Joe Ledger: Special Ops

Chap. 1

So, there I was.

Buck naked.

Duct-taped to a chair.

Couple of hard-cases with no-mercy eyes and a bag of tools. Big generator on a hand truck. Wires with clamps.

You get the picture.

There’s shit creek, and there’s me way the hell up it without a paddle.

I hate my job.

Chap. 2

Roll it back a few hours and I was fully clothed — an Orioles home-game shirt over jeans and flip-flops. Wayfarers up on my hair, cup of Starbucks cradled between my palms. Tickets for that evening’s game against Philly. I had a Franklin on the game, and the oddsmakers were telling me I was going to see Philly go home in tears.

Life was a proverbial peach.

I’d come into the Warehouse to clean up a few things in my office. Some after-action reports I had to sign-off on. Equipment requisitions. Like that. Nothing important. For once the whole world seemed to be taking five, sitting one out. I’d taken Junie out dancing last night and, though I’m not exactly going to get my own reality show, Dancing with Special Ops, I didn’t disgrace myself, break Junie’s toes, or reinforce the stereotype that white boys from Baltimore cannot dance.

Even my dog, Ghost, was off the clock. Junie messaged me a selfie of herself in an electric blue string bikini with Ghost standing guard in case anyone who wasn’t me got too friendly. They were at Ocean Beach with Circe O’Tree, Lydia Ruiz, and the new gal on Echo Team, Montana. Girls’ day out. No testosterone allowed. Except of the canine variety.

At this point all I had to do was turn off my laptop and walk out of the building, ideally dropping my cell phone in a trash can in the parking lot. Sunny skies, baseball, way too much beer. Only a bloody fool who doesn’t understand the way the universe works would even think about saying, “What could go wrong?”

I swear that thought didn’t go through my head.

So, I turned off my laptop, got up, switched off the office lights, and reached for the doorknob.

Which is when my cell rang.

I don’t have different ringtones for each person I know. I’m not thirteen. However I swear to God I can tell when a call is coming in from my boss, Mr. Church. Maybe I’m psychic. Maybe there’s a tremor in the Force. Not sure. But I knew it was him before I even looked at the screen display.

Did I consider letting it ring through to voicemail?

Sure. Every time he calls.

Did I do that?

No.

I don’t have that luxury. I can’t.

Besides, Church isn’t the kind to make social calls or to chat about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. Not much for the small talk.

And I knew for certain that he knew I was taking the afternoon off.

On the other hand, as I dug my phone out of my jeans I cursed him, his entire family to the seventh generation, his DNA, and his houseplants.

I punched the button and said, “Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not.”

I sighed.

“Tell me anyway.”

Chap. 3

He told me.

“Myron Bishop wants to come in.”

I said, “Holy shit.”

Chap. 4

Half an hour later I was pulling into a parking slot at Mercury Tower in Baltimore. Still in jeans and flip-flops. This was a pickup, not a combat mission. Had my piece, though, ’cause I’m not an idiot. Beretta 92f snugged into a clamshell shoulder holster under the Orioles shirt, and a rapid-release folding knife clipped to the inside of my right pants pocket.

The tower was forty-one stories, built during the let’s-cover-everything-in-glass phase of the eighties and early nineties, so it was basically a featureless oblong that was a sun-glare hazard for miles. Lots of security. They had to buzz me into the lobby, then made me stand for five minutes at the desk. I can charm my way past most receptionists, but this one looked like they stuffed Clint Eastwood into a wool suit and wig. She was maybe six hundred years old. None of them good years.

She scowled at me like I was something the dog rolled in and demanded to see my I.D. I fished out a set that said I was “Jeffrey Book, Feng Shui Consultant.” I batted my lashes at her and said that Mr. Bishop was thinking about redesigning his office and I was here to help him balance the energies to encourage a synergistic flow.

The receptionist — who had the improbable name of Mrs. Daisy — gave me a look that I was sure could cause some kind of liver damage. She called Mr. Bishop and looked pained when she found out I was expected. Her nails, as long and dark as a wicked witch’s should be, tapped some keys, and a temporary I.D. came out of the printer. As I peeled off the back and pasted it to my shirt, two large security types came and flanked me.

I let Frick and Frack escort me to the elevator. They pushed all the buttons. They rode with me to the thirty-ninth floor. They didn’t say a word.

Fine with me. Chris Tillman would be throwing the first pitch and the crowd at Oriole Park at Camden Yards would be yelling instead of me. I wasn’t feeling chatty.

As we soared upward I thought about Myron Bishop.

He was, by everyone’s estimation, a very bad man.

Brilliant, sure. Borderline supergenius, with more biotech patents on file than I’ve had hot dinners. His company, Accelerator Biologics, was at the absolutely bleeding edge of performance-enhancement science. And we’re not talking about a new kind of Viagra. Bishop and his mad scientists were building better soldiers and better athletes. No human growth hormones or anabolic steroids. Nothing that crude. He was using transgenic science to rebuild the DNA so the right genes code for lean-mass builders, increase the natural β2-adrenergic receptor agonists, and new ways for the body to self-regulate testosterone so that the subjects were real manly men capable of greater feats of strength, speed and endurance but without having their nuts shrink to acorns or their brains turn to mush. In theory.

He started out doing this way off the radar for sports teams and got caught. That led to six years of litigation and rulebook burning to decide if genetic manipulation was covered under the standard doping rules. It wasn’t. It is now.

By the time the court case was settled, Bishop had sold his interest in sports and was inking contracts with the military.

