"White Rabbit"chapter 5 by TdFmN

[esercito sconfitto]

The White Rabbit had acquired a tail. She noticed it when “Kathy Takagi” was in town shopping; early/mid 20s, about 5’6”, athletic build, light brown hair. Something about the woman’s manner, just a little bit too... deliberately… casual, had first caught Sayaka’s attention and the assassin had, seemingly unawares, led the woman through enough of the downtown area to be certain the woman was following her. Now the question was what to do about this new player in the game. Had Sayaka been wrong about Millicent Blandings? Did the information broker suspect that Kathy and White Rabbit really were the same person after all? Sayaka hoped that wasn’t it. It would mean that Sayaka would have no choice but to kill Millicent, and her plan to have Colonel Davis commit a “White Rabbit” assassination while Sayaka herself, as Kathy, was with Millicent had failed already.

The fact that Millie was Sayaka’s “lover” meant nothing. The assassin was perfectly capable of seducing a woman and then killing her after sex with no more emotional involvement than she would feel discarding an empty beer can after draining the contents. She had done just that many times – most recently that cop chick who had pulled her over less than three weeks ago on the road between New Chicago and Fort Rockford. She smiled as she recalled the feel of the patrolwoman's tongue between her thighs, the taste of the patrolwoman's own body, slick with sweat in spite of the cold, as Sayaka had reciprocated, and the look of terror in her victim's eyes as the assassin had placed the palm of her hand over the woman's mouth and pinched off her nose with her thumb and forefinger. The cop chick had struggled frantically but Sayaka's hand-to-hand combat skills and more-than-human strength had easily controlled the squirming of the doomed policewoman as the assassin had calmly and coldly watched the light disappear from her eyes. Sayaka could murder Millicent Blandings just as casually, and enjoy the act of killing just as she had enjoyed the multiple occasions on which she had bedded the information broker. No, her desire to keep Millie alive for a while longer was purely instrumental. She didn’t want to be completely dependent on Colonel Davis – Mickey – for information.

But maybe the tail didn't work for Millicent at all. Mickey had suspected that the Oversight Group knew exactly who and where she was but hadn't come after her because Dr. Fontaine had wanted to observe her "in the wild" to gather more data. So could this tail work for the Oversight Group, or maybe specifically for Pricom? And then there was Devereux Consultants and their mercenaries - the Pisces organization. They had known that Millie was White Rabbit's handler. Did they also know that White Rabbit and Kathy Takagi were the same person? Sayaka considered capturing the young woman and... interrogating... her. It would be easy, and Sayaka was certain her... methods... would quickly break down the woman's will power. But of course she would have to eliminate her victim afterwards and the woman's disappearance would alert her employer. There was, she decided, a better way.

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Michelle Davis was too caught up in thought to sleep, as the bus rolled through the night towards Youngstown. Once, many decades prior to the Cataclysm, Youngstown had been an important steel producing center, second only to Pittsburgh. For a combination of reasons the city had fallen on hard times, suffering severely from crime, unemployment, and declining population. But a large fraction of the world's shipping and port capacity had been destroyed during the Cataclysm and the American Confederation, built on the remnants of what had once been the United States, was again dependent on domestically produced steel. And the post-Cataclysm Youngstown had a very significant advantage over Pittsburgh. Youngstown hadn't been important enough to nuke. The city's original steel mills were long gone, of course. But the advantages of geography that had made it an important steel center in the first place still existed, as did the road and railroad network. And so the steel mills themselves were rebuilt and Youngstown was once again a city where big money could be made. Which also meant it was a magnet for women like Danielle Chambers.

