Chapter #7Prelude to a Stakeout--3 by: Seuzz   You close your eyes and put the card to your forehead. "Antonio Muniz," you say, and toss the card to Joe, who throws it onto a small pile with two others. "Andrew Cox," you say of the next one, and it becomes the base card in a new pile. "Terry Kipper." There are already three of those.
"Seven operatives," Joe observes when you're done sorting them. "Would the other five be on assignment?"
"No, they've all been in and out of Diana over the past month," you say. "They've just been using more than one decks of cards."
You fan Muniz's pile between your palms and absorb into your "inner constellation" of personas the mental imago they've picked up. Most of the imago dump is redundant—each card having independently acted on him as he held it—and the result is sketchy and fragmentary, but it's enough to give you a vague sense of the man. You inhale and exhale deeply, then evaporate the cards in the "pocket incinerator" you designed early during your apprenticeship with Nash Carnes. "They have a private comm network," you call over to Hal, who's huddled in a far corner of this, one of his half-dozen "underground" apartments. "If I got you one of their cells, do you think you could get into the network?"
"Easily," he replies, not tearing his eyes away from the screen of his own cell. "Do they ever use them to talk to these things?" He taps the half-disassembled "Mavis" unit that you stole on your first infiltration.
"Dunno, maybe I can find out from these." You reach for another clutch of cards, those belonging to Darryl Stanfill.
"Because if they do, I could—" Hal's voice fades as you let Stanfill's gossamer-like presence drape over you and drift into you. Do I ever use my cell to program a Mavis? you ask yourself. Answer unclear. Hal's voice briefly resumes "—the packet to—" before fading again as you pick up Cox's cards. Yes, they do wire their phones to a Mavis, but how? That answer isn't in these fragments. Hal is still talking as you pick up Kipper's cards. Ah, he and Liu ran a wire into a Mavis the very day he touched these cards. Process is fragmentary, though. You pick up Liu's cards, and those fill in the holes.
"—map of their inner network," Hal is saying. "So—"
He breaks off as you tug the ancient iPhone from his hand and scroll around until you find the app you want. You dig through a nearby box of cords, wires, and power outlets, looking for a— "Alright, I give up, Hal. How do you want to connect your phone to the Mavis?"
"Oh, you just need—" His fingers instantly close around one cord that looks exactly like all the others.
You make a face as you plug one end into Hal's phone and the other into the Diana device. The app you chose launches a sign-in screen, and you give it back to him. "Since that's not one of their phones, I won't take it any further, but that's what they use when downloading tats remotely from the Mavis to the library at Diana."
"Brilliant," says Hal. "I don't mean their system, they might as well not have security if they're going to do it this way. But—" His fingers fly over the screen of his phone.
Joe, who's been listening, catches your eye as Hal falls silent. "You decided what you're going to tell Steve about—?"
But then Hal interrupts with a shout of delight. "This machine's got a tat design already in it!" he shouts. He grabs up his electronic pad and swaps it for the phone at the end of the cord. "If I can pull it off and get a look at the sigils— These things are made for spoofing, and if I can get a bit of code into this tat, and this tat into their library—" His voice trails off again as he bends over the pad.
"Have you decided what you're going to tell Steve about this other disguise artist they picked up?" Joe asks when it appears Hal has lapsed into deep concentration again.
"I'll tell him what I told you," you reply. "And he'll have an idea of how to break it to Malaika."
You get your chance to share that news when Steve—having been picked up at the airport by Frank—shows up an hour later. "So I hear we hit the jackpot," Patterson says after he's settled in. "You scored a copy of their boss."
"And I can get updates on him pretty regularly too, I think. He's a party-hearty type, and his taste in girls is pretty predictable." You talk a little about Julian Dey, the head of Project Diana. "We can get into his Diana account too, of course. The asshole never changes his password. But Hal wants to get in through the cracks before we try that, in case they've got alarms that go off if we don't use a specific location or device to get in."
Hal only gives Patterson a cursory nod of acknowledgement as your supervisor settles next to the Mavis unit. "And this is one of the machines they use?" he asks.
"A portable version. And it sounds like Hal thinks it can use it to get us into their system," you say. Hal, being utterly absorbed in his electronic pad, doesn't pick up on the opening you gave him. "We're well ahead of schedule on getting what we need."
"Does that include having copies of their operatives?"
"Mm, that might take a little longer," you confess, "since they're rotating in and out of jobs, and several of them are currently overseas. But with access to Dey—and the internal systems—we should be able to track them, and then I can get to them." You pause. "I should talk to Malaika at some point."
"It's that important? What's about?"
"They caught one of us a couple of years ago. A Stellae. And they killed her."
* * * * *
That gets everyone's attention, except for Hal, who is lost in his own little world, and you have to call him out of it. "Her name was Minnie Fierro," you say after Steve and Frank have settled in for what promises to be a fairly intense debriefing. "Joe says he never heard of her. Have any of you?"
It's a pro forma question. If Joe doesn't know, Frank wouldn't either, since he and Joe have been joined at the hip since they were young. Nor would Steve, since he joined the Stellae about the time you did. Hal—when you prod him—also disclaims any knowledge of the name.
"It was about six or seven years ago that they caught her," you say. "All this is coming out of Julian Dey's head, by the way. She was a disguise artist, and if she wasn't a Stellae she was using techniques we've never run into before." You describe them as best you can manage, using Dey's own incomplete knowledge. "She couldn't change her imago like I could, but she had a technique that she called 'glamour'. It required some props, and she had to touch herself up a little, but she could use it to fool anyone almost as completely as I can, at least as far as appearances go."
"What kind of props?" Patterson asks.
"Junk," you say. "Anything that vaguely resembled some attribute of the target. Like, give her a blonde fright wig and a good look at Joe—she needed to see the people she was impersonating—and she could fool us into thinking she was him. It was only an illusion, though, and she couldn't fool a sense of touch."
"Which would limit her ability to mimic me," Joe chuckles softly.
"And she also couldn't vary her height or mass appreciably. So she couldn’t have imitated you," you tell Patterson. "But it was enough that was able to get past some of Dey's own people three times and carry out an assassination right under their noses."
"An assassination?" Frank asks. "So what makes you think she was one of us?"
"Maybe she was a conjuror with a new trick," Hal suggests.
You're surprised that he was paying attention, for his gaze is still bent intently on the pad of his phone. "Maybe," you agree. "But she had Dey convinced that she was a Stellae, and she even threatened him with us when they started torturing her for her secrets, said that we'd avenge her. That's why I'm wondering if she—" You draw a deep breath before continuing. "If maybe she was someone who went retrograde."
"Luccio's the last one I know of to go retrograde," Frank says, and Joe nods. "Before that I think you have to go back to Reyes in the nineteenth century."
"Could she have been with the Sages or the Akshardham?" Patterson asks.
"The Akshardham at least would have told us about her existence," Joe says. "If she was one of theirs."
"And she was Western, at least in appearance," you add. "The Sages tend to keep to the Middle Kingdom and its sphere."
"And they'd tell us if one of theirs went retrograde," Frank says. "It's too dangerous for all of us if someone starts running backwards."
"That means she might be Sulva, who never got found," you say, and Joe nods along, for he's the one who made the tentative diagnosis. "That is, if she's not just a conjuror."
"And she's dead," Patterson says after everyone has meditated on this a bit. "Then we can search Diana's files for more info on her, but it doesn't change the mission. I'll set up a conference call with Malaika tonight," he says to you. "And you can tell all this to her then."  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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