Not our military, though.

He was taking obscene amounts of money from Russia, from China, from North Korea, from Iran, and from a bunch of little countries who had more money than ethics.

The result? A new breed of super soldier.

Not exactly on a par with Captain America but pretty damn tough. On average, thirty percent more muscle density, fifteen percent greater potential for speed. Enhanced reaction time. Amped-up wound-repair system.

My guys in Echo Team had tussled with some of these jokers and very nearly had our asses handed to us. The whole “subdue and restrain” thing had to get tossed out the window. Instead we had to up the game on them in ugly ways that left a lot of hair on the walls.

Bishop and his company came under a lot of fire. We froze his accounts, had him audited, hacked his email, tapped his phone, and hauled him in front of subcommittees and judges.

We did that a lot, with enthusiasm.

He skated every goddamn time.

Apparently the thing he’s smartest about is planning ahead. Before he went into the super-soldier business he hired enough lawyers to sink the Titanic. They were able to establish a lack of illegality because none of the customers in any of the named countries were in any way attached to the military nor were they associated with terrorist organizations. What Bishop had done, you see, was break the research into pieces and sell those pieces to medical researchers, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies whose primary customers were kids and the elderly.

Fucker used a variation on the nuns-and-orphans gambit.

His lawyers put the burden on our State Department lawyers to prove that any single action Bishop took or sale he made could, in any way, be construed as a terrorist act. No, they could not. Could anything he did be construed as actions taken against the national security of the United States? No. Not really, because each single action was carefully tied to a humanitarian target market. The designer β2-adrenergic receptor agonists, for example, were only sold to hospitals and labs researching asthma and pulmonary disorders.

So, no one was able to prove within reasonable doubt that Bishop was anything more than a good businessman whose love of humanity transcended national borders and political agendas. Bishop’s PR people tried the government in the court of public opinion, succeeding in painting us as the bad guys and him as a saint. There was even a picture on the cover of Time that showed him handing a puppy to sick kids in a rural Chinese hospital. The kids were smiling and cute, the puppy was adorable, and Bishop contrived to look like fucking Santa Claus.

Good place to pause and vomit.

Here’s the truth that we knew but couldn’t prove. Whereas the science was apparently innocent when viewed piecemeal, when combined those bits added up to biotech that could — and indeed did — create superior soldiers with significant physical enhancement.

That’s who I was going to meet.

I’d met him before. Outside of a federal courthouse once. And again at one of his labs we raided. That raid, by the way, was based on bad intel. We busted the place up pretty good, and he handed us our collective asses in court to the tune of eleven million for repairs and a variety of nebulous damages.

When I saw him a third time at a sidewalk café in New Orleans where I knew he’d be, I had Top and Bunny with me, and they kept Bishop’s bodyguards entertained while we had a chat. Over coffee and some very nice pastries I told him that we were, at that moment, in the process of dismantling the labs of several of his clients. It was a global, coordinated hit. Very illegal, very off the radar, and very well coordinated. Our boys plus some day-players from Mossad, Barrier in the U.K., the Belgian Pathfinders, an Austrian Jagdkommando team, and even Iceland’s Víkingasveitin. Bunch of others. We didn’t target the hospitals or civilian research labs, but we’d spent two years making a hit list of covert labs that were actually making super soldiers for sale to private contractors like Blackwater and Blue Diamond.

There was not one shred of actionable evidence to link Bishop to these labs, though everybody knew he was involved. He was just too good with burning any bridges that led to him. The best we could do was cut his client list by at least half — call it a thirty-billion-dollar annual loss — and maybe put the fear of God into the other half.

I had the job of making sure that Bishop didn’t take any calls while this was happening. I wasn’t in the field because I was healing from some injuries I’d taken on a gig. This was not long after I got shot during the Majestic Black Book affair.

So, it was a couple of guys sitting at a table drinking café-au-lait and eating beignets while half of Bishop’s empire burned.

I made sure that we were photographed at that table. That photo was leaked to the right people.

Were we setting him up as the guy who sold out his own people to the Feds?

Fuck yeah, we were.

It was less than four hours before he started getting death threats.

Over the next few months there were sixteen separate attempts to assassinate him. His car was blown up — he wasn’t in it, alas. One of his lawyers went to meet Jesus, so we all put it in the win column. Couple of snipers took shots at him, and for a fun five minutes we thought Bishop was down, but the wily bastard actually had doubles. Not clones or anything that cool. Just actors hired to impersonate him and, as it turned out, die for him. Someone torched his house, and someone else mailed him a birthday card filled with anthrax.

None of it got anywhere near Bishop.

His empire was crumbling, but he still had enough money to hire actual loyalty from some of his super soldiers.

Which brings us to why I’m not drinking cold beer and watching the Orioles spank the Phillies.

When Mr. Church called me he said, “Myron Bishop wants to come in.”

“’Come in’ as in…?”

“He wants us to protect him.”

If I’d been drinking coffee I’d have snorted it out of my nose. “I saw a t-shirt with a bull’s-eye on it. Can we just mail that to him with a nice card saying ‘have a nice and very short life’?”

“Tempting as that is, Captain,” said Church, “the State Department would like some quality time with Bishop.”

“Wait, he wants to confess?”

“In a very limited way. He claims that he has become aware of some improprieties in his foreign holdings, has become alarmed by them, and wishes to bring them to the attention of the appropriate authorities and cooperate in every way possible.”

“It must hurt your mouth to repeat that.”

“I’ll take an aspirin later.”

