Chapter 13

Kat slipped back out through the kitchen and made her way, carefully, to the sidewalk outside the diner, far enough away that she could not be seen by those inside. She took a couple of minutes to scan the street and the people passing by, wondering if Paron or the InterSys agent inside had a partner or confederate. Nothing looked out of place, but after years of doing her own kind of sneaking around and tailing assassination targets, she knew how silly it would be to make assumptions. There could be a twenty people within a hundred meters of her and, if they were any good at all, she wouldn't know they were there until they acted. Taking a breath, and plastering a smile on her face, she entered the diner through the front door.

The suited man she had spotted earlier looked up as she walked through the door. His expression didn't change except for a slight tightening around his eyes. He recognized her!

Kat felt her heartbeat speed up and her body start to tense, but she forced herself to be calm as she walked by without looking directly at him. Her peripheral vision tracked him until he was too far to her rear, and then her eyes searched for reflective surfaces so she could see if he moved in her wake.

She could see a momentary, distorted view in the reflection on a napkin holder, then another in the glass covering a photo on the wall behind the counter, but she couldn't make out a lot of detail. The skin on the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades crawled, giving her goose bumps.

She arrived at Margo's table, giving her a casual wave by way of a greeting, slid into the horseshoe-shaped booth and scooted around so she was sitting at the top of the curve. It wouldn't allow her as much freedom of movement, but it would allow her to keep an surreptitious eye on the InterSys agent. She could see that Margo was also keeping an eye on the suited man, though using her peripheral vision, her attention, outwardly anyway, on her Kafe.

When the InterSys man turned back to his meal, Kat met Margo's eyes and shrugged, then motioned to a passing waiter. While they ate lunch, they kept up a conversation about harmless topics, chatting like a pair of old friends. They didn't bother to raise the privacy curtain or even a hush field, it would just make the watchers more suspicious. Margo, looking directly at Kat so she could see a minuscule droop of one eyelid, brought up Kat's uncle.

Since Kat didn't have an uncle, she paid close attention.

"Why don't you send a message to that handsome uncle of yours, dear. I put him off when he asked me out for drinks, I really was otherwise engaged that night, but he never called me back. Send him a message, and ask him to call me if he is still interested in getting that drink, and by way of apology, I will even buy."

Acting as though that was a hilarious idea, Kat dug out her Comm unit and typed out a message to CCD's Agency Comm officer, asking for a security detail to be outside the diner to keep an eye on the InterSys agent when it was time for them to leave.

During their meal, the Intersys agent paid his check and left, looking back once at the ladies before exiting the diner. Her Comm unit vibrated with a message from the security team stationed outside, letting her know that they had acquired their target.

They had not noticed any other observers so Kat, once she had received confirmation from the outside team, engaged the table's privacy shield and her Comm unit's extended hush field for good measure. The public privacy shield was intended for people who didn't want to be bothered. It created a holographic curtain around the booth and engaged an elementary hush field. Both were easily penetrated by anyone with some basic electronics knowledge and some easily purchased parts and most people never bothered with the feature.

Her own hush field was much more advanced and used a gigabit encryption algorithm that would take a professional about thirty minutes to defeat, assuming they could first determine the frequency hopping scheme she was using. It was as secure as current technology could create.

Once both fields were active, Margo pulled a data pad out and keyed in her activation code, sliding the pad across the table for Kat to read. It contained the details of an on-going investigation into the acquisition of a six retired military ships. The investigation was part of a larger effort to track all retired and resold Union naval vessels sold in the last twenty years. The Union government, once embarrassed, was taking steps to make sure that they knew what was happening to the ships they sold.

Once purchased, the crews on the six ships had filed plans for a transit from the Naval shipyards at Canopis in the Canton Sector to Farad in the Galad Sector.

Along the way, the ships disappeared. They never arrived at Farad, and they had not been spotted by an Union military or diplomatic ship, nor had they been reported as having entered any Union system in between. There was a great effort, as clandestine as you could make a massive search, to determine where these ships went and what they were being used for.

The mega-corp that had purchased the ships, ostensibly for use as cargo transport vessels, was Anson Industries, Galactic. The financial analysts had linked several of the major investors to shell companies that were, through intermediaries, owned by other mega-corps. One of these was Union Assets Holding Corp, the company that had owned the retired cruiser that had been Pan's prison for many weeks.

Kat could feel her anger, and her excitement, growing as she read. This was something she wanted in on. If they were going to ship her halfway across the galaxy when she wanted to be with Pan, the least they could do was allow her to continue working on the case she had helped discover.

Kat returned the data pad to Margo. "So where is Helios? Am I going to be able to help on this investigation or am I going to spend another month locked to my terminal?"

Margo shook her head. "That's why I wanted to talk to you here. Helios contacted me yesterday, asked if you were ready to head out to the field. Helios has spent the last eighteen months working as an expediter for CCD under his CCD cover, Francois DeLorme. A kind of floating trouble-shooter, traveling from installation to installation solving problems. In addition, he has been building a reputation as someone you can go to when you have sensitive materials that need to be moved from place to place, a smuggler, really.