by Stephen Moss
“Ayala’s work to track Mikhail Kovalenko and Pei Leong-Lam must be allowed to continue. For though they have been less violent in their efforts to stymie our work than Agent Wilson has, they have been no less effective, as evidenced by the ongoing absence of any Russian or Chinese financial or political support for our vital work, support we will most certainly need once construction begins at full scale.
“I know each of our nation’s State Departments and Intelligence Agencies have been working to gain a diplomatic and intelligence foothold once more, but I wanted today to formally ask each of you to join me in reaching out to your respective governments to see that no effort is spared in breeching the veil that has fallen over those two countries.”
His tone became stern, “I cannot stress enough how important it is that we gain access to them once more so that Ayala and her team can do their jobs.”
He looked at them all again, holding their gaze one at a time to emphasize his point.
Then he took a breath, “OK, it is not pretty, but it was time that you all knew the full extent of this crisis. Goodness knows I need your attention to be focused on the work here at Rolas, but I am afraid I need your help with this as well. This impasse cannot be allowed to continue. We must push forward, my friends. And that will take the various nations you all represent getting a handle on the situation in Northern Asia and reopening active dialogue with the Russians and Chinese.”
There were emphatic nods and stern looks around the table. These were very senior men and women each with a voice in the highest halls in their respective nations. Neal might have wanted to keep them focused on protecting Rolas Base, but at this point the most credible threat to the base’s security was from Russia or China and that threat was only going to get worse with time unless Ayala was allowed access to hunt it down.
He did not know what else to do. He simply did not understand why the UN, NATO, and the EU had all failed to get a grasp on the situation and he was running out of patience with the entire process.
“OK,” he said, allowing the tension to ebb from his shoulders with a long breath, “with that said, let’s get on with the rest of our agenda. General, I believe you are first up. If you would give us an update?”
Neal glanced to his right and General Milton nodded, fully aware of the importance of what Neal had just said. He only hoped that someone here might be able to bring pressure where he and Neal had failed.
But enough of politics, thought Barrett, setting his mind to the task at hand. And so Barrett began his lengthy briefing, deferring to General Braldinho and others as necessary.
The meeting ran on for several hours. They discussed their many projects, involving Birgit and Amadeu as needed without posturing or territorialism. Barrett was proud of how the gathered group of thinkers and leaders were forming into a team, as was Neal. It was just as they had strived for, and it may give them a glimmer of hope.
But they notably avoided discussing one topic any further: the political climate. The point had been made. The message heard. They would do what they could. Neal only hoped it would make a difference.
Chapter 24: Vendetta
Lana reveled in the rioters’ fury. The police and National Guard were mobilized in most of the major metropolises of the country, most notably in New York, Chicago, LA, and DC, where protests had turned violent. Many less politically motivated participants had started taking the opportunity to engage in some old-fashioned capitalism, looting the contents from any home or store they could violate.
But this unrest was spreading, onto streets, into homes, into suburbs, and the overflow of angst and fury was spilling into the markets and drowning them. With even Park Avenue’s residents affected, a wholly different resistance movement had been mobilized, with the wealthy and formerly wealthy starting to vocally support a forceful crackdown on the protests.
But that was not all Lana had to smile about, for amidst the violence and political rhetoric, Lana’s tap into Saul Moskowitz’s life had suddenly struck gold, proving more profitable than she had dared hope, and now she faced the very real possibility of bringing one of her intended targets to his knees.
Upon reflection, the attack on the White House had been ill conceived, she knew that. But she had nearly succeeded in spite of her overzealousness. If only she had spent longer assessing her target, or pursued some of the other movement she had tracked in the building, rather than focusing solely on the president’s party. But she could not have known that Neal would not stick with the president, and any additional time spent in the capital surveying the area would have brought with it ever-greater risk of discovery.
No, she had seen an opportunity, and she had taken it. And despite her failure to achieve her target, she had still survived the encounter and managed to strike at the very heart of the nation she had been sent to emasculate. She was not sure which of her fellow Agents were still alive, or what they were doing if they were, but surely they weren’t proving as successful as she was. Certainly there had been no news from Europe or Asia to indicate anything as spectacular as her reign of terror in the United States, except maybe that gruesome night in Gaza City several months ago.
In fact, Lana thought, there were many powerful nations still relatively untouched by the efforts of Lana and her cohorts. The most notable example of this was the wealthy countries of Western Europe, which, aside from the economic backlash from the various military and societal tremors resonating around the earth, had escaped the current crises relatively unscathed. As she contemplated this, Lana felt a deep-seated desire to redress that imbalance. Maybe once she had dispensed with Neal, and hopefully Madeline (if she could find her), she would head to Europe.
She sat in a new Ford sedan, moving slowly in the evening rush-hour traffic. Her face was heavily painted with makeup, and covered by a baseball cap and sunglasses. Thick black hair hung down about her neck. Not a wig. Real hair. The hair belonged to a Maribel Braggs of Ashburn, Virginia, as did the clothes Lana was wearing and the car she was driving.
