The Kingmaker

15 - Cruise

Zero hadn't slept. He perched motionless at the top of the DaleCorp skyscraper four hundred feet above the ground, leaning forward on one knee with his boot planted firmly on the ledge.

It was three in the morning. Cool, only slightly cloudy. On bright, chilly nights like this, it was easier to stay alert. Vigilant.

Not that he was here to keep watch of anything in particular. He knew better than to hope he would find his mark just because he had a bird's eye view of the rest of the city. There were twelve million people in this place. He had a greater chance of finding her if we went door-to-door like a walking sales rep, not looking out over Alexandria from the rooftop of a thirty five story building. From here, the few people that were out walking at this time of night looked no bigger than ants on the pavement, and there was little point in inspecting each one with his binoculars.

No. He was just here to think.

Zero's eyes darted over the dark silhouette of the other end of the city skyline framed by the moon's foggy light. Think. Where would she be? Where would she go first?

Before officially dispatching him, Baines had suggested that she would go first to her old family home, that maybe he ought to start his search from there. Zero had dismissed it out of hand - he knew the mark well enough to know she would never do something so clumsy and predictable. The only reason she would risk that was if she was a slave to sentiment, willing to throw away all of her plans and preparations just for a glimpse into the past.

He knew better.

She wasn't a slave to her past, but rather fixated on the future. He knew her type. For her, the vendetta and the reasons that drove it were always present with her, always boiling inside her. Every breath, every movement, the first thing thing she thought of when she awoke and the last thing on her mind when she fell asleep. She had no reason to go revisit old memories at her former home to stoke her grudges: she carried them with her like live coals every second of the day.

But maybe it wasn't a bad idea to go to the old Ingram property for other reasons. Of course, he wouldn't find a trail leading to the target from there, but maybe he would be able to find others who could help him. He knew well enough what had happened to the place after the gruesome night; he'd poked around and found out that someone had purchased it just months after the incident...'intact.' Meaning that they had taken the place as is, straight after it went back on the market freshly-cleaned and bloodless.

Bleached or not, people wouldn't normally be so willing to stay in a house that had been the site of such macabre violence not even a year before.

Maybe there was a clue to be found there. Tomorrow night, he would head that way and check it out for himself, probe a little just in case.

Zero leaned back, removing his foot from the ledge, and dropped the blunt he had been holding between his fingers for the last ten minutes onto the ground. With a twist of his boot, he ground out the cherry cinders at the end of the roll: by now, he was certain he had been standing here long enough for the distinct smell to seep thoroughly into his gear. Good. He'd never smoked a day in his life and likely never would, but it was necessary to put on a pretense for the time being. Appearances mattered.

"You fuckin' pothead," his partner grumbled when he returned to their post. "Knew you weren't just going for a piss. Now I'm gonna smell like that s**t, too."

Zero gave him a too-slow smile, eyes glassy and drooping. "Sorry, man."

"Keep that s**t up, and they'll cut you, kid. I don't even know why you're here. You're gonna get eaten alive the second we run into real trouble."

"Nahhh," Zero mumbled. He slowly wiped his hands off his bulky, tan-colored tactical vest. "I'm good, I'm good."

"No, you're not. Don't expect anyone to watch out for your ass when hell breaks loose. And kid, you don't know it, but hell's never too far away in Alexandria."

The older mercenary shook his head again and shot a disgusted look Zero's way before turning his attention elsewhere. It was a lucky thing that he had been paired up with the most ornery man in the whole detail - it hadn't taken much more than demonstrating some laziness to get on his bad side. A blatant show of incompetence would have been too effective, and it wasn't a good idea to get cut from the job so soon for it. Especially as that would raise questions of why he was even hired to begin with, and if anyone happened to be bored or spiteful enough to dig for answers, they might end up wandering a little too close to the truth.

No, he didn't need to act incompetent. He just needed to be someone that no one was interested in, someone who could not only coast under everyone else's radar but actively repel them - yet in a way that didn't throw suspicion on his motives.

"Stay here this time," his partner ordered with an unkind glower. "I'll walk the floor."

