Four guards down.
I pivoted toward the one who’d been accidentally dragged down and kicked him in the face. Twice. Real damn hard.
That left the one who was trying to push away the scientist I’d shoved at him. I shot the scientist in the back and when he crumpled I shot the sixth guard.
It was all over in the space of those salvaged heartbeats.
Bang, bang, bang.
That left me standing with the gun in my hand and them with their dicks in theirs. Metaphorically speaking.
They spent a couple of seconds being shocked, which is fine. I wanted them to fully appreciate the situation.
But all I could spare was a couple of seconds.
Then I said—in reasonably passable Korean, “Give me the device.”
The two scientists looked blankly at me. Shock or training or good poker faces, it was all the same to me.
I pointed the gun at the closest guy’s face.
“Now.”
In this situation, you think they’d say, fuck it, we lost. All their security guys on the floor, snoring and shitting their pants. Them looking like book nerds. Me looking like the big hulking thug I am. Gun looking like a gun. You think this would be easy math. A no-win situation so clear that it was almost no-fault. They couldn’t be expected to do anything here but acquiesce and hand it over.
That’s what you’d think.
That was what logic and sanity dictated in no uncertain terms.
It didn’t play out that way, and I knew it when one of them smiled at me.
This was not a smiling situation. Not even for me, and I had the gun.
The guy farthest from me—he was a half-step behind the other scientist—smiled. A small, ugly little smile.
Then he shoved his buddy right at me. It was so damn quick that it caught us both off guard. The closer man fell right against me, and I shot him more by reflex than intention. But his body was already falling, and it was a crowded room with bodies on the floor.
We both went down in a tangle.
Even little guys are a bastard when it comes to dead weight, and the dart made him totally slack.
I fell with him on top of me.
The other guy hit two buttons. One popped the glass dome over the artifact, which he scooped up and tucked under his arm, like a wide receiver.
The other was the central alarm button.
Fuck.
Klaxons began blaring with an ear-crushing loudness. Red lights slid out from slots in the walls and flashed with hysterical pulses. If I’d had epilepsy this would have triggered a fit.
I heard the hiss of a hydraulic door, and just as I shoved the unconscious scientist off of me I saw the other guy vanish through the doorway. The door began to slide shut.
I flung the guy off of me and shot to my feet, ran over several bodies—stepping on chests and faces and crotches as I fought to beat the close of that door. I leapt through a gap that didn’t look anywhere near big enough, tucked to make sure I didn’t lose a foot, hit the ground in a roll, felt the jolt as the concrete floor found every goddamn exposed piece of bone in my body, came up onto my feet, and pelted after the scientist. He was heading for another security door at the other end, faster than I ever saw Calvin Johnson run when there was nothing on the clock and the entire defensive squad on his ass.
He was already halfway down the hall when I capped off three rounds. Two hit the flaps of his lab coat and burst harmlessly. The third grazed him. He jerked sideways but didn’t go down. Must have grazed him.
I fired again and got nothing. The magazine was out.
I dropped it, fished for a spare, slapped it in place, and emptied the whole thing as I tore up the hallway. The Snellig has a twelve-shot capacity. I think I hit him with number eleven, because he dropped and my last shot passed right over his head.
The artifact dropped, too.
It hit the ground and bounced.
I think my heart stopped.
It landed and rolled awkwardly against the wall while I skidded to a stop. Until now it had been a lumpy chunk of silver metal with no discernable seams or openings, no lights, no switches or dials. In every photo I’ve seen of it, the device looked like it had been molded rather than assembled.
Now it looked different.
Now it had lights.
When it hit the floor something happened to it.
As I bent over it a series of small green lights suddenly flicked on all along its sides.
The lights were intensely bright; the colors more striking than LED Christmas lights.
I hesitated before touching it.
I mean…of course I did. Who wouldn’t?
After all, no one knows where this thing is from.
And right there I swear to God I heard a voice say, “Don’t touch it.”
I whirled, reaching for my last magazine, swapping out the old one with the speed borne of constant practice. But I brought the gun up and pointed it at nothing.
The hallway was empty except for the scientist who’d dropped the package. The room on the other side of the closed door was filled with his colleagues and their guards, and everyone was sleeping.
The alarms blared and the red lights flashed, but there was no one around to speak those words.
The voice repeated the warning.
“Don’t touch it.”
Here’s the thing. The voice I heard sounded like my own.
Chap. 7
Granted, I make no claims about being sane. Or even in the same zip code as sane. On my best day I have three different people living inside my head. The Civilized Man—who is the innocent and optimistic part of me. The one who wasn’t destroyed during the childhood trauma that otherwise turned me into a psychological basket of hamsters. Then there’s the Killer, that rough, crude, dangerous part of my mind, always looking to take it to the bad guys in very ugly ways. And there was the Cop, the closest thing I have to a sane and sober central self.
Each of them spoke in a particular voice inside my thoughts.
