by James Hunt
“I understand what’s at stake, Senator, but if—”
Runehart gripped the back of Dr. Kline’s neck and pulled him closer, teeth bared like a rabid dog. He’d been patient enough, and he was growing tired of waiting in the tall grass. “Do you know what I’ve had to do to ensure you keep your funding, Doctor? Do you know how much I’ve sacrificed to keep what you’re doing under the radar? None of this comes free. Everything has a price, and it’s time you started footing your end of the bill.”
Dr. Kline, a tiny man even compared to a non-genetically enhanced human such as Runehart, shrunk even smaller as he recoiled from Runehart’s touch. He cast his eyes away, his body trembling. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I—”
“I want to speak to him,” Runehart said, staring at 289-02 through the plexiglass.
Dr. Kline hesitated for a moment but eventually swiped his badge to let Runehart inside, the rest of his staff entering as well. The senator approached 289-02 like a kid viewing his Christmas present early. He circled the behemoth, staring him up and down, examining every angle. The beast was even more impressive up close.
“How does it filter commands?” Runehart asked, finally taking a step back.
“Voice commands,” Kline said. “Code words will trigger a response.”
It was all too much. Runehart couldn’t wait any longer. “Give them to me.” He spun around and quickly closed the gap between him and the doctor, but Kline recoiled.
“I don’t think it’s best—”
Runehart removed a pistol from the inside of his jacket and aimed it at the assistant. The rest of the doctors froze as Runehart pressed the barrel against her temple. “Tell me. Or I blow her brains across the floor.”
“Okay, okay.” Kline held up his hands, his voice wavering, and reached for a pen and paper.
“Clock’s ticking, Doctor.” Runehart held out his free left hand and waited for Kline to finish writing the code, snapping his fingers impatiently. The assistant shivered, and Runehart shushed her. Kline handed over the code. Runehart licked his lips, the excitement almost too much to bear. “Tango, November, Alaska, Iceland, Grand Canyon, April twenty-first, nine, Jonathan.”
289-02 immediately looked to Runehart, and for a moment, the senator thought the good doctor had tricked him, but fear had overridden any of Kline’s wits.
“Ready for command,” 289-02 said.
Runehart lowered the pistol and took a step back, that unelectable grin stretched over his face. “Kill everyone in this lab that isn’t me.”
“No!” Dr. Kline held out his hand, but 289-02 snapped the doctor’s neck in the blink of an eye. Screams pierced the air as the remaining doctors scrambled to escape, but they had done their work well. The monster annihilated all of them with a quick turn of his hands. And when the bodies laid lifeless on the floor, the beast calmly walked over.
“Mission complete,” 289-02 said.
The creature had no emotions, an evolutionary advantage and one that Runehart wished he could experience. He was never allowed to be what he truly was. He was never allowed to take off that mask in public. It was only in the privacy of his home that he was able to look in the mirror and see the truth behind all of the bullshit speeches and lies. But now he finally had a body to put his mind to work with. He finally had a tool that matched in skill what Runehart possessed in his capacity for cruelty.
***
Matt and Ella had passed out on Becca’s lap. They’d barely slept the night before, and the fact that they’d been locked in a small room for nearly twelve hours had driven both of them to the point of tears. They were scared, they were exhausted, and they wanted to go home.
Becca leaned her head back against the wall and shut her eyes. The anger had dulled some since the CIA had busted down their door and forced them into the back of a sedan, but there was still a lingering residue that fueled the light bounce of her knee.
The first thought that came to mind was that what Sarah had predicted came true. Some nuclear holocaust had descended upon them, and the agents that were sent to extract them were trying to keep them safe. But she quickly realized there were no bombs and that they were being held against their will—a fact that Becca had brought up repeatedly, but the agents held their silence behind black sunglasses and matching suits. She was given nothing, and she didn’t expect that to change any time soon. At least that was what she thought.
The door to the room opened, and a large, older, bald gentleman was thrust inside, after which the door was quickly shut. He was dressed in a suit like the ones her captors wore, but he didn’t share the same robotic expression when he looked at her.
“Mack?” The name left Becca’s mouth in a whisper. She tried to stand, but the two warm heads that rested on each of her legs kept her seated.
“Hello, Becca.” Mack lumbered over and collapsed into the only other empty chair in the room. His eyes drooped down like a sad hound dog’s, and there was perspiration on his forehead.
Becca thought that maybe they had tortured him. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d seen something like that.
“Are you okay?” Becca asked.
“I’ll be better once we get out of here,” Mack answered, dabbing at the sweat with a napkin. He looked down to the twins, smiling. “How are they holding up?”
Becca gave a light snort. “It’s not like they haven’t been through this before.” If it weren’t so damn disgusting, it could almost be funny. She brushed the hair on the sides of their heads then asked the question that she’d been thinking since they were taken. “Is Sarah still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Mack answered.
Becca had only met Mack once before, right after Ben’s death. He gave off the impression of a no-nonsense kind of man, not one for beating around the bush. So to hear a level of uncertainty in his voice was unsettling.
