Handsome Rob.
His identity paperwork said Roberto Segura. Six-foot-one. One-ninety-five. Black eyes. Black hair. Hispanic genotype. At least the last five were accurate. And his beloved mother remained at home seventy-five light-years away, so nobody was likely to hear him called by any other name around here.
The doorway he stood in opened up to a dive. One of those bars just this side of being condemned and torn down, except that it somehow kept passing inspections. Rob assumed greased palms somewhere, but didn’t care enough to dig in and find the truth.
He was a spy, not a cop.
Until recently, he’d been a Field Agent for Lincolnshire’s Guardia Civil Interior, The Service, as it was known. Today, he was working as a training officer, of sorts.
The Service had been running a mission where the parameters had gone a little sideways, but only after they’d set it up and put everyone into motion in the field. It was supposed to have been a simple thing. A courier going in to pick up a packet from a double agent.
Sometimes, you just develop that ninth sense, the one that tells you someone has a high-powered rifle with a telescopic, gyro-stabilized, ballistic computer attached, waiting for you to step into the killing zone so they can maintain plausible deniability later when a literal bolt from the blue strikes you down for having made one or more of the gods angry.
With Rob, everyone always presumed it would be one of the male gods, jealous that Handsome Rob had seduced some particularly beautiful woman they’d had their eyes on, but hadn’t opened enough time on the calendar to get to her yet.
Earlier that day, back at Headquarters, the Director had been listening to an update from his Chief of Operations, the folks known around the building as the Cowboys on Three, and had caught a hint of something everybody else might have missed.
But Miguel Cabrill had already proven that he was more than just a long-term political appointee warming a seat. The man had spent sixteen years reading ops reports and interviewing agents after missions. He had learned a few things.
He had stopped Rudolfo Alcazar, Dolf, cold and picked up a phone.
One thing had led to another. And another.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) Rob had been in the headquarters building just a few floors below Miguel, doing his weekly qualifying with pistols.
So now he was walking through the entryway of this dive, studying the lowlifes and braggarts around him.
The first thing that struck him as “off” about the situation was that far more people were here than should have been in a joint like this on a weekday afternoon. It wasn’t even happy hour.
The economy around Puerto Peñasco was too good right now for that many men to be out of work, unless they were seasonal carpenters, and even those folks tended to take gigs on the fishing boats down in the marina in the winter.
Yeah, Rob could see why Miguel had taken one look at this shitshow and upgraded things from junior field agent to the Service’s current golden boy. At least golden until he screwed up and turned into just another tool in the chest.
But this room felt like it needed more than just a regular field agent making a drop.
So Miguel had called in that favorite boy and put Handsome Rob on the case, in spite of the fact that he was now an assassin.
Of course, assassination was supposed to be a most methodical thing. Study your opponent for weeks to learn her patterns and blind spots. Ripple outwards at least two layers to understand who else might be involved at any given moment and how to use them as stepping stones if you needed to make contact.
Maybe you used poison in their favorite coffee mug. Perhaps it was a bomb, if you wanted to make a public statement. Or that theoretical high-powered rifle with a telescopic, gyro-stabilized, ballistic computer attached, if being struck down by the gods was on someone’s calendar for the day.
Hard faces scowled up at him as he walked by tables, an obvious outsider dressed a little too nice for this place. He did wear worn dungarees and a rain shell like theirs, but not old and worn. No oil stains or threaded collars.
It probably would have been less of a problem if the punks in here had all been dressed in off-the-rack suits badly tailored. That would at least have meant he was dealing with semi-professional gangsters. Men and women who lived by a code and understood that there were rules to the game.
These men were just mean drunks. Rugby players a little too deep into their pints, and grumbling at the pretty boy walking by to take a spot at the far end of the bar.
Like maybe the bastard didn’t understand that he’d have to get through every single one of them to make it back to the door if trouble erupted.
Rob smiled cheerfully at the nearest one until the fellow went back to his mug. Being at this end of the bar meant that nobody was going to be behind him if he had to open fire with the class four pulse pistol tucked under his rain shell. That he’d be able to pull the two stun grenades from his left-hand pocket and toss them into the room as party favors if anybody pissed him off.
Handsome Rob, Assassin.
“Beer,” Rob said to the hard-faced bartender with the buzzed hair and scarred ears as the man meandered down. “Something brown or porter.”
