And if Khalid didn’t currently know where Edgerton was, any more than they did, she’d just clouded the issue…and maybe thrown off that search.
“Sounded good to me,” Frank said.
They sat in a hotel they now shared with Corain, Amy Carnath, and Quentin. They knew damned well the plainclothes watchers across the street weren’t civilian police, and the hotel employees were down to a few–
“Go home,” Yanni had told the manager, personally. “Dismiss your staff. Those who stay to maintain the systems will get triple pay. Reseune will see to it if I survive to get back to my office. Those who stay on duty, the same. But it’s no longer safe. Go home.”
Seven of the staff, including the manager and assistant manager, the head custodian, two of his people, one sous‑chef, and the head of housekeeping, had stayed on, and they kept things running…making them more comfortable than they might have been.
Sit still, and wait. That was what they had to do right now. ReseuneSec had a handful of plainclothes agents throughout the city that made quiet visits to watched areas, and that made tight transmission to receivers here and there, data‑squeal that made it quick and thorough. The latter was Frank’s expertise more than his. He didn’t set it up or critique it: he just knew how to receive it.
And one message had come in which in no way heartened him.
It said, Trying to make contact with Lynch. Not answering last two days. Will continue effort pending outcome of other inquiry. M.
State, Defense, and the city government had police powers, and so, by a trick of history, did Reseune Administrative Territory and its adjunct at Planys. Reseune, with its ability to police azi welfare in every factory and office in Union, had an investigative and enforcement organization in some respects as extensive as that of Defense and the city government.
And Reseune used it…not the way Defense did, with obvious intimidation standing on the curb out there in the rain, no. With a little more finesse, Yanni hoped. Finesse might never have been his strong suit inside Reseune, but out here, with armed Fleet agents with drawn guns scaring hell out of the sous‑chef when he took a look into the alley, he tried not to offend the people they hoped to contact. He sent quiet queries to certain Defense contacts in other services, and hoped for answers–like the removal of surveillance from his curb.
He didn’t reply to the message from M. He just absorbed it and every other tidbit of information that came wafting in. He had dinner scheduled with young Amy, her Quentin, Frank, and Mikhail Corain. They maintained at least some of the comforts of home.
And deFranco had made it safely to Reseune. Chavez and his family were somewhere en route, granted he’d gotten through to the airport. Tien would go there next, solo; his family were safe on remote Viking. Harad, State, commanding another security apparatus, independent of Defense, would be the next to last to leave the capital.
He had the short straw. His people were armed and spread throughout the city–in plain clothes. He hoped to hell the agents that had scared the chef had been vastly exceeding their orders. But they were prepared to fight their way to the airport if they had to.
BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter xx
AUGUST 27, 2424
1430H
Hicks had had a heavy dose of trank–he wasn’t happy that the Warricks, father and son, with Grant and Paul, were involved in Kyle’s case at all; but he was a little glazed, and sat having a little fruit juice during prep, eyeing them all the while with distrust. Chi Prang was there, with her assistant. Ivanov took the medical end of things, with two psych nurses, a cardiovascular surgeon and her two surgical nurses on call. Supportive machinery was in the room–it was Ivanov’s suggestion, and Ari took the advice, even if it crowded the immediate area.
The Admin clinic couldn’t remotely handle an operation of this complexity, so they set up in the hospital’s A wing, a real surgery, with specialized monitors brought up from the psych labs, plus the other options, if that was what it took. It had needed two days to set it up.
Today finally involved Hicks. And the rest of them. And the monitors. And Kyle.
Kyle, for his peace of mind, didn’t know a thing about it–he arrived tranked out, though he seemed robust enough, once the monitors started telling what they knew. They lit up, one miniaturized bank alter another.
“We’re being careful.” Ari said to Hicks, who looked increasingly anxious as the moments went on and the monitors came up. “You’ll be right by him when he starts to wake up. Just keep him calm–you can touch him, but only say, ‘I’m here.’ Say your name and say, ‘I’m here.’ Nothing else outside the script.”
“I understand you,” Hicks said. He was, at the moment, scared as all hell, determined not to get thrown out of the operation, Ari thought. But that wouldn’t happen. That would be the worst thing for Kyle AK; if they lost Hicks’ active participation, they might lose Kyle, or lose him, mentally for good and all. If Hicks folded, they’d have to put Kyle back under, fast.
She went over to the rest of her group, who were going through the procedures book and script, a physical printout, with notes. Florian and Catlin attended her and kept to the background; Mark and Gerry were there with Justin and Grant–they weren’t short of security if they encountered a problem, but at the moment security meant four more bodies in not much space for the operators, just behind the heart‑lung apparatus.
Jordan was team leader. Jordan and Prang had worked together before, Jordan had said they were the two who’d actually done this kind of intervention once and a long time ago, and he bluntly wanted to be in charge. There wasn’t to be any freehand, just carefully planned branches: if Kyle did this, then that; if Kyle branched in another direction, something else. All possible paths were mapped, all with more care than any operation Ari had ever read; Prang had come into the conferences, and she and Jordan had laid down the increasingly complex map, with Ari’s participation and Justin’s, and they’d done it in three marathon meetings–fascinating, under any other circumstances. Fascinating, too, when Jordan was on business, talking about this branch and the other, and what the trigger might be. He was fast in his decisions, and focused only on the problem. The one point where he and Prang differed was about where the block actually sat, and exactly where a not‑very‑adept military operator had put in something and just told Kyle to protect it.
“Here,” Jordan had said, and pointed to the same area Grant had indicated, down in the secondaries–but then he’d linked it to a second item. Kyle had programming from back in the first days of the azi participation in the War–a routine about defending what his Contract‑holder set him to defend. That was fine, Ari thought, but to an alpha that defendwent metaphysical real fast, and they didn’t do that kind of thing; that had stood out, to her eyes. She found that kind of generality in the programming at four other points she could see, things they didn’t dowith alphas or even betas nowadays, because things hadgone wrong. She had those circled on her own copy, and Justin and Grant both had tagged them as inappropriate from the start. Old‑style programming. Old as the azi in question.
Kyle being, himself an Alpha Supervisor by the military’s make‑do procedures of the day, had considerably reworked his own programming by the time Defense sent him back to Reseune as a spy…that clearly had happened.