Chapter 31: A Gig for Padre II (Patreon)

Apologies for the delayed chapter. I've barely had any time to write with work and all.

Padre gestured toward the shorter woman first with an unhurried open hand.

"This is Valerie," he said, and his voice carried a soft tone. It was as if he had accepted a quantity of chaos into his life that no priest should have to accept and had made his peace with the arrangement. "She is, in her own particular way, rather energetic."

Valerie tilted her head and pointed two fingers at me in a loose approximation of a gun, the index extended, the thumb cocked back as if she was pointing imaginary iron at me.

"Ghost, huh?" She said with a bit of appreciation. "That's preem choom! Very... eh, mysterious? Very brooding."

She then scanned me head to toe with her eyes and whistled softly. "But you're a big boy for a ghost, choom. Most ghosts I know aren't, like... you know?"

"Valerie," Padre said to the woman who was still lazily holding her two fingers in the form of a gun.

"What?" She asked, almost sounding offended. "I'm just saying... You know, just... giving him a compliment. A bona fide compliment, Padre. Call it scout's honor."

"You were never even close to being a scout," Padre said, letting out a soft sigh as he shook his head.

"I mean, spiritually, I was a scout," she said as she hooked her thumbs into the silver-studded belt at her waist and gave me a grin that said she had been in worse conversations than this one and had found most of them at least mildly entertaining.

My Kiroshis worked behind my glasses, cataloguing the subdermal grip pad on her right palm, the retracted forearm housings tucked under the leather of her bomber sleeves, the personal link cable coiled in her inner wrist housing, and the neural port nested behind her right ear.

I didn't say anything and just let her feast her eyes. Her grin held for another two seconds before she nodded once, satisfied with whatever silent test she had been running on me. She took a step back and stood next to Clarita.

"And this," Padre let out an amused chuckle and moved his open hand to the taller woman, accompanied by an unmistakable shift from warmth to pride, "is Clarita."

Clarita Ibarra looked at me with total indifference, her optics tracking from my face to the Malorian Overture on my thigh, and then back up to the silver pendant at my throat and back to my face in a single emotionless sweep. Her wolfcut sat sharp against the golden line of her jaw, and her gold cybernetic forearms rested at her sides.

She looked, in the most literal sense, like the calmest armed person I had ever been in the same "parish" with. Granted, this was the first-ever parish I had ever found myself in.

"I took her in when she was fifteen," Padre said, "some time after my own daughter passed."

He did not elaborate, and he did not need to since the way his right hand settled briefly on Clarita's shoulder, and the way she let it sit there without leaning into the contact or shrugging it off encoded a shared complicated and grief-shaped history in under two seconds of physical contact. 

Clarita gave me a single, slow nod, and I returned it.

Padre turned to both of them and gestured between them and me with the same open motion he had used a moment earlier.

"This one goes by Ghost," Padre said. "He will be your runner this evening."

And that was it. A couple of words spoken, no surname given, no neighborhood, no resume recitation, no list of completed gigs or favorable references or technical specifications. Just a couple of words delivered with absolute confidence that spoke of the amount of due diligence Padre had done on me.

Honestly, I don't think I have ever been introduced with fewer syllables in my life. But I found myself appreciating it.

Valerie's eyes ping-ponged between Padre and me and back to Padre. "That's the whole intro? That's it? Not even a vibe? Maybe a fun fact?"

"Ghost is sufficient," Padre said.

"It's like maximum efficiency, fine, but I-" Valerie was interrupted halfway through her sentence.

"It is enough," Clarita said in a flat tone.

Valerie wanted to say more, but she closed her mouth, looked at me, and shrugged one shoulder.

We stood there on the cracked sidewalk for a long moment while the afternoon heat pressed down on The Glen and the distant rhythm of the pickup game on the basketball court rolled over us in the form of sneaker squeaks and shouted insults.

"So," Valerie said, planting her feet and squaring up to me with her thumbs still hooked in her belt. "Operational logistics. Let me guess, you're outside, yeah? Cracking cameras from the alley? Or are you going hot inside the building with us, jacked into doors and dropping daemons in real-time?"

"I'll be doing both," I said. "I'll take care of the external breach for the initial subnet entry, and once we cross the threshold, I'll be working on terminals, panels, and any networked hardware that's broadcasting while giving you some tactical info over the comms."

She pointed at me again, the finger-gun returning. "That's nova, genuinely nova. We had a guy last year, called himself Vector, sat in a car with a thermos of synth-coffee while we cleared a whole Maelstrom drop. The fucking gonk had the balls to call it 'overwatch.' But with you, it seems like we're getting an upgrade."

