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Back at the office, Roland debriefed Lucia and Mindy on the operation. Lucia was less than thrilled with Roland’s report. He did not believe in lying, but he had to admit he was sorely tempted to gloss over the part where the gorgeous loan shark disrobed and attempted to ply him with delights of a carnal nature.
“I will put the bitch on like a snow boot, Roland,” Lucia bristled.
“I told her that. Verbatim.” He was supremely happy he had done so. Lucia knew that Roland did not lie, and his declaration made Lucia smile, which is ninety percent of the reason Roland got out of bed in the morning.
“Did she believe you?” Lucia wanted to stay mad, but the situation was so ridiculous she couldn’t hold onto her irritation.
“I think so,” he shrugged. “She was just scared. She didn’t want me to hurt her, so she tried to make me like her. When it became clear I wasn’t going to bust up her place, she was fine.”
“So she put her clothes back on and gave you the intel you needed?”
Roland froze. “Not in that exact order.”
Lucia rolled her eyes, “She wasn’t all that scared, then. You are seriously helpless when it comes to women, goofball. You are lucky I like you.”
“I tell myself that very thing every day.”
“You two make me want to throw up,” Mindy added helpfully. Then she addressed Lucia, “Want me to kill this Sid bitch, boss?”
“No, Mindy. But thank you for offering.”
“I have no idea what chicks see in you, Roland. You have to be the ugliest guy I’ve ever met,” Mindy slapped his arm and winced as her fingers went numb.
“I don’t know what they see in you, either. You have to be the craziest bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah. But I’m pretty.”
“Pretty annoying.”
“Children!” Lucia interrupted them, “Let’s table the issue of Roland’s newfound sexual charisma—”
Mindy faked a retch at this, which made Lucia chuckle.
“—and focus on what Sid has told us already.”
“It’s apparently a Brokerage thing,” Roland was all too happy to move the conversation in a more productive direction. “They are up to their usual gig. Trying to get other people to handle their wet work. This time they want the Lodge to come after me.”
Mindy tilted her head, “That’s not a terrible plan, if you think about it. If it looks like Roland is stomping hunters, they will eventually put him on the Hit List. You’re tough and all, Roland, but if every Hunter in New Boston comes after you...” She made a face, “I don’t think you can take all of ‘em.”
Roland nodded, “Of course I can’t. Several hundred pro bounty hunters and assassins? They’d drag me down on numbers alone.”
“Is this ‘Hit List’ like Weregild for mercenaries?” Lucia asked.
“Not exactly,” Mindy explained. “Weregild is an official blood debt. It’s all about honor and brotherhood and macho bullshit like that. Hunters and assassins aren’t really big on the honor stuff. The Hit List is more of an unofficial call-out. When someone runs afoul of the Lodges, everybody keeps an eye out for the guy and kills him if they see him. We have a fund that pays a bonus to whoever gets the guy. It’s really just a way of keeping a whole ‘don’t fuck with the Lodges’ vibe current and viable.”
Lucia raised her eyebrows, “Wow. You guys have issues.”
“But I’m pretty!” Mindy beamed a vapid smile back.
“Yes Mindy,” Lucia sighed, “you are a pretty princess. But pretty doesn’t fix our problems. What we need is an angle.”
“I’m out, then,” the blond shrugged. “I only do curves.”
“Well,” Roland interjected, “I think we may have foiled that part of the plan entirely accidentally. I haven’t killed either of the guys who’ve come after me.”
Lucia nodded, “This is true, and the grievance has been filed, so tthe Lodge now knows that they are being set up. You were there, Mindy. Any chance they’ll give up the client?”
Mindy snorted, “Not a chance. First, they just won’t do it. Terrible policy. Second, even if they did, there is no way this guy is dumb enough to have used any traceable info in the postings.”
“Especially if this is a Brokerage thing,” Roland agreed. “It’ll be buried so deep we’ll never find anything useful.”
“So that leaves us with Manny and Sid as our best bet.” Lucia did not sound happy about it, “Two folks I do not trust at all.”
“But they’re all we got right now, Boss” Mindy supplied with an unhelpful shrug.
