Element Zero r-3

by James Knapp

  They got me. The guy with the gun nodded.

  “That one goes,” I said, pointing to the one who came up green. This time they let him leave. Once he was out the door, he took off.

  I checked out the other three. The static that crackled in the back of my skull was making my head hurt. Ten minutes was a long time to stew in that shithole. Yavlinski joined me and leaned in close.

  “Just give them what they want,” he said. “You got what you came for.”

  “They do the pickup. I pay you, you pay them. That’s how it works.” He sighed, and I caught a whiff of vodka.

  “Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”

  A call came in, flagged red. It was an alert from Stillwell. I picked up.

  Flax, this is Singh. Forget the pickup, get out—

  Out of nowhere, the static turned to a feedback whine that shot through my head. It hit me like a freight train. I saw Yavlinski’s eyes go wide as I reeled back. The brass slipped off my fingers and clanged on the floor as the shriek got louder.

  Yavlinski’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear. My legs went out from under me. The room spun, and I went down on my back on the cold, hard floor. Garbage puked out of my JZI. The three guys in the corner jerked and started to fall. Behind me, I heard the door open, and someone ran out.

  The carriers fell. Their bodies hit the floor near my feet. The last thing I saw was Yavlinski as he came down on his side a foot away from me.

  What the—

  A vein in Yavlinski’s eye turned black. It popped, and black spots bled through the white of it.

  Huma.

  I got it then: the fucker had finally done it. We were too late. After two years, Fawkes dropped the ax. The inhibitor was a wash. I was going down with the rest of them. Yavlinski’s ugly face was the last thing I was ever going to see.

  The light popped and went out.

  Nico Wachalowski—Mother of Mercy Clinic

  Fog drifted across the clinic’s lot as I pulled in next to a bank of snow pushed against a twisted chain-link fence. Van Offo watched the entrance with a flat orange glow behind his pupils, as a strip of fabric, part of a shirt, maybe, flapped from a coil of razor wire out back. The building face was covered in graffiti and darkened by years of smog. I’d seen too many places like it in the past year.

  I cut the engine. A gust of wind blew powdery snow across the windshield and made the clinic’s metal door rattle in its frame. Through the window, I saw the waiting area was full.

  “Let’s go,” I said. But Van Offo didn’t move. He leaned back and watched the door through half-closed eyelids. His mood had taken a turn since we left the train yard. He stared at the entrance to the clinic, but not at the people crowded inside. He had that far-off look he got when he saw something else, something only he could see. It was the same look Zoe used to get.

  “You know something?” I asked him. He shrugged.

  Orange light flickered softly behind his pupils. He had a secure connection open through his JZI, like he always did. The others watched and listened with him.

  “Van Offo, if there’s something I need to know—”

  The orange light went out and his eyes cleared. He’d killed the connection and left us alone in the car.

  “The team is still getting into position,” he said. “You mind if I smoke?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  He pulled one of his black cigarillos from his pocket and lit it. The tobacco crackled as he took a long drag, and smoke drifted from his nostrils. He clenched the end between his teeth and fished a business card out of his wallet, then scribbled something on the back. He handed it over to me, under his palm.

  “What’s this?” I flipped it over. He’d written a phone number there, and under it he’d written a name:

  ZOE OTT

  “That was not easy to get,” he said.

  “Is she still in the city?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “She is.”

  I watched him smoke for a minute.

  “Is she safe?”

  He looked amused as he blew smoke through a crack in the window.

  “You think you know something about that woman, Nico, but you don’t.”

  “I know she needs help.”

  “Not from you. She could kill you where you sit and not even mean to. She’s seen things almost no one else has seen. Trust me—she’s bigger than both of us.”

  “Then why give me this? Why now?”

  “Because the end is nigh,” he said, and he smiled, but eyes were serious.

  Van Offo, and those like him, had alluded to something like that before, but the way he said it made me uneasy. It didn’t sound like theory or rhetoric just then.

  “When?”

  He blew smoke from his nose. “Soon.”

  “Will the city be destroyed?”

  “The city? This city is just a drop in the bucket, I’m afraid.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means Motoko doesn’t tell you everything.”

  “Then you tell me.”

  “Let’s just say that if what we’ve seen is true, I’ll be glad to not be around for it.”

  “Around for what, Al? What did you see?”

  “A point past which there is no more future to look into,” he said. “Once Fawkes pulls the trigger, that’s it. Somehow he triggers a global event. I don’t know how. Wiping out this city is just the beginning.”

  I stared at him, and when he saw the look on my face he smiled weakly.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Just do your job. Maybe all this is a lie, to get you to do what we want. Right?”

  Motoko Ai was a liar, that much I knew, but I knew Van Offo too and he believed what he’d told me. I could see it in his eyes.

  “Ai told me I kill Fawkes,” I said.

  “Maybe that will stop this and maybe it won’t. Motoko thinks we can still fix things, but I wonder.”

  “If killing him doesn’t stop it, then what will?”

