Missed Opportunities - Prologue
Dec. 31st, 2010 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonora_conejaPairing: Hannibal/Face (eventually)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three remaining members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresolved theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Burress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
a/n: Everything’s the same continuity as the movie, basically, aside from a few minor changes that should be obvious as the story goes on. I'll trying to keep it true to character... that's kind of the whole point!
San Francisco, USA
This wasn’t exactly what he’d had planned for his life.
Not that it mattered, or anything.
Hannibal Smith checked the time, shifted in the booth in the back, all the way back, busboys and waiters whizzing by with oversized plates of overpriced food, spent glasses of sweet raspberry tea. Everything fake on the walls. Forced, artificial cheer. Fishsticks and cheap margaritas. He hated chain restaurants. “We’ll give her another ten minutes, boys.”
Murdock pushed the baseball cap up a little, stared out from under it, halfway through finishing the coloring page in the children’s menu. “You think the seahorse ought’a’be pink or blue, boss?” he asked, holding up the crayons in questions.
Hannibal looked up from where he was pretending to skin the menu. His pilot’s hair was getting shaggy again - it had been months since they’d been able to talk him into a haircut. He'd just start babbling about Samson and the pillars of Jerusalem and damn, Hannibal thought, the longer they were away from the military, from the structure and the doctors and the need to keep things in check, the worse he was getting. And there was nothing he or BA could do about it. They didn’t quite have the touch, not like his lieutenant had had. Fuck, he missed that kid... “If it’s blue, won’t it just blend in with the ocean?”
“Do seahorses need camo?” Murdock asked BA, nudging the man sitting across from him with his foot. “Huh, big guy?”
“Fool, give me that!” the big black corporal snapped, grabbing for the crayons. His temper hadn’t been improving lately, either. Not since the whole brush with Buddhism in jail, how he'd almost died at the hands of that Blackwater asshole Pike, and then killed the man less than a week later. Not since Harmon. He’d admitted once, after a ridiculous amount of Jack Daniels’ Hannibal had bought for the purposes of such a confession, that he still had nightmares about that week. The barrel of that gun. Pike standing behind it. Breaking the man's back.
Somehow, killing had made it worse for him.
“She’s twenty minutes late, boss. She ain’t coming.”
“Oh, she’ll be here, BA,” Hannibal said with a surety he didn’t feel, and he checked his watch. “And she’s thirty minutes late.”
“How about yellow, Bosco?” Murdock asked innocently, and BA almost tipped the booth table over lunging for the whole box, the pilot cackling the entire time. Hannibal sighed. Definitely getting worse.
They hadn’t had a decent paycheck in months. Done a lot of good on smaller jobs, sure, which was rewarding in its own way, but the slush fund was getting low, and something in the terse tone of the email, the way it skirted specifics, hell, the woman who’d sent it, was enough to get his attention. Never mind the offer for the job itself. Which was curious in its own way...
“How you are gentlemen doing tonight?” asked a female voice.
Hannibal didn’t bother to look up. The waitress had been already five times and he was getting sick of shooing her off. “We don’t want to order a Bloomin’ Onion, ma’am, we’re just waiting for our fourth person, and then I promise...”
“Well she’s here, colonel, but she is not sitting next to that.”
Not the waitress, then.
He wrenched the box of crayons away completely, scooting it to the far edge of the table where neither of his two boys could reach it. Leaned back a little in the booth, took her in. Lean, tall, dark hair, overdressed in Fendi pumps, Coach handbag, and how the hell did she afford that shit on a captain’s salary?
“Sosa,” he said blandly and waved at the empty seat next to Murdock. “He doesn’t bite.”
She looked at him, and he eyed her right back, like she was going to grow tentacles or something. Hell, maybe in his mind, she was. No way to tell. “El diablo,” he whispered meaningfully, and winked at her.
“Fuck that,” she muttered, and tapped the table with a manicured finger. “Take a walk with me, Hannibal. I’m sure the boys can mind themselves for a few minutes.”
