sonora_coneja (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sonora_coneja) wrote2011-01-17 09:22 am
sonora_coneja) wrote2011-01-17 09:22 am
Missed Opportunities - Chapter One
Pairing: Face/Lynch,
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresovled theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Buress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean
Hannibal tried to get comfortable, but even on this, that wasn’t possible.
BA wasn’t the only one who wasn’t a big fan of planes.
The last time Hannibal had been overseas was on that last deployment to Iraq, the one where everything had gone to shit. This was better than that, at least. No jumpseat in the back of a loaded C-5 for this flight, no waiting in cramped, crowded airports in Atlanta and Ramstein and Dubai. This was infinitely nicer. Nice, clean little passenger jet, room to spread out, walk around. Fully stocked little kitchen. Polished wood trim. Definitely a diplomat’s plane.
They had BA tranqed up and laid out in the crew bunk, and Murdock refused to engage the autopilot, so he was still up in the cockpit, singing softly to himself. Hannibal could hear him through the door. Alone with his own thoughts. Nothing to do now but watch the fathomless Pacific roll by beneath, white clouds skirting its surface like sheep, unnamed coral atolls breaking monotonous blue.
That, or go over the intel again.
It was a depressing picture.
This was the first attempt Lynch was making to sell the plates since the whole thing with Morrison had gone sour. He’d been laying low, moving around. Geneva, Luxemburg, Goa, Jakarta. The timetables were sketchy, based solely on datestamps and IP addresses the NSA had managed to strip off encrypted emails. However that worked. He’d been doing a pretty good job of covering his tracks, according to the analysis included in Sosa’s little information care package, but his intentions were fairly clear.
The buyer was some Chinese businessman living in Singapore, which meant the plates would be in Beijing with the government or in Hong Kong with the Triads within the month if the deal went through. Which meant all kinds of problems - enough counterfeit US currency in the world exchange markets could destabilize the national economy even further. It was a serious problem.
What the fuck was wrong with Lynch, Hannibal wondered. The former colonel still wasn’t convinced the CIA hadn’t masterminded the original grab for the purposes of setting up their own personal mint, and he’d known a few Company employees in his time. Shady, violent, of questionable morality, all of them to the man. The same kinds of traits could be assigned to most spec op guys. Didn’t make a man a traitor. This, though, this was...
He flipped to the last file again, a mostly-empty dossier on whoever Lynch - Buress, whatever the fuck - was working with. His partner in this whole thing. They didn’t have a name, and details were sketchy at best.
The guy had been spotted everywhere from Johannesburg to Oslo in the past, but had been sticking close to Southeast Asia the last few years or so. One translated account of blue-eyed man hired to hunt down a drug lord in the Golden Triangle, camp of thirty or fourty men just wiped out. The others were even less helpful.
But there was one Hannibal kept coming back to. A personal journal entry from a CIA field agent about three years back. Former US Army Spec Ops was suspected. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed. Tattoos, one distinctly described as a small, winged parachute, right above his left hipbone. The other, his dogtags, on either side of his ribs, under the arms, name and service number blacked out. A-pos blood. Roman Catholic.
She’d been found dead a week after the entry was dated, the agent. Shoved in a storm drain in Fukuoka, Japan, single hollowpoint .22 round in her temple, close-range, traces of semen, no signs of a struggle. The journal was found in her apartment. Nothing had been touched.
And there was one more curious detail, one curious little detail that seemed to stick out at Hannibal, unexplained by the rest of the report, taunting.
One bank account number, account now closed, found by the dead agent. One transfer in and one transfer out, once a year for about six years. Deposited to a parish in Los Angeles, usually in excess of a hundred-grand or so. This year, it was three. There had been no effort to trace the money further in either direction.
Hannibal slammed the laptop lid down in frustration. Practically useless, except for the clues that came out around the edges. The fact he’d been able to find the agent suggested inside contacts, the fact that it had been consensual suggested he was good at that sort of thing. The bullet indicated organized crimes ties, probably extending to the Chinese Triads, the Russian mafia. The deposit indicated some kind of ties to that parish... but what kind? What kind of mercenary or assassin or whatever the fuck tithed to the Church?
None of it made any goddamn sense.
Huffing, Hannibal was going to turn in using the bunk above BA, get some rest before they touched down in Singapore. But something was still bothering him about that tattoo. Sounded like jump wings, fairly common among military personnel, like the ones in his own tag. Airborne, Ranger, TAC-P, maybe, or Academy grad, if the guy had been an officer. And the thought of that just pissed him off.
