The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Get up,” I said as I rose and backed away. I laid the knife on a table.

  He got slowly and warily to his feet, rubbing his wrists and studying me, but I could see the effort he put into keeping his eyes from flicking toward the knife.

  “You’re a Yank,” he said.

  “You’re a genius,” I said.

  “You working for the Twins?”

  I said nothing.

  “No . . . you look the military type. You’re Special Forces, am I right?”

  I said nothing.

  “I did my time in the service. Don’t suppose you’d like to look the other way while I scarper? Little professional courtesy?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely. What I’d rather do,” I said, “is beat some answers out of you. How’s that sound for an afternoon’s entertainment?”

  He sneered. “This is a private facility, mate, and we’re in international waters. Check the map; we’re three miles outside of Costa Rican—”

  “Which means no one’s watching, Sparky.”

  “You think you’re going to strong-arm me? You’d better have a lot more than a knife.”

  “I have what I need.”

  He tried a different tack. “I thought you Yanks didn’t do torture anymore.”

  “Torture is something you do to the helpless. Like the stuff you did to those New Men.”

  “Boo-fucking-hoo, mate. They ain’t even people.”

  “Not all that sure you are,” I said.

  “Arrest me or whatever, but I’m not saying a bloody word.”

  I slapped him across the face. It was fast and hard, but I was going for shock rather than damage. He blinked in total surprise. Slaps hurt so much because the palm strikes so many square inches of face and all those facial nerve endings cry out in surprise.

  He put his hands up.

  I faked with my right and slapped him with my left. Carteret backed up a step. He was surprised by the speed but more so by the sting. No matter how tough you are, there is a certain primitive reaction to being slapped that brings out the essential child self. The eyes start to tear, and that sparks certain emotional reactions that are not necessarily valid but almost impossible to control.

  I smiled and moved toward him, slow and steady. He threw a head cracker of a hook punch. He was pretty good. Nice pivot, good lift of the heel to put mass into the blow.

  I kept my smile in place as I slipped it and slapped him right-handed.

  Carteret reeled back, caught himself, and tried to rush me, but I stopped him with a nonthrusting flat loot on his upper thigh. It’s like running into one of those half doors. It stopped his lower body and made him tilt forward farther and faster than expected. I slapped him with my left, blocked a combination, and slapped him with my right.

  His cheeks glowed like hot apples. All those nerve endings were screaming at him.

  In other circumstances Carteret would probably be a formidable fighter and I usually don’t screw around like this, but I needed to make a point. And it’s at times like this that I’m glad I study jujutsu rather than karate or tae kwon do. No slight on those other martial arts—after all, Top’s a karate expert and he can deconstruct an opponent like nobody’s business—but I wasn’t trying to destroy Carteret. I wanted to defeat him. Break him. Jujutsu is all about controlling an opponent. Evading, destabilizing, using mass and motion against the attacker. It has roots in grappling arts of ancient China and India coupled with the Japanese dedication to economy of motion.

  When Carteret rushed me again I parried his outstretched arm to one side and shifted out of the path of his incoming mass. As I did so, I lightly swept his lead leg just as he was stepping down toward me. It made him stumble into an awkward step and collapse into a clumsy sprawl. He immediately tried to right himself, but his arms were pinwheeling for balance, so I reached between them and slapped him again.

  He was panting now, eyes wide and wet, chest heaving with the runaway rage of complete frustration. Once he was upright he tried to kick me with a vicious Muay Thai leg sweep that would have broken my knee had it landed. I checked with with the flat of my shoe while I reached out with both hands and swatted down his guard. I slapped him fast left-right-left.

  “Stand and fight!” he screamed, and his voice broke mid-shout.

  I kept smiling.

  “Tell you what . . . I’ll let you hit me. How’s that? Just to make it fair.” I patted my gut.

  “Fuck you!” Spit flew from from his lips as he snarled, but he also took the opening and threw everything he had into an uppercut that was probably his favorite deal closer. I sucked my gut back and shifted ever so slightly with bent knees so that only some of the impact hit my tensed abs, but most of the real force was defused. I knew that it wouldn’t feel that way to him. In fact, he’d feel the firmness of contact, feel the shock of the impact in his knuckles and wrist. It simply wasn’t anywhere near as hard as he thought it was. I learned that trick from a West Baltimore boxer named Little Charlie Brown. Hell of a sweet trick. The guy slams you one and he’s convinced that he nailed you, but aside from some sting you aren’t hurt.

  I slapped Carteret across the face and stepped back, lightly patting my gut. I put a look of amused disappointment on my face. If I’d used my fist and beaten him to a pulp he would have had a totally different reaction. That was big pain; that was a warrior being defeated in battle. He would have manned up and endured and stonewalled. This was different. It made him a different person because it disallowed anything connected to his adult strength.

