Preoperational Background Chace, Tara F.

The first time Tara Chace was ordered to murder a man, it was in Kosovo, as a favor to the CIA.

She used a Parker-Hale M-85 supplied by the Istanbul Number Two that had been moved to a cache near what would ultimately become her sniper's nest in Prizren. She entered the country as a member of the British peacekeeping force's support staff, attached through the Ministry of Defense, then traveled as a liaison officer in an observer group past the NATO checkpoint into the city before striking out on her own. Once on-site, she hunkered down in an abandoned apartment on the third floor of an equally abandoned building to wait for her target and the dawn. The night had been cold, long, and Chace sat behind the rifle playing memory games in her head not to keep from falling asleep but to keep her mind off what she was there to do.

The target, a former Soviet general named Markovsky who had leaped gleefully into bed with the Red mafiya, appeared just after dawn, riding passenger in the cab of a three-ton truck laden with confiscated small arms. At first it had seemed Markovsky wasn't going to exit the vehicle, and Chace, behind the scope and with her pulse making the optics jump with every beat, half-wondered, half-hoped she would have to abort. The driver seemed to be handling the buy with the KLA, who had pulled up earlier, and all throughout the dance of "let's see the merchandise" and its companion two-step, "show me the money," Markovsky stayed put.

Then the driver turned and signaled the general to join them, and before Markovsky had set a foot on the ground, Chace had put three pounds of pressure on the trigger and sent his brains misting onto the truck's windshield.

All hell had broken loose then, as everyone back in the Operations Room in London had known it would, and Chace had run, pursued by the angry KLA and the angrier Russians. Her alpha route out of Zone was almost immediately compromised, and her UN cover blown soon thereafter. Running pell-mell through the streets of Prizren, the KLA firing wildly after her, she had caught a ricochet in the left calf and gone ass over tit, only to rise and run again. Two further near-misses with her pursuers before finally managing to steal a car, and then she'd had to keep a straight face and give a good lie past a Coalition checkpoint before finally making it to the British Sector.

At which point, safe at last, Chace permitted herself the luxury of passing out.

The mission had been considered a success, and her stock in the Special Operations Directorate of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service had risen accordingly, even as she limped back into the cramped and ugly little office in the M16 building at Vauxhall Cross. Her Head of Section, Tom Wallace, had rewarded her with a glowing write-up in her AIR, the annual evaluation that all directorate chiefs were required to submit concerning their personnel. Wallace had shown it to her before submitting it—not strictly against the rules, but an unorthodox decision—and taken great delight in pointing out his recommendation for "promotion at earliest opportunity."

"You'll have my job, soon enough," Wallace had said, and his grin had been as open and good-natured as ever, the look of a proud mentor. Nothing in his words hinted at anything other than sincerity.

"Let's hope so," Chace had replied. "Then I'll get the really good assignments."

It had been a joke, and they had both laughed, and time passed and the glow of the job faded as other jobs came, but the memory of it stayed with her. It followed when she was sent to Egypt and nearly lost her life in an ambush and was forced to kill three men in self-defense. It trailed her to T'bilisi where a Provisional Minder Three by the name of Brian Butler, who had been recruited into the Special Section only four days prior, died mere inches from her side.

It accompanied her home, first to her bedsit in South Kensington, and then later relocating with her when she moved to a flat in Camden.

It was tenacious, and the comfort found neither in a bottle of scotch nor in the arms of an eager lover could break its grip.

It became part of her life; more—it became part of her.

Wallace and she had laughed at the joke, but the fact was, there are no good assignments when you are a Minder; there are only ones marginally less likely to get you killed. As Wallace had told her when she'd first joined the Section as an eager Minder Three, "It's not the bullet with your name on it you have to worry about, Tara. It's all those damn other ones, marked 'to whom it may concern.' "

There were no good jobs, and assassination was the worst of them all. Even putting all moral and ethical questions out of mind—and when the order came, it was Chace's job to do precisely that—assassinations were fiendishly difficult to execute on every conceivable level. Politically, they were nightmarishly sensitive; logistically, they were almost impossible to adequately plan; and finally, once operational, even if the politics and the logistics had fallen in line, it would all go out the window anyway.

