He had a few moments now before a security console spotted the outtage and tried to fix it. He took five fast strides and bent over Madiry as if to ask her a question.
She looked up as if an old friend had startled her. “Hello, trooper.”
“Hello, aruetii,” Ordo said. He drew the Verp and put two rounds point-blank through her forehead and a third down at an angle through her upper chest. One round thudded through into the planter of soil behind her. Ordo had no idea where the other two went, but the informant was now dead and she simply slumped, head down as if still reading, a pool of her bright blood on the holozine’s screen.
Ordo slipped the Verp back under the document folder and walked away. It had taken less than ten seconds from cuing Mereel to walking away.
Nobody even looked at him as he strode calmly toward the GAR complex, passed it, and met Mereel on the other side of the speeder parking bays. They disappeared into the sea of vehicles and mounted the Aratech speeder bike to head back to base.
Kal’buir had always told the Nulls they were instant death on legs. Ordo liked to live up to that assessment. His thoughts were on Besany Wennen as he rode off, and how it was good that he hadn’t had to kill her, too.
Operational house, Qibbu’s Hut, 1330 hours, 385 days after Geonosis
The more the tagged targets moved around Coruscant, the clearer the strike team’s task became.
“That,” Fi said admiringly, “gets better every time I look at it, Bard’ilca.”
Jusik stared at the Coruscant holochart with a big grin and basked in the approval. The telltale red traces of the marked terrorists as they moved around the city were forming a pattern that firsthand surveillance would have struggled to build up.
“It was obvious, really,” he said. “You’d have come up with it yourselves sooner or later.”
Vau put down a bowl of milk in front of the strill. It lapped noisily, showering droplets across the carpet. “I vote that Dust-tagging becomes standard surveillance procedure. It’s a matter for your sergeant, of course.”
The police interloper’s trace had been removed. Jailer Obrim had given her a painless and unnoticeable EMP sweep to kill transmissions from the marker powder she had inhaled. Now just five marked targets moved around the grids of blue light, building an accurate picture of where they went and where they stayed. The division between the two was now very much easier to see. Four locations-the house in banking sector 9, the landing strip used by the fresh farm produce importers, and two apartments in the retail sector-were clearly the most visited.
“But we probably only tagged Perrive’s hired help,” Fi said. “We want the bigger guys.”
“The bigger guys,” Vau said, “need the hired help by their side. All this activity is connected to the fact that they’re about to receive explosives they badly need. Now, we know they used dead letter drops, for want of a better phrase, to avoid direct contact between the various terror cells in the network. It’s how they ensure there’s no way of tracing them back. So what does this tell you?”
Fi studied the hypnotic blue and red light in front of him. “They’re moving back and forth between locations over and over.”
“And therefore?”
“Therefore … they’re either one cell … or they’re several cells who have abandoned security precautions and are making direct contact with each other.”
“Well done, Fi.”
Fi didn’t care for Vau but he enjoyed praise. He savored the moment. “So what do you think we’ve got here?”
“Given that this centered on the explosives, I think we’re looking at the manufacturing cell-the people who make the bombs. Possibly also the ones who place them. Setting a complex device in a location or on a vessel can be a fiddly business, and I reckon this lot would do it themselves. They need to be mobile to get to different target locations, too, hence the need for a busy landing strip-nobody notices more traffic movement there. Now, Fi, that’s a group of people worth taking out. Those are hard skills to replace in a hurry.”
Jusik gave Fi a playful punch on the shoulder, elated. “Result!” He seemed to see it as a big puzzle to be taken apart. If Fi hadn’t seen Jusik use a lightsaber, he would have taken him for a boy who just liked playing with complicated kit. “Time to make their eyes water, eh, Fi?”
“You got it.”
“Delta has recce’d the landing strip. You’ve reece’d the house in the banking sector. That just leaves the two apartments, and Ordo and Mereel have stopped off to recce those now.”
The strill had finished its milk, most of which had ended up on the carpet. Vau-a sergeant who believed in thrashing courage into his men, a sergeant who had scarred Atin badly-grabbed a cloth from the kitchen area and mopped up the damp patches. Then he took a clean rag, soaked it, and wiped the strill’s mouth and jowls as if it were a baby. The animal accepted the indignity and rumbled with happiness.