Lock and Key

A bare whisper came from the speakers to either side of the screen. Xan opened his mouth to order his pawn to repeat the call, louder this time, but was saved the effort by a female voice responding to the whisper. So, Replay was alert enough to catch such a trifling noise; he must take that into consideration if the time came to make any future attempt on her life. "Authenticate," she said from somewhere ahead in the darkness, still beyond the range of the spy's vision, hence beyond Xan's view as well. It seemed a strange choice of words for a woman of her age, although it was possible she'd learned it from the Black Beret.

"Answer her," Xan ordered. At least this spy was likely to know what she meant by it. The military was such a wonderful resource; one needed only to recruit, not train.

"Holograms killed the video star," said the spy, no longer whispering, but still at much less than normal volume.

"Mary had a little nerf," Replay's voice answered; "come ahead, wayward son." Sign and countersign were both unfamiliar to Xan, which was a little surprising; he should have known all of Team Banzai's current codes. Unless, of course, this was something that went back long before he'd 'recruited' the man, something that had been in the rotation but never used.

"On me, Dingo." Rawhide's voice, normal volume, almost as far away as Replay. So much the better. Banzai's second in command still suspected nothing amiss.

"Coming in," said Dingo, and started forward cautiously. Even with his own night vision enhanced somewhat as a byproduct of the optics in the control implant, there was scarcely enough light for him to make out the floor more than two steps ahead; Xan might have cursed the fact that neither of them had much view, but he was too intent on the objective at hand. Replay had heard what she'd expected to hear; she'd trust his pawn until it was much too late.

It was not until the little picture there was on the screen wavered and went completely dark that Xan began to realize it wasn't as much of a sure thing as he'd thought. The last signal the implant transmitted was the muzzleflash and report of a single gunshot.

***

Replay, or perhaps I should say Jet, had expected a familiar phrase from Dingo, though she hadn't known that was what we called him until Rawhide had confirmed her suggestion he join them. While Dingo's reply had certainly been familiar, it hadn't been close to what she'd wanted to hear; among her own, any reference to the first video ever played on MTV, tech-skewed or otherwise, was a warning that things were not what they seemed to be anymore than the music video channel had been what the pundits had expected. The phrase "wayward son" was one of a dozen or more she could have used to confirm she'd gotten his real message, and in part a secondary message to Rawhide she hoped he'd understand given circumstances. Before the newcomer had been called Dingo, he'd been one of her people.

Rawhide had decided she knew him almost from the time she'd responded to Dingo's voice. No surprise there, really; if we'd ever met anyone from her territory who didn't know her, we were unaware of the fact. If Jet wanted to call him in despite her earlier paranoias, Rawhide was prepared to back her on it, but her apparent accusation that the man was off his assigned station wasn't normal. As far as he knew, she'd known Dingo had hooked up with us and approved of the informal arrangement, her only caveat to it being that we not hang the obvious handle on him since it was far too likely to cause confusion in the field.

"Company," said Jet, pitching her voice for Rawhide's ears alone; with Dingo coming toward them as gracelessly as one might expect of a nearly blind man, she wasn't worried that he'd overhear either that or the soft rasp of metal on leather as she pulled Rawhide's pistol from its holster. The single word would have been enough explanation for any of us to have allowed that so long as she seemed coherent; just now it was abundantly clear that she had something specific in mind. Barring only Cameo, she was probably the most experienced nightfighter among us. If she thought she had use for the gun, it was not something Rawhide wanted to argue, not without backup.

Dingo came through the door headfirst, helped into that angle by Jet's outstretched foot across the doorway; he landed on the concrete, hands out, only to take a surprisingly gentle blow to the ribs that knocked him to the floor. He had time enough to thank the heavens that Xan hadn't told him how to answer her before a muzzleflash lit the room. His ears were still ringing with the report of the shot when a wave of cold that didn't come from the floor washed over him, taking awareness with it.

The echoes of that shot traveled farther than they might have in the open; concrete walls being notoriously unforgiving surfaces for sound, Pecos and Big Norse heard it while they were still several feet short of the stairway. Both of them pulled their own sidearms immediately, moving for the relative cover of the wall but still making their way toward the source of the shot. "Rawhide," Pecos said quietly, recognizing the sound of his revolver. If he was shooting at something, chances were good that he'd hit his target, but that didn't entirely negate the possibility that there weren't other problems downstairs. With the lights out, neither of the two women were happy about having to deal with the steps, but they weren't about to pull out flashlights and make targets of themselves before they had a better grasp of what was happening.

They reached the stairwell without further incident, Pecos in the lead. She was halfway down, Big Norse on her heels, before they heard Rawhide's own exasperated reaction to whatever had happened. "What the hell was that for?"

Jet answered him without hesitation or ire. "So I stand half a chance finding out what's wrong around here. Something's not right with this guy; that's a given."

Reassured they weren't about to walk into an ambush, Pecos and Big Norse relaxed slightly, enough to be sure they could bring out lights. "Rawhide? You guys okay?" Pecos asked.

