“Will it be enough?”
“By no means. That you even ask illustrates some of the problem. But it will be a start, and it may make it possible to mend the rest with care and time. I will have to, as you would put it, talk fast.”
Cally sat in the conference room Papa O’Neal had reserved when he had arranged to meet her this morning before lunch. It had actually taken longer than she had expected for someone to talk to her, and this was an interesting opening gambit in the reckoning that was now due on both sides.
She was playing solitaire on screen when the PDA piped up. “Now’s when it really hits the fan.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“You’re agreeing with me. Things must be far worse than I thought. Neither of us is going to leave here alive, are we?”
“Shut up, buckley.”
“Right.”
A red-haired man with very old eyes and a bulge in his cheek came in the door and sat on the edge of the table. He smelled of Red Man chewing tobacco, and took a moment to spit into the otherwise empty Styrofoam coffee cup he carried in one hand, before setting it down on the table, near enough to reach but too far to be knocked over by accident.
“Cally, did you kill Colonel Petane?” He spoke each word slowly, as if he already knew the answer.
“Why, yes, Granpa. As a matter of fact I did.” She flipped the PDA closed and dropped it in her purse, took out a cigarette, lit it, all without taking her eyes off of him. Her arms stayed close in as she took a pull, her elbow propped in one hand. She regarded him steadily, waiting for him to speak.
He was silent for a moment, resting his forehead in one hand, before wiping it down his face and rubbing his chin. He picked up the cup and spat again before putting it back down.
“You know, you always hope that you can somehow keep the next generation from making the mistakes that you made. Part of getting old, I guess.” He took a deep breath and was silent for another long moment. “Would you mind telling me just what you were thinking when you decided that this was a good idea?”
“Sure. No problem. I became aware, on my vacation, that someone on our Targets of Opportunity list was falsely carried on the list as inactive because the database had him, inaccurately at the time, listed as deceased. Naturally, he couldn’t be properly regarded as inactive since he was, in fact, alive. Therefore, since he was on the list as a Target of Opportunity, I followed standing organizational doctrine, took out the target, and reported back in to file my after action reports and prep for the next mission.”
“I never raised you to be a guardhouse lawyer, young lady.”
“Hardly young.” She blew a perfect smoke ring which wafted away towards an air vent.
“You’re acting it.”
“You didn’t raise me to crap all over my responsibilities to my fellow team members, either.” She picked up her Styrofoam cup of coffee, frowned at the dregs and tapped her ashes into it.
“One, Team Conyers wasn’t your team. Two, do you honestly think they would have condoned elimination of a potentially useful source merely for revenge? Do you?”
“One, you’re correct. They weren’t my team, they were a fellow team. Two, Petane was not placed on the Targets of Opportunity list by me, and he wasn’t placed there for revenge. He was placed there, as I understand it, because it’s bad policy to allow fucking traitors who have ratted out your field operatives and gotten them killed to keep breathing. That he wasn’t removed from the list indicates to me that at some level someone was fully aware that a mistake had been made. Three, thorough interrogation revealed that Petane was not only not a useful source to date, but that his potential for future usefulness as a source was insignificant. Would you like my report?” she offered coldly.
“Cally, you knew full well this was above your pay grade. Did it never even occur to you to come in and discuss the issue and propose a formal, official reevaluation of the worthless scumbag’s status? Did it even cross your mind? Tell me something, what do you think your role in this organization is?”
“I like to think of myself as the chlorine in the gene pool.”
“If you think this is a time to be flip, we’ve got a much bigger problem than I thought.”
“Okay, I don’t. I believe that deciding to keep a traitor alive who had betrayed operatives to their deaths was a very questionable decision. Even had he been a very high quality source. However, had he been a high quality source, I would have left him breathing and with the belief that the interrogation had been a field review — a test that he had passed. I would have let him live despite my strong conviction that the decision to do so was wrong.”
“What, you just set yourself up all on your own to evaluate an agent’s value? Who made you God, Cally?”
“I became aware of his lack of value at the same time I became aware he was alive. The interrogation was merely confirming that information. Still, had he had any significant redeeming value as a source, he would still be breathing.”
“Yeah, we found that leak. Fortunately, he’s not my problem,” he said.
“Would you like my report?”
“Do I want it? No. Am I going to need it as part of cleaning up this mess, if it even can be cleaned up? Yes. Load it over.”
“Buckley, transmit the interrogation data and after action report to Michael O’Neal, Senior’s AID.” For once, the buckley made the correct decision to stay silent.
“Miss O’Neal, you are to consider yourself confined to quarters pending a determination in this matter,” he said formally, and added, “And Cally — don’t take any liberties with that order. That would include any electronic liberties with the computers of this base or anywhere else. Meals will be delivered. If the Bane Sidhe need you to go anywhere else on base, you will receive those orders from me. You are not to communicate with anyone else without a direct order from me. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Cally’s face was absolutely still as she accepted her dismissal, retrieved her purse, and left the room to return to her suite.
When she got back to her quarters the cleaning people had gotten her luggage from the road trip back to her. It killed a whole fifteen minutes or so to go through the pack and see what was still there. She didn’t know whether to be surprised or not that everything except the plastic bag of operation-tainted clothes was there. Someone had even, thoughtfully, retrieved her music cube from the car sound system. A second cube and a small bottle of clear liquid was next to it in the case. She turned the buckley’s AI emulation all the way off to use the PDA as a dumb cube reader and inserted the cube.
“Not everyone thinks you did the wrong thing. The shit can’t be stopped from hitting the fan, but at least you can have your stuff back. This message will self destruct in ten seconds, but please scrub and flush the cube, anyway. Thanks for keeping the faith, Miss O’Neal.” She read the words off a hologram of an old-fashioned video screen. After, she took the cube out and dropped it into the vinegar her anonymous admirer had supplied. In the bathroom, she dumped the vinegar down the toilet and flushed. If they weren’t specifically watching for it, it would never come up.
Of course, it could be a test, but when it came right down to it, she wasn’t as young as she looked and was way too old to be that paranoid. She turned the AI emulation back on.