“Okay,” Lucia breathed, “Let’s keep him working the client. No other hunters are going to take the bounty now that the word is out, so the client has to keep Manny in the loop or abandon this tack.”
“I would abandon it, personally,” Roland mused out loud. “Without the chance to turn the Lodge against me, it’s just a waste of time and money.”
Mindy scoffed, “But the money and time are already spent, so he may stick with it for the hell of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like something The Brokerage would do,” Roland argued. “They rarely act in a petty or emotional manner. Everything is an actuarial table with them.”
Lucia’s voice was soft and distant as her thoughts swam with possible answers, “What if they are using somebody? Somebody who hates you, Roland. They can make this play through some patsy and keep it running as long as they want.”
Roland nodded, “And keep us chasing a dead end while they keep doing what they are really planning!”
“Shit,” Mindy gasped, “This is all a goddamn distraction, isn’t it? We are hunting a snipe while they have some other scheme going? Fucking clever little shits, ain’t they?”
Roland had to admit that this whole thing felt like a big con. Using low-rent hunters, trying to get the Lodge to come after him, and burying the client in layers of secrecy were all a great way to keep his attention away from whatever else might go on behind the scenes. He could not deny the cleverness of it. “We don’t know that for sure, but it certainly has that feel, doesn’t it?”
“The only reason it’s not working is because so few hunters took the bait and you haven’t been killing them,” Lucia opined. She gave herself a sarcastic golf clap, “Glad to see my influence has been beneficial, all the same.”
“He’s growing as a person,” Mindy snarked before Roland could say it, “we know.”
Lucia stayed on topic, “We need Manny or Sid to draw the client out more. How can we do that?”
“Unfortunately, we really can’t.” Roland and Lucia looked askance at Mindy when she said this. The little blond killer threw up her hands, “It just isn’t done. He’s gone to a lot of effort to stay anonymous, there is no way he is going to just agree to show up and meet some no-name street muscle or a loan shark.” She smirked like a teenager, “No matter how naked she agrees to get.”
“Options, then,” Roland barked at Mindy, “If I was paying you to hunt this guy down, how would you do it?”
The assassin stopped and thought hard for a minute, “It’s got to be this Sid character. We followed the courier to the money already. That’s Sid. This guy will be running the transactions through her to stay anonymous. He was smart enough to hide the nature of the deal from her as well. I think we will need to stage a bit of a show, here.”
“What the fuck does that mean” Roland hated the theater.
“Sid is holding the money. What if Manny, finding out that the job he took was a set-up, went after Sid? Then Sid could cancel the transaction with cause, and she’d have to return the money she’s holding in escrow. Sid will want no record of the cash ever going through her because, you know, Roland’s all scary and shit. So, she will have to send it as hard creds to either the client or one of his proxies. That will get us a big step closer than we’ve been getting, anyway.”
“Good idea,” Roland harrumphed, “We need to wrap this loose end up, because now I’m really goddamn nervous about whatever it is they are trying to distract me from.”
Mindy smiled, “We’ll need Manny to make a little noise over at the counting house. Something believable. You know, the sort of quality drama that will travel through the rumor mills.”
“You think he can manage it?” Lucia asked with a hint of incredulity.
Mindy’s smile fell away as she remembered her conversation with the young man. “I don’t think it will be a problem,” Mindy’s voice had lost its irreverent jocularity. “I’m pretty sure he was one of the Red Hats.” She shuddered, “The boy has seen and done some shit, you can just tell.”
Roland’s face drew tight and even Lucia paused a long moment.
“What the hell is a Red Hat doing here?” Roland asked, face wrinkling in confusion as to how he should feel. He had more experience than anyone in the room with that particular organization. None of it good.
“I don’t think he’s one anymore. I think he’s running or hiding or both. He’s scared, I can tell that much.”
“How sure are you, Mindy? Did he say anything to you?” Lucia wanted answers, her voice was pitched slightly higher than normal, a trace of fear betraying her intense apprehension with this revelation.
“We were talking about Roland, actually,” she gestured to the big cyborg, “and I realized that something about the jolly black giant here freaked him out.”
