BROOD part 4
Feb. 1st, 2005 09:45 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsBROOD
Remy makes contact with the police, who might have the key to the mystery.
Five days without so much as a whisper on the streets. Remy was getting nervous. Normally when he got nervous, people died. But he wasn’t Gambit anymore, and that meant that stress relief couldn’t involve killing. More and more, he was coming distressingly closer to the idea that the Guilds might be right. That this was a series of escalations, and not a new player in New Orleans. Still, Tante had demanded his time, and that meant using everything at his disposal to make sure.
Which led to a dingy little café right down by the river; air thick with cigarette smoke and the reek of oily water. The man across from him was one of New Orleans’ finest; bent, corrupt, and utterly without anything remotely approaching a principle. George Robians smoked the most foul cigarillos known to man; a fog of toxic fumes surrounding him in his usual chair.
“So, you’re Gambit. We nearly got you in 98.”
“Non, you didn’t.” LeBeau said flatly. This was the early stage of the negotiations, and both men where staking out their positions. The ‘dick sizing’ as Flair used to call it. “I don’t really have time to mess around wit’ you, home. If you got de information, you better—“
“Relax. I have the details. But I’d like to see the money just. Nothing personal, but I don’t trust you at all.” Remy dropped the envelope on the table, and it disappeared almost as quickly. “Good. Here’s what we’ve got.”
The police file was thin, no more than two dozen pages of single-spaced text, a wedge of photos, and some handwritten notes tacked to the back of the folder. Remy speed-read it while George filled in the details.
“We do our best to keep track of the Guilds, to make sure that they know the lines they can and can’t cross as well as we do. For the most part, it’s worked fairly well. They may own the chief and the commissioner, but enough of the officers and street monsters are still honest enough to keep them on their toes. The players always make themselves known.”
“I am proud of your integrity.” Remy said sarcastically.
“Hey, if you’re going to have organized crime, then you might as well make sure its really organized.” George shrugged. “Our estimate is at close to twenty members from the various Guilds moving outside of the normal ranges. We’ve caught a number of them together with our surveillance. Acting very strangely, too. Like they were all on drugs or something. There are very few real connections between the names, not like friends or allies who you’d naturally recruit from. The only real pair in there are from the D’Armade family; Louis and Thomas D’Armade. A couple of low-level boys who they used mostly as muscle over the years. Both disappeared around the same time, right near the start of all of this shit.”
“You caught dem in surveillance at all?”
“Just before their disappearance. They passed over the usual gratuity to the boys working Havillard Yards, asking about some new guy running stuff out of the warehouses.”
“New guy?”
“Yeah. Some joker named Cardin.” George flipped through the sheets and came up with the name. “Jean Cardin. Petty thief and smuggler. Did some time inside about ten years ago. Just came back into town from Atlanta. I guess he got turfed out of New Orleans before then, by the D’Armade’s themselves.”
“What happened with him?”
“Disappeared. When both Louis and Thomas pulled a runner, we had a team go by the room this Cardin guy had rented. Nothing but some clothes, a stolen wallet, and a few weird items.” George pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, marked with EVIDENCE and dropped it on the table. The wallet with the credit cards was there, as well as a two inch metal cap with strange flanges for some kind of intricate securing systems on it, and a curl of adhesive tape, yellow, with red bio-hazard signs on it.
“Who’s on the stolen cards?”
“Doctor Fuller. Haven’t run them down yet. There’s one more thing.” George pulled a DVD case from his briefcase and set it down. “We got a store video camera recording of three of our missing Guild members. Transcript is in the file. You can take a look, but basically, they’re acting and talking in total unison. The staff shrink’s never seen anything like it.”
“Unison?” Remy made the immediate jump. Some kind of mind control. He’d have to look at the footage, but that type of behaviour sounded like the link unit work that the Russians had been focused on during the 90s.
“Totally.”
“Was Cardin ever tested for de X gene?”
