Koko Takes a Holiday (27 page)

Koko packed her bags and was on a transport north two hours later. After half a day of banging around Helsinki and getting her bearings, she had a plan.

* * *

Like a wobbling hurled tomahawk, the fuselage of the hired helo sliced through the freezing sleet above Helsinki under the cover of darkness. Gull-winged micro-fusion lift engines keened a tri-phonic, ear-splitting chime as Koko keyed her headset mic near her mouth.

“So, you’re a lousy pilot on top of being a crook?”

The pilot, a freelancer known only as Fredrikkaa, used her thick lips to work her cigarette to the other corner of her mouth and drew in some smoke. Her profile, puffy and red from drink, glowed creepily as the tip of her cigarette cherried. She mumbled something, but over the engine noise Koko couldn’t make out the words. Koko was familiar with a few key phrases in Finnish, especially operational commands and such, but she found herself coming up short on the profanity front.

The pilot didn’t bother using her own headset mic and shouted, “This building you want, this
pilvenpiirtäjä
? Defenses heavy!”

Koko keyed her mic again and gestured to the console. “I told you. The target is fortified on the lower levels, not on the roof. I’ve triple-checked the specs. Besides, this is a Eurofire Insert-40. What’re you worried about? The triangulum countermeasures on these birds come standard.”

The pilot swung the helo south-southeast, and they bounced across some chop.

“No-no,” the pilot replied. “I fly civil only. No weapons. This now a tourist birdy!”

Koko shook her head. Great. Whatever. Just get her close. That was all Koko needed and what she paid double for.

After studying the building, Koko had memorized Delacompte’s floor and unit number. Delacompte’s high-rise quarters were several floors below the structural outcrop on the roof that Koko planned to drop down on. With the crummy weather, she knew doing a staged rappel and climb-down would really heighten the surprise. Yeah, Koko thought, it’s going to be a hoot. Remind Big D of her good ol’ days.

Out the sleet-slicked forward canopy, Koko observed the
pilvenpiirtäjä
, the target building, approaching fast. She unbuckled her safety straps and moved aft to get into position. A moment later the pilot engaged the craft’s whisper drive and the engine racket softened as though the world around them had suddenly been swallowed whole. Using a single finger, the pilot pointed to the building and informed Koko via pantomime that they were one minute out.

Koko held up a clenched fist to demonstrate that she understood. She slipped on her harness, checked and clipped into the anchor hook above her head, and prepared herself. After pulling her deployment bag onto her shoulders, she gave the pilot a “go” signal and the cabin door
chik-choked
and slid wide. The cold wet wind gusted hard, and Koko saw they were directly above the roof. Koko threw out her nylon rappelling line to the rooftop below.

Koko stepped out onto the helo’s slippery landing skid. The sleet slashed her face and she pivoted one hundred eighty degrees, bracing her feet shoulder-width apart, keeping herself relaxed but steady on the skid. Heart beating hard, Koko looked down and saw the end of the rappelling line light up green, indicating the rope had made contact with the gravel on the building’s roof. Depth perception at their perilous height along with the weather and darkness was a mother, but having the guidance light hot on the line helped.

Out at a forty-five-degree angle, Koko gripped her brake hand on the line at the small of her back. In her head she recalled faint echoes of her trainers from years past.
Go slow, brake, then descend. Do not go hard or you will die.

Koko slipped off into the darkness.

* * *

After releasing the line for her harness, Koko watched the Eurofire helo wheel off over the skyline and disappear. All that lay ahead for Koko now was a gymnastic scale down to Delacompte’s flat. Luckily for Koko, the building’s architectural design included great bulging bars on each unit’s terrace, presenting her with easy consecutive leaps of eight feet in between floors. Smiling with the anticipation of her upcoming surprise, Koko took her time and reveled in the physicality of her descent. A minute and a half later and she hit the final overhanging ledge above Delacompte’s unit. Slowly she lowered her feet until she was able to swing herself and softly, silently land on Delacompte’s balcony.

