Chapter 18 The HIMF
Late that afternoon Dignity and Reason descended the stairs of Grace House, having been summoned by Grace to a meeting in the dining room. They had been told only that they were needed for a mission, and they were weary and resentful about it. The two weeks allowed for objections to the donation of Founders Grove to the City had not yet passed, so technically Dignity was not free from that entanglement. Neither was it Good Friday yet, the day Grace had said they would be expected to do something for him. They had been anticipating a little time off from the stress and felt like members of a bomber crew that had been on too many missions. Reason had only just returned from a shift at the Mammon Mart.
Passing through the ground floor, they encountered Faith, whose face glowed with cheer.
“Going to the meeting in the dining room?” asked the mother of the Orchard family. “You are? Well, be ready for a surprise!” She laughed happily. “No, I won’t tell you, except someone has turned up. I’ll be in there waiting for you. Come on, and you’ll see.” With a bounce to her step, she hurried on ahead of them.
Ambassador Grace intercepted them outside the dining room door. “I want you to know how thankful I am to you for coming,” he said.
“What’s up?” Reason asked briskly, feeling not at all thankful in return.
“There’s a plan afoot to buy more time for Leasing House. Come in and join the team that’s being assembled.”
When they entered, they simply stood and stared, for if the people seated around the table were all members of the team Grace had spoken of, then terrible mistakes had been made, for some of them were startlingly and even shockingly inappropriate. Faith they had known would be here, and they were not surprised to see Agent Prayer of the HIA (or Heavenly Intelligence Agency). Even the presence of Wisdom was not alarming, though he was plainly too young for such things. But what was Prevarica Leasing doing sitting beside him? Had she wondered in not knowing about the meeting and no one had thrown her out yet? When the girl turned from chatting with Wisdom and greeted them warmly, their response was cold. Even worse, seated just beyond Prevarica, casually smoking a cigarette and paying no attention to anyone, was Mammonette.
Reason’s little shoulders shuddered. She looked up at Dignity with a fixed, unyielding expression and said quietly, “That’s it for me. I can only take so much.”
“Better sit down,” he replied. “I don’t understand this any better than you do, but I can tell Grace is serious.”
“All right, I’ll hear him out,” she said with the tone of someone granting a special favor to a door-to-door salesman.
She sat down beside Dignity across the table from Prevarica and Mammonette. Grace sat too but not at the head of the table, which remained unfilled.
“Our mission leader is delayed,” the old man said to them. “When he arrives, I intend to leave you in his hands, but for now I will say this. Heaven’s King wants Leasing House, and since demolition has been put off till tomorrow morning, we have a slice of time in which to do something that will keep its attainment possible. Not probable but possible. I know that some of you are not feeling quite at ease with this, but…oh, but here is your leader.”
A tall, lean, and handsome young man had walked in. He greeted them all by name, shook hands, received a few hugs, and—while Grace was leaving the room—sat down confidently at the head of the table.
Reason had not seen much of twenty-six year old Patience Orchard since he had turned fourteen and qualified for the Heavenite Military Academy. He had been nearly thrown out of the Academy for playing pranks but had survived with a B average and had gone on to attend a Heavenite College as an ROTC student and philosophy major. Then he had spent two years as an army officer before being recruited into the HIA. Since then his life had been not only remote from his family but mysterious as well. Despite all this, Reason hardly thought of him as a responsible adult but more as the goofy adolescent who used to tease his ‘Aunt’ Reas’ with practical jokes and absurd riddles. How could ‘Paish’ be an intelligence agent? Yet here he was, looking not just confident but overconfident.
“I’ll just jump right in, because we’ve got to make up for some lost time,” he said to them cheerfully. “My own fault. I just got back from a mission a few days ago, and since then I’ve spent a lot of my time on the Gloria Dothan supervising the work on some vehicles we’re going to need. Mammonette is loaning us the use of a couple limos that the City government made available to her and her husband,” he nodded and smiled toward Mammonette, “and the techies on the ship have equipped them with ejection seats and various weapons, and made them able to track each other’s position.”
“Hang on a minute. What kind of mission is this?” Dignity asked, astonished.
“Huh, Uncle Dig?”
“You said weapons? What kind of weapons?”
“Oh, surface to surface missiles and that kind of thing. Probably won’t use missiles though, because there’s no time to train the drivers on how to operate them. I guess we could be doing that now, but we only have a few hours and we need to make a plan instead.”
From Reason’s throat came a high pitched sound something like a tin whistle, and everyone turned to look at her. “Patience, what is this?” she said in a voice so tight it almost failed. “Are you telling us you’ve been in the City for days, and that you’ve spent all your time souping up limos with weapons we can’t use; and that, even though we’re a bunch of amateurs, you’ve allowed no time to train us; and did I hear you say you’ve got no plan?”
Patience laughed easily. “Welcome to intelligence work, Aunt Reason. Actually, this situation is better than usual. I’ve got a tentative plan and just need to talk with some people individually to try to find the bugs in it. Hey, if you think the timing is tight now, you should have seen me six months ago when I was in Illinois. On that mission I was totally flying by the seat of my pants, just making it up from moment to moment.”
“And how did that mission turn out?” she asked pointedly.
“Ugh, don’t ask. I got involved with a lovely lady from the other side and things kind of fell apart. You can’t win them all.”
Dignity laughed. “You mean you were deceived by the beautiful foreign spy?”
“Patience!” Faith scolded. “How often have I told you to get to know a girl’s parents first?”
“Aw, mom.”