"Vector was useful," Clarita said.

"Vector had a fuck-ing thermos," Valerie said, putting emphasis on the word "fucking."

Clarita looked at Padre and asked, "Tonight?"

"The meeting between Señor Aoki and his Maelstrom contacts is confirmed for twenty-one hundred hours," Padre said. He reached into the interior pocket of his clerical jacket and produced three identical data chips, and handed one to each of us, like he was handing out bread during communion. "The floor plan, camera placements, and the drop point coordinates are on the chips. The payload leaves with you."

He held my eyes for half a second longer than the others.

"Quietly," he said. "This is my parish."

"Entendido, Padre," Clarita said.

"Yeah, yeah, low and slow, got it, gospel received, hallelujah," Valerie said as she turned. "Meet at Nunzio's at eight? The one on Bercedo?"

"Fine," Clarita said.

I pocketed the chip and turned to follow them out, and as I crossed the boundary of the basketball court's chain-link fence, I heard Padre's voice behind me.

"God watch over you," he said.

---

Nunzio's occupied a narrow, deep-set slot between a permanently shuttered laundromat and a tire shop, and it smelled, overwhelmingly upon entry, of synthetic cheese product, industrial tomato base, and the faintly burnt residue of an oven that had cleaned God knows how long ago.

The lighting was red and dimmed, and the booths were cracked synthetic vinyl in an orange that hadn't been confidently fashionable since 2041. The two televisions mounted above the counter were tuned to N54 News with the audio cut, the Ridgecrest casualty ticker scrolling across the bottom of both screens in corporate-sans-serif font that compressed three thousand and seventy dead human beings into a number small enough to fit comfortably between a Petrochem stock update and a weather forecast.

I arrived four minutes early and found Clarita already in the corner booth, her back to the wall, both gold arms resting flat against the chipped formica, a can of sparkling Real Water in front of her, and her eyes trained on the front door.

I pulled up the data chip's contents through my Neural Link and projected the floor plan onto an internal overlay one last time.

Valerie arrived six minutes after me, slipping through the door with a paper-wrapped slice tucked under her right arm, the rest of a half-eaten pie in a grease-stained box balanced in her left hand. She dropped into the booth beside Clarita with complete disregard for stealth, which I was rapidly recognizing to be one of her defining traits.

"Okay," Valerie said, setting the box in the middle of the table. "Critical, mission-essential tactical inquiry. Does anybody want pizza before we go zero a bunch of Tyger Claws, or is that just me being weird about pre-gig caloric intake again."

"That is just you," Clarita said as she deadpanned at her.

"Ghost?" Valerie asked.

I took a slice, and Valerie nodded once, satisfied to have fed one of the crew. She bit into her own slice, chewed for a moment, and glanced at the Ridgecrest ticker with a little bit of interest.

"War's getting close," she said, around the mouthful.

"It was always close," I said, thinking back on how I almost died earlier in the year.

"Yeah," she agreed and continued to chew.

Clarita's eyes dropped to the floor plan chip I had left visible on the table between us, and she tapped the surface with one finger. "Service corridor with an entrance along the east wall and a rear exit at the ground level. The office Padre marked is on the second floor, northwest corner, single entry, single small window facing the alley. We go up the service stairs, clear the second floor first, then wipe the main floor on the egress."

She lifted her gaze to look me in the eye. "How many hostiles did you identify on your reference footage?"

"Thirteen across four cameras," I said. "But the footage is forty-eight hours old. I expect tonight's meeting to draw more."

"It will draw more," Clarita confirmed.

"It'll draw more," Valerie agreed.

"We have to move methodically," Clarita said. "So do not rush or stack bodies in places that can be seen from the main floor. Valerie."

"Tch, I know, I know," Valerie said as she sucked her teeth.

"Valerie," Clarita said again.

"I heard you the first time, Clari," Valerie said with an eyeroll.

We left Nunzio's and headed toward a Villefort Columbus V340-F Freight van, which sat parked on a side street two blocks south of the target. It was a wide and flat-nosed cargo van in a dark grey-green primer that had been painted over what I can only estimate to have been a fuckton of times.

The chassis sat low on a reinforced suspension that had been clearly upgraded from the factory spec. The cargo compartment extended behind the cab, and the front windshield carried a hairline fracture that ran from the lower-left corner up toward the rearview mirror. The passenger-side door seal had been replaced at some point with a strip of black adhesive foam that compressed audibly when Valerie pulled the door shut.