  Down on the primal level, in the logic centers of the lizard brain, he knew he could not beat me. He believed that he couldn’t hurt me. He’d given me his best and it hadn’t even put a twitch on my mouth. Carteret’s face was a mask of pain. His subconscious mind kept scrambling to assign emotional cause to the tears in his eyes. I could see the tension grow in his face but leak out of his muscles; his shoulders began to slump.

  I slapped him again. Quick and light, like a period at the end of a sentence.

  “You’re all alone out here,” I said.

  He tried to slide past me toward the door. I shifted into his path, faked him out, and slapped him with my right. He made an attempt at a block, but it was weak—he was already telling himself that it wouldn’t work.

  “And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

  He looked past me at the knife lying on the table. He lunged for it. I pivoted off of his lunge and used my turning hip to send him crashing into the wall. While he was getting to his feet I folded the knife and put it in my pocket. Then I kick-faked him and slapped his right and left cheeks.

  Tears were streaming down his face. The skin on his cheeks was a ferocious red.

  “The people you work for can’t help you.”

  Another slap.

  “And they’ll never know you told me.”

  Slap.

  “But it’s the only chance you have left.”

  Slap.

  “Stop it!” he said, but his voice was as broken as his spirit.

  Slap. A bit harder, sending a message about insubordination. Carteret collapsed against the wall. He tried to push himself off. I moved to slap him again and his knees buckled. He slid down the wall, shaking his head, weeping openly now.

  I stood over him, within reach, the dare implied in my distance to him, but my smile was the promise of what would happen if he tried and failed.

  He didn’t try. His cheeks were so raw there were drops of blood coming from his pores. It looked like he was weeping blood.

  I stood there. “Look at me.”

  He shook his head.

  “Look at me,” I said more forcefully, putting terrible promise in the words.

  Slowly, warily, he raised his head. I would like to think that at that moment he was taking personal inventory of the things he’d done, of the abuse he’d heaped upon the helpless New Men. That would be sweet, but this wasn’t a TV movie. All he cared about was whether
he could save his own ass—from the immediacy of further harm and ultimately from whatever kind of punishment I chose to inflict. He was using what wits he had to sort through his options. How to spin this. How to survive the moment. How to spin a deal.

  “I want immunity,” he said. I don’t know what court he thought would grant it. He was right; these were international waters. Maybe he was afraid I’d turn him over to the Costa Ricans, or take him back to the states, or maybe put him in the dock in some world court. It didn’t matter. He wanted something that he thought would save him, and in exchange I knew he’d tell me everything.

  “I want immunity,” he said again. “Or I won’t tell you anything.”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  Interlude

  In flight

  Conrad Veder was unhappy.

  The private jet was luxurious, the food excellent, the cabin service first rate, but he was not pleased. His contact, DaCosta, had reached out to Veder using a private number to a disposable phone that he carried for single-use communication.

  “There’s been a change of plans,” said DaCosta.

  “What change?”

  “My client would like you to put your current assignment on hold.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  “This is irregular,” said Veder.

  “I know. But he was insistent.”

  “Does that mean the contract is canceled?”

  “Canceled?” DaCosta sounded surprised. “No. No, not at all. Apparently there is another matter he would like to discuss with you. A side job.”

  “And you don’t know what it is.”

  “No. He said he would like to discuss it with you.”

  “I can give you a phone number—”

  “No . . . he wants to discuss it with you face-to-face.”

  “I don’t do face-to-face. You know that.”

  “I told him.”

  “Then why are we having this conversation?”

  “He told me to say that he will provide a bonus equal to half the agreed price of the current contract if you meet with him.”

  That was three and a half million dollars. Even so, Veder said, “No.”

  “He said that he would wire the money to your account before the meeting.”

  Veder said nothing.

  “And he said to tell you that if you accept the side job, he will double the entire amount of the original contract.”

  Veder said nothing.

  “On top of the meeting bonus.”

  Veder, for all of his deep-rooted calm, felt a flutter in his chest. That would mean that this entire job would net seventeen and a half million dollars. He thought about that for a long minute, and DaCosta waited him out.

  “Where and when?”

  “He’ll send a private jet.” DaCosta told Veder the location and time.

  “You know I’ll assess the situation,” Veder said. “If this is a trick or a trap, then I’ll walk away.”

  “My client knows that.”

  “And I’ll hold you responsible for setting me up.”

  This time DaCosta said nothing for almost thirty seconds.

  “It’s not a setup. Check with your bank in thirty minutes. The money will have been wire transferred.”

  Veder said nothing.

  “Are you there?” DaCosta asked.

  “How do I know that this will even be the client?”

  “He told me that you’d ask. He said that if you did I was to say this: you are needed in the West.”

  Veder said nothing. It was the right code. The client had to be either Otto Wirths or Cyrus Jakoby. Veder had already determined that they were the ones who had been paying him to assassinate the remaining members of the List. They were the only people—apart from Church and the woman named Aunt Sallie—who knew about the Brotherhood of the Scythe and of his code name: West.