“What’s the play?”

“Unclear. Bishop is difficult to trust under any circumstances. However, even someone like him must feel the pressure of being under constant threat of assassination. He can’t go out, he can’t date, his social life has become nonexistent.”

“And I feel so bad for him, too. I may cry.”

“Try to rein in your emotions long enough to pick him up.”

“How far ‘in’ does he want to come? Are we putting him in WITSEC?”

“No. He doesn’t trust the Marshal’s service to protect him.”

“Fair enough. Most of them would want to shoot him.”

“He requested you.”

“Me as is in the DMS or me as in—?”

“You personally.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that. When we met at that café, I pretty much told him I thought he was dog shit on my shoe. Words to that effect.”

“Ah.”

“I also threatened to tie him to a chair and wire a car battery to his nutsack.”

“Well…I don’t think he’s entranced by your charm,” said Church.

“Then—?”

“He considers you a professional.”

“I am.”

“You didn’t try to arrest him. You didn’t actually use violence on him.”

“I insulted him.”

“Irrelevant. He’s in biotech, so he’s used to that. He said that you didn’t try to provoke him into any action that would have allowed you to use force on him.”

“Wasn’t that kind of moment.” Which was true in its way. I’d heard he had a bad temper, so I was deliberately rude in hopes he’d swing on me. He didn’t, so the whole thing stayed in low gear.

“You could have turned it into one,” said Church. “It was probably the only time when someone could have. You chose not to. He said it was very professional. It engendered a degree of trust. Now he wants to come in and talk to us and there aren’t many people left whom he trusts.”

“So I lose a day at Camden Yards for a dickhead everyone wants to see in a body bag. How did I get so lucky?”

“Perhaps you were too charming for your own good.”

“Cute. So what do I do with him once I have him? We putting him in a hotel under guard or do you want me to take him to the safe house in Elkton?”

“Did you ever finish the repairs on the holding cell at the Warehouse? The one where the toilet backed up?”

“No. The plumber comes in next Monday and….”

“Put him there,” he said.

He disconnected without further comment.

Chap. 5

I considered the way Frick and Frack flanked me on the elevator. I was in the center of the car, they were fanned to either side, quarter-turned toward me. Both had their jackets unbuttoned, which meant they were carrying. If they were both right handed, the guy to my right — Frack — was going to have to reach into his jacket toward me, which meant I could jam him back against the wall and keep the piece in its holster. Frick would have to reach across his chest away from me, because his piece would be hanging under his left armpit, the barrel facing away. If it came to a watershed moment, I’d bodyblock Frick and kick Frack’s kneecap off.

I generally don’t rehearse this sort of thing, preferring the fluidity of spontaneous reaction. But these guys were not top tier. I doubted they were graduates of a super-soldier program. More like meat in off-the-rack suits.

They didn’t make a play, so we didn’t need to explore the extent of their health plan.

Fair enough.

Maybe this would go by the numbers.

The car stopped and the doors opened and my assessment of the day changed.

Myron Bishop was right there, waiting directly outside. He was well dressed in a five-thousand-dollar suit and a million-dollar smile. There were four very, very large men behind him. They were smiling too.

Myron Bishop said, “Fuck you.”

And he jabbed me in the throat with a stun gun.

Chap. 6

So, there I was.

Buck naked.

Duct-taped to a chair.

I was never completely unconscious, though Bishop and — I think — both Frick and Frack kept juicing me with the stun guns.

Stun guns fucking hurt.

I twitched and jerked and pissed myself and screamed.

They laughed their asses off.

Despite the constant shocks, I didn’t make it easy for them. I strained my muscles, fought them, made them earn it.

One of the big goons with Bishop took my rapid-release knife and cut my clothes off. Except for my Orioles shirt. He pulled that off and set it carefully aside. Everything else was slashed to ribbons. He even looped my socks over the knife and cut them in half. While I can appreciate attention to detail, that seemed somewhere between petty and psychotic.

I hadn’t been wearing my earbud because this didn’t seem like that kind of situation. The bad call was entirely my own. No radio, no backup.

Had one of my guys done something as rookie as this, I’d have fried him.

There’s a lesson about hubris in all this. Balls.

The big goon with my knife was one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen. His face was lumpy and distorted, his nose flat and crooked, his eyes buried in little pits of gristle. And damn if he didn’t stink. Worst body odor I’ve ever smelled, and I’ve been to the great apes exhibit at the zoo. When he turned away to unload my weapon and place it on the table, I saw that his thighs and buttocks were unnaturally lumpy and huge. Not sure whether this was a bad side effect of the super-soldier formula or the wrong kind of manic weight training. Or whether he was simply a freak.

The other two goons were merely big. Six-five, six-six. Muscles upon muscles. No mercy at all in their eyes.

While all this was happening, Myron Bishop sat on the edge of a desk, swinging one foot and listening to a smooth jazz station. Kenny G or some shit.

He finally waved the goon squad back. He sent Frick and Frack down in the elevator.

“Nobody comes up until I say so,” he told them. “That means no calls, no nothing.”

They grunted like obedient dogs and disappeared.

Bishop pushed off from the desk and strolled toward me. “You know, I’ve seen every James Bond movie. I have them all on DVD. Great stuff.”

“Yeah? Who’s your favorite Bond?”

“Not my point,” he said. “In the movies there’s always this scene where the bad guy captures Bond, ties him to some kind of device….”

“Like the laser table in Goldfinger,” I said, trying to stretch this out.

