There were good reasons, Keisha knew, for having their first meetup be in a park. It was a public place, but not too public; she didn’t want to let a man she didn’t know into her hotel room, or to worry about being overheard in a venue like a restaurant. Two strangers meeting up on a park bench was a tired spy-show cliché for a reason. But the shows never let you see one of them waiting around on a breezy forty-eight degree day for half an hour.
It didn’t help that it was right by the water, on a mostly treeless plaza. The wind blew right through her jacket. She’d run through her coffee—it was the local stuff, all sugared up with grounds at the bottom of the cup, but she didn’t care—twenty minutes back. It would have made more sense to nurse it, but she had serious jet lag. Now she was wide awake, freezing, and getting tired of waiting for this damned officer to show up.
She might have attracted stares, but not many people were crazy enough to hang out by the waterfront at the end of December. The famous Mediterranean climate wasn’t that mild. Every couple of minutes a few tourists would shuffle by in a herd, packed together against the chill, and snap a few photos of Alexander the Great rearing up on his horse. Then they’d wander around for a few minutes, looking and pointing at all the other statues of other dead old men they probably hadn’t heard of. Maybe one of them would read a description out of a brochure, and the others would say something like “huh.” Then they’d get some sense and go off to get souvlaki or something. Keisha was tempted to join them.
When the colonel finally showed, she spotted him easy. For one thing, he was alone. He might have passed for Greek—tall, lean, short dark hair with some grey in it, complexion tan enough, brown windbreaker and black slacks. But nobody stayed in the service that long without getting the kind of burned-in military bearing that would make a man look like a soldier if he was bending over to pick up after a dog. His stride was too regular, his head was too high, and he moved like he expected other people to stay out of his way without being told.
Keisha didn’t care, because he was holding two tall, steaming cups of coffee. She took back most, but not all, of the curses she’d been pouring on his head as he handed her one and sat down on the bench beside her. This cup had grounds in it too, but that didn’t matter. It was hot.
“Ms. Graham, I assume?” the colonel muttered as she took in half the cup at a gulp. He had a long, skinny face, with deep-set eyes and slight jowls starting to form around his mouth. A bit like a bloodhound.
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “Keisha Graham. CWO-3.”
“David Hampton, Colonel. Obviously. Pleasure to meet you.” He looked around the park. “You haven’t been waiting long, have you?”
“Not especially, sir,” she lied, mostly because she’d been raised to know good manners. Even for inconsiderate ex-army birds.
“I’m sorry, I should have picked a place with more cover, but I wanted some privacy. Even if he knows I’m here already, and probably you too.”
“Even if who knows, sir?”
Hampton frowned. “Weren’t you briefed, Ms. Graham?”
“No, sir. I was ordered to come here and assist you in whatever capacity you required. I assumed you would give me the details when I arrived.”
The frown got harder. “And you didn’t look into the local situation?”
“I did not, sir. I got this assignment on very short notice—just yesterday, in fact. They pulled me off leave in a hurry. I reckoned I was here to be your hat trick, and didn’t worry about the rest.”
He blinked. “Excuse me, but just what is a ‘hat trick’?”
“It’s what we called it in the Corps. Organic field support for a small unit. Your CO has a problem and needs a quick fix, he turns to you and asks you to pull out a rabbit. Hat trick, see?” He plainly didn’t, so she pulled her pipe halfway out of her jacket for a visual aid, trying to shield it from the rest of the park.
He squinted at it for several seconds, then said “Jesus Christ!” and jumped up from the bench. Keisha hid the pipe in a hurry as a man with a camera turned to stare. “Please tell me that’s not—chief, is that thing loaded?”
Now it was her turn to be confused. “Only five grams. It’s what we call a ‘piccolo.’”
He looked like he was about to faint, bless his heart. “Five grams. Of ectoplasm.” Keisha nodded. “What’s the yield on that?”
“I’m not sure, sir. Theoretically, it might be a couple of kilotons, but I couldn’t convert it that efficiently all at once even if I wanted to kill us both, and it’s not like it could go off if I dropped it. It’s not nitroglycerin. Sir.” This man was a colonel in the Numenate?
Hampton sighed, and sat back down. “You’ll have to pardon me. I see they did things a bit differently in the Marines than I’m used to.”
