The Brummie Con Read online

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ALSO BY JEFFREY A. BALLARD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright © 2017 by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  All rights reserved.

  Cover designed by Ravven (www.ravven.com/)

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief quotations in a book review.

  If you want to be notified when Jeffrey A. Ballard’s next novel is released, and receive free short stories and occasional other perks, please sign up for his newsletter here. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe any time.

  www.jaballard.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN YOUR FATHER’S a Boss you expect his tenure to end in a body bag. That’s just the way it is. What you don’t expect is for him to go missing without a trace.

  Killing a Boss is a public affair. People need to see the body. People need to know the details. They need to know the kind of power the killer has to have to pull something off like that. And most importantly, people need to know who to call “Boss” next.

  But that’s the problem with expectations. Things rarely work out the way one thought they would. And what no one expected, what no one saw coming, was the Cleaners organizing and declaring open war on all the Bosses.

  Colvin broke the news less than forty-eight hours ago. I’ve already replayed that scene in my head more than four hundred and eighty times:

  “Is he alive?” I ask.

  Colvin answers, “We don’t know.”

  After a silence in which I couldn’t breathe, Colvin continues with, “We need you to find out.”

  As if I needed to be told.

  It’s now half past midnight and I’m wiggling myself into the anti-gravity suit in the back of a rental hovercar while Winn drives me over a wealthy part of town north of Atlanta on a cold December night. I’m spread across the backseat of the four-door sedan on my back with my butt arched in the air pulling the skin-tight anti-gravity suit on. The injuries on my back from the tour boat explosion seven days ago mostly itch at this point, but there’s still an annoying low ache.

  “Looks like he got the message,” Puo says through my comm-link. Puo’s back at our hastily arranged hideout in an old farm house we’re renting outside the Atlanta metro region. “He says the northeast air defenses are now down for a few minutes.”

  Shit. The “he” is Durante Cattaneo, my father’s second-in-command, and he may have gotten our message but that doesn’t mean he’s going to hold the door open forever for me. “Roger that,” I say.

  “I can’t verify it,” Puo grumps.

  We’re mostly blind. My father makes sure there are no surveillance assets in the area over his estate to hack into. Puo is deeply offended.

  “Roger that.” I hurry, sliding the suit over my hips and then flop down on the seat to jam my arms in the sleeves. The sheen of sweat makes my arms stick as they go. It’s too warm in here. “E.T.A?” I ask Winn.

  “Thirty seconds,” Winn says glancing back at me.

  I thread my fingers into the attached gloves, then I suck in my chest with a deep breath as I zip up the suit and then exhale out some nervousness. I grab my helmet preparing to put it on.

  “Good luck,” Winn says. He turns to look at me with concern in his bright blue eyes. The bruises on his face have faded to yellow from where the Cleaners beat him, and the scabs have mostly healed, leaving little red marks. The injuries give him an appealing fighter-boy appearance, and he has just enough stubble the way I like it, while his black curly hair carelessly frames his square face. He looks like he wants to kiss me goodbye—he leans back toward me by the smallest smidge.

  “Thanks,” I say, breaking eye contact and ignoring the flutter in my chest as I shove the helmet on. The smell of stale air, electronics, and plastic shove up my nose in the enclosed space. I shift over on the seat and open the passenger side door. “I’m ready,” I say.

  Heavy, winter wind rushes into the hovercar, buffeting up against me. My internal heater in the anti-gravity suit starts heating up to compensate—I still think that might be the best invention ever in the history of woman.

  “On my mark,” Puo says.

  “On your mark,” I repeat back. I take another deep breath.

  My father’s disappearance and the Cleaners declaring open war have thrown things with Winn and me into limbo, and I haven’t even had time to try and sort out why. A few days ago we were on a likely path to reconciliation; now my feelings about Winn feel like a distraction, a potentially dangerous complication.

  The heads-up displays from my helmet float out below me, unable to snap to the ethereal overcast clouds that hug the nighttime landscape below. I can’t see anything below the gray void below me.

  “Mark,” Puo announces.

  A blue bulls-eye blooms northeast ahead of us on top of the cloud deck. I push myself free of the hovercar and hear the passenger side door slam closed above me as I free-fall into the overcast night.

  Cold thin air rushes past me in a familiar sensation. It’s comforting, like sitting in front of fan on a hot day. I maneuver myself to free-fall head first.

  Ninety-five hundred feet to the bulls-eye floating in the darkness below. Atlanta is a thousand feet above sea level, so rather than display the altitude and make me do math, I have the heads-up display show the distance to the ground.

  “Are the defenses still out?” I ask Puo. Not that there’s much time left to avoid being turned into chunky air splatter.

  “Yeah,” Puo says, worry lacing his voice. He then mutters, “Not that I could tell.” I can almost hear him swallow over the comm-link. His visage is as clear to me as if I were standing over him and his computers: his six-foot three-hundred-pound frame sitting there with little beads of sweat on his round Samoan face; his black hair tied back into a tight ponytail that bounces slightly as he looks between monitors and types on his computers.

