‘Not necessarily us,’ Rourke said, gesturing up the street to where lit windows threw rectangles of illumination across the ancient, drenched cobbles of the street surface. ‘Bars can be bugged, particularly if someone in government is feeling paranoid. Then there’s Listeners, who are basically walking microphones, loads of subdermal implants. They go and hang around anyone they think looks suspicious and the handlers process the audiofeed, see if they can match it to any surveillance data. A lot of surveillance cameras have directional audio pickups too, and you’d be surprised how accurate they can be.’
‘Okay,’ Jenna said slowly. Rourke could see her trying to keep her face neutral, but knew that somewhere under there was an expression indicating that the girl thought Rourke was paranoid. To be fair, Rourke wouldn’t have believed half the surveillance tricks possible had she not used most of them herself in the past. ‘But why would the Captain
call
you?’ Jenna added. ‘Can’t he just send the data using the cryptkey I gave him?’
‘Sure he can,’ Rourke sighed, ‘but if he’s sending us anything it means he’s got a chance to boast about how he got the information, and that means he’ll be calling.’ She grimaced as the thunder crashed again. ‘Good grief.’
‘Are you sure it was a good idea to leave just Jia and Kuai on the
Jonah
?’ Jenna asked suddenly.
Rourke frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Well, Kuai wanted to just leave,’ Jenna pointed out. ‘What if he convinces Jia that they should take the ship and go?’
‘It had crossed my mind,’ Rourke admitted, ‘but Jia would never agree to it. She wouldn’t try to pilot it without at least someone on comms with her, and given the searches going on for
Carcharodon
-class shuttles at the moment she’d be mad to take off without a slicer on board. Plus, that girl’s out for blood; I could see it in her eyes.’
‘Okay,’ Jenna said, seeming slightly reassured. She appeared about to say something else, but Rourke held up a finger to forestall her as the comm in her ear beeped. She activated the link as Jenna tapped her wrist console, linking her own comm into the conversation.
‘Go ahead,’ Rourke answered.
+He’s in the Olorun System.+
Drift’s voice sounded weary, even allowing for the slightly distorting effect of the comm signal being encrypted at source, bounced off a satellite or two and then decrypted again, not to mention atmospheric interference. Rourke bit back the reflex to ask what had gone wrong; even with a supposedly secure signal, they didn’t want to give anyone who might be listening any more information than they had to about who they were or what they were talking about.
‘I don’t know it,’ she admitted.
+It’s not inhabited yet. It’s nominally FAS but it’s next to the Perun System, which is Europan. Apparently he hides out in an asteroid.+
‘What, like that smuggler base in the Albus System?’ Rourke asked. ‘Do we have any verification on this?’
+Not for the asteroid. As for the system, the Perun was where I did my last few drops for him; it had always been a different rendezvous before that. If he was already crooked and skimming resources off by that point then the Olorun would have been a suitably short trip to stockpile them out of sight. I think it’s solid enough to move on.+
Rourke nodded reluctantly. ‘I’d like more, but I have to agree with you. Are you sure you want us to go ahead with our part?’
+Are you?+
The question took her off-guard, which was a surprise in its own way. Until that moment she hadn’t realised exactly how uncertain she was about the whole business. She thought it might be an echo of what Drift himself had gone through, although inverted; he’d abandoned an infamous name and taken up an unknown one, whereas she had swapped deliberate, enforced secrecy for the comfortable obscurity which came with being mostly unremarkable.
She felt Jenna’s eyes on her and composed herself. Old training died hard, and she doubted the girl would have even noticed the momentary hesitation which was all the reaction she’d betrayed. ‘It’s probably our best shot at this, but you realise that it’s still not very likely to work, don’t you?’
+That’s why Jenna’s there.+
Rourke nodded again, noting the slight tightening of her companion’s features. ‘True. Wish us luck, then.’
+Good luck. And stay safe.+
Drift cut the link, leaving Rourke and Jenna with no sound but the hammering of the rain on pavement and a distant rumble as some other part of the sky was split by a million volts. She looked at the young slicer. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I’ll just be dealing with terminals,’ Jenna answered, trying to pull her coat more tightly around her,‘they’re predictable. You’re the one with a person to handle.’
