The outsiders

“They form a small community within a small community,” said Mr. Bendix.  “They have done for nearly four hundred years; estimates put their numbers at perhaps 2,000 people.  It is at the lowest end of self-sustaining, and we suspect they abduct others from time to time to keep their genetic pool from collapsing in on itself.  There have been… bodies… found.”

“There’s always bodies,” said Dax.  He was sprawling in an orange plastic chair in the Excess Café looking very much out of place.  He was dressed in full biker’s leathers with the logo of a newly-popular courier firm blazoned across his chest, with the helmet on the table next to his coffee.  The helmet was Prussian blue and covered in script that swirled around itself and seemed almost like ornamentation.  His booted feet were on the table, stretched over to the other side and straddling Mr. Bendix who looked uncomfortable about it, but resigned.  “When hasn’t there been bodies?”

“There weren’t supposed to be any bodies last time,” said Mr. Bendix.  “That was supposed to be recovering two small artworks.”

“There were bodies,” said Dax.  “Smelly ones.”

“Well, you know about the bodies up front this time,” said Mr. Bendix.  He was wearing a pin-striped suit and looked like an accountant, though in the surroundings of the Excess Café he looked like one rather down on his luck.  Or possible meeting the kind of client who had an aversion to paperwork.  He had a briefcase with him that was on the floor by his feet, and his knees were crowded uncomfortably beneath the table, which was rather too small to accommodate his 6’4” frame.  The table was bolted to the floor, as were the chairs, which contributed to his discomfort.  “And we think we’ve found the bodies, anyway.  It’s unlikely that there are more: the community is too small to indulge in mass-murder–“

“Ritual sacrifice,” interrupted Dax with a half-smile.

“–and we’ve run all the local records for the community for the last twenty years and found a total of seventeen missing persons that can’t be accounted for.”

“Fine, so you’ve found all the bodies.  What do you want us to do then?  If this place is as small as you say we can’t infiltrate it.  No-one’s going to believe the ‘long-lost cousin’ shtick even if we were willing to try it.”

“No infiltration.  No ‘shtick’ as you so eloquently put it.  Nothing of the sort.  This is an in-and-out job because, as you say, there’s no point trying to build a cover when there’s so few people that everyone knows everyone.  One night, one quick raid and you’re out of there as though it never happened.  What I nee– what we need from you is plausible deniability about the whole affair.”

Dax raised a jet-black, thick eyebrow.  “Since when have we even been a topic of discussion?” he asked, and his voice conveyed genuine surprise.

“Coffee,” said Leah, the waitress, appearing at his knee.  She placed down a chipped white mug between his legs and swept away the half-finished, now cold cup.  “And tea for you,” she said to Mr. Bendix placing a china cup with a willow-pattern on it in front of him.  The tea was fragrant and milky.  “With too much sugar.”

Mr. Bendix sniffed.  “That coffee doesn’t smell like it came out of a jar,” he said.

“And your tea isn’t PG Tips,” said Leah.  She was just standing holding Dax’s empty cup but her voice had its hands on its hips and was glaring at him all the same.

“It’s nice to have you back, Leah,” he said.  “It was really was becoming quite unbearable in here without you.”

She softened slightly.  “Debs is a nice girl but she doesn’t understand tiered-service,” she said.  “I could use–“

“Take it up with HR,” said Mr. Bendix raising a hand.  “You know I can’t intervene.”

“He’s right, Leah,” said Dax before Leah could reply.  “It’s compartmentalised in there like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Oh right, and you’d know, biker-boy!”  She walked off carrying the dirty cup, and Dax noted Mr. Bendix’s eyes following her away.

“Since when have we been a topic for discussion then?” he repeated.

“Oh?  Oh!  You’re not, but informally… ah, let’s say not-on-topic, there are a few people who, uh, necessarily have to know that there might be the possibility of finding someone like, well, someones like you if there were to be a need for it, if you see what I mean.”

“Like us.  But go on.”