The former colonel opened the computer back up.
There had to be something he was missing here.
“Who are you?” he asked quietly, knowing he wasn’t going to get a response.
The intel was probably bullshit anyway.
But it would be enough, because it had to be.
+++++
Singapore
Hannibal felt a familiar twinge of fear as the line between himself and the Customs official up ahead grew shorter.
His lieutenant had joked about that day in Germany, when BA had gotten the wrong passport and they’d all discovered that Murdock spoke yet another bizarre language in Swahili. Hannibal set his jaw against the memory of the kid’s laugh, and wished like hell he had a cigar.
He flicked the little blue book open. Sosa had insisted on him using a specific fake identity in the notes she’d given him. The former colonel could practically hear the smile on her face as she’d typed the words. No explanation as to why. Maybe just to throw him off, let him know that she was watching and knew at least one of his aliases. Pissed him right the hell off, but he’d complied.
The humorless Chinese man manning the little booth looked his passport over once, twice, took his customs form, and stamped down. Mark Singer was cleared for a three month visit to Singapore. Hannibal nodded and tucked the passport back into his jacket, moving off into the wide arrival lobby of the Paya Lebar airport, all chrome and smooth glass, searching for his team.
Amid the chaos, Murdock’s bright prints and BA’s hulking form stood out easily, and he moved towards them through the crowd. Smiling a little, Hannibal took a firmer grip on his small suitcase and felt better. On the ground, ready to go.
Getting closer, he noticed his boys were talking to someone. Coming up next to the pilot, he saw who it was.
“Motherfucker,” he hissed, and Sosa, in a simple wrap dress and flats, looking every inch the tourist, smiled at him. “Hi, colonel.”
“What are you doing here, captain?” Hannibal had to school his voice down. He’d always been a collected man, calm and even-keeled, but the last few months he’d begun to have trouble controlling his temper. Since the container ship incident and jail and the warehouse... “I thought we’d discussed...”
“This is my op, Smith. My op, my ass.”
“It’s okay, boss,” Murdock said, drawling it out a little more than usual. Probably nervous, in this corwd, Hannibal thought. “We could use a lady on this.”
“Yes, Murdock, a lady that Lynch happens to know personally,” Hannibal said sarcastically, and picked his briefcase back up, motioning for the other two to follow him out to the subway hall. “We can’t use you, Sosa.”
“Hannibal, please,” she said, half-running to keep up with his long strides. “I can’t let this go. If this goes to hell, it’s my ass and...”
“I don’t have time for your power games, captain. We’ll call you when we’re done.”
“...and I want to see this bastard dead as much as you do!”
He stopped. Things had gone bad between his lieutenant and this woman, years back, and he didn’t trust her. But that was the first sincere thing he could ever remember hearing from her, and that alone was almost enough.
She pulled around in front of him, put a hand on his arm. “I’ve got everything set up. I won’t get in your way. I just need to be involved.”
“Dead, Charisa?”
Her face went flat.
“You ever kill anybody, girl?”
“No,” she replied honestly. “But I didn’t hire you for that.”
BA, right at Hannibal’s side, looked at both of them and snorted. “That’s exactly what she hired us for, sir.”
Her eyes were like flint. “I’ve got a towncar hire waiting outside. You boys want to get back to the hotel or not?”
Hannibal stared at her for a minute more, trying to figure out what was going on in that pretty head of hers, and shook his own. “Come on, captain. Murdock’s right, we probably could use you.”
She fell into step alongside, gesturing out towards a certain door, but even as she walked away, Hannibal had to turn around and walk back towards Murdock, who was rooted to the ground, staring into the crowd. Carefully, the colonel put a hand on his pilot’s shoulder, not wanting to startle him. “Captain?”
A shudder ran through the younger man’s slim frame, and his hand came up halfway, like he was going to point it at something. “Thought... thought I recognized somebody, sir.”
“Who?”
Murdock kind shook himself, and smiled. “Wouldn’t make no sense, boss,” he said after a few moments and let himself be led away.
Hallucinations being what they were these days with the pilot, Hannibal tried to ignore the small voice in the back of his head telling him to look into this further, to find the person in the crowd that Murdock thought he saw. But it was useless, no point at all in searching the colorful mass of humanity and he led his captain away.
So Hannibal didn’t see the blonde man in a pair of horn-rim glasses, small bag thrown over his shoulder, disappearing into the lines for the subway. Didn't see him at all.
