Night Games Pt. 13

"Under guard of forty-two. Along a secret avenue.

Castel Sant'Angelo is waiting.

They're the guards of the Holy See. They're the guards of Christianity.

Their path through history is paved with salvation."

-Sabaton,"The Last Stand"

*

Aboard Franz Hauber's yacht, something was happening on Spencer Malone's computer.

"Tracy!" He called out. "The Contessa's finally turned her computer on!"

Tracy Baker came running from belowdecks.

"What've we got?" She asked him.

"From what I see, she has two email addresses that she uses regularly: lacontessa at castlefinzione dot snfnz is her business one, and lafuckingcontessa at castlefinzione is her personal one. Looks like she's sending one to a cptortega at ultimados dot snfnz."

"So," Tracy mused. "She's calling in her backup. Looks like Gordon's going to get his wish."

"He wants to fight one of them." Spencer pointed out. "Not fifty."

"She's not going to bring that many. She'll want them to get into the castle to spring her trap. She'll probably even let them get hold of the pendant to catch them red-handed. What we do after that is the real question."

Spencer turned around in his chair.

"There's also the fact that we don't know how it opens for sure. I mean, Morris saw how the other end does, but not the one under that house."

"The tunnel was built before the Renaissance. The San Finziones of Old weren't known for their creativity. Why do you think everything in the country is San Finzione this and San Finzione that? It'll be another secret stone to press. With the cam, Alice should be able to tell them how to find it."

"That's another thing." Spencer told her, wheeling back around to his computer. "Reports of previous incidents at the castle say that in an emergency, they activate a signal jammer that shuts down all unauthorized communication for blocks around. People who live near the castle complain that their phones and internet stop working every time it happens."

"We know the guys are walking into a trap." Tracy thought aloud. "So, she'll wait until they get inside to turn it on."

"Once she does, we'll lose comms and cams. They'll be on their own until they get back out. From the reports, the Denti house should be far enough down La Collina to be out of jamming range."

Squeaking came from belowdecks, and the boat began to rock slightly. Tracy took note of it.

"Sounds like Alice has forgiven Franz." She told Spencer. "Good. We're going to need her to whip up a couple things. What's La Contessa telling the Ultimados?"

Spencer watched the letters appear on the screen as La Contessa typed them. The words were in Spanish, which was a language that the native Texan understood.

"She's telling the captain she wants six of them for a special overnight duty at the castle."

"Only six?" Tracy asked. "She IS confident in them." She picked up the sketched map of the castle that Spencer had pieced together from tourists' stories and compared it to Morris Sinclair's rough drawing of La Contessa's Study. "She knows we're aware of the tunnel out, but not that other door Morris saw." She traced a line from the Study's rough position on the ground floor to where the passage might lead on the first. We're assuming the pendant will be in that safe, but it's just as likely that she keeps it with her in the bedroom. This passage leads to either her room, the maid's, or both. If it's not in the safe, that should be our next move."

Morris Sinclair walked in from the deck. He was somewhat calmer now that Gordon Walker had returned from dumping the car Franz had been driving around in. He saw what they were doing, grabbed a beer from behind the bar, and walked over to them.

"You weren't going to invite me in on the planning?" Morris asked Tracy.

"This is still the pre-planning." Tracy explained. "The actual planning comes in a couple hours. Right now, Spencer's getting some good stuff off that bug you put on her computer."

Morris hesitated. Coming up with things at the last moment was a thing Tracy did. Admitting that she didn't have a full plan eight hours before the job was par for the course.

"Ok. Have you accounted for the whole 'she's a witch' thing?" He asked.

"Actually, yes." Tracy said with a smile. She walked over to where a plastic pistol case was sitting and picked it up. "Oh, Gordon!" She called. Gordon Walker entered the room from the deck.

"Yeah, Tracy?"

"Whereas I don't seriously believe the myths that La Contessa can command the wills of others, Morris seems to, and I have accounted for them. Do you recall when I said I'd take care of anything bigger than what you brought with you? It's time to give it to you."

"You know I don't want to kill any more people, Tracy." Gordon commented, following Morris' lead and grabbing a beer.

