NUMBER FIVE
CODENAME: MAGPIE
STATUS: ACTIVE, ON DUTY
LOCATION: [REDACTED]
I was nicking emeralds. And not for fun, neither. This was one of the Boss’s specials.
You know about the curse of resources, right? A poor country discovers diamonds or gold, or rare earth minerals and it doesn’t make the country any richer because politicians are arseholes. It just fuels internal conflict and corruption, or guarantees an invasion, or a corporate takeover.
You usually can't solve that by nicking the stuff. That just means the civilians get forced to produce more to cover the shortfall. But if the quality is important, and there’s a limited window to sell it, then maybe there’s something you can do.
There’s this nasty little war brewing in South America. I won’t say where because I’m pretty sure the Boss had no legit reason to get involved. A bunch of city boys went prospecting illegally and found some of the highest quality emeralds in the world and of course a local warlord type seized control of the mines. He’s been using the emeralds to buy guns from the drug cartels just across the border.
The guns were for a land grab from the Government and the indigenous people. It got really messy, really quickly. We had maybe six months until this dickhead carved his own personal kingdom out of the rainforest.
Then the Boss got wind of a shipment of American SAMs that went ‘missing’. Rumour was that our boy was after them so he could take out government planes, maybe even commercial flights. The Cartel was brokering a deal between him and their tame arms dealer. It was the biggest deal so far and the first time we’d had the Warlord, the Cartel leader, and the Arms Dealer in the same place at the same time.
So I got dropped in the sweltering fucking jungle, in the middle of the fucking night, miles from the Cartel compound where the deal is going down. I had to yomp for hours in the dark just to get to the outer wall. And you all know that I left the Marines so I’d never have to yomp anywhere ever again.
I got over the outer wall no trouble but they were super paranoid . There were patrols between the inner and outer walls and a small army milling about inside. Fortunately someone in the compound had been reading the Ladybird book of security because they’d let trees grow between the two walls. I just did my whole treetop ninja thing and got over the inner wall, no trouble. I dropped down on top of a jeep.
Which was fine, except some fucker drove the jeep off with me on top of it. I had to dive into a fucking shrubbery by the mansion. By that point it was starting to get light and I knew I didn’t have long. I scaled the wall in a hurry and over the balcony wall and in through the open window. The only benefit of working in the jungle is that it’s too fucking hot to keep the buildings secure.
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Our intel said that the Cartel were holding the emeralds in a safe inside the mansion. They’d verified them before the Dealer would move the SAMs and they were expecting a cut for brokering the deal and providing security.
Intel also said that the safe should be a five minute job. The intel was only mostly right because they’d upgraded the fucking safe. Probably because they knew they’d be holding emeralds in it. I was stuck there with no idea how long until the house woke up, no ETA for the Dealer and the SAMs, and the equipment for the wrong fucking safe.
I didn’t have time for anything clever. I searched the desk and found the receipts for the safe. That told me who had it installed. I guessed that the guy that ordered it got to pick the password.
I got one of the foetuses from IT on the line and got him to feed me everything we knew about the guy. Now if you input the wrong password too many times it should trigger an alarm but it’s electric and they skimped on it so I just cut the power to the alarm and brute-forced the password. I have never typed so fast in my life. I tried every detail of the guy’s life. The names of his kids, his wife, his mistresses. Everyone’s birth dates. Even the pets. I was there for at least 40 minutes just on the password crack. Turned out to be the name of his favourite mistress’s pet parrot.
I swapped the real emeralds, which were beautiful, for cheap fakes. By then the arms dealer was arriving and I couldn’t get out of the building. I had to run for the balcony and hide on the roof.
Which meant that I was still on the roof when the great falling out happened. It took them two minutes to go from best friends to shooting each other.
It sounded like the Warlord got the Arms Dealer, one of the Cartel got the Warlord and then the cartel goons had a firefight with the Warlord’s bodyguards. I was sitting on the roof celebrating quietly when I got the message about One. Kind of took the shine off it.
#
'And the emeralds?' said Two as she watched Five finish the last of his drink.
'Were lost during the firefight. They were certainly not sold on the black market and they are definitely not paying for this shindig.' Five managed his usual wide smile but only for a second before he folded it away.
The way Five’s smile disappeared reminded Seven that Number Five had also been close to Number One. There had been a fling. Maybe more than a fling. The kind of thing that all the blanks knew about but none of them mentioned to the Boss.
Five put his glass down, took the bottle and turned towards Number Six. 'What about you? Were you working or were you just ruining someone’s day for fun?'
'Both,' said Number Six as he accepted a clean glass from Three. 'I was making gay porn in Russia.'
'The Boss frowns on moonlighting,' said Seven.
'It was on the company dime,' said Six.
'You got paid to go to Russia, and make gay porn for Queen and Country?' said Number Two.
'You know me,' said Six. 'I like to multitask. And if you’ll all shut up I’ll tell you about it.' He paused and sipped tequila. 'You remember Feliks Demochev? Muscovite politician, well connected, unfriendly to British interests and so performatively homophobic that we all thought he must be deep in the closet?'
'I remember Number One had a crack at him,' said Seven. 'He had no luck. We all thought that maybe Demochev was straight but One insisted that he wasn’t.'