by Dakota Banks
This was a tricky mission. In the confined quarters of the lab, she had only one target, a man whose photo she’d studied, and didn’t want to injure anyone else—otherwise, the simplest thing to do would be to blow up the whole thing.
She made her assault at night, dropped off by a fisherman she’d paid to deliver her and wait while she dived. She inflated the surface float antenna for the GPS, tossed it out into the water, and hooked the waterproof unit, attached by an umbilical cord to the float, to her belt. She went over the edge with barely a splash into the pitch-black water. With the lighted screen of the GPS unit leading the way and the cord playing out behind her, she found the undersea location, about ninety feet down. As she approached, she saw the lab’s lighting, minimal at this time of night, but still enough to see by in the vicinity. She clipped the umbilical to the side of the lab, just in case she had the leisure on the way out to reattach it.
To enter the lab, a swimmer had to come up from underneath into a pool in a wetroom. There was a small positive air pressure throughout the station so that the water in the pool didn’t rise up and flood the lab. She had no idea what she’d encounter when she popped up in the wetroom. Could be empty. For all she knew, she might interrupt some night expedition and the room could be full of divers.
Blood roared through her veins and her heartbeat thumped loudly in her ears. It was risky, impetuous, and exciting. Like the old days.
She slipped under the lab, which stood about ten feet off the sea floor on legs that made the station look like a giant insect from below. The well-lighted entrance pool glowed above her as a greenish rectangle.
Go for it.
When her head eased out of the water into the air of the wetroom, she saw one crewmember working among some boxes of supplies. He was wearing a pair of earphones while working, which was the best news she could get. She kicked her swim fins off and let them sink away from her in the water. She needed to be quick, and clomping across the floor with fins wasn’t good enough. She put her hands on the edge of the pool, levered her body out of the water, and delivered a flying kick to his head. She stuffed his limp body in a gear closet.
Maliha hadn’t been able to obtain a layout of the lab, the glaring hole in her plan. With the need to move quickly on any solid information she received, she was going to have to forgo the thorough study of her target that she used to do when working for Rabishu. The need for haste added another element of tension. The missions would have to be done by the seat of her pants and not carefully plotted with support from Amaro, Hound, and Yanmeng. Maliha realized she was breathing too fast with excitement and slowed her breathing.
She left her gear behind a crate of supplies in the wetroom and moved quietly into the interior of the lab. There was no night shift working, and she’d eliminated most of the sleeping rooms by the time she found one with a plaque on the door: Dr. Cort Maur. Hoping to find him sleeping, she opened the door just enough to see in.
No such luck.
Maur was wide awake, busily typing at a computer, and he turned to face her as soon as she opened the door. She ran in, just in time to see him reach for a button on his desk. It was probably an emergency button that would bring a medic and other personnel rapidly. She threw a star at his arm, hoping to keep him from pressing the button, but his hand finished the movement just as the star bit into his flesh. She crossed the room quickly and pinned him against the wall. Even with the alarm sounding, she took the time to take a reading of Maur’s aura. It wouldn’t tell her specifically that he was a council member, but it would confirm that he had done and would do evil things. Should that not be true, she had to assume that the information that sent her here was false, and she would abort the mission.
With her knife poised above his heart, Maliha blocked out the developing commotion outside and let his aura come into view. As with Laura Bertram, she saw an overall dull black, but in Maur’s case there were also red tinges of malicious hate.
She plunged the knife into his heart.
She heard noises, but on the station they had an odd, omnidirectional quality. She was sure they’d close in on her location, though, because the alarm emanated from this room.
How many people are on this thing? Two are down, maybe eight or ten more?
She made it to the door before anyone arrived. There were voices at the door, then three people entered the room in a rush. She slashed one across the arm as a distraction, knocked a head against a table, and gave the third an elbow to the jaw. She turned to find the man with blood dripping down his arm holding a taser on her. He was only a few feet away; he wasn’t going to miss. That was his mistake—he was too close. She knocked a chair into his legs, jerking his lower body to one side, and the taser went skittering across the floor. As he tried to recover, she brought her hands together and swung them at the side of his face. He dropped instantly. Leaping over their fallen bodies, she ran back into the hallway. One man opened the door to his room just as she passed by. She grabbed the door and hit him with it, knocking him out.
One scientist she saw as she passed his room was retreating to a closet. She just got a glimpse of him as he closed the door. His courage had failed him. He wasn’t going to be coming out until everything was calm again. Most likely, he’d be the one to find Maur’s body.
Seven accounted for. How many will be at the pool?
The wetroom was silent when she got there. She couldn’t see anyone waiting to trap her, but her scuba gear was gone. They must have thought the missing gear would keep the intruder on board until help could be summoned from the mainland.
Suspicious that she’d be attacked as soon as she showed herself, Maliha observed from a hidden vantage point for a couple of minutes. No change. She decided she couldn’t wait any longer. Someone could easily have radioed for help, maybe the scientist she thought was heading for a closet. It could have been a communications room.