Chambers had started out as a street punk extorting “protection money” from small businesses and risen to become boss of one of the two main criminal gangs in the resurgent steelmaking city. Though she couldn’t know for sure, Davis suspected that Nina Vossler, godmother of the Mahoning County Businesswoman’s Association, felt that one gang was plenty. The contract actually called for “White Rabbit” to kill not just Danielle Chambers, but her daughter Annette and also Linda Carruthers; Danielle Chambers’ attorney, consigliere, and lover. Whoever the client was, she either hated Danielle Chambers enough to want her daughter and her lover dead as well, or she wanted all the top leadership of Chamber’s mob eliminated, presumably facilitating its subsequent takeover by someone else. Nina Vossler qualified on both counts. Though Davis wasn’t exactly happy about (probably) working for a criminal godmother, that wasn’t what was causing her to lose sleep. She was, after all, doing this because Sakura, for reasons known only to her, wanted someone to think that the “White Rabbit” had carried out an assassination in the Ohio-Pennsylvania Administrative District while Sakura was somewhere else. The most likely explanation was that Sakura wanted to convince someone that she – wasn’t – the White Rabbit. If that was her price for helping to fight Pricom and General Gayle, so be it. No, there were other reasons for Michelle Davis’ misgivings.

The first such reason concerned Annette, 18 years old and a freshwoman at the local university. Michelle had killed women that young before – in battle. But this was different. She had no qualms about killing Danielle Chambers and Linda Carruthers. The former was a thief and murderer and the latter used her legal skills to ensure that thieves and murderers escaped the legal consequences for their crimes. But Annette – just 18 years old – had she done anything to deserve such a fate? Michelle knew that the real White Rabbit would not have a moment’s hesitation about murdering the girl and that Michelle herself had to be just as ruthless if the impersonation was to be convincing. But she wasn’t happy about it.

And then there was the second reason, the thing that had caused Davis to transfer out of “Special Operations” years ago, despite her obvious talent for that sort of work. Like Sakura herself, Michelle Davis really – REALLY – enjoyed killing. Davis couldn’t hold that against Sakura. The girl was what she had been created to be. If the White Rabbit was a monster, what did that say about the women who deliberately created – designed – her that way? No, Michelle couldn’t blame Sakura. But she could and did blame herself. She had felt guilty about taking such pleasure – explicitly sexual pleasure – in killing. And so she had transferred out of Special Operations to take assignments that would allow her to support her country’s war effort but wouldn’t require her to take life with her own hands. It had been several years since she had personally taken a woman’s life. And then an assassin had infiltrated Fort Rockford and stolen the “Bright Angel” file.

As Davis had figured out what had happened, and what was going to happen, she had come to a decision about what she had to do. And that decision, and the fact that Colonel Davis had not had a woman in months, had doomed Major Jenkins, General Gayle’s sensuous spy. As Michelle rode the bus through the Ohio-Pennsylvania night, her mind drifted back to that night in her former office; her mouth and hands exploring Jenkins’ body as the major had explored her, Jenkins moaning and writhing in orgasm, and finally the ecstatic writhing turning to terrified spasmodic jerking and then utter limp stillness as Davis had slowly garroted the bitch with her own stocking. Feelings of guilt notwithstanding, Colonel Davis couldn’t help smiling at the memory.

And now she was on her way to murder three more very sexy women. She thought about the photos in the file, subsequently erased, that Sakura had forwarded. She thought about Annette’s fresh, ripe, 18 year old body and her mother’s 39 year old one – 39 years old but elegant and voluptuous. Danielle Chambers had kept her body in great shape, though it was in shape for the bedroom rather than the battlefield. And finally there was the lawyer and consigliere, Linda Carruthers. Michelle wondered just how many prosecutors, judges, or juries she had swayed, not with legal arguments or well-placed bribes, but with her startlingly red hair, beautiful face, and spectacular figure. In a couple of days all three of them would be dead. And Michelle Davis couldn’t help feeling guilty about just how much she was going to enjoy that. Finally she drifted off to sleep. At 8:47 AM the next morning, the bus rolled into the depot in downtown Youngstown.

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The movie wasn’t very good. The lead actress was certainly attractive – gorgeous, in fact. And the stuntwoman who was her stand-in for the fight scenes actually displayed some decent martial arts form. But the plot was ridiculous, the gunfights were as poorly choreographed as the hand-to-hand fights were well done, and the explosions – Sayaka wondered whether anyone in the movie-making business had ever actually seen a hand grenade detonate. Probably not, she reckoned – but then, most of the women in the audience wouldn’t have had any experience with actual explosives either.

