Piera was sitting at her desk in her and Agapita's room and sharpening her throwing knives, which had had some opportunity to be dulled during their excursion to Sardinia the other day. She was scraping the edges keen again with a small whetstone, with a white cloth spread out underneath her to collected the flakes of metal shaved off by the abrasive rock – she treated the spreading speckling of black across the cloth as an indicator of progress. As Piera was testing the weight of one of the knives in her hand, there was a knock at the door. "Come in!" she called out.
It was one of the grown-ups – Priscilla, the blonde. She was carrying a brightly coloured crinkly plastic package in one hand. "Oh, hello Piera. Is Agapita in at all?"
"She hasn't been in all week, miss." Piera explained. Mercifully, she added mentally.
Priscilla looked confused. "Yes, but wasn't she discharged from the hospital this morning?"
"That's right," Piera nodded, "but she and Mr. Mancini went straight to another job in Naples." Maybe she'd come back with another dozen bullets in her and Piera would get a second joyous week of undisturbed sleep, too.
"Oh, yes, of course." Priscilla remembered Hilshire telling her about it - the fratello ought to be back tonight. She lifted up the box she was carrying. "Anyway, I've just got a little well-done gift for her here. Could I leave it for her?"
Piera nudged her head to one side. "That's her desk, miss."
Priscilla frowned a little at the cyborg's manner, but flattened it out again. She was busy with her work after all, it was understandable. "Okay then." The support agent crossed over to put the box down, ranging a curious eye over Agapita's desk as she did so. Her desk was still largely empty, just having a few textbooks and handbooks, plus a couple of photos of her handler – one posing for a formal picture in dress uniform, while another more natural-looking photo had him in combats examining the chipped and scuffed side of a vehicle in a dry and sandy place that was probably Iraq. Oh well – there was plenty of time for her to make it more personable. Priscilla placed the box back on the desk with another crinkle of its plastic wrapping, but as she did so she noticed a little glint of silver near the bottom of one of the pictures. She narrowed her eyes to inspect it more closely, and found it to be a coin, bearing the image of Enrico de Nicola - first president of the Italian Republic. Priscilla smiled to herself as she recognised one of the markers of the Gladiator Games. Maybe Agapita's personality was starting to blossom - collecting a reflective memento of the mission like that (it never entered Priscilla's head to consider it a bloody trophy). She glanced up to the photo that the marker sat under - it was probably Agapita's version of a medal.
Pleased and reassured with what she had seen, Priscilla gave Piera an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder as she said her goodbyes and left. "Remind Aggie that she won't be getting a present for every mission, mind!" Priscilla laughed to Piera as she shut the door behind her.
Piera waited for a second to make sure that the support agent wouldn't be coming back in, and then reached over and used a knife to cut open the packaging and extract the box inside. Flipping it open with the tip of the blade, a pile of small, round chocolates shone in the sudden light. Piera danced her fingers over them for a short moment, before with a dainty, light-fingered flick, popped one up into her mouth.
Blergh. Hazelnut centres. Agapita was welcome to 'em. Piera pushed the box back across to her room-mate's desk. After a second's thought, she closed the box and threw the torn wrapping into a wastepaper bin.
"...short matter of time before we can definitively and unequivocally resolve Operation Ivory, and its follow-up Operation Ivory-2, as a complete and final success.
Pieri Lorenzo
Section Two (Special Operations)
Chief of Section"
Lorenzo put down his pen after blotting down his signature, and then leaned back into his chair, exhaling a long, luxuriant, languid sigh of release and relaxation.
It had been a busy week. The diverse magnates, burghers and Captains Of Industry who the Agency had captured had need little inducement to sing; one advantage of dealing with high-grade businessmen is that they knew how to balance odds: when to deal and when to fold. Interviews had not needed to be escalated into interrogations; and by cross-referencing details of co-operative statements, augmented by intelligence from their prior investigations into the 'gladiators', Section One had been able to rapidly assemble profiles on a network of some twenty-eight agents who had scouted candidates for the Gladiator Games – and the Social Welfare Agency had acted quickly to cut that web apart. Fratelli had been charging up and down the length of the country to run the agents to ground. Three had committed suicide rather than endure capture; six had left Italy but under a Europol warrant were picked up by police elsewhere on the continent and delivered to border stations, where fratelli were on-hand to quietly do away with them once the uniformed officers had duly departed with their duty discharged. A further four had surrendered on contact, probably expecting plea-bargaining deals with the threat of airing many embarrassing names in court – not bullets between the eyes in the back of Fiat vans. Two were still at large, having reacted quickly and early to the high-spirited game in Sicily and fled to Africa and Asia before the Agency could catch up with them; that did not pose too much of a problem: while they were out of reach, out in the sticks they were also out of power, and in any case Jethro and Monique had been assigned their cases and they would tie off the loose ends before too long.
