by B. V. Larson
The interviewer began kicking and flailing. The blows didn’t bother Bjorn much. There was no power in them. It was like being struck by an angry child.
“What are you so worried about?” Bjorn asked. “It’s just a knock-out pill, right?”
The interviewer whined and gurgled, but could not speak.
“Did you swallow it?” Bjorn asked him.
The man tried to scream something at him through his shut mouth. Sounds came out of his nostrils, something like “let go” but Bjorn could not be sure. Reluctantly, he removed his hand from the agent’s mouth.
The man immediately spat out the pill. Bjorn’s reflexes were as superb as his strength. He snatched it from the air and held it up again.
The interviewer’s eyes were focused on the pill and nothing else.
“You’re more afraid of this little pill than you are of me,” Bjorn observed curiously. “Why?”
“They’re coming. You have to know that. You broke the signal when you—”
Bjorn lost interest in the man’s threats. He popped the pill back into the agent’s mouth again and this time when he slammed his jaws shut, he made sure the teeth closed on the capsule. The pill was crushed between two sets of wet molars.
The man howled and spat. He reached up with hands like claws toward Bjorn’s throat, but was easily pushed away.
“What is in that pill?” Bjorn asked, letting him go. “You might as well tell me now that you’ve taken it.”
The interviewer attempted to speak, but failed. He began foaming pink flecks that first appeared at the corners of his mouth, then spread across his swelling lips. His eyes were huge and ringed with white.
“You killed me,” he gasped. “They said you would kill me.”
“You killed yourself with your overconfidence,” Bjorn told him. “Did you really think I was going to just swallow a pill and commit suicide on the spot?”
The agent slid out of his chair and down onto all fours. He sagged down, dying. His eyes stayed open, but the strange foam still flowed. It made a dark stain around his mouth on the Berber carpet. Bjorn frowned and checked agent’s pulse. It was thready for a moment, then stopped.
“Fast-acting,” he muttered. He didn’t like it. He took a moment to wash his hands in the tiny bathroom. It could be some kind of contact poison.
On the way out of the room, he took the agent’s computer tablet with him. He didn’t head for the elevators or the stairs. Those easy paths would be blocked.
Instead, he crossed the hallway to the room opposite. He’d identified it earlier as an escape route, just in case. He straight-armed the door. The lock popped and a small sliver of broken wood fell out of the doorframe. He stepped inside and forced the broken door closed behind him.
Then he stepped into the middle of the dark room, scooted the bed aside and began to tear up the carpet.
His hands were like steel claws, which made the task easy for him. It was almost like unwrapping a Christmas present. Once through the thin layer of carpet, he pulled up the subfloor. This was the tricky part, as the nails squeaked and the plywood crackled.
He paused in his activities to head into the bathroom. He turned on all the faucets and the bathroom fan for cover noise, then he went back to work.
In less than two minutes, he heard men running down the hall and shouting. But by that time, he had dug his way down to the room below. He took the time to slide the bed over the hole he’d made in the room above before dropping down onto into the next room. Once there, he began digging again, tearing his way through the floor down into yet another hotel room.
He’d scouted this escape route over an hour ago, simply by making sure the rooms were unoccupied. He’d once heard of a lab experiment which had placed a monkey in a room with thirteen possible exits. A group of scientists had sat around, watching carefully to see which exit the monkey figured out and used to escape. The monkey had reportedly used the fourteenth exit—the one no one had thought of.
Bjorn liked to think of himself in that way, as the man who could do the unexpected. Many people believed that the key to being a successful killer lay in the method of execution. They studied the murder itself. But he knew better. Killing was relatively easy. Escaping the scene afterward—now that was the critical part where most assassins failed.
Soon he stood on the fifth floor, rather than the seventh. He was also on the opposite side of the building, on the side that faced south, away from the Pentagon. Bjorn was a paranoid man, but he didn’t think that they would put a team on him so large they’d watch both sides of the building. Probably they were in the hotel lobby, covering all the exits and waiting. They might have stationed a man on the roof too—a man with a high-powered rifle.
He took a moment to check out the tablet he’d stolen from the dead agent. He tapped at the screen and found the questions he’d been asked and answers he’d given. There actually were questions that he’d failed. Apparently, he did have plans to overthrow the government. This seemed amusing to him, but troubling as well. He felt as if he ought to know his own internal thoughts on such issues.
He also found the name of the man who was in charge of this recruiting op. It was none other than General Robert Kerr. Bjorn had heard of him, but had never dealt with him directly.
After briefly skimming the information, he smashed the tablet thoroughly. They might be tracking it somehow. Then he opened the hotel room window and stepped out onto the balcony. Without hesitation he jumped off.
On this side of the hotel, the lower section of the building thrust outward three floors down. He landed hard, leaving two footprints in the crushed stucco, but walked away uninjured. A thirty-foot drop wasn’t a big deal for a nanotized man. He hadn’t wanted to try this from fifty feet, which was why he’d dug his way down two floors first.