He pulled a handful of coins from a pocket and sat them on the bar in front of him. More than enough for an afternoon of drinking, and maybe a statement to everyone in here that they’d have to put up with him that long.
Or a reasonable tip for the house if he ended up getting rude on the punks in here.
Rob watched the man pour and slice the mug like the man’s life depended on the precision of his cut. Rob didn’t figure they’d drop a mickey finn into his drink without any provocation, but he had also taken a few things on the drive over here. They’d mostly neutralize anything Rob managed to get in his system from this place. Either way, he’d have one hell of an optical migraine later or have to take some antidotes that always made him fart.
But Miguel had asked him to come in on his day off, his training day, and run a mission with no recon, no prep work. Nothing but a decade of service and the sort of luck and experience that had gotten him adopted into the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang.
It was a shame Roxy, aka Mrs. Jones, hadn’t been in town. She might have gone through a room like this and set a new high score.
Rob was comfortable being in the top five percent for gunmen available. To date, he had killed exactly one person, and that was before he’d become a certified assassin. She had been a women Roxy had already shot hard enough to bleed the villainess out in another five minutes had Rob ignored her, but he’d been that pissed.
Assassination sometimes meant destroyed organizations, rather than lives.
Rob was rather good at that part.
His pint arrived and Rob handed the man two coins instead of one. The afternoon already looked like it might get ugly.
The grumbling had largely subsided to the point Rob could ignore it if he chose. He did. Anyone coming over to deliver a threat or a punch was going to be looking up Rob’s pistol before he got that close anyway.
The identity he was carrying right now included a license to carry a concealed hand cannon. It even said Roberto Segura. Not that anyone would be able to figure out who he really was if someone managed to run his identity numbers into the system downtown.
The Service had doctored him up a close-enough persona on the off chance that he had to do something here on Ramsey. Shooting some punk in a bar like this would get him arrested, after which Dolf or someone would come down to the station and have a friendly conversation with someone else about the Official Secrets Act.
Rob might not even miss his dinner reservations. Pity he didn’t have a date, but the place was the hottest spot in town and he’d rather go by himself, since he was single right now.
Still, Rob let a sense of complete invulnerability waft over the men around him like pheromones, as a way to deflect them onto weaker prey.
That was all it was right now. Middle school hijinks by punks that had never gotten past that stage of development. Listening to the same music as when they were fourteen. Eating the same food. Wearing the same clothes.
Being the same snotnosed punks they had been then.
Conversation died off. Heads turned. She did that to a room.
Rob glanced left to make sure nobody was sneaking up on that side before turning right to study her walking the rest of the way into the main part of the bar.
She’d dyed her hair since the last time he’d seen her.
Strawberry blond now, still long and with bangs that looked just a little ragged. Probably on purpose, knowing Mac.
She was approaching fifty-two right now, but the way she was dressed and made up suggested twenty-two. Rougher dungarees than his, worn with age. Tucked in, button up dress shirt in peach. Brown leather jacket with a rough surface. Probably Service issued, so it would stop knives and small pulse pistols in a place like this.
Her hair was tied up and tucked through the back of a cap with a long brim that shaded those gorgeous eyes and made her seem elusive. Maybe even vulnerable.
Rob wondered how many men had fallen for that.
She reached the edge of the open space and seemed to notice all the man staring at her like hungry hyenas. She smiled left to right like a spotlight, blinding every one of them with lust and inferiority in equal amounts, barely pausing as she recognized him at the far end of the space, minding his own business.
Handsome Rob had absolutely no business being in this room. Not in the middle of a hand-off supposedly happening shortly. This was not his part of town, and Mac knew many of the places he tended to hang out.
They hadn’t dated, but had gotten as close as a twenty-eight-year-old man and a fifty-one-year-old woman might get while falling short of anything physical. You gotta keep hearts and emotions off the table in this business. Just two agents employed by the Service and living triple lives.
He was just a backup that hopefully Mac didn’t end up needing.
Esmeralda Mac MacTavish. She’d joined the Service before he’d been born, working in Data Analysis for nearly thirty years until Miguel had asked her to pretend to be a field agent long enough to save Handsome Rob’s life.
Afterward, she had decided she liked the lifestyle, and took a lateral that was a demotion in status and became a nerdy field agent.
Because there were times when you needed a nerd, even if she still looked like the fashion model she’d been when she was eighteen.