He snapped his fingers. “Exactly. Or the villain invites him to dinner. Either way, the bad guy does this info dump where he brags about his evil master plan and basically tells Bond all the information he’d need to fuck him up if Bond ever got free. And Bond always gets free and then fucks him up.”

I said nothing.

“Which is crazy, ’cause why the hell would anyone do that? I mean, how stupid is that?”

“It doesn’t adequately reflect the real world.”

He grinned and nodded. “It’s a plot device. You read the books?”

“Sure. When I was a kid.”

“Same problem in the books,” said Bishop, nodding and grinning. Couple of guys bullshitting about movies. Like any other day. “But in the real world the hero would almost never meet the villain. Bond might tear down Blofeld’s plan or infiltrate Dr. No’s hollowed-out volcano with a bunch of ninjas, but if the super villain was there he’d be killed in any resulting firefight, am I right?”

“Ideally.”

“Unless—?” he prompted.

“Unless,” I said, “the op was to apprehend the bad guy and turn him over to an interrogation team.”

“Bingo. The hero and villain aren’t really going to meet and have a heart-to-heart. That doesn’t happen.”

“It doesn’t always happen.”

“What, you mean it does sometimes?”

“Life’s weird like that.”

He thought about it. “Fuck. I didn’t know that. You’ve done it? You’ve had that James Bond info-dump moment?”

“Not over dinner,” I said. “And never with a laser cannon.”

“But you’ve had it.”

“I guess.”

He looked excited. “I’d love to hear about it. Could you…you know…tell me about it? Just one or two.”

I smiled at him. “You are, of course, shitting me here.”

“No, I’m dead serious.”

“I’m tied to a chair with my junk hanging out.”

The goons laughed at that. The ugly one, Stanky McButtchunks, laughed hardest.

Bishop chuckled.

I did, too. It was a funny moment. Mind you, you’d have to be a few steps along the path to psychosis to find it funny, but I think we all qualified.

Bishop said, “I really would like to hear about it. Seriously.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s classified.”

“Unclassify it. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Ummm….no. I don’t see it happening.”

He leaned casually on the wheeled cart on which the generator sat. “Try.”

“Can’t and won’t.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that.”

It wasn’t something I wanted him to rush to prove.

So, I said, “What’s this all about, Myron? I thought you were going to go all Bond-villain on me and tell me about your master plan. Wasn’t that what you were leading up to?”

“No. I wanted to point out how stupid those movies are. Villains don’t have confessional moments with spies or assassins.”

“I’m not technically a spy.”

“You’re an assassin, though.”

“Labels are ugly things, Myron.”

He grinned, showing me expensive dental work. “Christ, I really like you, Joe. I even liked you that day when you were fucking up my life. You have balls—”

“As we can all clearly see.”

“—And you got a weird way of looking at the world. Skewed is the word, I think.”

“I prefer ‘unique perspective.’”

“Whatever. Point is, I got no evil master plan to reveal. I’m fucked. And I mean bent over a barrel with everyone from the SEC to NATO waiting in line to pull a train. I’m in total crash-and-burn mode here. My former customers and most of my business associates would like to see my head on a stick, and except for a few guys in my inner circle, I’ve got no one at my back.” When he mentioned his inner circle he gestured to Stanky and the other two.

I didn’t comment.

“So I am well and truly screwed here, Joe. A baby-raper in prison has a better chance than I do.”

“Nice comparison. You sure you want to run with that?”

“You’re missing the point.”

“No, I get you. Your empire has crumbled. Cut me loose, and we can go cry about it over some beers. Bring the goon squad if you want.”

“I think that ship has sailed.”

“Actually, it hasn’t.”

“You’re a federal agent. I’m pretty sure we committed about nine felonies in the last few minutes.”

“Which I’m willing to forgive and forget. No, don’t smile, I’m serious. So far all that’s happened is a little fun and games. I’m a big boy, I can let it slide. We’d rather have you come in where we can protect you—”

“—And interrogate me.”

“Let’s call it an extended interview. If you came in it would be with the understanding that you’re willing to cooperate, name names in exchange for immunity.”

“No one’s going to give me immunity.”

“No? Look in the front right pocket of my jeans.”

He did. The paper was in three pieces, thanks to Stanky and the knife, but Bishop smoothed them out on a desk and puzzled the pieces together. He grunted.

“That is an Executive Order from the President of the United States. It offers full immunity from prosecution in exchange for complete and unreserved cooperation. That means we protect you, we give you a completely new identity in a place no one will ever look, and we go out and arrest anyone who would ever want to do you harm. It also gives the State Department some iron boots with which to kick the ass of a few countries on our current shit list. The bottom line is that you get to have a good life and get to live that life. That was the offer I came to deliver today. That offer still stands. I can get a new copy of the Order. We can all step back off this diving board and end the day with everyone smiling.”

“I’m supposed to believe this after we kicked your ass?”

I laughed. “Dude, having my ass kicked is pretty much on my day-planner on any day that ends in a ‘y.’ I don’t burn up a lot of calories holding grudges. For me it’s all big picture, and my job gets easier if you’re in a nice split-level somewhere with no one shooting at you and the two of us swapping YouTube videos of kittens, you dig?”

“You really buying this shit?” asked Stanky. Even his voice was ugly.

For a moment it looked like Bishop was, in fact, buying it. Lots of different expressions crossed his face. Doubt, interest, some fear. The guy was an emotional train wreck, and I could see what months of stress were doing to him. Under his fake tan, his skin color was bad. There was a little tremolo in his voice, and his hands shook. I’d bet my pension that he was drinking too much and not getting any sleep unless he rode a sleeping pill down into troubled dreams.

