Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  With a howl of inhuman rage and pain, he tore them out of his shoulder and threw them away. He swung punches left, right, left, right, and I fell back. He was so goddamn strong that even if I blocked him I’d break an arm. I could feel the wind of each punch and the way my heart was beating way too fast.

  I dove sideways, rolled, came up onto my toes, and ran for it. He bellowed and ran after. I threw chairs in his path. I ran onto and over desks. I made it all the way to the back office and slammed the door in his face. He burst through it. I don’t mean he rushed through the doorway. He actually exploded the door itself as he slammed into it. Splinters of wood and glass filled the darkened room. I couldn’t see most of them but I could feel them cut me.

  I stumbled backward, out of time, out of places to run.

  Out of luck.

  He backed me all the way into the corner. My shoulders thumped against something I couldn’t see. Draped cloth of some kind. And a shaft of wood.

  A flagpole?

  In a flash of panic I grabbed the cloth and tore at it, hoping to get the pole. Maybe I could beat him with it. Instead the cloth tore free and the pole fell out of reach.

  The office was nearly pitch-black, which gave me a second as he tried to sort out which piece of shadow was my face so he could punch it to goo. I had the cloth.

  It was all I had.

  I looped it over his head and jerked downward. He bowed forward, and I kneed him in the face. Missed the nose. Got the cheekbone, which hurt like hell. My leg felt cracked and numb. Couldn’t care about that. In the split second while he was still bent over I jumped onto him, shoulder rolling over his back like an acrobat and dropping to my feet so that for a moment we were back to back. The cloth was still around his beck, so I looped one end over my opposite forearm and twisted to create a tourniquet, then I jammed my knee up between his shoulder blades and threw myself backward.

  It was a hard damn fall, and he had to weigh two ninety or three hundred. The impact nearly dislocated my hip. I brought my other knee up so I was on the bottom, and he was splayed backward on my shins with the flag cinched tight around his throat. The impact constricted it even tighter and I twisted with every last bit of desperate energy I had.

  He had the mass and the muscle. He was genetically engineered to be a superior soldier. Faster and stronger. More durable.

  Cutting-edge genetic science made him a monster.

  I used one of the oldest bits of practical physics. A turnbuckle. It’s torsion and leverage. Only simpler machine is the wheel.

  I turned the cloth loop until he gagged.

  Until he choked.

  Until there was not enough room inside that loop for a human throat to exist in any useful structure.

  And then I tightened it some more.

  If the bones and cartilage made any sounds as they collapsed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own screams.

  Chap. 9

  When I let him go, empty meat fell sideways.

  I lay there. Gasping. Hurt. Flooded with adrenaline. Seeing exploding stars in the darkness.

  I lay there for maybe a full minute, unable to move.

  When I finally peeled myself slowly—so damn slowly—from the floor, all the lights in the building switched back on.

  And Echo Team—my own goddamn team—came pouring out of the stairwell, guns up and out, shouting, yelling, staring.

  I was covered in blood, naked as an egg, and I still held the coiled flag in my hands.

  I looked down at it.

  It would have been extremely cool if it was an American flag. Very poetic.

  It was from the Rotary Club.

  Less poetry. Still effective as a son of a bitch.

  Chap. 10

  The postscript is brief.

  Bishop’s great escape plan was South America, a face job, a false identity, and a villa in Argentina. Bug picked that apart in seconds.

  They carted Bishop off to the hospital, and then he headed off to Gitmo for a long, long time of soul-searching and water sports.

  He should have taken the deal.

  Really should have.

  ~The End~

  Borrowed Power

  NOTE: Parts of this story are set between the novels Assassin’s Code and Extinction Machine. If you haven’t yet read Assassin’s Code, there are some spoilers in this story.

  Prologue

  They say that gods cease to exist when people stop believing in them.

  Others say that the gods of Olympus and Valhalla and all of the other pantheons are merely sleeping, waiting for that one person in whose breast a spark of belief is rekindled.

  Secrets are like that. Particularly the kinds of secrets governments hide and people like me kill to either defend or destroy.

  A secret doesn’t stop being important because it’s forgotten. Or buried.

  These secrets wait like dreaming gods until one person reaches into the darkness to stir them to wakefulness.

  Part One

  1983

  Chap. 1

  Les Égouts de Paris

  (The Sewers of Paris)

  March, 1983

  The killer descended from the glimmering lights of Paris into a black underworld of rushing water, stagnant pollution, raw sewage, savage rats, and forgotten bones.

  He carried no map, but the route was imprinted onto the front of his mind. He went deeper and deeper into the underworld, carrying with him the tools of his trade. A gun, a knife, a silver garrote, and a mind far colder than the waters that rushed through the bowels of the earth.