The remaining dozen agents were accounted for in the Social Welfare Agency's own inimitable style.
Some had felt a stabbing pain lancing across their abdomen on a packed platform in the train station. Others' heads had suddenly jerked as they made to cross the road, and discreetly and obligingly tipped over between parked cars on the side. Some had barricaded themselves into their homes and gone out in one last blaze of glory (or flickering stutter, given the mechanical speed and precision with which cyborgs worked). One had even assembled his client gladiators into a posse and stormed Section One's Sardinian station in Cagliara, unlike his earlier colleagues hoping to negotiate surrender from a position of strength instead of supplication. Several fratelli had to be flown over to contest what proved to be a vicious battle that would have sent the audiences of the Gladiator Games into quivers of exhilaration and paroxysms of rapture. They died hard.
They still died.
It had been a tiring week, but a satisfying one. It was rare that the Agency could genuinely say "job done" – the endless round with Padania just waltzed on and on to misery and infinity – but now here, finally, one sore was scabbed over, one pit was filled in, one tree was planted and blossoming, and the file could flap shut with the firm flat slap of sure finality. The sensation of being complete was one that Lorenzo did not often experience, but Lorenzo could come to appreciate it. You may live with the din of the city ringing around you at all times – you may even adapt to it, become accustomed to it, the sound whirling through you like a draught through a hole; when that hole was filled, and the noise cut off, it was weird, unreal, dislocating, suddenly cast off without reference – alarming, but new, exciting, and actually, rather good.
Furthermore, Lorenzo could take some luxury to ease his journey into this new sensation as well. The past week, maintaining a high operational tempo undimmed throughout multiple engagements - a speed that would have baffled the most ardent and fittest special forces units - surely also showed the Agency at its best. It would quiet detractors in the Cabinet, and cow enemies elsewhere.
Lorenzo permitted himself to hum a little formless ditty to himself as he stretched back into his executive chair. Things were going well!
Then Jean Croce walked in.
With a file.
Oh, God.
"Chief, could I have a moment?" He sounded... consternated.
Lorenzo flapped his chair back up to upright. "Yes, Mr. Croce, what is it?"
"It's about our orders."
"What about them?"
"Well..." Jean bit his lip nervously. "...there aren't any." It sounded stupid saying it, and Jean felt foolish for doing so. Of course there were daily standing orders, but as diligently as he inspected the board nothing particular had been pinned up. He was fearful of making an idiot of himself in front of the Chief, not being able to see in front of his own nose and find something obvious and prominent.
Jean felt like even more of a fool when Lorenzo's response was to nod. "That's right, Mr. Croce, no missions are planned so no preparation need be scheduled. We are currently in a reorganisation and recuperation period following the successful conclusion of Ivory-2."
"I understood that Section Two would be providing security for the Finance Guard as they begin dismantling the guilty parties' assets."
Lorenzo paused for a moment, and then very deliberately forward in his seat to put his elbows on the desk and steeple his fingers. "Why do you think that we would be doing such a thing, Mr. Croce?"
Jean paused himself, considering whether he really wanted to make an issue out of this. He decided that he did. "Sir, umpteen dozen counts of Conspiracy To Murder would be a start."
Lorenzo sighed, smiled indulgently (patronisingly?), and shook his head. "Mr. Croce, your dedication to the principle of law is admirable – but there's the alternative principle of public order and societal wellbeing. The 'patrons' of the former Gladiator Games have a combined wealth entering into the billions of euros. To publicly arrest them would fatally undermine confidence in our industry – not to mention cause international scandals with the foreigners amongst them – induce wider failures in business elsewhere and cause job losses for both the rich and poor. The only people who'd benefit from it would be editorialising journalists."
Towards the end of Lorenzo's explanation Jean's eyes began to wander as he tuned out the words that he expected to hear. When it looked as though the Chief had finished, he continued as he meant to go on. "You can't expect them to just breeze along as they were with no more than a slap on the wrist – it's not even a deterrent. The ringleader of the circus is even getting to keep his knighthood!"