But Sayaka wasn’t in the theater to see a silly action movie. Her “tail” had followed her into the theater and was currently sitting three rows behind Sayaka and one seat over to the right. As Kathy Takagi she had been to that particular theater several times with Millicent and was well familiar with the layout of the theater and nearby buildings. The left front exit opened onto an alley that was perfect for Sayaka’s purposes. As the heroine dispatched the chief villainess with a spear gun shot between her bikini-clad breasts and the credits started to roll, the White Rabbit stood up and headed for that exit. Without even looking, she knew the tail was about 20 feet behind.

Annelise Leclercq stared in amazement as she stepped out of the darkened theater and her eyes adjusted to the late afternoon sunlight. The girl she had been tailing, who went by the name “Kathy Takagi” though that probably wasn’t her real name, had disappeared. Annelise hadn’t wanted to follow too closely and alert Kathy to her presence. Still, it was only about six seconds since her target had left the theater. The girl couldn’t have gone all the way down the alley in that time unless she had sprinted. Had Kathy detected her then, in spite of her precautions? Annelise ran down the alley herself, hoping to catch Kathy in the street before the girl could completely lose the operative. It never occurred to Annelise that her target might be on the roof of the building to her left. There were no convenient handholds and the roof was a good 15 feet above street level, maybe a little more. No one could have jumped up there without special equipment…

Annelise Leclercq, only recently arrived from what had once been Belgium but was now simply a province in Greater Europa, had been with Pisces for four years and this was the first time she had ever blown an assignment. As she looked around the street in frustration, she was already dreading having to report her failure to her superior. The young operative headed for the rendezvous point, unaware that now she was the one with the tail…

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"Bianca Lapin" checked out of the fleabag hotel in which she had spent the last two nights… when she wasn't performing reconnaissance. Bianca Lapin - another one of those ridiculous "White Rabbit" puns that Sakura was so fond of. The colonel... hoped... that she had convinced the girl to stop that nonsense. And now Colonel Davis found herself doing exactly the same thing in order to convince - whoever it was that Sakura wanted to convince - that the White Rabbit was responsible for the assassinations the colonel was about to commit. She had spent the last two days ostensibly looking for work, but actually reconnoitering her targets. Dressed as common laborer, she hadn't attracted much attention as she had wandered through town and the publicly accessible areas of the university at which Annette Chambers was a student. Annette lived in an apartment just off campus, about 3 miles away from her mother’s home. A dorm room would have been cheaper but the Chambers family could well afford to rent a single apartment for the spoiled daughter of the mob boss. Good – it meant that Michelle Davis could probably kill her without having to kill any innocent witnesses. If she had lived on campus, that would have been harder. The entrance to the apartment was watched 24 hours a day by one of Danielle Chambers’ goons, who rotated in eight-hour shifts. But they hardly counted as innocent. The current minder was a short-haired brunette in her mid-20s, tall and well-built but not very attentive. She sat in a car parked across the street from the front door to the apartment complex, engrossed in a book. The colonel knew from her previous reconnaissance that this particular minder would be relieved at midnight, a bit more than four hours from now. If all went well, both the minder and her charge would be dead, their bodies hidden where no one would find them until after Michelle had similarly dealt with the mother and her consigliere.

If all went well – that was the kicker. The ex-special forces soldier had no doubt about her physical ability to deal with these two. She had kept up with her firearms and hand-to-hand training even after taking a desk job. But was she still mentally up for it? Did she still possess the requisite situational awareness to pull this off or had her years away from field work dulled her senses and corrupted her habit patterns? Killing Major Jenkins had been one thing. The colonel had been able to completely control the circumstances in her own office. But out on the street… did she still have it in her? “I guess there’s only one way to find out:” she said to no one in particular. It was almost 8 o’clock and the street was deserted and reasonably dark. The “laborer” ambled casually down the street towards the parked car. She knocked on the car window, startling the woman inside.

------“WHA??? What the hell are you doing?”

--“Sorry, ma’am. Did you know you have a flat tire here?”