  It had been the work of four weeks to obtain legitimate permits and credentials from the correct departments within the streets management offices, then copy those documents, and return the originals. If anyone ever checked, everything would be in its proper place. The level of proficiency at which the killer worked was both a source of amusement among his peers and the reason this man had never failed in a field mission. The jokes at his expense—“My grandmother’s slower, but she’s old”—were swapped out of his earshot. Or, at least, so the jokers thought. The killer usually heard what was being said, though through means that were only ever supposed to be used on the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans. Never on the home team.

  The killer did not recognize most of his peers as being on the same team as himself. He had a separate and entirely personal agenda that he chose not to share.

  Even the members of his own team—none of whom were on this particular mission—knew only what he wanted them to know. Just as his superiors knew only what he wanted them to know, and that included many of the details in his personal file. Most of it was a fabrication that had taken years, much thought, and a great deal of money to construct. Everything there—photos of his childhood, his school records, his medical history, even the samples of blood and hair on file for DNA testing—belonged to other men. Dead men whose lives he had borrowed, combined, and then otherwise erased.

  The killer was as certain as he could be that his real name existed in no database in any computer on earth.

  Except Pangaea.

  His computer.

  A computer the killer had obtained in the way he’d obtained many useful tools in his personal arsenal. He’d killed the man who built it and the men who guarded it.

  And then he completely rebuilt the computer to suit his own needs.

  Now Pangaea was a killer, too. Like him in many ways. It intruded where it did not belong and destroyed things that were too valuable to let stand. For Pangaea the path of destruction was through the memory banks of other computers. It sought certain information and retrieved it, often deleting the information on the target mainframes, then it deleted all traces of its own presence.

  The killer spent a great deal of time erasing all records that a computer system called Pangaea ever existed.

  One of Pangaea’s secret weapons was a new feature that the killer had developed and added to its operational system. A subroutine called “Kreskin,” designed
to search for patterns and collate any relevant information into a set of projections as close to human intuition and guesswork as a binary computer mind could achieve. At least with the current technology.

  That pattern search had located a target the killer had sought for a long time.

  It was why he was down here in the sewer.

  It was why he was hunting in the darkness like the predator he was.

  He moved as quietly as possible, running lightly along the narrow ledges to avoid splashing through the sluggish runoff from last night’s rain. The storm drains were vast, stretching for twenty-one thousand kilometers beneath the sprawl of the city above. These tunnels held the drinking and non-drinking water mains, telecommunication cables, pneumatic cables, and traffic light management cables. Following the tunnels took planning. Getting lost was simple. Dying down here was common.

  He took care. He planned every step.

  If his information was correct, he was near the target.

  The killer slowed to a walk and then stopped at the entrance to a chamber that was part of the channeling system that took water from dozens of culverts and combined it in a larger chute that flowed to the Seine. He crouched in the shadows, silent and unmoving, allowing his senses to fill him with every bit of detail about where he was and what was here. He was not a man to make assumptions, even about an empty tunnel.

  There was a rusted service door in the far wall. A weak bulb in a grilled cage mounted above the door threw dirty yellow light over the churning water. A child’s ragdoll bobbed in the current, and the killer paused for a moment to look at it. The doll was dressed in the checkerboard clothes of a harlequin jester, with bells on its hat and a broad smile of stitched red silk.

  It was an expensive doll and it looked well-worn, and not just from the passage through the drain. This was a doll a child had held close for many nights. Something loved, something treasured. And now it was lost here in the darkness, on its way to oblivion in the ocean. Perhaps if the child knew where it was then he, or more likely she, might imagine her tattered friend to be off on some grand adventure. Otherwise…it was a friend who was lost and would never be found.

  That thought came close to breaking the killer’s heart.

  So many of his friends were lost to him.

  So many.

  He almost reached for the doll, almost pulled it from the water as the thing bobbed past, but he did not. He remained as still as the shadows and the grime-slick walls and the bones of dead rats. Instead, he watched the harlequin doll drown in the froth of converging sewer water and rush away into the great nothingness.

  After a moment, he turned his attention to that rusted door. According to the records Pangaea had filched for him, that door led to a disused valve station whose purpose had been superseded by a more modern system controlled in an office on street level.

  At a glance the door appeared to be forgotten, with years of rust crusted to the hinges and knob. The low-wattage service light was there to aid with routine inspection of this rechanneling chamber.

  That was how things looked according to all official records and even on the service logs of the men who worked these tunnels. They knew the door was there, but they ignored it as they ignored hundreds of similarly disused doors, tunnels, chambers, holding tanks, ladders, and other detritus of an older age of public sewage. Like the subway systems in New York and London, here there were layers of new built on forgotten bones of the old.

  However the killer had a separate source of intelligence that insisted that this door was not at all what it seemed. And that there were more than rust-frozen valves on the other side.

  The killer was about to rise from his crouch when he heard something.

  Very faint, very soft.

  A footfall. A scuff.

  Not an animal sound.

  Human, though he could not tell more than that.

  He did not move, aware that he was so deep inside a bank of shadows that he was invisible. His clothes were as black as his balaclava, and he had black greasepaint around his eyes. Only the whites of his eyes were visible in the light, and no light touched him where he crouched. The gear he carried—grenades, knives, and more—was arranged on his belt with cushions so they didn’t clink or rattle.