"The President awards honours on the advice of the Prime Minister - naturally his judgement can't be brought into public question." Lorenzo sighed. "In any case, they're being stung by more than a slap, Mr. Croce." Lorenzo explained, patiently, for someone not so quick on the uptake, and glossing over his subordinate's rather overly casual manner. "In addition to their intelligence contributions we persuaded all present to express their natural philanthropy and noblesse oblige in order to make sizeable charitable donations to the Social Welfare Agency's ongoing efforts to restore quality of life to those stunted in their growth by tragedy. It should fund our operating costs and take the edge off of our budget concerns for quite a while."
"Blood money!" Jean almost spat. "Why should they get off easy? They're perpetrated crimes as much as anyone else that we've fought. Why are we suddenly equivocating? We live in a republic, not some feudal mud-pit! Since when were they beyond the law?"
"None of them are Padanians." Lorenzo sighed wearily.
"It's aiding and abetting!" Jean would not let it go.
"We've eliminated a criminal ring, robbed Padania of a high-level source of recruitment, wrung out some intelligence on Mafia operations in the south, secured the Agency's financial future and allowed one of the girls to become experienced." Lorenzo enumerated the bounty. "That's enough."
Jean pressed his lips together tightly. "I understand that Section One's Number Three in Cagliari died from his wounds shortly after the rescue. And then there's Adele Velice, lest we forget. Two Agency staff, murdered. What will you say to them, sir?"
"Between both Ivories some fifty assorted villains have met their end." Lorenzo fixed the impudent handler with a hard stare, quitely seething at Jean's sheer blinded arrogance to try to arrogate the guilt dead to his own purposes. "That. Is. Plenty."
Jean scowled. "Sir, is that your evaluation, or the party line?"
The gunshot exploded in Jean's ear. He instinctively ducked, teeth grinding for a way to defend himself, pawing at his hip for a weapon that wasn't there – and then realised that the report had actually been Lorenzo's hand slamming against his desk. He was standing out of his chair – and his face was knotted like a storm and black like thunder.
"By God!" Lorenzo roared. "You deviant little swine. You're too damn familiar, Mister Jean Croce!"
Jean took a step back instinctively, alarm trembling his features. He had never seen the Chief like this before.
"You have been given one cyborg to use and abuse as you wish, Mr. Croce!" Lorenzo was still shouting. "You do not have this entire Agency at your casual beck and call! We are not your tool, and I am not your bureaucratic adjutant to do the filing and stamping incurred by your tromping walkabouts! If you ever dare presume to intrude upon my station again then you will have a damn sight more than my mere displeasure to contend with!"
Lorenzo had delivered the entire tirade with the furious intensity of undammed fury, battering Jean with a white flood of loud anger.
"Is that understood?"
"…yes sir." Was all Jean could manage, still reeling from the gale.
"Then GET OUT!"
Jean fled.
Lorenzo exhaled slowly and then gently lowered himself back into his chair. Such an outburst was unlike him, but it was fulfilling to let loose with it. He was known being cold, stern, austere and withdrawn in temperament, but it did well to remind his charges from time to time that the full gamut of emotion was not denied to him – when he assumed his usual collected persona, it would make that controlled calm even more effective at cowing those reprobates. How could they tell when he'd choose to allow them to erode his patience again? Nastiness was held there, concealed up his sleeve like a switchblade - invisible, anonymous, unknown - but lashing out in an instant to the unwary.
The Chief smiled to himself, and poured himself a sherry from the bureau before continuing with his paperwork.
There was a knock at the door of Belisario's office. Four quick raps – that usually meant that it was Donato.
Belisario closed the game of Minesweeper that he'd been playing as he called out, "'Sopen!"
It was actually Bianchi who walked in, carrying a file. He raised his eyebrows at Belisario's confused look. "You seem surprised to see me, Belisario."
The Agency conditioner didn't use his techniques on himself – which might say something about their nature – and so was caught flat-footed. "Oh, er, it's just the door..." he mumbled.
Bianchi lit up with visible delight. "Oh, you mean the knocking? I change it every so often – keeps people on their toes." He seemed inordinately pleased that his little trick had worked.
Always head-games! Belisario regained his composure by dismissing it as inconsequential. "Anyway, is anything the matter?"
