Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [61]
They were the Silence. What one well-placed insider had once called the real world’s answer to MacGyver: two-hundred-plus operatives armed with nothing more than their wits and a pocket knife.
And the resources of a multimillion-dollar endowment, renewed annually by donors who remained distant and unnamed.
But for the operatives for whom Fatal was a tradition, albeit an ironic one, the who and the why of the Silence’s benefactors wasn’t something they thought about every day, if at all. It was enough that they were there, doing what they did. And part of what they did involved appearing in front of the Action Board on the third Friday of every month.
The Silence took no fees, accepted no credit, courted no publicity. A truly secret society in a world with a long history of pretenders to the name. But there were always holes, always flaws. No organization had perfect security, perfect information. And so the Silence regularly drained their direct operatives of whatever info they held, no matter if it seemed useful or not at the time.
And to that end, every Handler on the continent, and a few who had to fly in from overseas, stopped by to unload their month’s worth of reports in person, and get a grilling on every detail in return. Praise was allocated, and occasionally blame or reprimands.
The cocktail party afterward was a civilized veneer on the heavy drinking which invariably followed those reports.
It used to be a looser affair, but after the one “safe” bar in the neighborhood burned down during a labor disagreement, the Silence brass established this in-house gathering. Free booze was better than stuff you had to pay for, and the Silence had a way of keeping tabs on who was saying what in their drunken stupor.
Sergei hadn’t been to one of these gatherings in almost seven years. Purposefully absent, as though least in sight would mean least in mind, the minor flow of information he used to maintain his and Wren’s freedom fed to them over the phone, from a distance. Obviously, that distance hadn’t been enough. A phrase from The Godfather sprang inevitably, ironically, to mind. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
But there was never loss without gain. He hoped, anyway.
The press of a body nearer to his than was comfortable was his only warning. “What is your deal, anyway?”
“Excuse me?” Turning, Sergei raised one eyebrow, and looked down his admittedly patrician nose at the much shorter speaker, to no effect. He prided himself on the ability to freeze out unwanted conversational interlopers, but Dancy had never been able to take a hint. Sledgehammer or otherwise.
“Take the promotion, man.” Dancy leaned forward, the alcohol plain on his breath. Five foot nothing, squarely muscled like a bulldog, he had been around forever, gone up the ranks from messenger to Handler, and the scars of it were in his eyes. “You know they get what they want anyway, and they want your girl, bad. So why not take the bennies too?”
The Silence’s interest in Wren was open gossip. Bad sign. But it was their obvious need that gave him the leverage he was here trying to use. That didn’t make Dancy’s comments any easier to take. “Get. Away. From. Me.” His teeth didn’t quite grit together, but it was a near thing. He did not like being talked about. He never had, even in his glory days as an Active. He liked it even less when Wren was involved.
Dancy blinked, taken aback by the other man’s reaction to what he had intended as friendly advice.
“Right. Still the same old team player, huh?” That stung, more than it should have. More than he should have let it. “See you around, Softwing.”
Softwing. His nickname in the Silence. He’d always found that…amusing. Ironic. The owl and the wren. Birds almost of a feather.
Sergei took a cigarette out of the silver case he always carried and rolled it between his fingers. Fifteen years since he’d inhaled nicotine, and the urge was still there, a smoky siren’s song. He tested himself, every