Chapter 99 First big target

Chapter 99 First big target
Cael spread the intelligence across the desk in the study, physical documents alongside screen displays.

"Victoria Vanderholt," he said. "Primary residence, state building, forty third floor. She doesn't sleep there most nights." He pointed to a location on the city map displayed on the screen. "She rotates between three secondary residences on a schedule that changes weekly. We've been tracking the pattern for twelve days."
"And?" I said.
"And tomorrow morning she has a standing engagement that doesn't move regardless of the rotation. Has not moved in four years." He pointed to a location on the map, a street in the city's commercial district, unremarkable. "A coffee house on Meridian Street. Eight fifteen. She sits at the same table. She stays for forty minutes and then leaves."
"Is she alone?" I said.
"Not at all. Two close protection officers, and a vehicle with two more waiting on the adjacent street." He looked at me. "Approaching her directly in that environment ends with you dead before you reach her table."
"I'm not approaching her directly," I said.

He waited.

"I need something small," I said. "Like a mic. Something that can sit in a bag or a coat pocket without being detected by standard security scanning."

Cael looked at me for a moment. Then he picked up his comm and made a call that lasted forty five seconds.

"Someone will bring it to your room tonight," he said.

The device was smaller than my thumbnail, a flat disc with a surface that mimicked whatever material it was pressed against.

I held it in my palm and looked at it for a while before I went to sleep.

Meridian Street in the morning ran like a commercial street, the only difference was the people here were not all rich like many Lunars truly believed. Finding jobs was becoming harder day by day, and most people had to walk without a vehicle, stay on the streets that were not being taken care of anymore.

I came in from the northern end, moving with the flow of foot traffic.

Two of my soldiers were already positioned at either end of the block, plainclothes, comm links open, watching the coffee house entrance from angles that covered the close protection officers without being visible to them.

"Target arrived four minutes ago," one of them said through the comm in my ear. "Two CPOs inside, one at the door. Vehicle on Calloway Street, two occupants."
"Copy that," I said quietly.

I crossed to the eastern pavement and slowed my pace, reading the block.

The coffee house sat mid-street, its entrance recessed slightly from the pavement, a small queue of morning customers moving through the door in a steady trickle. The close protection officer at the door was good. He was watching the queue, and his attention distributed across the whole frontage.

I joined the back of the queue and moved with it slowly, the queue shortening by one person every thirty seconds or so, the morning continuing around me, the city indifferent to everything I was about to do inside its ordinary rhythms.

The officer at the door looked at me when I reached the front.

His eyes moved across the mask, the coat, the hands visible at my sides.

I held his gaze for a second and then looked past him into the coffee house with the expression of someone who had a meeting to get to and found queues professionally tedious.

He stepped aside.
Inside, the space was narrow and warm. Tables along the left wall, the counter along the right, the morning crowd filling most of it with conversations and the machinery behind the counter.

Victoria sat at the corner table at the far end. 

She looked exactly as she looked on the screens. Warm in the eyes, and very lady-like, wearing revealing clothes which I had heard being her tactic to win men over. She was reading something on a tablet.

The second close protection officer sat two tables away with a newspaper he wasn't reading. I moved toward the counter.

The device was in my right hand, pressed between two fingers, the adhesive side facing out.

I ordered something I wouldn't drink, and turned back toward the room with the cup in my left hand, moving toward the end of the counter where the pickup station sat directly beside Victoria's table, close enough that navigating past it to reach the door on the far side required moving through the narrow gap between her table and the wall.

I started moving through the gap. The close protection officer two tables over straightened slightly, tracking me.

Victoria didn't look up from her tablet. I let my coat catch the edge of her bag where it sat on the seat beside her, my right hand dropping to adjust the bag's position for half a second as I squeezed past, the device transferring from my fingers to the inside pocket of the bag in the same motion.

"Sorry," I said.

One of the CPOs was on his feet now, hand moving toward his jacket.

I kept walking, through the far door, out onto the side street, turning left without changing pace, the cup still in my hand, the comm open in my ear.

Thirty seconds later I was half a block away.

"We're clear," I said quietly.
"The device is active," the voice in my ear said. "Signal confirmed."

I dropped the cup in a waste receptacle and kept walking.

We listened from a vehicle parked four blocks north, the signal clean and clear through the receiver, Victoria's voice came through without interference, the ambient noise of the coffee house sitting underneath it.

She made two calls in the forty minutes she was there.

The first had nothing of importance, but the second lasted twelve minutes. I sat forward when I heard the voice on the other end. Adrian.

They spoke carefully, the conversation moving through layers of implication that required knowing the context to fully decode.

But some of it was plain enough.

A meeting. Tomorrow evening. A location she referenced by a name rather than an address, something called the Harlen building. I was only hoping Cael would find the location.

I looked at the soldier beside me in the vehicle.

She was looking back at me, waiting. I pulled out my comm and sent a single message to Cael.

Harlen building. Find it please.

His response came back in under two minutes.

An address. A building in the financial district, privately owned, not publicly listed. 

I sat back in the seat and looked out the vehicle window at the city moving past. I pressed the receiver against my ear one more time, Victoria's voice still coming through, saying things to Adrian Rothmere that she believed nobody else would ever hear.

"I've got you now," I said.