“Yes, well.  Us.  So what we need in this case is to be able to very definitely say that you weren’t available for this even if we’d wanted you to be.  Places you would have needed to have been, were we in the position to have been able to request your services, that would clearly be higher priority, if there were such a priority for things like this that don’t exist.”

Dax laughed and shifted his feet, pulling one leg back so that his knee was against his chest and his foot rested now on the edge of the table.  He picked up his coffee cup and sniffed it once before sipping it, and enjoying the earthy taste leavened with notes of warm spices.

“You’ll tie yourself in knots,” he said.  “So we have a job to do but we have to make sure that there’s no way anyone could show that it was us doing the job?”

“You need to show that you were doing some other job at that time,” said Mr. Bendix.  “Which is a bit of a tall order, I grant you.”

“Some might say impossible,” said Dax.

“True, but they don’t know about the abilities your team have, do they?”

Dax sipped his coffee again, enjoying it.  Mr. Bendix had been right: while Leah was away the café had been run like a real greasy spoon and it wasn’t much fun.  His memories of the first days of the Excess Café had turned out to have been sprinkled with fairy dust, and the mugs of builders’ tea and plates of fried everything with a grease sauce turned out to be much less appetising than he thought they were.  Finally he’d realised that it only worked if he went in while he was ravenous.  Leah with her approach to tiered-service, where the people the Café were for got real food and everyone else got what they were expecting was a big comfort.

“There are a couple of possibilities, I suppose,” he said at last.  “I have a couple of ideas.”

“I have a couple of suggestions as well,” said Mr. Bendix.  “Don’t look at me like that Dax, it is part of my job.”

“I think it’s something we do better though.”

“I can provide you with suitable cover jobs.”

There was a moment of silence as the two men looked at each other over their respective cups.  Then the clanging of a knife dropped on the floor broke it, and from the little kitchen at the back came a stream of invective.

“Turkish?” asked Dax, tilting his head to hear it better.

“Probably,” said Mr. Bendix.  “I know the Polish chef had to go, and he should have been replaced by now.”

“I’d be glad to look over your ideas,” said Dax, carefully looking into his coffee as he spoke.  “They might be useful when we’re working out how we’re going to do this.”

“I’d be delighted if they were to come in useful,” said Mr. Bendix equally carefully.  There was a moment more of silence.

“Do you have them on you?”

Mr. Bendix put his cup down and picked his briefcase up.

“Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned these days?  Shouldn’t you have them on a tablet and just email them to me?”

“You’ve finally got yourself an email account?”

“No….”

The briefcase combination wheels span under Mr. Bendix’s fingers, and then stopped.  He waited for two heartbeats and then spun them again to a different setting, and only this pressed the little release buttons.  The lid clicked, and Mr. Bendix lifted it carefully.  Inside was a newspaper, which he removed and placed on the table, and underneath that were three manilla folders, all stuffed to bursting.  He opened the first without taking it from the case and flicked past several stapled documents until he came to a two-pager printed on ivory paper.  “Here you go,” he said.

“This is tomorrow’s newspaper,” said Dax, who’d picked it up and was reading the headlines.

“Yes,” said Mr. Bendix holding out the two-pager.  Dax reluctantly swapped the newspaper for it.  “We’ve been having problems with the, ah, the, yes.  And one of them is advance delivery of the news.”

“That’s a problem?  For you?”

“Actually, yes,” said Mr. Bendix looking a little embarrassed.  “But we think we’ve know why it’s happening now.  And I really shouldn’t talk about it.”

“Fine, it’s your problem,” said Dax.  “Right, I’d better get to reading this and thinking about how we’re going to make this work, I guess.”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Mr. Bendix.  “Same time tomorrow?”

“Sounds good,” said Dax.

