Joe Ledger: Special Ops

Chap. 1

I hung upside-down inside the laser network of a bioweapons lab. Tripping the laser would trigger a hard containment, which would effectively turn the small subterranean lab on the picturesque little island in the south Pacific into my tomb.

I wish I could say this was the first time I’d been in this kind of situation.

Wish I could say — with real honesty — that it would be my last.

I was, as we say in the super-spy business, resource light.

All I had was a bug in my ear, a Snellig Model A19 gas dart pistol in a nylon shoulder rig, and the few prayers I still remembered from Sunday school. Sweat ran in vertical lines from chin to hairline, and one fat drop hung pendulously from the tip of my nose. The watch on my wrist told me that there was nineteen minutes left on the mission clock. I needed fifteen of those to do this job.

I needed another twenty to get out.

It wasn’t the heat that was making me sweat.

The earbud in my ear buzzed.

“The laser grid is off,” said a voice. Male, slightly nasal, young.

I composed myself before I replied. Barking like a cross dog at my support team would probably not yield useful results. So, I said, very calmly, “Actually, Bug, the laser grid is still on.”

“It’s off, Cowboy. All of the systems mark it as in shutdown mode.”

The network of red lasers suddenly throbbed. The crosshatch pattern, once comfortably large enough for my body to slip through, abruptly narrowed to a grid with only scant inches to spare on all sides.

“It’s on and it’s getting cranky.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything, Bug. I’m still hanging here like a frigging bat. The floor is thirty feet below me and the laser net is getting smaller. So…really, anything you could do to shut it down would be super. Very much appreciated. Might be a bonus in it for you.”

“Um. Okay. Maybe there’s a redundancy system….”

“And, Bug…?”

“Yeah, Cowboy?”

“If you don’t stop humming the fucking Mission: Impossible theme song while you’re working…I will kill you.”

“But….”

“My whole body is a weapon.”

“I know…you could kill me more ways than I know how to die, blah, blah, blah.”

The laser grid throbbed again.

I knew that the lasers couldn’t hurt me. This wasn’t a science fiction movie. Passing through them wouldn’t result in an arm falling off or my body being neatly diced into bloody cubes. However, they would trigger the alarms; and for the last hour and sixteen minutes I’d been very, very careful not to let that happen.

Bad things would occur if that happened.

Our best intel gave a conservative estimate of sixty security personnel on site, not one of whom was bound by international treaties, human rights agreements, or basic human decency. This place recruited from groups like Blackwater and Blue Diamond Security. The kind of contractors who give mercenaries a bad name.

They would shoot me. A lot.

Bug knew there was no reset button on the mission. It was a matter of getting it right the first time, which made the learning curve more like a straight line.

“Oh, wait,” said Bug. “Looks like they have a ghost program hiding the real operations menu. You need to input a set of false commands — which work as a faux password — in order to reach the….”

“Bug….”

“Long story short,” he said, “voila.”

The laser grid switched off.

I exhaled a breath I think I’d been holding for an hour and dropped the rest of the way down the main venting shaft to the concrete floor sixty yards below.

No alarms went off. No bells, no whistles.

No army of guards storming through the hatch to do bad things to Mama Ledger’s firstborn son.

“Down,” I said. I unclipped from the drop harness and stood back as the cables whipped up out of sight.

“Lasers are going back on in three, two….”

The burning grid reappeared above me.

“Good job, Bug.”

“Sorry for the delay,” he said. “These guys are pretty tricky.”

“Be trickier.”

“Copy that. Sending the floor plan to Karnak.”

Karnak was the nickname of the portable MindReader computer tablet strapped to my left forearm. It’s a couple of generations snazzier than anything currently on the market, but my boss, Mr. Church, always makes sure his people have the best toys. It’s dual hardwired and wireless connected to a whole series of geegaws and doodads built into my combat suit. I had everything in the James Bond catalog, from miniature explosives to a small EDS — explosive detection system — and even a miniature BAMS — bio-aerosol mass spectrometer which sniffed the air for dangerous particles like viruses and bacteria. Dr. Hu, the head of our science division, has told me several times that the collective value of those gadgets was worth ten of me. Considering that the rig I wore had a three million dollar price tag, it was tough to build a convincing counterargument.

One-man army is the idea. Or, in this case, one-man high-tech infiltration team.

The thing that really tickled Hu is that if I happened to be killed during the mission, the suit would continue to transmit useful information. So…the next guy would know what killed me and maybe not get killed himself. And then, when all useful info had been uploaded, small thermal charges built into the fabric would detonate and turn all of the electronics — and the body inside the suit — into so much carbon dust.

Hu thinks that’s hilarious.

He and I have not worked up much of a sweat trying to be nice to one another. If he stepped in front of a bullet train and got smeared along half a mile of tracks, I would — believe me — find some way to struggle on with my life. Sadly he doesn’t play on the train tracks as much as I’d like.

So, there I was a mile below the April sunshine, wearing my science fiction getup, all alone, looking for something that none of us understood.

This is not an unusual day for me.

Chap. 2

It might be an unusual day for the world, though.

