The Shack series

Chapter 36

Tess giggled.

I shook my head. "If it helps any, I'm pretty sure most boys that age are too stupid to live when it comes to pretty girls."

I could see Mackenzie trying to work out what I meant by that; I noticed she didn't brighten up when I said "pretty girls," though and remembered her slight annoyance at Tess when she had introduced them.

I waited until Delaney and Tess went out on a communication run to talk to her.

"I didn't mean to insult you when I called you pretty."

She eyed me for a second. "It wasn't an insult. I know what I look like. It just isn't... part of this. Everybody at school, everybody at the mall, that's all they see." She raised her hands. "Look, a pretty cheerleader girl! But with K2, with Tess and Delaney... I get to be the badass with a rifle."

"So are you the team leader? I'm having some trouble with your team dynamic. It's odd."

"We don't really have a team leader. I'm more like a spokesman because Tess would rather be invisible and Delaney..." She laughed. "Delaney's just not good with people sometimes."

I nodded. "I can see where that could be a problem."

She tilted her head, studying me. "So are we playing the twenty questions game? We figured it was coming sometime soon. You'd want to do it when only one of us was here, and not Delaney. You had your shot at her and probably didn't get much. So we already decided what we would talk about and what we wouldn't."

I blinked. K2 had spent some serious effort training them. "Okay. Let's do that. How did this happen?"

"Mostly by accident. Delaney's dad and my stepfather, Tony, were teammates in the Army, and I kind of dragged Tess into it." She looked thoughtful. "Kim told me you met my stepfather once, a long time ago. His nickname is 'Hollywood.'"

Hollywood. I damn sure knew that name. I remembered him, most women would since he was a walking talking wet dream. He was also an assassin. Or at least we thought he was. Michael had tracked him carefully, just in case he went rogue. He was a sniper, probably one of the best in the world, and he had worked, or maybe was still working, with Pogo and Howard's crew. We weren't certain; Howard could be touchy if we looked too closely at his people. I was pretty sure Hollywood mostly took his occasional contracts from the murkier side of the government. Taking out terrorists, arms traders, that sort of thing.

"That explains your ability with a rifle."

She nodded.

"Doesn't school get in the way of all this mercenary stuff?"

"Not as much as you'd think. Mom and Tess's mom thinks we're part of a junior law enforcement club; learning from police, doing ride-alongs and all that. We do enough of that to convince anyone, and we've built a pretty convincing legend with K2's help. I'm pretty sure Mom suspects. She's not stupid, and I know Hollywood knows better, but they never say anything. Mom was only a little over a year older than I am now when she joined the Army, so that's probably why she ignores it. Tess's parents are divorced, and she bounces between them, so there's a lot of room to work with there. Delaney... she has some kind of deal about this with her family. Most of the time, we just do courier work, sometimes we do short term surveillance or counter-surveillance, and occasionally we help with plumbing jobs -- infiltration and planting bugs. A lot of it is just a couple days. Sometimes just a few hours. Kim is usually pretty careful about everything. This one is different. We normally don't do babysitting...protection details."

"It's a different kind of work."

She caught my thoughts almost before they were fully formed. "You're wondering if I could kill someone. We've seen a few dead bodies. I go hunting a lot, and it's all about keeping your focus. I know it will probably happen sooner or later. I'm okay with that." She paused. "Tess would rather not. I'm sure she would if she had to. But that's why it's either Delaney or me with you for now."

"Delaney..."

Mackenzie gave me a cool look. "I don't think you have to wonder if Delaney would do it."

"I'm not. I'm pretty sure she already has."

She nodded. "I do this because I want to, so does Tess. I don't think Delaney has a choice. She won't go into it, and she doesn't want to get us involved. All I know is that people keep trying to kill her, and whatever the reason is, they can't just take it to the police."

That fit with what Tiffany had said.

"Pogo said you've done a contested extraction..."

Her mouth tightened into a grim line, and she suddenly looked much more like a hardened mercenary than a teenage girl. "That was supposed to be a simple surveillance job with a protective babysitting team on site, but it went sideways. It turned out that an oil sheikh's daughter ran away with her own daughters. His men killed her escort and snatched them right as we got there. Our backup team was held up." She stopped and made a sound dangerously like a snort. "Did you know Delaney knows how to drive a bulldozer?"

"Why am I not surprised."

She shook her head. "You asked if I was the leader. We all are, sort of. We're good at different things. Kurt calls us a team of experts. We each take the lead when we need to. But when things go really wrong, it's Delaney. She makes decisions even when all the choices suck."

I studied her for a second. "Most of the time, making any decision is better than making none."

"Delaney says Needles told her there are an awful lot of flattened squirrels on the road that wouldn't make a decision."

