Chapter 4 Threats and strategies
I got a phone call from an unknown number the next morning, as I was about to go and roust out young Briggs.
“Listen schoolteacher, and listen good,” said the voice – no vidfeed – “And you and your wife and child won’t get hurt. Forget the McNeal boy, and mind your own business. We know where you live, and that your wife and baby are vulnerable. Especially now you’ve moved out to an isolated ranch.”
There proceeded to be a few photographs of Willow with little Tarquin, rather grainy, and plainly from street cam footage.
He rang off.
I’d already traced the link. What? I may not be a gurfer, but I survived as a killer for hire long enough solo to pick up a few tricks. And the guy was an amateur.
Doubtless the next escalation of psychological warfare would be drones to photograph us at home. He’d be lucky. Our drones worked because they were working on a highly illegal, without clearance, FBI frequency, and all other frequencies over the whole Ranch were blocked.
Well, really, did you expect anything else? We were a jail for high profile kids whose daddies were Somebody, and who were all potential targets.
I let my team know, and went to collect Briggs.
“I haven’t time to play games with you this morning,” I said. “Get up.”
“Make me,” he said.
Well, he invited me. Don’t ask for what you can’t take. I heaved him out of bed by one leg, dragged him into the shower and turned it on. He had to get out of the wet tee-top and shorts he wore to sleep in and dry off; and then he had little choice but to get dressed. He eyed the bed as if he considered getting back into it, but when he moved towards it, I put him in a half-nelson hold and marched him down the stairs. Big bully boys fall apart when manhandled by those stronger than they are, especially when they are bigger than the one manhandling them.
“Sit down, shut up, and listen,” I said. “And as Briggs was supposed to be cooking breakfast, he gets cereal and only cereal; the rest of you have the courtesy of my wife cooking for you. But before eating, you need to know that one of you has an enemy who phoned me and offered violence to my wife and child as well as me if I learned anything about your situation.”
“So, gonna cave, I take it,” sneered Briggs.
“Certainly not,” I said. “But you all need to know that we are now on war footing; which means I’m going to give you less freedom than I hoped until this threat is dealt with. I hope it won’t take long, but you need to be aware. And if anyone messes around and the bad guys catch you, and kill you messily as an object lesson to me, well, it’s no skin off my nose if you were stupid enough to give them the opportunity. I get paid whether you live or die.”
That was for Briggs, primarily.
Jamie looked at me in terror. He mouthed ‘Cliff?’ I gave him a small nod.
“Is that me you’re talking about?” asked Hammond Fitzgerald.
“Do you think it could be?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I know a lot about a lot of people.”
“Well, then, your best bet is to take out the life insurance of letting me know it all, so that I can enact revenge if you don’t obey me and get caught,” I said, pleasantly.
“I think I lost my appetite,” he said. Jamie was pushing his own food about.
“Eat,” I said. “You have nothing to fear if you obey me. I am going to protect you.”
Hammond gave a short, cynical laugh.
“You might be able to hunt me through the desert with Indian skills, but these people are ruthless, and they carry serious weaponry.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald,” I said, “I thank you for your warning; but I know what they are. And they are scum with weapons. The do not have the mental discipline of someone trained and dedicated in black ops. They are amateurs with attitude, and, without under-estimating them, I don’t believe they will be any trouble. And this is why you need to obey me and not go off on your own. Some of the sentry guns, concealed mines, and attack drones are a little indiscriminate. What, did you think that I don’t take efforts to stop people kidnapping the brats of congresscritters? You may be juvenile delinquents but you are high profile juvenile delinquents, and whilst I may not care if some of you go out of your way to get smeared across the landscape, I will take it personally enough as an affront to my reputation to see about avenging you. Of course, it will be too late for you to care, but it may comfort your relatives.”
They all stared at me.
“You aren’t just a schoolteacher, are you?” said Dix.
“No, Mr. Dix, I am not,” I said. “And my wife is not just a mother and homemaker, either.”
“You trained Jay Silverheels, didn’t you?” guessed Dix. “You don’t just work out with him. Was he your cover to kill the Black Rose Gumi?”
“No comment,” I said.