“Boss...”
The former colonel shook his head at the concerned tone and slid out. “BA, I’ll meet you back at the van. Twenty minutes, okay?”
“I don’t think...”
“Twenty minutes. I’ll see you then.”
Sosa walked along next to him down the busy sidewalk. Fisherman's Wharf, just cooling down, families, parent sweating, kids scampering into candy stores and carting giant plush seals, young couples out on dates, headed for the seafood joints to watch the sun set. It wasn’t his first choice for a meet, too many security cameras, but she’d promised a 72 hour black-out on surveillance efforts.
The Department of Defense wanted this bad.
They strolled down to the edge of the wharf, the waters of the Pacific Ocean gray beneath them, crashing against pillars below. She had that kind of windblown look about her. Nothing suspicious, Hannibal figured, just an older businessman out with his trophy girlfriend, and he tried to relax. Bit the end off a cigar and lit it, cupping it in his hands against the light breeze. She sniffed a little. He ignored it. Let her speak first.
“I’m sure you’re curious...” she began, lounging back against the railing.
“About what? The five millions dollar fee you offered me? With no explanation as to why it’s so damn generous?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Your people obviously have a job they either can’t handle or won’t, nothing that can go to a CIA black-ops team, something that can’t be traced back to the government at all. You’ve exhausted all possible legitimate sources of private assistance and we’re either top or bottom of your list of extralegal aid choices,” he said, bored by this whole thing already. “You want us to mop up a mess you created.”
“Hannibal,” she said, folding her hands over the silky contours of her dress, “you know I always respected you as a...”
“Don’t bullshit me, Sosa. You don’t respect anyone.”
She closed her eyes, voice hardening. “Be that as it may, Hannibal, you were good at being a colonel and, from what little intel we’ve got on it, you’re doing a bang-up job at this mercenary thing...”
The former colonel followed the sun on the waves out to the horizon, out beyond. He hated that, this version of Hannibal Smith that existed now. Existed in large part because of this woman, even if it wasn’t her fault, not what she’d set out to do. “Cut the crap, captain. What do you want?”
“You’re right,” she finally admitted. “It can’t be tied back to the DoD. We’ve got a couple of men we need to go after...”
“We’re not assassins,” he said flatly, taking a deep inhale of sweet smoke, trying to steady himself. Fuck, that was the last thing he needed, getting a reputation for that sort of thing.
“We don’t need to kill anybody, um, necessarily,” and she held out a thumb drive. He didn’t take it. “The plates have resurfaced.”
The plates. Those fucking plates. That fiasco last year, the mission in Baghdad and the explosion on base. Arrest, trial, prison. The breakout and his failed attempt to restore his boys to some kind of honor, the one that had gotten Lieutenant Harmon killed and set them on the run like this. Good stuff, adventure novel material, romantic, even, and Hannibal sighed again. “Where?”
“Rumor is, some kind of buy in Singapore in a few weeks.”
“And the men you just mentioned? Is it Lynch?”
“Vance Buress? He’s still attached. He set up the deal, from what Langley’s telling us. Brilliant little piece of work, actually, we were going over some of the financials on it...”
Hannibal switched the cigar to his left hand and took the drive, looked at it closely, wondered what kind of tracking spyware they'd loaded on it, and reminded himself not to check it on his personal laptop. "He working alone?"
"We're not sure. Everything we have is on that."
"Why do I doubt that?"
Sosa turned around, elbows up on the rough, sea-eaten wood and shaded her face against the last rays of red light. A little more open, a little more honest, and Hannibal couldn’t help but wonder if this was her attempt to play him. Shit, he thought, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. Nothing like a year as a fugitive to make a man suspicious, and manipulation was only a threat if you didn’t understand the other person’s motives. She was still Army, despite everything. He probably knew her better than she knew herself. No mysteries there. “Look, this is a chance for you to redeem yourselves, finish you started, what, eighteen months ago? Get revenge for Harmon..."