She paused, trying to broach this with some tact. Mindy and tact had never really become all that well acquainted, however. “He let it slip that perhaps you and he have a lot of the same...” she faltered, “... issues.”
Lucia looked confused, but Roland caught on right away and said it out loud, “You think Manny has woken up on top of a few corpses too, huh?”
“He’s the right age, right type of personality. If they got him young, they’d have had him running ops long before he understood what he was doing.”
Lucia gasped, “Holy shit. Our mole is a goddamn terrorist?”
“Cut him some slack, Lucia,” Roland’s voice was tight, but not ungentle, “I’m technically a war criminal. Mindy is a murderer.”
“But...” Lucia stammered, as her augmented mind processed the new information too quickly and with too many unpleasant results. As powerful as her brain was, her fear and anxiety were as magnified as the rest of her faculties, thus both had to be managed with care. The sudden realization their ranks were now occupied by a member of the most reviled terror cell in the solar system started a spiral of catastrophic potentiality that accelerated faster than her normally unfailing mental discipline could recover from. Her jaw flexed and her eyes grew wide as she imagined the thousands of potential conclusions this new information might engender.
It was Mindy who calmed her down, “He would have been a child, Lucia. Probably an orphan. They love that because it means they get to prey on his fear and anger to trick him into believing things that aren’t true. It would start with small stuff to desensitize him and then get gradually bigger until he was as vicious a zealot as the rest of them.”
She took Lucia’s shoulders in her tiny hands, “But he ran, Boss. Bailed. He didn't want to be that sort of thing, so there is a chance he’s not lost forever.”
“You figure he’s hiding from them?” Roland asked out loud, trying to keep the thread going.
“Pretty sure. He’s scared as hell. Scared of them, and he’s scared of you,” she pointed at Roland.
“Boss,” she continued, “this can be a good thing. He will be an excellent infiltrator, well trained in weapons and demo stuff. He’ll know how to navigate black markets and smuggling operations. He can think and fight at the same time, or he would not have lived this long, and he’d have never gotten away.”
What Mindy was doing here was deliberate. She was feeding Lucia’s brain data it could use to build positive outcomes. When Lucia could wrestle the massive bandwidth of her brain into manufacturing positive scenarios, it was usually enough to keep her anxiety from blossoming into a full-blown panic attack. “How can we use him?”
Roland watched Lucia’s jaw loosen, and the tension left her back and shoulders. Her breathing slowed, and her eyes refocused. Her forehead wore a thin sheen of sweat, but she nodded briskly to Mindy, “It’s okay. I’m okay. Just... that was a bit much to dump on me.” She still looked strained. Roland could tell she was still in the process of beating her panic into submission, “And yeah, this is probably not the best group of people to get all judge-y without more info.”
“I’ll feel him out,” Mindy offered helpfully. “But I seriously think he’s running from them.”
“The Red Hats do not deal nicely with folks who reject their ways,” Roland concurred.
Lucia spoke through gritted teeth, “Let’s bring him in and sort him out. Where is he now?”
A few brisk comm conversations and twenty minutes later, Manny was ringing the door chime at the office. The door opened to the nervous-looking young man, shuffling from foot to foot and wearing an expression of acute discomfort.
Lucia looked carefully at him, studying his face and mannerisms as if there would be some external sign giving him away as a fanatical terrorist. There was none, which frustrated her for reasons that did not make her feel good about herself. Life would be much easier if evil had a dress code. But it did not, and all she saw was a boy barely twenty-four years old, looking for all intents and purposes like he was about to be given detention for throwing spitballs.
Roland started the conversation. “All right Manuel, the job is getting a little more complicated. We need you to pretend to hit a counting house to give us a back door to the clients’ accounts.”
Manny looked very confused, “How do I ‘pretend’ to hit a counting house? Wave a gun at it and shout 'pew pew?’”
Mindy chuckled, and Roland scowled, “The owner is in on it. We are going to force him to take his money back as cash, and for that we need it to look like the broker is in trouble with you.”
“Ah,” Manny nodded, “I see.”
When he did not continue, Lucia jumped in, “Can you handle that?”
Manuel shrugged, “Sure. I guess. As long as everybody is in on it.”