"Two of us are," came the mildly annoyed answer. "Dingo's been shot." He wasn't ready to rebuke Jet without hearing her explanation, but he wasn't at all happy either.

"He thinks he has," Jet countered, "and there's a 50/50 chance who ever was running him thinks so too. If I'd wanted him dead, I coulda broke his neck as easy."

"Buckaroo sent us to make sure you got to the bus," said Pecos. "We thought you were being attacked." She sent the beam of her flashlight into the boiler room door, revealing Dingo on the floor, unconcious but otherwise intact. Jet took advantage of it to hand Rawhide back his gun and drop down for a closer look at her recent target.

"You may've been right," she said after a moment, "except that he used to be one of mine before he got a little too hot to hide reliably. Too many holes in the Protected Witness Program in my neck of the woods. Couldn't tell you now where staff sent him, but at one point I'd've known." Preoccupied with the man on the floor, she wasn't fully aware that she might be saying too much; then again, she might have presumed Rawhide would say something if that was a potential problem. "Don't ask how, but I know he wasn't operating undercover, so telling me not to trust appearances was something he'd have saved for an audience unless he meant he wasn't as much in control as it looked."

"Xan," said Big Norse; "Go-phones and main comm are jammed."

"I could learn to hate that man real quick," said Jet. "Someone wanna put that light right here?"

In spite of the possibility of further threat, they all looked where she indicated. At the back of Dingo's neck, normally covered by his hair, there was a faint scar that she didn't recognize and evidently mistrusted. "Just like Captain Happen," said Pecos. "We found electronics then too, after he was dead. Not as obvious as talava."

"Not as effective, either, or Xan would have had the drop on us," Jet admitted. "I do not want to go out there, but it's getting to be too iffy around here. Any chance the medics can keep Willie sedated for awhile?"

"No problem there," Rawhide assured her at the same time Big Norse and Pecos both asked, "Willie?"

"The name he had where I know him from is William Peters. Man hates worse than anything to be called Willie. Can't say I blame him." She started to stand up, froze in place with her entire attention for something beyond the door.

While Pecos and Big Norse had headed directly for the basement when the briefing broke up, Buckaroo had started checking rooms in the south end of the building, collecting interns as he found them and sending them back to the bus in small groups. He'd just reached the halfway point of his section when he heard a single shot and recognized whose weapon it had come from. Under better circumstances, he could have expected an almost instant situation report, but with the go-phones inoperative for the duration, his first response was to head for the nearest stairwell. He went down those stairs like a driven man, silent only by virtue of long practice, actively seeking the enemy more as a threat to his people than as a personal one.

Coming in as he did from the far end of the basement from the boiler room, he missed a good part of the early conversation. Once he was able to hear them, however, the voices reassured him somewhat even before he was close enough to make out what the subject was. Even so, it troubled him that no one was headed for the bus. Rawhide, Pecos, and Big Norse all spoke simultaneously, then Jet answered, only the words "Can't say I blame him," intelligible. A moment more passed while he covered perhaps another ten feet, then Jet's voice drifted to him again. "It's Buckaroo."

"You tracking again?" Rawhide asked her, startled. Buckaroo could almost see the look on his friend's face.

"Only if you count audio, " she answered. She'd have a particularly disgusted expression to go along with that tone of voice, one she generally reserved for her own failings, however temporary; right now she had plenty to be frustrated about. "And I can tell you there's only five upright bodies down here so far. If we have to move, might be nice to do it before we draw a crowd."

***

Apart from such operators as commercial airlines and major freight shippers, relatively few of the aircraft one sees bearing corporate logos these days actually belong to the companies they purport to represent. There are few enterprises which can justify the expense of operating and maintaining large planes, especially those which are only needed occasionally. It is therefore common practice among the corporate sector to lease aircraft if needed, often with a flight crew as part of the contract. This is especially true if the corporation involved expects to need the plane on an infrequent basis over a long period, where tax considerations also come into play.

Among his other flying jobs, Lindbergh had been the junior man on one such flight crew before joining us, taking his orders from a major brewery. It had been a position where his youth had counted against him in several respects, foremost among them being that he lacked the years of experience as an aerial bus-driver that might have put him in line to captain his own plane. We had no problems with his youth or his peculiar sense of humor, and although he had yet to make residency, he'd been de-facto captain of the Institute's 727 almost since joining us. As we'd had no pilots among us qualified to handle that plane since Flyboy's untimely demise, his appointment to the position freed us from the necessity of relying on a combination of Blue Blaze Irregulars unable to leave their current jobs permanently, hired talent, and commercial airlines. He'd even managed to find us a permanent co-pilot after only a few pointed words with one of his former employers.

