During the flight Tyler and Angie compared notes about the Boston operation. Like her, Tyler never referred to the city by any other name. Even in the presence of others, he planned to beg a lousy memory as an excuse. "I'll remind 'em for both of us," he'd told Angie with a grim smile. Looking at notebooks (no electronic devices yet... that was for later when things were underway) was safer than discussing things aloud. You never knew who was around in this newest New World.
Farber had nixed he idea of direct communications to transfer intel. Once he'd learned the quality of Steve's geek contacts they opted for something simpler. One of the Renegade Programmers (Steve loved naming teams) wrote a code to be embedded in dozens of flash drives Angie would use with her Old School Adult Entertainment laptop. When activated it allowed coded messages to be entered that would display at the end of documents within cascades of characters that ran down the screen like the old style screen-saver displays. Hypnotic, endless, and useless... until now. Angie would overnight the drives to Jackie's L.A. office and he would turn them over to Steve, who would decode the messages and return the drives to Jackie, who would send them back to Angie under Old School corporate cover to use again. The drives had their own firewalls containing a fail-safe code; if an attempt was made to hack the files or the drives themselves, the sub-routine would automatically delete itself and further randomize the cascading character display, turning the coded messages to gibberish.
"I can't believe you almost shot this kid," Chris told her after Steve demonstrated the drives.
"I can't believe she didn't," Donovan deadpanned.
"Some of us recognize the potential of postponing judgement," Angie noted primly. Ignoring the others, she turned to Steve. "This looks good to me. We won't 'schedule' communication, the less consistency the better in terms of things for the Visitors to monitor. What we'll have for them to check... and I'm sure they will want to review before they are sent back to Jackie... will look one hundred per cent garden variety business. So, we done here? I got packing to do."
Tyler nodded and offered an overdone smile. "You know how I like my shirts, dear."
"Right. Rolled in balls and stuffed in the corners."
As they made the final approach Ham looked sidelong at his wife. She'd been touchy about being "checked up on" but only a fool would have ignored her state of mind. Going home for the first time to what was no longer home, worse still now the home town of the enemy, couldn't be expected to be easy for anyone. So he wasn't paying extra attention, just... keeping an eye on things. Not that he could convince her of that. When she slid down the shade next to her window seat, blocking the view, it didn't raise any red flags. She'd already told him that she'd seen all she wanted to from the air, meaning that morning a million years ago when the TV in that cheap motel showed the aerial view of the decimation of the city formerly known as Boston. Who could blame her?
Angie checked the locks on her laptop case a final time. The Visitor arrival scanning went way beyond Old World x-rays so nobody was going to want to open anything because nothing could be hidden. She'd already taken their in-flight notes to the lav and dissolved them with the chemical Ham had secreted in a tiny glass vial inside a faux camera battery. The vial itself was immune to the chemical but water soluble so no trace of their plans (or their destruction) would remain. Angie frankly was stunned by the amount of "spy-tech" that her husband and Chris still could access... former Black Ops men were scattered and mostly unaligned, but strangely available when needed. "Like vampires," Angie joked once to Chris, "you can always pick each other out in a crowd."
To keep things simple Ham and Angie wouldn't have a complicated cover or back story. He was still The Fixer, who'd briefly sided with the Resistance, and she was the reluctant rebel he'd picked up on the way. The tweak was that Angie's story had her turning mercenary under Tyler's tutelage (not entirely untrue) and deciding that the side that was winning was the one to back. Tyler didn't even need to fake that part; his known history told that story for him. Nobody would doubt that The Fixer was "flexible" in terms of those kinds of loyalties.
As Tyler and Angie deplaned both noted how much Old World airport infrastructure remained, familiarity breeding complacency being something the lizards had learned fast. As he gave the luggage chips to the skycap Tyler saw Angie's eyes widen a bit as she scanned the arrival area for their pickup . Standing near the gate in a very classy European-tailored suit was a tall fifty-ish man with sandy red hair, holding a formally lettered sign that read "Old School Entertainment". Tyler chuckled at the omission of "Adult".
"There's our chariot, let's go," he told Angie. Her reply caught him off guard.
"Well fuck me," she muttered to nobody in particular.
Before Ham could ask her what the hell that meant she was striding in front of him toward their driver. She stopped about six feet short of the man, saying nothing. The driver, however, lit up with recognition.
"Angie?!" He dropped the sign to one side and reached a hand out to her but she stepped back out of his reach, almost colliding with Tyler.
When she found her voice, it was flat and icy.
"Don't look so surprised, Daddy. I can play both sides too."