Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

  “I’m coming for you,” muttered Stafford. The driver, on the other side of a closed glass partition, heard nothing. “I’m going to skin you alive, you prick.”

  CHAPTER 91

  BERLIN BRANDENBURG AIRPORT

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  The sleek black Dassault Falcon 8X luxury jet touched down fourteen minutes after Stafford’s wheels hit the tarmac.

  The clearances had all been arranged by Annie Han, the computer hacker who officially worked for the South Korean government but who owed her truest allegiance to Arklight.

  The jet had a capacity for sixteen passengers, but there were only three aboard. Two men and a woman. They were met at customs by Oskar Freund, who had the papers and the authority to smooth their way through customs.

  A woman in driver’s livery stood waiting at the curb.

  “He was spotted when he came out,” she told them. “We have a bird in the air.”

  The bird was a medium-range radar-deflecting surveillance drone originally designed for the Russian military. Plans and prototypes were stolen by an Arklight hit team. The designer, his staff, and eight soldiers were killed in that raid, and one of Annie’s tapeworms was introduced to the computers and internet to hunt down and completely erase all traces of that line of research. It was later learned that Putin’s security officers placed the blame on a traitor within their own ranks. He denied it, of course, all the way up to the moment when a bullet punched through his brain. That he was innocent of that particular bit of internal espionage was outweighed by actual crimes for which lives had been lost. Annie and Lilith had no sympathies. Not a shred.

  “Where is he now?” asked Violin.

  “Heading out of town, it appears,” said the driver.

  “Catch him,” said Toys as he, Violin, and Harry Bolt climbed into the car.

  “Ma’am?” the driver asked of Violin, and she nodded.

  “Catch him as fast as possible.”

  The car peeled away from the curb, but before it could go half a kilometer, Violin’s cell rang. The caller ID was a steeple.

  “Hello,” she said warmly.

  “Are you on the ground yet?” asked Church.

  “Yes, we’re following Stafford.”

  “Change of plans,” said Church. “We know where Outlaw is going, and there’s every chance he’s going to need backup.”

  CHAPTER 92

  DAS VERARBEITUNGSZENTRUM

  WANNSEE, BOROUGH OF STEGLITZ-ZEHLENDORF

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  I tapped my Scout glasses to switch from outside sensors to a floor plan of the processing plant. It was a big oblong building that was laid out for prisoner isolation rather than the standard prison cellblock structure. Lots of small hallways leading to dead ends, and offices, crew quarters, the mess hall, ops center, and other key areas used as buffers between the cells. The idea was to prevent prisoners from ever making contact with one another. Even the walls were baffled to suppress screams and yells. All of which was fine for me, since I neither wanted to be seen nor heard.

  I removed two different kinds of tiny drones made to look like bees. They had unfortunate nicknames hung on them by Doc Holliday—Busy-Bees and Killer Bees.

  The Busy-Bees were designed to extend MindReader’s scanning range in order to hack internal surveillance, and they had good cameras and mics. I activated two dozen of them and tossed the whole bunch into the air. Their wings began buzzing, and off they went, flying fast down the corridors, staying high near the ceiling.

  While I waited for their feeds to reach my Q1 screen, I tapped some keys to let the supercomputer’s intrusion software hack into the central security systems. That took about eleven seconds, and then I owned the place. I set all the hallway cameras to record video loops that were keyed to sensors in my clothing. As soon as I approached the operational range of the cameras, the prerecorded loop would kick in, which meant I’d never appear on the monitors in the security office. Stealthy is my middle name.

  The same sensors were on Ghost’s harness in case I had to send him wandering off without me.

  I knelt and gave Ghost a few short commands. One of which was Pax, Latin for “Peace.” It meant that for the duration of the mission, and unless told otherwise, he was not to kill anyone. The staff here were not our enemies. If any of them got hurt during this invasion, then it was on me. I was okay with breaking and entering, but I wasn’t looking to spill innocent blood. Ghost was a very smart and very well-trained combat dog, and he would follow my orders.

