“Petane was on the TOL? Okay. Well, look, it’s not really my job here to debrief you for the organization. That’s an ops function. My job is to assess your mental state. Since you and everybody else agree that you did kill him, why don’t we start with how you felt about him and what your feelings were when you decided to kill him?”
“What feelings? He was alive. He was supposed to be dead. I fixed that.”
“Come on, Cally. Don’t make this worse than it has to be. Any thoughts of suicide?” he asked.
“Hell, no.” She looked affronted.
“Do you actively feel a desire to live?” He made a note on his pad.
“Sure,” she said.
“Then you can show that by talking to me. Please try to remember what you felt when you decided to kill Colonel Petane.” He looked up, he needed to watch her body language especially closely here.
“Love your bedside manner, Al.” Her smirk had a bitter, sardonic twist to it.
“You’d rather I lied to you? I don’t think so. Do you remember where you were when you decided to kill Petane?” he insisted patiently.
“Charleston. At home,” she said.
“And how did you feel when you made the decision?”
“Annoyed, okay? I felt annoyed, frustrated.” Her fingers tapped nervously on her purse and after what looked like a little mental debate, took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Maybe a little betrayed?” He pushed an ashtray towards her.
“Wouldn’t you?” she said.
“Maybe. Did you feel just a little betrayed?” he repeated.
“Yeah, I did.” She sighed. She was clenching and unclenching her hands.
“So, were you annoyed primarily with Petane, the Bane Sidhe, or someone else?” At least she was talking to him.
“I was annoyed with the Bane Sidhe, okay?” She leaned over to tap her ashes in the tray, seeming reluctant to move her arms away from her body.
“I can understand that, and even though the reasons may be obvious, can you spell them out for me?” he asked gently.
“It has been Bane Sidhe policy since recontact that we do not leave people who kill our operatives or who betray our people to their deaths alive. That’s a very wise policy. Abandoning it would be stupid as hell. And dangerous for us operatives.” She was cold, but patient.
“Even if the person in question can provide vital source information on an ongoing basis to the organization?”
“Look, I can deal with that. What I can’t deal with is that Petane was not providing valuable information, nor was he going to, and none of the people in admin and ops who made this initial bad call had the balls to take responsibility and fix the problem. Instead they just left the mess lying around with the guy still breathing for effectively no good reason at all.” Her hands were shaking as she took another draw and recrossed her legs.
“And how would you know that his information was worthless, or that he wouldn’t have better information later?” he prompted.
“Look, I interrogated him, okay? He wasn’t even immune to all the interrogation drugs Fleet Strike has. They were never going to trust that man with any information of a truly sensitive nature. Ever,” she said.
“And would you have left him alive if your interrogation had turned out differently? And what do you think his having been interrogated would have done to his utility and cooperativeness as a source.” Interesting.
“The interrogation was mere confirmation, okay? I already knew he sucked as a source, that’s a lot of why I was really, seriously annoyed. But yeah, I would have been pissed off, but I would have left him alive,” she admitted, sighing.
“Okay. I think we’ve covered this part. So how did you interrogate him and kill him? You can skip the surveillance part. Just walk me through starting with the interrogation,” he said.
“Do you have awhile?” She smirked again, again bitterly.
“For you, Cally, I’ve got all afternoon. Come on, tell me about it.” He leaned back and beckoned with one hand.
Chapter Nine
His assistant, Wilson, had shifted his furniture again. Around the low table there were four chairs. Two Indowy and two human. At the moment, three of the chairs were full, and his assistant had just brought in a tray of coffee and mineralized water. He quirked an eyebrow at Aelool.
“Should we wait for Roolnai, or should we go ahead?” he asked.
“I think it would be better if we proceeded. Clan Chief Roolnai is indisposed. I will fill him in on what was discussed later.” The tendrils of his green fur, really a photosynthetic symbiote, wavered slightly in the breeze from the air vent.
Vitapetroni and O’Reilly exchanged a look. The doctor’s eyes dropped and he shook his head slightly.
“So, Doctor, what, precisely, are we dealing with?” The priest took a cautious sip of his coffee. Wilson was precise and efficient about so many things, but his coffee was erratic. Sometimes it was on the verge of too cold, sometimes piping hot, or anything in between. A too-hasty sip was apt to leave his tongue burned for a couple of days.
“She’s normal. Well, as normal for what we made her as possible. She’s been working too hard. She’s too involved in her job. She badly needs an extended sabbatical for marriage and kids. But beyond that, she performed exactly as she’s been trained and conditioned to perform. I told you back when you made the decision to salvage Petane which agents couldn’t know, and couldn’t be allowed where they might come to know. She is what we made her; she performed as designed.” The doctor looked at his hands and back up at the priest and the Aelool. He shrugged.
“I am afraid that this example of a human operating as designed may be a problem for my people.” Aelool’s eyes were, characteristically for his species, but oddly for him, fixed on the ground.
“Miss O’Neal says that she would not have killed the man if he had been either removed from the TOL, as opposed to inactivated on account of recorded death, or if he had been a more than minimally valuable source, or if he had shown any likelihood of being more than a minimally valuable source in the future. I’m inclined to believe her,” Vitapetroni offered.
“Yes, Al, but the fact is, she did kill him when she had ample reason to believe we didn’t want him killed,” O’Reilly said.
“She doesn’t have the organization’s wants and wishes as a safeguard. That was a very deliberate decision for all the field operatives of her specialty, so that if the Bane Sidhe had to order a killing we were ambivalent about that ambivalence wouldn’t compromise the operative’s effectiveness. She found out he wasn’t dead, she checked the TOL, he was on it, she killed him. She might as well have been a guided missile. We trained her to follow certain orders. She followed them. Without her personal feelings she might have checked back for clarification. Probably would have. But I can’t emphasize enough that you don’t tell one of our assassins to kill a man you don’t want dead,” the doctor said.
“You humans have a phrase that I believe may apply. Something about lawyers that protect houses?” Aelool looked grave.
“Guardhouse lawyer. She probably believes, in fact does believe, she was being one. But then she’s been trained not to recognize some of the psychological aspects of her training. The traumatic stress dream cycle suppression, for example. She never seriously wonders why she doesn’t have nightmares. Her free will not to kill someone on the TOL she encountered or became aware of and was able to kill without compromising a mission… well, I don’t mean to say it was nonexistent. But it was considerably less than she believes it to have been, or than either of you obviously believe it to have been. I repeat, gentlemen, you must not tell one of these assassins that someone is a target if you do not want that individual dead,” he insisted.