Instead, he just bundled Murdock into the waiting towncar, letting the driver take his suitcase to put in the trunk with the rest of the team's gear. Time to worry about the finer points of Murdock's mostly benign mental issues later.
He leaned forward, regarding Sosa with one of those looks that used to have his enlisted men shaking tiniest mistakes, opponents shitting themselves. BA was already watching her intently, and Murdock just settled back into the seat with what was probably the most unnerving expression of all three of them. She just stared back, a little nervous but trying to hide it. Brave girl, he thought.
Hannibal broke the silence first. "I assume you withheld some of the information of this deal?"
She waited for the driver to get back in and roll up the little metal divider before answering. "There's going to be auction. Three days. That's our way in."
+++++
“Lynch, you motherfucker.”
The former CIA agent barely glanced up from his drink, the iPad with its scrolled-up Asian edition of Bloomberg. “Was your flight really that bad, sweetheart?
“I had to fly coach. Do you have any idea how much I hate flying coach? Puking babies and goddamn tourists.”
“How is this my fault?” the agent asked.
He looked good, Face had to admit to himself, his partner in this little venture. Nearly invisible beneath the half-lie that he was. Cream jacket, dark blue shirt, open neck, that all-American, old-money kind of look. Grad school at Yale, yatching on the weekends, Asian regional director of investing for some international bank, US government ties under the table and a wife languishing in adultery back home. This tiny little country, barely a blip on the equator, was full of men like that.
Of the species of man Lynch was pretending to be. That they were both playing at.
Perfectly appropriate to be having an afternoon drink in the open air bar of the Raffles Hotel, surrounded by all the British Colonial trappings of the white corridors and green courtyards.
“When was the last time you had to fly coach?” Face demanded, refusing to leave it there. Hell, he should have had another two days in Osaka, minimum, to wrap up his business there. His apology to Saito, the local Yakuza boss, had been extremely uncomfortable. One of those exchanges where he’d seen men forced to cut off their own fingers, and he knew he was being childish about the flight. But still... “Seven hours in goddamn coach. And then I had to take the subway back here.”
“You could have taken a cab.”
“And deal with that traffic? I don’t think so.”
Lynch stared at him for a moment, just a moment, and then started laughing, clapped him on the shoulder. “Face, sit your ass down. You’re making a scene.”
Keen blue eyes didn’t bother to look around. He’d already done that when he walked in here. A few European couples, taking refuge from the unrelenting humidity with Singapore Slings, the drink this place was famous for, an American family with two teenage daughters, predictably underdressed, some Chinese, typically overdressed, the Indian bartender. Same demographics that had likely been here when the hotel first opened in the 1800s. As good as any place for him, Face figured.
Singapore always had room for a few good men like him, he thought with a grin, men who stayed behind when everyone else had gone home, far too accustomed to jungle combat and the smell of blood, the taste of the women and the ease of the money to ever really go back. And that was really the problem with this part of the world, Face thought. Too many people like Lynch. Too many people like himself.
“I doubt that,” he said, but planted himself against bar next to Lynch. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“It’s hot,” Lynch said with a shrug. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live here.”
“I don’t live here,” Face said with an exaggerated yawn. The bartender came over and Lynch just pointed at his drink, held up a “two” with his fingers. “And that guy probably speaks English.”
“What’s your point?”
Face reached over his current employer’s shoulder and started playing with the iPad, making sure he rubbed as much of himself as was socially acceptable against the other man’s back as he did so, feeling solid muscle there. Mostly for show, like everything else about the ex-agent, but then, Singapore was about nothing if not artifice. It was permeating his life right now. He didn’t find it disagreeable. “You still got any of those game apps on here? I could really use something stimulating to do right now.”
“You keep dong that, pretty boy, and people are going to start thinking things.”
“Let ‘em stare,” Face purred.
Lynch glared up at him. “Dude, sit down, you’re making me nervous.”
“I just spent seven hours in coach, sitting down. I think I’ll stand.”
“Okay, Face, fine. Tell me why you spent seven hours on a plane from Osaka.”
The mercenary flipped to the last page on the tablet, pulled up Angry Birds and turned the sound up all the way. Fuck you, Buress, he thought to himself with a smile. “Government’s got your email.” He made it conversational on purpose.
“What? You sure?”
“Clean hack. Guess the jackassery over at cy-com occasionally produces results.”
“That’s not fair,” Lynch said, managing to sound like a five year arguing with the dog that just ate his cookie. He swatted Face’s hand away from the tablet and folded it up under his arm. “How the fuck is that fair? They can’t find fucking bin Laden’s fucking anything on the ‘net and they just, what, hello Lynch, stumble across my email?”
