Sister Time-Callys War 2 (3 page)

There are definitely worse things.
She snagged a glass from a tray carried by a balding, forty-something man in an ill-fitting tux.
Including being stuck in a dead-end job like waiting on these
bastards.
She jumped as a hand groped her butt and glanced back to see a man who looked like a seventeen-year-old geek in a tuxedo disappearing into the crowd with his matronly wife on his arm.
Case
in point.

A slim socialite with the tight face characteristic of good old-fashioned plastic surgery caught her arm.

Cally suppressed her reflexes, turning a blinding but polite smile on the woman.

"Gail? Is that
you
? Why the rumors said you weren't due back for at least another two weeks. It looks
fabulous
." The woman chattered at her, not pausing to wait for a response, "Where
did
you get the full set, you naughty girl, you. Oh, gawd, and the boobs look
great
! A bit over the top, perhaps, but you always were the drama queen, weren't you."

"It's so good to see you!" Cally piped in a bright, cheerful generic Chicago accent, noting from the woman's eyes that she was probably too blitzed to even notice that Cally wasn't this "Gail," whoever she was.

"God, I almost didn't recognize you, but I said from across the room,
no
two girls could walk like that.

Blonde really suits you. A bit dated, perhaps." She plumped her own fashionably chestnut curls into place. "But I always say you should wear what looks good on
you
and to hell with little things like fashion.

I'm never daring enough to do it, though. Anyway, you look
marvelous
! Oh, is that Lucienne Taylor-Jones? I just
must
speak to her! Kiss kiss, must run!" The woman weaved off in the direction of an eighteen year old looking, red silk-clad grande dame on the arm of an apparently sixteen year old uniformed man with a pair of stars on his collar.

Cally grinned privately at her "friend's" back.
There's always one. But it makes it easier to get to the
door.

Another female hand, this one with an electric blue and white French manicure, rested lightly on her arm as she wove towards the door at an oblique angle. "Love the dress, darling. It reminds me of something from Giori's Fall collection. Did you by any chance notice where they've hidden the Ladies'?"

Cally hadn't, but she had memorized the floorplan of strategic parts of the hotel and business center.

"Right over there behind the Birdwell sculpture." She pointed across the room to a gaudy confection of galplas and cobalt blue glass, formed to resemble yards of lace draped over a Shaker chair.

"Ah, I see the sign now. Good eye for art, by the way, and thank you." The woman left her, hurrying as much as the crowd would permit.

As she passed a waitress in a tuxedo that was just a hair too tight for her hips, Cally drained her champagne and added the empty glass to the woman's tray. Another tray she passed had Oysters Rockefeller, and mission or no mission, she couldn't resist taking two. Three would have been conspicuous. Not that she wasn't anyway. She could feel the male eyes on—well, on her everything, really. Rounded butts were apparently the thing, courtesy of some starlet or other. And the Captain she'd been impersonating when the slab went away had also been, not quite wasp-waisted, but close enough, In the little black dress she'd checked out from Wardrobe, it showed.
Goddamn conspicuous slab job.

She simpered past some guy with a Kirk Douglas chin and a martini, who moved just enough to be standing way too close, resisting the impulse to spike him in the instep with her heel. It didn't help that her last stolen weekend with Stewart—she still didn't understand why he insisted on her using a name that had been an alias in the first place and wasn't even his current one—had been damned near six months ago. Between that and the overcharged female juv hormones, which must have been somebody's idea of a bad joke

She, she was getting downright cranky.
Well, a secret marriage
sounded
romantic at the time.

She carefully didn't sigh with relief when she finally reached the door. She nodded to the door attendant as she slid past a couple who were presenting their invitations, and ducked out of the building through a fire exit. Holding her PDA up to her ear, she pretended to be dictating a voicemail to a friend, rounding a corner before telling her buckley to page the team.

A few moments later, an antique limousine pulled up and the rear door opened. She climbed in, gratefully slipping off the evil high heels and massaging her sore feet. The glass between the driver's seat and the passenger compartment lowered slowly. A man in a green and black chauffer's uniform that contrasted nicely with his properly spiked red hair glanced up into the rear view mirror and met her eyes.

