The gunrunner and her ho.., p.1
The Gunrunner and Her Hound, page 1
The Gunrunner and Her Hound
Maria Ying
Hua Publishing
Copyright @ 2021 Devi Lacroix
Copyright @ 2021 Benjanun Sriduangkaew
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
The characters and events depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Title Page
At Her Rightful Place
In That Place of Gold
Interlude: A Copse of Tall Pines
The Happiest Place on Earth
Gunmetal Orchid
Interlude: The Daughters of the House of Hua
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Christmas Party
Coda: The Beginning
Sneak Preview
Interview with the Authors
About the Author
Acknowledgments
At Her Rightful Place
An ice queen arms dealer hires a new bodyguard with a troubled past
I.
VIVECA
The woman standing in my office is well-built, and the arm with the rolled-up sleeve is admirably thick, clean; no tattoos. I'll have to train her to wear clothes properly—I find this look sloppy, and her future contains bespoke suits more expensive than her salary, if she earns my regard enough to reach the point of negotiating employment.
Her name is Yves, which is of course an alias: she is neither French nor a man, but I don't begrudge and I'm not going to correct. The French are not real people, in any case, and their language and names are to be bastardized or remixed as one pleases (good pastries; their one redeeming grace).
The first thing that comes out of her mouth is, "I didn't expect you to have an office."
I tilt my chair back slightly. We are both sheened in sunlight: I arrange my desk to my advantage, to limn myself in morning's gold or evening's bronze. Backlit so that my face is difficult to see. Less theatrics, more a matter of control. "Did you want to meet me in a dark bar?"
Her smile is faint, thin-lipped by nature. Likely she cannot help looking a little sardonic no matter her actual mood—she has that kind of face. "No, Ms. Hua. This place is beautiful, if a little Nordic. Wintry."
She means all the glass, the approximations of snowdrift and glacier that are terribly out of place in Hong Kong. But one creates the landscape one wishes to inhabit. "Tell me about your background. And do sit down, please. No point keeping you on your feet."
Yves has a trick of shifting the chair—a thing that resembles a carved iceberg, and is not much more comfortable—so that it makes next to no noise against the marble. "All in my files. But you'd want to hear it from me."
"Yes." The way she moves interests me. It goes deeper than your usual ex-military sort, and I like what I can't immediately categorize.
"I fought in Alaska at age twelve, in the Russo-American War." Her shoulders rise and fall. "There weren't quite enough adults to go around by then."
Too many taken by the plague and the civil wars, which had eaten their way across North America and left it ripe pickings for the Russians. My mother did good business back then; so much demand for everything, so much lucre for her offshore accounts. I prop my chin on my hand, examining the lines of Yves' stance. Relaxed, for all that I know she needs the job: there is a wake of what passes for recommendation letters in our line of work, stiff and proper, but too numerous. Bodyguards are long-term. They have to be trained to adapt to each client's team, and what they learn in the tenure is thick with trade secrets: the client's routes and supply chains, alliances, regular buyers. It's a wonder we don't have them assassinated after they leave us, considering. "I don't usually hire former child soldiers."
"It's a uniquely unappealing part of my resume." A pause. "Or rather, I don't want to work for people to whom it is a point of attraction."
"You sound difficult."
"My track record speaks for itself. People make certain assumptions about my background, about the kind of tool I'm likely to be."
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Yves to omit the truth of her early life: it is not as if there exists any sort of registry for former child soldiers, the entire point is that they're untracked, unrecorded—unpersoned ghosts, to be discarded without a trace; the casualty rate is not precisely low, since most of them are sent untrained into the thick of conflict zones. Idly I wonder if there is a child soldier school, somewhere, to improve the efficiency and minimize the squandering of resources. "Come meet my lieutenant. Then we can decide."
YVES
The affectations first: seated, in silhouette, back to the sunlight. Good positional advantage, for both negotiation and defense. Commands but does not reciprocate; dictates from a position of strength.
A snowy scene on the animated glass, climate control too cold. Ice motif in the furniture. Projects an image of undisturbed tranquility. Hard, cold. Austere. Low temperature keeps meetings short.
The woman herself, less important. Smaller than I am, weaker. But wealth is more powerful yet; she buys people like me as her armor. A sidearm mounted under the desk anyways. In this, she’ll have been practical—large caliber, armor piercing.
So: a client, and unremarkable at that. But they like to hear something in my voice that makes them unique and special. After all, respect is the only thing their money and power can't consistently buy. So I open with “I didn't expect you to have an office."
On its face, it’s an unbelievable statement—as if I am some backwater yokel come to the big city, or that my former employers only met in barren wastes and isolated compounds. But it isn’t a full lie, either. Many of my employers have preferred their palatial estates or secure bunkers. And I like to think there’s a certain… honesty… about this setting, a backhanded acknowledgement of the violence dictated from staid boardrooms.
She leans back in her chair, evaluating me. I take it as a good sign. I work well with observant employers. I’ve rolled the sleeve up on my shirt. It’s a small thing, an intentional blemish. If she thinks it’s unprofessional, I’ll know something about her; if she notices the lack of tattoos or tell-tale signs of substance abuse, then I’ll know even more about her.
