Scorched Earth Policy, Part 7

7 – Idle Hands Chen wasn’t taking her calls right now. Z got routed to a functionary named McCallum, who had his knickers in a twist over how shot up the guys in the woods were (and they didn’t find their being bound with hockey tape very amusing either). After asking how the Eurotrash dirt bags ended up getting so perforated with bullets, she finally told him, “They got in my way.” Did he think she was out in the woods for fun? He sounded flustered for a moment, but then got back on track with the usual “I don’t know how they do things in MI-6, but -” which she’d heard in some form or another a hundred times. She’d even heard it from MI-6. Shan took the time to change clothes, coming back into the living room wearing jeans not spattered...

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Scorched Earth Policy, Part 6

6 – In Action The first shot pinged off the hood, making both Z and Shan duck behind their open doors. Other shots went wide, although one cracked the windshield with a sound like rime creaking under the heat of the morning sun. “You got a lotta nerve, you stupid bitch!” a man roared from the shack. Shan looked at her across the seat. “A friend of yours?” “People love me,” Z replied, as she fired back blindly with one of the nines. She wasn’t trying to hit anything, just trying to make him stop shooting for a second so she could gauge where he was firing from. “You’re a people person,” Shan agreed. “Can I surrender?” “I’d let ya, but I bet they’ll think it’s a trap.” “What if I swore it wasn’t?” He ducked even lower...

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Scorched Earth Policy, Part 5

5 – Greetings From The Great North Woods In the end, she decided that she could kill in front of Shan, just not in any way that suggested execution style. Which left her with a bit of problem, because these guys just weren’t resisting. But she did agree to keep in touch with Chen, and hadn’t bothered for long enough that CSIS were probably starting to doubt her intentions. At least Shan had some hockey tape in his Jeep. They used it to tape the thugs’ wrists behind their back, and taped their ankles together up to their calves. Just because he was bleeding so much, Shan taped up the bullet wounded knee of the more severely injured guy. Shan advised him to tell the doctors not to just rip it off as they might take skin with it, but for his kind advice...

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Scorched Earth Policy, Part 4

4 – Waiting, Phase One Four Days Earlier It was so weird to see Shan with kids. It was even odder to see that they looked up to him. Z was sitting in what would probably be considered the “cheap seats”, if the Rec Center could be said to have cheap seats. It gave her not only a good look at the skating rink, but at the few people in the seats who were sitting watching, presumably parents and family members ready to take the kids home when this was all over. Z found, even after a short amount of surveillance, that she could pick out different types amongst the people. The “hockey dads” – guys who took it way too fucking seriously – all sat with rigid postures or clenched fists, acting like every kid who stumbled on the ice or took bad...

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