The slight bulge in his cheek and the faint but unmistakable whif of Red Man tobacco was out of character for a chauffer, but didn't surprise her in the least.

The two other men in the car couldn't have looked more different if they'd tried. Harrison Schmidt was slightly too handsome, on his worst day, to be a field agent. If he wore the right clothes to make his triangular frame look paunchy, and with the right makeup, he could look nondescript enough to get by in a support role. They tried to keep him from having to do so, since if he lost concentration his native dramatic flair tended to get in the way. He simply refused to alter the windswept, golden-brown hair that could have made a holo-drama hero die from envy. But his talents for obtaining or making virtually anything they needed, regardless of the circumstances, made him a valuable addition to the team.

"Oh, don't tell me you went in with your hair like that!" their fixer said.

"What's wrong with my hair?" Cally put a hand to her hair and looked around at the interior of the car trying to find a makeup mirror.

"Nothing, if you like split ends. And when you wash it you really need to work through a little mousse while it's still wet. And a hot oil deep conditioning treatment once a month. My hairdresser has an herbal shine rinse that works wonders. You need it, hon. And if you can possibly avoid it, no more color changes for you until you can let it grow out enough to trim the damaged hair off." He flicked a nearly invisible speck of dust off his immaculate, charcoal-gray sweater.

"This
is
my natural color. Well, now, anyway," she said.

"No, dear, it's been bleached and dyed
back
to your natural color. Not the same at all. When you were first back from sabbatical it was all fresh and not that bad, but the years of chemicals have taken a toll.

Honey, you have
got
to start taking better care of it if you want to be able to pass at parties like this one."

Tommy Sunday coughed into his hand, looking at Harrison.

"Dude, you're blind. Cally, ignore him. You look gorgeous as always, okay?" he said.

Tommy Sunday was a large man. He seemed to crowd the back of the limousine all by himself. His hair was so dark it was practically black. In an earlier time, he wouldn't have looked out of place among a pro-football team's defensive line. In fact, his own father had played. It was part of the reason he was such an avid baseball fan. Oh, he'd long since made peace with his father's memory, but the love of baseball had stuck. Cally was sure that he would be eager to get back to base as quickly as possible tonight, entirely out of a dedication to professional efficiency, and having nothing to do with game three of the World Series being due to start within the next half hour. Personally, she didn't think the game had been the same since they let Larry Kruetz get away with betting on baseball. Sure, the only incidents they could prove were on games in the other league, but she suspected the Commissioner's leniency had more to do with the Rintar Group owning a majority stake in the St. Paul Mavericks.

"Now, if we go ahead and get the post op review out of the way, we can all get home quicker.

Everything went okay, right?"

"I got the keys, if that's what you mean. And a line on another job. Hey, where's my stuff?" Cally said.

"What? Run that job bit by me again." Papa O'Neal said, glancing sharply at her in the rear-view mirror

"Your other granddaughter sends her love." Cally lied. She hadn't, actually, but she would have, of course, if she had had more time. Or at least the Indowy social facsimile thereof. She suppressed a slight grimace. In many ways it was harder to deal with the Indowy-raised humans than it was with any of the other races of aliens. You expected the Galactics to be alien. And you could always tell the Indowy-raised at a glance. They either wore robes like Michelle's, or street clothes of a particular shade of green that no other Human would ever wear. She was surprised they hadn't developed a fabric with active chlorophyll.

"Michelle? Michelle's there?" He started to turn his head and turned it back as he felt the car begin to drift.

"Was. She seems to have figured out the trick of getting places without crossing the space in between,"

Cally answered drily. "She left before I did. Vanished, actually. Either a very good cloak of some sort or teleported."

"You're joking," Tommy said, shaking his head. "Tell me you're joking."

"About my sister?" Cally asked. "Or her vanishing. Neither. That girl has some answers to cough up."

"What did she want that was worth breaking cover after this long?" Papa asked. He looked surprised and puzzled. No wonder. This was the first personal contact any of them had had from Michelle since they "died." Cally couldn't sort the rest of the jumble of emotions out from his face. Hell, she was having trouble sorting out her own.