Dilatory conversation follows, a few hollow sentences. She invites me to sit and tell her more of my background. As I move, her gaze intensifies; for a moment, I feel the sting of assessment, the banal inhumanity that comes from measurement and evaluation. It’s a feeling I am familiar with, and one I have had to strangle to excel in my line of work. The self-destructive impulse to take a swing at a superior, to betray a client, to take back some shred of control or dignity—that’s how you die. In the end, it’s better to be dehumanized by a look than a bullet. I’ve taken my past and made it a marketable skill set, and it stands to reason that the goods will be weighed.
Still. She is very observant.
"I fought in Alaska at age twelve, in the Russo-American War.” This is the crux of the matter, and what she really wants to know about. It isn’t as if I can tell her the truth, the ignominy that it wasn’t a thing that I did so much as it was a thing that happened to me. I shrug. "There weren't quite enough adults to go around by then." It’s an affected nonchalance, a blind to hide my counter-observation of her.
"I don't usually hire former child soldiers," she says, and there is a bite there: it is important to her that I know there are certain actions she finds more or less detestable, certain lines that she’ll bend and only unwillingly cross. The type that has some esoteric rules of behavior, then, or an ass-backward code of honor.
Alright, that’ll be extra.
But we’re still talking about me, technically. "It's a uniquely unappealing part of my resume." I pause, and then make eye contact. There’s a bite to my voice now, too; I also have a point I want to make. "Or rather, I don't want to work for people to whom it is a point of attraction."
There is a moment of tension as we hold each other’s gaze. Her eyes are bitter ice, and I can feel my body fight a need to shiver.
And then she sighs, announcing the end to whatever tête-à-tête we are having. "You sound difficult."
"My track record speaks for itself. People make certain assumptions about my background, about the kind of tool I'm likely to be."
She looks me over a final time, and I can see her coming to a preliminary judgement about how, precisely, she can use me. She smiles, and I realize it is the coldest, hardest surface in her office. "Come meet my lieutenant. Then we can decide."
VIVECA
Lieutenant is a misleading title to apply to Fahriye, seeing that what I have is too small to be a private army, but it's her old title in her military and she's fond of it. Her name is delicate; she herself is not. Yves isn't short, a little under one hundred eighty, but Fahriye is easily a head taller and a good deal broader.
I've sent them both off to a bar not because I believe alcohol will loosen Yves' tongue, but because Fahriye insists that her intuition works best under influence. So far she has not been wrong, and she never drinks to excess. Plus, a bar provides Fahriye with opportunities for crucial demonstrations—whether Yves knows how to case a location, how to watch for exits and entries, how to map perimeters. In a couple hours she will re
port back whether Yves is a good fit, longer if she talks the woman into a quick tryst. Fahriye's tastes range widely.
In their absence I take to the most banal part of my work, handling communications through lines encrypted within a millimeter of their lives, managing such logistics as can be performed remotely. The sales and purchase of arms used to be strikingly public, between imperial and client states, between corporate interests. Civilians accepted them so readily. In those days my professional forebears would be carefully pruned, disappeared, because they didn't answer to defense contractor conglomerates—not due to moral compass, but because they were proud to the point of stupidity. America's breaking shifted much, fundamentally altering the status quo forever, eradicating overnight certain large-scale companies and supply chains that served the empire. In this vacuum, independent dealers—like myself and my mother before me—arose. The Russians pursue monopoly less aggressively, and they like to play us off against each other.
(I have, also, a brother. He is more interested in narcotics. Occasionally we meet up in person to discuss which of us does more harm to the world. He agrees, at least, that I leave more lasting impact: literal craters and ruins. My hands are clean, I like to say without any seriousness, but they are not particularly. Supplying guns or shooting someone in the face, you have blood under your fingernails just the same.)
Later I head ten floors down to a favorite bakery that does the best char siu sou this side of Hong Kong. To anyone I appear no different from an ordinary office worker, a little more polished and a little more expensive if one knows what to look for: the cut of my tailoring, the black opal mounted on my ring that costs more than many diamonds. People unused to wealth understand its signifiers to be in gold and designer brands, in fast cars and enormous mansions. True wealth, though, is about the purchase of absolute privacy and absolute security. It is not about being under headlines, having your face plastered on billboards as you attend charity galas. Those are the trappings, the costumes. True power is in the lack of consequences even as you engage in the most heinous deeds.
Fahriye returns with Yves. That is answer enough: if she'd found Yves below her standards, the new recruit would have been politely turned out to the streets.
"These are still warm." I gesture at my char siu sou, now plated. "Care for some? And Yves, you're hired."
My lieutenant eats with gusto—she has a big appetite, essentially twenty-four hours a day, and we share favorites in food. Yves eats with more restraint, out of politeness. I wonder what kind of food she prefers or if, like most people of her background, she eats whatever is put in front of her and which fulfills her caloric needs.
