Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

  Ghost raised his head and peered at me, grinning to show his bloody metal teeth.

  CHAPTER 129

  HOTEL TIMIȘOARA

  TIMIȘOARA, ROMANIA

  Ghost hopped out of the cart, taking a particularly stinky and stained bedsheet with him, and I had to bribe him with doggie treats to relinquish it. Last thing I needed was my dog rolling around in someone’s love puddle. Silly damned mutt. I over-bribed him, and he went off happy, wearing the kind of look successful con men use when their scam has worked exactly as planned.

  He settled down in the entrance to the bathroom, belly on the cool tiles, head and front paws in the bedroom, nibbling the treats.

  I removed my stolen jacket and hauled the dozing bad guys out of the cart, used flex-cuffs on their ankles and wrists, and sat them in a neat row against the wall. This room was a corner suite, and I booked the only adjoining room, which was empty, under another fake name. I turned on the radio, found an opera channel, and dialed the volume high.

  There was a small medical kit on the bedside table, and I removed three small syrettes and placed them on the edge of the bed. The woman looked like Cruella De Vil, but without the obvious warmth or humanity. She sat on one side of Woodpecker, with Slenderman on her other side. I sorted through the IDs, ran them through the MindReader unit—making a mental note to send poor Otto Jäger something really nice for Christmas—and was in no way surprised when they all pinged as phony. So I used the touch pad on my tactical computer to take their fingerprints, and also sent clear photos, and I kicked all that stuff over via satellite to the MindReader mainframe in Greece.

  Bug would be going nuts, and once more the RTI crew would know where I was and what I was doing. Somehow that mattered less to me then than it had before. I felt, one way or another, my time of hiding and running was coming to an end.

  Which, of course, made me think of Junie.

  I love you, babe, I thought, wondering if somehow—intuitive as she is—she could hear me. You deserve so much better than me. But I love you with my whole heart.

  Ghost gave a single short bark. And when I looked at him, I swear to god he nodded. Only once, but I damn well saw it.

  Jesus.

  While I waited for replies, I set about examining the two cases. They were both the same make, model, and color, with nine-digit keypad locks. Very expensive, and this kind of case had steel mesh beneath the leather exterior. Pick-proof and cut-proof.

  For just about everyone except cats like me.

  I attached tiny leads to the keypad of the first one, connected the other ends to my tactical computer, and let MindReader sort out the combination. Took longer to connect the wires than get the code. The lock obliged by clicking open. I repeated it with the other case and was amused to see that it was the same combination, suggesting that the bags were intended to be swapped.

  I was briefly unnerved to discover that each case contained a small explosive device wired to the locks. They were rigged to blow if those locks, or the hinges, were forced. The bombs weren’t big, but they would have very effectively blown me in half had I been less careful.

  “God damn,” I said.

  In the Woodpecker’s bag, I found lots of money. Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds. Two bundles of cash in mixed Romanian leu notes bound by rubber bands. I thumbed through the bills and estimated around five hundred grand in lei, which shakes out to a bit over one hundred Gs in American dollars. There were also ten bundles of euros in two and five hundred denominations. About twenty-two thousand euros, which made it just shy of twenty-seven thousand bucks. I figured the euros were a partial payment for Cruella’s team, since they were black marketeers who worked this part of southeastern Europe, while the lei were for paying local help. At the bottom of the bag, I found a burner phone with a single number programmed in. I ran that through MindReader, too, and it accessed a system for wire-transferring much larger amounts. Once a call was made and a certain code typed in, ten million euros would be transferred to a numbered account in the Seychelles. I did not have that code, but I had a whole afternoon ahead of me, so anything at all could happen. I waved a stack of cash at Ghost.

  “There’s almost enough here to keep you in doggie treats for a week.”

  He wagged at me.

  I pointed at the three prisoners. “They’re evil. Bet you want to chomp on them some, dontcha, boy?”

  More wags.

  My dog is as bugfuck nuts as I am. This is not a news flash.

  I opened the other case and found a smaller container inside. White Styrofoam sealed with red biohazard tape. No labels, though, and nothing inside the case or container to indicate what I’d just found.

  “Rut roh,” I said in my best Scooby-Doo voice.

  I left the tape in place, closed the case, and picked up a syrette.

  “Eeny meeny miny moe,” I said, “catch a psychopath by the toe.”

  Cruella De Vil lost, and I jabbed her in the arm.

  “Wakey-wakey.”

  Normally, Sandman takes hours to flush out of the bloodstream, but Doc Holliday came up with something she calls JumpStart. It wakes a Sandman victim up pretty fast, but there are some unfortunate side effects. The woman’s eyes popped open. She pissed herself, and then vomited onto her lap.

  Despite her feeling what was probably a level-ten pounding headache, and the obvious humiliation of having puked and soiled herself, the woman’s head snapped toward me. She fired off a tirade in Romanian that would have stripped the flesh from a rhino carcass. The woman had a truly poisonous mouth, and I let her vent for maybe fifteen seconds, impressed with her creative vulgarities. They were very specific. She told me I was the slimy aftermath of a Turkish ass-fuck orgy. She accused me of fornication with my mother on Easter morning. She said that I buggered baby goats.