Criminal accountants reacted better to pretty women than bad boys, frequently.
And that was her mission.
Miguel had just felt iffy enough about the setup to send in a killer, in case things got out of hand.
Looking around the room, Rob had already started a countdown timer in his head to the first person he had to shoot. Bartender was high on that list, only because the bruiser looked like the kind of fellow who kept a bungstarter behind the bar and knew how to use it in a scrum.
Collateral damage if that happened, but he’d have brought it on himself by drawing a weapon when Rob was holding a class four pulse pistol, and we can’t any of us be friends at that point.
Mac turned, having spotted her lunch date. Or whatever cover she was using.
Again, Rob had spent thirty minutes reviewing case files instead of three weeks. He was here as an insurance policy and nothing else.
One that looked like it might be paying off shortly.
Mac moved to the booth where a middle-aged accountant stood out like a lily in a blackberry bramble. She even leaned in and kissed the man lightly on the lips before sitting across from him. It put her back to the door, but she knew she had coverage there. Otherwise, she might have slipped in next to the accountant.
Place like this didn’t have a waitress, exactly. In the movies, you always had that pretty bar maid who was an upcoming actress working on the breakout role.
Rob had spent too much time with Jorge and his fictional film companies that occasionally made movies, so he understood things like this from a Hollywood perspective as well as a Service one.
Doughy, middle-aged ex-biker dude with complicated tattoos wandered over there with a menu and took drink orders, probably trying not to drool.
Fifty-two-year-old Mac was a babe and three quarters. Twenty-two-year-old version probably should have been a proscribed weapon. Accountant certainly looked like a man who knew he had won the lottery.
Shorter than her six-even, though Rob had only ever seen the man seated. Probably weighed less than her one-fifty, but she’d been hitting the gym and running with the boys more, trying to get up to one-sixty of muscle. He was half bald and looked like a stiff breeze might carry him away.
It was an acceptable cover, as those things went. Wealthy, middle-aged male. Young, beautiful, desperate female who finds a sugar daddy.
If only you stupid bastards knew.
They made small talk while Rob watched out of the corner of his eye, most of his concentration on the punks to see which ones were made men and which were just hangers on looking for a gig.
Someone must have made a quiet comm call, because trouble walked into the bar about the time the waiter delivered coffee.
Five of them.
Señior Guadarrama himself and four punks, him in a custom suit, double-breasted. Muted green in a way that only worked if you had that many dinars to drop on it. Fedora on his head at a jaunty angle. Topcoat worn like a cape on his shoulders. Mid-forties from the skin around the neck.
Rob couldn’t see the man’s shoes from here, but he was willing to bet they cost more than most of the punks in here earned on a good month.
The room fell so silent that Rob didn’t feel out of character turning to look.
The bar had the feeling of a spectacle about it.
To give her credit, Mac didn’t break character when everything fell apart. She had a pocket stunner tucked in somewhere, but it wouldn’t do much good against pretty boss and his four dwarves.
Or a roomful of wannabe killers.
Thirty minutes of prep, when he should have had two months. It had been enough to know that Señior Guadarrama over there was high on a bunch of different lists, police as well as intelligence work.
Nobody had ever been able to prove anything enough to even bring charges. The man had his hands in all sorts of crime and trouble, but Rob was a spy, not a cop. The Service didn’t get involved with things like that.
Or hadn’t, until something came up that suggested the man had started running guns for a Salonnian criminal Syndicate. Once it crossed interstellar borders, the Service took notice.
Miguel had sent Rob in as an alternative to having a Heavy Rescue Assault Team standing by on the roof. They probably were as well, but he was in the room, and they were all at least thirty seconds from responding to anything when trouble erupted.
That might be the difference between life and death right now.
“Hello, Tomasito,” Guadarrama boomed over the room. “Introduce me to your pretty, new girlfriend.”
The man slipped his coat off and handed it and the hat to two of his punks as a show of dominance that probably impressed the hyenas.
To Rob, it just took two men out of commission for however many seconds elapsed between the start of trouble and the time they managed to get a gun out.
Rob leaned himself onto the bar so he could watch in a disinterested, I walked into the wrong bar today kind of way. A couple of punks at tables nearby looked at him askance, but his hands were visible and the look on his face was petite boredom.
Guadarrama sat next to Mac instead of the Accountant, boxing her in. It also provided her two hundred and fifty pounds of insulation if things got messy in the next ten seconds.