"And I wouldn't ask that of you. Firstly, it appears you're going to get your wish. La Contessa has ordered six Ultimados to the castle for the evening. I know you want to fight one. How do you feel about six?"

Walker's eyes widened.

"Like that challenge you promised is finally here."

"Well," Tracy remarked. "We now have an idea of what her trap will be: an ambush. And being a clever thief with a flair for the dramatic, she'll probably wait until Morris gets that safe open to spring it. It sounds like you're up to the task of facing the Ultimados. That brings us back to the subject of her alleged ability to command others."

She sat on a couch and turned the gun case to face her, unlatching it.

"It stands to reason that if she can command others, she has to do so literally. With an actual verbal command. Which means she needs to be there and needs to speak it. Otherwise, why not go on the tele and conquer the world with a few words? The key to defeating such a power, then, would be to take her down before she can speak. That's just a matter of getting the drop on her, which we know you can do. Do you think you'd be able to hit her in time with this?"

Tracy opened the case and turned it to face him. Gordon admired the firearm inside.

"Yeah." He mused. "Yeah, that could do it."

* * *

Contessa Helena de San Finzione and her friends had moved their meeting to the War Room in Castle Finzione's Government Wing. Supervisor Luc Allaine of Interpol and Generalissimo Hernando Ramirez had joined them. Luc reported to the others that the President's guards had been questioned and that one of them had told his girlfriend that he would be guarding The Star of Uongo. Agents with Interpol's office in Mtaji, the capital city, were now working with local police to question the woman and find out who she might have told.

Nigel Mander was the only one of Helen's friends who had been in the War Room before. Most of them were swiveling in their chairs around the glass topped conference table.

"Now THIS is a room for plotting the deaths of your enemies!" Julie Equals proclaimed from the chair at the head of the table. Helen walked up to her and playfully shoved her out of it.

"That's La Contessa's seat." She said, taking it. Helen looked over to Susan Bailey enjoying the way her high-backed white leather chair moved.

"How much of San Finzione's defense budget goes to this room alone?" Susan asked.

"Now that SanFinTech exists and we make our own stuff," Helen answered. "Not as much as before." She turned to Troy Equals, who was looking at a monitor displaying the current locations of all of San Finzione's naval ships at sea. "I'm guessing you approve of the change of venue, Troilus."

"Oh, yes." Troy agreed. He looked expectantly at the center of the table and something embedded under the glass.

That gave Susan a question.

"Why aren't we having this meeting in your Study like always, Helen?"

"Two reasons, Susan. The first is that everything going on is still top secret and we know that security has already been breached, so it makes sense to discuss things in the most secure aboveground room in the castle for now. The second reason is the same one I wanted Julie out of my seat. Because sitting in this spot, I can do this."

Helen activated the touchscreen built into her spot at the table. The thing that Troy had been looking at in the table sprang to life and a three-dimensional model of Castle Finzione appeared in the air above it. Susan let out a squeal of delight that caused all other conversation in the room to cease and everyone to look at her.

"Sorry, everyone." Susan said, grinning. "There was this table in the Ultimados' command center during the whole thing with Whyte. I never got to see them use it, but I knew it had to do something like this. So, I've been waiting a long time to see Helen make a fancy holographic map appear in the air."

"It gets cooler." Helen told her, lighting a cigarette. "Watch this." She touched the screen a few more times and the tunnel and the exit in the Denti house were added to the display. The hologram of the castle went transparent and turned into a vector-graphic 3D floorplan of the castle. While the room was still impressed with that, Helen blew a stream of smoke at the holographic emitter, making the laser beams that came from it visible to all of them.

Most of the room applauded.

"Thanks, everyone. Now, unless Tracy is cleverer than we think and all this is all the kind of misdirection shit Whyte got off on, Sinclair and Walker are coming in via the tunnel." Helen pointed at the Denti house with her cigarette. "Which, of course, deposits them in the Study. From there, they can get out the door into the hallway to make their way through the castle, where we'll have Troy and four Ultimados waiting to make them surrender. Or, if they know about that one too, they could try the passage to my and Jeanne's rooms. That's where they'll run into Mander and I on the other side of the wall."

Ramirez had a question about that.

"Four Ultimados? Capitan Ortega informed me that La Contessa requested six."

