Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  “I can’t believe it. You’re actually afraid of these guys.”

  “Fuck you, Deke. You have no idea what you’re talking about, who you’re dealing with. Can’t you see that?”

  “Coward.”

  “Let this go.”

  “No.”

  Which was when Deke did something he never imagined he’d do:

  Quit the FBI.

  That night he sat on his bedroom floor, hugging his knees. Ellie was already asleep, a book fanned out on her chest. Deke had never been more afraid in his life. Afraid for his family. Afraid for the world in which he was raising his kids.

  Afraid for what he had to do next, because he really had no choice.

  Because, damn it, as much as his rational self pleaded with him, Deacon Clark would not let this go.

  Deke returned to his soon-to-be-former office and started packing his personal belongings in a kind of daze. Was he really doing this? Yes, he was. An e-mail ding snapped him out of it. Deke looked at the sender, but didn’t recognize it at first: assistant at dgausa.com. He clicked it open, which immediately opened up a Web browser window. Damn it. At first he thought he’d unleashed a virus that somehow had made it past the FBI firewall. But when the horrific image appeared, and his cell phone rang, Deke knew he was dealing with something altogether different.

  “Agent Clark?”

  “Yeah,” Deke said quietly, eyes transfixed on the image before him. He had never seen anything more horrific.

  “Is your Web browser open?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re seeing the image.”

  Yeah, he was seeing the image, which only partially resolved the question of what had happened to Charlie Hardie. There was a time stamp on the image, meant to suggest that the photo had been taken just a few hours ago. There were tubes and tape and other gear implying medical care, but Hardie looked pretty fuckin’ far from cared for.

  “Is he alive?” Deke asked. “What did you do to his—”

  “Let me show you something else.”

  The image changed. Now Deke was staring at his own backyard. Not just his backyard, like an image stored in Google’s street view. This was Deke’s backyard as it appeared today, best he could tell. Deke could still see the tan grilling mitt he’d forgotten to bring into the kitchen last night. Last night he’d cooked chicken for Ellie and the kids, preoccupied with thoughts of what he’d tell the reporter the next day. None of that mattered now. Not when they were showing Deke his own house.

  “Don’t do this,” Deke said.

  “We’re not through yet.”

  The image switched again. Now they were inside Deke’s empty living room. He could see the clock on the wall—an oversize, classy thing that Ellie had picked up at Restoration Hardware. Deke tried to figure when they were in his house. Then he noticed the time on the clock; then he looked at the digital clock on his computer. Same exact time. The feed was live.

  “Get the hell out of my house, you son of a bitch.”

  The screen jumped back to the original image of Charlie Hardie, which was horrifying on its own.

  “You are currently investigating a certain group linked to white slavery. This group has ties to Eastern Europe. You know the investigation, Agent Clark?”

  “No. There’s no way I can—”

  “You will curtail that investigation immediately.”

  “I don’t have that authority.”

  “Your boss, Agent Sarkissian, will go along with it. As for your colleagues, you will simply have to convince them that the matter is not worth pursuing at a federal level. Do you understand me?”

  “You know what? I’m going to pursue you at a federal level, you son of a bitch.”

  The scene image jumped again, cutting away from Hardie. Now Deke was staring at his own bedroom. Ellie’s robe was draped over the bed. She usually showered late in the day, working from home until it was time to pick up the kids from school. She was in the shower right now and had no idea there was someone in their living room…

  “And we can continue on to the next scene, Agent Clark. Would you like us to do that? Or perhaps you’d like to skip ahead a little?”

  Scene jump: the view outside his daughters’ school. About forty-five minutes until the dismissal bell rang. Deke knew that they would be waiting inside until Ellie pulled up in the car line. But if these thugs were inside the house, then they could easily take the car. His baby girls would have no idea until…

  “Would you like us to continue, Agent Clark?”