Bjorn crossed the roof, dropped into an alley twenty feet below, and walked nonchalantly into the city streets. Once there, he was in his element. He vanished into the crowds like a shadow blending into dusk.
-2-
“What do you mean ‘the subject has successfully employed delaying tactics’?” General Kerr demanded loudly. He was a naturally loud man with a southern twang that accented his colorful speech patterns. “You’re telling me you lost him, right? What about the sniper? Is he as blind as the rest of your team?”
“No, sir—I mean, he never had a shot.”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m sure. He probably couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle. You tell him that for me. You got that, Randy?”
“Bull…butt…yes, sir.”
Kerr stabbed at the smartphone screen repeatedly until it disconnected the call. Somehow, these new phones resisted taking directions if you went at them too vigorously. He found the experience very unsatisfying. In his youth, he’d enjoyed slamming phones down into receivers. Now he wasn’t even given that small joy when his underlings screwed the pooch.
He continued tapping at the phone when he had his breathing under control. It was time to call in some favors.
“Randy? This is Kerr again.”
“I’m sorry sir, I haven’t had time to—”
“I know you haven’t had time to—”
“It’s been less than a minute, General.”
“I don’t care about that, listen—”
“I’m calling them—I mean I’m going to call them, but—”
“Shut up, man!” shouted Kerr in sudden fury. “I said I don’t care. I’m giving you new orders. I know where this killer is going.”
“You do?”
“That’s right.”
“Where, sir?”
“Well, I’ll tell you if you will shut up for one damned second.”
Kerr waited until the other man had remained silent for several seconds.
“That’s better,” he said. “Bjorn is heading for Star Force. That’s right, Andros Island. Get down there and look for him.”
There was more buzzing in his ear. Kerr rolled hi
s eyes and massaged his temples. Why couldn’t people just do as they were told without asking questions? He missed the real military sometimes. The United States was in a real war after all, a war against aliens and internal dissidents at the same time. If he’d been placed in charge of a correspondingly real military operation he would be able to order a questioning, simpering man shot. General George Washington had put down his share of mutineers in his time, and what was good enough for old George was good enough for General Kerr.
At the very least, Kerr figured he should have had the power to demote the man on the spot. He had neither of these powers as an intel ops-runner, and he didn’t like it. This business of running a spook patrol to keep a lid on Kyle Riggs and his happy band of pirates was getting on his last nerve.
Kerr pulled the phone from his ear and cheek and waggled it in the air. He waited until it stopped making sounds, indicating Randy had stopped speaking. He had no interest in anything the man was saying, he just wanted it to come to an end. Finally, it did.
He put the phone back to his head and growled into it. “All right, I’ve heard enough whining. You don’t need to know how I know. You’re just going to act on the intel and not ask any more stupid questions. Now, get down there to the Florida Keys and start looking for your target before he ships out.”
Randy finally stopped prattling and hung up. General Kerr walked to the window of his Pentagon office and stared across the Potomac. There, in plain sight, stood the hotel where this character who called himself “Bjorn” had given them the slip. The man was a natural talent at both killing and escaping. These were two critical skills for any assassin to have. And there was no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind that he was nanotized.
Kerr wanted this man on the team so badly he could crush Randy’s windpipe for failing. It was such an opportunity, and the team had pissed it right down their collective spook legs.
“He was right there!” Kerr shouted aloud. “Sitting within arm’s reach, and now he’s gone. The perfect mole…and they let him slip away.”
He shook his head and lamented the loss. Bjorn was probably going to have to be put down now. He’d smelled the trap and fled. Randy’s team had done the worst thing possible: they’d put him on his guard. He’d gone rogue, and like a stray dog that had been smacked around, he would never trust the bad man’s feeding hand again.
When they caught up with Bjorn the next time, Kerr figured he wasn’t going to let Randy’s team play amateur hour twice in a row.
“This time, things will be handled my way,” he said to no one.
* * *
The vast arrowhead-shaped warships of the Macros had returned to the Solar System. They were a cold race of gigantic machines. Whatever they lacked in flexibility and intellect they more than made up for in bulk and implacability.
The enemy fleet was gathering over Venus, massing up for their inevitable charge at Earth. Bjorn watched the news reports with mild interest as he traveled southward. Either the robots would kill everyone, or they wouldn’t. He didn’t think there was much he could do about it either way, so he tried not to think about it.
Apparently he was the only person on Earth who wasn’t riveted by the reports. There was nothing else to talk about planet-wide. Every news station was running the story, and the fact there was very little actual information to report didn’t stop them from covering it around the clock.
Bjorn had more immediate worries. He had to get out of the region, and he had to do it fast. After a bit of work on his laptop, using public wireless systems in coffee shops, he boarded a military transport in Norfolk. The big plane was deafeningly loud inside, but it was bound for Florida and it was cheap.
Arranging military transport wasn’t as tricky as it sounded, at least not for him. U. S. military personnel often took jump-seat rides all over the world almost for free. The only hitch was that he was no longer technically a member of the military. Fortunately, he had plenty of false documentation from past work. The hardest part had been getting together a cover story for his trip. Things had never been the same after the South American Campaign. In the days after the destruction of an entire continent, security had tightened worldwide. There had never been any reports of alien infiltration, but everyone was looking over their shoulders anyway.