This wasn’t any of those voices.
The voice I heard was the one I use in normal conversation.
My regular voice.
Clear as day.
I spun around, bringing the gun up in a two-hand grip. There was an empty hall in front of me, and an empty hall behind me. Just the sleeping scientist on the floor. Red flashing lights on the walls. Nothing else.
No one else.
That voice, though…it had been real.
There’s nothing in the playbook on how to react to that kind of situation. I didn’t feel like I’d suddenly gone crazier than I already was. There was no way on earth the North Koreans had somehow sampled my voice and rigged a playback just to screw with me. It was too improbable and there was no point. So, that wasn’t it.
The voice, though.
I had heard it.
I switched the gun to one hand and slowly knelt beside the artifact. The little green lights were pulsing now. Steady. Like a heartbeat.
I swallowed what felt like a throatful of dust.
“Fuck it,” I said, and gently scooped up the object.
It weighed almost nothing. It felt like metal, but there was no heft to it at all. Lighter than aluminum or magnesium. Lighter than Styrofoam. I had to press my fingers against its planes and angles to assure myself that it was actually there.
That alone is strange. If this was some new alloy, then someone had broken through the ceiling of superlight design. If it was durable—and given the thing’s history I had to believe it was—then that alone would be worth billions to the aeronautics industry. Durable superlight materials are the dream, the holy grail of metallurgy. If it could be studied and reproduced, it would totally revolutionize military aircraft. Maybe space travel as well.
And yet that was, as far as my team was concerned, a secondary benefit. An unknown benefit. It added another element of mystery to this thing. Science, as it’s known by the teams working with the Department of
Military Sciences—including the über-geeks at DARPA—couldn’t do this. The energy discharge alone was freakish. Now this.
The artifact was warm to the touch.
Creepy warm.
Not warm like metal.
Touching it was like touching flesh. If I closed my eyes, that’s what it would have been like. Skin, at normal body temperature.
Not metal.
“Jesus,” I said, and I wished I could have dropped it right there and then. I wanted to. It was repulsive.
“Do it,” said the voice. My voice. “Drop it and get out.”
I whirled around again.
The hall was still empty.
“Fuck me,” I told the emptiness.
The clock was ticking. I needed to be at the extraction point in ten minutes.
So I clutched the package to me, and I ran.
The corridors fed one into the other. I ran up flights of stairs. I ran down. I burned seconds I could spare bypassing locks on security doors.
Twice I encountered security personnel.
Twice I put them down before they could get off a shot.
After I dropped the last one, I passed through another door that took me out of the lab complex and into what was clearly an administrative wing. There were vault-style doors on that level, and the place was entirely deserted. Not sure if it was because of the hour—local time here was three in the morning—or because of the alarms. North Korean military protocols sent workers into secure bunkers during emergencies. I’d passed several locked chambers. Any staff working this late was probably squirrelled away in there. Good. Better for everyone concerned. Besides, I was down to three rounds in the Snellig. If I met any real resistance I’d have to switch to something lethal. I’d already killed one poor dumb son of a bitch; I didn’t want to compound my crimes.
I hurried through the offices. At most of the desks, the chairs were neatly snugged into the footwells, computers were off or on screensaver, and the desk lamps were dark. A few were less tidy; those probably belonged to the workers hiding in the bunkers.
There were no security guards in this wing. That concerned me. Not that I wanted to meet any, but it seemed odd.
Everything, in fact, seemed odd.
Then I rounded a corner and found something even odder.
Three uniformed guards lay sprawled on the floor.
There was no blood. No marks of violence.
For all the world, they appeared to be…sleeping.
I think I actually said, “What the fuck?”
Beneath my arm the artifact throbbed.
Actually throbbed. It was a feeling of heat that pulsed so quickly and abated so immediately that the effect was like the device had expanded and contracted. Like something taking a breath.
I almost flung the thing away from me.
Instead I held it out at arm’s length—despite its size I could easily hold it with one hand, it was that light—and looked at it.
Metal. Green lights.
Same as before.
But not exactly the same.
That pulse or throb or whatever it was….I didn’t like it.
No, sir. Not one bit.
It felt wrong.
Like the surface temperature and texture of it was wrong. I was reacting to it as if it was not a machine at all. It felt to me like something….
The word is alive, but I can’t really use it because that’s stupid.
It’s metal. It can’t be alive.
The thing pulsed again.
The green lights went from a neutral intensity on a par with traffic “go” lights, to a glare that, for a split second, was eye-hurtingly intense. I winced and cried out and….
And, yes, I dropped the thing.
Or, maybe I flung it away.
Hard to say.
Hard to actually think about.
The artifact hit the ground and rolled bumpity-bumpity across the floor.
And stopped when someone placed the sole of his foot against it.
Someone who, I swear to God, was not there a moment ago.
Chap. 8
The man was dressed all in black.
All.