“What the hell is going on?” Becca imagined there would be some level of resistance, but there wasn’t. He told her everything: the CIA’s shaky alliance with the GSF after the Global Power fiasco that eventually led to her husband’s death, the device the former deputy director of the CIA had created from that same program, the fact that the GSF was framed for the whole thing, and the bounty on every GSF employee around the world.
The global intelligence community had names, pictures, and personal information on everyone. And by now there were no doubt other family members of GSF employees being whisked off into the darkest corners of the intelligence community.
“Christ,” Becca whispered.
“If only he were here to do something about it,” Mack said. “But I’m afraid he isn’t.” He glanced up to the ceiling. “No matter how many times you ask.”
“Has any of this made the mainstream news?” Becca felt that it was a silly question, but she was compelled to ask regardless.
“Not yet,” Mack answered. “There is a senate committee that’s investigating me and what I’ve done. I’m sure the process will be expedited due to the sensitive nature of the case, but when it is over, it will become public record. Once that happens, there won’t be any hiding it, no matter where the chips fall.” He looked down at his hands, squeezing and massaging his palm, some of his knuckles swollen with arthritis. “A lot people will die because of this.”
“Sarah won’t let that happen,” Becca said. “She will find a way to stop this. You know what she can do, and so do I.”
Mack nodded his head slowly. “I’m well aware of what your sister-in-law is capable of, Becca. I’ve seen Hill do things I never thought possible in my thirty-year career. She’s gifted, there is no doubt. But, right now, she doesn’t have any resources, and every agency in the world is gunning to run her down. The odds stacked against her are higher than they’ve ever been before.”
“You don’t think she can do it?” Becca found it hard to believe herself.
“Maybe.” But just when the uncertainty crept into Becca’s mind, he smiled and looked her strai
ght in the eyes. “I do know one thing, though.” There was a reassuring glow to them, and it instantly made her feel better. “She won’t stop. Even when you ask her to.”
Chapter 4
Sarah reclined in the office chair, her head flung backward, exposing her throat, as she twirled around, staring at the ceiling. She’d already counted every grain of the popcorn ceiling. Twice.
Bryce sat on the couch in the living room, busy typing frantically on his laptop, searching for ways into Langley. The groans and keyboard finger-smashes told her that progress was slow.
“Are you done yet?” Sarah asked.
Bryce let out an exasperated sigh. “For the eighty-seventh time, no.”
“You know what they say,” Sarah said, still spinning in her chair. “Eighty-seventh time’s the charm!”
Grace placed a hand on Sarah’s shoulder, ending the spinning and giving a brief head shake with a motherly inflection that oozed ‘stop teasing your brother.’
Defeated, Sarah gave a nod and then rocked forward out of the chair. From the corner of her eye, she watched Grace and Bryce embrace, and a thin smile spread across Sarah’s face. Bryce had put up with a lot of shit over the course of his career with the GSF, most of it directly because of Sarah, so she was glad that he had found someone as supportive as Grace.
At the same time, there still was a twinge of jealousy. But she knew it was a natural reaction. The two had been paired together for almost eight years. And they’d worked so well together that they were the longest-running support-and-field-agent duo the GSF had ever seen. She brushed it off as nothing more than her competitive side and took a walk toward the back door to give Bryce room to scour that massive brain of his.
Sarah opened the sliding glass door, passed through a screened-in porch, and then swung the porch door open and stepped onto the grass of the backyard, the squeaky hinges groaning as the door closed.
Night had descended on the small suburban neighborhood, and its inhabitants were settling in for bed. A light breeze waved tree branches and bushes then spun a pinwheel some kid had planted in the backyard of the house next door, the windows inside dark.
But with the breeze, Sarah heard something else, and the immediate reaction brought her palm to the handle of her Colt. She paused, her eyes scanning the darkness, and that was when she heard the dull thud of a suppressor.
The bullet smacked the collar of Sarah’s Kevlar jacket, and she was spun backward onto the grass. She rolled left, a successive series of similar thuds echoing in the night air. She summersaulted backward, smashing through the screen door, and hurdled back through the sliding glass door, which she quickly slammed shut on her retreat.
Sarah darted into the living room, where Bryce still sat and was now receiving a neck massage from Grace, oblivious to their new friends out back.
“Not to rush the genius at work here, but are you done yet?” Sarah asked.
Bryce let out a low moan and rolled his head back and forth while Grace dug her fingers into his neck. “Look, breaking into Langley isn’t like sneaking across the border into Syria or some second-world country’s military base. It takes time to dismantle the nuances of the system, and—”
“Yeah, that’s great, but we’re currently being surrounded by snipers who want to kill us.” Sarah maneuvered to the front living room window and peered through the corner.
“What are you talking about?” Bryce said. “The alarms would have been triggered if someone was close.”
Sarah turned and was just about to give him a verbal wedgie, when she noticed the red dot in the center of his forehead. “Duck!”
The bullet penetrated the living room window and exploded into the couch just as Bryce and Grace hit the carpet. The light clank of shattered glass followed four more shots into the living room, and Sarah crawled over to Bryce.
“Told you,” Sarah said.