"She wants to hire us. I don't know what for. I'm supposed to talk to her again tomorrow night. Did you know she's apparently rich as Croesus?"

"What, she's talking about
personally
hiring us? To hell with that. How is she?" Grandpa asked.

"She's . . . very Indowy. But seems to be healthy and everything. Could use some extra food in my opinion. She was in Mentat's robes, like always." They had gotten a hologram a year through Indowy sources until the split seven years ago. Since then, it was more like a hologram every two or three years, whenever the O'Neal Bane Sidhe—and she still winced at the organization's new name—could get an operative close enough, on some other business, to sneak a picture. It didn't really matter. They could just replay the old holograms. She never changed.

"My stuff?" she prompted Harrison again.

"All the gear's in the trunk," Tommy said.

"But you got my shoes out, right?" She dangled the high heels from their straps. Her look spoke volumes.

"Uh . . ." Tommy hesitated. His experience of women frustrated with painful shoes had taught him that he usually wanted to be far, far away. Women did best with cute shoes when they only wore them long enough take them off—or at least didn't walk on them much.

"Sorry, darling. Forgot. I always find the grav belt a tad awkward." Harrison looked like he really was sorry.

"You wouldn't have had to wear them in the first place if you'd gone out the same way you went in,"

Papa O'Neal grumped.

"I told you, Grandpa, I flew the friggin' thing way up to the top of the damned building, and I didn't trust it not to give out then. No way was I gonna do it twice if I had a choice. What kind of moron thought it was a good idea to fly around hanging from some stupid belt?" She examined the shimmering pink nails of one hand. "Besides, you know I hate heights."

"The only fatalities flying the belt have been either from sabotage or a direct hit in combat." Her grandfather shrugged, apparently wise enough not to say anything more on the subject.

Cally regarded it as a mark of extreme dedication to her job that she'd let them talk her into this mission at all. She thought of the nightmare flight of death and shuddered. Never again. And it was high time she thought about something, anything else.

"Excuse me, y'all. I've got to check in or Morgan and Sinda will pout at me." She looked down at her PDA to dial, but the phone on the other end was already ringing, reminding her that she really needed to turn the buckley's intelligence emulation level down before it crashed itself.

"Buckley, you didn't call directly, did you?" she asked.

"What do you think I am, stupid? No, when they catch us all and kill us, it won't be my fault. Can I give you a rundown of our current tactical vulnerabilities?"

"Shut up, buckley."

"Ri—" It cut off as hundreds of miles away a phone was answered.

"Hello?" A soft female voice answered. Cally still marveled that the voice didn't sound even a little bit harried.

"Hi Shari. I'm done for the evening and thought I'd call in. How are the girls doing?"

"Sinda's out like a light. She really wore herself out in Aunt Margret's dance class. Morgan's almost finished with her homework. I'll get her."

Seven minutes later, the limo turned into the parking lot of a vintage car dealership, pulling around back to park. Its four occupants piled out and into the building, taking the hidden elevator in the back of the broom closet down to the tunnel. In the small antechamber, they carefully hung their dress clothes on the cleaning rack and racked their shoes and equipment. Cleaning was no longer a euphemism for precautionary destruction—not always. Things tended to be figleafed with a new look and reused as much as possible. It wasn't terribly safe, but then it wasn't a safe business. She tucked the small evening bag inside a pocket of a larger purse that had already been prepped.

Cally and Harrison got the makeup table to themselves for a few minutes while Tommy ran the standard post op checks, downloads, and scrubs on the surveillance equipment and Papa dictated the post op report into his PDA. By the time they were ready for their own turn at the table, she and Harrison were through. She smiled gratefully as he ushered her over to a stool and went to work on her neck and shoulders. Certified massage therapist was not on the list of desirable secondary skills for operational team members. It should've been, and Cally was personally grateful for the luck of the draw that had put Harrison available for field assignment just when Grandpa was filling the vacancies on the team left by her sabbatical and Jay's timely demise.