Herokiller

by Paul Tassi

  “Uh, I don’t know,” Moses said cautiously. “I feel like I’m going to leave with you wearing the shirt off my back.”

  It was nice to see the big man slowing getting back to his old self again, though he was cringing with every breath, brushing his hand along his side.

  “Oh come on,” Aria said. “Sit, sit, and sit,” she said, pointing to each of them. “And deal.”

  The dealer obliged.

  Two hours later, the three of them were almost broke and Aria could barely even be seen behind her chips, but they were having a blast, with an unlimited parade of free drinks and the chance to all just hang out with the pending threat of death still almost a week away. They had the good fortune of not being matched against one another in the quarterfinals, but none of them dared to say what they were all thinking. If they all won next week, they would occupy all four slots in the semi-finals, and would have to face one another. If Moses and Mark both won, they’d face other. The same was true for Aria and Ethan. This had always been the risk making friends, but Mark had allowed himself to because he thought the Crucible itself would never even be allowed to start, much less finish. But Crayton had proven himself more slippery than anticipated.

  I won’t kill any of them, Mark said, looking around the table. Moses was laughing, having just been called on his ten-high bluff against Aria’s pocket kings. No fucking way.

  If it comes to that, Crayton will die first.

  Could he really do that? Scrap the mission for them? Get sent to a blacksite to save the lives of three people he hadn’t even known three months ago? That wasn’t him. That wasn’t the man who watched thousands of Chinese burn on the water. The man who was responsible in part for the deaths of hundreds of thousands more in the ensuing chaos.

  They chose their fates, Mark reminded himself as she looked across at Aria checking out a fresh new pair of cards and smiling slyly. They signed up to die.

  So did you, he reminded himself. It’s why it bothered him. They had more in common with him than he wanted to admit. Half the Spearfish agents never made it back, Brooke’s brother included. The CIA had assumed few of them would.

  Mark placed a bet. Aria doubled it. He shifted his cards and called. Moses dropped out, Ethan stayed.

  Nothing felt right about any of this. Crayton was wrong from the start, but the mission itself was starting to grate him. The stalling. The lack of support. This was too big to heave onto his and Brooke’s shoulders alone.

  Mark stayed, but Aria bet again. Ethan was out next, washing his hands of Aria’s power plays. Mark eyed the board. Would his three jacks take it? Could she really have the flush? Her face was a playful mask of false intrigue, daring him to read her.

  Behind her through the open doorway, Mark saw the guy from earlier passing by, alone.

  “I’m out,” he said. “Bully.”

  “Aw, come on. I was ready to take the rest of your tiny pile over there!” Aria said, scooping in the pot.

  “Did you have it?” Mark asked, flipping his jacks as he stood up. She tossed her cards at the dealer, face down.

  “Guess you’ll never know.”

  Mark excused himself for an imaginary phone call and crept back onto the main floor. Almost immediately, he found himself trapped in a conversation with Vanessa Redgrave, Crayton’s omnipresent VP of operations. He smiled and nodded and tuned her out as he watched the young man from a distance, who was now standing alone and blinking conspicuously as he watched Crayton play roulette with a crowd around him cheering at every win and gasping at every loss. “Blinking conspicuously” meant it looked like he had an S-lens, and was snapping photos discreetly. His lips were moving as well, just barely, indicating he had someone on the line. Mark eyed him and saw no protrusions in his slim-fitting suit that might indicate a gun, but that didn’t mean much. He scanned around for other possible agents, but the kid was the only one that stood out. As he continued his search, he found Rakesh Blackwood and Soren Vanderhaven chatting at the bar, speaking in whispers and laughing, their eyes locked in his direction, assuredly having fun at his expense. He ignored them and panned back to the young man, but he was gone.

  Mark quickly broke off his conversation with Vanessa, much to her dismay, and hurried toward where he last saw him. He looked toward the restrooms and caught a glimpse of the kid heading inside just as the door closed.

  He tried to reach Brooke on the S-lens, but she didn’t answer, so he swiped her a quick message on his phone.