I brief Yves on my schedule for the next day. No further; new recruits are to be treated as potential spies and given limited access to information, to everything. "And," I add, "I want you to be my detail for tomorrow's business dinner."
Yves looks at me. Her hair is dyed an interesting shade—asphalt distantly lit by brushfire. "Viveca Hua doesn't have a reputation for being trusting. If you don't mind me saying."
"I don't mind, and not to worry; I don't trust you. My other personnel will be in the restaurant. Call this a field test." I nod to Fahriye. "She'll take you for your fitting."
For the first time since Yves arrived, I see real emotion in her face—something close to terror pinching the corners of her eyes. "Fitting for what?"
"Your suit. My bodyguards are supposed to dress well."
YVES
Fahriye is a big woman: big size, big laugh, big appetite. She’s a full head and shoulder taller than me, and her reach is similarly outsized. Judging by her scars, she’s got a hard edge of experience on me, too; if it came to an all-out brawl between us, I’d put my good money on her.
But she’s neither a bodyguard nor an enforcer, which means her real skills, and her real danger, is what’s behind her dark green eyes and constantly crooked grin. Brains and brawn; I’d like to think I know the type. And I know for a fact that Hua has no children and no living relatives, save for a brother who has his own sordid business. I wonder if Hua is grooming Fahriye to inherit her empire, like she did from her own late mother, or if she plans to burn it all down with her death. As the woman applying for the job to keep her alive, it’d be nice to know.
The “lieutenant” takes me to a dive bar, one of the dark and dingy places where the only thing more dangerous than the patrons is the health code violations. We take a sticky booth and, over a beer, she does her own version of Hua’s interrogation. She’s boisterous, but she drinks far less than her temperament indicates, and she watches me watching the place. I oblige and narrate: two men in the back, surreptitiously guarding the door to the kitchen, another on the bar. Probably arms traffickers, small time compared to Hua; subcontractors of a subcontractor, I wager. I’ve worked with the type.
We’re also decidedly unwelcome, a point that comes to a head when four more men come through the door and begin to approach our table.
“Well, I think that’s enough of that,” Fahriye says with a grin and stands, stretching like a massive feline. “So are you in or are you out?”
Brass knuckles, billy club carried underhand, hidden; packing heat, but not their first choice. Violence, but not total war.
I shrug. “This won’t be the first time I’ve been evaluated in a pit fight,” I say, and it sounds far more bitter than I intend it.
Fahriye flashes me a knowing, almost conspiratorial look as she reaches down for her beer and finishes it in a single massive swig. “Oh, and one more thing,” she adds, right before picking up our table and hurling it into our assailants. “Don’t get hit in the face. No visible bruises—the boss demands a little decorum.”
We tear the place apart after that. It’s almost perfunctory, clear that this was something between a walkabout and a working dinner for Fahriye; I suspect she let some lesser officer of the organization off for the night so she could stretch her legs with the new girl.
And I guess I pass, even if I do take a love tap on the chin; before I know it, I am again sitting across the table from one Viveca Hua, Fahriye unceremoniously eating some sort of stuffed pastry—kolaches?—beside me.
Hua summarizes tomorrow’s itinerary. No further knowledge for me, until I’ve earned it; a modest concession to operational security. I approve.
"And," she concludes, "I want you to be my detail for tomorrow's business dinner."
Now this is unexpected, and far too soon. I make a show of narrowing my eyes. "Viveca Hua doesn't have a reputation for being trusting. If you don't mind me saying."
"I don't mind, and not to worry; I don't trust you. My other personnel will be in the restaurant.” A ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “Call this a field test."
Then she nods toward Fahriye. "She'll take you for your fitting."
I start. I don’t mean to, and of all the things to get under my skin, I didn’t expect it to be this pedestrian instruction. But you can’t always control a fear response, and all the tests of the past day have primed me for this reaction: for a moment, I am struck by an impression of me as some sort of trained hound, being evaluated for a collar of cold iron and burning ice, measuring tape around my neck like a garrote.
"Fitting for what?" I manage.
She sees me flinch, and her ghost of a smile becomes very hard, very corporeal. "Your suit. My bodyguards are supposed to dress well."
II.
VIVECA
When Yves reports to me the next afternoon, she's properly clothed: a dress shirt in warm, pale gold, the jacket and trousers in burgundy so deep it nearly disappears into black. She does not look entirely comfortable in it, but she'll adjust in time. What is important is that she looks like a fine commodity and, even more crucially, a commodity that belongs to Viveca Hua.
(Fahriye, on occasion, points out that my sense of ownership toward human beings in my employ is indicative of the sort of issues one normally takes to a therapist. I have told her, also on occasion, that it is actually quite healthy considering my work. How else do you engage in this sort of profession if you don’t treat people as objects? But she insists I hide a heart of gold within my carapace exterior because I don’t totally use my personnel as cannon fodder. It is not an assessment with which my brother, who does know me exceedingly well, would agree. He would say—as would I—that it is about efficiency. I do not require therapists. They’ll absolutely violate patient confidentiality to leak your sessions to rival suppliers.)