Hence the reason for my being here.

Hence the reason why our best intel suggested that I might not be the only cockroach in the walls. A lot of teams were scrambling around looking for the same thing. Good guys, bad guys, some unaffiliated guys, and maybe some nutjobs guys. Last time there was this much of a scramble was when a set of four, man-portable mininukes went missing from the inventory of former Soviet play toys supposedly under guard in Kazakhstan. I’d been hunting for those, too, but they were scooped up by Colonel Samson Riggs. He’s the most senior of the DMS field team leaders. Kind of an action figure demi-superhero. Even has a lantern jaw, crinkles around his piercing blue eyes, and an inflexible moral compass. We all geek out around Colonel Riggs. He’s the closest this planet will probably ever get to a real-life Captain America.

Riggs was gone, now, though. Swept away by recent events the way so many other top operatives are who maybe spend one day too long in the path of the storm. Leaving guys like me to take the next job. And the next.

This was the next job.

So far there had been fourteen separate attempts to recover the package.

Those fourteen attempts resulted in sixty-three deaths and over a hundred severe injuries. That butcher’s bill is shared pretty evenly by all the teams in this game. There are six DMS agents in the morgue. Five more who will never stand in the line of battle.

And all for something that nobody really understands.

We call it “the package” or “the football” when we’re on an open mic.

Between ourselves, off the radio, we call it “that thing” or maybe “that fucking thing.”

Its designation in all official documents is simpler.

The artifact.

Just that.

It’s as precise a label as is possible to give, at least for now.

Why?

Simple.

No one — no fucking body — knows what it is.

Or what it does.

Or where it came from.

Or who made it.

Or why.

All we know is that twenty-nine days ago a team in Egypt ran the thing through an X-ray machine at what was the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology in Alexandria.

Yeah. You read about Alexandria.

The news services said that it was a terrorist device. Some new kind of nuke. The authorities and the U.N. aid teams keep adding more numbers to the count. So far it stands at seven thousand and four. Everyone at the University. Everyone who lived within a two-block radius. Not that the aid workers are counting bodies. There aren’t any. All that’s there is a big, round hole. Everything — every brick, every pane of glass, every mote of dust, and every person — is simply gone.

Yeah, gone.

And the ball buster is that there is no dust, no blast debris, and no radiation.

There’s just a hole in the world where all those people worked, studied, and lived.

All that was left, sitting there at the bottom of the crater, was the artifact.

One meter long. Silver and green. Probably made of metal. Nearly weightless.

Unscratched and untouched.

We saw it on a satellite photo and in photos by helicopters doing flyovers.

The Egyptian government sent in a team.

The artifact was collected.

Then their team was hit by another team. Mercs this time. Multinational badasses. They hit the Egyptians like the wrath of God and wiped it out.

The artifact was taken.

And the games began. The multinational hunt. The accusations. The political pissing contests. The media shit-storm.

Seventeen days later everyone is still yelling. Everyone’s pointing fingers. But nobody is really sure who was responsible for the blast. Not that it mattered. Something like that makes a great excuse for settling old debts, starting new fights, and generally proving to the world that you swing a big dick. Even if you don’t. If there hadn’t been such a price tag on it in terms of human life and suffering it would be funny.

We left funny behind a long way back.

About one millisecond after the team of mercs hit the Egyptians, every police agency and intelligence service in the world was looking for the package. Everyone wanted it. Even though nobody understood what it was, everyone wanted it.

The official stance — the one they gave to budget committees — was that the device was clearly some kind of renewable energy source. A super battery. Something like that. Analysis of the blast suggested that the X-ray machine triggered some kind of energetic discharge. What kind was unknown and, for the purposes of the budget discussions, irrelevant. The thing blew the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology off the world and didn't destroy itself in the process.

If there was even the slightest chance the process could be duplicated, then it had to be obtained. Had to. No question.

That was real power.

That was world-changing power.

For two really big reasons.

The first was obvious. Any energetic discharge, once studied, could be quantified and captured. You just need to build a battery capable of absorbing and storing the charge. Conservative estimates by guys like Dr. Hu tell me that such a storage battery would be, give or take a few square feet, the size of Detroit. There were already physicists and engineers working out how to relay that captured energy into a new power grid that could, if the explosion could be endlessly repeated under controlled circumstances, power… everything.

Everything that needed power.

People have killed each other over a gallon of gas.

What would they do to obtain perfect, endlessly renewable, and absolutely clean energy?

Yeah. They’d kill a lot of people. They’d wipe whole countries off the map. Don’t believe it? Go read a book about the history of the Middle East oil wars.

Then there was the second reason teams were scrambled from six of the seven continents.

Something like that was the world’s only perfect weapon.

Who would dare go to war with anyone who owned and could deploy such a weapon?

For seven and a half days no one knew where it was. Everyone held their breath. The U.S. military went to its highest state of alert and parked itself there. Everyone else did, too. We all expected something important to go boom. Like New York City. Or Washington D.C.

When that didn’t happen no one breathed any sighs of relief.

