I hadn’t long been in his employment on that hunting trip, and that was the first time I had seen his wife. Once or twice she had handled one of Cahuella’s hunting rifles, but with no sign that she had ever touched a weapon before that trip. Cahuella had asked me to give her a few impromptu shooting lessons while we were in-country, which I had, and while she had improved, it was clear that Gitta was never going to be any kind of expert shot. It hardly mattered; she had no interest in hunting and while she had endured the trip with quiet stoicism, she could not share Cahuella’s primal enthusiasm for killing.
Soon even Cahuella realised that he was wasting his time trying to turn Gitta into another hunter. But he still wanted her to know how to use a gun — something smaller now, for the purposes of self-defence.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘You hire people like me so people like Gitta won’t have to worry about their own safety.’
We had been alone at the time, down in one of the empty vivarium chambers. ‘Because I’ve got enemies, Tanner. You’re good, and the men under you are good as well — but they’re not infallible. A single assassin could still break through our defences.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But anyone that good would also be good enough to take out either of you without you even knowing it was about to happen.’
‘Someone as good as you, Tanner?’
I thought about the defences I had arranged around and within the Reptile House. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘They’d need to be a hell of a lot better than me, Cahuella.’
‘And are there people like that out there?’
‘There’s always someone better than you. It’s just a question of whether anyone’s prepared to pay them for their services.’
He rested a hand on one of the empty amphibian cases. ‘Then she needs this more than ever. A chance at self-defence is better than none at all.’
I had to concede there was a kind of logic there. ‘I’ll show her, then… if you insist.’
‘Why are you so reluctant?’
‘Guns are dangerous things.’
Cahuella smiled in the wan yellow light spilling from the tubes set into the empty cases.
‘That’s the idea, I think.’
We began soon after. Gitta was a perfectly willing student, but nowhere near as quick as Amelia. It was nothing to do with her intelligence; just a fundamental deficit in her motor skills; a basic weakness in hand-to-eye coordination which would never have manifested itself had not Cahuella insisted on this tuition. Which was not to say that she was beyond hope, but what Amelia could have mastered in an hour, it took Gitta all day to just stumble through at the most basic level of competence. Had she been a trainee soldier back in my old unit, I would never have been forced through this rigmarole. It would have been someone else’s problem to find a task better suited to her skills — intelligence-gathering, or something.
But Cahuella wanted Gitta to know how to use a gun.
So I followed orders. I had no problem with this. It was up to Cahuella how he used me. And spending time with Gitta was not exactly the most onerous of tasks. Cahuella’s wife was a lovely woman: a striking high-cheekboned beauty of Northern ancestry, lithe and lissom, with a dancer’s musculature. I had never touched her until this shooting lesson, had hardly had good cause to speak to her, though I had fantasised often enough.
Now, whenever I had to straighten her posture by applying gentle pressure to her arm or her shoulders or the small of her back, I felt my heart race ridiculously. When I spoke, I tried to keep my voice as soft and calm as I felt the situation demanded, but to my ears what came out sounded strained and adolescent. If Gitta noticed anything in my behaviour, she gave no sign of it. Her attention was focused tightly on the lesson at hand.
I had installed a radio-frequency field-generator around this part of the terrace which addressed a processor in the anti-flash goggles Gitta wore. It was standard military training equipment; part of the vast cache of stolen or black-market equipment Cahuella had hoarded over the years. Ghosts would appear in the goggles, mapped into Gitta’s field of view as if they were moving around the terrace. Not all of the ghosts would be hostile, but Gitta would have only a fraction of a second to decide for herself who needed shooting.
It was a joke, really. Only a very skilled assassin would stand any chance of getting inside the Reptile House to begin with, and anyone that good would never give Gitta those precious moments to make her mind up.
But Gitta wasn’t doing too badly by her fifth lesson. She was at least pointing and firing the gun at the right targets ninety per cent of the time, a margin of error I could live with for now, hoping that I would never have the misfortune to be the one victim in ten who was not planning to kill her.
But she was still not taking down her targets with any kind of efficiency. We were using live projectile ammo since the beam-weapons we had access to were just too bulky and heavy for self-defence. For the sake of safety, I could have arranged matters so that the gun would only fire when either Gitta or myself was out of the line of fire, not to mention any of Cahuella’s valuable hamadryad statues. But I felt that the instants when the gun was disabled would have rendered the session too inauthentic to be much use. Instead, I’d loaded the gun with smart ammo, each slug holding a buried processor addressed by the same training field which spoke to Gitta’s goggles. The processor controlled tiny spurts of gas which would shove the bullet off-course if the trajectory was deemed dangerous. If the required deflection angle was too sharp, the bullet would self-destruct into a speeding cloud of hot metal vapour — not exactly harmless, but a lot better than a small-calibre slug if it happened to be headed straight for your face.
‘How am I doing?’ Gitta asked, when we had to reload the gun.
‘Your target acquisition’s improving. You still need to aim lower — go for the chest rather than the head.’
‘Why the chest? My husband said you could kill a man with a single shot to the head, Tanner.’
‘I’ve had more practice than you.’
‘But it’s true, though — what they say about you? That when you shot someone, you…’
I finished it for her. ‘Took out specific areas of brain function, yeah. You shouldn’t believe everything they tell you, Gitta. I could probably put a slug into one hemisphere rather than the other, but beyond that…’
‘Still, it isn’t a bad reputation to live with.’
‘I suppose not, no. But that’s all it is.’
‘If it was my husband they were saying that about, he’d milk it for all it was worth.’ She cast a wary eye back to the upper storey of the house. ‘But you always try and play it down. That makes it seem more likely to me, Tanner.’
‘I try and play it down because I don’t want you to think I’m something I’m not.’
She looked at me. ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of that, Tanner. I think I know exactly who you are. A man with a good conscience who happens to work for someone who doesn’t sleep quite so well at night.’
‘My conscience isn’t exactly pristine, believe me.’
‘You should see Cahuella’s.’ She locked eyes with me for a few moments; I broke it and looked down at the gun. Gitta raised her voice an octave. ‘Oh; speak of the devil.’
‘Talking about me again?’ He was stepping onto the terrace from the upper storey of the building. Something glinted in his hand: a glass of pisco sour. ‘Well, I can’t blame you for that, can I? So. How are the lessons coming along?’
‘I think we’re making reasonable progress,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t believe a word he says,’ Gitta said. ‘I’m absymal, and Tanner’s too polite to say so.’