  While I waited, I deployed the other kind of drones, the Killer Bees. These were a bit larger and fitted with tiny dart shooters filled with Sandman. I’d have gone with Murder Hornets as the name for them, but I don’t hold the patent.

  The feed from the Busy-Bee drones came in and told me that there were nine security personnel actively walking the halls, three on duty in the monitoring office, five more in a lounge watching a DVD of the latest Marvel movie, and ten sleeping in a pair of bunkhouses. It was a large staff. The bees also confirmed that there were thirty-nine inmates in the various cells scattered throughout the building. None of the prisoners were named in the computer records. That was fine.

  My informant said that Casanova was in cell number 13. I thought that was funny. Unlucky 13.

  I clicked through the various feeds to put eyes onto the facility staff and get a sense of them. Then I froze when I saw a group of people standing in one of the remotest hallways. There was an older man—tall, blond, square-jawed, wearing an excellent suit. Beside him was a slightly shorter man with darker hair who held the hand of a very pretty woman. Two kids stood in front of them, and the woman had a small but noticeable baby bump. A big puppy with a goofy grin sat between the kids. They looked directly up at the swarm of drones. As if they could somehow look through the bees to see me.

  I knelt there, staring at the faces. Even though the screen was tiny, I could somehow see them all with incredible clarity and detail. To the small scars on the arms of the woman, to the stitches on the baseball the little boy was throwing up into the air and catching in a worn leather glove.

  Every.

  Single.

  Detail.

  It froze me.

  No, that’s not right. When you freeze, it’s like all the heat dies in the universe, all the way down to the atoms in your molecules. This wasn’t that. This was hotter. I could feel actual heat, as if I crouched next to something burning.

  Like a house.

  Like bodies.

  Like hope.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and sagged against the wall.

  “Please,” I begged. “Please, please, please…”

  I did not open my eyes until the heat dwindled, dwindled, and faded completely. Even then, I couldn’t move. My heart was racing, and shivers ran down my arms and spine. I was in a deep hole, and there was no rope to use so I could climb out. There was only a little light, but it was fading.

  No, that wasn’t right, either. It was not that the light was growing weaker but that the dark shadows all around me were getting stronger. Overwhelming the light, dominating it, consuming it. There was so little of that light left that I knew it couldn’t last. The Darkness was winning.

  “Please,” I said again, but in that moment, I couldn’t tell if I was begging for mercy, for the light to flare, or for the darkness to come and take me, body and soul.

  Then …

  Then I felt pressure against my elbow and only then dared open my eyes to see Ghost nuzzling me, his doggy eyes filled with concern.

  My mouth was dry, and my eyes were wet. I had no exposed skin for Ghost to lick, so he kept pushing at me with his nose. I reached for him with arms that weighed ten thousand pounds. I pulled my dog to me and wrapped my arms around him and clung to him.

  The screen on my computer showed an empty stretch of hall. No one there. Of course there was no one there. Tears burned behind my eyes. Ghost pushed his whole body against me, whining so softly only I coul
d hear him. Trying to tell me that he understood. That he was there for me. That I wasn’t alone.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said. “It’s all okay. I’m okay.”

  Ghost never cared that I told those kinds of lies.

  I did not want to let him go, but I had to. The clock in my head was ticking, and we were deep in the badlands here. Ghost backed away a pace but stayed close as I struggled to get my shit together. It was getting harder and harder to do that.

  This was not the first time I’d seen ghosts. I just hoped moments like this didn’t get worse, because I was already close to the edge. I’d been fooling myself that because the Darkness was not in total control, it meant I was coming out of it. That I was edging back toward being sane.

  Goddamn.

  CHAPTER 93

  DAS VERARBEITUNGSZENTRUM

  WANNSEE, BOROUGH OF STEGLITZ-ZEHLENDORF

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  I came back to myself, but there was effort in that process. General or abstract thinking won’t get that done, so I forced myself to think about specific mission details. It helped, but I found myself not wanting to look at the screen on my tactical computer. I ground my teeth and looked anyway.