  Veder did not like it. It meant stepping out of the antiseptic world of clean kills with no emotional connection and back into the muddier world of politics and idealism. Veder held both in contempt. Thirty years ago he had been recruited into the Brotherhood for his skills, and back then he was susceptible to idealistic rhetoric and flattery. The Brotherhood was to be the world’s most deadly alliance—the four greatest living assassins. It had been done with the ostentatious ritualism of the old Nazi Thule Society. The members of the Brotherhood wore masks when they met. They swore blood oaths. They promised fealty to the Cabal and all it stood for.

  How silly, he thought. He was privately embarrassed to have been coaxed into the group, though admittedly they had provided great training, excellent intelligence, and lots of money. And in a very real way they had made him the man he was, because as the List systematically dismantled the Cabal, Veder had learned habits of caution that became the framework for the rest of his life.

  Since then he had intentionally distanced himself from any connection to political or social agendas. He did not like being drawn back into it now.

  But the money . . .

  Veder was detached enough to realize that Wirths and Jakoby were using money now in exactly the way that they had used idealism and flattery back then. It was trickery and manipulation.

  What made Veder the most unhappy as he sipped green tea in luxurious comfort aboard the private jet was that the manipulation worked.

  Part Four

  Monsters

  He who fights with monsters must take

  care lest he thereby become a monster.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

  Monday, August 30, 5:01 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 59 minutes

  Grace Courtland lay naked in my arms. She was gasping as hard as I was. Our bodies were bathed in sweat. The mattress was halfway off the bed and we lay with our heads angled downward to the floor. The sheets were soaked and knotted around us. Somehow we’d lost all of my pillows and the lamp was broken, but the bulb was still lit and it threw light and shadows all over the place.

  “Good God . . . ,” she said hoarsely.

  I was incapable of articulate speech.

  Grace propped herself on one elbow. One side of her face was as bright as a flame from the shadeless lightbulb, the other side completely in shadow. She looked at me for a long time without speaking. I closed my eyes. Finally she bent and kissed my chest, my throat, my lips. Very softly, like a ghost.

  “Joe,” she said quietly. “Joe . . . are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it terrible?”

  I knew what she meant. After I’d interrogated Carteret and brought him back to the computer room, we heard more gunfire and the whump of explosions. I handcuffed Carteret, and Top, Bunny, and I rushed out to investigate. What we found was indeed terrible. The remaining staff members of the Hive had fled to the far side of the compound. A guard sergeant named Hans Brucker herded them all into a secure room, telling them all that they could seal it and that they’d be safe until Otto sent a rescue team. Once they were all inside, Brucker and two other guards had opened up with machine guns and threw in half a dozen grenades before slamming the doors. There were no survivors. No one who could talk, no one who could help us.

  Brucker then shot the two other guards and put his pistol in his mouth and blew the back of his own head off.

  It was insane.

  It was also confusing, because Brucker was clearly the man who had led the unicorn hunt. Despite what Church had thought, it wasn’t Haeckel. When I told Church this via commlink he ordered me to scan the man’s fingerprints.

  They matched Haeckel.

  No one had figured that out yet.

  Shortly after that the Brits arrived and we headed back to the states with what records we had, with SAM, and with Carteret. The remaining six tiger-hounds were gunned down by soldiers from the Ark Royal. The New Men were gathered up and brought aboard the carrier,
but they were so terrified that several of them collapsed. One died of a heart attack. The ship’s doctor ultimately had to sedate them all, and the incident left the crew of the Ark Royal badly shaken.

  Everyone else at the Hive was dead.

  It had been terrible indeed.

  “It was bad,” I said.

  “There are so many monsters . . . and we keep hunting them down.” She laid her cheek against mine. “What if we can’t beat them this time?”

  “We will.”

  “What if we can’t? What if we fail?” Her voice was small in the semi-darkness. “What if we fall?”

  “If you fall, I’ll be there to pick you up. If I fall, you’ll be there for me. That’s the way this works.”

  “And if we both fall?”

  “Then someone else will have to step in and step up.”

  She was silent a long time. It was a pointless conversation and we both knew it. The kind of convoluted puzzle that the mind plays with in the dark, when pretenses and defenses are down. There was no one else on earth with whom Grace Courtland could ever have had this conversation. Same with me. There are some things too deep, too personal, to even share with Rudy.

  I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tight.

  “One way or another, Grace,” I said, “we’ll get through it. With what we got from Carteret and the files we brought back from the Hive, Bug thinks that he’ll crack this in no time. Maybe even by morning. And then we’ll strap on the tarnished armor, take up our battered old broadswords, give a hearty ‘tallyho’ and head off to slay some dragons.”

  “Monsters,” she corrected.

  “Monsters,” I agreed.

  We lay there on the slanting mattress, the sweat of passion cooling on our naked skin, and listened to the sound of our breathing becoming slower and slower. I reached over and pulled the plug on the lamp and we were instantly cocooned in velvety darkness. We lay like that for a long time. I thought Grace had drifted off to sleep when she whispered to me.