It meant that someone was keeping it. Studying it. Getting to know it.

That is very, very scary.

Sure as hell scared me.

Scared my boss, Mr. Church, too, and he does not spook easily.

Halfway through the eighth day there was a mass slaughter at a research facility in Turkey. Less than a day later a Russian freighter was attacked with a total loss of life.

And on and on.

Now it was twenty-nine days later and a shaky network of spies, paid informants and traitors provided enough reliable intel to have me sliding down a wire into a deep, deep hole in North Korea.

If the artifact was here, then any action I took could be justified because even his allies know that Kim Jong-un is a fucking psycho. Basically you don’t let your idiot nephew play with hand grenades. Not when the rest of the family is in the potential blast radius.

On the other hand, if the North Koreans didn’t have it, then I was committing an act of war and espionage. Being shot would be the very least — and probably best — I could expect.

Which is why I had no I.D. on me. Nothing I wore or carried could be traced to an American manufacturer. My fingerprints and DNA have been erased from all searchable databases. Ditto for my photos. I didn’t exist. I was a ghost.

A ghost can’t be used as a lever against the American government.

I even had a suicide pill in a molar in case the North Koreans captured me and proved how creative they were in their domestic version of enhanced interrogation. I tried not to think about how far I’d let things go before I decided that was a good option.

I ran down a featureless concrete tunnel that was badly lit with small bulbs in wire cages. All alone. Too much risk and too little mission confidence to send in the whole team.

Just me.

Alone.

Racing the clock.

Scared out of my mind.

Hurrying as fast as I could into the unknown.

My life kind of sucks.

Chap. 3

“I’m losing your signal,” Bug said. “Some kind of interference from….”

That was all he said. After that all I had in my ear was a dead piece of plastic.

I looked at Karnak.

The small HD screen still showed a floor plan, which was good. But it wasn’t updating, which was bad. The data it showed was what Bug had sent me when I’d detached from the spider cable. We had an eye-in-the-sky using ground-penetrating radar to build a map, but that was a slow process, and suddenly I was behind the curve. The corridor ran for forty more yards past blank walls and ended at a big red steel door. Shiny and imposing, with a single keycard device mounted on the wall beside it. Knowing what was on the other side of that steel door was the whole point of the satellite. Pretty much no chance it was a broom closet. Before I tried to bypass the security I’d like to know that it was my target. Intel suggested that it was, but a suggestion was all it was. That’s a long, long way from certain knowledge or even high confidence.

“Balls,” I said, though I said it quietly.

Our timetable was based on the fact that two things were about to happen at the same time. A motorcade of official cars and trucks was headed here. We’d tracked it all the way from the Strategic Rocket Forces divisional headquarters in Kusŏng. Infrared on the satellites counted eighty men.

The second problem was a two-truck miniconvoy coming in hot and fast from the east. Six men and a driver in each truck. We almost didn’t spot them because their trucks were shielded with the latest in stealth tech — radar-repelling scales that contained thousands of tiny cameras and screens so that it took real-time images from its surroundings and painted them all over its shell. You could look at it and look right through it. Only a focused thermal scan can peek inside, but it has to be a tight beam. We were able to do that because of the one flaw in that kind of technology — human eyes. One of our spotters saw the thing roll past. Video camouflage works great at a distance. Up close, not so much, which is why it’s mostly used on planes or ships. The science is cutting edge but it’s not Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. Not yet, anyway.

If I wasn’t out of here real damn fast I was going to get caught between three hostile forces — the guards here, the incoming military convoy, and whoever was in those two trucks. I did not think this was going to be a matter of embarrassed smiles, handshakes, and a trip to the local bar for a couple of beers.

I’d wasted too much time with the laser grid, and now I could feel each wasted second being carved off of my skin.

I quickly knelt by the door and fished several devices from my pockets. The first was a signal counter, which is a nifty piece of intrusion technology that essentially hacked into the command programs of something like — say — a keycard scanner. It’s proprietary MindReader tech, so it used the supercomputer’s software to ninja its way in and rewrite the target software so that it believed the new programs were part of its normal operating system. In the right hands, it’s saved millions, possibly billions, of lives by helping the Department of Military Sciences stop the world’s most dangerous terrorists. If it ever fell into the wrong hands, MindReader and her children could become as devastating a weapon as the device I was here to steal.

Which is why each of the devices I carried had a self-destruct subroutine. If I died, they blew up. If they were too far away from me for too long, they blew up. If Bug, Dr. Hu or Mr. Church hit the right button, they blew up.

Such a comfort to know that all the devices hanging from my belt near all my own proprietary materials were poised to go boom.

I placed the device on the side of the keycard housing and pressed a button. A little red light flickered, flickered, and then turned green. I plugged a USB cable into it and attached the other end to a second device I had, which was flat gray and the size of a deck of playing cards. After too many seconds, a green light appeared on it as well, and a slim plastic card slid from one end.

I removed it, took a breath, and swiped it through the keycard slot.

And prayed.

Nothing happened.

My balls tried to climb up inside my body.

I swiped it again.

Nothing.