“Oh, right,” said Hammond Fitzgerald. “Now I have my appetite back; you’re dangerous enough to be comforting as well as scary. I want to tell you all about them.”
“Good man,” I said.
Willow had already had her breakfast, and mini Tarquin was having second breakfast, to the horrified fascination of the boys, whilst she jacked into the net, and was busy unravelling the threads of Sylvia’s and Cliff’s financial shenanigans.
I took the boys out to the horses and introduced them.
“There isn’t a lot to do save keep the beeves together and check them over,” I said. “Right, mount up.”
“Uh… how? They don’t have any pedals,” said Hammond.
Boy racer, terror on motorbikes, and he was scared of horses. He wasn’t the only one. Dix made an effort, and ended up facing the wrong way.
“Stupid… fellow,” said Briggs, scornfully, having modified what he had been going to say.
“At least he’s up,” I said. “More than you are. Mr. Dix, can you swing round in the saddle or will I help you dismount and remount?”
“I’ll swing round,” said Dix, with grim determination. He did, too.
“The art of mounting,” I said, “Is to cross your left leg across to put your left foot in the stirrup, holding the saddle horn and the rear of the saddle and push up and swing the other leg over.”
I demonstrated.
Briggs, for all his long legs, managed to get up, but hung over the saddle like a sack of potatoes. I had chosen patient mounts, but the horse turned and looked at him, and then at me, with a look of astonishment, which plainly asked if this was a new game. Jamie McNeal copied me, and managed it, in an untidy sort of way, and Hammond Fitzgerald got half way and gave up and fell off.
It took half an hour to get them mounted up. Now we moved out at a gentle walk.
The girls cantered down from their bunkhouse.
“What kept you?” said Ruth.
“They haven’t ridden before,” I said.
Ruth regarded them with the eyes of a veteran of at least three weeks.
“So I see,” she said.
They had made Hermione practise last night, I believe; to make sure they all looked as if they knew what they were doing.
It did wonders for the boys, who sat up straighter, and made more effort, even Briggs.
“There’s no throttle, no steering wheel, and no brakes,” muttered Hammond.
“Yes there is, but it’s a bit more subtle than a car or motorbike,” I said. “The stick-shift is also handled through your feet and arse.”
“If the universe had meant me to ride horses, we shouldn’t have had Henry Ford,” he complained.
“Stick at it, and I’ll introduce you to Kyle Evans,” I said.
“Really?” he flushed in pleasure. Kyle Evans, number two on the Assassin’s Black Board, just above me, whose public persona races hoverbikes, drag cars and formula one. Speed freak extraordinaire and now married to my friend Elizabeth from our days in that stupid competition ‘Extreme’ when I had been Jay Silverheels to make an extreme sanction. Or several.
“You know some interesting people, Ranny,” said Dix.
“I’ve been around a bit,” I said. “I dine with Adonis Hilton as well from time to time, though I wager he’s less interesting to you, and I know the King of England well enough for him to nod to me.”
It was a long time ago, all right? I helped George the Ninth to stage a coup against his own parliament when they went communist. Order restored, democracy returned, crisis over. He did all the military posturing and I killed people. Nothing fancy. I don’t hold with communism; it’s a nice ideal but then, so is Santa Claus, and I stopped believing in either when I went into Juvie Hall. Here, the ideals of ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability’ is soon replaced with the reality of ‘to each according to how much he can steal, coerce, or fineagle, from each as much as he can manage to skive out of.’ The rule in Juvie Hall is share the blame; which means, find a credible scapegoat. These precious kids I had here would never survive the system. Though at that, some might protect them, for the favours they could do later. I didn’t give a rat’s tit for what their daddies could do for me; and as I’m inclined to think that most messed up kids are the fault of their parents, it was more the case of what I would do to their daddies.
Once less uncomfortable on a horse, Hammond spoke up.
“If I tell you things now, you won’t remember details.”
“What do you think I have headware for?” I said. “I’ll record everything you tell me, and turn it into data at my leisure. Just talk to me, and trust me to sort it out.”
“Okay,” he said.
He talked. He talked about how he had first been targeted and given Starburst. He’d had a bad trip the first time from that amphetohallucinogen, and had come close to having a heart attack.