“My guy explained the details to me...”
“No, no, do not get into the geek shit, I will bleed from my ears.” He stood, just as the bartender finally brought their drinks over, and Face had to hide a smile as Lynch waved a fifty dollar bill at the guy and shoved it back in his pocket on his way out of the bar.
Face reshouldered he bag, and with a wink to the bartender, grabbed one of the highballs before it was whisked away.
He caught up to Lynch halfway out to the street, into the assault of cooking oil and motor oil and pollution and incense and that faint sick-sweet that hung on this city, overwhelming and intoxicating. The former agent carried his tension through his shoulders, high and tight, rattling through him, and Face made a mental note to call for a masseuse later. Or maybe he’d do it himself, push the soft planes of that untested body down, straddle those legs, work all those knots loose...and he grinned.
Stimulation.
Right.
“How bad is it?”
Face thought about the faces he’d passed in the airport. All of them unfamiliar, except for one. The American, Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap, something, someone from another age, another time, past and dead. He knew that face.
“Deal’s probably fucked. We should fold up shop before everybody gets into town.”
“We’re talking about quarter of a billion we’d lose. Maybe more.”
“I hear it’s worse being taken alive by the CIA, Vance. That true?”
His partner snorted, fiddled with the edge of his pale suit, thought for a minute.
“The Company doesn’t have the resources to come after us here,” Lynch finally declared and they hit the sunlight, out from under the wide portico that fronted the historic hotel. Out of the past, back in present day, Face thought. “They don’t have the balls, either.”
“I know, I know, you think Singapore’s denied territory.”
“It is. It’s Company policy,” Lynch said, wrapping Face’s arm back around his own shoulder as they moved off into the sweaty afternoon, out towards the taxi stand. “Trust me on this, Templeton. Nobody fucks around with this country. Have you seen what they do to gum-chewers?”
Face pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, but let himself be pulled towards the mercifully air conditioned cab. His job in this mess to take care of the details, all the things Lynch didn’t care about. “So what do you think they’ll do to us, Vance?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Because you’ve got everything set up right, there aren’t going to be any problems.”
Face just rolled his eyes. Smug bastard.
And after they’d gotten back to Lynch’s very nice penthouse rental off Orchard Street, after he’d dumped his bag on the bed and started stripping for a much needed shower, when Lynch had cracked the door and tackled him against a wall, both of them hard and sweating from the day outside, when Lynch had suddenly realized what that smell was and ordered him to go take a shower, it occurred to Face.
All his reasons for misgivings over this deal suddenly made sense.
That was whole problem with trying to deal with the details on this.
Lynch just didn’t care.
So Face decided not to tell him about the outside contract being taken out on them. Didn’t tell him about who he’d thought he’d seen at the airport.
No, not a word. Not when Lynch had slipped into the warm spray, slicked up, hard and wanting and Face let him have what he was after, fast and hard and nothing gentle, just right. Not once he’d finished the shower. Not after he’d dried off and found a pair of drawstring cargoes and gone for the guava juice in the kitchen, smiling at the Malay girl who did the cooking, helping her with her canvas bag of groceries, chatting with her about all the little things that happened down in the market. Not when Lynch, still glowing from orgasm, sat down beside him and demanded coffee in that asshole way of his.
No, the mercenary didn’t give Lynch the little technicalities. He’d take care of those himself.
That was the whole point, right?
"I should get back over to the Fullerton," he told Lynch. "Sure you don't want to be there for Friday's bidding?"
Lynch choked on a mouthful of hot coffee, sputtering as he answered. "Can't be within a fucking mile of that deal."
"Cause the Internet's watching?"
"Fuck you, Peck."
Face smiled to himself and flipped open his laptop, reviewing the potential buyer list for the plates, the one that had taken him surprisingly little time to set up. Wondered anew about a newcomer, late replacement last week for a bidder he'd had high hopes for. One bureaucrat from the World Bank with a taste for corruption was pretty much interchangeable with another, he'd figured, but...
And Face wondered again about the man he thought he'd seen at the airport.
Murdock. Henry Morrison Murdock. Pilot. Convicted felon.
Once, a long time ago, in that previous life where he'd known the guy, Cadet Murdock.
Details, details, details.
Had to pay attention to these things.
Even if it all turned out to be bullshit.