As Lana had stalked the small towns west of DC, she had come across Maribel’s home, and the annoying poodle she lived with. She had entered Maribel’s home and quickly dealt with the yapping pup, then she had studied Maribel’s possessions and surmised that the woman was both single and quite devoid of plans for that weekend. It was a perfect combination for Lana’s needs, and a very unfortunate one for Maribel’s.
She had watched Maribel come home and heard her call out for ‘poochie!’ as she closed her front door behind her. But Maribel’s little mutt had been quiet. Confused, Maribel had turned around, looking for her pet, and come face-to-face with Lana’s night-black visage. She had died quietly and quickly, Lana having temporarily lost her appetite for torturing innocents in the face of the greater target that was almost within her grasp.
Instead she had neatly scalped Maribel’s head, dressed herself in Maribel’s clothes, and applied liberal amounts of Maribel’s makeup to her face. She had then stuffed the overweight Maribel into a corner in the basement, along with her dog’s body, and exited the house without an afterthought.
While Washington Reagan Airport was shut to all civilian traffic, Dulles had remained open, and was struggling to move the large volume of travelers coming to and from the political hub of the still mighty United States. As Ayala’s administrative lead, Saul Moskowitz had originally planned to have Neal’s effects sent to his location on a military transport out of Reagan, but Ayala had said no. She had stressed that there was too great a chance that Lana would be able to track the small volume of traffic coming in and out of that airport, and that he should use a civilian transport out of Dulles.
Saul had argued the point at some length, but Ayala had been adamant, and Lana had been glad she had. The forces in and around downtown DC were now at a level that made even Lana pause for thought. Her attack on the White House had hastened events in America, and Ayala’s forces had responded in kind. To venture into that hornet’s nest again
would be suicide, Lana knew that.
That said, the security around Dulles airport was hardly to be sniffed at, Lana thought. Checkpoints were randomly searching cars approaching the airport, while cordons and motion sensors had been set up in the woods that bordered the runways. Lana had felt their probing sensors as she had stalked the woods the night before, looking for a way to get onto the runways, but she had not dared venture too close to the sensors, as she knew that would bring down the full might of Ayala’s forces.
But with the closing of Reagan, over sixty thousand cars were now coming and going from Dulles each day and searching them all would have been impossible. Cameras had been mounted at several points above the highways feeding the airport, scanning the faces of drivers and passengers, but their recognition software was primitive, and Lana could disguise herself well enough to fool these machines even if her hair and makeup would not stand up to close inspection.
If she was pulled over by one of the random roadblocks, it would probably not go well, and she would have to fight her way out of it, but they were not manned full-time with Ayala’s shock troops, who were focused on guarding the city proper, and she was reasonably sure she could escape before the shock troops arrived, if it came to that.
But she passed the last checkpoint without incident, and drove onward into the airport’s warren of parking lots and access ramps to the day parking lot aside the terminal. She took a parking space on the rooftop where few cars were parked, and climbed out, studying the cameras covering the lot as she did so.
Her mind began to analyze the way the cameras crossed each other. Her view of the world started to change as she overlaid the angles of the various cameras and a path began to emerge, a series of islands on the parking lot’s top level not covered by the camera network.
Lana then looked over to the roof of the main terminal building, and slowly her machine mind began to plot a similar map of where the airport’s guards there could and could not see.
Without rush, she calmly walked to the far side of the lot, stopping in a hole in the patchwork of camera views that covered the rest of the roof. Here she was hidden from the eyes roaming the lot. Deftly she removed her clothing, and used it to wipe the makeup from her pitch-black face. Looking back across the lot toward her car, and the terminal beyond, she could see her path planned out before her. Her mind was ready with the exact speed she would have to run, and the power and trajectory of her coming leap. Checking the skies, she watched the planes, and waited for the moment when the rush of a landing 747 would confuse the motion sensors they had nearer the terminal, then she ignited her run up.
Several floors below, taxies were pulling to and from the curb in the gap between the parking lot and the terminal. They swarmed around each other, jockeying for curbside position so they could unload their cargo of husbands and wives, lonely businessmen, harried parents, and confused children. From the amateurs with their vast bag of clothes that would never be worn, to the diligent packer with their matching luggage, so shiny and new, and so soon to be eyed by distant thieves.
The madding crowd busied past each other, watched closely by airport police. Couples talked silently about the stringent security, about whether it was even safe to travel in these strange times, about the riots wracking their country. Cameras scrutinized faces and license plates. Men and women twitched at the banging of car doors, and vigilant eyes sought out the unusual, looked for threats, sought signs of anything unusual.
But amid the noise and haste, no eyes or cameras were pointed skyward, and no one saw the naked, black figure silently soaring across the black sky above them. Her long, impossibly graceful leap took her from one from one patch of camera blindness on the parking lot’s roof to another on the terminal’s, landing with a skid and a tight roll.