Did. Past tense. Keisha tried not to grimace. “We all have our different backgrounds, sir, and I apologize if I alarmed you. I’ve been a VRIL specialist for the past six years, and I carry it with me on all missions. They told me to be ready for action as soon as the plane hit the ground.”
“And they just might be right there,” he said quietly, like he was talking to himself. “You were asking me about the man we’ll be meeting, weren’t you, chief?”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“I didn’t know we’d be meeting a man, but you did refer to someone, yes.”
“Well, his name’s Marshall. Titus Marshall. That’s the name he goes by, anyway. Don’t know his real name, but he’s almost certainly American. A contractor. God knows who trained him. CIA, maybe, way back in the day.”
“And what does he do, sir?” In their line of work, ‘contractor’ could cover an awful lot.
“That’s an interesting question, Ms. Graham, and I wish I had a quick, simple answer. We’re about 90% sure that he’s an emissor. He has a … crew of unconventional PPOs under his command.”
“All emissors?” That would be something. Familiars weren’t easy, cheap, or safe to acquire.
“Yes and no. They have familiars, but they’re not emissors. He does what you might call salvage work.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sure you’re aware, at least in the broad strokes, of the tactical and operational limits on a familiar. The thing itself is extremely dangerous, and damned near indestructible. The emissor’s made of mortal meat like the rest of us.”
“Which is why they conceal their identities so carefully. Yes, sir.”
“And of course if the emissor dies, the familiar can’t survive for long. Unless there’s somebody like Titus Marshall around, who’s worked out a way to recover the familiar with a new, adopted host.”
That got her to sit up a little straighter. “I’d like to see that. I take it we don’t know how he does it?”
The colonel shook his head. “No, that part’s simple enough, once you’ve figured it out. The CIA worked out the theoretical basis of it back in the eighties or so. But it’s a little, ah, sketchy, so we prefer to leave it to contractors like Mr. Marshall.”
Sketchy. When military intelligence considered a method too ‘sketchy’ to use, even for recovering a multi-million-dollar weapon, it was obviously better not to ask. But Keisha knew when she was being invited, and he really did have her curious. “What’s the method, then?”
“Kids,” the colonel bit out. “He uses kids. An emissant will reject a new host if it’s past a certain age. Children are more malleable.”
She looked away, and took another sip of her coffee. It hurt going down.
“Naturally, this isn’t something we’re proud of. But given our limited assets, we … no. No, I’m not going to try and justify this, Ms. Graham. But it’s the situation on the ground here, and I’ve been his liaison since he got here this spring.”
Another sip. Another subject. “He rates a full colonel for a liaison?”
“Yes, because he’s an arrogant son of a bitch. I’m told he only used to require majors. But he knows we need him—for God’s sake, we wouldn’t deal with him if we didn’t—and he feels he can dictate terms. So far, it’s been our policy to indulge him. That policy, I’m pleased to report, has just changed.”
She waited, but he didn’t go on. “I’m listening, sir,” she prompted, staring at Alexander the Great on his horse. How many children had the King of the Known World had in his army? She didn’t know, but however many it was, she bet he was honest about it.
“This might require me to go into deep background. I’m trying to think where to start. I assume you know as much as anyone in the general public about the history of the Numenate?”
“There’s not much history to tell.” Their whole outfit wasn’t two years old, a Frankenstein patched together from the PPOs of four other branches plus a grab-bag of intelligence services. New enough that she still woke up thinking of herself as a marine, some mornings. New enough that her old jarhead buddies hadn’t got tired of pointing out how much ‘Numenate’ sounded like ‘numbnuts.’
“The prehistory, then,” he said impatiently. “I know most of it’s classified, and for good reason. But you are aware that things used to be done much more informally?”
“Eight rounds of congressional hearings’ worth of informal. Yes, sir.” But now they were all together in the Numenate, and it would be different this time. Pinkie promise. When they announced the big shuffle, Keisha remembered, there’d been a political cartoon of Uncle Sam charging a football while Lucy from ‘Peanuts’ held it …
“Twelve, actually. Twelve hearings. No, thirteen.” He smiled. “Before your time, and some of them weren’t that well-documented themselves. I sat in on a couple. Those chairs were hot.”