It smelled, on the interior, of synth motor oil, used fast-food wrappers, and a very faint undertone of something copper that I made the conscious, professional decision not to investigate further.

"She's not pretty," Valerie said as she settled into the driver's seat and brought the electric motor online. "But she's reliable."

Clarita folded herself into the passenger seat, and I settled into the cargo compartment on a folded grey tactical blanket and pulled up the building's external subnet through my internal overlay while Valerie navigated the last two blocks.

She pulled the van into the narrow service alley running along the east face of the former pachinko parlor at twenty-oh-one. She killed the headlights and coasted on momentum alone until we reached the deep shadow under the building's overhang.

The alley was dark, and the overhead light fitting above the east exit had been smashed at some point and never replaced.

"We are parked," Valerie announced as if it were a meaningful personal accomplishment.

I quickly used my Paraline to wirelessly hack into the building's security cameras. The pachinko parlor's external surveillance was running on a Militech-branded civilian NVR unit, model CV-14, which had not received a security patch in approximately fourteen months and was broadcasting its local IP across the subnet. 

I mapped the four cameras against the floor plan in my overlay.

Camera one was mounted high above the main entrance, fish-eye lens, covering the front door and the first twenty feet of the converted gambling floor. The pachinkos had been ripped out years ago, and the open floor was now an unsentimental storage and transaction space.

There were wooden pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped cargo lining the left wall. Seven Tyger Claws were distributed across the main floor, two flanking the front door, two at the far end near the base of the staircase, and three loosely clustered around a folding table at the center. I sent a Ping quickhack, and their chrome profiles resolved in under a second as threat tags materialized in my overlay, floating in amber along the edges of each silhouette.

Camera two was on the east service corridor. There was one Tyger Claw watching the rear door from the base of the service stairs with his arms folded across his chest. He was alone and poorly positioned, his back angled away from the most likely breach point. He had on a light cyberware loadout, civ-spec optics, and was definitely not the type of man you assigned to guard anything important.

Camera three was on the second-floor landing where two Tyger Claws did a bored patrol loop, walking opposite vectors with no overlap in their visual fields. They had some okay-ish chrome, and one shared Kerenzikov between them.

Last but not least was camera four, which was in the northwest office where Hiroto Aoki sat behind a long folding table in a room that had originally been the parlor's administrative office. He was in his mid-forties with a lean physique and dressed in a black Tyger Claw jacket with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, leaving the chrome on his forearms exposed for all to see. Three more Tyger Claws stood behind him, and on the table to his right, still sealed and latched, sat the Kang Tao transport crate Padre wanted.

With a total of fourteen hostiles identified and tagged, and the target and payload located, the first part of my job was done. I surfaced from the feed to an empty van as Valerie and Clarita had already stepped out.

Clarita had drawn a suppressed Nue from her right shoulder holster, checking the round count and seating the magazine again and racking the slide. Valerie had zipped her bomber jacket to the high collar against the cooler evening air, her right hand hanging loose near her hip as if she were a wild west cowboy.

I leaned forward in the cargo compartment and walked them through the full picture in a low voice, laying out the distribution, patrol patterns, office configuration, and the position of the crate. Clarita absorbed the information, and Valerie's eyes flicked left as she built a parallel mental map alongside the one I was speaking of.

"So thirteen gonks and one mega gonk," Valerie said.

"Correct," I said.

She looked at me and tilted her head. "Okay, choom. So what are you waiting for? Come on out."

I stepped out of the van, noticing that Clarita was already at the east service door, examining the lock panel. She glanced back at me, and produced a Unity from what I could only guess to have been thin air. It had a factory-threaded suppressor barrel already mounted, the matte black polymer absorbing zero of the dim ambient light, and she held it out to me grip-first.

"Padre prefers his work done quietly," she said. "That hand cannon you have in your holster is not so quiet."

I took the Unity, which sat lighter than the Overture by a noticeable margin, even though its suppressor added four inches to the barrel. I pulled the mag out, counted 14 rounds, and noticed that it already had one in the chamber, bringing my number up to 15. Clarita then handed me three additional mags, and I slid them into my right pocket.

Then I reached into the left side of my waist and pulled out a Punknife. Clarita glanced at the knife once, then looked back at the door.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Born ready," Valerie said.

"That phrase has never meant anything," Clarita said, and produced a compact mag-key from her jacket, fed it into the panel, and released the lock, opening the door without a sound.