“In prison. He’s a low-scale empathy or something. Basically just gives him an edge in poker. They didn’t even bother to neutralize him, it was so minor.”
“Just curious.” So Cardin couldn’t be controlling them mentally on his own. Unless the samples they found at his apartment involved some kind of experiment. Perhaps with this doctor involved? The lid looked like a secure bioweapon transport lid, which meant he might have access to some kind of agent. “Merci, George. If you hear anything, let me know.”
“We’ll see. Oh, and Gambit? Make sure we don’t have to bring you in. That gets a little expensive, especially after what happened with Marcel. The warrant is still out on that case, and if we happen to get our hands on the main suspect, well…” George spread his hands wide, implying all manner of unpleasantness. Remy just nodded as he left the bar.
After watching the DVD, LeBeau contacts Moira MacTaggert to get some answers.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/x_logs/882523.html?#cutid1
Remy finally realises the plans of the Brood, but might not live long enough to tell anyone.
Four days wasted, and the guild deadlines were almost on them. The day after tomorrow, the guilds would go to war, no matter what Tante said. LeBeau was convinced he had the evidence to prove that the disappearances were Cardin and his access to this CF14 agent, using it to boost his own psionic abilities and take control of the bodies and minds of the Guild members. It made sense for him to start with those who had kicked him out the first time. If he was able to start a massive guild war, then he could pick up the pieces after and control the city.
The problem with that plan was that Cardin seemed to have abandoned it in the last week or so. LeBeau had caught up with a couple of them, able to view them from a distance. They moved with unnatural coordination, not identical but with unerring synchronicity, as if they were appendages of a great whole. Like a flock or a swarm in many ways.
In the last week, it seemed that they were looking for younger people, not even members of the Guild. He’d seen the process briefly, a simple spiking of a drink, or a tiny aerosol blast into the ear. LeBeau had been careful not to be seen, and that had limited him greatly. But it seemed that after twenty minutes or so, the victim would ’faze out’ almost, and a few minutes later, came back to activity, already exhibiting the odd changes LeBeau had noted in the others.
So, if they didn’t care about the gang war, what was Cardin’s new goal? Remy didn’t have an answer for that yet, as he carefully shadowed one of the people from what he was calling the Brood in his mind.
They’d been crisscrossing the streets for hours, looking around at the celebration preparations. It was the last Saturday before the giant Mardi Gras parade, and traditionally the largest party night. All of the bars and restaurants were preparing for the flood of people, and the Brood flickered in and out between them, observing the details.
Remy followed two of them into an alley, staying just back at the edge of the wall. Another of them went by behind him, and Remy focused on fading into the background, making himself ignorable. A thought suddenly struck him.
They were out in force, running up and down the festival sites. In five or six hours, those places would be filled cheek to cheek with people. If there was only a small amount of the CF14 agent, this was the way to get maximum dispersal. Nasty lectures about biowar protocols flipped up in his memory. That’s what they had to be doing; defining a profile for maximum agent exposure. Remy’s pace quickened down the alley.
He pulled up short as the two men he’d been following suddenly stepped out into view. His spatial sense picked up another two behind him, and Remy’s powers started breaking down the positions and avenues open to him.
“He.”
“Is.”
“The.”
“One.” They said, words coming from different mouths but perfectly stacked, as if from one speaker. Obviously, they had saw him in the street and set up an ambush. LeBeau wasn’t especially worried. Four men, even with training, would have difficulty matching up against his powers.
“Guess you found me den, hommes. Dat mean dis is de part dat you threaten me?”
“No.”
“This.”
“Is.”
“The.”
“Part.”
“Where.”
“You.”
“Die.”
“Snappy comeback.” Remy said as they closed. He didn’t have his staff, and he couldn’t use lethal measures to bring them down without killing the innocent hosts. Mind you, disabling was still an option, and LeBeau readied himself.