Chapter Two
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A year after the jailbreak, the three members of the A-Team are hired under the table by the DoD to take down the two men responsible for the as-yet unresovled theft of the Treasury plates - ex-CIA agent Vance “Lynch” Buress and former Spec-Ops officer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.
Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean
Hannibal tried to get comfortable, but even on this, that wasn’t possible.
BA wasn’t the only one who wasn’t a big fan of planes.
The last time Hannibal had been overseas was on that last deployment to Iraq, the one where everything had gone to shit. This was better than that, at least. No jumpseat in the back of a loaded C-5 for this flight, no waiting in cramped, crowded airports in Atlanta and Ramstein and Dubai. This was infinitely nicer. Nice, clean little passenger jet, room to spread out, walk around. Fully stocked little kitchen. Polished wood trim. Definitely a diplomat’s plane.
They had BA tranqed up and laid out in the crew bunk, and Murdock refused to engage the autopilot, so he was still up in the cockpit, singing softly to himself. Hannibal could hear him through the door. Alone with his own thoughts. Nothing to do now but watch the fathomless Pacific roll by beneath, white clouds skirting its surface like sheep, unnamed coral atolls breaking monotonous blue.
That, or go over the intel again.
It was a depressing picture.
This was the first attempt Lynch was making to sell the plates since the whole thing with Morrison had gone sour. He’d been laying low, moving around. Geneva, Luxemburg, Goa, Jakarta. The timetables were sketchy, based solely on datestamps and IP addresses the NSA had managed to strip off encrypted emails. However that worked. He’d been doing a pretty good job of covering his tracks, according to the analysis included in Sosa’s little information care package, but his intentions were fairly clear.
The buyer was some Chinese businessman living in Singapore, which meant the plates would be in Beijing with the government or in Hong Kong with the Triads within the month if the deal went through. Which meant all kinds of problems - enough counterfeit US currency in the world exchange markets could destabilize the national economy even further. It was a serious problem.
What the fuck was wrong with Lynch, Hannibal wondered. The former colonel still wasn’t convinced the CIA hadn’t masterminded the original grab for the purposes of setting up their own personal mint, and he’d known a few Company employees in his time. Shady, violent, of questionable morality, all of them to the man. The same kinds of traits could be assigned to most spec op guys. Didn’t make a man a traitor. This, though, this was...
He flipped to the last file again, a mostly-empty dossier on whoever Lynch - Buress, whatever the fuck - was working with. His partner in this whole thing. They didn’t have a name, and details were sketchy at best.
The guy had been spotted everywhere from Johannesburg to Oslo in the past, but had been sticking close to Southeast Asia the last few years or so. One translated account of blue-eyed man hired to hunt down a drug lord in the Golden Triangle, camp of thirty or fourty men just wiped out. The others were even less helpful.
But there was one Hannibal kept coming back to. A personal journal entry from a CIA field agent about three years back. Former US Army Spec Ops was suspected. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed. Tattoos, one distinctly described as a small, winged parachute, right above his left hipbone. The other, his dogtags, on either side of his ribs, under the arms, name and service number blacked out. A-pos blood. Roman Catholic.
She’d been found dead a week after the entry was dated, the agent. Shoved in a storm drain in Fukuoka, Japan, single hollowpoint .22 round in her temple, close-range, traces of semen, no signs of a struggle. The journal was found in her apartment. Nothing had been touched.
And there was one more curious detail, one curious little detail that seemed to stick out at Hannibal, unexplained by the rest of the report, taunting.
One bank account number, account now closed, found by the dead agent. One transfer in and one transfer out, once a year for about six years. Deposited to a parish in Los Angeles, usually in excess of a hundred-grand or so. This year, it was three. There had been no effort to trace the money further in either direction.
Hannibal slammed the laptop lid down in frustration. Practically useless, except for the clues that came out around the edges. The fact he’d been able to find the agent suggested inside contacts, the fact that it had been consensual suggested he was good at that sort of thing. The bullet indicated organized crimes ties, probably extending to the Chinese Triads, the Russian mafia. The deposit indicated some kind of ties to that parish... but what kind? What kind of mercenary or assassin or whatever the fuck tithed to the Church?
None of it made any goddamn sense.
Huffing, Hannibal was going to turn in using the bunk above BA, get some rest before they touched down in Singapore. But something was still bothering him about that tattoo. Sounded like jump wings, fairly common among military personnel, like the ones in his own tag. Airborne, Ranger, TAC-P, maybe, or Academy grad, if the guy had been an officer. And the thought of that just pissed him off.
