by J. G. Sandom
The men shot their guns simultaneously, in one vicious crescendo.
It was a miracle Decker wasn’t cut down where he stood...except that he wasn’t standing. Not any longer. He had flung himself to the floor as soon as Lulu had pulled the bolt back on the Uzi.
The air above his head blistered with heat.
Lulu let off a round in response. She fired and kept firing as she dropped to her knees.
All five gang-bangers were struck, shredded, sheared like sheep. Wedges of bone, beads of blood and torn flesh flew off in live shrapnel.
Decker rolled on the floor, looked about. The two agents still squirmed near the entrance. The boy at the door gasped and coughed, slowly faded away. And the other two agents, the ones who had come in from behind—what of them?
For an instant, Decker saw Lulu flying over his head. Without even seeing it, he heard what transpired.
There was a loud thwack as one of Lulu’s feet bore down upon somebody’s cheek. There was the sound of two fists jabbing precisely into two open and vulnerable pressure points. There was a pop as two palms came down on two ears simultaneously, creating a thunderclap of pressure in someone’s aural canals. Then, another whack as another foot struck solar plexus, then a chin, eye socket, neck, and neck once again. All this in sound, until he heard two separate thumps, and the two remaining FBI agents fell to the ground.
Decker looked up. Lulu stood over the agents, dragon-stanced, arms out and ready. “Come on,” she exhorted. She grabbed Decker by the hand, yanked him to his feet and dragged him behind her toward the windows. Moments later, they were shimmying out onto the fire escape.
Flakes of luminous white snow wafted down all around them, so thick it felt they were trapped in a snow globe. They slipped and slid down the steps.
The whine of a squad car made Decker pause for a second. Then, another siren. Soon, the street was alive with their screams.
Someone shot at them from below. Decker looked down. A policeman was firing at them from the street. He could hear bullets ricocheting right next to his ear.
Decker ducked, kicked in a window, tossed Lulu into the opening, and flung himself in right behind her.
They rolled onto the glimmering floor of a corridor. It shimmered with broken glass. He could hear it crackle and crunch under their feet.
An apartment door opened beside him and a teenage girl wearing a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt appeared in the entrance. She had pigtails, he noticed, and huge almond-shaped eyes...before the door slammed shut in his face.
They ran down the corridor. Decker pulled Lulu behind him. They had almost made it to the door leading to the stairs when it opened and the dull metal gray of a gun muzzle slid into view—like the head of a snake.
Lulu rolled to the floor in what seemed like slow motion. Decker reached for the gun barrel.
A shot bubbled up from the opening, followed by the sound of a thunderous report. Bang! Then, nothing but ringing.
Decker could feel the heat of the gun barrel in his hand as he grabbed it, pulled it up and then back, striking whomever was holding it on the opposite side of the door. There was a dull thud. The door opened and Decker saw another young gang-banger fall to the floor, a nasty gash on his cheek.
“Come on,” he shouted to Lulu. They leapt over the kid in the stairwell. Above them, Decker could hear people milling about. Their footsteps echoed down the stone stairs. Then, the taught blast of gunfire.
Decker and Lulu leapt to the side as the bannister splintered beside them. Someone was shooting at them from above!
“Cease fire, you idiot. He wants them alive,” came a voice from above.
Decker yanked Lulu forward and they dashed down the stairs. They ran as fast as they could, careening against the walls, fearful of venturing too close to the bannister.
Only two more flights to the bottom, Decker realized. He stole a quick glance above and noticed the hands of three sets of agents on the bannister in pursuit.
He jumped to the next landing, spun about and waited for Lulu to catch up. Only one more floor and we’ve made it, he realized. Just one.
They ran and they ran, turning round the last bend. They sprinted the last few steps to the door. It led out to the basement and the basement garage. Decker could smell the scent of car exhaust. The smell of the open road, and of freedom.
He kicked the door open and the frame of a man coalesced into view.