Even former master assassins can be surprised, and only Remy’s spatial sense kept him from being crippled in the first seconds. The four men moved as a single directed entity, overwhelming him almost immediately. Remy lashed out with a kick, shattering one of their kneecaps as two of them grabbed him, hauling him roughly to the right even as the third placed a kick directly into the space he was forced.
LeBeau broke one hold, delivering a precision strike to the kidneys but to little effect. The other forced him into the wall headfirst, gashing open the side of his head. An elbow crushed the man’s nose with a wet crunch, forcing him back even as blows rained on LeBeau’s back. Remy swept low, unbalancing the last two and launching himself back, away from them. Their movements were too perfect, exactly coordinated to the extent that it overwhelmed his mutant speed and senses. Remy looked around as another three of the Brood entered the alley, and he was sure more were on their way.
“Least no one saw dis.” He muttered, and ran to the opposite end of the alley, Brood close in pursuit. Remy dodged traffic, cut down a second alley, his nose telling him he was closing on the docks. He risked a quick glance behind, and saw that now it was nine Brood following, their footsteps echoing as they hit the concrete in perfect unison. Gambit raced between shipping containers, and lit out on the concrete quay. Now twelve Brood were in the chase, slowly drawing a net around him. Remy considering trying to fight his way out, but discarded the idea. If that was his only option, lethal was the only avenue open to him.
Remy retreated back to one of the docks, casting around for an escape route. His eye caught one of the loading pivot cranes, still poised for cargo lifting at the edge of the mooring links. The long arm of the crane extended almost fifty meters out over the water, and an idea formed in LeBeau’s mind. Ignoring the blood dripping down his face, he starting running towards it, even as the first Brood reached the dock, trapping him on it. Gambit jumped, catching the edge of the crane structure and hauled himself up it. It only took a minute to reach the top of it, and he steadied himself on the long arm. The Brood clustered around the base, starting to shake the unit to dislodge him. Remy raced always the arm, his mutant agility the only thing keeping him on, until he reached the edge of the arm, extended way out over the water. Remy launched himself off it, diving cleanly into the brackish waters below, temporarily out of the reach of the Brood.
Remy makes contact with the police, who might have the key to the mystery.
Five days without so much as a whisper on the streets. Remy was getting nervous. Normally when he got nervous, people died. But he wasn’t Gambit anymore, and that meant that stress relief couldn’t involve killing. More and more, he was coming distressingly closer to the idea that the Guilds might be right. That this was a series of escalations, and not a new player in New Orleans. Still, Tante had demanded his time, and that meant using everything at his disposal to make sure.
Which led to a dingy little café right down by the river; air thick with cigarette smoke and the reek of oily water. The man across from him was one of New Orleans’ finest; bent, corrupt, and utterly without anything remotely approaching a principle. George Robians smoked the most foul cigarillos known to man; a fog of toxic fumes surrounding him in his usual chair.
“So, you’re Gambit. We nearly got you in 98.”
“Non, you didn’t.” LeBeau said flatly. This was the early stage of the negotiations, and both men where staking out their positions. The ‘dick sizing’ as Flair used to call it. “I don’t really have time to mess around wit’ you, home. If you got de information, you better—“
“Relax. I have the details. But I’d like to see the money just. Nothing personal, but I don’t trust you at all.” Remy dropped the envelope on the table, and it disappeared almost as quickly. “Good. Here’s what we’ve got.”
The police file was thin, no more than two dozen pages of single-spaced text, a wedge of photos, and some handwritten notes tacked to the back of the folder. Remy speed-read it while George filled in the details.
“We do our best to keep track of the Guilds, to make sure that they know the lines they can and can’t cross as well as we do. For the most part, it’s worked fairly well. They may own the chief and the commissioner, but enough of the officers and street monsters are still honest enough to keep them on their toes. The players always make themselves known.”
“I am proud of your integrity.” Remy said sarcastically.