Mercenaries

It was Tuesday and the weather was still sultry.  There were people on Regent Street tending to the palm trees, an illustrative point to the climate deniers.  We'd had four years of summer, and though we continued to complain about it, we were getting used to it.  We were even getting suntans.  I picked up a locally-grown orange from a street-stall just down from the Apple store and peeled it with the machete I keep on my belt.  People walking past gave me odd looks, but no-one complained.  The ever-present heat had slowed people down a little.
A way further on and I reached a coffee-shop.  The sign on the door was turned to show that it was closed; I ignored it and pushed the door open anyway.  An alarm sounded briefly and a red light flickered over my face.  I stopped, and tried not to blink.
"Dax," said a mechanical sounding voice.
"Wretched thing," said another voice, this one human sounding and female.  There was a thump somewhere over by the espresso machine.  "That's not Dax, Dax is out the back.  You identified him already earlier."
"On the third try," said another voice, this one thin and reedy, could be either male or female.
"Still got troubles with it?" I asked, closing the door behind me and shivering blissfully in the air-conditioned room beyond.  The chairs and tables were laid out in standard coffee-shop style; there was a dusty, faded blue sofa in the window, and a coffee-ringed low table there scattered with old, torn magazines.
"Just weird ones," said Zaïre, her dark face appearing briefly and then disappearing again.  Something else got thumped.  "It's doing the iris identification perfectly, but it's not matching them up in the database right.  And that's not possible, it's a one-to-one look-up."
"So it thinks we all keep swapping eyes?"
"Hah, yah, well that would do it right enough.  Hey, you don't, do you?"  Her face reappeared, looking slightly worried, which on her was sexy.
"No," I said, smiling.  "Sounds like it would be painful."
"Oh no, I know how we'd do it," she said.
"No way!"  That was Dax's voice.  "No eye-swapping.  This isn't a Phillip K Dick life."
"Nah, it's Ballardian," I said, gesturing back outside.  "If people calm down a little more I reckon we'll go into one of those pauses he wrote about, where the whole world just sits and waits for a few years, trying to decide if there's anything to do that's still worth doing."
"Namaste," said Dax.

I headed further into the coffee shop, into the gloom where it got a little colder.  Dax was sitting at a little bank of tables, all pushed together to form a longer one.  On the tables were boxes of bullets, each box holding twenty-four steel rounds.  Each round engraved with the nine thousand names of God.  I counted quickly, there were eight boxes, and a ninth not yet full.
"Where did you get so many?" I asked.  My skin crawled very slightly to see them all lying there like that, so much potential power inert and inactive.
"Anna-Mix," he said, not looking up.  His fingers were tying something almost invisible around another bullet, preparing it to go into the ninth box along with the rest.  "I don't know where she gets them from.  I know it's not the Needle, he's not doing much business at the moment."
"Is he recovered then?"
"Somewhat.  Seems like being the subject of prophecy can leave its marks on a man."
"Is he safe still?"
"Harder to say."  Dax placed the bullet into its box, and started putting the lids on each of them.  "Two hundred and eight," he said.  "The Needle won't be any use to us until we know for certain what's come back, so count him out.  This time, we do it without him."
"No great loss," I said.  It was, but he hadn't featured heavily, except maybe a way to resupply ammunition if we needed it, and with two hundred and eight rounds, maybe we wouldn't.  I'd never expected to be able to get that many.
"Mr. Bendix?"
"Isn't saying much at the moment, so She can't be saying much either.  They won't tell us what's going on until they think we need to act."
"Could be too late by then."  Dax nodded, and I half-smiled.
"Lehar's still at the Café," he said.  "She's keeping an eye on the Street.  She says it's all quiet so far, but Lissa's been missing for the last two days and Asian Steve's been seen twice."
"Twice?"  Lissajoux was a joker in the pack, a card I'd love to have on our side, but we had no hold over him.  Asian Steve was a barometer, and if he was coming out of his den then he was worried that it wasn't safe in there.  And that man had better defences than most fortresses.  I'd seen him face down an angry Oni and walk away.
"Yeah.  Lehar said he had to be nervous because he was so calm and controlled."
Dax finished putting the lids on the bullets and pushed one box over to me.  "You need these."
"I know."  I was still reluctant to take them.  Each bullet would be the undoing of something or someone; sometimes catastrophically.  I felt uneasy knowing I had such power to hand.
"Remember the Septentrional Fortress?" asked Dax.  He didn't wait for a response.  "This will be worse.  Much worse."