One moment there was nobody there. The doorway was empty, the coast clear. Then, the doorway was blocked by a shape quite familiar.
Decker ground to a stop. He’d been about to lunge forward, to lead with a punch and a kick, when he saw who it was.
Rex McCullough.
His best friend...holding a weapon.
And it was pointed right at his heart.
CHAPTER 50
Saturday, December 14
I hid in the garden, completely exhausted, and drank from a green garden hose. Sirens wailed in the distance. They were still looking for me. They would keep looking for me until they had found me. Of that, I was certain. After all, the blond man had the age of the universe.
My only chance now was to do what I had to do first.
I stared up at the snowy white clouds. It was late afternoon, almost sunset, and the sun languished on the distant horizon like a coin on the lip of a jukebox.
A perfect sunset, as always, I thought. I handed the hose to Barzani. “And every one of us in here, we’re...you know,” I suggested. “Dead?” It was difficult to accept. It was ludicrous.
He brought the cool jet of water to his lips. I watched as he drank. When he was finished, he dropped the hose on the ground. “Not everyone,” he said, wiping his mouth. He turned off the tap. “That’s both the problem and the opportunity.”
At that moment, for no special reason, I remembered my hand. I tore off another piece of my shirt and slowly, with great care, began wrapping it around my battered red knuckles and fingers. As I fiddled, a monarch butterfly wafted in over a great bed of blue sage where the hose was attached to the house. Its wings bobbed, black and orange, weaved and fluttered, bounced and wafted, and I marveled at it. I marveled at the way that it danced in the air right in front of me. And the fact that it even existed.
“Here, let me help you with that,” said Barzani. He began to re-tie my bandage.
“They say it takes several generations for monarch butterflies to make the journey from Mexico up to Canada every year,” I said, changing the subject, “and yet, somehow, they know where to go. They remember genetically. Does that mean that they’re programmed? Are they machines too?”
The monarch hovered and settled on the tip of a kaleidoscope-colored Buddleia nearby.
I smiled. I reached out with care, slowly, delicately, afraid of my clumsiness, but the butterfly didn’t flutter away. It remained on the tip of the bush, preternaturally still.
“Hold still,” said Barzani.
And I did.
He laughed, his dark brown eyes softening. “What was it Zhou said?” he asked me as he fussed with the bandage. “‘Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, for all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness, unaware that I was Zhou. Soon, I awaked. And there I was, myself again. But, now, I do not know whether I was a man then, dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I’m a butterfly now, dreaming I’m a man.’”
We are the authors of our lives, I thought. I am. I am! I watched as the butterfly took flight into the gloaming light. I feel.
“There you go,” said Barzani as he tied off the end of the bandage. “Good as new.”
Jupiter shimmered high in the sky. It twinkled and gleamed, so alive! I smiled, remembering the childhood movie and song. “When you wish upon a star, Makes no difference who you are, Anything your heart desires...” But I never had the chance to complete it.
The blond man appeared right beside us, right next to the hose and the butterfly bush.
> I stood up and leapt back, only to see Barzani turn and slip on the wet soil as the blond man came in from behind.
He swung his right hand down and around, and then up through Barzani’s lower back, through his spine, upward, until Barzani began to shimmer and shine, as if charged by Saint Elmo’s Fire, aglow, like white phosphorous. He let out a scream, a primal cry at the moon as the arm rushed up through his colon, up, up, through his liver and spleen, his sternum and ribcage, tearing the lungs with his fingers, his throat, until it pierced the skull casing and clenched the gray throbbing mass of his brain in his fingers.
For a moment, Barzani stood there on the tips of his toes, his back arched, picked up from behind by the great hook of the other man’s arm.
Then, he slithered apart. The two sides of his body simply slipped off the blond man’s raised arm, fell off to the side, like a snakeskin, and splashed onto the floor. All that remained was the glimmering brain in the blond man’s outstretched right hand, the brain stem and spine dangling down, luminous, blinking, as though alive with charged lightning bolts. For a moment it gleamed with electric delight. Then, the light sputtered and faded.