In front of Koko, two sliding nine-foot-high window doors glowed. Thick, mushroom-brown curtains were drawn nearly tight but a sliver of light escaped. Koko combed a hand through her wet hair and freed the small deployment bag from her shoulders. Yes, she thought, this dropping in all of a sudden might seem a mite rude, but Koko was positive they’d share more than a few hearty laughs over the stunt. Then she wondered if Delacompte was alone. Whoops. What if Delacompte was entertaining or, worse yet, what if she was scandalously indisposed? This could be a new chapter in Koko’s long list of embarrassing life screw-ups. Fuck it. Too late for second guesses now.

Behind the sliding glass windows, a vertical rift of light between the curtains beckoned. Koko took a tentative step and then another, but she froze when she heard a pained shriek inside.

What the hell?

Two quick steps forward and Koko cupped her hands to peer through the glass.

The scene inside hurled a pole of ice straight through her stomach. A well-appointed living room with blinding white features and furniture draped in transparent plastic tarps spread wide as if the room was set to be repainted. Delacompte, pallid-cheeked, sweaty and awkward on the floor with her legs in obstetric akimbo, a half-empty vodka bottle tipped to its side and leaking to her right, a vial of scattered pills nearby. Delacompte writhing, her face contorted in pain, hauling up something from within her, higher and higher to her wheezing breast. A deflated, smeary umbilical cord trailing.

No.

An appalling knot of expression on the infant’s face—shrieking.

NO!

Delacompte’s four trembling fingers and the thumb of her right hand pinching off and squeezing the baby’s neck.

Koko pounded on the glass and screamed. She lunged sideways for the handle on the terrace window, yanking hard and to the left, but found the sliding window’s mechanism locked. There was no time. None.

Koko launched herself shoulder-first through the glass.

Her crash ripped the curtains from the rod. Delacompte looked at her, her expression shorted out by shock, her groggy, blood-starved brain unable to assimilate the fact that Koko was actually there, rolling to her feet and moving. Koko spun sideways and kicked out with all her might, the toe of her right boot connecting with Delacompte’s open jaw. The impact instantly rendered Delacompte unconscious and threw off Koko’s equilibrium. Koko collapsed to the floor in a heap by Delacompte and her dead child.

The gravity of her friend’s desperate act lowered onto Koko, and with it a profound sorrow so new and so disturbing it felt as though her insides were imploding. Broken glass clinking beneath her, Koko lolled her head to the right and wiped the salty sting from her eyes. She found herself reaching out for the child, inert and facedown on the plastic.

Never in her life had Koko touched the skin of an infant, let alone a newborn. Never once in the collectives or even the de-civ warzones when she guarded hopeless refugees wailing from hunger and despair. The slippery softness on her fingertips shocked her and pulled the breath from her chest.

Five tiny, pebble-sized toes. A foot now in her fingers and a lifted leg revealing the cleft of the child’s sex.

Koko rolled wildly left and vomited. She puked for a full minute until it seemed nothing more would come forth and her throat felt as though it’d been flossed with frayed wire. Finally, when she stopped heaving, she rolled back and felt the grief and disbelief inside changing. The thick emotional calluses from a lifetime of warfare and capitalized catastrophe had vanished. A blizzard of symphonic confusion welled inside her, overwhelming her practiced discipline and control. Koko convulsed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

“
What have you done?
”

Flynn’s face blanches.

“No…”

Koko shuts her eyes and wrestles against the surge of memories. She deflates heavily after a long intake and expulsion of air. “Yeah,” she says. “I should have just gotten the hell out of there, but I didn’t. I stayed.”

“But why?”

“What do you mean, why? I was traumatized, you dope. I was overwhelmed and confused. I mean, I’ve seen and done a lot in my life, Flynn, but never, ever something as bad as that.”

Flynn notices that Koko is shaking, so he reaches out and touches her shoulder.

“What did you do?”

Koko thumbs both of her eyes and blinks. “What did I do? I called out for a good, hot curry—the hell do you think I did? I found some heavy tranquilizers in her bathroom medicine cabinet and cleaned up everything.”

“By cleaning up everything you mean even the—”

“Yeah. The building’s thermite disposal flue. I kept Delacompte sedated and tied down in her bed for two full days until she came around. And you know what? That was the hardest part of the whole thing. Suffering her shame and the distress in her eyes. For a while she fought it, thinking I was some kind of hallucination, but I stayed with her and drew her out. When she realized I was there for real she confessed to me she couldn’t go through with it and forced a premature delivery. When I asked her why she didn’t terminate the pregnancy or why she waited so long, she made the worst and weakest of excuses. Stupid, horrible stuff. Work overload, procrastination, disbelief—she’d always been dutiful in her hygiene so it couldn’t possibly be true.

