| From: | "Paul J. Adam" <shadowtk@********.demon.co.uk> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Dangerous Dining? |
| Date: | Fri, 31 May 1996 12:23:19 +0100 |
This was yesterday.
+++++begin news item
SIX HURT IN DINER SHOOT-OUT
Patrons of a Tacoma restaurant fled in panic as a vicious gun battle
erupted, a number of unidentified individuals exchanging automatic
gunfire over the heads of terrified women and children. Several of the
shooters were believed to be wounded or killed, but none were captured:
Lone Star units took over ten minutes to arrive, and the terrorists were
long gone by then. A police spokesman said only that the slow response
was due to "exceptional circumstances". The wounded suffered injury from
stray rounds, broken glass, and contusions in the struggle to reach
safety: the terrorists continued their running battle into the street
before they fled.
+++++end news item
An insider's view of that made it up as I'm writing, so I'll let that
stand by itself.
And this was a little incident that didn't make the papers at all,
lunchtime today. Watch the group just arriving.
+++++begin trideo
The view is a restaurant's security footage: a hotel's penthouse
restaurant, and this is the outside area: a number of tables of people
enjoying their lunches under open sky, on a clear, bright summer
afternoon.
A group of five - mixed by race and sex, several with the slightly ill-
at-ease look of those who do not normally frequent such places - walks
into the view, led by a tuxedo-clad waiter to a table where a blandly
attractive woman waits.
They sit, orders are taken, and a conversation begins: there is no
sound, but the discussion appears to be getting heated when one of the
group, a burly Ork woman, suddenly slumps forward: in rapid succession,
all five guests go slack, one falling from his chair completely: only
one, an Elf who has the slight jumpiness of the highly wired, seems to
begin reacting, rising and reaching for the woman; and he is barely out
of his chair before he falls limply back into it. None of them move.
The woman rises to her feet, picks up her purse, and calmy walks away,
leaving all five where they sit or lie: she leaves the view, and it is a
minute or more before anyone except the camera seems to notice the state
of the table. By then, the bloodstains are clearly visible on the five
bodies. Still, the diners and staff do not seem to be aware of the five
bodies, as two suited men appear with a trolley, piling the corpses into
it: it would almost be funny, if those weren't dead bodies. They throw a
sheet across the top, hiding the tangle of dead flesh, and wheel the
trolley out of view.
A few more moments pass, then another diner walks cautiously over to
that table, studying it, even looking under it: he does something to the
tablecloth, cutting a piece out, then moves towards the camera as the
screen goes black.
+++++end trideo
As luck would have it, a friend of mine from Lone Star was meeting a new
lady friend for lunch there. He's also a magician, and recognised an
illusion spell when it's thrown: that's why nobody else noticed anything
amiss.
The best part is that he found a microrecorder that the Elf had dropped.
Guess those guys might have expected some sort of trouble. Anyway,
nobody knows anything and nobody really knows who those five were, who
they were meeting, or what they were killed for, yet: in fact. most of
the world doesn't seem to know anyone died there. The Golden Dawn
Hotel's security sucks, for a place with its pretensions, but I guess
that's why they have trouble filling tables.
Oh, just in case you think this was too easy, the woman had a white
noise generator, but it wasn't a very good one - one of those hide-it-
in-an-earrring types. Fuzzed the original right out, but some signal
processing cleaned it up and you'd hardly know it was there. Better
living through technology, boys and girls.
+++++begin playback
"Good afternoon, sirs and madams. Are you residents or guests?"
"We're here to see Miss Cuellar. We're expected." Probably the female
Ork.
"One moment, madam... Yes, of course. If you would follow me? Would you
care to check your coats? Your bags?"
"We'll keep them, thanks." A different voice.
"Certainly, sir. Miss Cuellar, your guests."
"Thank you." A forgettably pleasant voice, with a slight Aztlan accent.
"Would you care to order now?"
"Sure, uh, five house specials and five beers." The female Ork again.
"Madam may be mistaken, we do not-"
"Cuellar"'s voice, "The entrecote, rare, and a salad, for all of us.
Kirin for my friends, and a glass of house red, please."
"Certainly. A few moments..."
"Why the frag do we have to meet here?
"Because I don't like seedy bars on the edge of the Barrens, I don't
like amateurs, and I don't like failure." Cuellar's voice is much colder
now.
"Hey, we did our job. Drek happens. They were slick, they were fast,
they got away this time, and we lost two people going for your targets."
"Your job was to kill those two. We gave you the tools and the location,
set up a perfect target, and they still got away. My employers are
unhappy."
"Hey, nothing's perfect. Like I said, they were good. Too good for a
drekky twenty kays each for us. Those were pros, real hard-core. You
said they were some sort of UCAS spooks, not that they were fragging
combat monsters!"
"I told you who they were and what they did. I assumed you had heard of
Jason Lynch and the Lady."
"The who? What names do they use when they're at home, then?"
Cuellar sighs. "And you did not think to investigate, to check, to do
research."
"You gave us the targets, we went for them, what more do you want?"
"I wanted the targets in zipper bags. I hired you to do a job and you
failed, dismally."
"Hey, bitch, you didn't tell us these were-"
Another voice, alarmed. "Ritzy, you okay, you - ugh!" Scraping noises, a
cough, rustles of movement, a grunted "you frag-" and then a deafening
clatter, all in a few seconds. The tape is suddenly sharper, sounds
cleaner and clearer: a mosquito buzz you hadn't consciously noticed is
gone.
"Amateurs." sighs Cuellar, her Aztlan accent gone. "Total
fraggin'amateurs. Tony, Bob, cleanup. Nobody seems to have noticed, I'll
hold cover for three minutes. I'm outta here, I told the boss this
wouldn't work." Footsteps, departing.
Another long pause broken only by the background noise of the
restaurant, before a scraping noise and a click ends the recording.
+++++end playback]<<<<<
-- Lilith <12:32:45/05-31-57>