  It was the baby goats one that pissed me off. I like baby goats. Ever see those videos of them in pajamas? Adorable.

  I removed the fake glasses and the fake mustache, then squatted down in front of her. I said nothing. Her words trickled down and stopped as she caught sight of my smile. And then my face. Despite the side effects, JumpStart clears the head pretty quickly. It’s intended for situations like this. The drugged glaze cleared away, and I saw the exact moment when she recognized me.

  Her eyes snapped wide and filled with horror. Her skin blanched to a corpse pallor, and her lips began to tremble. “No…”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 130

  HOTEL TIMIȘOARA

  TIMIȘOARA, ROMANIA

  “You’re him. Oh, sweet Jesus on the cross, you’re going to kill me,” she said, not framing it as a question. She spoke in Romanian, which was fine. That was one of my languages, and I’d brushed up on it in anticipation of this moment. Not with her, specifically, because I still had no idea who she was, but for a moment like this.

  She tried to shrink back through a hole in the dimension. She tried to twist free of her bonds. She tried to kick me. She tried to scream, but all I did to stop that was to lay my hand on the pistol next to me and give a single shake of my head. She fell into a shivering silence, tears cutting lines down her cheeks.

  I gave her the old Joe Ledger smile. The one that crinkles the skin around my baby-blue eyes and makes my teeth look like an ad for good dental hygiene.

  “I have questions,” I said softly. “You’re going to answer them.”

  She forced a smile onto her face and moistened her lips and—god help me—tried to look seductive. Despite what looked like Campbell’s Chunky soup smearing her mouth and lap, despite sitting in a cooling pool of her own urine, she was actually trying to work her charms on me.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, sister, skip the bullshit,” I said. “I’m not the audience for that crap, and you’re not the type to peddle it.”

  She dropped the act, and for a moment I saw the real her. Cold, calculating, and vicious. Then fear crept back and clouded that.

  “What do you w
ant?” she asked.

  “I want two things,” I said. “The first is the code for the wire transfer. No, don’t look surprised. Don’t play dumb and don’t lie to me, either, because you won’t like how that works out.”

  She stared at me, trying so hard not to cry.

  “I’ll only ask this once,” I said. “The code.” Something in my voice reached her, and she suddenly rattled off the code. I punched it into the burner and then, once the deposit was underway, fed the target account number to MindReader. The funds would go to an account I set up called WC—shorthand for War Chest. Whatever I didn’t need for my hunt would eventually be donated to FreeTech.

  “Good,” I said to the woman. “That’s very good. You’re earning brownie points. You’ll need them. Next question is what’s in the bag you were going to hand off?”

  “I—”

  I cut her off by holding up a single finger. “If the next two words out of your mouth are don’t know, you won’t like what happens next.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said in a much more fragile voice than she probably wanted to use.

  “That will depend on how you finish that sentence, won’t it?” I asked calmly. Or at least my voice sounded calm. Inside my head, though, a furnace was burning toward overload. It scared me how easily I could joke, and function, and sit here having a chat while the Darkness inside of me was so damned hungry.

  She kept trying to look away, and each time, I snapped my fingers, loud as a gunshot, to bring her back to focus. To me.

  “Do I need to ask again?” I murmured. “Right now, we’re having a conversation, but if you’d rather play Truth or Consequences, say so. I can work with that. Hell, I could have fun with that.”

  Despite her toughness, there were tears in her eyes, and her breath was shallow and rapid. Panic breathing. It took her a few tries to get her voice.

  “It’s a chemical agent. R-33. That’s what they call it.”

  I thought the word aha. I’d seen references to that all through the files I’d been stealing.

  “What does R-33 do? What’s it for?”

  “I … I’m not—”

  “Remember the rules,” I cautioned.

  “No, I really don’t know,” she insisted. “At least I’m not sure. Please, you have to believe me. I’m telling the truth. All I know is that it’s some kind of enhancement thing. An energy booster, but I don’t know how it’s to be used. All I really know about it is the code name and the cost.”

  I gestured to the other two. “Do they know?”

  She turned to them and considered. She nodded to Woodpecker. “He’s a local broker. He’d know who he was taking it to and where. But that’s all.”

  “Okay. And the other guy?” I said, indicating Slenderman.

  She licked her lips again. Not to try the seduction thing but to stall. “I don’t know him. Not even his name. He uses a code name. Die Katze.”

  The Cat. How interesting.

  I said, “Aha.” Aloud this time.

  I grilled Cruella for another twenty minutes, but it was clear she really didn’t know anything more.

  “Thank you for playing,” I said and shot her with the dart gun.

  Mind you, it was tempting to just freaking strangle her. I wanted to. Or maybe the Darkness wanted to. Hard to really say. But there was no proof she had blood on her hands. I had her prints, a scan of her face, and I took a swab of the inside of her mouth to capture her DNA. All of that would go into the system, and god help her if she came onto my radar again.

  I left Woodpecker to sleep. He was too much of a small fry for my needs. Lucky him.