In a weird, detached way I almost felt sorry for him. We’d done an even better job of ruining his life than I’d thought.

Now, understand me, when I say I felt sorry for him, it was only a fleeting thing. Like gas pains after a plate of nachos. He was a scum-sucking bottom feeder whose business deals had probably cost thousands of people pain and maybe put a few hundred in the dirt.

So, yeah, I’d actually kill him without blinking, but in that moment I felt bad. He looked like a hurt, scared, little kid.

Bishop turned away and paced the office for a few minutes. We all waited him out. Now was not the time to push. After a dozen turns back and forth, he stopped by a tall metal cabinet, opened it to reveal shelves filled with office products and cleaning supplies. He took down a box of Hefty trash bags, tugged one out, and turned to one of the other goons.

“Red,” he said, “put his stuff in here. Dump it somewhere no one will find it.”

He handed the box of bags to the other goon. “Billy, there should be enough here to wrap up the parts.”

I said, “Ah, fuck, Myron.”

Bishop looked at me for a few silent seconds. “Sorry, Joe. The truth is that you fucked me over pretty good. You know how many days I’ve had diarrhea? My blood pressure could blow bolts out of plate steel. You ruined more than my business. You ruined me.”

“So let me make it right,” I said. “We’re not the Marshals. They’d hide you away in some Podunk town and make you live small. The DMS can give you a better life than clerking at a shoe store in East Galoshes, Iowa. I’m serious. We have some places on some islands. Palm trees, ocean views, the works. Like a resort.”

“I had that.”

“Have it again. Have it forever.”

“Even paradise would get boring if I could never leave.”

“Well, shit, man, what’s your plan now? Go on the run for the rest of your life? Defect to North Korea and live in some underground bunker until you stop being useful?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I have other plans.”

“What other plans? What other options do you have left? I’m offering you the best deal.”

“Sorry, Joe, I’ll pass.”

“Tell me why.”

He smiled. A thin, small, slightly weary smile. “This isn’t a James Bond movie, Joe. Guys like me don’t have confessional moments. You don’t get to know our plans. All you get to do is know that you fucked up and failed. Maybe that’ll give you a little taste of what I’ve been going through.”

He came over and stood right in front of me. If I hadn’t been taped to the chair I could have reached out and strangled him.

Without breaking eye contact with me, he spoke to his goons. “Make it last,” he said. “Ruin this motherfucker the way he ruined me.”

Bishop bent forward and patted my cheek.

“No offense, Joe.”

Chap. 7

Here’s the thing about duct tape.

It’s tough, we all know that.

Breaking it through sheer muscle power is pretty much not going to happen. Especially if it gets folded over while you’re struggling. That increases the breaking strength.

Here’s the other thing about duct tape.

People trust it way too much.

They tape you up and they think you’re good, they think you’re there to stay.

Try that shit on someone like, say, Houdini. Or a Vegas stage magician worth half a shit. Try it on some of the really smart street thugs. They’ll all slip out of it.

Like I slipped out of it.

The trick is to have them tape you while you’re struggling, and to make sure your wrists are flexed out and all your muscles are bulged. These assholes helped with that with their damn stun guns. They thought they were wrapping my wrists and binding me to the chair. Actually they were wrapping my muscles and bones while they were expanded. And, yes, you can expand the width of your wrist by splaying your fingers and tensing the muscles. It separates the radius and ulna. Look it up, this isn’t a science lesson.

Point is, I was not nearly as tightly bound as they thought I was.

All the time Bishop was talking shit to me, I was relaxing my muscles and easing my right out of the loop of tape. Same way magicians slip out of handcuffs.

When Bishop leaned close to pat me on the face, I whipped my hand out of the last strand of tape and punched him in the throat.

Not my best punch.

Probably the hardest punch he ever took, though. He wasn’t the physical type.

He made a horrible gagging-choking sound, and I stood up, spun him, and wrapped my left arm around him, my forearm pressed to his right carotid and laying on the windpipe, my bicep pressing the left carotid shut.

The goons, Red, Billy and Stanky — I never found out his real name — surged forward and I lifted Bishop onto tippy-toes and clamped my right hand behind his head to increase pressure and secure the lock.

“Stop right there,” I growled. “Anyone moves and he dies.”

They hesitated.

“Tell them to back off,” I ordered.

Bishop, whose face was turning a nice shade of puce, could only gurgle. I shook him a little bit and added another couple ounces of pressure.

“Tell them to stand down,” I ordered. My feet were still taped to the chair, so I wasn’t in any shape to fight these guys. Besides, they had guns and I had duct tape and my birthday suit. Not a good mix. “Tell them or I will kill you.”

He couldn’t exactly tell them, but he gesticulated with great enthusiasm.

The three goons towered over us. They looked so big and scary and mean that I was scared out of my goddamn mind. Talking trash does not actually make you brave. It doesn’t win you a fight. They knew it and I knew it.

My only weapon was Bishop.

I gave him another squeeze, careful not to bring him to the point where he choked out. If he suddenly went limp, they’d think he was dead, and then they’d tear me apart.

Bishop waved wildly, making shoving motions to order them back.

They took a step back.

“All the way to the wall,” I said. The office was about forty by twenty. They retreated about half that distance but no amount of threats, commands or wild gestures would get them to go all the way.

Shit.

