Sister Time-Callys War 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

figleafed with a new look and reused as much as possible. It wasn't terribly safe, but then it wasn't a safe business. She tucked the small evening bag inside a pocket of a larger purse that had already been prepped.
    Cally and Harrison got the makeup table to themselves for a few minutes while Tommy ran the standard post op checks, downloads, and scrubs on the surveillance equipment and Papa dictated the post op report into his PDA. By the time they were ready for their own turn at the table, she and Harrison were through. She smiled gratefully as he ushered her over to a stool and went to work on her neck and shoulders. Certified massage therapist was not on the list of desirable secondary skills for operational team members. It should've been, and Cally was personally grateful for the luck of the draw that had put Harrison available for field assignment just when Grandpa was filling the vacancies on the team left by her sabbatical and Jay's timely demise.
    She knew the rest of the team, while glad to have her back, still missed George Schmidt. She could understand that. George was a damned good assassin and field man. Unlike his more flamboyant brother, he could blend into a crowd easily, either as a shortish, nondescript man or a teenage boy, if he chose.
    He had needed the brotherhood of being part of a working team to pull him through that awkward and painful grieving time after losing his father-in-law to the enemy, and then his wife to a sudden and severe infection bare months afterwards. Everyone agreed that her grief had weakened her system, and in the immediate aftermath of the organizational split of the humans from all but a small remnant of the Indowy and other galactics, the O'Neal Bane Sidhe had discovered quite unpleasantly just how much their internal emergency medical services had relied on access to the slab. Valerie Schmidt had been one of the casualties of the chaos.
    It was good for George to have had Harrison to get him over the hump of anger, where you just wanted revenge and wanted to kill any and every enemy culpably connected with your loss. Assassination was one job where you couldn't be impersonal forever and stay sane, but you couldn't let it get too personal, either. It was like walking a razor's edge all the time, while accepting horrible danger and risks of loss.
    Not many people could do it. She'd never figured out if she was supremely lucky or supremely unlucky that she could.
    By common consent they let Tommy and Papa leave first. Harrison didn't follow baseball, and she wouldn't have been able to stay for the game, anyway. Seventeen minutes after they left, she slid behind the wheel of her ancient, primer-colored Mustang. One of the things she liked about Harrison was he understood her need to drive her own car now and again. A natural gearhead, he had restored, enhanced, and carefully tuned the car so that it had more power than your average police interceptor, but had artistic rattles and clinks. The ever-so-slight smoke out the exhaust that implied (falsely) that it would soon need a ring job was the perfect finishing touch. The best part was that she could turn the special effects off, taking her baby out on a nice open stretch of road to listen to the engine purr. She didn't get to do it often enough, with one thing and another. Still, she could feel the power under her right foot, and that'd do for now. They drove out of the city in silence, watching the stars come out as they got beyond the smog belt. In Indiana she turned up a dirt road between two cornfields and followed it around to the back of a grain silo, where she hit the garage door opener and drove into the vehicle elevator.
    Underground—far underground—she parked it in her reserve space. One benefit of the split was plenty of parking. She waved Harrison off to whatever his evening plans were and went to turn in the night's take.
    The Base had none of the graffiti and vandalism which so dated the various SubUrbs. Still,