“Shit,” I said.

And tried one more time.

Slower.

There was a faint click, and then the big red door shifted inward by almost an inch.

I let out the air that was going stale in my chest. My balls stayed where they were. They didn’t trust happy endings.

When I bent my ear close to the doorframe, all I could hear was machine noise. A faint hum and something else that went ka-chug, ka-chug. Could have been anything from a centrifuge refining plutonium to a Kenmore dishwasher. I don’t know and didn’t much care. All I wanted was the package.

No voices, though. That was key.

I nudged the door so that it swung inward, slowly and only slightly. Light spilled out. Fluorescent. Bright. The machine sounds intensified.

No one shouted. No voice spoke at all.

I pushed the door open enough to let me take a look inside. Not one of those dart-in, dart-out looks you use in combat situations. When there’s no action, the speed of that kind of movement was noticeable in an otherwise still room. I moved slowly and tried not to embrace any expectations of what I’d see. Expectations can slow you, and if this got weird, even losing a half step could get me killed.

The room was large and, as far as I could see, empty.

I held another breath as I stepped inside.

The ceiling soared upward into shadows at least fifty yards above me. Banks of fluorescent lights hung down on long cables. Bright light gleamed on the surfaces and screens and display panels of rank after rank of machines. Computers of some kind, though what they were being used for or why they were even here was unknown. I’ve seen a lot of industrial computer setups and there had to be eighty, ninety million dollars’ worth of stuff here. Then I spotted a glass wall beyond which were rows upon rows of modern mainframe supercomputers, and I rounded my estimate up to a quarter billion dollars. The floor was polished to mirror brightness.

I tapped my earbud hoping to get Bug back on the line.

Nothing.

I faded to the closest wall and ghosted along it, taking a lot of small, quick steps. There was a second door at the far end of the big room. If any of my intel was reliable, the artifact had to be in there, or near there.

Fifty feet to go, and I was already reaching for another of the bypass doohickeys when a man stepped from between two rows of computers. A security guard. Young, maybe twenty-two. With a gun.

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

His eyes bugged, and he opened his mouth to let out a scream of warning.

Chap. 4

There are times in combat when you have options. You can take someone prisoner. You can use some hand-to-hand stuff and subdue him, leave him bound and gagged. Or you overpower him and juice him with some animal tranquilizers.

Those are options that let the moment become an anecdote for both of you, to allow it to be a story — however painful or embarrassing — to tell later on. Maybe over beers with your buddies, maybe at your court martial, maybe to your wife as she holds you to her breast in the dark of night.

Those are moments when mercy and a regard for human life are allowable elements in the equation. They’re moments when even if blood is spilled, it’s merely a price to be paid. A small price. No one dies. The price doesn’t pay the ferryman’s fee.

This wasn’t one of those moments.

This was the kind of moment when there is no allowance for human life, for compassion, for choice.

The guard opened his mouth to scream and I killed him.

That’s the only way the moment could end because there wasn’t time for anything else. If he screamed, I’d die. If he screamed, the artifact would slip beyond the reach of people who wanted it stored and studied rather than used.

So he had to die. This young man. This peasant-soldier working for people who had no regard at all for his life.

Nor, in that terrible moment, did I.

As his mouth opened I moved into him, intruding inside his personal envelope of mental and physical safety. My left hand cupped the back of his neck, and I struck him under the Adam’s apple with the open Y of the space between thumb and index finger. The blow slammed the side of the primary knuckle of the index finger against the eggshell-fragile hyoid bone. He stopped breathing. His face instantly turned a violent red and seemed to expand as he tried to drag air in through an impossible route. I swung him around, turning him so that his panicked face was pointed to the ceiling as I dropped to my right knee and broke his back over my left.

It all took one second.

One bad second that changed his world and broke a hole in the lives of everyone he knew and everyone who loved him, and slammed the door on every experience he would ever have. Bang. That fast.

And it chipped off a big piece of my soul.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would see his young face watching me from the shadows of my deathbed when it was finally my time to go. He would be waiting for me, along with too many others whose lives had ended because of the necessities of my job.

Yeah, I’m a good guy. Tell anyone.

Fuck.

Chap. 5

Tick-tock.

I laid him down on the floor and moved on.

Grief and regrets are for after the war.

I raced to the far end of the chamber, pulled the keycard scanner, reprogrammed my master key, and slid it through the slot.

It went green on the first try.

No, I wasn’t going to suddenly start believing in good luck.

The door opened.

I stepped through.

The room was a lot smaller. Maybe twenty by twenty.

There was a big steel table in the exact middle of the room. A whole lot of weird-looking equipment was grouped around the table. Scanners and other stuff that looked like they came from a Star Trek movie were arranged to point at the thing under a glass dome on the table.

The artifact.

Right there. Closer than I could have hoped. Not hidden beyond an airlock, not wired up to fifty kinds of alarms.

I could have taken four paces and touched it.

Except.

The whole damn room was filled with people.

Three little guys in white lab coats. Not a problem.

Six bigger guys in uniforms.

Problem.

