Undercurrents (22 page)

She snapped her head forward, and her skull struck the interrogator’s nose so hard that Polian heard a crack like a snapped chicken bone.

The interrogator staggered back, hand up to stanch the blood gushing down across his lips and chin.

She stared at him, eyes narrowed. “How ’bout that? Already you’re not enjoying this night.”

Polian stepped alongside the interrogator. He passed the man the hand towel with which he had been dabbing his jaw. Then he peered, wide-eyed, at the man’s swelling nose, and whistled. “That’s gonna leave a mark!”

The interrogator glared at Polian across the wadded towel as he pressed it to his nose and a bright red stain blossomed across the fabric.

Polian raised his eyebrows. “Mind if I chat with her while you fix that?”

He removed his Tressen jacket, folded it, then laid it on the table. Then he stood, hands on knees, at a safe distance from the woman and smiled at her. “Me? I’m not like the gentleman you just sucker punched. I
am
the bad cop. Very bad. I don’t want to make this interview pleasant. I want to hurt you. Like you’ve hurt so many fine soldiers.”

She shook her head. “Baby-killers aren’t fine soldiers. The only thing I’ve ever hurt is your rotten system.”

It was, Polian thought, a genuinely felt, if futile, posture. Zealots actually took pride in enduring pain for a cause. He needed to change her attitude.

The interrogator stepped forward, his nose now bandaged. Arms outstretched, he rammed the bloody towel that he had used to contain his nosebleed into her mouth until she gagged. “These walls are thick. But not thick enough to muffle the screaming you’re going to do. I’m not going to play good cop anymore, Colonel. We’ll move quickly through the preparatory stages and get right to the really horrifying stuff.”

“ ’Ite me, ah’hole.”

Polian walked to the table and flicked on the hologen that lay alongside the electrical console. He let the recording of her first session run until the moment when she said, “You bet your ass. Senior special-operations case officer.” Then he paused the recording so that her image hung in the air in front of her, her lips parted as she prepared to reveal a lifetime of secrets that would humiliate her nation.

She stared, and her eyes widened.

Polian smiled at her and pointed at the image. “You have no memory of this at all, do you? You’ve hurt my cause over the years, Colonel. I’ll concede you that. But this confession holo will hurt your cause worse. Far worse. Your epitaph won’t be heroine. It will be traitor.”

For the first time, confusion then fear sparked in the woman’s eyes.

Polian smiled more broadly. It was one thing to endure pain for a cause. Quite another to suffer it for betraying one. Stripped of pride in her own heroism, she would crumble quickly. She would talk, then she would plead, weeping, for them to let her shame die with her. Then she would die.

He turned to the interrogator and nodded. “Let’s get started.”

Forty-six

I tugged Alia behind a building across the street from the clinic where Kit was being held. Then I adjusted my snoops for the available light and peered around the building’s corner.

Alia whispered, “What do you see?”

I saw a white building gingerbreaded with arched windows and parapets. “He wasn’t kidding. It is a castle.”

“Of course. Where else would they hold a princess?”

I adjusted the snoops’ magnification. “One Interior Police staff car and two covered lorries. They’re just sitting in front of the clinic at the curb. They’re seventy-five yards away from us. Twenty yards in front of the building.”

“More guards? Then they know we’re here!”

I shook my head, and the image blurred for an instant. “The doctor said the guards he’s seen since the argument have all been Yavi. These guys are ferrents.”

The image steadied as one of the clinic’s front doors opened and two broad-shouldered bullet heads in civilian clothes, right hands inside their jackets, trotted down the front steps toward the Interior Police vehicles.

The staff car’s door opened, and a man in a brown trenchcoat and slouch hat stepped out and toward the Yavi guards.

I whispered, “My guess is we just walked in on round two of the turf battle over the prisoner.”

The man in the trenchcoat and the two Yavi met at the curb. He held out a paper, then pointed at it, then at the clinic.

One Yavi shook his head, while the ferrent waved his arms. Their voices echoed off the stone buildings.

Alia said, “They sound mad.”

A second ferrent stepped out of the staff car. Then the tailgates of the two lorries banged down, and two squads of uniformed ferrent riflemen, like the checkpoint guard who had passed us through, clambered out.