The former colonel opened the computer back up.
There had to be something he was missing here.
“Who are you?” he asked quietly, knowing he wasn’t going to get a response.
The intel was probably bullshit anyway.
But it would be enough, because it had to be.
+++++
Singapore
Hannibal felt a familiar twinge of fear as the line between himself and the Customs official up ahead grew shorter.
His lieutenant had joked about that day in Germany, when BA had gotten the wrong passport and they’d all discovered that Murdock spoke yet another bizarre language in Swahili. Hannibal set his jaw against the memory of the kid’s laugh, and wished like hell he had a cigar.
He flicked the little blue book open. Sosa had insisted on him using a specific fake identity in the notes she’d given him. The former colonel could practically hear the smile on her face as she’d typed the words. No explanation as to why. Maybe just to throw him off, let him know that she was watching and knew at least one of his aliases. Pissed him right the hell off, but he’d complied.
The humorless Chinese man manning the little booth looked his passport over once, twice, took his customs form, and stamped down. Mark Singer was cleared for a three month visit to Singapore. Hannibal nodded and tucked the passport back into his jacket, moving off into the wide arrival lobby of the Paya Lebar airport, all chrome and smooth glass, searching for his team.
Amid the chaos, Murdock’s bright prints and BA’s hulking form stood out easily, and he moved towards them through the crowd. Smiling a little, Hannibal took a firmer grip on his small suitcase and felt better. On the ground, ready to go.
Getting closer, he noticed his boys were talking to someone. Coming up next to the pilot, he saw who it was.
“Motherfucker,” he hissed, and Sosa, in a simple wrap dress and flats, looking every inch the tourist, smiled at him. “Hi, colonel.”
“What are you doing here, captain?” Hannibal had to school his voice down. He’d always been a collected man, calm and even-keeled, but the last few months he’d begun to have trouble controlling his temper. Since the container ship incident and jail and the warehouse... “I thought we’d discussed...”
“This is my op, Smith. My op, my ass.”
“It’s okay, boss,” Murdock said, drawling it out a little more than usual. Probably nervous, in this corwd, Hannibal thought. “We could use a lady on this.”
“Yes, Murdock, a lady that Lynch happens to know personally,” Hannibal said sarcastically, and picked his briefcase back up, motioning for the other two to follow him out to the subway hall. “We can’t use you, Sosa.”
“Hannibal, please,” she said, half-running to keep up with his long strides. “I can’t let this go. If this goes to hell, it’s my ass and...”
“I don’t have time for your power games, captain. We’ll call you when we’re done.”
“...and I want to see this bastard dead as much as you do!”
He stopped. Things had gone bad between his lieutenant and this woman, years back, and he didn’t trust her. But that was the first sincere thing he could ever remember hearing from her, and that alone was almost enough.
She pulled around in front of him, put a hand on his arm. “I’ve got everything set up. I won’t get in your way. I just need to be involved.”
“Dead, Charisa?”
Her face went flat.
“You ever kill anybody, girl?”
“No,” she replied honestly. “But I didn’t hire you for that.”
BA, right at Hannibal’s side, looked at both of them and snorted. “That’s exactly what she hired us for, sir.”
Her eyes were like flint. “I’ve got a towncar hire waiting outside. You boys want to get back to the hotel or not?”
Hannibal stared at her for a minute more, trying to figure out what was going on in that pretty head of hers, and shook his own. “Come on, captain. Murdock’s right, we probably could use you.”
She fell into step alongside, gesturing out towards a certain door, but even as she walked away, Hannibal had to turn around and walk back towards Murdock, who was rooted to the ground, staring into the crowd. Carefully, the colonel put a hand on his pilot’s shoulder, not wanting to startle him. “Captain?”
A shudder ran through the younger man’s slim frame, and his hand came up halfway, like he was going to point it at something. “Thought... thought I recognized somebody, sir.”
“Who?”
Murdock kind shook himself, and smiled. “Wouldn’t make no sense, boss,” he said after a few moments and let himself be led away.
Hallucinations being what they were these days with the pilot, Hannibal tried to ignore the small voice in the back of his head telling him to look into this further, to find the person in the crowd that Murdock thought he saw. But it was useless, no point at all in searching the colorful mass of humanity and he led his captain away.
So Hannibal didn’t see the blonde man in a pair of horn-rim glasses, small bag thrown over his shoulder, disappearing into the lines for the subway. Didn't see him at all.
