Chapter 31

(Four)

I watched the fight with interest. The bodyguard the girl had was increasingly a problem. She needed to be dealt with. I watched our target go deeper into the school and prepared to leave, taking a moment to observe the gang of boys picking themselves up. I swung the parabolic mic in their direction just out of curiosity.

"Damn that D!" shouted one boy.

"She's too strong Flint maybe we should just forget that Amanda chick. Plus you know Winston has a thing for her too," another smaller boy said.

"Shut it you chicken! Not after what that bitch did to Stacy! We just need to take her unaware, take out D first, then we can take our time teaching that damned lizard a lesson," Flint replied. He was obviously in charge and had a serious axe to grind.

"Yeah OK ... well we better head up it's nearly registration time," the other boy said nervously.

"Sod that," spat Flint, "Let's bunk off down at the shops, I'm sick of school already."

The gang moved off out the gate with Flint at its head. The more nervous boy looked torn for a bit then ran after them. This group could prove to be useful, blunt instruments but perhaps suited to our task. Maybe they could take out that bodyguard, they looked fervent enough as well as stupid enough to manipulate. I'm not sure that having them do it would do our cause much good locally, but the general media backlash the target had engineered meant it couldn't do much more harm. In fact it might be beneficial just have the locals write this place off as a bad school.

"Do we have any scrubbed and tagged HEFW7's?" I called to Five.

"Couple," she said eyeing me suspiciously.

"Could you collar a clean one and gift wrap it for me," I said.

She nodded and went to work while I dialed for authorisation, something like this could backfire so I wanted to be sure I wouldn't be blamed if it did. Standard arse covering techniques but much needed as in this case I wouldn't be fired I'd be found swinging from a lamppost with bits of my anatomy cut out, probably by the hand of the lovely Five.

"Barry this is Dave," I said into the phone, neither were real names just convenient nondescript names close to our code numbers. Traffic using code numbers would have raised some eyebrows and using encryption made it look like you had something to hide. Much simpler to hide in plain sight it was a lot harder to detect, "I've been thinking about giving the boys I told you about a set of flowers to give to Dorothy for her birthday since I won't be able to make the party. Would you ask Alfred if that's alright?"