Rogue(53)

It took a lot of people for this distraction. I called and reserved rental vehicles. I got a Lincoln van and a Maruto carrier plus a classic, classy Mercedes. I’d drive that, Silver the Maruto, and one of the actors the Lincoln. Once in the area, Silver and I would bail. They’d continue.

I was still taking a bet, but I was confident. This man was the big fish in the area. He was the only one someone would spend large amounts of money to hit, and he was going to be making a very public presentation, then dealing with several bureaus for a lot of money.

Still, I wasn’t positive. Every intel agency in the universe was monitoring these assassinations. If they came up with a coherent analysis, they’d move to interdict and intercept. Was there a political tie? Some economic benefit to each one for a particular nation? We hadn’t found it; no one back home had contacted me with anything. No one else was moving, or indicating they knew. So everyone was keeping quiet and looking for leads.

So far, he was doing a very good job. No M.O., except “exotic.” No connection between targets, except rich and powerful.

Unlikely, but had he won some lottery and was satisfying a personal agenda?

My mission consisted of intel gathering, protection of victims when possible, interdiction of Randall’s logistics, to be followed by execution when possible. They all would have some effect. The more he was hindered, the less marketable he was, and the greater his overhead.

To be fair, if he’d been some petty mercenary or assassin of factional assholes on this planet, and never left the surface, we’d likely have never known and not cared. He could have made a quite adequate living here, too. There were some nice areas.

That fit his persona, though. He’d always wanted to be more. He needed feedback and attention as reassurance. In this case, headlines and money and offers of further jobs reinforced his belief in his competence.

So I’d keep attacking that.





We needed recon on site, and there were several ways to do it. Of course we ran into issues over it.

The first thing we did was send a coded message to the embassy, citing an authorization number and requesting a drop of supplies.

We actually got a one word response of “denied.” No reason was given. The code was good or they wouldn’t have replied at all, or else queried for further bona fides.

Denial meant one of several things. It could happen if they were short of resources due to some other mission. I’d gotten nothing informing me of that. It could happen if our mission conflicted with one of theirs, but they’d not been told the nature of our mission, and our coding overrode anything less. I hated to think it was due to some self-aggrandizing cockholster clutching at power for an egoboost, so it was probably some petty little reg-wanker hoping that by enforcing “procedures” he’d make a name for himself.

That still left us without said supplies, especially the advanced drones we wanted. However, this was Mtali, and I had a standard map and one of the specialized algorithms taught to Special Warfare officers, that let me mark the location of several caches. One of those would have what we needed, and then some.

We were sufficiently in place. I was able to rent a small unitized coordinate excavator. I drove to the cache I needed, which was not the closest and was a little tougher to reach and, therefore, less obvious. It was in an outlying park in a copse of trees. With a coverall and some traffic markers, which were obligatory even if unneeded, I managed to dig unhindered; only a man and his two young sons stopped briefly to watch the machine scoop and scrape and dig. I nodded and smiled, let them watch a few minutes, then gestured from within the rumbling roar that they should keep moving. The man smiled and waved, and I returned it.

Once I had the box exposed, I grabbed stuff from within. I took a standard ruck with a variety of tools and weapons, the container marked for recon and a small, heavy satchel with bullion and readily convertible documents. It didn’t hurt to have more money. I noted mentally so we could inform the embassy as we left planet, in courtesy they’d not extended to us. I replaced the lid, filled it in with the digger, pulled the markers and drove back to down.

That evening we moved to set things in place early. There was a juggling act of service life of the devices, detectability to other intel agencies who were certainly monitoring the events, placement and the moment when the cordon would be too tight for us to deploy them at all.

In addition to scatterable pebble sensors, we had two small drones designed to mimic generic birds, the kind humans took most everywhere. They had biomimetic muscles of memory spring, effective and visually passable brown feathers, small camera eyes and an energy cell good for several divs of operations with a half div (two hours) of flight time. They had limited payload capacity, and transceived on a high-speed scramble that was supposed to be hard to locate and crack. The birds’ payload was more pebble sensors.