  The current tone of worry in his voice is his normal anxiousness, I decide—his normal butt pucker on a job and not caused by a specific imminent threat. It’s a general sort of worry caused by clandestinely dropping on my father’s heavily fortified compound to have a secret conversation with Durante Cattaneo, my father’s second-in-command.

  We’re still frustratingly ignorant in this whole thing. No one, except the Cleaners, seem to know what’s going on. All we do know is that several Bosses have been assassinated, and those that survived the assassination attempts are under siege, and for some reason the Cleaners really want Puo and me dead.

  Five thousand feet. I’m hurtling through the top of the cloud deck. The blue bulls-eye continues to float below me in the void. I flare my arms and legs to position myself better—that’s one hell
of a small bulls-eye. I’m used to dropping on the ocean where if you miss your mark you’re only off by some distance to your ultimate target. If I’m off here, well, ouch.

  Two thousand feet. The heads-up displays start snapping to the hills that are coalescing out from the bottom of the clouds. The nightvision paints the landscape below in blue pixels with a few hot spots from where various mansions are lit up for the night. An occasional land car streaks through a winding road.

  I recognize the aerial outline of my father’s estate. The meandering flat line of blue pixels that connects the bulls-eye and the nearest hot spot of my father’s mansion should be the river. That bulls-eye looks awfully small spread over the surface of a not very wide river. The river isn’t that deep either—ten, maybe twelve feet. We don’t know exactly. All we have to go on is a late night swim I took there once.

  Five hundred feet. The anti-gravity suit starts decelerating my free-fall. I should be under the anti-aircraft EMPs, but now I’m in prime range for the auto-tracking Gatling guns and slowing my descent is only going to make it easier—let’s just say, my father may be somewhat aware of our capabilities and took some precautions in case anyone else had our abilities.

  Thankfully, I don’t hear any rapid pops of gunfire or see any bright flashes. The mid-December night is silent except for the cold wind rushing over my helmet.

  One hundred feet.

  I can see the stone bridge upriver. The nightvision paints the bridge in blue pixels. There are two funny-looking shapes in the middle of the bridge on each side that might be mistaken for ugly statues. But I know better: they hide two auto-tracking Gatling guns that appear to be facing the river—right where the bulls-eye is. That better be a coincidence.

  The agitator lasers ahead for my entry into the water. I rotate in the last fifty feet to land on my back.

  The goal is to drop as fast as I can into the river and get under before any patrols are sent out to shore up the air defenses that went down. So I’m not hitting the river at full speed, but nor am I jumping off a stone bridge with frivolity.

  I hit the water with a heavy splash.

  The airy vice grip of the water clutches and pulls me under. Damn that’s cold—!

  Oof! My back smacks against muddy river bottom knocking my breath out. My back protests this new intrusion on its recovery. Damn, that hurts.

  “Queen Bee,” Winn asks over the comm-link using my code name, “you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I manage to say. Ever since Hayes back in the Seattle Isles hacked people’s CitIDs we always use code-names when communicating over digital channels as an extra security precaution. And in a war with the Cleaners, it’s an extra-special helping of precaution.

  I lay there for a second catching my breath and letting the internal heater of the suit warm me up. “I’m under. I think Chameleon’s calculations were off—”

  “Off?” Puo breaks in. “Whadda ya mean off?”

  “The riverbed broke my fall,” I say. I push myself up and flip over, starting to make my way downstream toward my father’s compound. A bloom of mud and silt escort me downriver. I let the current do most of the work.

  “Nonsense,” Puo says. “All within the margins of error. You’re fine aren’t you?”

  “I’ll remember that,” I say, “the next time you drop in the suits.”

  “Next time?” Puo says on top on me, suddenly alert. “Whadda ya mean next time?”

  I grin inside my helmet and don’t answer. Puo hates dropping in the anti-gravity suits. He’ll only do it if there’s no other possible option open to him.

  “Queen Bee,” Puo whines, “what are you thinking? What do you mean next time? Queen Bee!”

  I start egging him on, chuckling at his discomfort.

  “Heart attack, Queen Bee,” Puo says. “Heart attack.”

  “Gah, fine,” I say. “We really need to set a limit on how often you’re allowed to invoke that.” And it was a coronary heart spasm.

  “It was only seven days ago,” Puo says.

  “I said fine.” I follow the bottom of the river around the bend. The nightvision does a good job of outlining debris like logs and stones to push myself over. Not too much farther.

  “Music?” Puo asks about piping in soft classical music over the comm-link. It’s a defensive measure so we know immediately if we’re ever cut off or jammed.

  It’s quiet down here. Much quieter than the ocean. No life. No motor boats. All I can hear is the water moving over my helmet. “No,” I say, lowering my voice. “It’s too quiet down here, I don’t want the music to drown anything out.”

  “Roger that,” Puo says.

  When I don’t say anything for a bit, Puo can’t help himself with, “So what do you mean next time?”

  I debate a few answers before settling on answering truthfully, “I don’t have anything specific in mind.”

