Free Lone Wolf by Nigel Findley

trivia—for example, everything you never wanted to know (and were too smart to ask) about the World Combat Cyclists League plus its past and current roster of sociopathic murderers . . . er, players, yeah, that’s it. He also likes archaic, nineteen-sixties “folk” music. After Big Bad Bart, I can forgive him for that, however. He also claims he could once play the Irish whistle before he goblinized and his fingers got too big. Under other circumstances, I could get to like him, but I can’t afford to let that happen. Which is probably what I hate most about undercover work.
    In the first week I got to see Blake in action, in casual face-to-face meetings and more formal settings like the war council where I introduced Ranger to the wonders of escrima. I learned a lot. First off, nothing Blake does is casual— nothing. It’s all planned out, every possible outcome, each permutation and combination worked through in that big head of his. I’ve seen him orchestrate a “chance, fortuitous” meeting with Bubba in the safe house hallway, disarming the cracker’s defenses and setting him at his ease, then “spontaneously” dropping the point that was the whole purpose of this game into the conversation, and watching the reaction.
    It’s a good technique, I’ll grant the man that. Ask somebody’s opinion formally, and they’ll react like you’re forcing them to commit—publicly and irrevocably—to that position. The result? They’ll weasel and double-talk and cover their hoops and spread the blame nine ways to Sunday. Trick them into letting that same opinion slip in a “casual” conversation, and you’ll hear the closest thing to the truth—the closest thing to their real opinion—that you can get out of them without magical mind-probes or torture.
    Blake’s a master of that technique, and others. He’s a frag of a leader. He listens to what everyone’s saying, everyone around him—and not only what they’re saying with their voices—and synthesizes it all into a kind of gestalt of the world. Nothing seems to surprise him, and he seems to know what people are going to say—me included—before they say it. He scares the fragging drek out of me. And what makes it worse is that I can’t even hate him.
    So in a week, I figure I’ve learned more about how the Seattle Cutters work —really work, deep down and dirty on the inside—than over the whole last eighteen months. Before I saw the execution of policy. Now I see that policy being made. If I’d known the movers and shakers were this fragging competent, I probably would have thrown this assignment back in my superiors’ faces. There aren't any overt, obvious threats to my life and limb, but I can feel, deep in my gut, that I’m in more danger now than I’ve been for the whole last year and a half.
    But enough sniveling. I was getting more real, hard intelligence about the Cutters than ever before—the deep, central, policy-related drek that I figure the Star put me here to scoop. Trouble was, it was getting a lot harder to find opportunities for getting my reports out. As Blake’s “personal aide” and gofer, I was basically on duty seven or eight hours a day and “on call” most of the rest of the time. That made it tougher to get to meets where I could hand off my reports.
    Frag, it was even hard making time to log onto UOL and check the message base. Who knows how many potential meets I hosed just because I didn’t know about them? But I figured that would change eventually. Things would settle down as I got more worked into the schedule. For the moment. all I could do was let my handlers at the Star know I was still alive and sucking air—a simple matter of posting innocuous responses on various message bases, the actual message in the fact that I responded at all, not in the words I used. Meanwhile, I would save up all the intelligence I was gathering for one motherfragger of a report when I finally got to deliver it.
    And the