Michelle pointed at the right front tire.

------“What? Oh, shit!”

The goon opened the car door and walked around to the curbside of the car. No one in the apartment complex across the street would be able to see the woman as she squatted down to examine the tire in the dim light. And on the near side of the street there was a park – deserted this late in the evening.

------“I don’t see anythi… MMMPPHHH!!!”

The terrified goon arched her back in agony as the colonel slid a commando knife into her solar plexus. The woman tried to scream but only a muffled groan escaped from beneath her killer’s smothering hand. Michelle quickly lowered the spasmodically jerking body to the ground, kneeling on the torso to pin the dying woman in place. She tried to ignore the way the woman’s breasts quivered under the tight-fitting blouse. As the goon gave one final convulsion and then lay still, Colonel Davis looked up and down and across the street – no indication that anyone had heard anything. Satisfied that there were no witnesses, the colonel opened the passenger-side rear door of the sedan and dumped the body on the floor. No one would see it unless they looked directly into the car’s window and even then they would need a flashlight. So far, so good. She closed the car door and waited another minute – minute-and-a-half – two minutes. Still no sign that anyone had noticed anything. Michelle Davis walked nonchalantly across the street and rang the bell for apartment 317 – Annette Chambers’ apartment. There was a security camera scanning the foyer but Michelle’s hat prevented it from getting a good view of her face.

----“Yes? What is it?”

--“Ma’am? My name’s Bianca Lapin. Your mother sent me on a … rather delicate… matter. May I come in?”

----“Bianca Lapin? I don’t think we’ve met.”

--“No, Ma’am. I’m… an independent contractor that she hired specifically for this job.”

There was an unmistakable eagerness in the girl’s voice as she answered.

----“Ooh. Did she decide to kill that bitch professor after all?”

That was a surprise. Maybe Annette wasn’t really as innocent as she seemed. Maybe Michelle didn’t need to feel bad about killing her. She did not, of course, know anything about the “bitch professor”, but she improvised.

--“Uhh… ma’am – this is hardly the place to talk about… that. Please let me in.”

There was an audible click as the electronic door lock disengaged. Colonel Davis walked through the newly opened door and headed to the elevator to the third floor.

Michelle kept herself from staring – with difficulty – as Annette Chambers opened the door to her apartment. Her ripe 18 year-old body was clad only in a t-shirt and panties. She was not wearing a bra… It was obvious that the girl liked showing off her body, obvious too that she used sex appeal to get what she wanted.

And if that didn’t work, there was always violence.

----“So, did mom agree to have Professor Stephens killed? Is that why you’re here/”

The girl sat down cross-legged on her couch and gave the colonel a lascivious smile. She was obviously turned on by the thought of this “Professor Stephens” being murdered.

--“Let’s talk about that.”

----“What’s there to talk about? That bitch gave my research paper an “F” and is threatening to recommend my expulsion – for plagiarism she says. Can’t mom see we can’t let her get away with that?”

Colonel Davis breathed a silent sigh of relief. The world would not be the least bit poorer when Annette Chambers was violently removed from it. “Like mother – like daughter, I guess.”

--“Your mother is concerned that…

----“But she owns half the cops in town anyway! And Linda has the judges eating out of the palm of her hand… or...”

The girl giggled lewdly

----“… her… wherever.”

--“Nevertheless, they’re both worried about the publicity.”

Annette pouted.

----“Then why are you here?”

--“I’m an… independent contractor, as I said, here to examine the feasibility of… doing this… in such a way that there would be no “blowback” on your family.”

Annette was smiling again.

----“You mean you’re going to kill her but make it look like an accident? How are you going to do it? Just make sure it’s painful, Okay?”

No – definitely no need to feel guilty about killing Annette Chambers.

--“I’m just here to see if it’s feasible, and make a recommendation to your mother, who will make the final decision.”

