Honor of the Clan (16 page)

"Tramp" Michaels, so named for an incident in a Burmese whorehouse he'd rather forget, wasn't real keen on their team leader. A thrown-together team of guys who never worked together, never even worked in the same organizations, no training, on a live op was asking for a goatfuck. Yeah, that was bad enough, but even for a juv this guy looked like a kid. Like barely fourteen. And now he was dressed in a cheap civilian suit like a weenie missionary carrying the Book of Mormon. At least it was something to do, but it wasn't what he was trained to do. It wasn't making it any easier to dump the volcanic rage he was feeling and click into the zone. Dead civilians he could deal with. Dead dependents of teammates—he really wanted to kill the guys who did this. Which was bad. Target identification could slow you down, get you or your teammates killed. And what about the surviving kid? No way this wasn't going to fuck him up bad.
Really
wanted these guys.

He had memorized the map of the neighborhood, as a matter of course. As had Kerry beside him. "You okay, man?" he asked.

"Cocked, locked, and ready to rock," his buddy affirmed. His left hand was closed into a fist so tight the knuckles stood out whitely, thumb grating across the index finger. His voice was tight with leashed anger.

"You too, huh? Into the zone buddy, into the zone," Michaels, as always, found it easier to support Ketch than himself.

"Roger that."

And that simply, the fury went from fire to ice for both of them, the ice at the familiar distance that allowed clean operation and got the mission done. It felt good, the familiarity. First, extract the kid. And the safe-house guy who had probably fucked up and let it all happen. Then find these other fucks and correct their breathing problem.

None of these thoughts stopped him from tracking the details of everything they passed as they moved in on the objective. As always, those details were preternaturally clear, and the world slow, as his thoughts clicked over miles in instants. He had become the machine, and there was the house.

"Mormons," Kerry said.

"We don't have to talk the talk, dude, we've just gotta walk the walk," Tramp pulled up to the curb and parked smoothly.

Under other circumstances, since it was a mission necessity, it would have been an interesting way to get in close to the house and an interesting problem. At the moment, there was nothing but the now. Under the guise of saying a few words to each other, ostensibly about missionary stuff, he and Ketch got a good three-sixty look over each other's shoulder after getting out of the car. He could see, way down at the end of the street, Schmidt on his bike. Time to move.

Despite their roles, when the two men turned to walk up the sidewalk to the front door, it was with the lithe coordination of wolves from the same pack, on the hunt.

Tramp was glad to see the door had a knocker. He mimed pushing the doorbell and stood, facing the door with his buddy in what they hoped was the sincere, angelic attention of men of God on a mission. Which they were, just not in the sense they were feigning. After all, God had a thing for wrath and vengeance against scumbags, too, didn't he? Extraction first, but in the process observe all the details for the tracks and sign necessary to hunt some very bad people down. Bad people who had very much messed with the wrong pack.

"This is gonna suck for Landrum," Kerry said. "Used to date Kerrie."

"Ouch. What fuckhead assigned him to this team?" Tramp scowled in the general direction of the Schmidt shrimp, who was off his scooter and walking up the driveway with his paper-bagged wine bottle, looking credibly like some "friend" of the family.

"I don't think it was Schmidt. Don't even know if he knows."

"Oh, great. Fucking brilliant." Michaels stuck the key in the doorknob and turned as he heard the telltale clatter of the kitchen storm door opening. Acting, for a moment, nothing like Mormon missionaries, he and Kerry rushed in the front door, looking to both sides as he kicked the door shut behind them. Unhappily restrained by the order not to draw, each of them had a hand under his suit jacket, which was as close to drawing as they could get without breaking their shitty ROE.

The black fist spray-painted on the wall suggested that the tangos were indeed gone, which was great for the survivors, if true. If. Tramp followed his buddy down the hall to the left of the empty living room, backwards, guarding his six.

"This is the one to keep Landrum out of," Kerry announced grimly as they turned into the first room, a bedroom that sat on the front side of the house.