Chap. 6

We all went for our guns at the same time.

I was already totally wired, so I was maybe one heartbeat faster than the others.

The Snellig gas pistol fires tiny, thin-walled glass darts filled with a fast-acting nonlethal nerve agent. A new synthetic version of tetrodotoxin. Granted you fall down and shit your pants, but you do not die, so put it in the win column.

I was firing as I moved, rushing to put one of the lab coat guys between me and the guards, hoping they wouldn’t want to risk shooting them. That bought me another heartbeat.

Two of the guards spun away, their eyes rolling high and white within a microsecond of the darts bursting on their skin. They went down hard. One of them collapsed against a third guard, dragging him down, too. The other three clawed at their side arms. I shoved my human shield against one, fired over the scientist’s shoulder and took another guard in the cheek. He dropped and I closed on the one soldier left standing and pistol-whipped him across the chops. Teeth flew and he spun around so hard I thought he was going to screw himself into the floor.

Four guards down.

I pivoted toward the one who’d been accidentally dragged down and kicked him in the face. Twice. Real damn hard.

That left the one who was trying to push away the scientist I’d shoved at him. I shot the scientist in the back and when he crumpled I shot the sixth guard.

It was all over in the space of those salvaged heartbeats.

Bang, bang, bang.

That left me standing with the gun in my hand and them with their dicks in theirs. Metaphorically speaking.

They spent a couple of seconds being shocked, which is fine. I wanted them to fully appreciate the situation.

But all I could spare was a couple of seconds.

Then I said — in reasonably passable Korean, “Give me the device.”

The two scientists looked blankly at me. Shock or training or good poker faces, it was all the same to me.

I pointed the gun at the closest guy’s face.

“Now.”

In this situation, you think they’d say, fuck it, we lost. All their security guys on the floor, snoring and shitting their pants. Them looking like book nerds. Me looking like the big hulking thug I am. Gun looking like a gun. You think this would be easy math. A no-win situation so clear that it was almost no-fault. They couldn’t be expected to do anything here but acquiesce and hand it over.

That’s what you’d think.

That was what logic and sanity dictated in no uncertain terms.

It didn’t play out that way, and I knew it when one of them smiled at me.

This was not a smiling situation. Not even for me, and I had the gun.

The guy farthest from me — he was a half-step behind the other scientist — smiled. A small, ugly little smile.

Then he shoved his buddy right at me. It was so damn quick that it caught us both off guard. The closer man fell right against me, and I shot him more by reflex than intention. But his body was already falling, and it was a crowded room with bodies on the floor.

We both went down in a tangle.

Even little guys are a bastard when it comes to dead weight, and the dart made him totally slack.

I fell with him on top of me.

The other guy hit two buttons. One popped the glass dome over the artifact, which he scooped up and tucked under his arm, like a wide receiver.

The other was the central alarm button.

Fuck.

Klaxons began blaring with an ear-crushing loudness. Red lights slid out from slots in the walls and flashed with hysterical pulses. If I’d had epilepsy this would have triggered a fit.

I heard the hiss of a hydraulic door, and just as I shoved the unconscious scientist off of me I saw the other guy vanish through the doorway. The door began to slide shut.

I flung the guy off of me and shot to my feet, ran over several bodies — stepping on chests and faces and crotches as I fought to beat the close of that door. I leapt through a gap that didn’t look anywhere near big enough, tucked to make sure I didn’t lose a foot, hit the ground in a roll, felt the jolt as the concrete floor found every goddamn exposed piece of bone in my body, came up onto my feet, and pelted after the scientist. He was heading for another security door at the other end, faster than I ever saw Calvin Johnson run when there was nothing on the clock and the entire defensive squad on his ass.

He was already halfway down the hall when I capped off three rounds. Two hit the flaps of his lab coat and burst harmlessly. The third grazed him. He jerked sideways but didn’t go down. Must have grazed him.

I fired again and got nothing. The magazine was out.

I dropped it, fished for a spare, slapped it in place, and emptied the whole thing as I tore up the hallway. The Snellig has a twelve-shot capacity. I think I hit him with number eleven, because he dropped and my last shot passed right over his head.

The artifact dropped, too.

It hit the ground and bounced.

I think my heart stopped.

It landed and rolled awkwardly against the wall while I skidded to a stop. Until now it had been a lumpy chunk of silver metal with no discernable seams or openings, no lights, no switches or dials. In every photo I’ve seen of it, the device looked like it had been molded rather than assembled.

Now it looked different.

Now it had lights.

When it hit the floor something happened to it.

As I bent over it a series of small green lights suddenly flicked on all along its sides.

The lights were intensely bright; the colors more striking than LED Christmas lights.

I hesitated before touching it.

I mean…of course I did. Who wouldn’t?

After all, no one knows where this thing is from.

And right there I swear to God I heard a voice say, “Don’t touch it.”

I whirled, reaching for my last magazine, swapping out the old one with the speed borne of constant practice. But I brought the gun up and pointed it at nothing.

The hallway was empty except for the scientist who’d dropped the package. The room on the other side of the closed door was filled with his colleagues and their guards, and everyone was sleeping.

