Part VII: The Double Agent

  One Year Ago ...

  "No more shooting at us. Let's talk," Caza yelled.

  Fiona listened in on the standoff conversation over the PA while she fidgeted. The interior of the shack was arranged just a few minutes earlier to her spec with monitors placed in all four corners linked to the Vertodo 360 Cam on the roof.

  She still felt like something was off.

  No one could approach without her first sighting them from a hundred meters, but something was not quite right.

  A set of eyes lay on her. She could feel it somehow.

  Fiona shook her head and told herself:

  Your paranoia is going to destroy you.

  Still, until she knew for certain she was in the clear, Fiona could not contact her Control.

  He went by Gato Montes, and she needed his input before her brother, Andu, talked the Klinica Kompleat staffers into surrendering to him.

  Andu crouched behind a trash compactor with a comlink in hand, and the three staffers hid behind the entrance patio.

  At least two of them, the males who were grounds attendants, possessed small arms. They fired on the creep team mere minutes earlier as Andu and the Americans got out of the lead vehicle, forcing the team into cover.

  The attendants were badly outmatched, and only Andu's benevolence kept them alive.

  Fiona got busy. She only had minutes before the three staffers would surely surrender. She pulled up a file integrity visualization map of her system to identify if the invader was using electronic means of surveillance on her.

  She kept her operational command system extraordinarily clean, which made the invasive instruction set stand out from the support tool cluster from which it embedded to hide itself while it read through the system logs.

  She hit the invasive program with an endpoint detection file to siphon its communication data; the trajectory of its feed was located nearby with an oscillation pattern so strong she could see it on the monitor bare-eyed without magnification.

  Now she understood. Fiona turned the cam to the sky. A single nightwing hovered above by a few hundred meters.

  Most likely, the crow was attracted to the El Otros drama below it. The infection-related heat signatures on the two grounds attendants and female concierge clerk trapped along with them could easily be seen from a dozen kilometers away by a nightwing, given the staffer's present level of anxiety.

  However, as unfortunate as that may have sounded, it presented an opportunity for her to slow things down. Fiona hit Andu up on his earpiece.

  "We've got company," she told him. She then sent the live feed of the nightwing.

  "Damn it," Andu cursed. "Can you handle it for me?"

  As usual, he fell right into her plans.

  "Yeah," she said casually to reassure him that she was on the ball. "Stall the staffers by asking them questions about their duties. Any excuse to keep them put. Don't let them do anything potentially kinetic for now."

  "Thanks, Li'l Chief," Andu answered in his sign-off.

  Fiona typed a message to the nightwing. First she put in the warrant ID and then Elise's bounty hunter registration number and attached a message:

  'This Is A Legal Notice: You Are Interfering In Official Salvage Matters. SHOO! GET! SCRAM, bird.'

  Fiona burned the nightwing's instruction set out of the operational command system.

  It soared higher and flew away towards Vida Escondida.

  She punched in Gato Montes. His face was visually obscured, but the interior was the second floor of the main building of the Klinica Kompleat building.

  "Che Encanto," he said, addressing Fiona by his code name for her. "You can't allow them to capture the staff. I wouldn't ask you to do this, but the satellite is blocked. I can't order their self-destruction."

  Fiona was confused by the odd choice of words.

  "You mean, their suicides?"

  Gato Montes paused before answering.

  "Yes. You'll have to activate a turret. Hurry, get it in place."

  He was asking her to kill the three staff members.

  "I'm here to save El Otros, not murder them!"

  She could hear exasperation in his voice. It wasn't her place to question an order. Her intuition read in his voice doubts that they should have ever gotten involved on a physical level.

  "Fi...Che Encanto, they are foot soldiers. If they get captured, that puts the entire community at risk. All of their lives are in your hands. Can I count on you?"

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  "Of course," Fiona answered back, though she felt at that moment like running far away from it all. Finding a way out of the Quadra itself and distancing from the mess she got herself into when she first agreed to work for Gato Montes against his mortal enemy inside ùltimos Diás—Elise Luna Claro.

  But now she couldn't imagine life without him, and her heart's stirrings bounced back in place.

  "Of course," Fiona repeated. "I'll do it for you. Give me a moment to set everything in motion. Che Encanto, out."

  It felt weird to refer to herself as 'Che Encanto' (my charm) instead of 'Nde Encanto' (your charm), but that was by protocol.

  She charged up the generator hidden on top of the main building, and then turned on the coolant sink to counter the generator's heat signature.

  In a few more minutes the turret would be online. In the meantime, she hit Andu's earpiece.

  "The bird is no longer a problem. Everything is a go," she said.

  "I saw it fly off four minutes ago. Run into a problem?"

  "Nothing I couldn't handle," she answered dismissively.

  "Hey," Andu said. "Elise is late. What's the hold-up?"

  She checked her messages and converted one to text from just eleven minutes previously.

  Fiona paraphrased it.

  "She is doing a last-minute purchase order switch-out for what we'll need for the breach equipment. Elise gave an estimated time of arrival in exactly ten minutes."

  "Alright," he said. "I've got to talk these scared-out-of-their-minds people over to our side before she gets here. Gallo Puntero, signing off."

  "Che...," Fiona feigned a cough, "Fiona, signing off."

  How can you be so careless!

  "Fucking amateur hour," she cursed herself.

  She didn't stop for long to continue berating herself. Out of curiosity, Fiona checked out their operational expenses, fearing that the purchase switchouts Luna Claro committed would save a significant amount from the original order list.