Rob let a single twinkle into his eyes as he calibrated movement vectors.
One of his instructors had impressed an important lesson on Rob, even before Jorge and his gang refined it and hammered it home. Dress nice, look professional, and have a plan to kill every single person in the room. You never know when you’ll need it.
All eyes were on the performance over there, as they should be. Again, Rob checked his blind spot on the left, but that was why he had chosen this corner in the first place.
He was behind everyone else right now, unless and until someone turned around to look at him.
Whoopsie.
Accountant had gone pale. Mac was concerned, but still came off as a barely-out-of-school kid in over her head.
Rob knew better. He’d kicked in the door on a group of professional mercenary killers with the woman and learned a new trick from her along the way.
“Tomasito, I have heard terrible rumors about you,” Guadarrama announced, like some bizarre kabuki with dialogue added.
Four punks with only six hands free lurked around the booth in menacing ways. Left-handed, Rob didn’t think he could get them all with a stun grenade. Not from here, anyway.
Still, this was exactly the situation that had gotten Rob called on duty today. Miguel was still the sneakiest man in The Service, if push came to shove.
Rob sat his beer down and sighed audibly, just in case anybody was paying too close attention to him.
“There are stories going around, Tomasito,” Guadarrama continued theatrically. “Suggestions that you are being blackmailed by my enemies. That maybe you have already sold me out.”
The man fell silent and Rob slipped a hand into his jacket pocket. Up until those words, this might have all been a terrible misunderstanding that some fast talking and hand-waving could defuse.
But the accountant, Tomasito, had a packet on him right now. A small chip filled with all sorts of useful evidence that the man was indeed being blackmailed for. Except that instead of buying his life from another gang, Tomasito was investing in witness protection by the Ramsey government. A new life on another world, with enough of the money he’d stashed over the years to live comfortably while waiting for that high-powered rifle with a telescopic, gyro-stabilized, ballistic computer attached to come through a window some morning.
The packet was supposed to have ended up in Mac’s possession, perhaps during a hug at the end of the meal. Perhaps slipped across while holding hands.
They’d never believe the woman was merely an innocent girlfriend if they were about to make a spectacle of their accountant.
Hell, the only other supposedly innocent witness in here was that guy at the far end of the bar…
Rob could almost smell that realization as it hit the men around him. Heads perked up, almost like a colony of prairie dogs sensing trouble. Heads started to turn this way like a tide coming in.
Rob found the arming switch on the first grenade and pulled the nasty, gray egg from his pocket. Always get it clear before arming. Just in case you drop it. Words to live by.
Rob shifted his weight around like he was stretching and pushed the button. He chucked the thing sideways along the bottom of the bar, hoping it would roll and not hit any legs.
That rolling and bouncing deadly egg made one hell of an ominous racket that caused heads to rotate right back away from him, so Rob slipped a hand under his jacket and grabbed the pistol.
Pulse pistol doesn’t kill as well as a slugthrower, but it was a lot less noisy. Tended to burn and bruise painfully when done right, rather than punch holes in people, so you have a lower death rate when you shot. Useful, if you wanted prisoners but wanted them down, bleeding and scorched. And a charge cartridge held a lot more shots than a slugthrower.
Rob slid backwards off his stool and drew the weapon.
One of the nearby punks got a growl on his face and started to stand up, as if to say Going somewhere?
The grenade went off.
Mayhem erupted.
And Hell followed with him…
Rob shot the guy in the right shoulder. This close it blew him over backwards and took him out of the fight.
Second shot looked random, until you realized which one of Señior Guadarrama’s goons went down, staggering sideways into the only other one with his hands free.
Rob pivoted and shot the bartender on general principle, following the shot by vaulting over the bar in case incoming fire was about to demand the right of way.
Screams were starting to wind themselves up, like a tornado siren waking from that long, winter slumber to greet the first twister of spring.
Rob stayed low and tossed the other grenade back over the bar, set for impact detonation.
If you were smart, you’d stay down at this point.
Hammer of light. Thunder of sound.
Rob rose and shot anything that moved.
Señior Guadarrama was just now falling out of the booth from where Mac had stunned him. He was probably the safest, as he’d be assured of waking up, unless someone else in here had it in for him.
Rob shot a fifth and sixth man, both leg shots that just left a person with a limp for a few months. He wasn’t trying to maim or kill anyone today.