Head to toe. Black pants and pullover. Black socks and shoes. Black gloves. A black balaclava and black goggles. I couldn’t see a single square inch of his skin. He could have been white, Asian or, yeah, black.
He was big, though. About my height. Not as bulky in the arms and chest, but close enough.
And he was just there.
Standing where he shouldn’t have been standing, within arm’s reach, and I hadn’t seen or heard him approach.
So, fuck it, I shot him. Point-blank.
In the script in my head that I was writing for this scene, he should have folded up like a deck chair and that should have been that.
That wasn’t how it played out.
I fired the dart gun, and he moved out of the line of fire.
It was weird. He was fast but not the Flash. It wasn’t like he dodged a bullet, so to speak. He wasn’t that fast. No, it was like he had such perfect timing that as I fired he was already moving—as if knowing exactly the timing and angle of my shot.
Then he pivoted and slapped the gun out of my hand.
There’s a way to do that if you know what you’re doing. You hit the gun at one angle and the back of the wrist at another. Do it fast and simultaneously, and the gun goes flying.
My gun went flying.
I have been disarmed exactly once in my adult life.
That time.
If anyone had wanted to wager on whether someone could do that to me, I’d have bet my whole pension on that answer being “no.”
My gun went flying anyway.
I wasted no time goggling at it.
I kicked him in the knee.
Which he blocked with a raised-leg hoof kick.
I hooked a left at his short ribs, but he chop-blocked with his elbow and counterpunched me in the biceps, numbing my arm. Growling in pain and anger, I faked once, twice, and hit him with a jab in the nose.
Except that he turned his head two inches to the left so that my jab hit the point of his cheekbone.
Then he switched from defense to offense, throwing a series of punches and kicks at me that hammered me all the way across the hall and against the wall. He blocked every one of my counterpunches, parried every kick, even intruded into my attempted head-butt by head-butting me.
It was all very fast and very painful.
I won’t lie and I won’t sugarcoat it. He beat the shit out of me.
He humiliated me.
I didn’t land a single solid punch on him, and he hit me as often as he wanted to, and it was pretty clear that he really wanted to.
Winded, bleeding, bruised and dazed, I sagged against the wall.
I tried to win that fight.
I’ve never really lost a fight. Not in years. Not any fight that’s ever mattered to me. No matter how tough the other guy was, I was tougher. Or, if he was too tough then I won because I was crazier. I don’t care if I get hurt, but I will win a fight. I’ll burn down a house if that’s what it takes to win a fight.
Except that I lost this fight.
Lost it fast, and lost it completely.
This man, whoever he was, outfought me.
I am a special operator. I’m a senior martial artist. I’m a warrior and I’m a killer, and he simply took me apart.
He even used some of my own favorite moves, some of the things I tried to use on him. He used them faster and he used them better and I went down.
On my knees, blood dripping from my mashed lips, I tried to change the game on him. I snagged the rapid-release folding knife from its little spring clip inside my trouser pocket. It came into my hand and with a flick I locked the three-point-seven-five-inch blade into place and I lunged in and up and tried to castrate the fucker.
He twisted away. I heard cloth rip. I saw droplets of blood seed the air, but he moved so fast that all
I did was slash him. I could tell from the resistance that the blade hadn’t gone deep enough to cut muscle or tendon. Only trousers and skin.
The blood was red.
The skin that showed through the torn fabric was white.
Not the light brown skin of an Asian. This guy was Caucasian.
He twisted and hit the side of my hand with a one-knuckle punch that turned my entire hand into a useless bag of pain. The knife clattered to the floor. He bent, scooped it up, and suddenly I was pressed back against the wall with the wicked edge pressed against the flesh of my throat. He held the knife the way an expert does when he wants you to know that you’re not going to take that blade away from him. Not in this lifetime.
I was done.
I was cooked.
Beaten, bloodied, and disarmed.
With a knife to my throat and his fingers knotted in my hair to hold me still.
Then he bent close and spoke with quiet urgency into my ear.
“Believe me when I tell you that neither of us wants you dead,” he said.
I froze. I didn’t dare move a muscle.
“I need you to listen to me, and I need you to understand. You can’t ask any questions. The best and only thing you can do is to listen and tell me you understand and agree.”
He pressed the knife more firmly against my throat to emphasize his point. A drop of warm blood ran down alongside my Adam’s apple.
“You listening, sport?”
“Y-yes….”
“Good, ’cause I’m only going to say this once.” He was leaning so close that even through his mask I could feel the heat of his breath on my ear. “You don’t know what this device is. None of you do. You can’t know and, believe me, you shouldn’t. You don’t want to.”
“Pretty fucking sure we do,” I growled.
He made a sound. Might have been a laugh. “No, you really don’t.”
“Who are you?”
For a moment I thought he was going to move the knife away. Or cut my throat. His hand trembled.
“Let me ask you a question, chief,” he said. “And you give me a straight answer. No bullshit. Can you do that?”
Joe Ledger Page 20