Zero obliged him with a slow nod and watched him turn away.

Tomorrow night, he thought. He wasn't on duty then since the executive would be on the move all day and needed a smaller, tighter squad to escort him. Zero, of course, hadn't been one of the mercenaries selected for it. He was one of the least impressive and capable of the detail, after all; what use would they have for him?

Which meant he was free to pursue his own ends in the meantime. The house first, and then after he checked out the property, he would decide where to go from there.

The target was somewhere in the city, and she wasn't leaving anytime soon. Not only that, but Zero knew well enough that she would be making waves, too, and it was only a matter of time before he caught the scent.

It wouldn't be long now. Her time was running out.

-----------

The shipyard was probably the best place to start. Not in terms of safety or comfort, but the shipyard was never quiet, and noise was exactly what Eden was looking for tonight. Not just any kind, though - she needed noise that she could dissect and extrapolate from. Valuable noise. She needed more information, and if she sneaked around long enough, someone with too-loose lips might start flapping their gums and give away something she could use.

But two hours later, all Eden saw from atop her secret, silent perch atop a shipping container was an illicit deal going down on the docks. Those big wooden crates being passed off a barge were more likely to be full of illegal arms rather than drugs, and she wasn't ready to play that game yet. Weapons trade was a wild beast; she needed more pieces on the board before she could play with the kids on that block. There were better trees to shake, less risky ones.

If the rest of the night continued this fruitlessly, she was going to end up wasting an entire night. That was unacceptable, not this early in the game - if ever. With no leads and not enough time to comb the entire city, she had to revisit what she knew and try to narrow down the possibilities.

Square one, she thought. Back to the hooker, that was where she needed to start.

The woman - Danielle, apparently, if the name she had given was genuine (it probably wasn't) - had mentioned something about campers, mobile motor-homes being set up as temporary cook sites in response to the chemistry building's shutdown. But that couldn't be right. RVs were far too conspicuous in a city like this to move around or even stay in place on the fringes unnoticed. What use did Alexandrians have for them, after all? It was an urban supercenter. The small portion of the population that could afford luxuries like camping had far better recreational alternatives at hand, and the rest of the city simply didn't have the time or the money to indulge in the first place. A motor home was so rare that anyone who tried to move around in something so large would be far too obvious about it.

So no, not RVs, no campers. It had to be something else, but Eden had a suspicion there was an inkling of accuracy in Danielle's information. It wasn't easy to set up an entire meth lab in a pinch that tight, so it would be nothing large scale. Something compact, less elegant, more crude, but with the facilities to create product already in place. They wouldn't have time to put anything together that wasn't already mostly assembled.

As Eden stared out over the water, sunk deep in her thoughts, she watched as the barge finally began to move again from the dock. The men must have unloaded all their crates full of contraband already. That had been fast, she thought curiously. She would take notes for the future for when she needed to start playing that ballgame. On the wide open water, it sure was a lot easier to move around than driving into the city -

She froze.

Water, of course.

Mobile. Discreet. Or at least discreet enough that most of the city wouldn't notice anything too amiss. And even with crude facilities already in place -

Eden stealthily clambered off the shipping container, making sure she remained concealed in the shadows as she did so. No need to attract the attention of those jumpy, trigger happy men on the dock over there. She had places to go, and she was only too certain that they would have a lot of heavy-handed questions about what she was doing lurking in the shipyard while they handled their business.

But she didn't have time to waste, either. As soon as her shoes touched the ground, she was off like a shot, running down toward the beaches. She didn't know if she would make it in time to find anyone still there now that it was just a couple hours until morning broke, but at the very least she would be able to confirm it with her own eyes.

How could she not have thought of that before? The answer was so obvious.

Half an hour later, she was trotting parallel to the boardwalk, looking out over the waves. A fog had settled over the water....which, of course, so conveniently concealed the smoke that those yachts were belching out in the distance. Lights were on, and the boats were moving to and fro.

One, two...six. Six vessels, all silently pouring steam behind them as they cruised along.

Eden grinned.