The alarms blared and the red lights flashed, but there was no one around to speak those words.

The voice repeated the warning.

“Don’t touch it.”

Here’s the thing. The voice I heard sounded like my own.

Chap. 7

Granted, I make no claims about being sane. Or even in the same zip code as sane. On my best day I have three different people living inside my head. The Civilized Man — who is the innocent and optimistic part of me. The one who wasn’t destroyed during the childhood trauma that otherwise turned me into a psychological basket of hamsters. Then there’s the Killer, that rough, crude, dangerous part of my mind, always looking to take it to the bad guys in very ugly ways. And there was the Cop, the closest thing I have to a sane and sober central self.

Each of them spoke in a particular voice inside my thoughts.

This wasn’t any of those voices.

The voice I heard was the one I use in normal conversation.

My regular voice.

Clear as day.

I spun around, bringing the gun up in a two-hand grip. There was an empty hall in front of me, and an empty hall behind me. Just the sleeping scientist on the floor. Red flashing lights on the walls. Nothing else.

No one else.

That voice, though…it had been real.

There’s nothing in the playbook on how to react to that kind of situation. I didn’t feel like I’d suddenly gone crazier than I already was. There was no way on earth the North Koreans had somehow sampled my voice and rigged a playback just to screw with me. It was too improbable and there was no point. So, that wasn’t it.

The voice, though.

I had heard it.

I switched the gun to one hand and slowly knelt beside the artifact. The little green lights were pulsing now. Steady. Like a heartbeat.

I swallowed what felt like a throatful of dust.

“Fuck it,” I said, and gently scooped up the object.

It weighed almost nothing. It felt like metal, but there was no heft to it at all. Lighter than aluminum or magnesium. Lighter than Styrofoam. I had to press my fingers against its planes and angles to assure myself that it was actually there.

That alone is strange. If this was some new alloy, then someone had broken through the ceiling of superlight design. If it was durable — and given the thing’s history I had to believe it was — then that alone would be worth billions to the aeronautics industry. Durable superlight materials are the dream, the holy grail of metallurgy. If it could be studied and reproduced, it would totally revolutionize military aircraft. Maybe space travel as well.

And yet that was, as far as my team was concerned, a secondary benefit. An unknown benefit. It added another element of mystery to this thing. Science, as it’s known by the teams working with the Department of Military Sciences — including the über-geeks at DARPA — couldn’t do this. The energy discharge alone was freakish. Now this.

The artifact was warm to the touch.

Creepy warm.

Not warm like metal.

Touching it was like touching flesh. If I closed my eyes, that’s what it would have been like. Skin, at normal body temperature.

Not metal.

“Jesus,” I said, and I wished I could have dropped it right there and then. I wanted to. It was repulsive.

“Do it,” said the voice. My voice. “Drop it and get out.”

I whirled around again.

The hall was still empty.

“Fuck me,” I told the emptiness.

The clock was ticking. I needed to be at the extraction point in ten minutes.

So I clutched the package to me, and I ran.

The corridors fed one into the other. I ran up flights of stairs. I ran down. I burned seconds I could spare bypassing locks on security doors.

Twice I encountered security personnel.

Twice I put them down before they could get off a shot.

After I dropped the last one, I passed through another door that took me out of the lab complex and into what was clearly an administrative wing. There were vault-style doors on that level, and the place was entirely deserted. Not sure if it was because of the hour — local time here was three in the morning — or because of the alarms. North Korean military protocols sent workers into secure bunkers during emergencies. I’d passed several locked chambers. Any staff working this late was probably squirrelled away in there. Good. Better for everyone concerned. Besides, I was down to three rounds in the Snellig. If I met any real resistance I’d have to switch to something lethal. I’d already killed one poor dumb son of a bitch; I didn’t want to compound my crimes.

I hurried through the offices. At most of the desks, the chairs were neatly snugged into the footwells, computers were off or on screensaver, and the desk lamps were dark. A few were less tidy; those probably belonged to the workers hiding in the bunkers.

There were no security guards in this wing. That concerned me. Not that I wanted to meet any, but it seemed odd.

Everything, in fact, seemed odd.

Then I rounded a corner and found something even odder.

Three uniformed guards lay sprawled on the floor.

There was no blood. No marks of violence.

For all the world, they appeared to be…sleeping.

I think I actually said, “What the fuck?”

Beneath my arm the artifact throbbed.

Actually throbbed. It was a feeling of heat that pulsed so quickly and abated so immediately that the effect was like the device had expanded and contracted. Like something taking a breath.

I almost flung the thing away from me.

Instead I held it out at arm’s length — despite its size I could easily hold it with one hand, it was that light — and looked at it.

Metal. Green lights.

Same as before.

But not exactly the same.

That pulse or throb or whatever it was….I didn’t like it.

No, sir. Not one bit.

It felt wrong.

Like the surface temperature and texture of it was wrong. I was reacting to it as if it was not a machine at all. It felt to me like something….

The word is alive, but I can’t really use it because that’s stupid.