  The Cat—Slenderman—was another matter entirely. I jabbed him with a syrette of JumpStart and watched him twitch and cough and piss and puke his way out of Sandman’s arms and into the awful realities of the moment.

  I watched him pull at the threads of what he last remembered and tie them into the fabric of what was happening. What was about to happen. The woman had blanched, but the Cat turned an even whiter shade of pale as he realized who I was.

  “Ledger,” he gasped, making it sound like the name of the devil.

  He was not far wrong.

  CHAPTER 131

  THE PLAYROOM

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  Kuga was alone at the pool when Mr. Sunday walked out onto the patio.

  Brooding clouds hid the sun, and the trees were filled with ugly birds. Kuga did not get up but instead let Sunday drag a chair over and sit down. The salesman wore crisp blue jeans with a razor crease, hand-tooled cowboy boots with hummingbirds and roses on them, an embroidered Western shirt with the same pattern, and a brown sport coat with leather elbow pads. He even had a white cowboy hat on his head.

  “Christ, Sunday,” said Kuga, “you look like you’re either going to try to sell me a certified used pickup truck or run for office in some little redneck town.”

  “I believe I would enjoy either of those pursuits.”

  Sunday sat down in an Adirondack chair. The black birds in the trees screeched at him, but when he looked up at them, they fell silent and stood shuffling their wings.

  “Cockroaches with feathers,” he said.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because I knew you’d be alone,” said Sunday. “Your little Spanish extortionist is busy elsewhere.”

  “You really don’t like each other, do you?”

  “I don’t trust him.”

  Kuga grunted. “Santoro? Why the hell not?”

  “More to the point, my friend,” said Sunday, “why do you?”

  “He’s never given me any reason not to trust him.”

  “No, of course not. The world’s subtlest and most effective manipulator of people would never dream of making you—the cash cow whose tit he’s been sucking on—distrust him. Heaven forfend.”

  Kuga picked up a cold cucumber slice from a chairside tray and bit it in half. “You’re out of your mind.”

  Sunday merely smiled.

  CHAPTER 132

  HOTEL TIMIȘOARA

  TIMIȘOARA, ROMANIA

  I gave him the same charming smile I’d given Cruella.

  “Pisica,” I said, using the Romanian word for cat, “let’s have a nice little chat.”

  He literally shot to his feet—something that’s mighty damned hard to do with ankles and wrists bound and all sorts of complicated drugs playing merry hob in his bloodstream. Ghost also jumped up, and suddenly, the goofy dog with a pile of treats transformed into some prehistoric proto-wolf.

  Just.

  Like.

  That.

  It’s terrifying to see. Ghost’s entire body language changed. Not sure how he does it, but his shoulders bulge up to look bigger, he lowers his head and glares with merciless, hungry eyes. His muzzle wrinkles to show those titanium fangs. The total effect will give any sane person serious pause.

  The Cat stood there, shivers rippling up and down his body as if a winter wind were blowing on him with blizzard force.

  I said, “Sit.”

  He sat.

  Ghost did, too. Like a gargoyle in the middle of the floor. Watchful. Ready.

  “I have a few questions,” I began. “Now … do I really need to go over the rules? Pretty sure you know how this works.”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” he asked, sneering as he spoke. “You’re going to kill me regardless.”

  I nodded to the other two. “I didn’t kill them.”

  He ignored Woodpecker and studied Cruella. It was clear from the mess around her that she’d gone through the same fun wake-up process as he had. I saw him watching her chest to see if she was breathing. Then he turned back to me. He had eyes like a Vegas bookmaker, and I could tell he was working out the odds. His whole attitude suddenly shifted from hostage about to be fucked with to a business guy wanting to get to the bottom line. Maybe it was a front, maybe it was his way of regaining some measure of agency
over the moment, or maybe he really was as pragmatic as that.

  “What will get me out of here alive?” he asked frankly.

  “Information is your best shot,” I said, equally reasonably. “First, tell me about R-33.”

  He looked momentarily shocked, then narrowed his eyes. Then he ticked his head toward Cruella. “So, the stupid cunt couldn’t keep her mouth shut.”

  I made a very subtle finger gesture for Ghost, who immediately bared his teeth again. Some people train their dogs to roll over or fist-bump. I use mine for messing with people’s heads. Ghost gets biscuits either way.

  The Cat flinched back. “Ce pula!” he cried.

  It means “what the dick?” Local equivalent of “what the fuck?” You don’t need to know the local language to guess that. A good chunk of his businesslike calm dropped right off.

  “Focus on me,” I said coldly. “On what we are talking about. Tell me about R-33. What’s the code stand for? What is it, and what does it do?”

  He kept glancing at Ghost, who was now sitting like a Sphinx.

  “R-33,” I prompted.

  The Cat cleared his throat. “It’s an enhancement drug.”

  “What kind of enhancement? Are we talking super Viagra here? Something to sell to the old rich sons of bitches you used to peddle little girls to?”

  “No. Nothing like that,” he said. “This is military grade.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “It’s some kind of experimental compound,” he said. “It’s something new. Something that’s supposed to increase physical strength and stamina. That’s about all I know. I’m just a salesman.”