“So do we form a real plan now,” Reason said, “or just make it up from moment to moment?”
“A real plan, sure, but first let me say that these limos are recognized by every policeman and security guard in town and will get us past any gate or checkpoint. Not bad, eh?”
“Not bad if we can trust the person we’re getting them from,” Reason said, while feeling her color heighten on her face and neck.
“Oh, that. Well, let me reassure you that Mammonette is working for us now as a double agent. Lawyer Means sent her to me because she’s on the verge of being framed by Chief Sordid for the murder or attempted murder of her husband.”
Mammonette stirred and put out her cigarette in a tiny ashtray she had brought with her. “They want the Mammon fortune,” she said icily. “The City is bankrupt, but Mammon Enterprises could keep it going for a while, so the City leaders called on Sordid to find some dirt on me, so they could get me arrested and have a clear path to the money. But he couldn’t find anything on me.”
“Nice way of putting it,” Patience commented. “Not that there wasn’t plenty but just that they couldn’t find it, huh?”
Mammonette actually smiled briefly at this, so that Reason saw in a flash that these two had already established some sort of friendship.
“Well, I don’t make it easy for them,” Mammonette replied archly. “So then they manufactured evidence that I was neglecting Mammon’s care. Due to the pre-nup agreement, I’m very limited in how much of Mammon’s fortune I control directly, I mean if I were to lo
se Power of Attorney. So as soon as the court hearing is over, and if neglect is proved, then Mr. Power is supposed to take over from me as POA. When I’m no longer making decisions for Mammon and signing things, Power will step in and take control of Mammon Enterprises until Mammon dies. And there goes every red cent he and I have slaved for over decades. As soon as I can get a lawyer, I’m getting set to appeal.”
“Things have to move fast to suit the Mayor,” Patience put in for her, “and an appeal will slow things down. So Sordid’s next step will be to spring a trap that will remove her from Mammon House. Mammonette has learned about this from a mole she has in City Intelligence. Like I already said, Chief Sordid will manufacture evidence that she tried to murder her husband; or, better yet, Sordid will murder him and frame her for it. Seems unnecessary, but Sordid is a very thorough guy. When he wants to hurt somebody, he makes sure they can’t ever hit back.”
“He’s not satisfied with ruining me, he wants to annihilate me,” Mammonette said.
Having heard this, Reason now saw that Mammonette really could be of use to this mission. But could be, she reflected, is a mile off from will be.
“I should have mentioned too,” Patience said, “that Mammonette is also letting you off work with pay, Aunt Reas’, for the rest of the week, so you’ll be freed up for the mission. You see, there’s lots of things she can do for us.”
“What can we do for her, though?” Reason asked. “What have you offered her, Paish?”
“Hey, it’s funny when people still call me that. Anyway, Aunt Reas’, Mammonette came to me with the idea that we could, in the course of tonight’s mission, eliminate Sordid, get him out of the way.”
“Do—do what?”
“Yeah, and that would wreck the effort to frame her with murder, because Sordid is so cautious he keeps total control of such things, just to himself. Knock him out, and Mammonette gets months or longer before the City could put the scheme together again. Of course, she’ll still have to fight the neglect charge, but she’ll be in a much stronger position.”
“But you don’t mean assassination?” Faith said with wide eyes.
“Oh. Sorry, mom, but that’s part of what I do. But really, it doesn’t have to be assassination. No, I’m thinking that we can just make him look so bad to Power and Therion that they fire him. Putting the lost memo into Power’s hands should do that.” He turned to Reason. “Hey, Aunt Reas’! Knock, knock!”
“Wh-what?” she said, for she was still trying to recover from what he had said about assassination.
“Knock, knock.” He grinned at her ingratiatingly.
“Uh, who’s there?” she said in a ghost’s voice.
“Secret Agent Four.”
“Secret Agent Four who?”
“You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you?”
He laughed and most of those at the table joined him at least mildly. Reason compressed her lips and glared at him.
“Look, Patience, this is a pretty confidential discussion, and we have a member of the Leasing family here,” Dignity now said with a glance toward Prevarica. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Prevarica spoke up for herself. “Sure, he’s sure! I want you all to know that I’ve had a change of heart, just like I’ve been telling Wiz here. Right, Wiz? I don’t believe in the ways of the City anymore—not after they’re trying to tear down my house! So when Wisdom asked me to join your team—”
“You did?” Dignity said to Wisdom.
“Uh, yeah. Patience asked me to ask her.”
“When he asked me today,” Prevarica went on, “I was eager to help. After all, this is all about Leasing House, isn’t it? Shouldn’t a Leasing be involved? And I know now that I can trust the Heavenite government. I even gave Patience the originals of the secret report from Chief Sordid’s office. I’m casting my lot with you and no holding back.”
As she smiled angelically, Patience answered the insistent ring of his cell phone, and after a few moments, put it away again. “That was Chief Doohickey, a member of the crew of the Gloria Dothan. She has our equipment and vehicles ready for us and would like for us to meet her at the Heavenly Embassy to pick them up. So what we’ll do is just go get the stuff and then continue the meeting over there. Let me just say this for now. I guess Grace has told you all what our aim is: get Leasing House moved way down on the City’s demolition list. So I’m forming this HIMF team. That’s Heavenly Intelligence Mission Force.”
“Or Highly Improbable Mission Force,” Reason said quietly to Dignity but not quietly enough.
“Hey, that’s a good one, Aunt Reas’!” Patience said, and he repeated it loudly enough for everyone to hear. “How about Heaved In My Face? That’s one we made up in spy school.”