"Actually, there might be." Bianchi's expression appeared more set and serious as he opened the file that he was carrying. "I have the after-action reports here for the first Ivory operation."
"Well, what about them?" Belisario didn't know where Bianchi was leading.
"I have Avise Mancini's narrative here." Belisario licked his fingers and flipped through the papers in the file before pulling out one particular sheet. "Something came up which seemed... irregular. I've marked it."
Belisario scanned the page of dense text until he met a couple of lines picked out with orange highlighter. He read aloud, "Agapita remarked that killing the gladiator 'felt great'. This caused some discomfiture amongst the patrons..." He looked back up at Bianchi.
"Well, you can see why I might be 'discomfited' myself." Bianchi frowned at Belisario's questioning look. "Why is a cyborg exhibiting such tendencies?"
"Hasn't she told you this herself in your psych sessions?" Belisario shifted his position in his chair, making it squeak.
"Yes, but if I'm going to respond to it I'd like to determine its point of origin." Bianchi pressed.
Belisario twisted the side of his mouth into a frown. He really didn't appreciate Bianchi's questioning – it felt like a jab at his professional competency, and if not then he would have thought that the resident psychologist would have known to phrase his request more tactfully. Belisario stood up out of his chair with a sigh and traced a finger along one of the dense shelves above his workstation until he pulled down a green-coloured box file marked "XB12-04". He opened in and a concertina of spreadsheets bounced out like a jack-in-the-box. Belisario picked through them until he retrieved a sheet of his own, handing Bianchi a series of jagged-looking graphs.
Bianchi furrowed his brow at the squiggles and zig-zags. "I... don't understand this."
Belisario smiled inwardly, unable to resist a bit of intellectual posturing – even if the adult portion of his brain admonished him for being petty and puerile, it was hard to shake off university drinking-circle tribalism that told him that psychology was a nonsense subject, on the lines of Media Studies, or Physics. "They're traces of dopamine levels," he explained, "the peaks coincide with periods of violence."
"Fighting is pleasurable to her?" Bianchi frowned. "Why would you do something like that?"
"If Agapita was a first-generation cyborg then she would approach combat in a clinical and neutral way, true, but the second generation was predicated on less direct control and greater emotional integrity – obedience through inducement, rather than command. It's a stage in the process for widening conditioning's scope to the general public—"
"I know all this, Belisario." Bianchi shook his head irritably.
"—and if we can't override emotions, as with the first generation, we finesse them to avoid mental traumas instead." Belisario continued smoothly. "The old Maria Machiavelli enjoyed mischief – really, we've just adapted that for Agapita."
Bianchi seemed baffled. "You mean that we have a cyborg who gets off on killing?"
Belisario rolled his eyes dismissively. "What is it with psychologists and sex? I thought that Freud was meant to be old hat nowadays. In any case, no, nothing even nearly so extreme. She just finds it... satisfying, that would be the term."
Bianchi blinked and peered closely at the sheet of graphs in his hands again, as if he could elucidate some hidden truth within them that the conditioner had missed. Belisario guffawed. "Chin up, Doctor, if none of us had neuroses you wouldn't have any work!"
Defence Minister Monica Petris sat in her office in the Palazzo Baracchini, the headquarters of Italy's Ministry of Defence atop the Quirinal Hill of Rome: that august station from which had looked out Popes, Kings, and lately presidents. She had just dismissed her permanent undersecretary who had been briefing her on the parliamentary questions due to take place that afternoon at the Chamber of Deputies in the Palazzo Montecitorio; there was still a good twenty minutes or so before the ministerial limousine would be ready, so she filled the gap in her schedule by reading over again the report on Operation Ivory that had been copied over from the Social Welfare Agency.
Five hundred and one kills to inflict for her to post her first profit.
Petris looked out of the office window – made of thickened plastic composites, not glass, to confound snipers – and out over the roofs of Field of Mars, colours dull like bare soil thrown up by a bombardment, to the snaking scales of the Tiber and beyond that the dreaming domes of the Vatican, round like celestial spheres, bubbles of infinity on the cusp of being released into the cosmos. A vision of war, and a vision of peace – and between them the snaring twisting of the serpent which put things not necessarily in that order.
Well, little miss – four hundred and eighty-eight to go.
Agapita shivered slightly, although not with the cold; after several days on a hospital trolley (it should have been fewer, but some of her operations were put back when other cyborgs had come in damaged from the week's fighting) it was a genuine delight to feel the light of the sun again – the light and loose short-sleeved white chemise and short black skirt that she was wearing let it warm every part of her.