"You miss him, Charisa?" Hannibal asked pointedly, remembering their relationship, how fiercely his lieutenant had loved her, how the kid had been talking about proposing, how he'd cried over her when she said no.
"Come on, colonel. This a no-brainer.” A weak smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes looked glassy. She sounded like a human being for the first time in this discussion. "I know you're going to do this. Just say yes."
He tapped the drive on the rail. “When do you need us in place?”
“Oh, no, I’m providing transport on this. No fuck-ups. That government is way too uptight with security. We’ve got a Gulfstream on diplomatic charter scheduled for Paya Lebar in two days. That should give you boys enough time to get ready, whatever it is you do to man up, roast a pig, bay at the moon, listen to some AC/DC...”
So, the snark was back. He ignored it. “I want clean records for all of us. In addition to the fee.”
“I’m authorized to grant you that,” she said without so much as blinking. Of course she was. They must be desperate for his team to take this job, Hannibal thought to himself, probably for reasons she either couldn’t disclose or didn’t know, and he filed that little nugget of information away for later.
"Harmon as well."
She flinched. "I'd assumed, yeah."
“I’m guessing reinstatement is out of the question?”
She stared at him, that facade level and calm once again, and Hannibal wondered again how much of an act for her, how much of her own bullshit she believed. How hard she actually was under all of that bravado. Shame she’d gotten snapped up by the DIA, really; there was probably a decent officer in there somewhere.
“Well, as long as Murdock gets to fly,” he replied with a grin, and walked away, just imaging the expression on that made-up face of hers.
But the mirth was short lived, grin faded and worn from overuse, falling off as he made it back to the van, moving through the thickening crowd like it wasn’t there, a separate world he didn’t get to touch so often anymore. This was going to be bad, because he knew what they were up against.
What he was capable of.
“Whatcha got for us, bossman?”
Hannibal settled into the passenger side seat of the van, BA’s baby, tooled up beautifully on weekends and between jobs at the garage where he worked those same hours. Kept him sane, and the colonel didn’t begrudge him the hobby.
"Unfinished business. Another crack at those plates, doing it right this time." Hannibal's voice cracked as he said it, remembering the warehouse by the German lake, the sniper shot that rang through Morrison before he could give up any real information, the round splattering out into Harmon's neck, nicking the artery, nothing they could do, blood everywhere, soaking his jeans...
BA’s hand froze over the gearshift. “You talkin’ ‘bout...”
"Buck up, BA. We gotta do this," and the pilot forced himself forward, off the back bench and into the little space in between the bucket seats of the front, the crazy dropping away, eyes strangely calm. He patted BA on the shoulder as the big man let loose a groan, forehead hitting the wheel. Nodded to Hannibal. “So, when we leavin' and whadda I get ta fly?”
+++++
Osaka, Japan
His cell rang, and he groaned.
Motherfucker. Always at the most inconvenient times.
He tried to ignore it, focus on what he was doing. That dark hair, wanton across the pale hotel sheets, pale skin, those dusky nipples, perked to hard little nubs beneath his fingers, that moan beneath him that he answered with a teasing little lip, fake eyelashes, obscuring those dark, dark eyes, that burying heat, pulling him down...
The cell phone didn’t stop, though, the vibrations shaking the room’s minimalist nightstand, the entire surface buzzing in harmony, and he pushed himself up onto an unsteady elbow, and almost missed as he grabbed for it.
“Fucking what?” he growled, slightly hoarse from an overlong stay in the hotel bar downstairs, and reminded himself of the severe necessity of water, painkillers, in the morning.
“Hey, Face, long time no see.”
He rolled over, stilling the protests next to him, off the wide bed, walking towards the window. The room was cold, a buffer against the humid night beyond, and from here, the wide swath of neon Dotombori stretched away, a brilliant ribbon in the unrelieved grid of the post-war city. But the shiver the conman felt was from neither the temperature nor the sights.
This couldn’t be good. Very few people had this number. Emergencies only.