Instead, he just bundled Murdock into the waiting towncar, letting the driver take his suitcase to put in the trunk with the rest of the team's gear. Time to worry about the finer points of Murdock's mostly benign mental issues later.
He leaned forward, regarding Sosa with one of those looks that used to have his enlisted men shaking tiniest mistakes, opponents shitting themselves. BA was already watching her intently, and Murdock just settled back into the seat with what was probably the most unnerving expression of all three of them. She just stared back, a little nervous but trying to hide it. Brave girl, he thought.
Hannibal broke the silence first. "I assume you withheld some of the information of this deal?"
She waited for the driver to get back in and roll up the little metal divider before answering. "There's going to be auction. Three days. That's our way in."
+++++
“Lynch, you motherfucker.”
The former CIA agent barely glanced up from his drink, the iPad with its scrolled-up Asian edition of Bloomberg. “Was your flight really that bad, sweetheart?
“I had to fly coach. Do you have any idea how much I hate flying coach? Puking babies and goddamn tourists.”
“How is this my fault?” the agent asked.
He looked good, Face had to admit to himself, his partner in this little venture. Nearly invisible beneath the half-lie that he was. Cream jacket, dark blue shirt, open neck, that all-American, old-money kind of look. Grad school at Yale, yatching on the weekends, Asian regional director of investing for some international bank, US government ties under the table and a wife languishing in adultery back home. This tiny little country, barely a blip on the equator, was full of men like that.
Of the species of man Lynch was pretending to be. That they were both playing at.
Perfectly appropriate to be having an afternoon drink in the open air bar of the Raffles Hotel, surrounded by all the British Colonial trappings of the white corridors and green courtyards.
“When was the last time you had to fly coach?” Face demanded, refusing to leave it there. Hell, he should have had another two days in Osaka, minimum, to wrap up his business there. His apology to Saito, the local Yakuza boss, had been extremely uncomfortable. One of those exchanges where he’d seen men forced to cut off their own fingers, and he knew he was being childish about the flight. But still... “Seven hours in goddamn coach. And then I had to take the subway back here.”
“You could have taken a cab.”
“And deal with that traffic? I don’t think so.”
Lynch stared at him for a moment, just a moment, and then started laughing, clapped him on the shoulder. “Face, sit your ass down. You’re making a scene.”
Keen blue eyes didn’t bother to look around. He’d already done that when he walked in here. A few European couples, taking refuge from the unrelenting humidity with Singapore Slings, the drink this place was famous for, an American family with two teenage daughters, predictably underdressed, some Chinese, typically overdressed, the Indian bartender. Same demographics that had likely been here when the hotel first opened in the 1800s. As good as any place for him, Face figured.
Singapore always had room for a few good men like him, he thought with a grin, men who stayed behind when everyone else had gone home, far too accustomed to jungle combat and the smell of blood, the taste of the women and the ease of the money to ever really go back. And that was really the problem with this part of the world, Face thought. Too many people like Lynch. Too many people like himself.
“I doubt that,” he said, but planted himself against bar next to Lynch. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“It’s hot,” Lynch said with a shrug. “Honestly, I don’t know how you live here.”
“I don’t live here,” Face said with an exaggerated yawn. The bartender came over and Lynch just pointed at his drink, held up a “two” with his fingers. “And that guy probably speaks English.”
“What’s your point?”
Face reached over his current employer’s shoulder and started playing with the iPad, making sure he rubbed as much of himself as was socially acceptable against the other man’s back as he did so, feeling solid muscle there. Mostly for show, like everything else about the ex-agent, but then, Singapore was about nothing if not artifice. It was permeating his life right now. He didn’t find it disagreeable. “You still got any of those game apps on here? I could really use something stimulating to do right now.”
“You keep dong that, pretty boy, and people are going to start thinking things.”
“Let ‘em stare,” Face purred.
Lynch glared up at him. “Dude, sit down, you’re making me nervous.”
“I just spent seven hours in coach, sitting down. I think I’ll stand.”
“Okay, Face, fine. Tell me why you spent seven hours on a plane from Osaka.”
The mercenary flipped to the last page on the tablet, pulled up Angry Birds and turned the sound up all the way. Fuck you, Buress, he thought to himself with a smile. “Government’s got your email.” He made it conversational on purpose.
“What? You sure?”
“Clean hack. Guess the jackassery over at cy-com occasionally produces results.”
“That’s not fair,” Lynch said, managing to sound like a five year arguing with the dog that just ate his cookie. He swatted Face’s hand away from the tablet and folded it up under his arm. “How the fuck is that fair? They can’t find fucking bin Laden’s fucking anything on the ‘net and they just, what, hello Lynch, stumble across my email?”