I killed cameras one through three before we had even crossed the threshold, leaving only the office feed for me to monitor every once in a while. The service corridor was narrow and dimly lit by a single failing LED strip. The Tyger Claw at the base of the stairs was still facing the rear door and was still standing in the same posture he had been in a few minutes ago. 

Clarita closed the distance walking along the left wall, and by the time the gangoon had registered the shift behind him and began to turn, her right arm was already around his throat. She then snapped the man's neck, which sent a shiver down my spine, because I'll be damned, who would've ever thought it'd sound like that.

She looked at Valerie, who pointed at the broken-down cardboard pallet stacked against the near wall, and they tucked him behind it in under a minute.

We took the service stairs and the second floor opened into a low-ceilinged hallway with three doors on the left wall and a Tyger Claw at the far end, his back partially turned as he talked in a low voice to the second man on patrol. My overlay kept their tags lit as I fed the camera-three data to Clarita and Valerie.

We were halfway down the hallway when the second Claw turned his head at the exact wrong angle.

He didn't see us directly. He saw the shadow my not-so-subtle six-foot-six frame threw across the wall under the LED strip at the hallway junction, the angle just steep enough to cast a silhouette he didn't recognize. His hand started its descent toward the iron at his hip, and his throat was opening to yell.

I sent the Synapse Burnout quickhack subconsciously, and he froze, his hand stopping above his weapon, his jaw locking against the yell his nervous system was no longer accepting commands for.

A dull ache bloomed at the base of my skull and pressed forward behind both of my eyes in an expanding pulse that my Neural Link logged.

Neural Link load spike: 94%.

Residual thermal discharge: 0.1°C.

Estimated recovery time: 5 seconds.

Clarita was on him before he finished freezing, and Valerie crossed the same distance to the second man with a fluid approach and grabbed him from behind before snapping his neck. We moved the bodies into the closest of the three doors, which was an unused supply closet.

The northwest office door was a Militech CV-7 series commercial security panel with a six-digit PIN and a biometric backup that the current occupant had disconnected. The biometric was running in an open-state loop, broadcasting its own defeat across the panel firmware.

I pulled out my personal cable, slotted it to my Neural Link, and conencted it with the door, sending the unlock signal and routing the override through the Paraline and into the panel's control firmware.

The LED changed from red to green, but I did not open the door.

I tapped back into camera four's feed, and Hiroto Aoki filled my overlay, sitting behind the folding table, separating noodles from a paper container with a pair of disposable chopsticks, talking to one of his three guards.

I queued a chain of quickhacks and checked the sequencing twice, because the order of operations against a target with Aoki's hardware loadout was a variable that would've punished improvisation. Cyberware Malfunction first, to hit the Kang Tao plating on his forearms and disable his offensive chrome before it could find a trigger. Reboot Optics second, to strip his vision for the duration of the optical reboot cycle and remove his ability to acquire targets. Sonic Shock third, to take his spatial orientation. Short Circuit fourth and last, which would ride through every piece of chrome left in his nervous system and convulse him into the floor.

I looked at Valerie and Clarita, who were in position with Clarita to the left of the door, her Nue raised and her back flat against the wall, and Valerie to the right.

I sent the chain and pushed the door open.

Aoki had half-risen from his chair when the Cyberware Malfunction hit. He swayed, gripping the table's edge with locked hands, his mouth hanging open in pain as the Short Circuit dropped him, his legs folding in a full-body spasm that took the chair, the steaming hot noodles, and a quarter of the table's contents to the floor.

All three of his guards reached for their weapons, but they were too late.

The two Tyger Claws on that side of the table dissolved into a mess of suppressed muzzle flashes at the hands of Valerie, while Clarita went right and put one round through the throat of the third guard before he finished drawing his sidearm. The shot ripped through his carotid artery, and blood came pouring out of his neck. One of his hands shot up to hold his neck, but it never reached its destination as a shot ripped through his hand, taking his middle and ring fingers, and punched into his face just below his eye socket. It was followed by a third shot which entered his open mouth and severed his brain stem. He crumpled almost immediately.

On the floor, Hiroto Aoki's optics rebooted, and he looked, his arms still partially locked at his sides by the residual freeze of the Cyberware Malfunction. His jaw was working against the lingering interference, and his eyes tracked across the room, finding the three of us stepping over the corpses of his subordinates.

Clarita moved to stand directly in front of him, the suppressed Nue held at a downward angle along her thigh. She looked down at him with an indifferent expression on her face.