A third Yavi appeared at the top of the entrance steps. A short-barreled Yavi needle gun with a drum magazine dangled by its sling from his right shoulder.

“Things are warming up.”

“Are they going to fight?”

I shrugged and slid off the snoops to adjust the sensitivity. “Maybe. At the least they’re gonna argue.”

Alia whispered, “This is perfect!”

“Huh?”

“Pyt says the best time to attack is when the enemy is distracted.”

“Well, in this case Pyt just may be wrong.”

Alia sniffed. “What kind of hero
are
you?”

I slid the snoops over her eyes, thumbed the autofocus, then pushed her head out around the building’s corner. “The kind who can count! How many do you see?”

Alia pointed her finger in the air. “One. Two. Three—”

I snatched the snoops back and stared down at her. “Twenty-nine! Counting the Yavi.”

She rolled her eyes and pointed to the side of the building. “You don’t
storm
the castle, of course! The doctor said there’s a side door. I saw explosives in your bag. Blow it open.”

I did have door bores with me, and the Tressens didn’t have much in the way of remote alarm systems. But I shook my head. “Even if I circled behind those other buildings, I’d finally have to cross a hundred yards of open, floodlit ground. That’s suicide.”

In the shadows, Alia crossed her arms and snorted. “Some hero!”

“Stop that!” I drew my bush knife and waved it. “I can’t just wave my magic sword and make—”

Bam!

It was more a crackle than an explosion. The clinic lights flickered, something else popped, then the building and grounds were plunged into total blackness.

Forty-seven

Polian shuffled forward, arms extended, in the suddenly pitch-black room. He stubbed his toe and fell. “What the hell did you do?”

The interrogator’s disembodied voice echoed in the darkness. “I told you there could be glitches when we powered up! It’s just a fuse or something!”

Polian heard the echoing footfalls of running feet on floor tile, and the voices of his men. “We’re under attack!”

Pop
-
pop
-
pop
.

A needler set for three-round burst.

Someone screamed.

“Cease fire! Cease fucking fire! Whoever that was, you almost hit me!”

“Lock the place down!”

Polian screamed into the darkness, loud enough that his men would hear him. He should have issued snoopers and just let the hospital staff be suspicious. “Stop it! Stop it, all of you! We’re not under attack! It’s a damn blown fuse! Stop locking things down! Go find a way to get the power back on!”

The interrogator’s voice sounded in the dark. “Polian?”

“What?”

“Do your men have any idea how to restore power?”

“They’re soldiers, not electricians. What about the hospital staff?”

“Who knows? This culture is new to electricity. They’ve got a rotten power grid. They don’t even have backup power in a
hospital
.”

“I don’t choose our allies.”

“Look, I think I can get the lights back. The electrical closet’s just down the corridor. But I’ll need an extra pair of hands.”

“Hold on.” Polian crawled on his hands and knees until he touched the metal leg of the chair into which the woman was taped. He pulled himself upright until he felt her head, limp and slumped forward. The first jolt hadn’t knocked out only the lights. She was going nowhere.

This was, indeed, a minor glitch. It would remain minor as long as the lights were restored before some nervous idiot shot some other nervous idiot in a friendly fire incident.

Polian said to the interrogator, “Meet you at the door. Then we’ll feel our way. Keep close to the wall or some fool will shoot us both.”

One minute later, he and the interrogator stepped out into the pitch-black corridor. Polian barked his shin against the door guard’s desk and swore. He felt across the empty desk and chair. The guard was gone.

Polian laid his hand on the interrogator’s chest in the blackness and stopped him. “Wait!” The woman was unattended in the interview room. Polian fished the room’s key from his pocket, felt for the door handle, and locked her inside.

Forty-eight

I pressed my back against the stone wall of the building that hid us and listened to ferrent and Yavi shouts and footfalls provoked by the sudden darkness.

Alia crept alongside me and touched my arm. “Now,
that
was more like it!”

I shook my head and whispered as I peeped around the corner. “I didn’t do anything.” I turned the bush knife blade in my hand as I sheathed it. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

Through the snoops I saw the ferrents, all prone, rifles aimed and facing out in a ragged, circular perimeter that surrounded their vehicles. The Yavi, without snoopers, had also frozen in place, guns drawn but with nowhere to shoot in the dark.