“You have any idea what the fuck time it is where I am?”
“You’ve got a satellite phone, you told me to call if...”
Face groaned internally. The voice on the other end was one of his contacts back in the States, an old classmate out at Lackland, Cyber Command, on a rather heavy retainer. Guy’s sister had thyroid cancer, couldn’t pay her medical bills any other way. Face had even forged the insurance documentation for the guy, covered his ass, and he’d proven a generally reliable source of information over the years. And if he was calling...
“Buddy, you’ve got thirty seconds.”
“Just got into office. There’s been some chatter you should probably be aware of...”
Face glanced over at the Japanese girl, curling a leg over one of the narrow, flat little pillows, over all that wet warmth. He could smell her on his skin, sweat, fading perfume, falling apart. She looked about twenty, but there was no way to be sure and over here, it didn’t really matter. These things expired too quickly. She patted the sheets, his emptied space, and he looked away again. Focused. Sat down on the little ledge under the wall-length window and listened. Listened to all of it.
"Any indication of who they're sending?" Face asked after the other man fell silent, tracing nonsense patterns on the glass, mind racing, thinking about the angles, thinking about who they'd play, how he'd play them.
"Outside contractors. Doesn't say who."
“Get me what you've got, man. Thanks for the update."
He heard a shift, and the captain's voice got a little louder, a little closer to the receiver. "Dammit, Face, calling you's one thing, but stripping shit off the classified nets..."
Face rolled his eyes. He hated having to talk people through these things. "Say hi to your sister for me,” he said lightly, smirking to himself, imagining the sudden fear in the little hitched breath he heard, and slid the phone shut. Tossed it away into a chair. The direct approach was sometimes just more fun.
The girl was still watching him. Watching him out from under those eyelashes, and he smiled back.
The next flight back down to Singapore wouldn’t leave until morning anyway. Time enough to talk Lynch about the news then.
Might as well finish up the business at hand.
Chapter One
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three remaining members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresolved theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Burress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
a/n: Everything’s the same continuity as the movie, basically, aside from a few minor changes that should be obvious as the story goes on. I'll trying to keep it true to character... that's kind of the whole point!
San Francisco, USA
This wasn’t exactly what he’d had planned for his life.
Not that it mattered, or anything.
Hannibal Smith checked the time, shifted in the booth in the back, all the way back, busboys and waiters whizzing by with oversized plates of overpriced food, spent glasses of sweet raspberry tea. Everything fake on the walls. Forced, artificial cheer. Fishsticks and cheap margaritas. He hated chain restaurants. “We’ll give her another ten minutes, boys.”
Murdock pushed the baseball cap up a little, stared out from under it, halfway through finishing the coloring page in the children’s menu. “You think the seahorse ought’a’be pink or blue, boss?” he asked, holding up the crayons in questions.
Hannibal looked up from where he was pretending to skin the menu. His pilot’s hair was getting shaggy again - it had been months since they’d been able to talk him into a haircut. He'd just start babbling about Samson and the pillars of Jerusalem and damn, Hannibal thought, the longer they were away from the military, from the structure and the doctors and the need to keep things in check, the worse he was getting. And there was nothing he or BA could do about it. They didn’t quite have the touch, not like his lieutenant had had. Fuck, he missed that kid... “If it’s blue, won’t it just blend in with the ocean?”
“Do seahorses need camo?” Murdock asked BA, nudging the man sitting across from him with his foot. “Huh, big guy?”
“Fool, give me that!” the big black corporal snapped, grabbing for the crayons. His temper hadn’t been improving lately, either. Not since the whole brush with Buddhism in jail, how he'd almost died at the hands of that Blackwater asshole Pike, and then killed the man less than a week later. Not since Harmon. He’d admitted once, after a ridiculous amount of Jack Daniels’ Hannibal had bought for the purposes of such a confession, that he still had nightmares about that week. The barrel of that gun. Pike standing behind it. Breaking the man's back.