"Wakey, wakey, Aoki Hiroto," she spoke to him fluently in Japanese.

"You! You know who I am. If Padre finds out-" Aoki replied in Japanese.

But Clarita interrupted him with a single sentence spoken in English. "Padre sends his regards."

She fired two shots. The first round entered Aoki's forehead just above his left eye and exited the back of his skull at a downward angle, painting an arcing fan of brain matter and red-black blood across the ground behind him. The second round followed right after through the same entry wound and severed the brain stem.

His body seized up, and his hands clenched into fists as he leaned forward from his seating position. He then slowly fell sideways as his body released a spine-shivering exhale, followed by a dull thunk as his head hit the floor.

I nudged his body out of the way with the heel of my foot and dropped into the office chair beside the table. I plugged myself into the terminal's data port and punched into the system's root directory. I hit the encrypted partition walls, and began processing through them. The ledger partition was nested behind two layers of Kang Tao standard AES-256, which was commercially solid, but to me it was worth jack-shit.

It took me less than twenty seconds to get the ledger opened. I pulled the data chip from my pocket, slotted it in the terminal's peripheral port, and initiated the transfer protocol, watching the progress bar fill across my overlay while the file unpacked and the names, badge numbers, payment dates, and bribery records of every NCPD officer who had been allowing Aoki to operate inside Padre's domain loaded themselves into forty-three megabytes of encrypted archive.

I unplugged myself from the terminal, and once the download was done, which was almost instantly, I pulled the chip.

I stood up and turned to see that Valerie already had the Kang Tao crate in both hands. Clarita stood at the door with her back to the room, the Nue down at her side as she tapped one of her fingers in a musical rhythm against the suppressor.

"Good to go?" she asked, without turning.

"Yup," I said, pocketing the chip. "Time to delta."

"Then we..." Valerie started speaking, but I didn't pay attention to it since my internal alert fired.

The front camera, which I had reactivated and set to motion-threshold detection on the main-entrance feed, tagged a new cluster of movement signatures at the building's primary access point. I ran the count before the alert finished its first cycle.

Ten bodies. Moving with purpose, with proximity, in the loose, overlapping, comfortable formation of men who already knew the building, who already knew each other's spacing, and who were walking through the front door with the physical ease of arrival rather than approach. They were already inside before I had finished counting.

"We have a problem," I said. "Ten new contacts meeting with the seven remaining Claws gonks at the main entrance."

"Maelstrom?" Valerie asked.

"Looks that way," I pulled the floor plan back up across my full overlay, scanning the second-floor architecture for anything I had missed in the initial mapping.

From below, the unmuffled sound of a man calling Aoki's name resounded.

"Aoki!" the man called out.

"Aoki!" the man called out again, but louder this time.

"The window," Clarita said in a hushed voice. "Now!" 

Valerie crossed the office with the Kang Tao crate clutched against her chest like a child, swung her right boot up in a tight arc, and drove the reinforced heel through the painted glass. The glass detonated outward in a sheet, the painted coating fragmenting along its impact lines into a constellation of black flakes that scattered into the alley.

From below, the conversation had quickly turned suspicion into footfalls, with the sound of boots making their initial decision about which staircase to commit to, and slides were racked, chambering a round into their weapon's chambers.

"Go!" Clarita said.

Valerie tossed the Kang Tao crate through the window, the case dropping into the alley with a dull thud, and then she vaulted the frame in a smooth, low-shouldered roll.

I went after her, holding the Unity in my right hand without holstering it. I planted my left palm flat against the right anchor of the casing, and inverted my body through the opening. Thanks to my previous experience with parkour, I was able to shake off the four-meter drop with a smooth roll, dispersing the impact.

Clarita followed behind me, dropping the four meters with ease, which I could only attribute to Titanium Bone Lacing.

"Get moving," she said.

I scooped the Kang Tao crate up by its molded handle as I passed, and matched Valerie's stride toward the V340-F's rear hatch. She yanked the hatch open, and I shoved the crate into the cargo compartment, pulling myself in after it, and the rear sealed behind me as Clarita slid into the passenger seat and Valerie.

The van rolled out of the alley at a slow and inconspicuous pace that made me feel like I was going to age four years in eight seconds.

"Faster," I said.

"If we go any faster, it'll only look like we're running," Valerie said. "Posted speed limit looks like we're commuting. If you want to blend in, look uninteresting."

"They're going to follow," I said.

"They might," Valerie said. "Probably not. They have no idea what they're chasing or who since we didn't leave a face."