  An invisible, crushing weight pushed down on his chest. Deke was not an emotional man, but he recognized the symptoms of utter heartbreak. He thought of Sarkissian, the strange look on his face, and understood. He thought of Charlie Hardie lying there on that gurney, technically still alive but pulled apart in the most ghastly way Deke could imagine. But he thought more about his wife, Ellie, in the shower, and his girls waiting for their school day to end.

  “No,” Deke said softly.

  10

  Your place or mine?

  —Popular saying

  THE NEXT TIME Hardie woke up he was surprised to find himself sitting in a metal chair and wearing a fairly nice suit.

  He couldn’t remember how he ended up in this room, or why he was wearing this suit. Nothing more than fragments. Flashes in a black-and-gray fog. It wasn’t quite amnesia, because he remembered his name and who he was and what he had been doing just a short time ago—namely, being shot to hell in Los Angeles, California, and being patched together by these two jackass doctors. But after that…?

  Was there a car?

  He swore there was a car involved.

  Pieces of it floated around in his mind, like half-remembered parts of a nightmare. A black car. Needles. Blood spraying out the side of someone’s head. The more he thought about it, the more his heart raced. His brain struggled to put the fragments together into linear order. His brain struggled like a computer trying to reboot itself.

  He tried to focus on the memory of the car. There was a car, wasn’t there? It was coming back now. Yeah. Definitely a car. A big, black, scary Lincoln Town Car.

  Or was that just a memory of a nightmare?

  Relax. It’ll come. Don’t force it, don’t freak yourself out.

  You’re only in a suit you don’t remember buying, in a room you’ve never seen before.

  No reason to panic at all.

  The room was wide with a low plaster ceiling. Paint flaked off the walls. The molding looked like real wood, reminding Hardie of his grandparents’ house in North Philadelphia. There was something very 1920s about it. The only nod to modernity was a fluorescent light above him, which flickered every couple of seconds, as if warning: I could go out at any moment. Appreciate me while I last.

  There wasn’t much here, except the chair Hardie was sitting in, a metal table, another chair, and a filing cabinet tucked in the corner. The fading paint on the walls made it seem like other pieces of furniture had been in this room at some point, long enough to cause discoloration.

  Hardie tried to listen for any sounds that would give him a clue as to his location—and somewhere was the faint swelling of violins. Maybe. Those could also be in his head.

  His head.

  Another piece of memory.

  Right. He’d been shot in the head.

  Hardie tried to reach up with his right hand and it stopped short. Metal dug into his wrist. He looked down with throbbing eyes and saw that he had been handcuffed to the metal chair.

  Well, at least that settled a few things. This wasn’t some dumpy hospital room. He was being kept here, and someone had thought Hardie was enough of a security risk to slap some handcuffs on him. Which was funny, because Hardie felt ridiculously weak, down to the middle of his bones. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so drained. Yet he was still conscious. So at least there was that.

  His left hand was free. Hardie tried to lift it, but the muscles in his arm screamed in protest. He for
ced it anyway, to the point where his fingers actually trembled as they touched the side of his head. The side where he remembered being shot. His hair had been cropped very short, and he could feel the rough edges of a ragged scar on his scalp. No stitches; just the bumpy mountain of skin. Hardie’s fingertips traced the wound about five or six inches around toward the back of his head until it faded.

  So he’d been out of it long enough to heal. Which was weird.

  Because it felt like he’d been shot only a few hours ago.

  Right?

  Hardie felt the rest of his head while he was at it, and yeah—someone had given him a crew cut. He’d hadn’t had such a short-cropped haircut in twenty years, since back in his military days. He felt the rest of his face, and it was hard. The skin rough. When had they cut his friggin’ hair? Why didn’t he remember that? How long had he been out, anyway?

  Hardie sat in the room, trying to put all these memories together, wondering where he was and what they had in mind for him. Because it was clear he had pissed off somebody important—​somebody who wanted to go through all this trouble to save his life and bring him to this room, dress him up in a suit, handcuff him to a chair.