"Two will be protecting the twins." Helen informed him. "And that's where I'd like you in all this, Susan, guarding the boys. We know this is personal for Tracy, but I don't think she's crazy enough to go after them. I'm still not taking any chances with their safety. We can move them to their parents' room for the night. But one of us should stay with them." Helen pressed another button and the room lit up on the map. "That should be far enough away from everything to keep them and yourself safe."

Susan nodded. Although the four of them tended to sleep together whenever they visited from Seattle, the guest bedroom closest to La Contessa's chambers and the Nursery had been designated Troy, Julie, and Susan's permanent room and was where they kept their things. She also had a question for Helen.

"Could their target be the Study itself?" She asked. "There's plenty of stuff to take in there. One classified document off your desk would be of value to someone. And I know her goal isn't money, but there's a lot of it in your safe."

"About three hundred-grand. A tempting target, but not enough for someone's magnum opus. And if it was about taking any old thing from me, there are plenty of gold knick-knacks that could have fit into Sinclair's pocket while he was in there. But he's too smart a thief to steal anything during the recon. No, the job is personal, so the score is personal too."

"Well." Julie made her way into the conversation. "Susan's got the babies taken care of. Troy will have Ultimados protecting him, so he's ok. You and Mander have each other. Now, what have you got for the rest of us that you're NOT going to stick on the sidelines, Helena?"

"Tracy's expecting a trap, and we're it." Helen answered. "And yes, I knew you wouldn't settle for keeping the kids safe with Susan, so I have something important in mind for you, Julie."

"Well, you've got Troy protected. You're not planning on sticking me with La Policia on this, are you?" Julie looked around the room. "Say, where is Prefect LeGrasse, anyway?"

"He's not coming." Helen told her. "La Policia have been ordered to stay out of this. Tracy fancies this a criminal-vs-criminal challenge. That's fine. I'll play that game. And the most basic rule, which even I won't cheat at, is 'no cops.' Turning to The Man would mean admitting she's too good for me to handle my way and I lose."

The Generalissimo had something to say about that.

"I feel I should remind La Contessa that there is more at stake here than a matter of thieves' honor. The People of Uongo still need you to recover the Star in time for the treaty-signing."

"Oui." Luc agreed. "As the only representative of Le Man present, I would encourage La Contessa to use every resource at her disposal. However, as someone with an understanding of how the criminal mind and the laws of this country work, I also recognize that there is no stopping you."

Helen took a drag and leaned back in her chair.

"It's nice to see that you've picked up the first thing you need to know about working with me, Luc. And no, Hernando, I haven't forgotten about the Star of Uongo. We get Sinclair and Walker; we get Tracy and the rest of them. We get Tracy, we get the Star back and I make her tell us the name of the buyer. The smartest and admittedly funniest thing Tracy could do right now would be nothing. Leave us there all night, hiding behind furniture and waiting to yell surprise, while she goes laughing out of town with the money. The people she works with are good enough that one of them has to have pointed that out. But she's still going through with it. Because she NEEDS to! Because until she pulls this off, I'm the better criminal. And if that was something she could accept, we wouldn't be having to do all this."

"We still don't know exactly what she wants." Susan pointed out. "We've got some ideas but depending on how well she knows you and how personal she's trying to make it, Helen, we might want to send some Ultimados to guard La Contessa's private collection of Warren Zevon memorabilia."

"I think I've figured out what she's after." Helen told the room with another drag of her cigarette. "I've suspected for a while now and been planning around it." She turned to Ramirez. "And what about you, Hernando? The Ultimados are coming, so now it's a military operation."

Ramirez turned to Luc.

"The castle is about to be besieged and my troops are going to defend it. My place is here with my Contessa."

Luc nodded his understanding. He spoke up.

"That leaves me questioning what I can do. If La Policia are not going to be involved, Interpol has no one with which to coordinate. I am aware that this is a personal matter now, but I would remind La Contessa that all of these people..." Luc had been in this room before and activated a touchscreen embedded into the table before him. The map of Castle Finzione winked out and was replaced by rotating holographic mugshots of the players they'd identified thus far. The rest of Helen's friends applauded the new trick. "Are wanted for crimes outside of San Finzione. When she is done with these people, we will want them."