Valerie took a route through residential blocks that I would not have selected, and stopped once at a four-way intersection to allow an elderly woman with a folding shopping cart to cross the street ahead of us with the patience of a saint and the wave of a long-haul trucker. The old woman waved back and Valerie waved even harder.

"You are something else," I said.

"I'm a professional," Valerie said. "Professionals respect the elderly."

Clarita did not say anything the entire ride.

We reached the drop point, which was a service garage tucked behind a Spanish bakery on the northern edge of San Amaro. The roll-up doors were halfway raised when Valerie pulled the van into the rear alley, and a man in a faded Valentinos jacket was already standing at the threshold with a light pointed at the ground and a hand resting comfortably on the grip of a Lexington holstered under his left arm.

He nodded at Valerie and nodded deeper at Clarita while simply glancing my way to register my mask and my height before stepping aside. The doors came down behind the van slowly, and we made our way to Padre, who was waiting in the back office.

He sat at a folding card table with a small thermos of coffee in front of him, an open laptop displaying what looked like a parish prayer schedule, and a paper bag of pastries from the bakery upstairs. He looked up as the three of us entered, and the warmth that flooded his face at the sight of his two daughters was immediate.

"Mijas," he said as he stood and embraced Clarita first, and then Valerie, who returned the hug with a quick and completely unprompted update about the pizza they had eaten at Nunzio's. Padre listened to her attentively before finally turning to me.

"El fantasma," he said.

I produced the data chip from my pocket and held it out to him. He took it and looked at it for a moment in the palm of his hand, weighing it before he tucked it into the interior pocket of his clerical jacket without inspection.

"And the crate?" Padre asked

"It's in the van," Valerie said.

"Hector will retrieve it," Padre said as he gestured to the table. We sat, and Padre poured espresso into three small ceramic cups, and he slid one to each of us before settling back into his own chair.

"And Aoki?" he asked.

Clarita met his eyes and gave him the smallest possible nod.

"Hecho," she said.

Padre's eyes closed for a moment before he crossed himself, and when he opened his eyes again, the expression on his face was contemplative.

"Que Dios tenga misericordia de su alma," he said quietly. "Or que arda. He will decide."

He turned to me.

"Your work this evening was clean," he said. "Quieter than I had any right to expect, given the scale of the cell you walked through. The ledger you secured will protect my parish for the next several years. The crate you recovered will protect it for considerably longer. The reduction of Señor Aoki was performed with the kind of professional discretion that does not usually exist in operators your age."

"My age," I asked, a bit surprised.

"Yes, mijo," Padre nodded. "You're young, very young, and very talented. I say you're still not even an adult yet, given your height, which was only supposed to be six-foot-two from what I had learned. The only explanation for a mostly ganic person is a growth spurt. And those don't tend to happen in your twenties."

I said nothing at that, and he just reached into his interior pocket again and produced a credit shard, which he slid across to me.

"Your commission," he said. "Fifty thousand. The ledger work bears its own premium, and the cleanliness of the execution bears another. I tip for quality."

I picked up the shard and ran an authentication, resolving the encrypted credit balance through the embedded chip and confirming the figure across my internal overlay.

Credit transfer authenticated: 50,000 eddies.

Source: Anonymous bearer instrument.

Destination wallet: Pending acceptance.

I accepted, and the eddies were routed using my Aiden Protocol before finally landing in my wallet.

"Appreciated, Padre," I said.

"Appreciated and earned," he said with a gentle smile. He lifted his coffee cup in a small, ceremonial gesture toward the three of us. "You worked well together this evening. I would like to use this composition again."

"I'm in," Valerie said immediately.

Clarita did not answer verbally, but she lifted her own coffee cup, looked at me over the rim, and offered the same slow nod she had used to acknowledge me at the basketball court.

I looked at her, then at Valerie, and finally at Padre.

"I wouldn't mind it," I said.

Padre smiled, and the smile reached his eyes. 

I drank the coffee, which tasted good and probably cost more than the cup it was served in. I sat with two killers and a priest in the back of a Heywood garage on a Tuesday night, and I drank real coffee.

The war was still coming. The Net was still full of names I had not yet decided what to do with. The Mustang in my building was still a stripped husk that I was likely going to have to fully rebuild and fabricate.

But with an extra fifty large ones in my account, two new contacts who knew how to clear a Tyger Claw cell without leaving a trail, and a priest who had decided, for reasons of his own, to keep me around, today was a better Tuesday than most.