That’s where Bjorn’s specialized training came into play. He was a man trained to use a host country’s infrastructure against itself. Every security protocol ever built followed rules, and strict adherence to those rules over time caused a certain degree of blindness in the people who followed them. They became more concerned with the rules themselves than what they were actually trying to protect.
Bjorn had found that most security people tended to pay the least attention to what was right in front of them. In their minds, they had marked such things as safe and uninteresting. They were scanning for the unexpected. Since they expected him to try to sneak out of the country, he knew they would be watching every transportation hub. Therefore, the safest spot was to place himself right under their noses. By getting into a military transport with false orders inserted into their own computer files and a fake ID, he could have managed to have himself shipped anywhere around the globe.
Again, his destination was chosen to be unexpected. He would travel to Florida, right into the heart of the current action. The subtropical state had been turned into a militarized region over the last several years as Star Force grew in the islands to the south and enemy ships had battled with Earth’s fleets in the skies there more than once.
Bjorn employed one of his more useful IDs, that of Specialist Edwin Serkin. A nonexistent reservist with unusual skills, Serkin’s backstory always included reactivation and assignment for duty in whatever remote location Bjorn wanted to go.
Today, Specialist Edwin Serkin flew to Key West Naval Air Station. He was urgently needed there for vague reasons. In the military, vague orders were rarely questioned by those who reviewed them and passed them on. It was assumed the imaginary Serkin was working on a secret project—God knew there were enough of those around these days in Florida.
Bjorn deplaned and blinked in the bright tropical sun. By the time he made it out of the plane and onto the tarmac, his skin was already prickling under the assault of the tropical humidity. He could feel the heat sinking into him. Sweat sprouted quickly in response. He told himself he would just have to get used to it—he planned to be here for a long time.
He’d deplaned and passed the initial checkpoint without a problem. He’d almost made it to the guard post in fact before anything went awry.
Fortunately, he spotted the spotter first. There was a man at the gate who didn’t belong there. The chain-link fences, razor wire and checkout station were all expected and in place, but the man in the navy blazer, his tie flapping in the breeze—he was all wrong.
First of all, most people on the base were in uniform, or at least had crew-cuts and a noticeable military bearing. This man was different. He leaned against the guard post with an insolent, bored stance. He had the look of someone who’d been stationed there for far longer than he’d expected to be, and he was disgusted by the duty. But he was still alert. He examined every passenger as they exited the transport with keen eyes, lifting his black sunglasses when someone interesting approached.
Bjorn had positioned himself at the rear of the group automatically. He stepped aside long before he reached the front of the line.
The guard at the gate was busy looking down at IDs as he checked each one against a roster. Security was tighter than it had been in the old days, but usually, these routines gave Bjorn no trouble. It was the man with the flapping tie he was worried about. He was looking for a face, and Bjorn had a pretty good idea who he was hoping to find.
With precise, quick steps, Bjorn walked around to the far side of the guard post and vaulted the ten-foot tall chain link fence. He did this with a single smooth motion, bounding into the air impossibly high. He paused only long enough to place hi
s hand into the wire at the top. He caught himself with this single outstretched hand and redirected his angle of travel downward. He landed on his feet with a thump. Behind him, the razor wire rattled and droplets of his blood glinted in the sun.
Bjorn fell into step with the others on the far side, who glanced at him and frowned. No one challenged him, fortunately for them. They were all too busy meeting relatives and digging out their keys. The welcoming parking lot was dead ahead and everyone had their eyes on it.
At a steady, almost nonchalant pace, the group headed for their waiting cars. Bjorn slung his bag over his neck. Blood still ran from his injured hand, dribbling down onto the sidewalk. He stepped out over the grass, not wanting to leave a visible trail.
He’d made it halfway to the parking lot before anyone caught on. He heard a distant shout behind him: “That’s him!”
He didn’t bother to look back. He didn’t concern himself with how he’d been spotted. Perhaps someone had witnessed his leap and reported it. Perhaps the man at the checkpoint had missed Edward Serkin. Possibly, the man with the flapping tie had done a count and come up with a discrepancy.
It didn’t matter. What mattered now was that the race was on, and Bjorn meant to win it.
He reached out to the man in front of him, a soldier with his arm around a young woman who’d doubtlessly come to pick him up.
Bjorn squeezed, snapping the man’s collarbone in less than a second. The young soldier fell to his knees, gasping. The woman knelt with him, asking him what was wrong.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something hit me. I might be shot.”
The girl shouted something about a “shooter”, and that was just gravy. Everyone who’d initially gathered around the stricken man now began backing away. A fair number of them began trotting for the parking lot, while others milled around the spot in confusion, trying to aid the couple.
Bjorn joined those flowing toward the cars. He reached the edge of the parking lot when the spook from the guard post broke past the crowd around the couple. The diversion hadn’t fooled him.
