Hansel, on the other hand, was a realist, completely lacking in vanity. His focus was on getting the job done well and quickly, and getting out. Speed was of the essence, since Hansel had several stops to make before the night was over.

Hansel steered a delivery truck up to the warehouse compound’s security gate. The truck was a massive tandem special, two containers in line; the false St. Croix markings on its sides were indistinguishable from the real thing. The cargo inside the two containers, however, was not office equipment.

The night guard at the complex gate had been keeping himself awake in his glass-enclosed box by watching reruns of For Clan and Honor on a console-top tri-vid display. He didn’t look happy to see a big truck stopped at the barrier outside. He came out anyway, a disgusted expression on his face.

“You don’t get in without papers.”

“I’ve got papers,” Hansel said. He did indeed have papers; excellent forgeries, the best that Cullen Roi could provide. “Just wait a minute.”

He retrieved the forged papers from the truck cab’s under-dash compartment and made a show of looking through them before handing them out the window. “Here.”

“Not my job to let people in or out. Just my job to watch the gate.”

The guard took the papers anyway, and read through them, frowning. His lips didn’t move as he read, but Hansel suspected that it was a near thing. When he was done he raised his head and eyed Hansel with mistrust.

“It says here you were supposed to be delivering this stuff at five this afternoon.”

“Stuff happens,” said Hansel. “At five this afternoon I blew a flux circuit. I had to spend good money getting it fixed, too.”

The guard scowled like a teacher listening to an excuse for late homework. Hansel waited calmly.

The guard said, “You couldn’t have laid up somewhere for the night, could you?”

“Sorry,” Hansel said. “I’ve got things to do at home tomorrow. All I want to do is unload this stuff and be on my way.”

“Pass on through, then.”

“I need the papers back after you’ve signed them,” Hansel reminded him.

“Right.” The guard scrawled his name with a St. Croix giveaway pen and returned the papers. “Ramp’s around behind back. And don’t expect any help from me with the unloading.”

“Thank you,” said Hansel politely, but the man was already retreating into his lighted box.

The guard pressed a button on the security console, and the gate swung open. Hansel drove the big tandem truck into the warehouse compound and around to the rear of the main building. He stopped next to the loading dock, which was conveniently out of sight from the gate—yet another reason why this warehouse was one of the Kittery Renaissance’s chosen sites.

He got down from the cab, went over to the first container of the tandem pair, and knocked on the side panel.

“You guys can come out now.”

The panel slid open with a metallic groan, loud in the darkness. Hansel wasn’t unduly worried about the noise. Their presence inside the warehouse compound had been accepted and accounted for, and work sounds would be expected.

A half-dozen men climbed out of the first container. Like Hansel, they were dressed in workers’ coveralls with the St. Croix company logo embroidered across the shoulders in back. Maybe in storybooks and tri-vids the secret operatives made themselves invisible by dressing all in black, but Hansel knew better than that. Nobody in Geneva was as invisible as a manual laborer in his working attire.

“We don’t have much time,” he said as soon as the last man emerged from the container. “Get moving.”

The men swung a ramp down from the open side panel and began unloading boxes. The labels on the boxes identified them as containing preassembled metal filing cabinets and collapsible tri-vid reception tanks, manufactured by third parties and repackaged with the St. Croix logo.

Deceptive packaging, Hansel thought with amusement, in more ways than one. The boxes actually held an assortment of pistols—auto-pistols, lasers, and flamers—a few rifles and shotguns, and the ammunition to go with them, enough in this truck alone to outfit at least a company. Not all of them were likely to be needed, but there was no way to tell in advance which of the group’s weapons stockpiles would see the heaviest use on the day itself. It was necessary, therefore, to fully supply all of them.

The Kittery Renaissance had sunk a large percentage of its liquid funds into this project. If it failed, the movement would be toothless for a while, money depleted, members dead, or lost in the disappointment of failure. Those kinds of losses could spell the end of the whole organization.

We’ll just have to succeed, Hansel thought.

Hansel had the key codes for the locks on the warehouse doors. He got them open in seconds, both the small door at the top of the loading ramp, and the big garage-style door next to it. Inside, the warehouse was full of containers like the ones being off-loaded from the truck.

“Jacques, Benny,” he said. “Get down here and move some of this stuff out of the way.”

Two men, both built like drilling ’Mechs, detached themselves from the group of laborers. Jacques asked, “Where do you want us to put the stuff we’re moving?”

“Stack it a bit higher, move the boxes a bit closer together… we want our stuff mixed in with it, but still easy to find in a hurry.”

“Right you are, boss.”

“And make certain to leave enough room for the big surprise. We don’t want to spoil the day by having it found too soon.”

The men laughed and began shifting boxes. When all of the weapons and ammunition had been safely unloaded and concealed, Hansel returned to the truck. He mounted into the cab, started the engine, and brought the truck around so that he could back it through the big door and into the warehouse. It wouldn’t all fit—the cab and the front container were still outside—but the rear container was inside and out of sight. He hit the button on the cab console to open the back door of the rear container and lower its heavy-duty hydraulic ramp.

That done, he climbed down from the cab again. “All right, take her out.”

Two of the men climbed up into the container, the others waited outside it. A moment later a Fox armored car emerged from the truck’s dark interior, was pushed down the ramp and braced by the team to keep it from rolling out of control.

“Boss?” said Benny. “How are we going to hide something like that?”

“You’ll see.”

Soon, the armored car had been covered with a canvas drop cloth, its outline under the cloth obscured by boxes of office supplies—innocent ones this time—stacked on its flat surfaces. Half a dozen similar canvas drop cloths went over random piles of crates throughout the warehouse.

“The armored car doesn’t have to stay hidden forever,” Hansel explained. “Just so no one looks at it until Friday, that’s long enough.”

The work crew got back into the truck container. Hansel shut the warehouse doors and climbed into the cab. Shortly afterward, he was signing back out through the compound gate, on his way to repeat the process twelve more times, at different locations, before dawn brought returning workers and increased traffic to the streets of Geneva.