  He tapped the business card with Zoe’s name on it.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked toward the clinic entrance again with that odd expression on his face. “Something she said once. She suspects she will be involved, or that’s what she said.”

  “Was she drunk when she said it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think anything can stop it.”

  He spoke offhandedly, but he was serious. The bad feeling I had got worse. I stowed the card in my jacket pocket.

  For the first time, I realized there might be more to Van Offo than I’d thought. I knew how his superiors operated. They didn’t want me contacting Zoe, and he’d gone against them by giving me that number. It put him at a big risk.

  “You know,” he said. “You two have something in common.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “An obsession with what you’ll never have.”

  He stubbed out the cigarillo and waved away the smoke.

  “Get your affairs in order,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”

  “What about you?”

  “I just did.”

  Wachalowski, the team is in position at the rear entrance. Local law is moving in to cordon the block.

  Understood.

  “I have to reestablish the connection now,” Van Offo said.

  “Al—”

  The orange light flickered back on behind his pupils, and he held up one hand. I stopped talking. He wouldn’t answer, and there wasn’t time anyway.

  Stand by, I told SWAT. We’re going inside.

  I opened the door and climbed out of the car. The air was bitter cold, and at street level, it was barely brighter than night. The clinic kept three lights on over a rusted sign that read MOTHER OF MERCY. As we approached, I saw a bullet scar in the brick and two more dimples in the metal doorframe.

  I pushed open the clinic door and stepped through
. The waiting room was even more crowded than it looked from the lot. Every chair was filled, and many stood to wait their turn. The receptionist sat behind a pane of bulletproof glass. She busied herself on a computer and didn’t look up when we came in.

  “The end is nigh.”

  He believed it. On some level I’d always thought it was a scare tactic, a way to manipulate me when the usual methods failed, but I looked at the people in front of me and I couldn’t help but wonder, Is this all for nothing?

  I closed the distance to the receptionist station, and faces began to turn toward us. Some showed concern, others fear. They were poor, and most were homeless. They didn’t need any more trouble than they already had.

  The woman at the desk looked up as we approached the glass. She looked us both over.

  “What is it this time?” she asked. Her voice came through a barely functioning speaker fixed in the glass pane. I held up my badge so she could see it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you know the drill.”

  She frowned, but reached under the desktop. The door to the examination area buzzed and the bolt opened.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do than hassle us?” she asked. But right at that second, I didn’t have a good answer for her.

  “Get your affairs in order, before it’s too late.”

  I opened the door and Van Offo followed me through. It bolted again behind us.

  “I’m calling my supervisor…. ” she began, but her voice trailed off. Al reached across and switched off the speaker to the waiting area. He leaned in close to her and spoke in a low voice.

  “That won’t be necessary. Just relax and wait here.”

  I opened a connection to their computer system and began sifting through their logs as I looked down the short hallway that connected the reception area to the rest of the clinic. A man with a grizzled beard and a frostbitten face sat in a chair, a blood pressure cuff around his right arm. The nurse attending to him didn’t look up from the gauge as she pumped the rubber bladder. A doctor stood nearby, and he frowned when he saw us.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, but stopped short as two SWAT officers crept in from a side hallway. His eyes widened.

  “Calm down,” Van Offo said. The man’s eyes relaxed but remained wary. “Everyone stay calm and quiet.”

  “Sir, we’ve tracked a suspicious data stream to this site,” I said to him. “We have reason to think—”

  “What do you mean ‘suspicious data stream’?” the man asked. “Look at this place …”

  His voice fizzled in midsentence as Van Offo approached him.

  “Sleep.”

  His eyelids fluttered and closed. He wobbled on his feet a little, and Van Offo steadied him.

  “We know there is someone else here,” he said to the man. “Where are they?”

  The man’s face changed then. The look of confusion had been an act, and when it fell away there was anger in his eyes.

  “You’re too late,” he said in a low voice. Several staff members glanced nervously at us, not sure what to make of what they were seeing.

  “What makes you say that?” Van Offo asked.

  “They’re not coming back,” he said. “I heard them.”

  “Answer me,” Van Offo said. “Where are they? Don’t lie.”

  I processed the last of the system’s logs and found that no significant data had been stored in their system in the past twenty four hours.

  “It’s not here,” I said.

  “It’s here somewhere.”

  I looked around and saw confusion and fear. Whatever Fawkes’s men were up to, these people didn’t know anything about it.

  Except the man Van Offo had. He knew. Even while being controlled, there was a spark in his eye and I could tell he’d been converted, in more ways than one.

  SWAT, have you found anything? I asked.

  Not yet. We’ve got the perimeter secured.

  I signaled to the two officers to check the examination rooms. They moved down the hall and began opening doors. From one, I heard a woman gasp.

  Van Offo’s pupils dilated as he stared at the doctor, who began to speak in a slow, quiet voice.

  “The basement,” he said.

  “Basement?”

  Even while his face remained slack, I could see the intensity in his eyes. The man wrestled with something internally, but as many had before him, he failed. His eyes became sleepy and docile.