Somehow, killing had made it worse for him.
“She’s twenty minutes late, boss. She ain’t coming.”
“Oh, she’ll be here, BA,” Hannibal said with a surety he didn’t feel, and he checked his watch. “And she’s thirty minutes late.”
“How about yellow, Bosco?” Murdock asked innocently, and BA almost tipped the booth table over lunging for the whole box, the pilot cackling the entire time. Hannibal sighed. Definitely getting worse.
They hadn’t had a decent paycheck in months. Done a lot of good on smaller jobs, sure, which was rewarding in its own way, but the slush fund was getting low, and something in the terse tone of the email, the way it skirted specifics, hell, the woman who’d sent it, was enough to get his attention. Never mind the offer for the job itself. Which was curious in its own way...
“How you are gentlemen doing tonight?” asked a female voice.
Hannibal didn’t bother to look up. The waitress had been already five times and he was getting sick of shooing her off. “We don’t want to order a Bloomin’ Onion, ma’am, we’re just waiting for our fourth person, and then I promise...”
“Well she’s here, colonel, but she is not sitting next to that.”
Not the waitress, then.
He wrenched the box of crayons away completely, scooting it to the far edge of the table where neither of his two boys could reach it. Leaned back a little in the booth, took her in. Lean, tall, dark hair, overdressed in Fendi pumps, Coach handbag, and how the hell did she afford that shit on a captain’s salary?
“Sosa,” he said blandly and waved at the empty seat next to Murdock. “He doesn’t bite.”
She looked at him, and he eyed her right back, like she was going to grow tentacles or something. Hell, maybe in his mind, she was. No way to tell. “El diablo,” he whispered meaningfully, and winked at her.
“Fuck that,” she muttered, and tapped the table with a manicured finger. “Take a walk with me, Hannibal. I’m sure the boys can mind themselves for a few minutes.”
“Boss...”
The former colonel shook his head at the concerned tone and slid out. “BA, I’ll meet you back at the van. Twenty minutes, okay?”
“I don’t think...”
“Twenty minutes. I’ll see you then.”
Sosa walked along next to him down the busy sidewalk. Fisherman's Wharf, just cooling down, families, parent sweating, kids scampering into candy stores and carting giant plush seals, young couples out on dates, headed for the seafood joints to watch the sun set. It wasn’t his first choice for a meet, too many security cameras, but she’d promised a 72 hour black-out on surveillance efforts.
The Department of Defense wanted this bad.
They strolled down to the edge of the wharf, the waters of the Pacific Ocean gray beneath them, crashing against pillars below. She had that kind of windblown look about her. Nothing suspicious, Hannibal figured, just an older businessman out with his trophy girlfriend, and he tried to relax. Bit the end off a cigar and lit it, cupping it in his hands against the light breeze. She sniffed a little. He ignored it. Let her speak first.
“I’m sure you’re curious...” she began, lounging back against the railing.
“About what? The five millions dollar fee you offered me? With no explanation as to why it’s so damn generous?”
“Yeah, that.”
“Your people obviously have a job they either can’t handle or won’t, nothing that can go to a CIA black-ops team, something that can’t be traced back to the government at all. You’ve exhausted all possible legitimate sources of private assistance and we’re either top or bottom of your list of extralegal aid choices,” he said, bored by this whole thing already. “You want us to mop up a mess you created.”
“Hannibal,” she said, folding her hands over the silky contours of her dress, “you know I always respected you as a...”
“Don’t bullshit me, Sosa. You don’t respect anyone.”
She closed her eyes, voice hardening. “Be that as it may, Hannibal, you were good at being a colonel and, from what little intel we’ve got on it, you’re doing a bang-up job at this mercenary thing...”
The former colonel followed the sun on the waves out to the horizon, out beyond. He hated that, this version of Hannibal Smith that existed now. Existed in large part because of this woman, even if it wasn’t her fault, not what she’d set out to do. “Cut the crap, captain. What do you want?”