  POSSIBLE MSS CONTACT, INVESTIGATION.

  As he reached the door, it swung open, and the massive frame of Drago Rusakov poured out. They exchanged a glance, Mark having to practically look straight up to make eye contact with the man, and in those black eyes Mark saw nothing but a void. Rusakov drifted by him like a glacier, and Mark slid inside the marbled bathroom.

  There was only one other man there, white, middle-aged, and he zipped up and brushed by Mark without washing his hands in one of the gold-laden sinks. But in a far stall, Mark could see two shiny shoes. He turned back to the door and jammed the e-lock, ensuring no one else would join them.

  Mark’s mind raced as he tried to calculate his next move. He could remote wipe the guy’s S-lens with his phone, but if he let him walk, he’d lose valuable intel. And he couldn’t question him if he knocked him out and scraped the data manually. An all-out brawl with an MSS agent could spill back out into the casino and blow his cover. Or he could, you know, die, if the kid had a poisoned microblade up his wrist or a molar mine in his jaw.

  The toilet flushed. Mark didn’t have time to weigh any more options.

  The lock of the stall clicked open, and Mark’s foot plowed into the door a millisecond later. The hardwood cracked against the kid’s forehead and staggered him, and in an instant, Mark was on top of the dazed would-be agent, a hand around his throat and the other searching him for weapons. But most importantly, Mark wrenched the stunned kid’s face toward his and ran a siphon program in his S-lens, instantly transferring his lens data to him, eye-to-eye. Useful for sharing photos with friends, but also for complete data dumps, with a military-grade hacking program embedded in Mark’s device.

  Mark quickly scanned through the photos as the kid struggled. Crayton. Crayton. Crayton. Surveillance.

  “Man, what the fuck!” the kid finally choked out as Mark’s grip slipped a bit.

  “Who are you?” Mark said, testing the cover. He wasn’t fighting back. Not effectively anyway.

  “Han,” he sputtered. “Han Takeda!”

  “Why are you here?” Mark asked forcefully.

  “My buddy, Chris. Chris Westerland. His dad owns the casino. He’s in Ibiza but he threw me his ticket for this. Knows I’m a huge Crucible fan! Just got off a call with him.”

  Mark checked the call log, which did indeed read “C-WEST,” who had been online a few minutes earlier. He kept scanning the pictures in the S-lens as well. There were more shots of Crayton, but also of all the fighters at the party. Eventually he reached a few creepshots that had zoomed into Soren Vanderhaven’s cleavage, and a suspicious-looking round, black shape that Mark recognized as Aria’s ass in her slinky party dress. After that there were a few more of her from more traditional angles, laughing, smiling, playing cards.

  His heart began to sink.

  Wordlessly, he searched for the kid’s name. Six forms of legit ID popped up immediately. Police record too. Arrests for two public intoxications, thrown out, three counts sexual assault, thrown out. Rich kid. Too dirty for a cover. Mark began to loosen his grip.

  He’s no one.

  “Is this because you saw me checking out Aria? I’m sorry man, I watched Heroes and Legends, I know you two got … whatever it is you got. She’s just so fuckin’ hot! You know? Well, of course you do.”

  “Why Crayton?” Mark growled, his pulse racing, but the adrenaline was slowly starting to fade. “Why so many photos of him?”

  “Did you just gank my whole S-lens roll? Damn, I gotta get that
hack. I’d stop scrolling if I were you soon though.”

  Still sifting through the photos, Mark reached the end of the party shots and was greeted by a giant, erect penis next to a hand giving a thumbs up. He winced, and kept scrolling past several more like it, and then eventually found photos of Han at various clubs timestamped days and weeks earlier.

  “Crayton’s the man, dude. He put all this shit together! Other billionaires are sitting on their asses investing in fusion power and synthetic trees and shit, and he’s bringing gladiator matches back from the dead. Fuckin’ badass.”

  Mark finally released Han, his sportcoat wrinkled and his forehead bleeding, but otherwise unharmed. He sighed loudly.

