confirm; Chris’ comu positioning system was jammed, as it had been all day, but this was her one chance and her best information. McGregor had to be in this house.
“Why should our luck start now?” Livvy muttered to herself. From the passenger seat, Louie wagged his tail hesitantly.
“Yes, Louie, we’re going in to look for Chris,” she said. “Soon.”
She had an hour before the time she had selected for going in, and while she waited she unpacked and repacked her satchel of Bruno’s gifts, reviewing the use, operation, and position of each one. LLE was even more powerful than she’d imagined but she knew she was going well beyond its legal mandate, both in what she was going to do and how she was going about it. It no longer mattered. Later, when she had time, she’d dwell on the twist LLE gave her philosophical question: did this make her a good cop or a bad one?
Chris had warned her: a private little war. Megan and the Chief had unofficially sanctioned it. Bedford had asked for it. At the moment, fueled by rage over Mickey Bedford’s death and Jesse’s kidnapping, she was looking forward to it. Handy thing, rage.
She was counting on a number of factors to make her effort possible: Chris would be in the underground bunker, safe from her first assault and retaliation from the guards. The element of surprise, and the fact that she would be almost alone, would make it difficult for Bedford’s security to respond effectively. And more importantly, Bedford’s guards wouldn’t be calling in anyone from the public sector because the last thing Bedford wanted was regular Enforcement responding to the breach. She was cool with that; secrecy was part of her mandate, and everyone she met would be his private security, and fair game.
And last but not least, they wouldn’t expect that she could be lead straight to Chris’ location. They wouldn’t expect Louie.
Her hour was up. She got out of the car, Louie following, and hefted her pack onto her shoulder, where it settled securely. It was a cool night with a quarter moon and a slight breeze. The only sounds were from a few mechanicals along the distant arterial roads, the whispery scrunch of her shoes on the sidewalk, the crickets, and Louie’s intermittent excited panting. When she got to a point across the street and far enough from Bedford’s property that she should still be out of range of the acueyes at the gate, she paused and dropped to one knee by Louie’s side.
This part couldn’t be helped. She could only hope that Louie was as smart as she believed he was.
“Louie, gate,” she said, speaking clearly and pointing at the ironwork gates 80 meters ahead. “Gate. Sit. Stay now.”
If Louie was puzzled, he didn’t show it, other than to cock his head to one side and look her in the eyes. He sat silently and watched her walk away.
This part of the city was full of mature trees and some of them, fortunately, were close to Bedford’s perimeter wall and probably cherished by neighbors who didn’t share his paranoia. If Bedford was obeying the strict privacy laws enacted at the beginning of the century, and she was counting on his powerful neighbors to compel him to do so, then he’d have no acueyes overlooking his neighbor’s property. On the other hand, Bruno had assured her that those same neighbors would respect her LLE sleeve insignia when they saw it glowing for their acueyes. They would certainly monitor her intrusion like an owl tracking a mouse, he’d said, but would know better than to interfere. She was LLE.
She crept along the outside of Bedford’s perimeter wall a short distance through the neighbor’s yard and approached the tree she had spotted earlier during her drive-by. Using it would allow her to avoid any early contact with the wall, which was probably touch-sensitive, or at least she had to assume so.
Tonight, getting into her first position would be the last time she would be able to hesitate. Once she left there, she couldn’t stop again until she found her partner. As she climbed up and settled into a good place to sit in the lower branches she thought briefly of Robert Maas, and experienced a bitter aftertaste of vulnerability. If there was after all a perimeter acueye capturing her every move, they were just waiting to find out if she was alone before starting to take shots at her, and she would have no chance at success.
Forcing herself to wait one more minute, she took her first good look at the house. As far as she could see Bedford’s house plans and the security plans for the neighbor’s were both precisely matching the plans she’d gotten from the city’s building permit files. She opened her expandable pack, and while she continued to survey the compound with half her attention, she took out the launcher piece by piece and she assembled it by touch. Now, she heard only the crickets, the soft rustling of the leaves surrounding her, and the incongruous clicks of the launcher pieces snapping together. Other than the guard at the gate, she saw no movement.
When she’d fired off the last Spritzer, she tossed the launcher over the wall into Bedford’s yard and lobed the Basebombs at the windows across the side of the house by hand. They exploded instantly with a louder pop, still quiet enough to keep the noise within the perimeter wall, and sprayed dangerous dissolving liquids over the glass, giving her a choice of entrances. Thirty seconds after landing, the Spritzers began going off with a soft hiss. They were as spectacular as Bruno had promised, sort of a combination of sustained low-key, sizzling fireworks that confounded infrared and motion detectors, and copious thick smoke that not only enclosed the entire two floors of the house, but billowed across the yard with the slight breeze.
It was time to move. She threw her armored tarp over the sharp hazards, tossed her pack after the launcher and jumped, briefly settling on top of the wall. From there, she grasped the lower edge of the tarp hanging inside the wall and swung down into Bedford’s home territory. Her grip on the tarp was enough to let her hang for a second and then she dropped with a soft thump, rolled, and got to her feet in one continuous, unforgiving move.
There was no phalanx of gunmen rushing like apparitions out of the engulfing smoke and the sustained flaring of the Spritzers, so she wouldn’t need to drop her pack, throw hands in the air and pretend she’d made a wrong turn. They hadn’t spotted her approach, and now, the acueyes had to be in a three-way daze. Cloaked in the sensory confusion, she should be essentially invisible.
First Louie. Since she was as blind as they were, it was a matter of vectors of planned movement, using the house for orientation. A 50 meter rush to the house through drifting smoke and the sparkling light show she’d created, then a turn towards the gate, tossing some pure Smokes through the dissolved windows as she picked up speed passing along the side of the house. Her advantage approaching the gate was that she knew where the gatekeeper had been standing. She ran towards that spot out of the smoke, already aiming, and hit him with two duoloads without slowing down. He went down like an axed tree.
Louie was there before her, bouncing on his forefeet with pent-up urgency. The lock plate for the pedestrian gate was conveniently labeled so she hit it with her Masterkey and had the satisfaction of watching Louie wiggle through while it was still opening. With her faceplate down, she couldn’t talk to him without shouting, but he fell in at her side and they ran back together into the smoke and erupting flares towards the house.
It was a strange sensation after so many years doing only investigative work, to have her world narrow down to her weapons and the house, with whatever remaining guards it held, and her firm objective. In Tactical, she’d been part of a team. Tonight, she had Louie.
She wanted no one at her back, so she chose the last set of French doors at the back of the house and paused only long enough on the outside to lean close to Louie’s ear and say distinctly “Find McGregor. Louie, find Chris.” He leapt in over the ruined glass and wood smoothly and disappeared into the smoke-filled room as Livvy scrambled through after him. Immediately, she sidestepped to brace up against the adjacent wall. A small table went over with the loud crash of what was probably a priceless Chinese vase. The smoke still made normal vision impossible so with her back now to the Spritzers, she toggled her faceplate to infrared and looked around. There was Louie, crouching with his head down on the other side of the room just as a human figure appeared at what had to be a door. It was embarrassingly easy to eliminate the man with two Stinger shots but she didn’t delude herself into thinking that they would all be so simple. Quickly groping her way through the room, she used her hips and knees to locate the obstacles so that she could have her hands free for her Stinger. She’d have bruises tomorrow.