  I checked the signal from the Busy-Bees again, but all they showed were more empty halls except where there were bored guards on patrol. Lots of locked doors. Only that.

  Only that.

  “Unclench,” I growled under my breath, “and get your screwed-up head out of your ass, Ledger.”

  At any given time, I have three distinct personalities vying for control. The Modern Man is the idealistic optimist who is probably the person I would have become had it not been for a traumatic incident when I was a teenager. My girlfriend, Helen, and I had been jumped by a group of older teens. They beat me nearly to death and gang-raped Helen. Although we both technically survived that attack, we were never the same. I became psychologically fractured, retreating from who I truly was into a series of jagged-glass pieces of other personalities. Therapists helped me clean house, but three remained, of which the Modern Man was the purest. Then there was his polar opposite, the Killer. Ruthless and violent … but always directing his rage at the people who did the kinds of things that had been done to Helen and me. In defense of the innocents, he will do things I never tell my friends or Junie Flynn. It was the Killer, as much as any part of me, who’d kicked in Helen’s door when she’d not answered her phone in days. It was he who’d gathered her cold body into his arms and howled like some demented thing. And it was he who’d steered me first toward the army, then the cops, and then my wet work as a shooter, first for the Department of Military Sciences and more recently for Rogue Team International. He knew there was a war to wage and was constantly ready to take it to the bad guys under a black flag. Well … let’s call it a different kind of black flag. The Killer never hurts the innocent. Ever.

  Most of the time, though, I was the Cop. Reasonable, informed, precise, thorough, and pragmatic. A solver of problems, a logician, and strategist. The Cop was the sense of order in my otherwise chaotic head.

  I was trying to get into the Cop headspace now. Like my other aspects, he’d been shoved to the back by the Darkness, so much so that he seemed to stop being anything but a memory. Now I really needed him. Desperately. To solve this, to make sense of this crazy hunt I was on, to pick up the pieces of my fragmented memory and puzzle them into some shape that had order and purpose. As random and obscure as the Darkness was, there was a method in there. A plan. And I was sure that at the end of the chain of logic—no, I won’t call it dark logic because that sounds too much like I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons with myself.

  Only this logic was skewed, slanted. It was like trying to understand a word puzzle in a different language. It had a different kind of emotional logic from the one I understood. I was fighting for understanding and fighting for control, and it was anyone’s guess as to whether I was gaining ground or being fed crumbs by this new, dangerous, warped, and ugly aspect of myself.

  Funny, but when I was first aware of it, I’d told Rudy, and he was the one who gave it the name. He called it the darkness, but for him, it was lowercase, not a proper noun. I knew differently. It was every bit as real a person within me as the Modern Man, the Cop, and the Killer. It wanted to live, just as they did. It wanted control because, just like the others, it had work to do. Unlike them, it did not want to share its secrets, its methods, or its toys.

  Earlier this year, after I got out of the hospital, I’d speculated about what a person does when they turn out all the lights. At first, I’d relied on the old military answer to that: you learn to use the darkness. But that was wrong. It was too commonplace an answer for a person as damaged as me. It wasn’t that I learned to use the darkness imposed on me during that act of transgressive horror.

  No.

  In that moment, I became the Darkness, only I didn’t know it yet. I think by accepting that it was a real thing, I gave it license and access, neither of which I seemed able to take back. I didn’t delude myself into thinking I was clearheaded now, because I’d won any heroic internal struggle.

  “Head in the fucking game,” I told myself, and I realized I was so jangled I’d nearly said it too loudly. Even Ghost gave me a sharp, questioning look. “Sorry,” I told him, pitching my voice much lower.

  Ghost gave an eloquent grunt of reproof.