  Gato Montes plan to preemptively take out Tasìa del Alma-Gris as a threat depended on getting Luna Claro on board with capturing her.

  To Fiona's relief, the new purchase was nearly thirty-five thousand USD more expensive than the original drill machine on order.

  She grinned at the balance sheet she read through—that put the operation in the red in terms of solvency. This part of the plan was her own contribution to the greater scheme.

  Motion on the forward monitor told her it was almost time. Fiona clicked between the Klinica Kompleat exterior cameras. She marked the three staffers as targets. Then limited the quantity and speed of the rounds. A tri-burst she set thrice for each target and set the shot speed to one point two seconds aimed at the heart.

  She keyed into the parameters: No self-defense measure, nor harm to other targets. The turret was going to have to be a necessary sacrifice.

  The woman started running first, jumping over the stairs onto the patio and towards the pathway. The two groundskeepers followed quickly behind.

  Fiona took a deep breath, and held it in place. She flipped the button that set the turret in motion.

  With a violent slam, the turret was instantly grounded on the awning. In the next split instance, the first marked grounds keeper's torso lit up with rounds exploding against his back and out of his ribcage.

  Fiona tried not to see anymore of the carnage, but she caught the glimpse of an image that would stick with her and she would wake up visualizing every morning until her dying day.

  She shook it from her thoughts.

  Thankfully, their deaths were quick and merciful. That was the only thing graceful about this shit show, Fiona told herself.

  She closed her eyes and tried to breathe calmly as she needed to take a minute to reconcile what she had done before getting back to her work. A postmortem assessment of what went wrong would be expected of her from both Andu and Luna Claro.

  Fiona shook her head once more. She had her own postmortem to consider.

  Well, I am a murderer now. How do I feel about that?

  Fiona recalled Luna Claro's quip about an El Otro she had hunted down, very much annoyed Fiona even asked her about it.

  Couldn't give less of a shit, so why are we still talking about it?

  She had grown to hate the woman, and Fiona suspected in her own case, she would never be able to shrug it off so easily.

  With her official tasks completed, Fiona managed to slip away, and at the rendezvous motel room, as she waited for Montes Gato, Fiona stood naked, staring at her own body in the mirror.

  She didn't like what she saw. A year ago she was athletic and pretty with chiseled cheeks instead of puffy ones. She only agreed to gain the fifty-five pounds for Montes Gato's scheme to lure Elise Luna Claro into a relationship.

  Fiona chuckled over the thought as she pinched at a belly roll, "Imagine this being someone's idea of a honeypot."

  But it was. The psychological profile assessed by ùltimos Días's own clinical staff nailed down nine factors that would make another woman irresistible to the bounty hunter, and now Fiona embodied them all.

  Of course, Andu was suspicious. Not only did she get reassigned to Luna Claro's team, but when Fiona gained the weight, he was well aware of his boss's romantic type. Compounding that, Fiona had not shown interest in other girls since boarding school, and now she was dating Luna Claro.

  Andu took her to the side, and they had that awkward conversation.

  He asked.

  Are you here on my team now to spy on my boss? For some bullshit internal corporate skulduggery?

  She had an excuse at ready, practiced and rehersed with an AI coach to enhance the sincerity of her delivery.

  No, Andu. It is not like that at all. Higher-ups feel that Elise is profoundly unhappy after, you know ... So, I was asked to accommodate her needs. Sorry, it may seem manipulative, but they want to minimize her emotional state that could compromise operational efficiency.

  He had scowled at the idea, but it seemed to satisfy his curiosity. At the least he put out no feelers in-company to poke at the veracity of her claim.

  She was sure of it. Montes Gato was in a position to know if he had.

  The appartment door opened softly. Fiona stepped back into the main room. He stood there tall, wearing a tan shearling overcoat, and appearing ruggedly handsome with his peppered silver hair and matching mustache.

  "Hello, Fiona." He said softly.

  "Hello, Rubin," she answered in turn with a sadly wan smile.

  Rubin Estes, the Deputy Director of ùltimos Días, stood before her. He was a most powerful man; Fiona had no doubt that he was madly in love with her.

  "How are you feeling now?" He asked.

  She shook her head and approached him. From a tabletop she scooped up two blue pills and a double shot of Amaretto she had prepared for him and handed them over.

  "Like total shit. But before we talk about anything else, you are going to fuck me until I don't feel anything at all."

  After he did as she demanded, Rubin lay sleeping by her side an hour later. They never did have that conversation, but she couldn't wait any longer for him to wake. Luna Claro would be back from tending to the wounded soon.

  Fiona cleaned up with a quick shower and doused herself in body spray as she planned out how she was going to convince Luna Claro into pursuing the bounty on the thief.

  At least the next few hours would keep her busy and keep her mind off of the murders. The woman, the one who was a concierge, heard the shots behind her pick off the grounds attendants one by one.

  Fiona could see it, the horror of realization in the woman's eyes and open screaming mouth, before she caught the nine bullets.

  She was next in line, and she knew it.

  Fiona doused her face in cold water with the showerhead to change the course of her thoughts.

  "Fuck me," she whispered and repeated in a hyperventilated stutter.

  After she quietly slipped out the door so as not to awaken Rubin, she glanced around to check her surroundings.

  Fiona froze in place. Even in the darkness past the walkway lights, she could see the outline of the nightwing that perched on the diesel exhaust pipe of a decommissioned 18-wheeler.

  The bird stared back at her.