Handsome Rob had carefully made three distinct reservations at the hotel while he’d been in orbit. Money had been transferred to three accounts, as though everyone here wanted to get away from each other on the ground, cooped up for too long on a small ship.
Not that they were a team of foreign agents quietly invading Borlait as part of the game to track down Hummingbird.
Mac was staying upstairs in one of the nicer suites. Not quite penthouse, but spendy and overlarge for a single woman traveling. She didn’t really have a legend on this mission, so was playing it open enough to distract everyone from the other two.
Alicia had a simple room like a traveler on vacation. She would handle electronic security, both offense and defense, for the three of them. As well as tracking down anybody Rob could find.
Without access to the local network of agents or stringers, he was flying mostly in the dark, but that wasn’t really anything new. Miguel frequently used him in situations where all spy craft had fallen apart and you were reduced to guessing and blunt force.
What the boss occasionally called kinetic solutions. The kind of thing where you rattled a box to see what fell out or who responded. While keeping yourself alive in the process.
The term was also used for assassinations occasionally, but those were exceptionally rare in the business, for all that he had such a job title. You were far better off recruiting agents and breaking in someplace to read files when nobody was looking.
It was only when somebody went rogue that you needed the specialized skills. The killers.
Weren’t many like him. Wasn’t much need for them, which was good.
Carlota Rojas was off the reservation in bad ways, ways that might call such players down on her as she was fleeing across the desert and leaving a trail of dust behind her.
As, hopefully, were the folks chasing her.
Rob had gone back and forth on how he should present for this mission, and finally settled on just being the pilot. That kept him farthest out of the light, while Mac could keep eyes on Carlota when they spotted her. Not that it took much with a woman that beautiful.
He walked across the hotel lobby by himself, having arrived last on purpose. Alicia already owned their reservation system and was working outwards to see what other resources she could tap.
The woman hated being underestimated. This was the same Alicia who had printed her resume on Dillon’s personal printer, in his office, at headquarters. The head of the Service’s Research and Development Inspectorate, Dillon Vergrue, who had convinced the people heading out to kick in Alicia’s door to knock instead.
Then he had gone and hired her.
Rob was turning her into another field agent. Of sorts. He didn’t really understand computers, not like she did. And now he didn’t have to, as he had a galaxy-class expert handy to do things and explain shit to him.
“Reservation for Segura,” he told the young man behind the counter.
“Here you go,” the man replied as they handled everything and Roberto Segura got checked in.
It was a little weird, traveling under…well, it wasn’t his real name, but it was the one he’d been assigned as a courier, and kept all the way up to the present. A lot of folks called him Handsome Rob, but that was Jorge’s fault.
He nodded, collected his things, and headed up to the room. Most of his gear would remain with the ship until he had a better idea what he would need, then he’d get a storage space in town. Alicia needed to identify which ones they could trust with the arsenal of weapons and toys he had brought from Ramsey.
Upstairs, Rob deposited his things, then took the stairs up a few stories of the tower to Alicia’s room. Mac had come down as well, so they settled in.
Alicia had a device sitting on the coffee table and blinking every three seconds. He’d seen similar ones, but most jammers like that were the size of a cigarillo lighter that would fit inside your fist. Why did you need one that might fit in a 350ml can?
Unless you wanted to disrupt anybody within maybe forty yards.
“So, I have a rough start,” Alicia said as Rob settled across from her on the couch with Mac leaned against him.
Alicia had crossed her legs and still somehow fit in a comfortable chair, with a clamshell, traveling computer on her lap, connected to the wall mount rather than relying on radio packets. More stable signal, less likely to be sniffed and maybe hacked.
That much, he understood.
“According to the schedule Carlota suggested when she sent the first packet, she should have mailed Chapter Three by now,” Alicia continued. “It ought to have arrived at the local publisher earlier this week. They are here in Bennan.”
“Here,” Rob grunted with a smile.
“Twenty-eight million inhabitants in the local jurisdiction,” Alicia shrugged. “Why isn’t she going somewhere else each time? We’d never find her.”
“The same reason she didn’t just mail the completed manuscript to everyone and watch things catch fire,” Mac spoke up, in her role as Carlota’s stunt double. Or something. “This is a game, and she has to show them she’s better than they are by giving them a chance to stop her. In their failure, she wins.”
“And dies,” Rob said. “I still don’t think any of you have mentally gotten to the point where the finished manuscript is done and ready to be published. Sure, you win, but the agencies aren’t going to stop at that point and go back to their locker rooms, just because the time-keeper whistled the end of the game.”
“They’ll keep coming after us forever,” Mac nodded, still half in the mindset of that other woman. “We need to die, and make it look believable.”
“And public,” he added. “There must be proof that you died.”
“They don’t have my physical records,” Mac said. “According to Carlota, she destroyed those.”
“So a female of the right general shape, damaged in death enough that the face is unrecognizable,” Rob nodded, watching the two women blink and flinch a little, but they weren’t on as personal of terms with death as he was. “I wonder if she has one already, or will need to get such a candidate when she gets closer.”