  But…for what?

  There was murmuring elsewhere in the building. Hardie tried to focus on it, but the sounds were too faint. Were they even voices? It almost sounded like the string section of an orchestra, hitting notes that were too far away to place. Maybe bells, too?

  After what seemed like an eternity, the door opened. A woman stepped into the room, closed the door behind her with a metallic snick.

  It was, of course, Mann. Holding a long cardboard box about the size of a golf club.

  “Hiya, Charlie,” she said.

  And in that moment, Hardie knew he was really, really fucked.

  So this was a revenge thing. Plain and simple. His life had been spared so that Mann could toy with it.

  Whatever positive thinking he’d managed to muster up was gone. Mann was here, and she was probably going to torture him before killing him. Probably using whatever was in that box. Or she’d kill him and desecrate his dead body. Or maybe come up with some slow agonizing torture that would eventually, and only eventually, kill him.

  “Uh, hi,” Hardie responded.

  Mann slinked into the room, strolled right up to the table between them, and rested the box on top. She looked healthy, a little more filled out. And she seemed to have both of her eyes, which was kind of a shock. One of them was a brighter, otherworldly blue.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  Hardie wanted to gesture with his hand—Be my guest. But the handcuff prevented him. And he didn’t feel like trying to lift his left arm again.

  She took the chair opposite Charlie. The metal legs scraped against the concrete floor as she moved a little closer. “Good to see you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, really. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  Memory flash: Mann with an eye patch. She wasn’t wearing one now, though.

  “You’re looking better,” Hardie said.

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Not to interrupt the pleasantries,” Hardie said. “But if you’re here to kill me, I’d rather you just go ahead and do it. I’m not into small talk.”

  Mann smirked. “Me? Kill the unkillable Charles Hardie? I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. Besides, whatever happened between us is…well, ancient history.”

  “Doesn’t exactly feel that way to me.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t feel that way to the Hunters, either.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and now Charlie could see it—the glass one. Her right eye. The unnaturally blue one. So she hadn’t emerged from their little battle unscathed. She’d lost an eye. What was that old saying? It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye? Hardie supposed the fun and games were over. Now it was something else.

  “That’s ancient history, too,” Mann said. “Look, as much as I’d love to sit back and reminisce, I’m here for a reason. They wanted you to talk to a familiar face, so that you’d know they were serious.”

  “Again with the they.”

  “It’s always they, Charlie. Don’t you know that? They run everything.”

  “Kind of surprised they didn’t have you killed for screwing everything up so badly.”

  This time Mann giggled before catching herself. Her cheeks turned red, and she fought for her composure. “Oh, Charlie, I’ve missed you. No, they didn’t have me killed. They don’t waste assets. And I’m an asset to the Industry. Just like you.”

  Hardie tried to put his face in his hands, wanting to press his own eyeballs in to see if they’d stop throbbing. But then he remembered he was half handcuffed. Still, he used the palm of his left hand to rub his forehead. The movement was awkward; his left arm seemed to want to do its own thing, not be pressed into service.

  “Do you have a headache?” Mann asked with something resembling genuine concern in her voice.

  Hardie said nothing and continued rubbing his head. “Yeah. You wouldn’t happen to have any aspirin, would you?”

  “That’s an unfortunate side effect of the memory shot they gave you.”

  Hardie looked at her from between his fingers. “Memory what?”

  “A shot to erase your short-term memory. Which is why you’re so confused right now, and why you have a really bad headache. They didn’t want you remembering anything about your trip here. Not the sounds of tires on the road, or the way the air felt or smelled. Nothing. So they blanked out your recent past. It’s a security precaution.”

  “Exactly how much of my recent past?”

  Mann smiled and hummed playfully. Hmm hmm hmmmmm.

  “Great,” Hardie said. “You sure you don’t have any aspirin?”