Unless someone demanded it.
The smart bunch of the punks in the room indeed stayed down at this point. A few flipped over tables, but he and Mac had the room between them, so you couldn’t get good cover.
And Rob was outnumbered about twenty-to-one, even with Mac protecting the accountant.
Just for the hell of it, Rob pulled out his identity card with his left hand as he shot number seven.
“Policia!” he yelled with a voice his first drill sergeant had taught him. It echoed off the walls in here like the voice of doom. “You are all under arrest.”
He didn’t figure many would fall for it, but it added another level of confusion. Especially if the Service needed to make the accountant disappear after this.
And then somebody blew the front door off the hinges with a shaped charge and heavily-armored trouble stormed the room firing.
Rob put his pistol and faux badge on the bar and his hands in the air, smiling.
Mac stayed down, but the only woman in here wasn’t likely to get shot accidentally.
A Heavy Rescue Assault Team generally had better manners than that.
The door behind him burst open as more cops came through the kitchen and pointed lots and lots and lots of guns at anybody still moving.
Weren’t that many, even after fifteen seconds.
But Rob hadn’t been playing around.
And Hell rode with him...
One of the Troopers walked over and kept the big gun pointed at him.
“Segura,” Rob said simply, not moving, hands up and a grim smile on his face.
The trooper nodded.
“Status?” the woman asked him.
Rob hadn’t realized it was a woman under all that armor, but it really didn’t matter. She’d saved his ass when he saved Mac’s.
“Mostly stun trauma,” Rob replied. “Bartender and four others with pulse wounds and will need your medics. Don’t think we’re in triage mode.”
“Understood, sir,” she said and vaulted the bar to inspect the semi-comatose bartender. Impressive in all that armor.
Rob waited for all the bad guys to be lined up on one side of the bar by two dozen angry men and women with guns. Cops finally showed up about fifteen minutes later. Or maybe that was when the people in charge outside finally let any through the barricades.
Rob recognized Ahmed, Detective Sergeant Ahmed McIntyre al-Inverness. They were drinking buddies, of a sort, and Ahmed knew what Rob and Mac did for a living.
The rest of the cops apparently got to stay outside in the drizzle.
“Do I wanna know?” Ahmed asked as he got close enough.
Rob and Mac were seated at a table he’d turned back upright after the room got largely emptied. The accountant had disappeared into protective custody, along with Señior Guadarrama and a few of his goons. Everyone else was out on the street, waiting their turn in the black maria.
“Probably not,” Mac spoke up now, having been largely silent. “And congrats on the promotion.”
Ahmed beamed. Detective Sergeant. Rewarded for helping Mac and Rob on an old case.
“What happened?” Ahmed asked anyway, gesturing around him as forensics folks did their thing.
Rob just smiled and pointed for the man to sit with them. Him and Mac had beers in front of them, but Ahmed was on duty.
“Pretty sure it will leak to the press later as a gangland hit gone terribly wrong,” Rob said. “Or maybe Puerto Peñasco Police, working with planetary authorities, broke up a drug smuggling ring. Haven’t talked to my boss yet, so I don’t know what cover story will be used.”
“You two scare me,” Ahmed admitted.
He was Rob’s weight, four inches taller, so skinny. Not bad looking for a cop, even if he had to shave twice a day.
But he was a cop.
Rob and Mac were spies.
Rob shrugged. He started to say something, but his handcomm chirped.
He looked at the screen, but all it said was M.
No name attached, but the man didn’t need one.
M was actually how his predecessor had tended to sign everything. Miles Cavendish. Former Director of Lincolnshire’s Guardia Civil Interior.
Rob had always wondered if Miguel Cabrill had gotten the job entirely on his first initial, after that legend had finally retired.
“Hey, boss,” Rob said vaguely as he answered.
“Thank you,” Miguel said simply. “Now, if you and Mac can be spared, I have a need. You’ll have to move quickly, but something else has come up.”
“We’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Rob said.
The line went dead instantly.
“Boss wants us for a post-mortem,” Rob said to Mac. He turned to Ahmed. “Someone will be in touch with the appropriate stories. I suggest you let them conduct the press interview with you and maybe the mayor standing close beside them so you look good on the tele tonight.”
Mac nodded and they both rose.
Ahmed shook his head.
“Seriously, you two frighten me.”