Bryce reached up to the coffee table and pulled the laptop onto the carpet with him, quickly pulling up the satellite imagery for the area. “The code that disabled the alarm system is Chinese. Looks like there are four of them.” He zoomed in on the surrounding houses and saw one combatant on each side of their safe house.
Sarah pushed herself to her knees but kept low, keeping her voice at a whisper now that the gunshots had gone silent. “You two stay here.”
“What are doing?” Grace asked.
Sarah removed the second Colt from her holster and shrugged. “Being awesome.” She stayed hunched below the pane of the front living room window, both pistols aimed at the wall. A shadow slowly crept by and spread across the carpet.
Adjusting for the angle of the shadow, Sarah aimed a little farther to her left then squeezed the triggers of her Colts. The heavy .45-caliber ammunition easily pierced the drywall and connected with the leg of the assassin outside, who groaned as he dropped into the grass.
Retaliatory gunfire exploded through the front wall of the house, and Sarah banked hard left to avoid its path. She sidled up next to one of the couches to provide an extra buffer between her and the house’s thin walls.
Sarah activated the display on her arm. “Bryce, I need an enhanced thermal scan for outside.” The imaging revealed four foreign agents, one on each exterior wall of the house.
One of the figures approached the back door, and Sarah sprinted toward the rear of the house. Silent footsteps pressed against the carpet, then the tile, then the concrete of the back porch just as the assailant reached the screen door.
Sarah burst through the closed door, knocking both it and the assassin to the grass. He scrambled to get to his feet, but the loud crack of contact between Sarah’s knee and the assassin’s chin popped his head up and sent a stabbing pain through her leg from knee to hip. She unsheathed the knife on her leg, hoping to end it quickly and quietly, but the ninja bounced right back after the blow, swinging the rifle around and squeezing off three suppressed gunshots into the air before Sarah knocked the rifle out of his hand and into the grass.
Quickly, Sarah struck with jabs to the throat, cheek, stomach, and nose, only to have them blocked and swatted down inches before contact. The assassin then pivoted forward, pressing an attack, and Sarah was inched backward as she caught a quick glimpse on her display of the other combatants now converging on the backyard.
The assassin’s comrades appeared at either corner of the backyard, and Sarah snatched the wrist of the current fighter and yanked him into close quarters, spinning him to the right, while she removed the Colt from its holster with her left hand. Bullets thumped into the chest of the human shield while she returned fire.
The bullets hit the target, but the protected Kevlar around the assailant’s chest kept him alive as she pulled both herself and the spy still trapped in her chokehold through the porch and back into the house. The two flopped on the floor, and Sarah aimed the Colt at the open sliding glass door while her hostage squirmed. “I read in your match-dot-com profile that you liked to be adventurous. I’m glad you didn’t disappoint.” She increased the pressure, and the man’s windpipe crunched like a soda can, his body gone limp.
The two shooters still in the backyard pumped several rounds through the back walls, forcing Sarah deeper into the house. She stumbled on her retreat, and the thump of a silencer preceded a bullet into the middle of her back and dropped her to the carpet.
With a pain spreading outward from the center of her spine, Sarah lay motionless, playing possum until the assassin that had snuck inside was within reach, then yanked his legs from underneath him. Ass and floor connected fast and harshly, and while she was still in pain from the well-placed bullet on the Kevlar protecting her back, she jammed the tip of her knife into the assailant’s neck, sending a spray of blood all over the front of her.
“Gah, we’ve got a squirter,” Sarah said.
The body twitched as the last bits of blood drained from his neck, and Sarah shoved the body aside. She took both pistols in her hands and crouched low behind the couch, waiting for the
last two goons to enter through the back, but when she glanced down at the display on her arm, both of them remained in the backyard, frozen. Then she watched both of them slowly retreat, forcing Sarah to expand the image on her forearm to be able to keep an eye on them.
“Bryce, are you seeing this?” Sarah asked.
“Yeah, doing a sweep of the air space,” Bryce answered.
Sarah stood, tilting her head to the side as she took a few steps toward the back door, stepping over the dead body sprawled out on the carpet, her eyes growing wide. She didn’t need Bryce to finish the scan. “Oh shit.” She grabbed Bryce and Grace by the arm and pulled them toward the front door. “We have to go.”
Neither resisted, Bryce clutching his computer in one hand as the pair smacked into the corner of a hallway passing through the living room toward the front door.
“But the scan’s not done!” Bryce said.
They flew out the front door, a humming noise growing louder, very quickly. Now in the front yard, Sarah turned her head and pointed to the drone that had just banked left and fired a missile.
“That’s all the scan I need,” Bryce said.
The missile whistled through the air, and only seconds later, a blast of energy and heat flung all three of them forward into the grass, and the house erupted in a fiery explosion that lit up the night sky. Debris rained over the property, and Sarah’s ears ached from the piercing din.
Smeared in dirt and grass, she raised her head and saw that both Grace and Bryce lay unconscious. “Bryce!” She scrambled to his side and flipped him over on his back, checking for a pulse and then breaths. Both were good. She moved to Grace, finding a pulse but no breaths. She tilted Grace’s head back and opened her mouth, pumping air into her lungs.