  Hardie had to admit it: he didn’t understand a thing about what was going on. Why was Mann smiling and chipper? That made him uneasy, far more than the ache in his skull and the handcuff around his wrist.

  Now Mann leaned forward, sizing him up with her eyes. “You’re going to behave, right, Charlie?”

  He took a moment before responding. “Sure.”

  “Goody.”

  Mann fished in her pocket and produced a small key. She stood up, scraping the chair back across the concrete floor, then moved around the table to Hardie’s side. He flinched. She told him to relax, then leaned forward. Her breasts brushed against his shoulder.

  Hardie blurted: “You know, you still have a nice rack.”

  It was a dumb inside joke between them—at least Hardie thought so. The first time they’d met, she’d been topless, sunning herself on a patio high up in the Hollywood Hills. He hadn’t known she was a professional assassin back then. He just thought she was rich and eccentric and an exhibitionist.

  But Mann stepped away and frowned. Dark clouds formed in her eyes. Even, impossibly enough, the glass one. Okay, Hardie thought. Here it comes. Here’s the Mann I know. He braced himself for a punch in the head or a chop to the throat.

  Instead, her hands came up and started to unbutton her blouse.

  Now, this wasn’t what he expected.

  “What are you doing?” Hardie asked.

  “For old times’ sake,” she said, then removed her blouse to reveal her bra—disappointingly white and rather matronly. Mann reached around to the back and unhooked it.

  “Look,” Hardie said, “I know this is a cliché, but when I said I had a headache, I really meant that I had a—”

  When Mann’s bra came away from her chest, one of her breasts came with it. It took Hardie a few seconds to realize that the bra had padding on one side to perfectly match her remaining breast. The left part of her chest was glistening with fresh scar tissue, pink and raw-looking.

  “God,” Hardie muttered. “What—”

  “The big C. Runs in the family, sad to say. You can run away from many things in life, but you can’t run away from your genes. Happened a sh
ort while ago. I’m still getting used to one of the girls being gone.”

  Hardie didn’t know what to say. What could you say? Sorry you lost one, but the other looks great? Mann wasn’t a high-school girlfriend. She was a cold-blooded killer. She had racked up many notches on her gun. She’d tried to kill him.

  Then it occurred to him. When did she find the time to, like, survive breast cancer? How long had he been out?

  “It’s not all bad,” she continued. “Amazon warrior women used to remove a breast willingly, so their tits wouldn’t get in the way when drawing back an arrow. Mind you, I prefer a gun, but I’m tempted to give archery a shot. Certainly would make for a great cocktail-party story, don’t you think?”

  Hardie couldn’t look anymore. Mann rehooked her bra, slid her arms into the blouse, rebuttoned it. “Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you know that you’re not the only one who’s lost something, Charlie.”

  “What do you want?” Hardie said. “Why are you here?”

  “They wanted you to see a familiar face. They wanted you to know this is for real.”

  “What’s for real?”

  Mann smiled. “Your new life.”

  “We’re in the vestibule of site seven seven three four,” Mann said. “This is a secret maximum-security facility, known only to an extremely limited number of people in the world. We’re somewhere deep in the earth, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Even I don’t know where it is.”

  “Right.”

  “No, I’m serious. They stuck me with the same memory shot they gave you. When I leave, they’re going to give me another shot, and I’ll wake up in a hotel room somewhere else in the world. Hopefully someplace with a spa and excellent room service.”

  “They, again, huh?”

  Mann leaned forward, raised her eyebrows. “Creepy, isn’t it?”

  Unconsciously, Hardie’s trembling left hand went to the crook of his right arm and then he realized what he was searching for. The needle jab. Sure enough, there was a fabric bandage there, and wine-dark bruising around it. Somebody had given him a shot. Somebody had been giving him lots of shots. Sticking him up as though he were a college student trying to make some extra bread over a weekend.