  “Whoa,” Winn breaks in. He’s continuing to drive up above in the skylanes waiting for my retrieval.

  “Whoa, what?” I ask.

  “Just surprised,” Winn says, “you passed it up when he set you up so beautifully.”

  I clench my jaw and chuck my first few responses. Winn has been like this the past few days, picking his moments to try and bait me into being playful. I (again) refuse. Instead I ask Winn, “Where are you?”

  Winn pauses a second before answering in a matter-of-fact voice, “I’m about mile north of you and about to drop down to park and wait for your pickup.”

  “Roger that,” I say. Sporadic lights from the outer gardens glow down from above the river surface revealing a smidge more detail in the nightvision. The suit’s internal heater has reached a nice toasty temperature (Best. Invention. Ever.). “Chameleon, you reading anything unusual?” We attached some goodies to the underside of the rental hovercar for Winn’s drive-over of the area.

  “You mean besides the anti-aircraft EMPs spread around the grounds,” Puo says, “the auto-Gatling guns perched on various roofs, goons on patrol, and what looks like good old-fashioned mortars?”

  “Yeah, beside those,” I say. The old-fashioned mortars are new, but Father always did have a flair for the dramatic.

  “No,” Puo says. “What’s it look like down there?”

  I float over a perfectly square manmade device with a rounded nub at the center painted in blue pixels—probably a concrete base with a hydrophone in the center. I studiously do not touch it to find out. “Quiet,” I say dropping my voice to a whisper.

  The right bank of the river is turning from mud and freshwater plant life to the straight edges of masonry draped in crud. “Coming up on the entrance,” I whisper again.

  Puo and Winn take a cue from my tone and don’t say anything.

  I maneuver myself over to be near the masonry wall, taking care to avoid suspicious-looking perfect squares (they don’t match the rest of the wall) embedded in the masonry that continues to curve down toward the riverbed the farther I travel.

  Bright lights shine down into the water from my father’s mansion above. The nightvision auto-adjusts to let less light in. There’s no sound down here. I can’t hear the trickling of water inside my helmet or hear anything outside the river.

  There. There’s a break in the masonry wall. I catch the edge with my hand and pull myself around, my heart thumping in my chest. This is the most dangerous part. This is where my father would strike if he were to choose. Somewhere close, somewhere not easily escapable, somewhere where there’s no ambiguity about intentions.

  I pull myself forward slowly. “I’m in the death tunnel,” I whisper. Sweat drips down the side of my temples. I switch to swimming, careful not to touch any of the masonry that now surrounds me.

  I see the round crisscrossed metal sewer grate ahead of me. “The grate is still in place.”

  “Start humming,” Winn whispers back.

  I oblige and start humming a low, haunting song as I come up to the metal grate entrance and stare at it. I mentally prepare mys
elf, hoping against all hope it’s not booby-trapped. The humming will let Puo and Winn know if it is and I die a silent, agonizing death.

  “Wait,” Puo announces. “This isn’t right.”

  “What isn’t right?” I ask, my heart rate spiking as I look around quickly.

  “Standby silently,” Puo says.

  I do as Puo orders, using the time to focus on my breathing. I take slow and steady breaths, expanding and contracting out my stomach in diaphragmatic breathing to try and calm myself.

  “Okay,” Puo says. “Hum this instead.” The Leave it to Beaver theme music pours in over the comm-link.

  “Damn it, Chameleon,” I say over the music. “You scared the bejesus out of me.” But I can’t help smiling.

  “What kind of mess does scaring the bejesus out of you make?” Puo asks. “You really shouldn’t leave any trace of bejesus behind for someone to follow.”

  I shake my head at Puo and start humming the theme song. It’s already putting me in a better mood. I retrieve the underwater-fitted laser cutter and start bobbing my head to the catchy beat. “Here I go,” I say. A thought flashes through my head that I should probably say something meaningful to Puo and Winn before I die, but instead I just reach out and grab the metal sewer grate.

  Whew. “I’m still here,” I announce and then get to work cutting the sewer cover away.

  “Well,” Puo says cheerily “that’s one possible death trap avoided. Only ninety-seven more to go.” He keeps the Leave it to Beaver theme music on a loop.

  “Thanks, Chameleon,” I say. The laser cutter makes short work of the bars around the edges and I set the sewer grate carefully down below me.

  I slide myself into the tunnel and activate my helmet lights. “I’m in.” Now there’s just a long claustrophobic maze-like swim to my clandestine meeting.

  ***

  The swim through the old mansion sewer tunnels is tense but uneventful. I spotted at least two unpleasant surprises that waited for an unfriendly swimmer who hadn’t previously communicated their clandestine approach.

  The sewer cover leading up into the wine cellar is kindly already removed. I make some splashing noises to announce my presence before pushing my head slowly up through the water. My helmet lights cut through the darkness to fall on an Italian man in his mid-thirties: Durante Cattaneo. He holds a handgun bearing a mounted flashlight in a two-handed grip.