Shadow of Freedom

In the meantime, she had to figure out what she was going to recommend to President Lombroso, and she grimaced at the thought. The president wasn’t a lot happier with her than she was with Braddock, and this wasn’t going to help. Maybe she could figure out a way to make it an intelligence failure and put it all on Friedemann Mátyás? She’d have to think about that.

* * *

The parking garage on the far side of Trifecta Boulevard, the surface level street east of the corporate tower, offered an ideal staging area for Colonel Braddock’s Scorpions. Each Scorpion individually exceeded the maximum vehicle weight for the garage by about twenty percent, but there were only thirty of them. Distributed across four floors, their weight was more than sufficiently spread out. Better yet, the garage had accesses on both its east and west sides, which meant the AFVs could be moved into the garage from the west without anyone in Trifecta Tower seeing them.

One might have wondered how useful armored vehicles were going to be in a situation like this one, but over the last few weeks, it had become the Presidential Guard’s policy to deploy overwhelming force in order to overawe and terrify potential dissidents. Besides, it was always possible there was a ground assault element involved in this insane plan after all, and having the firepower on hand to deal with one if it came along seemed like a good thing.

Braddock personally supervised the movement of his vehicles into the garage, then moved his own command vehicle to the roof. The vehicle crew was clearly uncomfortable sitting out there in the open as they remembered the anti-tank launchers they’d encountered last month. Braddock didn’t care about that. First, because he doubted these bastards were going to escalate the confrontation by using heavy weapons (assuming they had any) any sooner than they had to. And, second, because he wasn’t in the command vehicle. He’d moved to a better vantage point just inside the ground-level entrance facing the Tower, maintaining his connection to the command vehicle on a secure frequency while its position on top of the garage gave it the best transmission reach he could come up with.

Now he keyed the mike.

“Command One,” he said, and waited for the earbug tone to tell him the communications computer had automatically patched him through to Yardley. “Command One, Tiger is in position,” he said then.

“Good,” Yardley replied.

* * *

The desk com buzzed again, and the strike leader punched the key.

“What can I do for you, General?”

“You could start by cutting your throats and saving me the effort,” Yardley suggested.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going anywhere without Guernicke and we’re planning on killing a lot more of you bastards before you ever get into this office. So shall we move on to your second suggestion?”

“Let Ms. Guernicke leave the building unharmed, and we’ll let you and the rest of your murderers withdraw unmolested.”

The leader laughed out loud.

“Oh, I don’t think so!” he half-chortled. “As fairy tales go, it’s not bad, but we stopped believing in the tooth fairy a long time ago. Try again.”

“All right, third option. You stay right where the fuck you are, we sit outside here, and we starve your asses out. How does that sound?”

“At least a little more like you’re telling the truth. On the other hand, we brought a fair amount of food with us. Of course, we won’t be able to share any of it with Ms. Guernicke or the other Trifecta employees in here with us, so they’ll probably get hungry—and dehydrated—a lot faster than we will. If you want to try it, though, more power to you.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started,” Yardley told him. “There’s always the possibility of knockout gas through the environmental systems. Or we send in SWAT teams. That’s a damned big tower, and you can’t begin to put fire teams everywhere you’d need to be to stop us. We can work our way around you, get our own teams in position, then blow our way through walls and floors to take you out.”

“Probably,” the strike leader acknowledged. “I’d say the chances of your pulling that off without our killing Ms. Guernicke before you get in here are no more than forty-sixty, though, and that’s if you wait a couple days, until fatigue and anxiety start dulling our alertness. Of course, that’s also assuming we’re willing to wait that long before we just go ahead and shoot the bitch. For that matter, we’ve got somewhere around fifty more Trifecta employees up here, most of them pretty damned senior, and we don’t especially like any of them, either. You want some of them airmailed back? They’ll make an awful mess when they hit the pavement without counter-grav.”

There was silence from Yardley’s end, and the strike leader leaned back in Guernicke’s sinfully comfortable chair.