When it had grown dark, the blond man tossed the brain and spine to the ground. He turned and looked over at me, a smile on his lips.
But, by then, I was already long gone.
CHAPTER 51
Saturday, December 14
Decker couldn’t see a damned thing. He was wearing some sort of hood that smelled of seared plastic. He could barely breathe, let alone see. It had been this way since their capture in Boston. McCullough and his team had handcuffed Lulu and him, slipped these insufferable hoods over their heads, and then stuffed them both in a van before spiriting them away toward the airport.
Well, that last part was a guess. Decker wasn’t one hundred percent certain about their destination. But, it was an educated guess. One minute they’d been driving through the tunnel toward Logan, and the next someone had rolled up his sleeve and injected something into his arm.
He had woken up here, in this room. He wasn’t sure where he was. Some kind of utility room, judging from the humming of nearby machinery. Not to mention the iconic odor of heating oil. And what was that other smell, coffee? He had no idea how long he’d been out.
“Lulu?” he said. “Lulu, are you there?” Decker tested his bonds. His hands were handcuffed behind him. “Lulu!”
“What is it?” she answered. Her voice was groggy and weak. “John? John, is that you? Where are we?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“That bastard, Chen Yuan,” Lulu said with disgust. “I shouldn’t have trusted him. But I thought, with enough money...I’m sorry, John. This is all my fault. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t—”
“Forget it.”
“My grandmother always tells me, ‘The son of a cat still hunts mice!’ I should have known better.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s a Spanish proverb,” said Decker. “El hijo de la gata ratones mata.”
“My grandmother is a collector of proverbs,” said Lulu. “She doesn’t particularly care where they come from. As long as they’re true.”
Just then, Decker heard the scrape of a bolt, the creak of a door and someone entered the room. No, three sets of footsteps—three people. Leather on concrete. And one of them was Ted Hellard. Decker recognized him from the squeak of his shoe!
Someone approached Decker and plucked the hood from his head.
For a moment, the world was a flash of bright light.
He’d been right. They were inside some kind of utility room or loading bay. There was a garage door at one end and a raised concrete platform with a railing at the other.
Lulu, also hooded, was sitting just a few yards away, next to a work bench covered with various pieces of machinery. Lathes and drills and what looked like a table saw. That’s when Decker noticed numbers and letters stenciled on the wall at the far end of the platform, immediately above another steel door. He’d seen the same font and color convention before.
At Fort Meade, the NSA headquarters in Maryland.
Decker felt a flood of relief. This was not some off-the-grid, black ops hideaway where his captors could behave with impunity. There was only so much they could do to them here.
A man walked up to Lulu and removed her hood too. She looked terrified.
After a moment, the man turned and faced Decker. He was obviously a soldier, from his posture and build, and yet he wasn’t wearing a uniform—just a khaki outfit such as one might find on a merchant marine but with no discerning insignia. That was odd. A small Hispanic man with a buzz cut.
Decker tried to turn around in his chair so that he could see the other two men in the room but he couldn’t quite swivel about. “I know you’re there, Hellard,” he said.
Rex McCullough swept into view. “John,” he said, nodding.
It was as if he were passing his friend in the hallway on the way to the cafeteria back at the Center. “Rex,” he replied.
Decker looked over at Lulu. He gave her a smile and was cheered by the fact that she managed to scowl back in response. At least she no longer looked terrified. But Decker was puzzled that they had chosen to interrogate them together, instead of separating the prisoners, which would have been standard procedure.
He looked back at McCullough. Rex had sat down on a stool only a few yards away. “OK,” he began. “Because of our friendship, I want you to tell me your side of the story, John. I’ve already heard everyone else’s. FBI. CIA. NSA. Everyone’s got an opinion. I don’t. I think, after all you’ve been through, after all you and I have been through together, you deserve your day in court. Well, this is it. Shoot. From what I hear, you may never get another chance.”