I began shuffling backward. There was about two inches of play in the tape around my ankles, so I had to move in little retreating baby steps. I dragged Bishop with me all the way to the elevators.

That was a tricky moment. I had to release the restraining clamp on the back of his head in order to flap backward and unearth the button. Bishop gurgled out a plea. The goons surged forward. I punched the button and then clamped my fingers over his eyes.

“I’ll tear your eyes out and make you eat them before they can take me down. Do you believe me?”

“Yes! Oh, Christ…yes.”

“Tell them to back the fuck off.”

He did.

They only backed about half a fuck off, though. Not even as far as before.

Behind me the elevator went bing!

I shuffled us back. Naked guy ankle-tied to an office chair with a chunky business guy in a choke hold. Not a pretty picture.

The doors began to shut.

The goons started rushing forward before the doors closed completely.

Bishop screamed at them.

The doors closed.

Chap. 8

I used my right hand to slap the buttons for the twentieth floor.

I needed time to get my shit together, get armed, call for help. If I showed up in the lobby, Frick and Frack would gun me down. If I got off on a floor too close to the top, the goon squad would simply run down a few flights of stairs. To confuse things I hit all the buttons from twenty down to the lobby. Let them guess.

Then I choked Bishop unconscious. When you do it right, compressing both carotids, it takes eight seconds. Compress one and you double the time.

He went out right away, probably because his throat was already a mess.

I coveted his trousers. Big and baggy.

But as he sagged in my grip I smelled a bad smell.

I said, “Ahhh…shit.”

Which was accurate, because Bishop’s bowels failed him as he went out.

So much for a clean pair of pants.

Or, let’s face it, any pants.

Damn it.

I threw him into a corner of the elevator and went to work freeing my ankles.

We hit the twentieth floor before I was out, so we stayed on.

I got my right foot out on seventeen and the left out just as the doors were opening on sixteen. I kicked the chair out, grabbed Bishop by his hair and tried to drag him out.

Turns out he wears a toupee.

I tossed the rug away, grabbed the shoulders of his suit coat and hauled his limp, smelly, flabby ass off the lift.

The doors closed.

We were on a floor with several suites of offices. All closed.

A kinder God would have given me a men’s clothing designer, a knife shop, and an armorer. Instead I got a CPA, an investment broker, and a real-estate attorney.

You take what you’re given.

I let Bishop lay there. He was dead weight for me now. He wasn’t my problem. Instead I picked up the chair and swung it as hard as I could at the big picture window of the attorney’s office. I cowered back as it shattered.

Bishop didn’t need his jacket, so I pulled it off. I considered taking his shoes, but he had small feet — maybe eight or nines. I have thirteen wides. No joy there, but I took one to smash out the last of the glass in the window frame. I did a quick reappraisal, then stripped off his dress shirt and spread that over the glass on this side of the frame; and bent over the frame and laid the jacket on the other side. Then I vaulted the frame, which was waist-high, crunched over the padded glass, and entered the offices.

First thing I looked for was a phone. Found the secretary’s desk, figured out that I had to dial nine for an outside line, and called the duty sergeant at the Warehouse. I gave him the address, a quick rundown on the situation, and my location inside the building. I told him to scramble everyone who could pull a trigger.

As an afterthought I told him to bring me a pair of pants.

Then I told him to patch me through to Bug, our computer guy.

“This is an open line,” I said as soon as Bug answered.

“Copy that, Cowboy. What’s going on?”

I gave him an even briefer version of the story.

“I don’t have my com with me,” I said, “and I’m probably going to have to keep moving. Kind of a Die Hard situation.”

“How can I help?”

“Be creative. I need the power out and I need some distractions. See what you can do.”

“No problem.”

“And call Church. He knows I’m here, but he doesn’t know this. I need him to control local law and the press. I do not want to be on the front page of the paper with my dick hanging out.”

“You talking literally or figuratively?”

“Literally. I’d give a month’s pay for a thong and ballet slippers.”

“Jeez.”

“Get moving, Bug.”

“Already working on it.”

I hung up.

The cavalry was coming, and that was good news.

I heard a sound — Bishop groaning. Soon he was going to start yelling.

Shit.

I ran back, vaulted the frame again and spent some quality time kicking him unconscious. Brutal? Yeah. Uncivilized? Sure.

Satisfying?

You betcha.

If he survived today he was going to need a damn good dentist. I did give him the courtesy of angling him so that he didn’t choke to death on his bridgework.

Then I ran back into the lawyer’s office to look for a weapon.

I found exactly nothing. No guns, no knives, nothing.

“Okay,” I told myself, “plan B.”

In jujutsu, which is the hand-to-hand combat system developed by the Samurai, there’s a nasty little subscience called hadaka-korosu. Loose translation is the art of the naked kill. No, it isn’t the art of fighting in the buff. Naked kill refers to self-defense and combative offense using commonplace objects as weapons, meaning those things that aren’t designed for that purpose. It’s basic tool use. Any object has some combative potential so long as it can be seen, heard or felt. You couldn’t use, for example, a single tear or a soft contact lens because they can’t be perceived in any useful tactical way.

Everything else falls into a basic weapon category. There are blunt objects, things you can throw, items that will cut, flexible things useful in binding, objects that will distract, and so on. It’s like MacGyver if he wanted to go medieval on people. Or, as one of my instructors said, “Imagine fifty people trapped in a building during the zombie apocalypse. One of them is a handyman, the kind of guy who can fix anything, make stuff, and use tools. Which of those fifty people is going to survive? Which one is going to become the most valuable person in the building? In a real-world crisis, when everything is falling apart, the handyman always gets out.”