“I couldn’t accept it myself. I mean, this was a woman I’d always looked up to and measured myself against. It was all so pathetic. She said she considered it impossible. Thought she had a tumor or maybe a cancer, refusing on all fronts to accept the idea that she’d been pregnant. It made me sick. Fuck. She begged me, Flynn, begged me to understand the opportunities of her new world. She couldn’t have a baby. It would destroy everything she had worked so long and so hard for.”

“What about—”

“The father?” Koko sniffs and clears her throat with a couple of shallow coughs. “She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask or even care. I’m not saying I’m proud of what I did, but when she was through with giving me her excuses I told her I had her back. I made a promise, you know? No more questions, no judgments. I just bucked up and powered through. I put my trust in the mercenary code—thinking, hell, it was understood, right? I thought that’s what friends are supposed to do for each other when they’re up against a wall.”

“Covering up an infanticide can’t be high on anyone’s list of favors.”

Koko knocks his hand from her shoulder. “You bastard! You think that was easy for me?” Koko glares at Flynn before shaking her head. “I guess part of me didn’t want to believe it’d happened. I didn’t want to know Delacompte wasn’t the person I thought she was. This screwed-up world is hard enough, but when people you look up to let you down by being weak, vain, and stupid, I don’t know, you start to lose your bearings and the entire sham stares you right in the face. You fray apart. At least that’s what I felt back then, and I couldn’t live like that. So, I did what I had to do, got through it, and tried my best to forget the whole mess even happened. Anyway, that’s what went down in Finland. So, fast-forward a couple of years. Delacompte ends up in an oversight position on The Sixty, and I’m blown completely away when she reaches out to me. She goes on and on and tells me she wants to set me up carte blanche with my own bar. At the time I was feeling pretty ragged out from all the syndicate work I’d been assigned, and I said yes even though deep down I knew something didn’t feel right. Stupid, right? But a job like that on The Sixty Islands? Delacompte positioned the opportunity as a way for me to retire from the gun-for-hire lifestyle with reasonable comfort. What was I supposed to do? Hell, I’m not getting any younger and a chance like that doesn’t come by every day for someone like me.”

“So it was a payoff.”

“Maybe initially, I guess so. I don’t know.”

“And now all of this is about some kind of a cover-up? But why? You’ve kept quiet all this time and you helped her. She’s the one who hired you.”

“Are you familiar with New One Roman Church of the Most Holy Liberator?”

“The fundamentalist extremists? Sure, of course, who isn’t?”

“Every big-shot board executive at CPB is a member, and it’s no mystery that Delacompte has set her sights on a top slot. Shit, the CPB do extensive background checks and interviews at the senior board level—”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning sooner or later they’d probably call me in because they know I was Delacompte’s hire. I’m the only one who knows what she did, and if the CPB ever gets wind she killed her own baby to keep her stupid career on track, she’s done for. The one thing the Church can’t turn a blind eye to is the taking of a life before it’s even had a chance to corrupt itself.”

“This is crazy.”

“You want stone crazy? How’s this for a chaser. Delacompte’s had selective memory treatments.”

Flynn’s eyes just about double in size. “Don’t tell me she doesn’t even remember what happened.”

“Nope. Like I said, I should have known something was screwy right then and there when she sweet-talked me with her recruitment spiel and told me she’d undergone SMTs. And she might claim she’s found religion, but that’s a crock too. Delacompte is about as likely to be grounded in the holy word of God as I am to go down without a fight. All this? This is about climbing the corporate ladder for her, nothing more. This is about saving her own butt.”

“But the SMT therapy. Why is she after you if she can’t even remember you were there?”

“Maybe she filed away an order to get rid of me at a later date. I mean, it is possible. Delacompte is a buttoned-up sort when it comes to logistics. But what really ticks me off is I was right under her thumb all this time, working on The Sixty. Whether she can remember the whats or whys of what went down back in Finland doesn’t even matter. I think the woman bided her time until she could pick her shot and take me out.”