“I swore I’d never take any again,” he said. “But then, Craig Thomas dissolved one in my drink at break, and I had a rush like I’d never known. I… I already ran with the Street Rats, because Craig had bet me I couldn’t soup up my car and race him, so I couldn’t not, could I?”
“At your age? I can see why you’d not want him laughing at you and calling you names,” I said.
“He’s a big bully, like Briggs, and I’m not that big, but I’m a good mechanic,” said Hammond.
“And it never occurred to you to get rid of him by draining his brake fluid?”
He stared.
“No, it never did,” he said.
“Maybe that makes you a better person than me,” I said.
“No, just a sucker,” said Hammond, sadly. “I… I’m having withdrawals.”
“You can cold turkey safely from Starburst,” I said. “I looked it up. And it will be pretty rough, but I’m not going to let you step down, or use other fancy drugs, because you need the incentive to stay right off it. And then, I’ll start building on the skills you already have to teach you how to have the sort of thrills that no chemical can equal. Not just racing against Kyle.”
“To take part in ‘Extreme?’” he asked.
“No; to work for the government in the departments they don’t admit to having,” I said.
“Which is what you do?”
“I’m a freelancer, as you might say; I step in when their operatives have something they can’t handle. And I’m of the opinion that this little favour of babysitting is to find the misfits and train them to be my successors,” I said, cynically.
Tarquin – the big one – is a great believer in waste not, want not.
Jamie wanted to talk to me.
“Do you think it was Cliff?” he asked. “Who called you, I mean.”
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” I said. “But Mr. Fitzgerald has enemies too.”
He wouldn’t have them for long. Craig Thomas was a year older than Hammond, but he was already old in wickedness, a pusher but not a user. I pulled his record. His father was a drug dealer and part of an organisation which supplied the likes of Hammond and other kids suckered into the lifestyle.
Now, I can’t take down every organised crime group in the world; but when they manage to go out of their way to come to my notice, I’ll make an exception. And Hammond Fitzgerald was temporarily my foster kid. As were the others. And the only one I didn’t think had much chance of being likeable was Jeff Briggs. Washington Dix was just hasty with his fists; and we could work on that.
Jeff Briggs was just an entitled little twerp.
Still, if I could break him down enough, maybe I could also rebuild him.
In the meantime, we had a few attempted incursions with drones, which hit our no-fly zone and wandered off with their GPS reprogrammed to think they were on Dune. Fictional world. I don’t know if they found any gigantic worms, and I didn’t much care. Willow followed them, and one of them went swimming in the nearest river, diving determinedly to the bottom, convinced it was homing in on the Kwisatz Haderach. Sure, anti-drone warfare to scramble the programming is illegal. Whoever said I was legal? It was under my ‘don’t ask, don’t get told’ agreement with the Feds, and my Neon Flower had designed it herself. I was very proud of Willow. She had been bored in the last month or so of pregnancy and wanted protection from drones which took ‘frag with extreme prejudice’ to new levels.
She succeeded.
One of the other surveillance drones Cliff had sent was accessing AI art fora and was sending back pictures of fawns, lambs, and kids. The goat variety, not human. Willow has a warped sense of humour at times.
We got back with Briggs complaining that his thighs were sore.
“I told you they would be, if you didn’t wear sensible clothes,” I said.
“I’m not going riding again,” he said.
“Oh, you are capable of cooking your own food?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You have to feed me.”
“You’re on a contract,” I said. “And if you decide not to do as you’re told, I will provide you with the means to feed yourself at a basic level. I can also make you sleep in the barn. Or in a bunkhouse on your own. Of course, it makes you more vulnerable to any incursion of the bad guys, but if you don’t comply, don’t expect anyone to make it easy. You can have cornflour, oats, some fat, water’s available, and navy beans. It’s nutritious enough.”
He was horrified.
“You’d better let me have some of those awful jeans, then,” he grumbled.
“Good,” I said. “You’ll find it so much easier to be a good boy than to have to be sat on the naughty stair.”
I think that rankled more than the idea of having to feed himself from scratch.
I had more important things to do than to worry about a silly boy’s entitlement; I was expecting a physical incursion next.