  “But for real though, sorry about the Aria pics,” Han continued. “Guess subtlety ain’t my strong suit.”

  Mark ran his hand through his disheveled hair. He’d heard of deep cover, but there was no way this was a front. He was jumping at shadows. Well, assaulting shadows in bathrooms, anyway.

  “It’s … fine, man,” Mark said, slowly walking backward. “It’s my bad. It’s just been a hell of a month.”

  Han nodded and dabbed the blood on his head with toilet paper.

  “Stressful shit, I get it. No worries. Just … you know, save the rage for that Tagami cranker.”

  Mark practically stumbled out of the bathroom when Brooke called him back.

  “You made contact with MSS?” she said in a hopeful tone that made Mark extra reluctant to explain his fuck-up.

  “Uh, about that …”

  32

  MARK STARTED TO SLIP into a dark place the next few days. The mission was at a standstill, and nothing he did seemed to move it forward an inch. Since Easton’s death, the Glasshammer guards no longer forcibly accompanied competitors everywhere, so once again he had a window to dig. He’d mostly neglected his training, scouring every inch of Crayton’s manor as best he could at night for more intel, and spent most of the days doing research through encrypted channels to support Brooke’s work, but there were no new breakthroughs. His screw-up at the casino had potentially exposed him, and more importantly, it turned up nothing at all useful. The quarterfinals were mere days away, and despite all they’d learned about Crayton, there was still not enough to move on.

  Aria invited him out for a late-night run, but he declined, instead lying on his bed with a fifth of whiskey and watching a replay of Drago Rusakov’s SportsWire interview. Melanie Mitchell seemed afraid to even ask him anything, and just let him grunt and speak when he felt like it.

  “These women,” he said with a thick accent. “This cheerleader. This ballerina. They do not belong here.”

  Mitchell nodded slowly, her eyes wide.

  “They will die. They will not die well. It will be ugly thing.”

  He rubbed his beard and his beady eyes glinted from the overhead lights.

  “Ballerina will dance and dance. She will be pretty. Like flower. Crowd gives many kisses and cheers. Good TV, as you say.”

  Mark took another swig and kept watching.

  “But this is not like the Prison Wars. Those men knew death when they were still living. This? These girls know nothing. They know smiling and curly hair and happy TV talking,” he said, moving his hand like a puppet.

  “They do not know death. I alone remain. The black man dead. The pig man dead. No more from the Prison Wars. Only me. And I know death. I am full of souls. Full to bursting.”

  Rusakov stared straight into the camera.

  “This will be ugly thing.”

  Mark forgot about sleeping the rest of the night.

  But it wasn’t just that night, it was every night.

  Mark was losing sleep at an alarming rate, throwing himself into an unhealthy, illogical cycle of training, drinking, and research. Even Brooke, doing all of it remotely with no imminent threat of death looming, was starting to wear out.

  “I can’t read through another interrogation brief,” she finally said after an all-night S-lens session with Mark. “I’m serious. I’m going to claw my eyes out if I have to read ‘prisoner unresponsive’ as the answer to every goddamn question. Do they cut their tongues out over there or what?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Mark said, rubbing his eyes. His S-lens warped and reformed after being prodded by his finger. Brooke’s exhausted face snapped back into focus. He saw her hand-waving through virtual docs on her end.

  “Oh,” she said, coming to a stop. “I forgot about this.”

  “What?” Mark asked, no longer even daring to hope for a breakthrough.

  Brooke looked into the lens.

  “How much do you want to know about Shin Tagami?”

  “Huh?” Mark said. “What does he have to do with this?”

  Brooke shifted.

  “Erm, nothing. But I mean you’re probably fighting him in a few days, and I know the public pretty much knows nothing about the guy other than he’s old and quiet and badass enough to fight without protection or a blade.”

  “And you know something else about him?” Mark asked.