"I think I want to meet Needles one of these days."

She eyed me with a touch of concern. "You know he's dangerous, right? Like really, really, dangerous. My stepdad told me that, and he doesn't say much about his old unit or the guys in it. He met Delaney, and he told me she has Needles' eyes."

"I thought they weren't related?"

"They aren't." She stared at me meaningfully.

I took a bite of my sandwich and thought about the simmering rage I'd glimpsed in Delaney. She had it under control; absolute iron-clad control. But it wasn't gone. It was just on a chain. When she needed it, it would always be there. "A bulldozer?"

"A bulldozer."

I pictured the trail of destruction an enraged Delaney could wreak with a bulldozer. And Needles thought it was a good idea to teach her that. I needed to think about whether I ever wanted to meet him. "Sounds a little messy."

Mackenzie nodded. "It was messy. But it worked."

*****

A Simple Plan

*****

"So we need to get into the FBI." Tess stated it matter-of-factly, like she was talking about buying a hamburger.

"No, I said the file or whatever it is has to be in the conference room down the hall from my office at the FBI. We can't get in there."

I could hear the frustration in my voice. I'd screwed up, and I knew it. The whole damn trip to the Smithsonian Mall had been pointless. I'd been thinking of what amounted to a first date with Michael, not where we'd first met. I hadn't been concentrating enough. The injury, his death, it all had me focused on our relationship, and I'd screwed up. "The first time I met him, we were both in that conference room for a planning meeting; he was one of about a dozen agents there. I didn't think of it because we were just introduced; we didn't really talk or anything."

"It's not the most secure place in the world. The building is right on the street, not on a separate campus." Tess looked over a CAD diagram of the building I was pretty damn sure the FBI security team wouldn't have been happy to know was available. "If we could get over here... there's a cargo elevator that would take us to the right floor. It's only about 50 feet and a corner from there to the conference room door."

She seemed entirely too comfortable with that. I frowned and shook my head. "Inside the main security perimeter, up a secure cargo elevator, and into a locked conference room, all secured with key card readers."

Tess shrugged. "Could be worse, could be biometric locks, like a fingerprint or retinal scanner."

Delaney grinned evilly. "Oooh. Then we'd have to chop off a finger or pull out an eyeball and take it with us."

Tess sighed and shook her head. "It doesn't work that way. An eyeball might be good for a retinal scanner for maybe five hours, if everything goes just right, but the fingerprint scanner wouldn't work. It's not like the movies."

Delaney scowled. "That sucks."

"It's a two-part issue. A severed finger has no electrical field to even activate the sensor and then the RF sensor wouldn't be able to find living tissue to scan. You can't use a dead hand to open a phone either. Same problem."

Mackenzie stared at her. "What if you put just put the skin of someone's fingertip over your own? As long as it's fresh, right?

Tess shook her head. "You might be able to trigger the scanner because you do have an electrical field, but would the RF scanner actually read the print? I don't think so. That scanner uses RF to look at the fingerprint so it ignores even the chapped or dry surface of the finger. I think it would probably just read your print, and not the skinned fingerprint. I don't know for sure, not without testing it."

They were taking entirely too much ghoulish glee in the whole discussion, so I cut in. "Ignoring the fact, just for a moment, that you really are talking about chopping off my finger, I think they frown on that kind of testing."

Delaney made a sour face. "This would be in the name of science, right? Doesn't matter anyway. She said there are none of those kind of locks."

I grimaced. "Not exactly. The conference room has a standalone computer for presentations, and it uses a fingerprint scanner for access. If I had to guess where Michael left me something, it would be on that computer."

Mackenzie shook her head. "You'd be locked out. I mean, they can't be stupid enough to leave your computer access turned on."

Tess shook her head. "If they do, it's a trap to try to find out where you are accessing the network from."

"On the network, sure, but the stand-alone computers wouldn't be locked up. People on that one are given access individually as needed. Not much chance of anyone even thinking about that one. It isn't used much. But I wouldn't give us good odds on reaching the room."

Tess gave me a sly look. "So you're sayin' there's a fuckin' chance."

I stared at her with a bit of shock. Not only had the soft-spoken girl never really used foul language before, but she also wasn't using her own voice. If I hadn't been looking right at her when she said it, I'd have never known it was her.

Delaney winged a wadded up candy bar wrapper at her. "I do NOT sound like that!"

Mackenzie started laughing. "You do! You sound just like that."

Tess batted her eyelashes at Delaney. "You do. You sound just like that."

That wasn't her voice either; it was Mackenzie's. Maybe a spectrum analyzer could tell the difference, but I couldn't hear it.

Candy wrappers snapped back and forth for a couple of minutes until they got the horseplay out of their system.