It’s metal. It can’t be alive.

The thing pulsed again.

The green lights went from a neutral intensity on a par with traffic “go” lights, to a glare that, for a split second, was eye-hurtingly intense. I winced and cried out and….

And, yes, I dropped the thing.

Or, maybe I flung it away.

Hard to say.

Hard to actually think about.

The artifact hit the ground and rolled bumpity-bumpity across the floor.

And stopped when someone placed the sole of his foot against it.

Someone who, I swear to God, was not there a moment ago.

Chap. 8

The man was dressed all in black.

All.

Head to toe. Black pants and pullover. Black socks and shoes. Black gloves. A black balaclava and black goggles. I couldn’t see a single square inch of his skin. He could have been white, Asian or, yeah, black.

He was big, though. About my height. Not as bulky in the arms and chest, but close enough.

And he was just there.

Standing where he shouldn’t have been standing, within arm’s reach, and I hadn’t seen or heard him approach.

So, fuck it, I shot him. Point-blank.

In the script in my head that I was writing for this scene, he should have folded up like a deck chair and that should have been that.

That wasn’t how it played out.

I fired the dart gun, and he moved out of the line of fire.

It was weird. He was fast but not the Flash. It wasn’t like he dodged a bullet, so to speak. He wasn’t that fast. No, it was like he had such perfect timing that as I fired he was already moving — as if knowing exactly the timing and angle of my shot.

Then he pivoted and slapped the gun out of my hand.

There’s a way to do that if you know what you’re doing. You hit the gun at one angle and the back of the wrist at another. Do it fast and simultaneously, and the gun goes flying.

My gun went flying.

I have been disarmed exactly once in my adult life.

That time.

If anyone had wanted to wager on whether someone could do that to me, I’d have bet my whole pension on that answer being “no.”

My gun went flying anyway.

I wasted no time goggling at it.

I kicked him in the knee.

Which he blocked with a raised-leg hoof kick.

I hooked a left at his short ribs, but he chop-blocked with his elbow and counterpunched me in the biceps, numbing my arm. Growling in pain and anger, I faked once, twice, and hit him with a jab in the nose.

Except that he turned his head two inches to the left so that my jab hit the point of his cheekbone.

Then he switched from defense to offense, throwing a series of punches and kicks at me that hammered me all the way across the hall and against the wall. He blocked every one of my counterpunches, parried every kick, even intruded into my attempted head-butt by head-butting me.

It was all very fast and very painful.

I won’t lie and I won’t sugarcoat it. He beat the shit out of me.

He humiliated me.

I didn’t land a single solid punch on him, and he hit me as often as he wanted to, and it was pretty clear that he really wanted to.

Winded, bleeding, bruised and dazed, I sagged against the wall.

I tried to win that fight.

I’ve never really lost a fight. Not in years. Not any fight that’s ever mattered to me. No matter how tough the other guy was, I was tougher. Or, if he was too tough then I won because I was crazier. I don’t care if I get hurt, but I will win a fight. I’ll burn down a house if that’s what it takes to win a fight.

Except that I lost this fight.

Lost it fast, and lost it completely.

This man, whoever he was, outfought me.

I am a special operator. I’m a senior martial artist. I’m a warrior and I’m a killer, and he simply took me apart.

He even used some of my own favorite moves, some of the things I tried to use on him. He used them faster and he used them better and I went down.

On my knees, blood dripping from my mashed lips, I tried to change the game on him. I snagged the rapid-release folding knife from its little spring clip inside my trouser pocket. It came into my hand and with a flick I locked the three-point-seven-five-inch blade into place and I lunged in and up and tried to castrate the fucker.

He twisted away. I heard cloth rip. I saw droplets of blood seed the air, but he moved so fast that all I did was slash him. I could tell from the resistance that the blade hadn’t gone deep enough to cut muscle or tendon. Only trousers and skin.

The blood was red.

The skin that showed through the torn fabric was white.

Not the light brown skin of an Asian. This guy was Caucasian.

He twisted and hit the side of my hand with a one-knuckle punch that turned my entire hand into a useless bag of pain. The knife clattered to the floor. He bent, scooped it up, and suddenly I was pressed back against the wall with the wicked edge pressed against the flesh of my throat. He held the knife the way an expert does when he wants you to know that you’re not going to take that blade away from him. Not in this lifetime.

I was done.

I was cooked.

Beaten, bloodied, and disarmed.

With a knife to my throat and his fingers knotted in my hair to hold me still.

Then he bent close and spoke with quiet urgency into my ear.

“Believe me when I tell you that neither of us wants you dead,” he said.

I froze. I didn’t dare move a muscle.

“I need you to listen to me, and I need you to understand. You can’t ask any questions. The best and only thing you can do is to listen and tell me you understand and agree.”

He pressed the knife more firmly against my throat to emphasize his point. A drop of warm blood ran down alongside my Adam’s apple.

“You listening, sport?”

“Y-yes….”

“Good, ’cause I’m only going to say this once.” He was leaning so close that even through his mask I could feel the heat of his breath on my ear. “You don’t know what this device is. None of you do. You can’t know and, believe me, you shouldn’t. You don’t want to.”

