A parade of women, short, tall, thin, or fat paraded across the dinner table.
“You notice anything about them, Penny?” Kris asked.
“None of them were carrying a purse,” the intelligence officer said.
“What’s that mean?” Jack asked.
The two girls exchanged smiles. “We’ll show you tomorrow night.”
The three of them plotted path after path from their probable station to the private suite at the top of the towers. There were plenty of private access and working areas in a building that huge, almost as many as there were on a space station. Kris and Jack knew their way around stations, both for offense and defense. They got to feeling right at home with the tower.
Approaching midnight, with yawns all around, they called it quits. Penny dismissed herself with, “I’ll take the back bedroom and close the door.”
She did, for about five seconds.
“It’s freezing in there,” she announced as she busted back in on them.
“I had the door open to warm the place up,” Jack said, in defense of his effort to keep all the women who presently occupied his life warm.
“You may have, but that place was freezing to start with, and it’s not much better now,” Penny said.
“Heat rises,” Kris said. “I wonder what the loft is like.”
“I’ll try it,” Penny said, heading up the ladder and disappearing for a minute. Then her head popped over the railing. “It’s quite nice up here, and I can rob the blankets from the other bed. You just ignore me. I’ll be asleep in no time.”
“We’ll never ignore you,” Kris said. But one thing led to another on the floor before the roaring woodstove. Kris found she didn’t really care whether Penny was awake or asleep, just so long as Jack was close, and Kris managed to keep quiet.
And Jack was very close.
29
Foile was exhausted.
Around him, his team was asleep, Leslie curled up beside her desk, Mahomet with his head down on his desk. His boss had retreated to her own office and was likely asleep on its couch.
There was a sofa in Foile’s office. At the moment, it looked pretty inviting.
From the drone overflight he’d ordered, they’d heard not a word. Had the Prime Minister balked at using military assets to hunt for his daughter? Foile was not about to make a phone call. If it happened, it happened. If not, well, maybe the Prime Minister wasn’t as worried as he’d sounded yesterday. No, day before yesterday, and soon yet another day more.
Foile was way behind on sleep, but as he settled down on the sofa, he had to wonder: just who would Billy Longknife be afraid of for his daughter? Who on Wardhaven would even think of killing Kris Longknife?
It hadn’t been too long ago when it was in all the media how she’d saved all their hides when those strange battleships showed up demanding the planet surrender.
Boy, talk about your political failure there.
Everyone on this planet owed the princess their life. So who might kill her?
Foile got comfortable on his sofa. His mind was spinning with questions. How many of them did he really need to answer?
Then he sat bolt upright.
If he knew who Billy Longknife feared would kill his daughter, Foile would know where he needed to deploy his police assets. Get between her and whoever it was.
He shook his head and settled back onto his sofa. Billy Longknife hadn’t told him anything when he assigned Foile this case. Nothing had changed to make him reveal more about his wayward daughter now.
Foile regulated his breathing. Tomorrow would be another day. Likely another very busy day.
30
Kris was up as first light filled the lodge. She cooked bacon, without burning it, and scrambled eggs. That brought a complaint from Penny that there was no way to mangle scrambled eggs. Kris cut her off like a good slave driver by pointing at the diagram of Longknife Towers. They went over it until they could talk their way through it without their computers’ flashing a map on the wall in front of them.
If things went according to plan, they would be at Al’s suite twenty minutes from leaving the loading dock. But all three of them knew that matters rarely went according to plan—on black ops or white.
So they sat around the fire trying to think of everything that could go wrong and what they’d do when it did. It was kind of fun. Each took a turn playing the red team and punching a hole in their plan. Then all of them would have to come up with a solution.
It worried Kris how easy it was to make their plan go off the rails. And while they always came up with something that would put it back on track, most of the solutions looked pretty flimsy to Kris. Hope was not a strategy, but it sure looked like they were counting on hope and lots of good luck to get them through this.
Lunch was sandwiches. They ate in silence. Meal done, Kris stood.
“Let’s get in our disguises,” she said.
“You know something I don’t know?” Jack asked.
“Nope. It’s just the hairs on the back of my neck are beginning to stand up.”
“Mine, too,” Penny said.
“If both of your feminine intuition is ringing a bell, this guy is listening.”
“We’ll need new disguises,” Penny pointed out, as they surveyed the wreckage of their old covers. “Nobody would hire Ms. Travaford for a guard job.”
“We all need to not look like ourselves, Jack included,” Kris said. “I put the chances that we’re not all being hunted as zed or worse.” That got nods.
They opened the suitcases Harvey had packed for them. Oversized middle-class work clothes poured out of one. The second held nearly as much makeup and padding material as Abby had provided.
“Does everybody want me fat?” Kris cried in dismay.
“Kris, you are a lovely lady of light and delicate proportions,” Jack began diplomatically. “How else do we disguise you?”
He paused for a moment, then got a big grin on his face. “Well, there was that time on Turantic when you didn’t wear much at all.”
“Yes, you enjoyed that. Don’t tell me you didn’t. I felt the proof on my leg.”
“I had to get close to you.”
“People, people,” Penny said. “You’re scandalizing this poor girl, and I really don’t think we have time to waste on distant, if very fond, memories.”
They busied themselves with different disguises. Penny and Jack worked over Kris, much to her own dismay. Then Kris and Jack did the same to Penny. Finally, both girls got to take a swing at Jack. He refused several of their initial suggestions.
In the end, all of them put on weight, just not as much as Kris had before. All their faces changed, from brow to nose to mouth, and foreheads got narrowed as armored wigs went on. Jack would likely be ordered to get a haircut by their new boss, but he certainly didn’t look like a Marine anymore.
Kris was the one that discovered the C-16. It was carefully wrapped and nestled next to an explosive sniffer that assured them that there was no boom stuff here. Move along.
There were also several flash bang grenades of different persuasions. Finally, from the bottom of the last suitcase, came three plastic automatics. All gave them the option of deadly force or sleepy darts. Kris set all three for sleepy and fired a dart from each into a support post. The darts hung there, not all that deep in the wood.
“No casualties tonight,” she said, handing the weapons over to her team.
“Just make sure the other guys chop on that order,” Penny said.
The explosives and grenades disappeared into various portions of their disguise. Kris had to sit down three times before she was comfortable with the placement of her weapons load.
It was just past two o’clock when Kris surveyed their preparations and found them good. She glanced around the mess they’d made of the lodge and felt a strong need to be somewhere else. “Let’s move out, folks. Someone once told me a moving target is harder to hit. I say let’s beat feet.”