swap — you just stuck the fresh AID in a desk drawer or somesuch, then the cybers’ wizardry did the rest. AIDs being a lot more standardized than anything of Indowy make, swapping hardware was a tiny risk — it was just damned expensive. And took nine minutes and fifty-three seconds that could get you killed.
The really critical pieces of mission-specific gear were an AID for herself, and a hush box. The latter item was a little white box that, for an AID, was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. Developed after the war from a hybrid of some easier Galactic technology with common Earth know-how, many AID users carried them, and all recognized them. Most Darhel even used them, now — they wanted their verbal sparring matches private from others of their kind just as much as humans would. Paranoia was an emotion both species shared in equal measure. Pardal was on the list of Darhel confirmed to use such a box.
A chunky bracelet on her right wrist contained a mister that could be filled with any number of drugs. Operatives were routinely immunized to many drugs of the psychoactive variety. This gave a wide array of choices for an operative who wanted to affect someone at close range without being drugged herself. A simple clenching of the fist and a cool, damp cloud of dreams — sweet or otherwise — would ride in on the victim’s next breath. Naturally, the most popular drugs for this were very, very fast.
Harrison had outdone himself. The woman who stepped onto the curb from the yellow cab was so conspicuously lovely that anyone seeing her would be sure he ought to recognize her from holodramas or advertisements and begin searching his mind. She was precisely the sort of beauty the Darhel typically hired to grace their offices. It was not that the Darhel found the women more than artistically appealing. Darhel understood conspicuous consumption and its relationship to power. Everything a Darhel owned or used was the best available, or, if not the best, the most ostentatious.
The black bob of George’s girlfriend was intact, but glossy as a mink coat. His brother had taken the cornflower blue eyes and enhanced them with subtle cosmetic flattery into deep, hypnotic pools. Her skin was to porcelain as fine pearls were to chalk. Her figure needed precious little flattery, but Harrison had managed to imply that the body underneath the cashmere sweater-dress and impeccably cut blue coat belonged in some ancient pagan temple, not on Chicago’s winter streets.