Rourke just shrugged, and tried to make her voice sound more confident than she felt. ‘They’re predictable enough.’
The walk south from the archway was short, but undeniably wet. Rourke tried to keep to narrow alleys where possible to give the sky as narrow an angle of fire as she could, but there was only so much to be done against the elements. Prague’s streets were virtually deserted by pedestrians with only a couple of other souls braving the fury of the Czech skies, although there were still some electric cars purring through the wet. In one respect that comforted Rourke, but with less potential witnesses came less chance of blending into a crowd. She felt particularly exposed as they crossed Národní, the wide road with its maglev tram tracks which marked the border between the Old Town and the New Town. This was a sketchy plan thrown together on the fly, even by the standards of the
Keiko
’s crew, and for a moment she missed the sense of reassurance from when she’d had a supervising officer, a support team and the nominal protection of a government. That had been an illusion, at least in part, but she still would have been a hell of a lot better prepared for this sort of insanity.
You made that decision a long time ago, girl. Focus on the here and now.
An automated booth lit up at their approach, offering tourist-guide downloads at a price well above reasonable and just below the ridiculous, but they ignored it and zigzagged through the avenues and junctions of the New Town. Rourke had memorised several different possibles routes to and from their destination in order to avoid looking indecisive or suspicious, something her training had drummed into her long ago, but she took the quickest one now. It was only a couple of minutes until they reached their goal, a stout door of red-painted wood which was raised above street level by three well-worn marble steps.
The building towered over them by five storeys, bracketing the entire length of the narrow street with its equally imposing opposite number. Only the slightly differing external décor occurring every four or so windows along its length hinted where the wall of stone was divided internally. It seemed strangely huge, despite the fact that she’d seen larger buildings on half a hundred worlds including this one; over a certain scale, humanity’s edifices seemed to be processed by her brain as oddly regular geography instead of artificial constructs. However, this narrow canyon of a street was still small enough to be human in scope, and she felt dwarfed.
Jenna stepped smartly up to the lock while Rourke crowded into the space behind her, facing out into the street while doing her best to surreptitiously shield what the girl was up to with the sweep of her coat. She was about to quietly enquire how long it was likely to take when the door buzzed and a huff of effort from Jenna indicated the slicer pushing it open.
‘That was quick,’ Rourke commented, slipping through behind her crewmate into a hallway of warm light and neutral decoration. The floor was tiled in a brown and cream pattern and a couple of inoffensive, mass-produced holos in frames broke up the expanse of the walls. There were locked boxes of dark steel attached to the wall for when the building’s tenants received any form of physical mail, and ahead of them a staircase with bannisters of rich, dark wood began its climb to the upper floors.
‘I could have got through that blind drunk,’ Jenna snorted softly, pulling her jumpsuit’s sleeve back over her wrist console.
‘I remember,’ Rourke replied, feeling a slight smile tug at her lips. Jenna’s cheeks coloured slightly, and she coughed to cover her embarrassment.
‘Where now?’
‘Top floor.’ Rourke nodded at the stairway, removing her hat and shaking the water from the brim. ‘Flat Nine. You’re certain she won’t be here yet?’
‘The House is still in session,’ Jenna said, brushing a strand of sodden hair back behind her ear as she consulted her wrist again, ‘and given recent events she’s going to have to be there.’
‘Good,’ Rourke nodded. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’
The climb to the top floor wasn’t as easy as it would have been thirty years ago, or even twenty: it wasn’t that Rourke was getting out of shape as such, but she was starting to notice things like knees, which she had previously taken for granted. Still, she was reportedly older than she looked and definitely older than she felt, so she wasn’t going to be complaining. Indeed, she seemed slightly less out of breath than the young slicer at her side by the time they reached the top corridor with its two doors facing each other, both darkened by decades of age and varnish but nonetheless solid for that.