I’ve taken that sort of advice to heart. I once strangled someone with a bikini top. Long story. Done a bunch of other bad things to bad people using whatever was to hand.

The irony of actually being naked was not lost on me; but I wasn’t amused. Ha-fucking-ha.

There was another sound from outside.

A voice. Not Bishop’s though.

I snatched a few things off the secretary’s desk and ran back to the hall where I caught a snatch of what the voice was saying.

“Nothing on seventeen. Heading down one.”

There was a squawk of feedback from a walkie-talkie. Nothing I could understand.

“Roger that.”

The voice was close. Right outside of the fire tower door.

The lights went out.

Bam, just like that.

It plunged the whole building into utter darkness.

Thank you, Bug.

A yard away a line of pale yellow appeared in the wall of featureless shadows. The door opening. Lights from the fire tower emergency lights spilled out, pale and weak.

The door began swinging inward, and I rose up and rammed it with every ounce of body mass, fear, and rage. Steel hit flesh. There was a single bang, and something hot burned past my ear, but I didn’t care. I had Bic pens in each hand and began chopping at a shadowy figure. I hit him in the chest, the throat, the mouth, the sinuses, the left eye. I buried one pen so deep into his eye socket that as he screamed and reeled back the pen was torn from my hand. His hands went up to try to fend off the assault, but he bungled it. His gun went flying. I tried to grab it, but it spun over the rail and dropped into the stairwell. It fell so far I never heard it land.

It was the goon called Red, and he was screaming too loud.

I grabbed his tie, jerked it out and then slammed my forearm down on it. The leverage, plus my two hundred and ten pounds of mass snapped him down to his knees. His screams stopped, and as an after-echo I heard the bones in his neck break apart.

He didn’t die right away. Broken necks aren’t always an off switch, but I let Red lay there and die. Fuck it.

I crouched and did a fast pat-down.

He had one extra magazine. No backup piece, though. And no knife.

Damn it.

I started to pull off his clothes, but the stairwell was suddenly filled with shouts and the sound of pounding feet. Ten floors down and coming fast. Those big sons of bitches.

I ran back to the lawyer’s office for more goodies.

I was very fast about it.

By the time I got back to the fire tower, the spry sons of bitches were only three flights below me.

I decided against the stuff I’d just grabbed. Not enough time. So, I squatted and hoisted Red onto the rail.

“Yo!” I said in a bad imitation of the dying man. “Fucker went up.”

I saw a head and shoulders lean out from one floor down. Billy.

I dropped Red on his face.

Big, wet crunch that could not have boded well for either of them.

Then there were bullets from the level below them filling the fire tower and whanging off of everything.

I got out of there fast.

The emergency lights were on in the office now. Not good.

Using Bishop as a shield was not going to work. Not this time. He was covered with blood and looked dead.

I returned to the offices and looked for something that would give me some kind of chance. I was pretty sure it was my friend Stanky coming up the stairs. He was huge, and if he was truly a super-soldier, he could tear me apart with his bare hands. Plus he had a gun.

My odds sucked.

Time to change the math.

I grabbed a heavy stapler and ran from one emergency light to the next, smashing the bulbs and bringing back the darkness.

Darkness was my weapon to use. Not his.

I heard the fire tower door open.

I heard his growl of anger when he found Bishop. I’d left the security light by the elevator intact for that reason. I wanted Stanky to see what was out there.

I prayed that he’d grab his boss, cut his losses, and bug out.

Nope.

He was a big shape in the gloom.

I crouched down in a cleft between a desk, a wheeled chair, and a file cabinet. He came creeping, letting his pistol lead the way.

“I know you’re in here, dickhead,” he said.

I said nothing.

“When I find you I’m going to rip your balls off. That’s not a joke. I’ve done it before.”

I believed him.

“Make you eat ’em before I—”

I gripped the chair and rammed it at him. There was a lot of desperate energy behind that shove, and I hit him as hard as I’ve ever hit anyone in my life.

He crashed down. The gun went flying into the shadows.

I piled on top of him, needing to end this fast because surprise was the only advantage I had on this brute. I still had the stapler and I smashed it down on his face.

Except he got his forearm up instead and took the hit. He cried in pain, but it wasn’t the kind of cry that said “I’m done.”

Which he proved in the next second by twisting his hips and shoulders into a wild hook punch that caught me over the ear and rang every bell in the world. I went flopping sideways into a metal trash can, sure that my skull was fractured.

With a display of rubbery agility you wouldn’t expect to find in a man of his size, he popped to his feet and came for me. In the dismal light I saw him swing again, so I whipped the trash can at him. His punch collapsed it like it was foil, but the impact deflected his aim. The punch flattened the can against the plastic chair pad under the desk.

I tried for a kick to his nuts, caught him on the thigh, and knocked him back four feet.

That gave me a half a second, so I scrambled up and snatched the first thing I could find on the desk. It was a thick three-ring binder. He swung again. There was no finesse in his punches, just a lot of speed and power.

I shoved the flat of the binder toward him and his knuckles slammed into it. The shock knocked me back against the desk, but he had to have felt it. You can’t punch through a loose-leaf binder filled with a hundred pages of paper. That is, for all intents and purposes, a block of wood. He jerked his hand back, hissing in pain. So I followed the fist back to its source and slapped him forward and back with the binder, rocking his head side to side. He stumbled back two steps, and I reversed the binder so that the covers opened to form a Vee. I rammed that into his throat.