“Hey, if you’re going to have organized crime, then you might as well make sure its really organized.” George shrugged. “Our estimate is at close to twenty members from the various Guilds moving outside of the normal ranges. We’ve caught a number of them together with our surveillance. Acting very strangely, too. Like they were all on drugs or something. There are very few real connections between the names, not like friends or allies who you’d naturally recruit from. The only real pair in there are from the D’Armade family; Louis and Thomas D’Armade. A couple of low-level boys who they used mostly as muscle over the years. Both disappeared around the same time, right near the start of all of this shit.”
“You caught dem in surveillance at all?”
“Just before their disappearance. They passed over the usual gratuity to the boys working Havillard Yards, asking about some new guy running stuff out of the warehouses.”
“New guy?”
“Yeah. Some joker named Cardin.” George flipped through the sheets and came up with the name. “Jean Cardin. Petty thief and smuggler. Did some time inside about ten years ago. Just came back into town from Atlanta. I guess he got turfed out of New Orleans before then, by the D’Armade’s themselves.”
“What happened with him?”
“Disappeared. When both Louis and Thomas pulled a runner, we had a team go by the room this Cardin guy had rented. Nothing but some clothes, a stolen wallet, and a few weird items.” George pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, marked with EVIDENCE and dropped it on the table. The wallet with the credit cards was there, as well as a two inch metal cap with strange flanges for some kind of intricate securing systems on it, and a curl of adhesive tape, yellow, with red bio-hazard signs on it.
“Who’s on the stolen cards?”
“Doctor Fuller. Haven’t run them down yet. There’s one more thing.” George pulled a DVD case from his briefcase and set it down. “We got a store video camera recording of three of our missing Guild members. Transcript is in the file. You can take a look, but basically, they’re acting and talking in total unison. The staff shrink’s never seen anything like it.”
“Unison?” Remy made the immediate jump. Some kind of mind control. He’d have to look at the footage, but that type of behaviour sounded like the link unit work that the Russians had been focused on during the 90s.
“Totally.”
“Was Cardin ever tested for de X gene?”
“In prison. He’s a low-scale empathy or something. Basically just gives him an edge in poker. They didn’t even bother to neutralize him, it was so minor.”
“Just curious.” So Cardin couldn’t be controlling them mentally on his own. Unless the samples they found at his apartment involved some kind of experiment. Perhaps with this doctor involved? The lid looked like a secure bioweapon transport lid, which meant he might have access to some kind of agent. “Merci, George. If you hear anything, let me know.”
“We’ll see. Oh, and Gambit? Make sure we don’t have to bring you in. That gets a little expensive, especially after what happened with Marcel. The warrant is still out on that case, and if we happen to get our hands on the main suspect, well…” George spread his hands wide, implying all manner of unpleasantness. Remy just nodded as he left the bar.
After watching the DVD, LeBeau contacts Moira MacTaggert to get some answers.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/x_logs/882523.html?#cutid1
Remy finally realises the plans of the Brood, but might not live long enough to tell anyone.
Four days wasted, and the guild deadlines were almost on them. The day after tomorrow, the guilds would go to war, no matter what Tante said. LeBeau was convinced he had the evidence to prove that the disappearances were Cardin and his access to this CF14 agent, using it to boost his own psionic abilities and take control of the bodies and minds of the Guild members. It made sense for him to start with those who had kicked him out the first time. If he was able to start a massive guild war, then he could pick up the pieces after and control the city.
The problem with that plan was that Cardin seemed to have abandoned it in the last week or so. LeBeau had caught up with a couple of them, able to view them from a distance. They moved with unnatural coordination, not identical but with unerring synchronicity, as if they were appendages of a great whole. Like a flock or a swarm in many ways.
In the last week, it seemed that they were looking for younger people, not even members of the Guild. He’d seen the process briefly, a simple spiking of a drink, or a tiny aerosol blast into the ear. LeBeau had been careful not to be seen, and that had limited him greatly. But it seemed that after twenty minutes or so, the victim would ’faze out’ almost, and a few minutes later, came back to activity, already exhibiting the odd changes LeBeau had noted in the others.