  His curiosity was piqued. As much as he hated to say it, he was more engaged with prep for the tournament now than the mission, which seemed to be going nowhere. All he had to do was kill people there. Much simpler. Of course he didn’t want to kill Tagami. The man had done nothing to him. But what the hell was Brooke talking about?

  “During visitors’ weekend, I may have snuck into his room to do some digging.”

  “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “Gideon’s suggestion. I mean, he’s the only other Asian guy in the damn tournament, and this entire thing revolves around China. He, we, thought he could potentially be an MSS plant.”

  “I assume he’s not, given that you’re apparently pulling this out of your ‘shit I forgot to tell Mark’ file.”

  “He’s not, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth reading. At least for background. But if you’d rather just fight the mute old sage and leave him a mystery, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  Mark thought about it for a few seconds, and took another sip of gin.

  “Screw it,” he said, waving his drink-filled hand. “I can’t stomach any more briefings either. Just send it.”

  Brooke waved a document up onto the screen. It was a scan of a handwritten letter, written shakily.

  “The man lives like a monk,” Brooke said. “But I found this rolled up inside one of his bedposts.”

  “This is, what? Nepali?” Mark said squinting. “I’ve got a handle on five languages, but this isn’t one of them.”

  “Me neither,” Brooke said. “Here’s the translation.”

  Another page appeared, in English.

  Captain Hirota,

  I remember my son’s message like it was yesterday. He was so excited he had been placed in your unit. You were the great Iman Hirota, the hero of the Himalayas. Your victories against the Chinese invaders were legend in these parts. My son was proud to serve in your guard, and said all the other boys thought the same. For my part, I felt relief. There is no safety in war, but at least my Kamal would be looked after by one so brave and formidable.

  But now? I spit. I spit on you, your memory. Your legend of lies. It must have been some other man who did those great things. It could not have been you. Iman Hirota was a hero. And you, whoever you are, are a coward.

  My son is dead. And he is not the only one. There are grieving mothers all over my village who curse your name nightly. They say you sold them. You sold them to the Chinese for slaughter, and fled. Did they promise you position? Wealth? How much was my son worth? How much were all the sons of this valley worth? I want to know.

  I do not know if you will ever see this letter. I send it to your last address, but they tell me your family is gone as well. A vacation, perhaps? Living a life of affluence with your blood money?

  Know that an entire village curses your name, your soul. Carry that with you. Carry it like I hope you carry the faces of the dead.
The face of my sweet Kamal.

  You are old, growing older. Naraka will find you soon, and I know Yama shall not be kind to you. That is my solace. My only solace.

  Your shame will stain your soul in this life, and throughout eternity.

  The letter was unsigned.

  “What the hell?” Mark asked. “Tell me you’ve got some context for this.”

  “I do, but you may want to leave it at that,” Brooke said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “What, because he was some kind of traitor in the border war? And sold out some kids? Now I’m supposed to make him pay, I guess. Bringing that karma around.”

  “Sure,” Brooke said.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Well, after I found that, I definitely needed the rest of the story to make sure he wasn’t still a Chinese agent, if he’d been reportedly working with them. It took a while, but I tracked down a few sources who could retell this story. The whole story.”

  Mark sat and listened, pouring himself another drink.

  “Before he was Shin Tagami, he was Iman Hirota. Japanese mother, Nepalese father. He grew up in Tokyo, but when the border war started, his father’s village was on the front lines. He flew out and rose to captain in just a few, short guerrilla assaults on the mountain that soon became the stuff of local legend. It’s hard to know how much of it is true, but one story had him taking out a twenty-man Chinese convoy singlehandedly. No record of that, but who knows.

  “Eventually, he was given his own unit. A selection of the Gurkha Army’s best and brightest. The toughest, smartest young soldiers. He caused even more havoc with them, to the point where China was almost forced entirely out of the mountain province.

  “Rather than try and take on the guerrilla division directly, China sent an exfil team to Hirota’s village. Soon after, they sent him a note attached to a video file.

  “‘Your unit for your family,’ it said. The Chinese had taken his wife, two daughters, and three grandchildren.”