A New Lead

[Codename: Renegade]

CIC Command. Undisclosed Location

A trickle of blood. It seemed remarkable that that thin trickle, escaping from the left nostril, was the only trace of that vital fluid. Certainly, saliva glistened in the intense lights, across the chin, and in gobbets down the chest, but aside from that one thin stream there was no trace of crimson. No bruises, no lacerations, not even a fingerprint. In fact, the most serious physical injuries on this person were probably sore arse cheeks from the prolonged period of being strapped to the chair.

But the mind of this prisoner.... that's quite a different story. A flayed, tortured collection of emotions - mostly fear at the moment - that more than compensated for the lack of physical damaged.

Muscles in the prisoners face twitched, his stubble covered cheek spasming as if some small animal was burrowing around inside his mouth. Things were coming to a conclusion. Very soon now, this man's last mental defences would be stripped away, and he would reveal the last secrets he held. Then he would die or be killed. Either way, they would know what they wanted, and the traitor would be dead.

Operative Spectre longed to reach out and take some kind of physical part in this interrogation. Or at the very least, unleash some sort of Psionic strike at the traitor strapped to the chair. But he knew well enough that any intervention by him at this late stage could kill the prisoner, and ruin days of interrogation, not to mention the months of field work. He knew it, but he still hated just sitting here, watching.

He could feel brushes of the interrogator's work as she delicately pared the traitors mind, extracting and storing the information it revealed. The strain of the interrogation was showing on Interrogator Domina's face. Beads of perspiration glinted on her face, as she frowned at the imprisoned rogue Operative. She made no movements, and the mesh of fine cables connecting her to the terminal behind her never wavered a hair. No muscle twitched that Spectre could see, and the simple bodysuit was revealing in that department. Nothing moved on her lithe body. Unless he concentrated, he couldn't even see her breathe.

He shifted his gaze from the Interrogator to the captured renegade. He still wore his HES suit, although it had been stripped of all it's hardware and wetware. It was now little more than a tough rubberised suit, since the traitor no longer had the Psi-power to strengthen it with his Inhibitor set to maximum, and with its armour removed.

Spectre regarded the trapped Ghost with contempt, wishing he'd been able to strip the HES from him completely. This despicable traitor didn't deserve to wear anything provided by the CIC. He had personally cut away the remaining insignia from the suit when the prisoner had arrived. The moment this scum had turned his back on the Control, and chosen the lowly path of the hired assassin, he had forfeited the right to wear them, and in Spectres mind, the right to live.

The prisoner jerked, and then slumped against his bonds, muscles that had been held taught for days relaxing in paralysis.

"It's done" Domina's voice was hoarse, and she wiped sweat from her forehead as she spoke. "We have extracted everything. There's nothing he knows that we don't now"

Spectre rose from his seat in front of the prisoner, and grabbed a handful of brown hair, brutally yanking the man's head up. Blood still trickled from his nose, and he was drooling around his tongue as his jaw hung slack.

"Can you put him back together?" Spectre asked, looking at Domina.

"I can give him a few minutes of lucidity, but not much" she scowled at the senior Operative "Is it really necessary Spectre? I - "

"It is necessary, Interrogator" Interrupted Spectre "I am in charge of this interrogation. Waked him up". Spectre opened his hand, and the prisoners head flopped forward, half-closed lids obscuring his blue eyes.

***

From the comforting darkness he was dragged, too tired and beaten to even attempt to resist. Light began to flood his consciousness, and his head swam as his vision slowly blurred into focus. Reflexively he tried to move his hands, to protect his eyes from the harsh lights, but they were tightly bound to the arms of the chair. He could move none of his extremities. After a few moments, he resolved to lift his aching head. Wincing at the light, he raised it, looking at the figure before him.

Even with his Psionic Inhibitor at maximum, his ocular implants were functioning enough to identify the man before him, even with his face mask on obscuring his features. He knew who it was without even acknowledging the data from the implants; Spectre. He knew it'd be him that caught him in the end. There'd been a few close calls with other Operatives, but he knew it's be Spectre that got him if anyone did...

"So you knew did you?" Spectre said without his vocal modifier, and he realised he spoken his last thoughts aloud "Then you knew you were dead"

"I.. I knew a lot of things. I knew anything was better than st... staying here. It's wro... wrong" He managed. His mouth didn't seem to be working properly.

"Wrong? What do you know about wrong? You are a traitor! You are a traitor, and you will die. That is all you know!" Answered Spectre, drawing a small sidearm. "You won't even die with dignity. This was taken from a terrorist. It's a crude weapon, base a primitive. It will serve to end you, renegade"

A grunt was all the renegade Operative could manage. His jaw seemed to have seized. All he could see was Spectre and the weapon, and all he could hear was Spectres voice. "Die" Was all he said.