Mr. Bendix

Mr. Bendix sat in the antechamber, a small room with threadbare green carpet and unpleasant yellow wallpaper. There were two high-backed wooden chairs and a smell of anchovies that grew stronger or fainter depending on the day of the week. He sat stiffly, as straight as he could, and tried to ignore the ache in his calves where the steel bola had caught him. His pinstriped suit, smart and elegant first thing that morning, now looked tired and shabby. This annoyed him far more than his injuries, and he radiated a calm anger about him as he waited for the summons. Finally a section of wall squeaked and slid aside to reveal a narrow hole, and a reedy voice called out,
"Enter please, Mr. Bendix."

The room beyond the antechamber was a board-room in the traditional manner: a long polished wooden table ran the length of the room with leather chairs spaced equally along the sides. At Mr. Bendix's end of the table was a three-legged wooden stool; at the opposite end was a leather throne of a chair. There were windows in both long walls that opened onto the thin air above London, and provided views of the river, the Houses of Parliament, and the London Eye. Behind the throne-like chair at the head of the table was a polished wooden sideboard, walnut thought Mr. Bendix. Glassware sat on top of it and sparkled in the weak winter sunlight.

"Sit, Mr. Bendix," said the thin woman sat at the head of the table. She was bald, and her head was so pale as to appear blue. Her arms were stick thin, and her dress, though undoubtedly expensive and tailored, seemed made for a woman twice her size. And that woman, thought Mr. Bendix, would still look anorexic. "Tell us where we stand," she said, her esses whistling through gaps in her teeth.

Mr. Bendix looked around the table at the eight other people seated there, four on each side. They all looked politely bored; most had notepads in front of them on which were ineffable doodles, but one had a laptop open and was tapping idly on the keyboard.
"Gentlemen of the board," he said, "I have activated Dax at your command, and briefed Lehar. I have every reason to believe that the rogue Anna-Mix will be neutralised in less than seven days."
"Why so sure?" said a man from the right-hand side of the table, not looking up from doodling on his notepad.
"Dax has made his kill in under three days every time we've used him," said Mr. Bendix. "I have added in some contingency time as Anna-Mix has advantages that others he's hunted has not."
"You mean she knows we're coming for her," said the thin woman.
"And she knows something of our systems," said Mr. Bendix. "Yes."
"There will need to be an embassy made now then," said the reedy voice, and it came from a older gentleman on the left-hand side of the table with grey hair and a pointed moustache. "We cannot risk a diplomatic incident at court."
Mr. Bendix shivered and then hated himself for it.
"Will she care?" said someone from the right side of the table, and though no-one spoke, everyone around the table looked at the speaker and the answer was clear.
"She may already know," said the thin woman, "but nonetheless we must present the matter at court in the approved manner. Anna-Mix has gone rogue, and it is our prerogative to handle that appropriately. This is not an incorrect response."
'I wonder if you believe that yourself?' thought Mr. Bendix. 'But then, you're not going to the court are you?'
"You will need to leave immediately," said the older man who'd brought this up. "Change into something suitable; I hear it's summertime at the court at the moment."
"How much longer will I be the ambassador to the court?" said Mr. Bendix, trying not to sound whiny. "I think we agreed that it would be a temporary posting."
"We'll review it when you return," said the thin woman. "For now, just go. It doesn't do to keep her waiting. You should know that."
Mr. Bendix walked out the chamber backwards, keeping the thin woman in his sight the whole time. He had no respect for her, and he certainly didn't trust her.

Outside the antechamber he leaned against the wall next to the doorway and listened while the door squeaked closed. Sometimes the board members spoke too soon.

"When will we tell him that if he stays away from the court for too long now he'll die?" said the reedy voice, but no-one answered until after the wall had closed up again.