tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62855562011-04-21T17:43:30.065-07:00high thin wire[All war is deception. - <i>Sun Tzu</i>]Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1117917939763491152005-06-04T13:11:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:33:14.618-07:00VAUGHNBeta comes in many forms, over wire.Most of it is purchased. Subscription, from services, or through private arrangement you make yourself and generally pay a great deal for. The IS provides their operatives with a constant stream that varies according to job, rank, clearance and your own preference. Beta is comprised of facts, images, statistics, trends. It is never static, and the Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1092936113789422442004-08-19T10:16:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:25:33.514-07:00ACEIt was an hour or so before dawn, and I was drowning in the Atlantic.None of us had had enough sleep to be doing this. Miranda was practically standing on top of my head, and I kept breathing seawater and listening for a chopper that was taking way too long to show up.We were all hypothermic, except Miranda, who I finally seized by the arms and shoved underwater, hard. She came up sputtering, Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1092935694959012602004-08-19T10:12:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:22:47.270-07:00BUTTEZephyr is high strung. Zephyr is a bitch, Zephyr is crazy, she's blind and everyone says it doesn't matter, she's still one of the best snipers out there; I'd been around her maybe twenty minutes and I wanted to kill her already.Cunt. I know it's not a nice word to use about ladies, but that's what I was thinking.You could tell she didn't trust any of us to do our jobs, except Rico. She Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1090002828435444152004-07-16T11:31:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:20:46.145-07:00ZEPHYR"IS don't shoot IS."Three hours, it'd been. Three hours and me and Rico were still going around about it."Well, looks like they do, amigo, because that wasn't no Joe lying there with a hole through his brain."We were in Texas when it happened, and I fucking hate Texas. Now I fucking hate Texas even worse.And we were still in Texas, sitting in a grimy hotel with no air conditioning, sweatingKatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1086367907883907582004-06-04T09:49:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:37:21.001-07:00 VAUGHN A handful of years after my father died, I came home on furlough to visit my mother. I came home infrequently, although my mother and I remained in our way as close as we ever had been. Simultaneously distant and proximate, where we could share the house at Kitigan for days at a time with little to no conversation, reading, walking. I would sit in my father's study and stare at the Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1085418498584741232004-05-24T10:07:00.000-07:002008-08-26T09:59:41.363-07:00 BUTTE Rift. I'd worked with him a hundred times. More fringe than even I am, the dregs of what the IS offers, with his licensure under constant threat. A rat bastard, but good at what he did, which was mostly kill people quietly. You say: what the fuck, IS are about protection, not assassination. I say: yeah, sure. We contracted together a lot, when I was lucky enough to get a contract that Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1085416470332558332004-05-24T09:32:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:00:00.153-07:00 ACE Rift. Maybe it's true, maybe there are parts of my brain still burned with the imprint of wire, maybe I have learned to store and retrieve data with a rate and accuracy far beyond what I could before. There was no way I should have remembered that name, or matched a vague memory of a face to only a hint of that face; no way I should have in a second's glance suddenly laid memory over what Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1084405523290985582004-05-12T16:43:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:00:20.469-07:00 VAUGHN I am a heretic, if God is in the details. The information on the wire about Ace's academy class could fill volumes. Months of beta to study, even if I used probability and sort and file routines, and didn't do it all by hand. Ace himself had a long and complicated history, filled with a hundred or more red flags. Villains of the international black market beta trade scene he hadn't Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1083796806988041502004-05-05T15:40:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:00:39.483-07:00 Harlan, on ACE You want to know how Ace got his nickname? It didn't happen how you'd think. He's not Ace because he can pilot anything from a helicopter to a jet. He's not Ace because up until the agency washed him, he scored 100% on every one of their written tests. He's Ace because without wire, he can't hit the broad side of a barn with a sidearm if his life depended on it. He's one of the Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1081787182773358982004-04-12T09:26:00.000-07:002008-08-26T10:00:59.833-07:00 ZEPHYR Around sixty-one and a half kilohertz. That's my frequency. Mister We Don't Quite had a hard, nervous pulse that vibrated the carotid in his thick neck, and I could pick it up on the second or third FM harmonic, a little ripple in the Doppler that came back to me as part of the constant echo from bisonar pings. My mother was one of the six original carriers of the Garrett-B virus, whichKatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1080838176930571462004-04-01T08:49:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:01:16.470-07:00 ACE I'm not that naive. I knew I was being set up; I knew that the supposedly private conversation with the president had been anything but private. They must have known I'd know. They must have known I'd let myself be manipulated anyway. I agreed to go back. I went through their tests, filled out their forms and answered hours of interview questions. I spent five days with biotech specialistsKatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1080143622038175042004-03-24T07:53:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:01:35.779-07:00 VAUGHN Fall at Kitigan has sharp edges. My parents' house lies midway down a hillside, tucked into trees on the driveway side and with a great tongue of grassy landscape lolling down from the back. In spring it is bucolic; the tumbling swath of lawn is soft, furred, dotted with wildflowers. The trees are delicate with their blossoms and fruit, and the light is high and bright, the whole Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1079560104740160872004-03-17T13:48:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:02:00.514-07:00 BUTTE Sometimes you get to be the hero. It doesn't happen often, so it's not a good enough reason to get into this business. Anyone thinking he's signing up to be some knight or superhero is looking for disappointment. I'm here for the money. Money and prestige. Money, prestige and wire. But sometimes you're in the right place at the right time and the situation goes down the crapper. If Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1078858093396615982004-03-09T10:48:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:34:43.001-07:00 ZEPHYR Guns are sexy. Sexy as fuck. You never handled one, you got no idea what I'm saying, I know. Some IS never carry a gun. You hardly have to; we got a million different ways to kill somebody, in the unlikely event it came down to having to do it. I once killed a guy with my shoe. There's something about a gun, there's something about the slick feel of it in your hands, the weight, yeah, IKatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1075853616952060242004-02-03T16:13:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:02:37.328-07:00 ACE The rain was practically horizontal when I checked through the double gates at R2N. When I took off my jacket and emptied my pockets for the agents in the foyer, even my tie was wet. The President's secretary offered me a cup of coffee and brought a towel with it. She closed the door behind her, which left he and I alone. "Mr. Jenkins." "Mr. President," I said. "You know from prior Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1075832842306154652004-02-03T10:27:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:03:00.486-07:00 VAUGHN It was true, years ago, that the more you knew the better. You researched your friends, you researched your enemies. You vigorously sought out every detail of the landscape of the job at hand. Down to the weather. Down to what the CO in the camp down the hill had for breakfast. Now, you can lose everything by these details. Either by having too many or too static a set or simply by Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1073606301793859262004-01-08T15:58:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:03:19.554-07:00 VAUGHN Two funerals in a month. My mother's, at dawn with only three of us--pastor, a member of the funeral home staff and myself--in attendance. Also, my father's. A burial at sea at my request, although he could have claimed a plot at Arlington. There was not much in the way of remains on the USS St. Martin to recover. Which was, after sixteen years submerged, perhaps fortunate. A part of meKatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6285556.post-1073281897626484522004-01-04T21:51:00.000-08:002008-08-26T10:03:35.580-07:00 BUTTE The face in the mirror is a good face. Good, like handsome. Good, like trustworthy. I paid for everything else. The body, the training, the wire, the beta that got me the job tonight and kept my client happy. Dowager sixty, with enough money that she knew the tux was mine and my diamond cufflinks were real. She had six dogs on a leash. Not including me. "You make me feel so good," she Katehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07508073643304208823noreply@blogger.com