“You’re right,” she finally admitted. “It can’t be tied back to the DoD. We’ve got a couple of men we need to go after...”
“We’re not assassins,” he said flatly, taking a deep inhale of sweet smoke, trying to steady himself. Fuck, that was the last thing he needed, getting a reputation for that sort of thing.
“We don’t need to kill anybody, um, necessarily,” and she held out a thumb drive. He didn’t take it. “The plates have resurfaced.”
The plates. Those fucking plates. That fiasco last year, the mission in Baghdad and the explosion on base. Arrest, trial, prison. The breakout and his failed attempt to restore his boys to some kind of honor, the one that had gotten Lieutenant Harmon killed and set them on the run like this. Good stuff, adventure novel material, romantic, even, and Hannibal sighed again. “Where?”
“Rumor is, some kind of buy in Singapore in a few weeks.”
“And the men you just mentioned? Is it Lynch?”
“Vance Buress? He’s still attached. He set up the deal, from what Langley’s telling us. Brilliant little piece of work, actually, we were going over some of the financials on it...”
Hannibal switched the cigar to his left hand and took the drive, looked at it closely, wondered what kind of tracking spyware they'd loaded on it, and reminded himself not to check it on his personal laptop. "He working alone?"
"We're not sure. Everything we have is on that."
"Why do I doubt that?"
Sosa turned around, elbows up on the rough, sea-eaten wood and shaded her face against the last rays of red light. A little more open, a little more honest, and Hannibal couldn’t help but wonder if this was her attempt to play him. Shit, he thought, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. Nothing like a year as a fugitive to make a man suspicious, and manipulation was only a threat if you didn’t understand the other person’s motives. She was still Army, despite everything. He probably knew her better than she knew herself. No mysteries there. “Look, this is a chance for you to redeem yourselves, finish you started, what, eighteen months ago? Get revenge for Harmon..."
"You miss him, Charisa?" Hannibal asked pointedly, remembering their relationship, how fiercely his lieutenant had loved her, how the kid had been talking about proposing, how he'd cried over her when she said no.
"Come on, colonel. This a no-brainer.” A weak smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes looked glassy. She sounded like a human being for the first time in this discussion. "I know you're going to do this. Just say yes."
He tapped the drive on the rail. “When do you need us in place?”
“Oh, no, I’m providing transport on this. No fuck-ups. That government is way too uptight with security. We’ve got a Gulfstream on diplomatic charter scheduled for Paya Lebar in two days. That should give you boys enough time to get ready, whatever it is you do to man up, roast a pig, bay at the moon, listen to some AC/DC...”
So, the snark was back. He ignored it. “I want clean records for all of us. In addition to the fee.”
“I’m authorized to grant you that,” she said without so much as blinking. Of course she was. They must be desperate for his team to take this job, Hannibal thought to himself, probably for reasons she either couldn’t disclose or didn’t know, and he filed that little nugget of information away for later.
"Harmon as well."
She flinched. "I'd assumed, yeah."
“I’m guessing reinstatement is out of the question?”
She stared at him, that facade level and calm once again, and Hannibal wondered again how much of an act for her, how much of her own bullshit she believed. How hard she actually was under all of that bravado. Shame she’d gotten snapped up by the DIA, really; there was probably a decent officer in there somewhere.
“Well, as long as Murdock gets to fly,” he replied with a grin, and walked away, just imaging the expression on that made-up face of hers.
But the mirth was short lived, grin faded and worn from overuse, falling off as he made it back to the van, moving through the thickening crowd like it wasn’t there, a separate world he didn’t get to touch so often anymore. This was going to be bad, because he knew what they were up against.
What he was capable of.
“Whatcha got for us, bossman?”
Hannibal settled into the passenger side seat of the van, BA’s baby, tooled up beautifully on weekends and between jobs at the garage where he worked those same hours. Kept him sane, and the colonel didn’t begrudge him the hobby.