***

The explosive report of the pistol reverberated through the steel-walled chamber, and now there was significantly more blood than just the thin trickle. The body of the traitor hung against it's restraints, it's head thrown back at an awkward angle, and Spectre holstered the dirty pistol. His own upgraded ocular implants showed that the former Operative before him was dead, and his FoF identifier turned red, staining the words Operative: Jackal.

"Get this mess cleaned up. We'll have more work for you soon enough Interrogator" said Spectre crisply as he turned to leave the chamber. They'd extracted enough information to give them a new lead on tracking Spectre's real quarry. The first traitor. The first renegade.

Soon enough it would be Ryan Collier in that chair, no mere imitator. And Spectre would end him in a far more painful way than the late Jackal had experienced.

 

[Codename: Renegade]

The Meadow

Unnamed meadow, twelve miles east of Capital City.

Rain. Cold, miserable, and above all, very wet, poured from the leaden winter sky. This wasn't the sort of desultory shower that a mere umbrella could ward off. This was the sort of downpour that swept in under the shelter of the opened umbrella, sprayed in your face, and soaked through your coat in seconds, filling your shoes and leaving you shivering as the wind whipped in and chilled you to the bone. It gurgled down gutters, overflowing drains and turning roads and pavements into small rivers. Suffice to say it wasn't a very nice day to be outside. And in less than an hour, the sun would set, somewhere behind the obscuring wall of heavy clouds, and night would fall, making it even less pleasant out in the cold, miserable, wet rain.

With the veil of the rain shrouding things in the distance, and the failing light, the CIC Ghosts were very hard to spot. Even had it been broad daylight with perfect visibility, they'd have been hard to spot once their 'Shimmer' cloaking systems had activated. They simply weren't there. If one were close enough, and the Operative he were watching was clumsy enough, one might see the ripple of a footfall in a puddle where no foot should be. But the meadow was empty. And these Operatives were taking great pains not to be clumsy. They moved through the scattered shrubs and trees, avoiding the swathes of long grass. At least, they had moved. None of them had shifted much more than a metre in the twenty-four hours. They'd been sat there - or hung there, as was the case for one in a tree, and one atop an abandoned water tower - for twenty-four hours straight, waiting.

This was the appointed time. Their quarry would be here any time now. Fingers hovered ever closer to triggers. A dozen Canister rifles and four assault carbines were primed and ready to unleash Hell. As soon as the word was given. Operative Spectre would give that word only if he couldn't capture the quarry himself.

*

With a minuscule mental effort, Ryan Collier, aka Renegade, tightened the weave of his HES over an area of his left buttock in two rapid twitches. The itch that'd been plaguing him for the last eight or so hours subsided, and he silently thanked whatever Gods were listening for letting him learn that neat little trick. The rest of his body didn't twitch. He was concealed well enough that he probably could have afforded to reach down and scratch his arse with his hand, but he hadn't earned his place as the CIC's top Operative by pulling stunts like that.

He had to admit that he was quite impressed by the little display down in the meadow. Sixteen Operatives by his count, lead by Spectre, and including several of the Control's best. He was also a little flattered that he warranted such a major operation. All those guns, just for li'l old me, he thought with a grin beneath his face mask.

They were good, and they were being very, very careful. A lesser Operative wouldn't have spotted them. But in the two years since he'd parted ways with the Central Intelligence Control, Renegade had become very good at tracking other Ghosts. He had to be. It wasn't only him they threatened now - he had a family. A woman he loved, and two children that reminded him why he'd left the Control in the first place. He had to stay one step ahead of the CIC to protect his family now. So he stayed two steps ahead, just to be safe.

This little shindig in the meadow below simply vindicated his caution. He'd been sat here in this hole for four days now, awaiting the clandestine arrival of Operative Jackal. Looked like Jackal wasn't coming. He'd been ready with a custom made dart chambered in his rifle. Had Jackal turned up, Renegade would've fired the projectile at him. He wouldn't have hit him - but it would've distracted the other Operative log enough for Renegades next shot to take him down. He wouldn't have killed him, but the toxins loaded into the second shot would have been enough to over-ride the HES suits AutoMed capabilities, and put Jackal into a coma that Renagade would wake him from when he was good and ready - and sure that he wasn't acting as bait.

At the first sign of more than one Ghost agent approaching, Renegade had dropped out the magazine with his special home-brew rounds, and loaded one chock-full of AP rounds. The very discreet messages he'd managed to slip into the CIC network had been very clear that only one Operative should ever attempt to make contact at a time. Any more than that and they would be killed or ignored. The Ghosts in the meadow were obscured from his FoF system, but he doubted Jackal would be among those down there. In fact, he doubted the other Operative was still alive.

