Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella by Mike Shepherd Read Free Book Online

Annie’s pink box had done.
    “So, how is your vacation going, Mr. Foile?” she said.  The tone was chit chat.
    Taylor chose to return the soft ball with an equally easy pitch.  “So far, I’m just in the decompression stage.  I usually need a week just to shake off the stress of the job.  I was catching up on the last month of comics when you walked by.”
    She put the compact away.
    “So why are we here?”
    “Trouble sent me.”
    “He only sends me trouble.  What kind of trouble are you, Mr. Senior Chief Agent in Charge?  You still licking the wounds from your chase after Kris Longknife?”
    “I didn’t know that made the news.”
    “It didn’t.  I rarely bother with the official version.  No, I was following you and her antics on your Bureau net.  You would have had a better chance of catching her if you knew where she was headed.”
    “Ah, but I didn’t.  My orders to ‘Find her before she gets herself and others killed,’ was rather vague.”
    “Which leaves one to wonder if you were intended to fail?” she said, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow.
    “If I was to fail, why send me?”
    “Yes.” she said.  “So, why did Trouble send me to you?”
    “It seems that the logs of the Wasp’s last voyage, it being the princess’s flag, were brought back to Wardhaven and buried under an entirely new security level. ‘Burn before Reading,’ or some such thing.  The question posed to me by a good friend was whether or not we can trust the access logs of the data, or have the travels of our wayward princess been read more widely than the Prime Minister would prefer.”
    The woman shook her head.  “If you don’t want data read, don’t put it on the net.  Back in the ancient days, the only way to access some data was to place an order to have the tapes hung on the computer.  You did what you wanted then put them back in a locked box, or so my old grandmother insists.  It wasn’t that way in her day, but in her great-grandmother’s day, no doubt, when the dinosaurs stomped the Earth.”
    She paused to enjoy Taylor’s smile at her humor.  “Who has these logs?”
    “I don’t know.  They are Navy property, I would suspect that the Navy has custody of them.”
    “Hmm.”  Now Taylor observed that even a frown looked good on her.  “That could definitely complicate my job.  The Navy types are notoriously untrusting.  They insisted on being trained up on this new security system and then tweaked it to their liking.  I could likely walk into the Prime Minister’s personal files without him twitching to the visit.  Navy, ah, not so much.”
    She paused to study her fingernails for a long moment.  They were a most stunning shade of lavender, and matched her eyeshadow.  Taylor had seen the combination on teenagers and been tempted to ship them off to the morgue.
    On her, it was strangely alluring. 
    Or was it that, on her, even death would be alluring.  Taylor closed down that line of thought.  Hard.
    “To get somewhere, it often helps to know where you are coming from.  Do you have any guess who these pairs of unauthorized eyes might belong to?”
    “Some of Mr. Alexander Longknife’s associates,” Taylor said.
    Mademoiselle M uttered a nasty word.  “Why should I risk my neck, as well as my street cred on some intramural dust-up between that family?” she snapped, and glanced at the door.
    Taylor suspected that she might allow him one more sentence.  Maybe two.
    “The life of all humanity just may be weighing in the balance.”
    “Says who?” she snarled.
    “Kris Longknife.  And Trouble seems to agree with her.”
    “That girl.  Maybe.  Him?  Damn.  Start talking, Mr. Taylor.  I might have bought your pig in a poke for just an ordinary problem.  This has got foul smelling stuff all over it and very likely several pounds of explosives thrown in for a joke.”
    Quickly, Taylor ran the woman through the runaround the Longknifes had subjected him to, from