  It always unnerved me to see it. It was eerie how quickly people could be made to abandon their beliefs. Al was particularly good at it.

  “The basement level is flooded,” a woman said, not understanding. “It hasn’t been used in years.”

  “What’s down there?” I asked her.

  “Look,” she said. “I know it’s out of code, but it’s locked up. We don’t use it. This place serves—”

  “How do we access the lower level?” Van Offo asked the doctor. He pointed down the hall robotically toward a wall of metal shelving stacked with boxes.

  SWAT, this place has a basement level that wasn’t on the schematic. We’re headed down.

  Got it.

  “Come on,” I said. Van Offo and the officers followed as I passed the examination rooms and shoved the rack aside. There was a door behind it, secured with a heavy padlock. Several more SWAT members approached from the connecting hallway.

  “Open it,” I said. One of them used an arc cutter to slice through the lock, and it trailed smoke as it thumped to the floor. He flipped open the latch.

  I opened the door and started down. Flashlight beams swept the stairs in front of me to a landing where a heavy metal door had been mounted in the concrete. I pushed on it, but it didn’t budge. When I scanned the edges, I picked up a magnetic field.

  “It’s got a magnetic lock,” I said. There were no hinges and no release mechanism on our side of it. When I tried to peer through the metal, I found it was shielded. Whoever set this up wasn’t anyone from the clinic. The door had been installed from the inside, to keep people out.

  SWAT leader, can your guys open this? I asked.

  Yeah.

  One of his team moved in and pressed a metal tool to the doorjamb. A panel lit up on one side, and the hairs on my arms stood up. The feed from my JZI warped briefly and I heard the bolt release from inside the door. He shoved it open with a metallic creak.

  Beyond the door, a concrete corridor extended into the dark. There was an electric switchbox mounted on the wall to the right. I flipped it, and electric light flickered on from above. Wires ran along the floor to noise screens that were mounted crudely along the ceiling.

  There’s something down here. We’re moving in.

  Understood.

  Up ahead, a doorway opened into a large cellar where a dim light flickered. As we neared it, my heel dropped down into a foot of icy water. Laser points swam over the glassy surface as the splash echoed down the tunnel.

  “Help us,” a voice called from the cellar. It was a scream, but it was muted, so I barely heard it. I drew my gun and signaled to the others.

  Watch for civilians.

  “Help,” the faint voice screamed again.

  “No one can hear you,” another muffled voice yelled back.

  We stepped through the doorway at the end of the hall, SWAT moving in behind me. I passed through the noise screen and the faint screams jumped to full volume.

  “—one! Anyone! Help us!”

  There were a series of wire metal cages set up on the concrete floor against the far wall. In each one, a person sat shivering in several inches of water. When a flashlight beam moved over them, they squinted and covered their eyes. More noise screens hummed from the ceiling.

  A thin man in a wool coat and with acne scars on his face stood outside the cages, holding in each hand a large, insulated alligator clip that trailed thick cables. Many of the wire cages had clips already attached to the frames.

  “Hold it!” I shouted, aiming my gun. He
turned to look at me, but his expression didn’t change. He connected the clips to the cage nearest him while the woman inside stared.

  “I said, ‘freeze’!”

  He stepped away from the cage and held up his hands.

  “It’s done,” he called out. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else with him. Two SWAT officers sloshed through the water toward him, rifles trained on him. He knelt down with a splash as one officer bound his wrists behind his back with a zip cord.

  “Just do it!” he yelled.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Alice, we’re at Mother of Mercy. We’ve got human captives here—five men, five women. You getting this?

  I see it.

  I scanned the pockmarked man’s face and found him in the system. His name was Rafe Pena, arrested in the past for drug and weapons transport, and assault.

  “Oh,” a woman whispered. “Oh, it’s the police…. Thank God. Thank God, it’s the police…. ”

  Computer equipment hummed on the surfaces of a series of workbenches set up along the right wall. LEDs flashed in the shadows. On the other side of the room, a series of gurneys were set up with IV racks. I could make out blotches of dried blood on the bedding. Surgical tools lay in trays, and behind them, hanging on the concrete wall, were larger blades: bone saws, a machete, and even an ax.

  “What is all this?” I asked. Rafe kept his eyes down and didn’t answer.

  “Who are you working for, Rafe?” I asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re just a thug. Who set this up? Who’s paying you?”

  “Get us out,” another voice said. Someone shook the wall of one of the cages. “Get us out of here!”

  “Stay calm,” I said. “You’re safe now. We’re going to get you out.”

  The rattle got more intense. It was a shirtless, skinny man with brown skin and a shaved head. Tattoos covered his shoulders and chest. His fingers were bloody as he gripped the wire, and his eyes were wild.

  “Sir, calm down.” I looked around for a way to open the cages. Each one was fitted with an electronic lock. I followed the cables from the alligator clips and saw them merge with other bundles of cable that ran under the water.