Instead of dancing around the issue, Mindy just blurted out, “Were you a Red hat?”
Manny’s face blanched ghost-white pale, and he looked like he was going to run.
“God damn it, Mindy!” Roland growled. “And they say I’m insensitive?” He turned to the terrified man, “It’s all right, kid. There ain’t no saints in this room. If you were a Red Hat, then you’re in good company. But I’m going to need to know what the story is.”
Manuel responded, and he no longer sounded like a frightened young man, “I am not one of those animals!”
“But you were, once.” Roland’s voice was even, calm. “You ran?”
Manny nodded, “I didn’t know. I didn’t understand what we were really doing.” He looked Roland in the eye. It was the look of a peer, “they tricked me, made me do things, you know what I mean?”
Mindy and Lucia knew to keep quiet. This was not something they would ever truly understand.
But Roland understood, “You're damn right I do. They told you that you were a soldier. A hero. They turned you into a weapon and then they set you loose on folks who had nothing to do with your war.”
“I am a murderer,” Manuel whispered, but without stammering. It was a thing he had accepted about himself long ago. He hated it, but it was truth, and lying would not bring back any of the dead. “Or at least an accessory to it, anyway. I was a scout. I found ways into places we did not belong, and I told them where the guns were, or the money, or where to put the bombs to do the most damage.” His face torqued into a sour grin, “I think they suspected I was soft, because they never let me set the bombs or go on the missions myself. If I had known all along what they were really doing, I’d have ran long before. But I was too good.” He laughed an ugly laugh, “I can get into anywhere. I am good with computers and locks. People like and trust me. No one could keep me out of a place if I wanted to get into it. So they kept telling me how great I was and I kept getting into secure places for them.”
The trio were all listening with rapt attention now, and Manny kept talking as if no one was there at all, “Soon, I realized that the buildings they were blowing up were not empty, or not really filled with ‘fascist soldiers of the occupation.’”
Manny stopped, and the next sentence had to be forced past a throat choked with self-hate, “The last one was a hospital. I had my suspicions, naturally, but these were the people who had raised me. They wouldn’t lie to me, right? They promised me the hospital was a front for the occupiers. They said it was a laboratory where they made biological weapons. I should have never believed them.”
He stopped, and Roland helped him, “But you wanted to believe them. They were your family after all.”
Manny nodded, “I got in pretty damn easily, which was the first sign that this was no secret lab. I am ashamed to admit that even after seeing the children’s wing I continued with my scouting. It would be just like the Occupiers to hide their evil behind children, right?”
Roland grumbled his affirmative, “They always say shit like that.”
“And people like me believe them,” Manny agreed. “I returned, gave my report, and then I told my superiors I did not believe there was any laboratory there. Stupid me, I told them I was conflicted over the potential harm to the children, too. I recommended that they abort. They told me I was a fool, and that I was soft.”
Roland smiled a sad smile, “A true soldier for freedom would not have those reservations. A true brother would want to kill the children of the enemy, to sap their strength and will.”
Manuel returned the smile, his tinged with anger, “You’ve heard it all before, huh?”
“I was a soldier before you were born, kid. I’ve heard worse.”
“They tried to kill me the next night. I think they knew I was lost to them.”
“They were right,” Roland said, “You were tainted goods at that point. Once you start asking hard questions, you are no use to them anymore.”
“So now I am here,” Manny finished with a shrug, “I need money and I have skills. If you can stomach working with a former Red Hat, I will complete the job. You can count on me.”
“I won’t preach at you, kid. You’ve already figured out that I ain’t going to heaven when I die, and Mindy here has a luxury suite in hell booked for herself. If you really were tricked into scouting for the Hats, then I’ll take you at your word.” Roland held out a giant hand, “Welcome to the team, Manny.”
Manuel reached out with tentative fingers to grasp as much of the giant hand as he could, and Roland engulfed the smaller man’s hand with his own. He gave just enough pressure to send the right message and added, “But if I find out you are lying? I’ll kill you in ways that would make demons weep.”
Manuel Richardson had stared the devil in the face more than once in his short life, and he did not flinch at Roland’s threat. He responded with a flat and emotionless: “I believe you, Mr. Tankowicz.”