I whispered, “Maybe a power outage. Maybe the Yavi cut the lights to slow down the ferrents.” If so, why were people shouting and shooting inside the building?

Chaos and uncertainty ruled the moment.

Military history was littered with the regrets of soldiers who failed to seize the moment. It was also littered with the bodies of more of them who seized the wrong moment.

If the lights came up while we waited, hidden here, we could just go ahead and recon the place as I had planned. No problem. Except that we would then have to try to come back and start over.

Alternatively, I could run four hundred yards mostly behind cover, then the last hundred yards concealed in darkness that was like green daylight to me. If and when I got inside I had to navigate another hundred yards of corridors that I knew only from a non-military observer’s secondhand reminiscence. Then, in some eleven-year-old’s fantasy, I would somehow rescue the princess. Hell, in my fantasy, too. This was what I came for.

I bent, reached into my rucksack, and drew both machine pistols and chest holsters.

Alia held out her hand and wiggled her fingers.

I slipped the right holster over my shoulder as I stared at her hand. “What do you want?”

“My gun. I’m not going in unarmed.”

“You’re not going in at all.”

Her jaw dropped. “Why not?”

I hesitated. “Because I said so” was likely to get me as far with an eleven-year-old girl as it always had with a thirty-three-year-old woman.

I said, “Uh, because this is a raid. Did Pyt teach you about raids?”

She raised her chin. “Naturally.”

“Quick in, quick out. If the raiding party gets separated during the raid, they need a secure place to reassemble. A rally point. You’re the rally point security element.”

She rolled her eyes. “You made that up. You’re just scared I’ll get hurt.”

No to the first, yes to the second. I shook my head. “No.”

“Yes, you did! You can’t get separated from
yourself
.”

I exhaled. Why me? There wasn’t time to argue. “There’s only the one set of snoopers.”

“Oh. I guess you’re right.”

Not that I was crazy about leaving her here alone. I dug in my rucksack again, stood, and held out an object. “This is—”

She squinted in the dark. “A six-shot double-action .38 with a three-inch barrel and iron sights. Inaccurate, compact, reliable. Good backup gun.”

“Oh. Can you use it?”

“Pyt taught me more than raids.”

I handed her the pistol. She flicked open the cylinder, checked it, then tucked it into her trousers’ waistband while I hefted the rucksack onto my shoulders. My teeth were clenched, and I expected the power to flash back on every instant.

Alia stood in front of me, rearranging my holster straps and the knife scabbard. Finally, she patted her palms on my chest, then stood back and looked me up and down in the dim light. “There! Now you look ready to rescue a princess! You should’ve shaved, though.”

I didn’t feel ready. But I ran, crouching, into the dark, weighed down by my load and by anxiety that the lights would expose me in the open, that Alia wouldn’t stay put, that after all this Kit wouldn’t be there, or…

I circled behind another building and made the clinic’s side door in three minutes without incident. I set the ruck on the ground, tugged out a door bore, and grasped the doorknob to fit it in place. The door opened, and I swore at myself for time wasted by not trying the door first.

Then I was inside. The door led in to a level lower than the level on which Kit was, I hoped, being held. The stairwell up was empty, and I navigated the stairs easily with my snoops.

The public corridor at the top of the stairs bustled, if you can call nurses stumbling around searching for candles bustle. I padded down the corridor in total darkness, an unseen shadow breathing hoarsely. The T-junction where a Yavi guard was supposed to be posted was deserted. I peered left down the corridor that led to the front of the building and saw two Yavi peeking around the half-open entry doors with guns drawn. The ferrents had been kind enough to divert my opposition.

I crossed the corridor intersection behind the preoccupied guards’ backs, then counted doors as I walked.

I stopped in my tracks when I heard two male voices behind one door on my left, realized that the door was closed, and bypassed them.

Finally, I saw ahead the fourth door on the right. I didn’t really have to count. The physician had said that a desk and chair had been set up in the hallway as a station for the all-hours guard. The desk and chair were right where they were supposed to be. The all-hours guard wasn’t. I suspected he was one of the two now guarding the front door. I smiled as I ran. Chaos could be a spook’s best friend.