When Buckaroo left him without specific orders, it was in the belief that Lindbergh had arrangements of his own to attend to. It was altogether possible that Xan's bravos would harry us all the way to Lambert, in which case it would be a very good idea to have the 727 in a position for a quick departure. If that could be set up at all with our communications apparently down, the pilot was the man for the job; some of the C-130 runs he'd accomplished for the Army were proof enough of that. He may have enjoyed getting reactions from his passengers almost as much as he liked the flying, but playing head games with the real opposition was a challenge he took more seriously.

Circumstances being what they were, however, Lindbergh's priorities didn't quite match up with Buckaroo's expectations. As the others dispersed to their various assignments, he turned back into the lounge in search of ideas. It seemed to him that the first item on the agenda was to get back in touch with the outside world in some way, and when he noticed the telephone sitting on the floor in one corner, he had to pick up the receiver and put it to his ear. The utter lack of dial tone that greeted him was no real surprise, but sometimes one has to go through the motions, and once he cradled the handset, he picked up the whole phone, then followed the cord to where it vanished into the wall. "I shoulda known," he said to himself when he saw that, although realistically it would make things easier than dealing with a modular jack since he was going to have to strip wires anyway. Typical of the Church's much stereotyped (and occasionally real) penny-pinching attitude where relatively durable goods were concerned, it was an old black rotary phone, heavier than he'd remembered from his mis-spent childhood, and he wouldn't have been surprised to find out it was still there because it had always been leased, never purchased. He leaned over, put it down for a moment, and cut it loose from the wall without a second thought.

When he went out into the rain, he had the phone in one hand, cord wrapped around his wrist, and the Beretta ready in the other. Somewhere near the driveway he remembered seeing a junction box where the building's phone wiring met with a main cable. If he could find it and hotwire a connection without electrocuting himself, he could call the local police and get us some backup. He'd see about getting in touch with folks at the airport if his luck held long enough. Even without bravos to worry about, things were going to be tough enough.

***

Perfect Tommy arrived back at the bus at a dead run, slipping sideways between the opening doors with a dexterity that many a pro running back would have envied. This didn't prevent him from becoming soaked to the skin long before he reached his goal, but the water trail he left on his way to operations was a scant trickle of what it might have been if he'd been moving slow enough to notice things like Lindbergh's own dash for the road. Someone threw a towel at him before he got that far, and he was rubbing down his hair by the time he reached the communications post. Mouse, a brightly red-haired intern some 3 weeks short of being able to test for residency, began her report before he could open his mouth to ask what they'd tried already. "We're being jammed on all frequencies," she began, unaware of exactly how much he already knew. "Very powerful equipment, probably no more than a couple blocks away, maybe as close as the bottom of the bus. Comm's down completely, and we're down to groping in the dark with the radar. If I had more people and the equipment, we'd be a lot closer to solving the problem, but right now, I don't even know what kind of hardware we're looking for. It could be masquerading as just about anything bigger than a lunchbox."

"So there's no way we can warn Reno and Wayback," said Tommy. "And we're blind."

"I haven't seen a pay phone around here, and even if we put all hands on a picket line, trouble would see us first. Short of that, I'm out of ideas."

"Everybody's headed back this way. That help the manpower issue?"

"Maybe," she allowed. "But what do I tell them? Look for anything out of place? Right, like us Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and heathens are supposed to know what a defunct Catholic school ought to look like." Mercifully, she stopped short of adding 'Not.'

"No possibility anyone could have planted something on the bus? I hope."

"Underneath, maybe; we'd probably have missed them coming the way it's been raining. About five minutes ago, you might not have gotten here yourself. Probably would have drowned waiting for T-Bear to open up." That was probably a bit of an exaggeration, but Tommy wasn't willing to put money on that, although it would not have been wholely out of character for the other man to leave him standing in the rain a few seconds longer than absolutely necessary.

"Mouse, I'm wounded," T-Bear called back to them, distress and disappointment in his voice. "I'd never do a thing like that.

"No, you'd drown him personal-like, right?"

"Absolutely." It would have been quite impossible to listen to that part of the conversation and assume he meant it; ever since T-Bear had taken over as official crew chief for the Jet Car, he and Perfect Tommy had worked together considerably, and sniped good-naturedly at each other whenever they weren't both up to the elbows in automotive equipment. When it came to cars, trucks, or busses, however, T-Bear was seriousness itself. "If I find out someone's been tampering with the bus," he said in a much different tone, "they're gonna wish they were history." However upset the idea had him, he had at least part of his mind on immediate business; he'd left his driver's seat long enough to retrieve his Smith & Wesson, and a stack of towels, while pestering Tommy.

He also found he'd returned to it just in time to open the door for the first group of interns Buckaroo had dispatched. A few of them were already armed, and had possesed the forethought to drape various lightweight plastic bags over their sidearms for the trip from building to bus. Towels and information were passed around with equal informality, and the first returnees had scarcely stopped dripping when New Jersey brought his group in. "Where's Lindbergh?" New Jersey asked immediately.

"I thought he was with one of you guys," said Perfect Tommy. "You don't suppose...?" The words had scarcely left his mouth when the distorted but recognizable crack of a single gunshot echoed from the general direction of the building.