Chapter Seven
Tigan
Tracking Nickolaus Tigan to his duty station on Deck 9 was a depressingly simple hunt. He and nine other men are responsible for keeping the ship clean and tidy, a suitably innocuous, unnoticed thing aboard a battleship. They are not in Weapons Control, have nothing to do with Armament, Navigation, Engineering, Radar or anything essential. They are very literally 'Swabbies', Conscripts who generally exhibit the skills of ballast, men you never see unless you trip over a mop.
To the women these men, Tigan and perhaps all his counterparts, have the perfect Undercover jobs. Unseen, unregarded, talked around and never remembered, they should be the ones Security and the IA should keep under constant watch. The fact that the Inquisitor Afloat may not be surveilling Tigan is enough to grant Deputy Grand Inquisitor Pride's wisdom not to bring the man into this Investigation.
Nell looks forward to the next phase of their Operation, the Inspection of their Colleague's files and efficiency.
A check of the lone blackboard in the vacant Janitorial Services room where the men are based had yielded Tigan's assignment: Deck 9 from bow to midship and they find him wielding a mop at the bow in the second of three corridors that span the length of the ship. As noted, it was a depressingly easy hunt.
They approach from behind, no one they pass giving them any more attention than two attractive, white haltered and mini-skirted women would garner. Fifty feet from the end of the corridor their target works, his back to them. Kensi halts, the stop making Nell pause as well.
"What?"
Rather than answer, Kensi lifts the hem of the long side of the slanted skirt and removes, from a strap high on her thigh, a black rectangular device two inches wide by four long and lifts the lid to access the keyboard and screen.
"Come on," Nell protests the unfairness.
"Got to." Keying the signal to Callen's device, she transmits '6', the code for 'apprehending suspect' followed by the four numbers stenciled on the left wall five feet forward of their position. She lifts her hem and returns the device.
"We can still take him," Nell declares. He's their prey, the men do not need nor do they deserve the credit.
"We are."
x
Crewman Tigan's mop arcs are from bulkhead to bulkhead, his half step path from the end of the corridor would eventually back him to the women but they do not wait. Kensi, on his rightward stroke, steps around his left side in front while Nell assumes a position by and behind his right shoulder.
"Crewman Nickolaus Tigan," Kensi hardly needs to ask but the appearance of both women halts his cleaning arcs.
"Yeah?"
"INCI–" Tigan's right elbow comes up and back between Nell's eyes and then his left foot comes forward and up under Kensi's skirt.
It's a fallacy that anatomical differences do not mean there are no consequences to so vicious an attack. Though the result is different the intense pain is as debilitating and before Kensi crashes to her knees, hands pressed too late to the devastated spot, Tigan runs past her.
Nell, having been driven backward, lowers her bloody left hand from her face in time to see Tigan leap over her partner's collapsing body. She is in pursuit by the time Kensi is left bent forward, trying to force her eyes open.
There's a companionway at the end of the corridor heading down to deck 10. He takes the steep steps several at a time and Nell, furious at the pain in her face and the useless chase (where can he go?) is determined to bring this to a rapid conclusion.
He disappears down the steps by the time she reaches the edge and leaps, executes a taekwondo flying side kick, left leg tucked up and right at full extension and sails above as the man leaves the steps. He'd have to turn back to make the rest of the ship or the next companionway, he'll never escape her but he's a fraction faster than she expects.
She catches him not with a head blow which would push him forward but against the back of his neck and the impact on the soft flesh carries him down before her. She lands, left foot on his back and right behind his neck and the double crack and crunching snap are loud in the confined end of the corridor.
It's also his last noise as she steps off and turns to look down at the body. If Nickolaus Tigan is not dead, the closing of his trachea by breaking the supporting muscles that keep the air passage aligned and open, together with the paralysis from severed spine means death in seconds as heart and lungs cease working.
Duchane had lasted less than the time it had taken him to fall.
x
The noises now come from past her right where Kensi, holding to the rail and moving, Nell thinks, quite carefully, descends the companionway. They step shoulder to shoulder beside the body. "Was it necessary?"
"An accident," Nell admits. She looks right and up at the taller woman. "I wanted to knock him senseless."
"I hope that mole has the microdata thing in it, but Pride wanted him alive for interrogation." The image of the Inquisitors who had been disciplined for their failure with the sailors they had been ordered to interrogate is vivid in their minds.
Kensi pulls her dagger from her right thigh sheath, Nell steps a half step left so Blye can crouch low over the body. She uses the blade to cut away the back of his white shirt, gets the point under the black mark and works the mole up. She doesn't remove it, there's enough light in this secluded spot and what she sees satisfies her. She straightens and they stand facing the corpse. "Callen and Hanna will be here soon." She looks right down the corridor that transverses the ship. There are hundreds of moving bodies but no one pays them mind. The knee knockers at each doorway help to obscure the body from those most distant, the stairs provide the best cover for it - for now. "I'll help as much as I can, but I'm not sure what I can say to save you."
"I don't want you to say anything to save me." Nell's hand arcs fast to slam left of center between her breasts. Shock greater than the excruciating agony holds Kensi's wide eyes on the clenched hand and silver pommel. A titanic leftward yank rips the atrociously keen adamantium blade along the path between her ribs and out her side and blood gushes out the rift to splash upon the body before them.
Kensi can only shift her eyes left and the last thing she sees as darkness closes in are the eyes of her partner.
x
Nell, holding the adamantium dagger after it ripped through and out her partner's side, watches Kensi fall as her knees give way. Her visage never changes from that look of wide eyed astonishment as she slams down upon her knees on the deck, the gush of blood easing to a flow as she pitches forward and lands upon the motionless sailor.
Nell feels the hot wetness on her fingers and turns her hand so the blood will drip off the blade's point onto the deck.
"What the hell happened here?" a man's familiar voice demands. She looks right to where black uniformed Callen and Hanna, at the head of a phalanx of white uniformed men and women, slow to a stop. Hanna turns, clears back the crowd so Nell can speak to her superiors.
She has to explain, among other things, her bloody face and soon-to-blacken eyes. "We tried to take him but he fought away. While I was stunned Kensi chased him down the companionway but there was an accident she said, and by the time I got here he was dead.
"Kensi found, under a fake mole, the information he was carrying. But she also knew how angry Deputy Grand Director Pride will be at losing whatever Tigan knew. He'd probably torture her to death for it. She asked me to spare her, to give her a quick death rather than execution by slow torture."
They know no one, not even Henrietta Lange, can save someone from the exemplary punishment that Pride will mete out for so extreme a failure. The last Inquisitor to face such a fate under Granger for so titanic a debacle had been L1 Lauren Hunter nearly a year ago. She'd survived eleven days of relentless chastisement before succumbing to dehydration halfway through her sentence.
"You did right."