She swung her legs underneath the table, taking pleasure in the movement – movement which didn't need to be timed and regulated like her training sessions! – and looked about her again. The location, at a waterfront café and restaurant, wasn't entirely ideal – the clanking of stays and halyards against masts and the snapping of burgees was a little distracting and would make it more difficult to discern the origin point of any incoming fire – but the pleasant espresso that she and her handler were drinking was some consolation.
As she continued to swing her legs, her foot hit Avise's shin next to her, causing him to spasm. Agapita's face immediately fell. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" She gasped.
"No matter, Agapita," Avise grunted, rubbing the bruise with his other leg, "we'll save the apologies for when you break something." To try and stop her brooding blackly on inconveniencing her handler, Avise thought of a different topic.
"I've not seen you wearing something like that before." Avise said conversationally, looking over her clothes. "It suits you." Rather flattering as well, if he had to say so. "Trying to show off your unblemished body again?"
"I'm just glad to be rid of the marks," Agapita explained, "they weren't really the sort of injuries that I wanted."
"Eh?" Avise didn't know what her cyborg was pressing at.
"For my first wounding," Agapita continued. "being hit by a bullet is nothing special. There needed to be more... more occasion. It felt like it should be special. Vanessa was chasing down some runners to a marina pontoon, and she got speared by a harpoon in midair when she was jumping onto their speedboat." Agapita emphasised each beat of the bloody blow as though they were setting down great weighty buttresses supporting some grand edifice, the hole torn by the wound the passage through some monumental victory arch gracing the streets of Rome.
"Harpoon..." Avise mused. "Are you implying that Vanessa looks like a whale?"
Agapita's face flushed crimson with shame. "No!" She was horrified. "That would be cruel!"
"Do you mean that it would be false, or are you being tactful and just trying spare Vanessa her blushes?" Avise chuckled while his cyborg fretted.
"Are we going to fight again here?" Agapita asked, trying to escape her own embarassment.
"Agapita, you are not to go finding excuses to get yourself hurt!" Avise growled, suddenly stern. "If you want to get tossed off an elephant's tusks and then have to fight your way out of the digestive tract of a... a hippo, you will not do it on the Agency's dime. Think of the poor souls who spend their lives in fear of just getting shot, and be grateful!" Avise scratched at his right arm unconsciously.
"Yes, sir." Agapita was glum. "It's just that everyone was working so hard this past week, I want to show that I'm contributing."
Trying to boast over rivals, or fit in with friends? It was an ambiguous statement. "Don't worry, you did great at Agrigento. It's nothing to sneer at," Avise reassured his cyborg, "thirteen kills is quite substantial – you achieved more in one day than even Triela manages in a month."
"Most months." Agapita pouted.
"Agapita, dearest, I didn't even manage that many in about sixteen years of soldiering." After a second's hesitation – she killed more people in an afternoon than I did in sixteen years! - Avise reached over and gave Agapita's hand a reassuring squeeze of the hand. "You're doing absolutely fine." Well, even though they weren't direct kills he did run the Dardo over that pick-up truck in Managaban. There had probably been six or eight Mahdists in that, it probably bumped his own score up a bit.
The idea of actively outpacing her handler, the one who was supposed to be her guide, mentor, ideal and exemplar, gave Agapita some pause for thought. She felt a little guilty, as though it was an indiscretion or usurpation, and abandoned her protest. She looked over to her handler, her smile nervous but honest and her eyes open with appreciation, and showed that she recognised his gift and reward by taking a sip of her espresso.
She only lapped at it lightly – the cup was tiny, after all – but it was less a miserly desire to eke out the cost of the drink, and more from a simple wish to savour its flavour. Such a small amount of fluid couldn't burn, and so she played it forward and backward over her tongue until a thin skein reached over to the farthest edges of her tongue and achieved the fullest spread of taste. As it percolated down through the buds on her tongue, a new question formed inside of her.
"Sir, if we're not here to fight, why have we come?"
"Speak of the Devil," Avise remarked, his eyes tracking over to the esplanade. "Here he comes now. Now, game face off, Agapita, this isn't an operation here."
A middle-aged man, somewhat portly and gone to seed, crossed into seating area. "Hello," Mario Bossi said, affecting a cheery demeanour as he approached the table, "mind if I sit down?"
THE END