The route here was more convoluted. A darting run here, a well-placed jump there, but soon Lana’s black eyes were peering out over the edge of the terminal’s far roof, north, to the heavily guarded cargo sheds, where the absence of hordes of civilian traffic had made that approach impossible. She looked and she saw the plane she sought, her acute eyesight picking out the marking on its side and comparing it against the schedule Saul’s team had set up and the cargo company manifests she had hacked.
She saw her target and she studied it. She had fifteen minutes till it was scheduled for takeoff. She had deliberately waited till just before the flight, so that she wouldn’t leave too much time for her clothing and car to be discovered in the lot behind her. By the time they investigated that, she should be airborne, hitching a ride with Neal’s effects, so she could track them back to their owner.
The airport was backed up, and the plane was a few minutes late taxiing to the runway. When it eventually started moving, she saw it leave the cargo terminal and backed up, preparing her machine legs for the next step. She had carefully programmed her body with the coming leap. Because, with the speed and distance she had to go, there would be no time for even her inordinately fast mind to intervene.
Her path was set. The moment came. Without requesting confirmation, her body surged forward, landing with two feet on the edge of the roof. Her legs bent as far as they would go, and then catapulted her skyward with all their might, out over the waiting passenger planes, over the unsuspecting travelers, pilots, and crews busying themselves with preflight rituals.
Her target turned on to the bottom of the runway as it was supposed to and Lana could see its two pilots as they conversed with air traffic control. They did not see her black body against the night sky as she flew, landing just under their starboard wing, using its bulk and the roar of the engines to hide the resounding crack of her landing. The jet was cleared for takeoff, and even now was revving its engines.
Once again her mind was programmed not to wait for her. Her legs wrenched at the tarmac, driving out her momentum in a screeching, ripping skid as she skidded up to the wheels.
Without pause, she was grasping at the plane’s undercarriage as it started to accelerate. She caught it in a flash, barely a blur on the runway as she darted under and up to the landing gear. She could not afford to hesitate even slightly. If she was seen here by the pilot of one of the planes approaching the runway or one of the ground crews that busied this way and that, she would be in for a fight.
But it was all over in a flash, a momentary black blur against an already dark night. Her skin was a void that defied sight on the clearest of sunny days, at night she was but a shadow as she flashed through the dark sky, a sky where motion sensors were made pointless by the muddled haste and jet wash of the countless planes plying the runway.
In a moment, she was worming her way up into the plane’s fuselage through the landing gear doors, even as the jet started to gather speed.
By the time the plane was airborne, she was nestled amongst the crates in its hold, listening carefully for any signs that her boarding had been witnessed. But the plane did not slow its steep climb, nor did it bank to land again after some warning from the ground. Cautiously confident that she had managed to avoid detection, she sat back and allowed her body to assess the stresses and strains she had just put on it while the plane banked lazily onto its course.
But it was not alone. Far, far above the flight paths of the approaching and departing cargo and passenger planes, two black StratoJets also banked and turned, swooping in from where they had been circling in wait. As the cargo plane took off, they gently dropped into position far behind the bulky jet. Lana had managed to avoid the cameras and guards at the airport because, as usual, they had underestimated her speed, and because they had underestimated her ability to be subtle, when she needed to be. But she had underestimated her enemies too. She had assumed only human guards were watching the airport, and that her true adversaries were far away, guarding more important objectives.
John and Quavoce did not know exactly how Lana had managed to hack Ayala’s network security without detection, but their supposition that she had done so had been confirme
d when they had seen their old colleague leap aboard the cargo plane far below. They had wanted to fight her right there, but it was too dense a kill zone, there were simply too many ways for a savage killer like Lana to hurt innocent people in such a populated area, and too many ways she might escape as well.
No. They had let her board the plane, and let it take off.
It was a flight that was going to take Lana exactly where they wanted her, so they could face her on their terms.
- - -
Several hours into the flight, Lana was relatively sure that they were over the Midwest. Her internal compass told her what direction they had been flying in, and she could estimate their airspeed by the pitch of the engines’ whine coming in through the plane’s hull. The cockpit was cut off from the cargo hold by a thick steel door. She had crept close to it to listen to the pilot’s conversation after takeoff, but had not loitered. She had nothing to fear from the man and woman if they discovered her, of course, but she knew that if she was to be successful, the crew had to be alive and well when the plane got to wherever it was going.
Hanging back in the plane, she had scanned the packages aboard until she found what she had supposed was Neal’s belongings. She had not cracked them open, instead she had inserted one of the last of her tiny bugs in between the cardboard flaps, and watched through its eyes as it slid inside. After using the bug to check the contents, and confirming that she had the right package, she had ordered the little device to slip itself inside one of the many books inside and go silent. She would notify it later, if she needed it to confirm the package’s location after it left the plane.