Nothing is as it seems here.
She made a dash for the pool, dove in and swam hard to clear the undersurface of the lab. Suddenly pain ripped through her calf. She twisted in the water and found a diver taking aim at her with another harpoon. The first had just grazed her leg. She didn’t have much time to deal with him. He had a supply of air and she didn’t.
With the underwater lab lighting their struggle, she picked a throwing star from her belt and released it at him, aiming for the arm that held the harpoon gun. It was a poor choice, one that she regretted as a waste of time. The water slowed and distorted the path of the star, and it went wide of its mark. He fired from about fifteen feet away. Maliha tried to twist aside but didn’t quite make it—her movements were slowed in the water, just like those of her throwing star. The harpoon scraped her side and her blood trailed in the water. Her lungs burned in her chest. As he fitted another harpoon, she swam straight at her opponent and rammed into his belly. The harpoon gun fell from his hand and drifted to the ocean floor below them.
She started to swim up toward the surface and he grabbed her foot. She jackknifed her body, slid her last knife from her waist belt, and stabbed him in the shoulder. He released her foot and she swam urgently to the surface. There was no time for any precautionary stops to avoid decompression illness—all she could think of was filling her lungs. Her first gulp of air was a taste of life.
The fisherman’s boat was gone. Maliha swam parallel to shore for a while, not wanting to come ashore in the place she’d started, in case the fisherman had decided something was fishy and called the police. Nausea and joint pain from her lack of decompression caught up with her. She’d experienced worse and knew she just had to wait it out.
Kill Number Two—Check.
She was struck midway in her swim with the movement of her scale. After unzipping her wetsuit, she floated on her back while a parade of figures painfully crossed her belly. Maur must have been a killer outside his council doings and her reward for dispatching him was generous. The pull through time barely registered.
She swam on
her back and came to land some distance from the place she’d started. Her harpoon wounds were minor for her and the salt water had scoured them clean. When she got to shore, she bit her lip against the pain of the fresh scale balancing and splashed salt water on her bare chest. With the effect fading, she zipped up her suit and walked inland a few miles. She hitchhiked at the side of the Bruce Highway.
The first vehicle that happened along, a pickup truck with a male driver, stopped for her. She was barefoot, wearing a wetsuit with a couple of rips in it, and had no gear, but the man didn’t say a thing about it. Maliha rode without fear with any human, since she felt she could handle any situation that arose, even weaponless. She wondered that the man, named Dac, wasn’t afraid of her, a wild-looking apparition with tangled, damp hair and the smell of the sea on her.
Australian men are fearless. I want one.
Maliha went home with Dac and discovered that he made a living salvaging shells carried up on the shore by storms and selling them to tourists. She showered and changed into a clean shirt and a pair of shorts he set out for her. They were too big, but covered all the essentials. Dac came in and brushed her damp hair while they talked quietly about the sea and his goal of opening up another shop “unless I’d have to work too hard,” which made them both laugh. He cooked her something delicious from the sea and they made slow, sweet love in his summer bedroom, outdoors on a screened porch.
Maliha woke a couple hours after dawn to the smell of coffee brewing and the sizzle of eggs frying. She’d broken her long-held rule of never staying the night with a casual lover.
“I hope you didn’t need up earlier,” he said. “You were sleeping so beautiful. The ocean does that, the rhythm of the waves. Me, I get up before dawn. Good time to walk the beach.”
He looked her up and down. She’d slept in one of his T-shirts that said DAC SELLS SEA SHELLS.
“Your shop doesn’t open for a few hours,” she said. “How about taking me to Sydney?”
“How about taking that shirt off first?”
It didn’t take Maliha long to decide that he had his priorities straight.
Later, he pulled up in front of her hotel. She felt a bit scruffy wearing his cutoff shorts cinched at the waist with a belt, a T-shirt pulled down over the belt, and oversized sandals he’d given her. He’d topped off the look with a straw hat that had been in his shop’s lost and found for a year or two.
She started to get out and he stopped her with a hand on her wrist.
“You ever need a place to stay after a bit of night diving, you know where to come. You can stay as long as you like. I can make the place a lot nicer for…for a woman to live in.”
She took it as a serious offer, one of the best ones she’d gotten, and so un-Jake-like.
Not that Jake had proposed. We didn’t even have any kind of exclusive arrangement.
She hesitated for a moment, wanting to read his aura but not wanting to spoil the moment if he wasn’t the man she thought he was. Curiosity won out. She focused behind him and let his aura come into view. His was beautiful. Clear bands of yellow and purple with areas of light pink that were the beginnings of love, the whole almost dancing about him. She slid close to him on the seat, kissed him in a lingering fashion, and then left.
In her hotel room, she changed clothes and folded the T-shirt up to keep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rasputin sat in the council’s meeting room at the TGEF building in Washington, D.C. The meeting’s start was ten minutes overdue. All of the monitors in the room were solid blue, showing no signal received. He was about to get up and leave. He had little patience for waiting for anyone.