So, if they didn’t care about the gang war, what was Cardin’s new goal? Remy didn’t have an answer for that yet, as he carefully shadowed one of the people from what he was calling the Brood in his mind.
They’d been crisscrossing the streets for hours, looking around at the celebration preparations. It was the last Saturday before the giant Mardi Gras parade, and traditionally the largest party night. All of the bars and restaurants were preparing for the flood of people, and the Brood flickered in and out between them, observing the details.
Remy followed two of them into an alley, staying just back at the edge of the wall. Another of them went by behind him, and Remy focused on fading into the background, making himself ignorable. A thought suddenly struck him.
They were out in force, running up and down the festival sites. In five or six hours, those places would be filled cheek to cheek with people. If there was only a small amount of the CF14 agent, this was the way to get maximum dispersal. Nasty lectures about biowar protocols flipped up in his memory. That’s what they had to be doing; defining a profile for maximum agent exposure. Remy’s pace quickened down the alley.
He pulled up short as the two men he’d been following suddenly stepped out into view. His spatial sense picked up another two behind him, and Remy’s powers started breaking down the positions and avenues open to him.
“He.”
“Is.”
“The.”
“One.” They said, words coming from different mouths but perfectly stacked, as if from one speaker. Obviously, they had saw him in the street and set up an ambush. LeBeau wasn’t especially worried. Four men, even with training, would have difficulty matching up against his powers.
“Guess you found me den, hommes. Dat mean dis is de part dat you threaten me?”
“No.”
“This.”
“Is.”
“The.”
“Part.”
“Where.”
“You.”
“Die.”
“Snappy comeback.” Remy said as they closed. He didn’t have his staff, and he couldn’t use lethal measures to bring them down without killing the innocent hosts. Mind you, disabling was still an option, and LeBeau readied himself.
Even former master assassins can be surprised, and only Remy’s spatial sense kept him from being crippled in the first seconds. The four men moved as a single directed entity, overwhelming him almost immediately. Remy lashed out with a kick, shattering one of their kneecaps as two of them grabbed him, hauling him roughly to the right even as the third placed a kick directly into the space he was forced.
LeBeau broke one hold, delivering a precision strike to the kidneys but to little effect. The other forced him into the wall headfirst, gashing open the side of his head. An elbow crushed the man’s nose with a wet crunch, forcing him back even as blows rained on LeBeau’s back. Remy swept low, unbalancing the last two and launching himself back, away from them. Their movements were too perfect, exactly coordinated to the extent that it overwhelmed his mutant speed and senses. Remy looked around as another three of the Brood entered the alley, and he was sure more were on their way.
“Least no one saw dis.” He muttered, and ran to the opposite end of the alley, Brood close in pursuit. Remy dodged traffic, cut down a second alley, his nose telling him he was closing on the docks. He risked a quick glance behind, and saw that now it was nine Brood following, their footsteps echoing as they hit the concrete in perfect unison. Gambit raced between shipping containers, and lit out on the concrete quay. Now twelve Brood were in the chase, slowly drawing a net around him. Remy considering trying to fight his way out, but discarded the idea. If that was his only option, lethal was the only avenue open to him.
Remy retreated back to one of the docks, casting around for an escape route. His eye caught one of the loading pivot cranes, still poised for cargo lifting at the edge of the mooring links. The long arm of the crane extended almost fifty meters out over the water, and an idea formed in LeBeau’s mind. Ignoring the blood dripping down his face, he starting running towards it, even as the first Brood reached the dock, trapping him on it. Gambit jumped, catching the edge of the crane structure and hauled himself up it. It only took a minute to reach the top of it, and he steadied himself on the long arm. The Brood clustered around the base, starting to shake the unit to dislodge him. Remy raced always the arm, his mutant agility the only thing keeping him on, until he reached the edge of the arm, extended way out over the water. Remy launched himself off it, diving cleanly into the brackish waters below, temporarily out of the reach of the Brood.
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