To the side of the road a man stood, visible in silhouette, hipshot, sucking on a vape, tiny clouds escaping his nose and mouth as the desert night sucked the heat from the air. This guy was smaller than Bearded Guy had been. Compact. Wiry. Low-light vision showed his hard hands and knobby, swollen joints. Black hair and a full black beard that fell to his chest. A single tuft of white ran through the beard, at the center of his lower lip. Every bit of skin I could see was tattooed including his face, dark blue teardrops under both eyes like dual fountains. Enemies killed on one cheek, enemies hurt on the other. Jagged dark blue lines rose like lightning from his left eyebrow to his hairline. I had no idea what they meant. Red lines ran along the fingers of his left hand.
A slim foot extended from the Mammoth Tac-V. The rest of her slithered out, and she dropped to the ground, a controlled fall down a meter and a half—slightly less than her own her height—to the stone. She landed like a gymnast, knees bent, arms loose, and stood. She strolled over to the tatted Vaper. She took his pipe, put it to her lips, and puffed several times. His body language suggested that he was pleased. They weren’t wearing comms systems, so I couldn’t listen in on their chatter.
“Tuffs. Can you get a cat in there?”
“Say what?” Jagger asked.
Bugger. The office camera was way back, too far for me to have seen the woman.
“Can you see in there? Make out that woman? The one who just jumped from the troop transport?”
“Got a glimpse. How did you see—?”
“You’ve been with OMW a while,” I interrupted. “Tell me you don’t know your enemies, who, I believe, are these people.” I was being less than subtle when I suggested, “I’m just a junkyard receptionist. They appeared after you got here. They followedyouin.” I pushed a little, a very,verylittle, with my blood. “Youput me in danger.”
“You think they . . .” He stopped. “They followed me,” he agreed easily, because the timeline worked. “I know some of ’em. The guy I took out at the office front airlock was Rikerd Cotter, number three in the Angels. The woman . . .” He went silent.
I watched the woman and the Vaper on camera. There was something personal, intimate, way more than friendly, between the two. Even in the dim light, he appeared to lean into her, to mirror her movements.
I opened a screen to watch Jagger’s face as he watched the couple out front while also skimming through his Morphon. He was looking at photos and documents, his expression faintly perplexed. The set of his jaw said he wasn’t going to tell me whatever he was thinking or looking for.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, agreeing with his thoughts. “I understand. There’re things an enforcer knows and never speaks about. Ever. Military Intel. Unproven intel. Gossip and lies. But . . .”—I let my voice go slow and soft—“youdidbring them here.” Which left off any mention of Harlan, who arrived first, before Jagger, but still. The suggestions were enough and might even be too much if he realized he was being influenced.
Jagger said, “I have a report of a badly-scarred woman who joined the Angels as an Old Lady, six-plus years ago, riding with a newly made-man, the guy with her on-screen, moniker One-Eyed Jack.”
My heart thundered through me. The breath I took hurt. One-Eyed Jack had shot Harlan. His note said so—the note, addressed to me, which he’d written after he sealed himself into the Tesla.
Jagger said, “One-Eyed Jack bears a striking resemblance to—”
He stopped. He was flipping back and forth from picture to picture, the office camera set too far behind him for me to see his pics clearly as tears gathered in my eyes. The tattooed man with the black and white beard had killed Harlan. Myfriend.
Jagger studied several pics, his eyes going back and forth from his Morphon to the screen where the woman and the Vaper stood.
“Yeah . . . Yeah,” he muttered. “I have a feeling that’s a woman who died—officially that is—over seven years ago. Clarisse Warhammer.”
“You mean like, ‘Hello, Clarisse, are the lambs screaming?’” I paraphrased. “‘Pardon me as I have some liver, fava beans, and Chianti?’ From that old movie? And Warhammer? Not a real name.”
“If she’s who I think she is, the names were assigned by the military, and appear on at least one set of her official IDs. She’s real. She’s also listed as presumed dead by the military. And it appears she’s also number two in the Angels. A female made-man, listed in their contacts as CL Warhammer. But. If I’m right, she’s had a lot of nano-plaz work done to restore her features. The woman out front looks like she did before she was wounded.”
Jagger’s statements covered a lot of overlapping, contrary possibilities, things I’d think through later if we survived this. On the office camera, two junkyard cats leaped smoothly to the back of Jagger’s chair and reclined, watching everything he did. Which was weird, but not weirder than anything else that was happening.
On the office screen, the woman gestured to the office in the distance, but spoke too softly to be overheard on the property’s security sensors. One-Eyed Jack, the Vaper, put an arm around her shoulders, a companionable gesture rather than a claiming one. It was odd; women in the OMW and in the Angels tended to be viewed as possessions, not equals. There were exceptions, and the war had changed things. Little Mama and Little Girl had proven that. But we had been the rarities.
“I get that she’s a female made-man. But awomanis number two in the Angels?” I clarified.
“She took that spot two years ago. She fought her way up, taking out a line of made-men in personal combat.”
“Augmented?”
“To hell and back,” Jagger said, his eyes on his Morphon, scanning documents. “Yeah. Here it is. Augmented by the military, trained and used extensively as an assassin, under another name, in another life. When the war ended, she proved too violent and uncontrolled to follow orders, so she was tossed out on her butt, along with thousands of warriors like her. No money, no usable skills, no temperament for civilian life. Instead of trying to integrate as a citizen, she hit the road. Killed three civilians when a mom-and-pop power station refused to provide free power for her stolen vehicle. Military tracked her, found her, and jailed her in a Class Five disciplinary barracks. That was seven years ago. After less than six months, she busted out, killing a number of guards and destroying a significant section of the prison’s physical structure. There was vid of her taking off with several wounded, kidnapped guards. She was so badly injured that they figured she had died of her wounds. But . . .” Jagger went back to skimming photos.
A Class Five disciplinary barracks meant an underground prison with no access to the surface except through a lot of heavily armed guards and sealed off sectors. Escape-proof. I watched the woman move. There was something odd about her weight transfers and muscle shifts, something controlled, utterly self-assured. Like a spider in the center of her web, waiting for prey. She puffed several more times on the Vape and handed it back to One-Eyed.
“One-Eyed Jack bears a striking resemblance to one of the injured, kidnapped, missing prison guards, Jack Seyer. Makes sense. She had to have inside help. But,”—he shook his head, swiping through more pics, putting some up on the screen—“this attack squad has top of the line military equipment.”
He was just now coming to the same possibilities I had. I asked, “Could she have parlayed her position in the Angels to get government contracts? Say, with someone from before her prison days, someone who didn’t disappear, who moved on up in the military or the Gov.? Maybe she used that shared past to blackmail or forge a relationship? Maybe she got in with General Ervin E. McElvey?”
“Aiming to replace the OMW and contract with the military; a sub-rosa agreement. Made while the Angels also forged an agreement with PRC.” He cursed, a single harsh expletive. “Might explain a lot of things.”