The mob boss’s daughter smiled as she stood up from the couch and hooked her fingers into the neckline of her t-shirt, slowly and deliberately pulling it up over her head; exposing the pale flesh of her smooth stomach and then her full breasts. She tossed the shirt aside and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties, as if she was about to strip completely nude. The girl’s face was flushed and her nipples were erect. A dark thatch of pubic hair poked out from the top of the panties and her labia were clearly discernable through the thin fabric. Col Davis kept her cool, but only with difficulty. The “fringe benefits” of being a contract assassin were definitely better than those of a soldier on the battlefield…

----“So… Miss Independent Contractor… what can I do to… ensure… you recommend to mom that we kill the bitch?”

When Colonel Davis didn’t answer, the girl slid the panties down her shapely legs and kicked them away. Was the girl turned on by Michelle’s own fit, athletic body? But that would hardly be obvious beneath the loose fitting clothes she was wearing. No, the colonel decided, the girl was making herself so obviously available because she was turned on by the thought of her teacher being murdered.

----“I can tell you want me.”

The girl was certainly right about that. “Damn it!” the colonel thought to herself. “Don’t do it! Just kill her and get out of here!”

----“Most of the women who work for mom want me but are too scared of her to do anything about it. But you… Miss Independent Contractor… you’re not scared of mom, are you?”

--“No ma’am, I’m not.”

----“Then why don’t you show me what you can do?”

--“With pleasure, ma’am.”

Michelle timed her strike just as the girl was exhaling. With little air in her lungs, Annette Chambers gave out only a shocked gutteral moan, inaudible in the adjacent apartment, as the rigid fingers of Colonel Davis’s spear hand strike drove into the girl’s solar plexus. Annette opened her mouth as if to gasp for breath, or perhaps to scream. But Michelle’s follow-up strike had already crushed her larynx. The girl stared at Colonel Davis in disbelief and horror. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets and she sank to the floor. “Damn it.” The colonel thought again as she watched that voluptuous nude body twitch spasmodically before going completely still. Annette’s eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Michelle knew the real White Rabbit would have taken the girl up on her offer before killing her, knew also that refraining from doing so was the “professional” thing to do. But still…

Quickly the colonel wiped clean everything she had touched and headed out the door, locking it behind her. The time was 8:17 PM. She had less than four hours to get to the Chambers residence and eliminate Danielle Chambers and Linda Carruthers. That should be plenty of time. As she headed across town her mind drifted back once more to the two women she had just killed, especially the gorgeous and sensual 18-year old whose offer she had so reluctantly turned down…

--“Damn it!”

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Even as “Kathy Takagi”, Sayaka always kept some items in her purse that would enable her to improvise a quick disguise but which wouldn’t arouse suspicion if Millie were to search the purse. She stashed the scarf she had been wearing and pulled out a baseball cap. She had no idea why it was called a “baseball” cap, except that it had something to do with some pre-Cataclysm sport. She idly wondered whether Millie, or maybe the colonel, would know.

Her next trick was far more radical. The item she pulled from her purse this time looked for all the world like a tube of lipstick, but was actually a disguised battery pack. She pressed the base of the tube against a starburst design on her windbreaker jacket. That ordinary-looking windbreaker actually cost more than some automobiles and the starburst design, apparently just decorative, was actually an electrical lead for the “camsuit” modification. The light blue jacket began to change to a green jacket with brown pockets and collar. In five seconds the change was complete and the white rabbit silently lowered herself from the roof. There was a minor scrape on her left hand. Even she couldn’t leap to the top of a 15 foot building cleanly, though she had leapt high enough to grab the edge of the roof and pull herself up. There had been a rough spot where she had grabbed the edge and it had just slightly broken the skin. She would have to make up some story for Millie about how she had cut her hand. No big deal.

As she followed Annelise Leclercq through the darkened downtown streets, Sayaka was confident that the woman wouldn’t recognize her so long as the bill of the baseball cap obscured the White Rabbit’s face. Her target stopped in front of a bank of payphones in the city square. Once, pre-Cataclysm, women (and men – Sayaka reminded herself that there had been men in those days) had carried phones in their pockets or purses. According to the stories, these “smart phones”, smaller than a wallet, had more computing power than the bulky computer Millicent Blandings had in her home. And a home “desktop” computer in those days had more computing power than the entire computing center she had destroyed at Fort Monmouth a few weeks ago. Even more amazingly, you could use one of those tiny phones to talk to someone on the other side of the world, via satellite links.