Everyone involved, from the staff in the Ops Room to the officers of the Special Section—known in-house as the Minders—to the Director of Operations himself, Paul Crocker, understood that. Chace, as Minder Two, had distinguished herself, and Wallace had been right. One day she would have his job. One day she would be Minder One, the Head of Section.

But distinguishing herself wasn't enough. The "good" assignments didn't interest her. She wanted the bad ones, the ones no one believed in, the ones that required a Minder and, more, required her. She wanted to prove herself, not just that she was capable, but that she was better.

While she had done all these things, she had also murdered a man in the name of queen and of country.

No matter how she tried, it couldn't be rationalized.

And finally she understood why Tom Wallace's laughter never reached his eyes.

London—Oxford Street, Marble Arch
07 August 1517 GMT

The planning was exceptional, the result of two years spent preparing for the action, an operation meant to run like clockwork. And much like clockwork, it nearly failed, simply because men are not machines, and they feel fear.

When it came upon him, it came by surprise. It stole his breath and cramped his stomach, and for an instant he was certain he would wet himself. Just inside the Marble Arch tube stop he balked, the wash of passengers flowing past him in both directions. He felt the uncomfortable pressure of the glass bottles in his backpack, felt the sweat springing to his palms. Adrenaline filled him, made the stink rising from the tunnels all the more rank, the perfumes and deodorants and colognes that much more cloying. The noise of the station, the echoes of the trains and the voices and PA, became almost unbearably loud, adding to the sudden rush of vertigo.

For a second time, he thought he might vomit.

He steadied himself against the wall, closed his eyes, fought to control his breathing. Of all the things he had practiced, of all the things he had envisioned the eleven times he had made this same trip as a dry run, he had never considered this. He had known he would be nervous. He had even acknowledged that he might be scared. But this level of fear was unexpected, and it unmanned him.

Worse, it made him question his faith, and that added a new emotion, a rising sense of shame. He willed himself to walk on, to continue through the turnstiles and onto the escalator and down to the platform, painfully aware that seconds were passing, that the schedule they had so carefully crafted was now in dire jeopardy. And still he couldn't move.

He thought of the others, ready to board trains at Baker Street and Bank, and he was certain that their faith was stronger than any fear. His mind, which had seized, as paralyzed as the rest of him, suddenly snapped into gear once more, began racing with doubt. Even if he did move, they would fail. Even if he did move, it wouldn't work. Even if he did move, he would be stopped before boarding the train, before opening his backpack, and perhaps the others had been stopped already, had been caught already. Perhaps they had talked, and even now, on close-circuit monitors, he was being watched, and the police were beginning to close in upon him.

He prayed, or tried to pray, but the battering his faith had taken was enough to make him feel insincere, and he had no hopes for it. God worked through him and others like him, and everything he did was as God's Will, and wasn't it, then, God's Will that he be weakened in this moment? Wasn't it God's Will—all praise to Him—that he stand here now, lost?

Someone laughed, and he was so certain it was directed at him, that it was mocking him, that his head jerked round in an attempt to find the source.

It was a woman, or a girl almost a woman. Perhaps sixteen, traveling with friends the same age, of both sexes. She was small and slender, with a lovely face and a mouth that, to his eyes, was impossibly large as it opened in her laughter a second time, now shrieking with glee as she batted the hands of one of her male companions reaching for her. A boyfriend, he thought, and watched as the boy wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her through a turnstile. When the boy hoisted her, her skirt crushed between them, accentuating the curve of her maturing hip, the slender strength of her thigh. She twisted in his grip, laughing, and the cotton shirt she wore was trapped between them, the front pulling down slightly, and it revealed cleavage and, against the stretched fabric, the curve of her breasts and shape of her nipples.

Then they were through, moving toward the escalator, and without another instant of hesitation, he followed, his prayer answered, his faith restored.

He had seen it all throughout Europe: women without men to watch and protect them. Women forced to live what was so condescendingly referred to as liberated lives. They worked as clerks and hostesses and teachers to men, their bodies and voices and every movement geared to entertain and to advertise. Even now, riding the long escalator down to the platform with the girl and the boy and their friends only a few meters ahead, he was surrounded by it. Placards and posters advertising clothes and watches and perfumes and liquors and movies. All using women as bait, the promise of their sex, of their surrender. A tease and a temptation, degrading both the subject and the viewer.

Copyright © 2004 by Greg Rucka