Julie turned to address Luc.

"I know you're new around here, Supervisor Allaine, but Interpol could be waiting a long time for Helena to be 'done' with them. I mean, there's a reason we still don't talk about Daft Punk."

Helen dropped her cigarette.

"And there's a reason you shouldn't!"

"Helena, they broke up. It's over! You won!"

She picked up her smoke and gazed into the distance.

"This isn't the kind of thing that ends."

Julie turned back to Luc.

"See?"

Luc indicated that he understood

"Well, we will want them eventually."

"I'll do what I can." Helen came as close to promising as she was going to. "But they're in San Finzione, so that means they face justice here first. And it's good to be the highest court in the land. We'll be sure you're in on the final arrest, Luc. Everyone else, we have a siege to prepare for. Let's get to it."

* * *

Back on the yacht, Tracy and her team went through their final preparations. Spencer watched the monitor as more messages were sent back and forth between La Contessa and the man he'd identified as Capitan Gregario Ortega, commander of La Squadra de Ultimados.

"Looks like two of the Ultimados are going to be guarding the Nursery." He told Tracy and the rest of the team. "The others are going to be waiting in the hall with something she describes as 'a highly valuable foreign asset of San Finzione.'"

"That's vague enough to mean anything." Tracy commented. "So, I was right. She's going to let you two get all the way into the castle before springing her trap. Anything else?"

Spencer looked through the messages that were coming more quickly now.

"She's sending a message to the Prefect of Police telling him to ignore any calls tonight about the Denti house. Looks like you were right on that point, too. She's too much of a real thief to let the cops spoil the fun."

"Well, this highly valuable asset sounds like the trap she's planning to spring. And it's going to come at them through those large wooden doors." Tracy turned to Alice Mei. "So, we have to make sure they don't open them. How're we coming on that, Alice?"

Alice was mixing some compounds into an applicator that looked like a small caulking gun.

"What I'm mixing up here should take care of that door. And what about the cops?"

Tracy looked to Spencer, who was reading another email.

"Looks like she's calling them off entirely. They're to ignore any calls about the Denti house. That's the name of the place they'll be going in."

"Of course, she's called them off." Tracy declared. "She wants to catch us herself. My gauntlet has been picked up."

"That's something I've been meaning to bring up, Tracy." Alice said, sealing up her finished product. She picked up a black puck-like disc and started rigging it to a canister grenade. "I handle the science. You know more about the actual crime side of crime than me, Tracy. And you haven't literally issued her a challenge, but you've done everything but that. You laughed off my Moby Dick reference before, but I'm thinking now that it's because it hit too close to home."

"It might've done." Tracy admitted. "You saw 'From Dusk Till Dawn,' right?" Alice indicated that she had. "So, you know how, going in, even if you had no attraction to women whatsoever, you came out of the theater with at least one lesbian fantasy about Salma Hayek?" Alice agreed. "There's something of that to it, yes." Tracy looked out the window, to where the lights of the city were coming on to combat the darkening of the sky. "She's up there right now. Thinking she's smarter than everyone because nobody's proven her wrong yet. And we're going to do it. Yes, we. This is a group effort, I recognize that."

"You've read the interviews, Tracy. She's INTO women. If you want her that badly, just take the castle tour until she shows up and introduce yourself. You don't need to go to all this to get her attention."

"They used to say that about her." Tracy informed her. "After the Count died, whenever an attractive person in San Finzione didn't come home that night, they said that person would be back as soon as La Contessa tired of them. But that stopped in recent years. Sometime before she had her children, all that stopped. To my thinking, someone came into, or back into, her life, and that's the father of her children. You still read about her occasionally hooking up with the celebrity of the moment. A number of actors who need to borrow a beard for a news cycle or two. But there's someone she cares about. Finding out who would be an even bigger prize than her necklace, but that's the thing I've settled on. And it's either in that safe or in her bedroom."

"Or she'll be wearing it." Oscar Dodge pointed out, mixing a drink behind the bar. "I mean, you picked it because you see her with it all the time, Tracy. You're probably right that she doesn't keep it down in the vault and it's close at hand. But what're you going to do if it's around her neck?"