His targeter passed over faint signals that he recognised as Ghost 'Shimmer' systems, and his trigger finger itched. He couldn't target precise limbs whilst the other Ghosts were cloaked - he couldn't even be sure he'd hit the target at all, especially at this extreme range - but he still longed to take the shot. He didn't even know who it was that lurked behind that cloaking field. Chimera? Spectre? Basilisk? Or some unknown, a recruit he'd never met before?

It didn't matter. He wasn't going to soot and he knew it. He was going to sit here in his cosy little hole in the hillside, watching this quiet little shindig through the lens of his Allvision targeting system, and wait 'til everybody else went home. Then he'd wait a little bit longer. Then he'd head home himself.

The rain poured on. Cold, miserable, and very, very wet.

 

[Codename: Renegade]

Omega Ops HQ, Undisclosed Location. Somewhere near Ayenee City.

The video screen that posed as a window in Ryan's modest office showed the pre-dawn gloom shrouding one of the Capitals more affluent shopping precincts, it's fountains and 'modern art' sculptures were pale shadows in the amber glow of the precincts street lights. The broad paved area was quite a nice view during the daylight hours, especially during the summer, which was why Ryan had picked it from the selection of video feeds available for the video-windows installed in a handful of offices throughout the command building. Lately, with the dismal weather the city had been suffering, the view would have been grim. Had he spent any time in the office since the summer he probably would've changed the feed to somewhere warmer, perhaps Coral City.

Ryan shook his head and turned his eyes away from the video-window. He was distracting himself, because he was annoyed and tired. He only had his desk lamp on, and was leaning back in his chair in front of his computer keyboard, a lukewarm mug of tea held in his hand. He should probably be at home in bed, or at the very least, out cold on the small bed in the next room. But his frustration wouldn't let him sleep and he didn't feel like forcing himself into sleep right now. He took a mouthful of the tea - strong enough to stand a spoon upright, and loaded with sugar - and made a disgusted noise after swallowing the cooling liquid. He considered getting up and making a fresh cup, but refused to let himself be distracted again.

Putting the cup down with more force than was strictly necessary, he leant forward, and began tapping at keys again. An annoyed frown creased his forehead.

It seemed, that in the intervening months since the Central Intelligence Control's failed attempt at killing him with a bomb in his car, things had changed rather drastically at his former employers. All black market sources of CIC goods had dried-up, agents and Operatives seemed to have dropped off the planet, and almost all of his carefully planted and concealed taps and devices into the CIC's systems had been shut down or blocked. It was almost as if they'd remembered how to be a clandestine organisation again.

It made Ryan a little nervous.

Before, he'd always had a vague idea of CIC operations - even those he didn't pick up himself were invariably relayed to him by one of the Omega agents, who monitored the feeds that Ryan had passed on to them. This meant that he could almost always get the drop on them, being able to surmise the actions of the Ghost unit by the wider spectrum of events. Occasionally he'd be caught blind - the bomb attack on his car sprang to mind - but not often. And that was only when the Ghost unit operated alone, which it rarely seemed to do since his departure a little over two years ago. Ryan guessed it was Director Kuger wanting to keep an eye on them, lest any more of them get ideas about following Ryan out the door.

After hours spent sat at this desk, Ryan had managed to re-establish only a handful of the disconnected links, all of them to remote sources, such as satellites and relays. He had nothing connected to the CIC's core systems any more. He'd moved on to combing the Omega Ops reports on their own intelligence feeds, hoping to pick up something on the CIC. He'd found plenty, but nothing he could directly attribute to them.

The death of a Blood Lotus Yakuza outside the City limits. A cache of weapons complete with a body that the system flagged as an old S1 operative. On off-duty soldier killed by a long distance headshot in one of the industrial areas. All very interesting, and all enough to set little alarm bells ringing in Ryan's head, but nothing conclusive. Nothing to point at who was behind any of it. With most of the old players out of the game, wiped out of existence, or hidden so deep they were non-entities, it was hard to place the blame. Even the Guild seemed in the dark about things.

Killings that no-one in the great and inglorious Assassins Guild of Ayenee didn't know about always worried Ryan. That mercenarial bunch of killers usually had at least one ear to the ground, and a dozen stethoscopes. If they didn't know anything, then it was something off the grid. The CIC? Some new group? A rogue?

He sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. The digits on his watch displayed 06:32. With any luck Nick or Nerissa would show up soon, and he could pick their brains. Hell, right now he'd even settle for Red, just someone for him to talk to. Someone he could trust.

He picked up the cup of tea again, this time cursing after swallowing the now cold liquid.