“Pretty fucking sure we do,” I growled.

He made a sound. Might have been a laugh. “No, you really don’t.”

“Who are you?”

For a moment I thought he was going to move the knife away. Or cut my throat. His hand trembled.

“Let me ask you a question, chief,” he said. “And you give me a straight answer. No bullshit. Can you do that?”

I said nothing. Wasn’t really feeling all that chatty.

He took it as assent, regardless. “What do you think they’re going to do with the device? I’m not talking about the North Koreans. What do you think we’re going to do with it?”

I said nothing.

“Do you honestly and without reservation believe that once the U.S. government gets their hands on it that they’ll hide it away and never use it? Do you think that if they did use it, they’d only concentrate on its potential for unlimited power? Do you think they can resist the temptation to study its potential as a weapon?”

I said nothing.

“You have good intentions, Joe,” he said. I didn’t ask him how he knew my name. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know that answer. “But sometimes you’re naïve. You’re too trusting. You think everyone has the same altruism as Mr. Church. You think that you can keep this thing from ever falling into the wrong hands. Tell me that’s not true. Tell me I’m lying.”

I still said nothing. My heart was hammering in my chest.

He sighed.

“I’m going to take the device out of play,” he said. “Nobody gets it. Not our people, not theirs. Nobody.”

“Bullshit,” I said finally.

“No,” he replied, “no bullshit. I know where it came from. I know what it is. And I know what will absolutely happen if anyone—anyone—fucks with it. And they will. You know it, sport. They’ll fuck with it and fuck around with it and then it’ll all go to hell.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” he said, “you can’t. I can. I do.” He paused, and there was a strange quality in his voice. A kind of sadness that runs all the way down to the cellar of the soul. “I’ve seen it. That’s why I can’t let you take it.”

He took the knife away, gave me a hip-check that knocked me sideways, and stepped backward out of reach before I could recover my balance. The device lay pulsing on the floor between us. Closer to him than to me.

Slowly, carefully, he knelt and scooped it up with the hand not holding the knife.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Who are you working for?”

He hesitated, studying me, then dropped the knife on the floor and pulled the goggles off. He dropped them onto the floor next to the knife. The he pulled the balaclava over his head and dropped that as well.

I stared at him. The hinges of the world seemed to snap and crack off and for a moment the whole room seemed to tilt.

I know that face.

I knew those blue eyes and the scuffle of blond hair. I knew that crooked nose and the scars. Some of the scars. There were more of them than when I’d seen that face last.

More than there had been when I looked into the shaving mirror that morning.

I said, “I don’t….”

It was all that would come out.

The face was older than mine. Harder, sadder, with deeper lines and more evidence of damage.

But it was my face.

He looked down at me with my own eyes.

There was such a look of deep hurt and enduring pain in those eyes.

“I’m taking it with me,” he said. “Once I’m gone you’ll have six minutes to get out. You’ll need four and a half.”

He smiled then.

There was no joy in it.

Not for him.

Not for me.

He turned and walked away. Within a few steps he was running. He rounded a corner and was gone.

I knew, with absolute certainty but with no understanding of why I knew it, that if I ran to that corner and looked around it, he wouldn’t be there.

There was a brief squelch in my ear and then Bug’s voice. “…To Cowboy, do you copy?”

I tapped my earbud but I had to suck some spit into my mouth and swallow it before I could trust myself to talk.

“Cowboy here.”

“Thank God! We were having kittens and—”

“Shut up, Bug. How do I get out?”

“Do you have the package?”

I hesitated, trying to construct a reply that would make sense. “Mission accomplished,” I said. Or something like that, I don’t really remember.

He gave me the route.

I ran it.

I got out.

Chap. 9

They grilled me for days about it.

Days.

No sleep. No easing up.

My boss, Mr. Church. Dr. Rudy Sanchez. Aunt Sallie. Others.

They asked me hundreds of questions. Or, maybe it was the same few questions hundreds of times. It blurred together after a while.

They hooked me to a polygraph.

Someone — it might have been Dr. Hu — slipped me a Pentothal cocktail and grilled me through the haze.

They kept asking the same questions.

And I gave them the same story every single fucking time.

After a while they stopped asking.

They let me sleep.

Eventually they even let me go home.

Tomorrow the interviews or interrogations may start up again. I’m not sure. All I know for certain is that the artifact is gone. No one has seen it. I suspect no one ever will.

Where has it gone?

I have no idea.

I really don’t.

What happened in the lab remains the biggest mystery of my life, and that is saying a whole lot.

I know what I saw. I know what I heard.

It’s just that I am absolutely certain, without any margin for error, that I will never understand it.

Not, at least, until I’m older.

As he had been.

Older.

Sadder.

Stranger.

I don’t believe in time travel, and I’m not sure I buy any bullshit about parallel dimensions. But, how else do I explain it? What else makes sense?

Nothing

Not a goddamn thing.

But…the device is gone.

Nobody has the weapon.

So…yeah…there’s that.