Michaels glanced over his shoulder into the bedroom. The bastards had rather thoughtfully left the closet door flung open, giving a plain view of one of the best bits of cover in the room. Kerrie Maise sprawled across the bed, sloppily shot in four or five random places, other than the head shot at close range that had obviously killed her. The streaks of blood on the floor suggested that she had staggered backwards with the first couple of shots and fallen onto the bed.

With no time to feel, they cleared the room and sent the relevant click code. The grey and white splatter, some still stuck to the wall behind the bed, was one of those sights a guy really didn't want in his head as the last memory of any woman he'd fucked. Despite his professionalism, the boil of rage threatened to swamp him.

He clamped a lid on it as they left the corpse behind to proceed on to the next room, which was evidently one of the kids' bedrooms. Mercifully, it was empty, though tainted by a strong smell of puke. They sent the code and moved on to the master bedroom. A pair of clicks, the tone said Schmidt's, indicated the non-survivor boy had been found. Clearing the last room on their list, they moved farther back to the holo/rec room, where Landrum waited, white-faced.

"Basement," he said.

"Don't go into the front of the house, dude," Tramp told the other man firmly. Probably he would have been smart enough not to, but some things were worth making sure. You couldn't un-see shit.

When Landrum's face turned a rockier shade of pissed, he knew he'd been right to insist.

"No." The word came out of his and Kerry's mouths simultaneously, communicating that they would restrain the man physically if necessary.

Landrum spun on his heel and stalked off to the kitchen, followed by Kerry. Michaels, again, brought up the rear.

The entire process of clearing the upper floor of the house had taken less than thirty seconds.

In the kitchen, he and Kerry watched the top of the stairs while Landrum and Schmidt made the descent to the basement, returning momentarily with the civilian man and the boy. Pinky, Tramp reminded himself. This wasn't just any civilian child. This was the son of one of the guys in his unit.

"They killed Jenny," the boy said, face pinched with fear and fatigue. The safe house—and wasn't that a sick joke—guy didn't look so hot either, and no wonder.

Tramp raised an eyebrow at Landrum, who was again firmly seated in "professional" mode.

"Kid next door. Thought it was him." He nodded at the small boy.

A little surprising, but if the body was messy, obviously possible.

"We're out of here." Schmidt said. "You two with me. Just keep your mouths shut and walk with me, ignore my talking, get in the car that pulls up."

The civilians with their team lead, Kerry, Michaels, and Landrum proceeded along their own exit paths, keeping alert for any attempt on the survivors between house and cars. Tramp hated this exit plan. It left the survivors too out in the open, the brief passage down the driveway being an eternity if a competent shot was watching the house. He'd been overruled. Broad daylight; suburbia. Sometimes mission requirements put you in a sub-optimal situation.

He was still relieved when the car with the two Schmidts and the civilians got off, while equally apprehensive about the exposure of the car.

As he and Kerry pulled into the post-extraction rendezvous, he was damned glad to see the car with the dependent had made it, and reflected that compared to the more open work of DAG, this resistance shit sucked. But they got the surviving dependent out, and the safe house dude, which was a win to take home.

Boarding the van to make the final leg of the trip back to base, Kerry caught his eye. Both men were thinking the same thing. Fucked up resistance ROEs or not, they
wanted
in on the op when these Bane Sidhe found the bastards that did the wife and other son.

They were real good guys. Finding Maise's wife and older son in large pools of congealed blood, finding the "message" symbol left on the wall—George didn't know if they recognized it as a mafia symbol or not. It didn't matter. They all knew who'd really sent it. The third body turned out to be that of a little girl from next door. He didn't envy the clean-up crew's job in dealing with that. A "disappearance" of a child was often worse than having the police find the body. Ten to one, the crew would have her buried in a shallow grave somewhere and get the police an anonymous tip. Some time after that, after business had been taken care of, the family would probably get a cryptic notification hinting at the destruction of the perpetrators. Nothing was without risk. In this case, the kid had gotten caught in the crossfire of their war. That it was all of humanity's war would mean nothing to Jenny Sorenson's parents. Arranging for them to get the body back, along with a small sense of justice, was the least the organization could do. The Sorensons would probably interpret the justice notification as coming from a rival organized crime faction. The Bane Sidhe would do their best to subtly encourage that assumption.