It would have stopped him had it connected.

He got a muscular shoulder up and took the shot, then backhanded me, catching the binder and sending it flying across the room. I narrowly avoided his return shot by back-rolling over the desk. As I landed on the far side I shoved the desk at him, hit him in the thighs, and, as he abruptly bent forward, grabbed the back of his head and slammed him facedown onto the desk. He rebounded from that, and I saw a black line following him. A trail of blood that looked like ink in this light.

With a roar like the gorilla he resembled, he grabbed the edge of the desk and hurled the heavy mahogany aside like it was cheap particleboard from Ikea.

I backpedaled until I hit the desk behind it, hooked the chair with my foot and kicked it at him as he rushed me. It caught him at knee level and he almost fell. I swept the contents of the second desk toward him, hitting him with a bunch of debris that did him no harm at all.

However it gave me a chance to dive for a coatrack closer to the door. He staggered to his feet and swung another punch at me, really putting some hate into it. I swung the wooden coatrack into the arc of the punch and that’s what he hit.

That time I heard his hand bones break.

Nice.

I kicked the base of the coatrack into his groin. It doubled him, but he hugged the rack to his body as he hunched forward, tearing it from my hand. I whirled, fumbling at the desk for something useful. Found a vase and broke that over his left ear. Picked up a couple of paperbacks and slapped them together with his head in the middle, right over his ears.

His scream was ultrasonic. Pretty sure I burst one of his eardrums.

But the son of a bitch kept coming.

He staggered toward me, reaching with long punches, both of us knowing that with his level of strength he only had to hit me once to win this fight.

I pivoted, grabbed a fistful of pencils from a cup and as he came up off the floor at me I slammed my fist down, hoping to get an eye or his face.

I missed both.

Instead I hit right above his collarbone. Right below the sweeping curve of his trapezius muscle. There’s a sweet spot there. The subclavian artery.

On any other person I’d have opened the faucets and he’d have sprayed his life all over the walls.

But Bishop’s science had given him tougher skin and thicker muscle tissue. The pencils stood up like porcupine quills, but not one of them went deep enough.

With a howl of inhuman rage and pain, he tore them out of his shoulder and threw them away. He swung punches left, right, left, right, and I fell back. He was so goddamn strong that even if I blocked him I’d break an arm. I could feel the wind of each punch and the way my heart was beating way too fast.

I dove sideways, rolled, came up onto my toes, and ran for it. He bellowed and ran after. I threw chairs in his path. I ran onto and over desks. I made it all the way to the back office and slammed the door in his face. He burst through it. I don’t mean he rushed through the doorway. He actually exploded the door itself as he slammed into it. Splinters of wood and glass filled the darkened room. I couldn’t see most of them but I could feel them cut me.

I stumbled backward, out of time, out of places to run.

Out of luck.

He backed me all the way into the corner. My shoulders thumped against something I couldn’t see. Draped cloth of some kind. And a shaft of wood.

A flagpole?

In a flash of panic I grabbed the cloth and tore at it, hoping to get the pole. Maybe I could beat him with it. Instead the cloth tore free and the pole fell out of reach.

The office was nearly pitch-black, which gave me a second as he tried to sort out which piece of shadow was my face so he could punch it to goo. I had the cloth.

It was all I had.

I looped it over his head and jerked downward. He bowed forward, and I kneed him in the face. Missed the nose. Got the cheekbone, which hurt like hell. My leg felt cracked and numb. Couldn’t care about that. In the split second while he was still bent over I jumped onto him, shoulder rolling over his back like an acrobat and dropping to my feet so that for a moment we were back to back. The cloth was still around his beck, so I looped one end over my opposite forearm and twisted to create a tourniquet, then I jammed my knee up between his shoulder blades and threw myself backward.

It was a hard damn fall, and he had to weigh two ninety or three hundred. The impact nearly dislocated my hip. I brought my other knee up so I was on the bottom, and he was splayed backward on my shins with the flag cinched tight around his throat. The impact constricted it even tighter and I twisted with every last bit of desperate energy I had.

He had the mass and the muscle. He was genetically engineered to be a superior soldier. Faster and stronger. More durable.

Cutting-edge genetic science made him a monster.

I used one of the oldest bits of practical physics. A turnbuckle. It’s torsion and leverage. Only simpler machine is the wheel.

I turned the cloth loop until he gagged.

Until he choked.

Until there was not enough room inside that loop for a human throat to exist in any useful structure.

And then I tightened it some more.

If the bones and cartilage made any sounds as they collapsed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own screams.

Chap. 9

When I let him go, empty meat fell sideways.

I lay there. Gasping. Hurt. Flooded with adrenaline. Seeing exploding stars in the darkness.

I lay there for maybe a full minute, unable to move.

When I finally peeled myself slowly — so damn slowly — from the floor, all the lights in the building switched back on.

And Echo Team — my own goddamn team — came pouring out of the stairwell, guns up and out, shouting, yelling, staring.

I was covered in blood, naked as an egg, and I still held the coiled flag in my hands.

I looked down at it.

It would have been extremely cool if it was an American flag. Very poetic.

It was from the Rotary Club.

Less poetry. Still effective as a son of a bitch.

Chap. 10

The postscript is brief.

Bishop’s great escape plan was South America, a face job, a false identity, and a villa in Argentina. Bug picked that apart in seconds.

They carted Bishop off to the hospital, and then he headed off to Gitmo for a long, long time of soul-searching and water sports.

He should have taken the deal.

Really should have.