Resistance by John Birmingham Page A

slightly into what looked like a combat-ready stance. He had turned himself forty-five degrees away from the nearest of Trinder’s agents and was holding up both hands, almost as though he cradled an invisible baby in his arms. It wasn’t an unnatural stance. He looked like a man having a perfectly reasonable discussion, the sort of man who liked to speak with his hands, perhaps. But with Dave’s vision newly attuned to such things, and with one of Trinder’s Men in Black holding his caved-in face between bloodied hands, it seemed quite obvious that the concierge was not the mincing ass-bandit Dave Hooper had taken him for.
    Or maybe he was, but he just happened to be a really badass bandit. Dave suppressed a chortle at his private joke.
    ‘Get rid of them,’ said Trinder, pointing at the techs again. As if by peeling off a couple of them he’d somehow got his way, instead of being thwarted.
    ‘I’ll get the doctor,’ Alec offered, hastening to exit the scene. A couple of Trinder’s men helped the injured camera guy and his now subdued offsider out through the mess they had made of the room.
    The injured agent made no move to leave with them. Instead he tried to staunch the flow of blood with a handkerchief which had been white but was now a red ruin. Alec paused at the door motioning back over his shoulder to his colleague.
    ‘Armando, seriously, I think it’s best we leave these gentlemen to their business.’
    The concierge, or style maven, or whatever the hell he was, favoured Trinder and Heath with a cold glare. He held his position long enough to make sure everybody in the room knew he was only leaving because his boss had asked him to.
    ‘Pussy,’ he said to the man whose nose he had broken, before following Alec out the door. That left Georgia Knox as the only ‘civilian’ in the room. Dave had no illusions about his own status. Trinder had already given him the impression he was little more than government property. Heath might have dressed it up in some bullshit about him being ‘part of the team’ or something after New Orleans, but it hadn’t escaped Dave’s attention that he had not been without a military escort since waking up in the hospital three days earlier.
    ‘I’m not leaving,’ said Georgia, just in case anybody remained in doubt.
    ‘That’s fine,’ said Heath, ‘but we are.’
    ‘Whoa,’ said Trinder throwing up one hand like a traffic cop. ‘I have travel orders for Mr Hooper alone. Not for you, Captain, or any of your merry men.’
    Dave laughed. ‘Are you trying to lure me into your van? Are we having a stranger danger moment here, Agent Trinder? Because my mother warned me about going off with odd men.’
    Trinder did not even bother looking at him, keeping his eyes fixed on Heath.
    ‘I have orders from the National Intelligence Assay Group to secure Mr Hooper and conduct him to a location I am not at liberty to disclose to you, where he will assist us with OSCAR’s investigations into any and all hostile incursions into CONUS since the on-water incident at datum point Longreach . . .’
    ‘Did you say incursions? Plural?’ Georgia demanded to know. ‘Have there been more that you haven’t told us about like New York, or . . .’ She frowned for a moment and looked at Dave, pleading with her eyes.
    He grinned. ‘Buttecrack. Or, you know, beau-cray.’
    Trinder spun on him, but seemed to catch himself at the last moment, perceptibly shifting his attention to the young female producer.
    ‘I don’t know what you think you’ve heard,’ he said, ‘but you won’t be repeating any wild rumours and causing unnecessary panic on my watch.’
    Dave’s attention was split between Trinder and Heath, and he missed the slight movement of the agent behind Georgia until it was too late. He jabbed her in the neck with something that looked like a small squeeze tube and she yelped in surprise and pain before her eyes rolled back into her head and she started to slump to the