  The Busy-Bees helped me map out the safest route, and so we set off. Ghost went first, and I relied on his nose and his instincts every bit as much as my electronic doodads. We moved silently along the dimly lit halls, pausing now and then to allow foot patrols to make a turn down a corridor before we entered that passage. Everything was so quiet. We were near the staff lounge, and I couldn’t hear the explosions and dramatic music of superheroes and villains beating the snot out of one another. Nice. Made me want to send a box of chocolates to whomever designed the acoustics. Maybe give him a foot massage.

  One confusing thing was that the cells were so scattered that it was tough to follow the numbering system. Nor were there arrows on the walls or those colored lines you see in some factories to guide you to key points. Likely that was to make it even more difficult to find any specific person. That would have been frustrating if I didn’t have a tactical version of the world’s most sophisticated computer on my arm.

  It took me under five minutes to locate cell 13. It was snugged way back into a corner, with the adjoining rooms proving to be dry storage for office supplies on one side and the electrical room on the other. And that was lucky, too, because the machines in the electrical room generated a constant audible hum, further masking incidental sound. Luck seemed to be on my side.

  Ghost and I peered around a corner, saw the foot patrol making a left at the far T junction, and then we hurried to the cell. Some jokester on the staff had used a Sharpie to draw a big red heart on a sheet of printer paper and had taped that to the door. For the great lover, Casanova. Cute.

  I knelt outside his room and spent a couple of minutes sending new protocols to my swarms. The Busy-Bees fanned out and landed high on walls near the corners, positioned to watch for foot patrols coming my way. By resting on the walls, they conserved their batteries. As for the Killer Bees, I sent two to each intersection. If things got freaky, the Busy-Bees could paint approaching guards with tiny lasers, and the Killer Bees would zero in on each specific guard and send them into slumber land. I didn’t want to have to do that, but the way my luck’s been running, I figured I’d have to. Once I was outside again, any bees I could not retrieve would be sent a detonation code that would activate minuscule thermite charges. There’d be nothing left for a forensic analysis and no way to trace it back to me or RTI. No way for Bug to track me, either.

  I attached another of my doohickeys to the lock on the cell door, sicced Q1 on the security links, and then used the key card–cloning tool to bypass the lock. When all this was over, whoever designed this place as impregnable was going to need crisis counse
ling.

  Then I looked at Ghost to see if he was ready. He was—his brown eyes were very cold and his muscles tensed for action. I opened the door, and we stepped inside.

  CHAPTER 94

  DAS VERARBEITUNGSZENTRUM

  CELL 13

  Casanova was reading a book. For some bizarre reason I will never know, it was a copy of A Wrinkle in Time. Seemed an improbable choice.

  He looked up at me, frowning at my weapons and gear. His frown turned to apprehension when he saw Ghost. Casanova picked up a torn piece of toilet paper, placed it to mark his page, set the book down, then looked at us with all the blank anticipation of a schoolboy ready for his lesson.

  I closed the door, sealing us in the soundproofed cell. When I needed to leave, all I had to do was approach the door and the Q1 interface would convince the locking mechanism that I’d swiped the key card again. The wonders of modern science.

  His eyes narrowed, then he glanced up at the video camera that was protected behind a tough wire screen. The little light was on, but he had no way of knowing the feed was on a continuous loop.

  “Morning, lover boy,” I said brightly. I said it in Spanish. His native tongue was Catalan, but everyone in Catalonia also speaks Spanish. Besides, Catalan wasn’t one of my languages.

  “What is this shit?” he asked, but without emphasis. The way a surly prisoner would, but not one who wanted to risk his privileges.

  “This shit,” I explained, “is a private conversation. It will go like this: I’ll ask questions, and you will give honest and very complete answers.”

  “Is that what you think will happen?” He seemed amused.

  “It is. You may not think so, but … yeah … that’s how it’s going to play out,” I said. “And in case you have doubts, there are penalties for wrong answers. But let me say right now that you really don’t want to find out what they are.”