‘This one.’ Rourke nodded to the door on the left. Jenna stepped up smartly and did . . . something. Rourke still wasn’t too sure exactly how the girl’s wrist-mounted console worked or connected, but it did the job and that was the main thing.
There was another buzz and click. Jenna stepped back slightly and Rourke shrugged her coat off into the girl’s hands, then went through the door fast and silent, her palms aching at the absence of a gun. Not that she’d have wanted to use one even if she came across someone unexpected – her custom-modified, silenced Smith & Wesson might have just about escaped notice by neighbours in this storm, but she wouldn’t have liked to chance it – but the simple threat of a firearm could stop someone from making a noise before they started. However, the Europans had taken a dim view of people bringing in guns even before they’d had a suspected terrorist attack in their backyard, and with the
Jonah
locked up in Star’s End and no active smuggling contacts on Old Earth, she and Jenna had had to come in through customs like respectable people.
She ghosted through the flat, checking corners and possible hiding places on instinct, most of her attention listening for telltale sounds: a startled breath, a challenge half-formed in a throat, a click or scrape as something was hurriedly set down or seized up.
Nothing. Beside herself, and Jenna standing outside the door, there was no-one here.
The apartment was quite large, but also largely empty. This wasn’t a home full of heirlooms, halfforgotten presents and books bought to read on a day which had never come. This was a functional stopover point, a place where a busy professional could stay when work kept them away from the family pad. In the case of Anna-Marie Císa rˇ, the Europan Commonwealth’s current Minister for Defence, that was certainly likely to be true for the immediate future.
Rourke took note of the layout: bedroom, living room, a kitchen diner, bathroom and, as they’d predicted, a second bedroom turned into an office which housed the apartment’s terminal hub. She moved back to the front door and pulled it open again by a crack. ‘Clear.’
‘Good.’ Jenna hustled inside, shutting the door behind her and absently thumbing the ‘lock’ button. ‘Honestly, you’d have thought she’d have better protection in place.’
Rourke frowned at the lock’s control pad.‘I thought SecuriTop was a good make?’
‘They are,’ Jenna acknowledged, ‘this is, like, four times harder to crack than the lock downstairs.’ She shrugged, looking around. ‘But for someone who knows what they’re doing, that’s like the difference between . . . between you shooting a target at five feet and twenty feet.’
‘Right,’ Rourke nodded.
‘You want a secure house, you put a damn great metal lock on it,’ Jenna added, passing Rourke her coat. ‘The only people who trust computers alone to keep them safe are the ones who don’t know much about them.’
‘You know what to do?’ Rourke asked, cutting her off before the girl could expound her opinions on the limits of technology any further.
‘Yeah.’ Jenna’s grin lit up her face with a mix of eagerness and mischief. ‘This is going to be
fun
.’
Rourke stopped her with a hand in the centre of her chest. ‘Just do the job. Don’t get carried away, and for all our sakes, don’t leave any traces.’
She was slightly surprised when Jenna brushed her hand away with an annoyed look. ‘You want to come and babysit me, be my guest,’ the girl snapped, ‘but you won’t know what the hell you’re looking at. So you let me do what I do, and you do what you do and lurk in the shadows.’ She brushed past and headed for the minister’s office.
Rourke sighed. She’d never liked dealing with external specialists anyway; they had a tendency to be unfocused, or lose focus easily, and have an unduly high opinion of their own value. Still, they’d always been a necessary evil, and over the last eight years on the
Keiko
she’d become inured to all but the most extravagant extremes of personality.
Tamara Rourke made a quick and more specific search through the apartment, found what she was looking for, and settled down to wait.
It was, in fact, close on three more hours before the lock on the flat door buzzed and gave Rourke the split second of warning she needed to prepare herself. She rose silently to her feet from the chair she’d been occupying in the living room and took a breath, counting on the noise of the door being opened and closed to obscure the faint sound – far too many people underestimated how noticeable breathing was when it wasn’t expected – and waited, out of sight of the main door. There was a rustle of clothing as a coat was hung up, a slight clatter of something hard being placed carelessly onto the hallway table – probably the key card to gain access to the block in general and this flat in particular – and then a pause.