  The sound came from a side tunnel to his left. From the memory of the tunnel schematics in his mind, he knew that the closest street access to that tunnel was at least a mile away. A long way to go in the dark. He raised the black cover of his watch and touched the face, reading the position of the arms. Three minutes past four in the morning. Far too late for the evening maintenance crew, two hours early for the day shift.

  He waited.

  There wasn’t another scuff. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly. The scuff had probably been a rare accident. An unseen patch of slime.

  The killer drew his pistol. A .22 with a sound suppressor. It was poor at long range, but this man never killed from a great distance. He was selective and careful. It was not because killing up close provided some men with a physical thrill. That was not a factor in the function of either his heart or mind. It was a matter of not liking to make errors. Distance, especially in the dark, increased the risk of errors.

  Errors were the result of sloppiness, nerves, or poor process.

  He crouched, the pistol held in both hands, barrel pointed down, his forearms resting against his bent knees to keep the muscles from fatiguing.

  Forty feet down the tunnel the shadows changed. A slender fragment of the darkness detached itself and crept forward with catlike grace.

  In the bad light it was difficult to tell much about the figure.

  Small, slight of build, moving with the ease of a dancer or a martial artist. Someone who knew how to move. No visible weapons in the hands; however, the black handles of knives stood up from sheathes on each thigh.

  The killer pursed his lips in appreciation.

  He watched as the figure approached the downspill of yellow light and paused, becoming as motionless as the killer himself.

  Suddenly a sound broke into the moment as the rusted metal door opened. Despite its decrepit appearance, the door opened with a soft click and swung outward on nearly silent hinges. Three men stepped out. Two of them wore boots, jeans, and t-shirts; both wore identical shoulder holsters with .45 pistols snugged into them. The third man wore a hazmat suit with the hood off. The men in jeans drew their pistols and walked to the edges of the runoff trough, looking up and down into the shadows. The killer knew that they saw nothing, that they could see nothing; neither had allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness before trying to look through it. They didn’t see the killer, and they didn’t see the other figure crouched barely six feet from them.

  The two thugs nodded to the man in the hazmat suit who reached through the doorway and lifted out a Styrofoam cooler of the type used to transport medical or biological materials. A red biohazard symbol was stamped onto the white plastic side. He walked to the edge of the trough and stood for a moment looking down into the eddying water. Then he set the cooler down.

  The killer raised his pistol.

  His intel had brought him here to this place, this time. His mission projections had him back at street level within eight minutes from first trigger pull.

  Then everything changed.

  The figure crouched in the dark moved.

  There was a rasping sound, steel clearing leather, but no flash of metal. Like British commando knives, the blade was blackened. The figure rose from a crouch and swarmed among the men. The blade swept right and then left, and suddenly arterial blood geysered, spraying all the way to the curved top of the brick tunnel. One of the thugs reeled back, fingers scrabbling to stem a flow that could never be stopped. The second man staggered away and turned in an almost graceful pirouette, hands reaching out to break a fall that turned clumsy and artless. They collapsed like discarded puppets onto the stone walkway so quickly that the man in the hazmat suit was unaware of their deaths until
bone and slack flesh struck the stones behind him.

  He twitched and spun and was on the verge of crying out in shock and alarm, but the figure moved past him, sweeping an arm across his throat with such speed that arm and blade vanished into a dark blur. The man in the hazmat suit dropped to his knees and then fell forward, his slumping corpse humped over the Styrofoam chest.

  It was the fastest thing the killer had ever seen.

  How quick? Three seconds? Two?

  The thugs and the other man lay dead. Blood ran in slow lines down the walls.

  The shadowy figure stood facing the open doorway, knife gripped in one hand. The cuts had been so fast, the edge so sharp, that no blood clung to the weapon except a single pendulous drop that hung for a moment from the tip and then fell with the softest splash.

  The killer watched all of this down the barrel of the .22 he held in hands that neither trembled nor swayed. He was thirty feet away, and if he’d to paint a fourth corpse onto this tableau he could have done it with impunity. Fast or not, the kill shot was his to take.

  But the figure turned.

  Slowly, with grace and without haste.

  Toward him.

  A gloved hand reached up and hooked fingers under the edge of a mask. Lifted, pulled it away.

  In the weak lamplight the hair which spilled out from under the mask looked yellow, but the killer knew that it was not. He knew that it was as white as snow. Thick and lustrous, but paler than death. The face it framed was nearly as pale, except for a red mouth and eyes so dark they looked black. It was a beautiful face. Regal and cold and cruel. A face unused to smiles. A face like a death mask of some ancient queen, or a temple carving of a goddess of war.

  The killer knew that face.

  He held his pistol on her for five long seconds.

  As always there was a fierce internal debate. His finger lay along the outside of the trigger guard. It would be so easy to slip it inside and take the shot.