“I bet they were. So, this Marshall, he worked for us back in the ‘informal’ days?”
“Probably. A lot of the relevant files spontaneously combusted. Whole warehouses at a time. A couple of suicides and disappearances, too. What we know is that Mr. Marshall’s been active since at least the early nineties. Most likely he was trained by one of the intelligence services.
“Whoever it was, they set him loose to tear into the Soviets’ underbelly, down in the ‘stans. All disavowed, ‘oh no we have a rogue agent on the loose,’ same bullshit they pulled on us in Latin America but we did it better. Bigger budget, and we let ours have a longer leash. His was long enough that we barely noticed when he went rogue for real. And nobody really cared, as long as he stayed in Asia giving the Kremlin ulcers.”
“But he didn’t, did he?” Here they were in Thessaloniki, after all.
“Of course not. Who wants to play god-king in Habibistan? Anyway, he might not have had a choice about it. I don’t want to deny Mr. Marshall credit where it’s due: he really did make himself a hell of a nuisance. He might have been one significant factor—among many—leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. For what that’s worth.”
“Was he already using children at that point?”
“Oh, sure. That’s, uh, part of the problem, actually. We’ll get to that. By the time of the Whiteout—what was that, four years ago?”
“Five,” Keisha corrected.
“Time flies. So, by that point, he’d been going on a rampage all over the heart of Asia, apparently killing his rivals and incorporating their talent. Might have taken out another rogue for us, we’re not sure. Even before he left, or got chased out, he was styling himself as the head of a ‘family.’ The Marshall Family. He didn’t have quite as much turf as Alex there, but it was definitely embarrassing.”
Keisha nodded. “So when new management took over in the Kremlin—“
“As soon as things were settled down, and stable, they went headhunting. They leveled a major city in Kazakhstan in the process. He got the message and left.”
“You mean Guryev? That was him?”
“Oh, you heard about that? Yeah. By then he was ‘Titus Marshall’ and we were keeping a real file on him. There weren’t actually any protests or uprisings or whatever the cover story was, they knew better than that. Marshall moved into town, the place went up like Hanoi, and he moved on in a hurry. Draw your own conclusions.”
She looked into her almost-empty cup. “I can see why we kept that quiet. Sir.”
“The Russians, too. Nobody came out looking good from that one. After that our friend laid low for bit. He might have set up as some kind of gangster in Syria. Did a few little jobs for the local scum, testing the waters for a new business model. A few favors for us, too. Then the Kremlin played the biggest ‘rogue agent’ ruse of all.” He waved his arm east. “At which point Mr. Marshall set up base here, without anyone’s permission. Hasn’t left since.”
“Brazen, isn’t he?”
“He has at least three familiars at his command, not including the one we assume he has for himself. He doesn’t charge much—all things considered—and he gets results.”
“Him and his ‘family.’”
“Yes, Chief Graham. Him and his family.” Hampton drained his own cup dry and threw it in the trash. “But things have changed, very recently. Titus Marshall all but runs this town now. He collects his own taxes, has goons shaking down businesses for a cut. And we’ve been willing to overlook that.
“But then, two days back, the French lost an emissor around Istanbul. KIA. They’re coy, naturally, but nobody thinks they had more than three total. They might have had plans to reclaim this familiar for themselves, but we’ll never know now, because it seems Mr. Marshall beat them to it. Killing a few of their men in the process.”
“Oh, Lord.” Keisha squeezed her eyes shut.
“Brisson is shitting barbed wire right now. Our boy—and we pay him, he’s ours—just stole an irreplaceable asset. I don’t even know how much it cost to develop that thing, especially if you factor in all the failed efforts. Worse than that, it’s a humiliation. He wiped his ass with Gallic pride. They’re making noises about bailing on NATO, or the Coalition. Probably just noise, but nobody wants to chance it. That’s where we come in.”
Keisha looked him in the eye. “Just the two of us, sir?”
“Don’t get me wrong. We can’t do anything rash, or without consulting our superiors all the way up to God. For now, you’re just my assistant, and we’re going to quietly observe. But we keep our eyes open, and if the opportunity presents itself we can very rapidly get permission and any necessary assets to send Mr. Titus Marshall on to his specially reserved four-star executive suite in Hell.”