“Has?” Alicia asked.
“We’re in a big city,” Rob shrugged. “Folks die of a variety of things. The city will have a morgue, and you have a lot of open space on this world to use as a potter’s field. Borlait isn’t completely empty, once you get more than fifty miles from Bennan. It just feels that way because population density falls off to almost nothing. Almost.”
“So we need to figure out how she fakes her death?” Mac asked.
“Do you want to die, Carlota?” he asked the woman leaned against him to steal his heat, then turned to include Alicia in his gaze. “All this for that singular blaze of glory? Or did you want to be able to stand off to one side watching and laughing quietly as they poke at the remains of the poor soul they think is you?”
“They don’t get to win,” Mac growled at him. “Not like that.”
“There you go,” he nodded. “We need to find the local publisher office or her literary agent, whoever will be easier to break into, so I can see what new things she’s included, like additional clues. Then we need to find out how she plans to die.”
“So we can help kill her for good?” Alicia asked.
“So we can offer her asylum if she wants it,” he countered. “Everybody else will want her dead. Even if she is, somebody might recognize her later. She’ll need help to properly vanish.”
“I thought you people were experts at assuming new identities,” Alicia said. “That’s what all the cowboys are always saying to try to impress me.”
“Those require a professional depth of detail in various systems to look real,” he said. “You two understand better than I do how many places you might pull tidbits from. What happens if you only find a reference in one place?”
“Looks hinky,” Mac nodded. “Which causes folks like us to start digging.”
“Exactly,” he smiled. “So you need someone with government-level powers and money to really put details in a variety of semi-random systems. Credit reports. Rental history. Old traffic tickets. Various social network accounts. Yearbooks. Not many people live such mundane and boring lives that they don’t show up in those places, and they leave traces elsewhere.”
“So how would you do it?” Mac asked.
She and Alicia had both been in cryptography, which was a highly specialized space filled with mathematics. About as pure and clean as you could get. And as far from getting blood all over your hands as possible and still be in the same building.
“The Service regularly opens new accounts for folks,” he grinned. “Starts by registering a birth officially, then put the paperwork in the drawer for several years. Goes back later and insert schooling and vaccination records. Slowly build things up by just leaving messiness. Family. Friends. Cousins. Whatever. Eventually, the records age up to be the same as someone being recruited, and you can swap them in, minus all the things that might let an enemy agent know any sort of truth about them.”
“You sound like an expert,” Mac observed.
“I wasn’t born as Roberto Segura,” he replied with a grim smile. “That came much later. Usually with couriers that they expect to have a long career with the Service.”
“What about Jorge?” Mac asked.
“That’s his real name, as far as I know,” Rob said. “He was once a serious thespian doing dramatic work. Then that one screwball comedy to pay some bills and he was suddenly typecast and famous. However, instead of railing against it and fighting to get back to the serious stuff, he just started making low-budget action comedies that took advantage of his reputation and made him filthy, stinking rich. After a while, he got so famous for that phase of his career that he could do things for the Service and nobody would ever believe that the man was really a spy. Look at some of the crazy shit he got me into, after all.”
“I still think a lot of that stuff was made up,” Alicia interjected.
“Worse,” Rob turned to her and smiled. “We had to leave out some of the crazier bits from the official report because Miguel would never believe it.”
“Such as?”
“We really did recruit a group of mercenary soldiers to attack that one pirate base,” he said soberly. “They thought that they were making a movie, right up until five minutes before we dropped when Jorge told them the truth and started handing out real weapons. Mrs. Jones led a team of killers across the surface of a small, atmosphere-free moon, with live firepower. And she got the high score. Longbow, of all people, had the second most kills that day.”
Both women kind of sat there stunned.
Every once in a while, the truth was bigger than anybody would believe of any video fantasy.
“Alicia, find me morgues and other places where we might find or hide a body,” he instructed the woman.
“Hide?”
“You haven’t gotten that far ahead in your thinking as Carlota,” he said. “I’m betting she hasn’t, either. Maybe we can find her and give her an opportunity to save her own life. If not, we can be sitting close by like a spider when she finally figures it out and starts to run.”
“Okay,” Alicia replied quietly. “What else?”
“Get me the publisher and the agent,” he said. “I’ll handle the breaking and entering.”
“What about me?” Mac asked.
“We don’t know what she looks like, beyond a few, basic statistics,” Rob grinned. “I’m willing to bet that others are in the same boat. You pretend to be rich, semi-famous, and interesting. I mean more than usual. Let’s see if any enemy agents start sniffing around and we can blow their covers. Miguel sent me here primarily to damage other agencies. Losing their people because someone got arrested or got their face on the morning newssheet works in our favor.”
Mac grinned at him. She was already being Carlota in her head. He could see the woman becoming something of a stunt double for the woman, like Roxy had secretly been for Mrs. Jones in the old days.
He was, after all, here to create chaos. What better way to do it?