"I'd like the things in the trunk if at all possible. Family mementos," Andreotti said.

The assassin kept a neutral face and told the middle-aged man that he'd inform the clean-up crew. The crew would know to go over every damned thing in the box and catalog it, tagging any suspect items for restriction to base. "Family mementos" of one sort or another gave nightmares to internal security staff as they managed a highly multigenerational conspiracy. The pre-recontact human Bane Sidhe numbers had been small. Mostly, it was a very few interconnected families who tended to have multigenerational relationships with certain factions in certain organizations—as, say, the sub-faction in the Society of Jesus. Contrary to the broadest and longest standing conspiracy theories, the generations of Bane Sidhe sleepers had rarely been Freemasons.

It wasn't the best room for interviewing a kid, Schmidt reflected. It was your standard boring, windowless, institution-green, Galplas room, with four battered, chewing-gum colored, folding chairs and not much else. One for him, one for Saunders, one for Pinky Maise, and one for the grief counselor who was supposed to make a kid who'd just lost his mother and brother feel "comfortable." While George allowed that the pretty young thing—pretty juv thing, really—could make him more comfortable any time, he doubted Anne Veldtman was doing much for the kid.

The impression was confirmed when the kid looked at her and said, politely, "Ma'am, you've been really nice and everything, but would it be okay if I just talked to these guys by myself?" The five-year-old had a small child's gravity that would have been cute under other circumstances.

George reminded himself of Caspar Andreotti's debrief indicating that this kid was anything but cute, and would not only resent being treated like the little kid he was, but would also be likely to hide his intelligence behind a juvenile facade if thus treated. With the result that they could miss some critical data.

Veldtman started to object, but went quietly when Saunders jerked his head towards the door. That was one thing about a disciplined organization. You didn't tend to get many people who would let sentiment override orders. Orneriness, yes. Sentiment, no. This was Saunders' show. George was only along for the ride as a second check to make sure nothing of operational value was missed.

After she left, Pinky focused his intent gaze on George. "You're one of the guys who got us out. Thanks," he said. "You look kinda like a kid, but you're not."

The subtext was subtle as a sledgehammer. The Maise kid was asserting that he, also, was much less a kid than he looked. George didn't know about that, but he glanced at Saunders and gave a slight shrug. In his limited experience of children, they reacted better to adults who didn't patronize them.

"You're welcome," he said.

"Okay, Maise," Saunders was a pretty good interrogator, and opened by addressing the kid the way he would an adult in the military subculture. "Andreotti tells us there's a lot more to you than meets the eye, so I'm gonna treat you just like anybody else. That work for you?"

"Yeah," Pinky said.

"Okay, tell me about today from the time you got up to the time the team came and got you. Try not to leave anything out, but don't worry too much. I'll be asking you a lot of questions after to pull out all the details. Get it? Go," Saunders gestured to the kid—Maise, George corrected himself—to begin.

"At least five attackers," Pinkie said, looking into the distance. His eyes tracked back and forth as if he was reseeing the entire incident. "Basement, four. Three male, one female. Weapons: Nine-millimeter semi-automatics. Silenced. . . ."

It was a hell of a thing for a kid to go through. But it slowly crept in on George that they weren't dealing with a kid. Pinkie was more like a forty-year-old stuck in a five-year-old's body. One with a surprising memory for detail regarding the assassins, to the point that the Maise assured them he would be able to recognize their voices if he heard them again.

Given the kid's presence of mind and memory for detail, Schmidt believed him. By the time the five-year-old got through with his account, George found he had almost no questions.
"Can you think of anything else?"
just sounded . . . childish.

Nathan O'Reilly raised an eyebrow at Dr. Vitapetroni, the head of the Bane Sidhe psych department, who had joined the organization's director in his office to watch live holo of the interrogation. "Well?" he asked.