That’s it. If they want to have their little private discussions they can do it when I’m not warming a chair.
He was halfway to the exit door when three of the monitors came on.
“Going somewhere, Doctor?” It was the Frenchman, the one who irritated Rasputin the most of all of them for reasons he couldn’t define. It wasn’t anything superficial, like appearance or voice, because those were distorted by the monitor.
I think he’s too damn smug. I’d like to get him on my operating table and…
“I didn’t hear an answer.”
Rasputin gritted his teeth. “Just thinking of getting a cup of coffee,” he said, “since the meeting hadn’t started yet.”
“If you want coffee we can have some brought in. Or tea.” It was the other man speaking, the one of indeterminate background, probably British. Even in his disguised form, Rasputin thought his cheeks looked hollower and his eyes a bit sunken.
Not sleeping well. Recent events, I imagine.
“Not necessary. Could we please get on with it then? Or are we waiting for the two missing members?”
“They won’t be joining us.” This time the Leader spoke decisively, or as decisively as one could with a garbled voice.
Rasputin already knew that, but thought he should appear ignorant of it.
“Status report, please.”
Rasputin zipped through a list of countries and percentages of their populations infected with nanites.
“Your estimate of our time to activation?”
“Three weeks, maybe four.”
“Cut it in half,” the Brit said.
“There will be less penetration—”
“Something wrong with your hearing?” the Frenchman said.
“I was about to say there is no reason there can’t be a second wave, as long as the first one is sufficiently damaging.”
Rasputin wasn’t surprised to hear that the council members wanted to move the timetable up, because they were worried about their own skins with an assassin running rampant among them.
The council had plans in place to swoop in to deal with the shock of losing the production and consumption capacities of the developing economies. Once set back with large population kills, the countries would be thrown into a recovery period measured in decades. Lengthened indefinitely, the council hoped, by new programs of suppression imposed from the outside. For their own good, the targeted countries would have to accept direct intervention from the outside. The council’s plans were to shamelessly exploit that opportunity and move the devastated countries into indentured servitude, funneling all their wealth to the countries represented by TGEF.
But they knew that the global economy had intricate entanglements. Losing the targets would be a setback for legacy economies, too. Literally overnight, the inflow of cheap foreign goods would be halted. It would be a painful adjustment but one that according to the TGEF council was overdue, and could be smoothed out by advance planning.
They think they have plans in place to cope with all that. They are deluded fools who can’t grasp the full extent of what they are doing. They are planning not just the demise of half a dozen countries but of their beloved legacy world, too, although they don’t see it. Not right away, not as fast as the first rounds with the nanites. But it is a path to ruination and chaos that will spread across the world. Among all the Ageless, my achievement will be the greatest.
“Cutting the time in half requires substantially more money for distributors,” Rasputin said. “Another one hundred million.” It was a lot, but he knew he had them hooked. There was nothing they’d deny him now.
“Not a problem,” said the Frenchman. “Money will be transferred to your working account.”
“Agreed,” said the Leader. “And I think a cushion of fifty million should be on reserve. Money should not hinder us at this point.”
The other heads nodded.
Rasputin smiled, both at the thought of the extra money coming his way—only a fraction of which would be allocated to the nanite project—and the fact that both the Frenchman and the Brit would be dead soon—by the rogue’s hand or his.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The city of Tel Aviv-Yafo perched like a majestic golden eagle gazing out over its dominion, the Mediterranean Sea. It was not lost on Maliha that there was an Is
raeli Desert Eagle handgun that was equally as in-your-face as the city she’d just landed in. A taxi to the White City took her through streets with office buildings, banks, and hotels that gradually yielded to cafés, parks, and the signature white concrete buildings designed by Jewish architects who left Nazi Germany.
Abiyram Heber’s apartment building stood up on piers that let the desert wind sweep underneath it. She was about to enter the building when she spotted her friend working in the garden space set aside for residents.
She called his name, and he turned to look at her. He took his glasses down from where they were riding on his hat and looked again.
“Yes, it’s me. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
“Come closer.” He leaned on his rake.
He was about sixty years old. His hair had thinned and gone white. His cheekbones were sunken a little and his eyebrows had grown thicker, but his eyes were as sharp and intelligent as ever. There was still strength in his frame and he had the easy movement of someone long used to keeping his body in top shape.
“My dear.” His voice was welcoming, but he didn’t reach out to her. “It’s been so long. What is it now, thirty years?”
“Yes.”
He leaned forward and studied her face, his keen eyes taking in every inch. She knew he would question her appearance and would test her before he would accept her. She expected no less. She also knew that he was armed and would use his weapon if she didn’t pass the test. Their meeting was like that of two lone wolves, each assessing the other. Abiyram’s eyes scanned the vicinity for those who might be close enough to hear their conversation, even checking the balconies above. A few children played in the shade of the building next door, but other than that, they were alone.