“My guy explained the details to me...”
“No, no, do not get into the geek shit, I will bleed from my ears.” He stood, just as the bartender finally brought their drinks over, and Face had to hide a smile as Lynch waved a fifty dollar bill at the guy and shoved it back in his pocket on his way out of the bar.
Face reshouldered he bag, and with a wink to the bartender, grabbed one of the highballs before it was whisked away.
He caught up to Lynch halfway out to the street, into the assault of cooking oil and motor oil and pollution and incense and that faint sick-sweet that hung on this city, overwhelming and intoxicating. The former agent carried his tension through his shoulders, high and tight, rattling through him, and Face made a mental note to call for a masseuse later. Or maybe he’d do it himself, push the soft planes of that untested body down, straddle those legs, work all those knots loose...and he grinned.
Stimulation.
Right.
“How bad is it?”
Face thought about the faces he’d passed in the airport. All of them unfamiliar, except for one. The American, Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap, something, someone from another age, another time, past and dead. He knew that face.
“Deal’s probably fucked. We should fold up shop before everybody gets into town.”
“We’re talking about quarter of a billion we’d lose. Maybe more.”
“I hear it’s worse being taken alive by the CIA, Vance. That true?”
His partner snorted, fiddled with the edge of his pale suit, thought for a minute.
“The Company doesn’t have the resources to come after us here,” Lynch finally declared and they hit the sunlight, out from under the wide portico that fronted the historic hotel. Out of the past, back in present day, Face thought. “They don’t have the balls, either.”
“I know, I know, you think Singapore’s denied territory.”
“It is. It’s Company policy,” Lynch said, wrapping Face’s arm back around his own shoulder as they moved off into the sweaty afternoon, out towards the taxi stand. “Trust me on this, Templeton. Nobody fucks around with this country. Have you seen what they do to gum-chewers?”
Face pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, but let himself be pulled towards the mercifully air conditioned cab. His job in this mess to take care of the details, all the things Lynch didn’t care about. “So what do you think they’ll do to us, Vance?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Because you’ve got everything set up right, there aren’t going to be any problems.”
Face just rolled his eyes. Smug bastard.
And after they’d gotten back to Lynch’s very nice penthouse rental off Orchard Street, after he’d dumped his bag on the bed and started stripping for a much needed shower, when Lynch had cracked the door and tackled him against a wall, both of them hard and sweating from the day outside, when Lynch had suddenly realized what that smell was and ordered him to go take a shower, it occurred to Face.
All his reasons for misgivings over this deal suddenly made sense.
That was whole problem with trying to deal with the details on this.
Lynch just didn’t care.
So Face decided not to tell him about the outside contract being taken out on them. Didn’t tell him about who he’d thought he’d seen at the airport.
No, not a word. Not when Lynch had slipped into the warm spray, slicked up, hard and wanting and Face let him have what he was after, fast and hard and nothing gentle, just right. Not once he’d finished the shower. Not after he’d dried off and found a pair of drawstring cargoes and gone for the guava juice in the kitchen, smiling at the Malay girl who did the cooking, helping her with her canvas bag of groceries, chatting with her about all the little things that happened down in the market. Not when Lynch, still glowing from orgasm, sat down beside him and demanded coffee in that asshole way of his.
No, the mercenary didn’t give Lynch the little technicalities. He’d take care of those himself.
That was the whole point, right?
"I should get back over to the Fullerton," he told Lynch. "Sure you don't want to be there for Friday's bidding?"
Lynch choked on a mouthful of hot coffee, sputtering as he answered. "Can't be within a fucking mile of that deal."
"Cause the Internet's watching?"
"Fuck you, Peck."
Face smiled to himself and flipped open his laptop, reviewing the potential buyer list for the plates, the one that had taken him surprisingly little time to set up. Wondered anew about a newcomer, late replacement last week for a bidder he'd had high hopes for. One bureaucrat from the World Bank with a taste for corruption was pretty much interchangeable with another, he'd figured, but...
And Face wondered again about the man he thought he'd seen at the airport.
Murdock. Henry Morrison Murdock. Pilot. Convicted felon.
Once, a long time ago, in that previous life where he'd known the guy, Cadet Murdock.
Details, details, details.
Had to pay attention to these things.
Even if it all turned out to be bullshit.
Chapter Two
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(I'll probably try to have a section up about this length or longer every Sunday until I'm done!)
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