“That would suppose you managed to take any of this alive,” the leader responded. “Which isn’t going to happen. Mind you, we’d rather get out of this in one piece, but we’re okay with it either way. Your fucking Presidential Guard made sure of that last month. You know what I’ve got left to lose, General Yardley? Last month it would have been a wife, a teenaged daughter, and a ten-year-old son. Today? Well, I’ll let you guess.”
There was silence for a moment, and the leader heard Guernicke whimpering in terror as she crouched in a corner with a pistol barrel pressed to the side of her head. Once upon a time, his heart might have felt at least some pity for her, but that had been then, and this was now.
“Should I assume the rest of your murdering little band feels the same way?” Yardley asked finally.
“I’ve got you on speakerphone, General,” he replied, looking up to meet the others’ eyes. “You hear anybody disagreeing with me?”
“It’s still not going to happen,” Yardley shot back. “I let you go with Ms. Guernicke, and you’re not going to turn her loose. You’re going to hang onto her, and you’re going to keep on making demands that get steeper and steeper until there’s no way in hell you’re going to get what you ask for. And then you kill her anyway, and you blame it on us. I don’t think we’re going to play that game.”
“Up to you, General. But before you make up your mind—”
He beckoned to the woman holding the gun to Guernicke’s head, and she jerked the Trifecta executive to her feet and half-dragged, half-led her across to the desk. The leader looked at Guernicke for a moment, then pointed at the com terminal.
“For God’s sake, Yardley!” Guernicke screamed into the mike. “What the fuck are you thinking? Give these people whatever the hell they want!”
The leader nodded, and Guernicke was hauled back to her corner and shoved back onto her knees. He waited another moment, then turned back to the com himself.
“There you go—your mistress’ voice has spoken, General. Now you know she’s still alive, and you’ve got your marching orders. What’re you going to do? I don’t think Trifecta’s going to be very happy with you and Lombroso if she ends up dead in a firefight now that she’s told you what you’re supposed to do.”
The silence from the other end of the com link was profound.
* * *
“Jesus, General!” Colonel Tyler Braddock exclaimed. Colonel Braddock, who was very fond of his self-assigned callsign “Tiger,” was a good ten centimeters taller and far broader across the shoulders than Olivia Yardley. At the moment, his swarthy complexion was pale and sweat beaded his hairline. “They’ve really got Guernicke in there. What the fuck do we do now?!”
“Shut up, Colonel,” Yardley said in a flat, dangerous voice. Her hazel eyes were hard as she glared up at the taller Braddock. It was his Scorpions which had opened fire last month and touched off the May Riots, and she wasn’t feeling particularly charitable where he was concerned at the moment.
He looked down at her, opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again and nodded, and she snorted. At least the idiot had some sense of self-preservation.
“What we’re not going to do,” she told him then, “is let these bastards panic to us into promising them what they want. Not unless I can figure out a way to make it look like they’re actually getting it right up to the second we shoot them all in the head. If we let them out of that tower with Guernicke, this shit is just getting started. At the moment, we’ve got them penned up in there, and I want to make damned sure they aren’t going anywhere, so start moving your goddamned troops into position. And try not to kill anybody you don’t have to, this time!”
Braddock flushed angrily, but he kept his mouth shut, nodded, and climbed out of Yardley’s command vehicle. He stalked down the frozen slide-walk towards his own command post, and Yardley watched him go.
I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the bastards on the other side will manage to kill him for me, she reflected. I can always dream, though.
In the meantime, she had to figure out what she was going to recommend to President Lombroso, and she grimaced at the thought. The president wasn’t a lot happier with her than she was with Braddock, and this wasn’t going to help. Maybe she could figure out a way to make it an intelligence failure and put it all on Friedemann Mátyás? She’d have to think about that.
* * *
The parking garage on the far side of Trifecta Boulevard, the surface level street east of the corporate tower, offered an ideal staging area for Colonel Braddock’s Scorpions. Each Scorpion individually exceeded the maximum vehicle weight for the garage by about twenty percent, but there were only thirty of them. Distributed across four floors, their weight was more than sufficiently spread out. Better yet, the garage had accesses on both its east and west sides, which meant the AFVs could be moved into the garage from the west without anyone in Trifecta Tower seeing them.
One might have wondered how useful armored vehicles were going to be in a situation like this one, but over the last few weeks, it had become the Presidential Guard’s policy to deploy overwhelming force in order to overawe and terrify potential dissidents. Besides, it was always possible there was a ground assault element involved in this insane plan after all, and having the firepower on hand to deal with one if it came along seemed like a good thing.
Braddock personally supervised the movement of his vehicles into the garage, then moved his own command vehicle to the roof. The vehicle crew was clearly uncomfortable sitting out there in the open as they remembered the anti-tank launchers they’d encountered last month. Braddock didn’t care about that. First, because he doubted these bastards were going to escalate the confrontation by using heavy weapons (assuming they had any) any sooner than they had to. And, second, because he wasn’t in the command vehicle. He’d moved to a better vantage point just inside the ground-level entrance facing the Tower, maintaining his connection to the command vehicle on a secure frequency while its position on top of the garage gave it the best transmission reach he could come up with.
Now he keyed the mike.
“Command One,” he said, and waited for the earbug tone to tell him the communications computer had automatically patched him through to Yardley. “Command One, Tiger is in position,” he said then.
“Good,” Yardley replied.
* * *
The desk com buzzed again, and the strike leader punched the key.
“What can I do for you, General?”
“You could start by cutting your throats and saving me the effort,” Yardley suggested.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going anywhere without Guernicke and we’re planning on killing a lot more of you bastards before you ever get into this office. So shall we move on to your second suggestion?”
“Let Ms. Guernicke leave the building unharmed, and we’ll let you and the rest of your murderers withdraw unmolested.”
The leader laughed out loud.
“Oh, I don’t think so!” he half-chortled. “As fairy tales go, it’s not bad, but we stopped believing in the tooth fairy a long time ago. Try again.”
“All right, third option. You stay right where the fuck you are, we sit outside here, and we starve your asses out. How does that sound?”
“At least a little more like you’re telling the truth. On the other hand, we brought a fair amount of food with us. Of course, we won’t be able to share any of it with Ms. Guernicke or the other Trifecta employees in here with us, so they’ll probably get hungry—and dehydrated—a lot faster than we will. If you want to try it, though, more power to you.”