"Unfinished business. Another crack at those plates, doing it right this time." Hannibal's voice cracked as he said it, remembering the warehouse by the German lake, the sniper shot that rang through Morrison before he could give up any real information, the round splattering out into Harmon's neck, nicking the artery, nothing they could do, blood everywhere, soaking his jeans...
BA’s hand froze over the gearshift. “You talkin’ ‘bout...”
"Buck up, BA. We gotta do this," and the pilot forced himself forward, off the back bench and into the little space in between the bucket seats of the front, the crazy dropping away, eyes strangely calm. He patted BA on the shoulder as the big man let loose a groan, forehead hitting the wheel. Nodded to Hannibal. “So, when we leavin' and whadda I get ta fly?”
+++++
Osaka, Japan
His cell rang, and he groaned.
Motherfucker. Always at the most inconvenient times.
He tried to ignore it, focus on what he was doing. That dark hair, wanton across the pale hotel sheets, pale skin, those dusky nipples, perked to hard little nubs beneath his fingers, that moan beneath him that he answered with a teasing little lip, fake eyelashes, obscuring those dark, dark eyes, that burying heat, pulling him down...
The cell phone didn’t stop, though, the vibrations shaking the room’s minimalist nightstand, the entire surface buzzing in harmony, and he pushed himself up onto an unsteady elbow, and almost missed as he grabbed for it.
“Fucking what?” he growled, slightly hoarse from an overlong stay in the hotel bar downstairs, and reminded himself of the severe necessity of water, painkillers, in the morning.
“Hey, Face, long time no see.”
He rolled over, stilling the protests next to him, off the wide bed, walking towards the window. The room was cold, a buffer against the humid night beyond, and from here, the wide swath of neon Dotombori stretched away, a brilliant ribbon in the unrelieved grid of the post-war city. But the shiver the conman felt was from neither the temperature nor the sights.
This couldn’t be good. Very few people had this number. Emergencies only.
“You have any idea what the fuck time it is where I am?”
“You’ve got a satellite phone, you told me to call if...”
Face groaned internally. The voice on the other end was one of his contacts back in the States, an old classmate out at Lackland, Cyber Command, on a rather heavy retainer. Guy’s sister had thyroid cancer, couldn’t pay her medical bills any other way. Face had even forged the insurance documentation for the guy, covered his ass, and he’d proven a generally reliable source of information over the years. And if he was calling...
“Buddy, you’ve got thirty seconds.”
“Just got into office. There’s been some chatter you should probably be aware of...”
Face glanced over at the Japanese girl, curling a leg over one of the narrow, flat little pillows, over all that wet warmth. He could smell her on his skin, sweat, fading perfume, falling apart. She looked about twenty, but there was no way to be sure and over here, it didn’t really matter. These things expired too quickly. She patted the sheets, his emptied space, and he looked away again. Focused. Sat down on the little ledge under the wall-length window and listened. Listened to all of it.
"Any indication of who they're sending?" Face asked after the other man fell silent, tracing nonsense patterns on the glass, mind racing, thinking about the angles, thinking about who they'd play, how he'd play them.
"Outside contractors. Doesn't say who."
“Get me what you've got, man. Thanks for the update."
He heard a shift, and the captain's voice got a little louder, a little closer to the receiver. "Dammit, Face, calling you's one thing, but stripping shit off the classified nets..."
Face rolled his eyes. He hated having to talk people through these things. "Say hi to your sister for me,” he said lightly, smirking to himself, imagining the sudden fear in the little hitched breath he heard, and slid the phone shut. Tossed it away into a chair. The direct approach was sometimes just more fun.
The girl was still watching him. Watching him out from under those eyelashes, and he smiled back.
The next flight back down to Singapore wouldn’t leave until morning anyway. Time enough to talk Lynch about the news then.
Might as well finish up the business at hand.
Chapter One
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Date: 2011-01-13 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-11-03 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-03 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-03 04:31 pm (UTC)And the Muse is a fickle thing, it'll happen in time.