But the satellites hadn’t survived the war. And something called “EMP” had apparently ruined those miraculous electronic systems. Sayaka wasn’t quite sure what “EMP” was though it had something to do with detonating nuclear weapons at extremely high altitudes. Maybe Sayaka would ask Mickie about it someday. But in any event, post-Cataclysm electronics were much bulkier and slower than pre-Cataclysm electronics, due to some sort of lingering residual effect from those high altitude nuclear blasts, which apparently had been an unexpected result and was still not fully understood. The White Rabbit frequently carried a radio-detonator on her missions to allow her to remotely detonate charges she had set. But the signal from such a detonator was very simple - much simpler than voice transmission. The days when a person could carry an actual telephone in her pocket were long gone. Except for the specialized and expensive rigs on large ships or planes, electronic communication was once more the province of landlines.

---“Allo?... Leclercq… oui...”

Sayaka could only catch portions of what the woman was saying on the phone, due to the background noise, but she was certain it was French. Millicent had said that Pisces was mostly active in Europe. So it was probably Devereux Consultants who was behind this. The woman said something about “chef”, which Sayaka thought probably meant “boss” rather than a fancy cook, in this context. A passing car kept the assassin from hearing what the target was saying to the “chef”, but the woman winced as if she was being scolded. After one final “Oui” she hung up the phone.

But she made no move to leave the square, though it was now almost 9 o’clock. There were still enough people around that Sayaka wouldn’t stand out as she waited to see what happened next. About 10 minutes later a car pulled up and the woman got in. The driver of the car was about 30 years old, a very pretty blonde. From her demeanor, and the deferential manner of the woman who had been following “Kathy Takagi”, this was pretty obviously the “chef”. Disguised as she was with the cap and camsuit-altered jacket, Sayaka risked getting closer to try to overhear their conversation.

---“I’m sorry about letting her get away, boss. I don’t know how she did it.”

The woman’s English was passable, though with an accent – French probably, though Sayaka wasn’t completely sure. But why was she speaking English? The answer came soon enough.

-----“Never mind that. Is this Takagi bird the super-assassin Devereux is looking for, or is she just Blandings’ bit of fluff?”

---“I’m not sure.”

-----“Bloody hell! Devereux will be cheesed off. What do you think she’s paying us for?”

---“We know where Blandings lives. We could…”

-----“Not without the client’s permission. You know Blandings hired two more Yank Marines for extra security. That ups the risk even if Takagi is just totty… and we don’t even know that. We need to report.”

---“Why is Mademoiselle Devereux so interested in whether Kathy Takagi is this “White Rabbit”? Surely there are other assassins?”

-----“None of our business, mate. She wants to know. She’s paying to find out. And you cocked it up!”

The French (actually Belgian, though Sayaka didn’t know that) woman winced again and the two drove off. Sayaka resisted the temptation to follow them on foot. Even she couldn’t keep up with them at highway speeds. And while she was probably fast enough to stay with them in town, it was likely to… draw attention.

But she didn’t need to follow them. She had their license plate number. And after she put Millicent to sleep tonight, she would have the information broker’s computer, and her contacts in various agencies, who, for a fee, could tell who owned the car, and where she lived. Sayaka also had a lot to tell Mickie when she next saw her. As she hailed a taxi to take her back to Millicent Blandings’ home, she wondered how the colonel was doing as the imitation “White Rabbit”.

At that very moment Michelle Davis was surveilling the Chambers residence on the outskirts of Youngstown. Two guards outside, one in front, one in back, as expected from her previous reconnaissance. She hadn’t confirmed that Danielle Chambers and Linda Carruthers were inside, but the chauffeur-driven limousine was parked in the driveway. Colonel Davis had ditched her laborer’s clothes and was wearing her own camsuit – night camo selected. A silenced .40 caliber pistol – the White Rabbit’s weapon of choice – in hand, she moved silently towards the house.