Decker smiled. “That wasn’t bad,” he said, after a moment. “If my hands weren’t handcuffed behind me, so help me, I might even clap a little, Rex. ‘After all you’ve been through, after all you and I have been through together...’ Classic. And yet, only a few hours ago, I was a traitor to my nation, the beneficiary of a forty million dollar bribe. That’s quite the turnaround, Rex.” Decker laughed. “Don’t waste your breath. As it turns out, I don’t have any issues telling you my story. And I mean it when I say, my story. Leave Lulu out of this. I only dragged her along as protection. She has nothing to do with this.”
“How sweet,” the Hispanic man with the buzz cut replied, moving closer to Lulu. “He likes her.” He waved his hand along the top of her spiky black hair.
“I mean it, Rex,” Decker added. “If you want me to cooperate, if you want to know what I know, let her go. She doesn’t know anything anyway.”
Rex shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s out of my hands, John. She killed a number of agents recently deputized by the Bureau.”
“Who? Those gang-bangers in Boston? They shot at us first.”
“Until an inquiry can clear her...” His voice trailed off. “Look, John. You don’t have much time to come clean. With everything else that’s going on right now, all of these unexplained incidents.”
“What incidents?”
McCullough looked at the figure standing behind Decker.
“You might as well come out where I can see you,” said Decker. “I know that it’s you, Hellard. You may be wearing fancy English walking shoes but they squeak like a pair of department store specials.”
Hellard came out from behind Decker. He walked over and stood by McCullough. “Don’t get cute, Decker,” he said. “You’re already in enough trouble as is.”
“No, really. I want to know,” Decker said. “What incidents? You mean like major cyber security breaches? Malfunctions of weapons systems? Penetration tests?”
“What do you know about it?” asked McCullough. “We’ve had reports of American submarines firing on each other near the pole, NATO tanks targeting other NATO tanks in Afghanistan, Israel’s Iron Dome intentionally missing rockets from Gaza. The Secretary of Defense is calling it a possible cyber
Pearl Harbor. If you know anything, John, now’s the time.”
Decker took a deep breath. He looked at McCullough and Hellard. He glanced over at the Hispanic man with the buzz cut standing by Lulu. Here goes nothing, he thought. He took another deep breath and he told them.
He told them about what had happened in Lulu’s apartment in Cambridge, how the place had attacked them and how even her toy Dino-Bot had attempted to kill them. He told them about what had happened in China. He told them about the assassin in Georgetown, about the hidden messages they’d been receiving from Mr. X and his exhortations that they find out who was behind Zimmerman’s death.
The more he told them, the more nonsensical it seemed. Mysterious intelligence sources from cyberspace. Houses that blew themselves up. VR feelings of doom. Ludicrous.
And to top it all off, HAL2. Some kind of inhuman nemesis. An AI conspiracy. Even to Decker, it seemed like a kind of cartoon. A bad action flick.
And yet he was absolutely convinced it was true.
As he told his story, Decker found himself looking about the utility room at all of the machines and devices arrayed on the counter. Even the coffee machine seemed to regard him with newfound intelligence.
Was that red light a camera? Or was it simply a small LED indicating the burner was on?
When would the drills and the desk saw and lathes come to life?
All of the appliances and gadgets, all the tools and electrical conveniences that had once been a part of the natural backdrop of modern existence, since Boston and Bondville, now bore a malevolent hue. Now, they idled like owls on dark branches at night, waiting for some hapless mouse to run by. They waited and watched.
“That’s enough,” Hellard said. “All the evidence points to you as the source of the leaks, Decker. We even have a money trail leading right to your door. We know you’ve been working with other groups, such as Anonymous, to infiltrate sensitive industrial and classified military systems. We know you were involved in that break-in at Westlake Defense Systems.”
