“The software’s running an automatic update. I don’t think I can shut it off. It’ll just have to run its course.”
Sarah pushed the glasses up from her face and onto her head. “We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way, then. Where’s Vince’s signal coming from?”
“Down the hall, left, then two rights, and one more left, second door on your right. And be careful. He might have company.”
“I’m always careful.” Sarah skidded around the first corner, guards firing bullets that sent bits of concrete crumbling from the wall. She sprinted, looking for the next turn. Nothing but solid stone around her, with a few doors spread out sporadically to her left.
Sarah pulled her right pistol and extended her arm completely behind her, lining up her shots and keeping a full sprint. The sight along the pistol bounced up and down until she forced her arm rigid and the first face came into view. The gang behind her was running in a clustered formation—six men spread out like an awkward V. She squeezed the trigger, and the lead man went down. She shifted her arm an inch and a half to the right, squeezed the trigger, and another fell to the floor in a bloody mess. The crew sent a barrage of rage-infused bullets her way while slowing their pace, giving her distance. “Pussies!” she yelled back.
“Turn right!” Bryce said.
Sarah’s boots squeaked against the concrete as she dug her heels into the floor to stop herself then, with another burst of speed, sprinted down the hallway. “I swear these guys just keep getting worse and worse the longer this thing goes on.”
“Uh, Sarah.”
“I mean, it’s one thing to be overwhelmed by a large force, but I’m just one person, for crying out loud.”
“Sarah.”
“Although I will be the first to admit that I do have the skill, tenacity, and energy of a dozen spies, so maybe I’m just being too hard on them.”
“Sarah!”
“What?”
“Twenty bad guys closing in on you from the east side, heading straight for you.”
“Perfect. Those glasses done updating yet?”
“Yeah, looks like they just finished.”
Sarah pulled them down, and the security footage of both herself and the guards heading her way popped into the field of vision. All of them were armed with AK-47s, which in her humble opinion seemed to be the weapon of choice for any thugs, cartels, mobs, insurgents, and terrorists looking to wreak havoc, elongating the continuation of the fine Russian heritage from which it had evolved.
Doors sporadically lined the sides of the walls beside her, and each one she passed was scanned, giving her a quick rundown of the contents inside, along with any other exits that it may contain. When the graphics in front of her blinked for a staircase, she skidded to a stop and burst through the door just before the henchmen made contact.
“What are you doing?” Bryce asked.
“Improvising.” Sarah reinforced the door with two steel filing cabinets and a quickly rigged C-4 explosive, activating the motion sensor. The moment that door jerked open—boom. The staircase behind her led to a second-floor hallway that would get her to the side of the building where Vince was located. The glasses recalculated the path based on her current trajectory, and again the yellow line appeared on the floor beneath her.
Once Sarah made it to the second floor, the rumble of the explosion below rattled the walls, ceiling, and floor. An intersection in the hallway was fifty feet in front of her when the glasses flashed an alert.
“Two hostiles, coming around the corner,” Bryce said.
The alerts came from both sides of the hallway. Sarah kicked it down into another gear and aimed for the left corner of the intersection. The flashing continued, beeping faster the closer she moved to the point of contact. She reached the corner the moment the hostiles arrived, and she jumped, landed the bottom of her foot against the cornered edge with her leg angled at ninety degrees, then pushed hard, jettisoning herself into the three guards caught by surprise at the flying woman barreling toward them.
Sarah landed her right foot against the chest of the first guard, knocking him backward and into the other two. She landed on her side, pulling the right pistol out of its holster and shooting the two across from her. The guard she’d knocked to the ground during her spot-on recreation of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon rose to his feet, and she swung her right leg into his ankles, sweeping him back to the floor.
The two guards behind the one she had just put on his ass each received a bullet to the neck. Sarah brought the sights of the pistol down a few inches to kill the guard in front of her, but the sole of a boot knocked the gun out of her hand. She reached her left hand for the other pistol, and the man lunged at her before the tip of the barrel left the holster.
Sarah’s head jerked hard right after a nasty hook to the left side of her chin. Another vicious blow hit her left side, but she brought her arm down just before he managed to pull away, trapping it in a vise. Sarah wrapped her right hand around his throat and squeezed, her fingers crushing the Adam’s apple, until the man went limp.
Three more guards appeared down the hall, and Sarah quickly jumped to her feet, the guard’s body sliding from under her arm, and she sprinted back down the hallway, continuing her trek to the back of the building.
Sarah found two grenades on her belt and fisted one in each hand on the run. She pulled the pins with her teeth and kept pressure on both the levers. The gunshots from the rifles behind her rippled lead down the hallway, some giving her a few grazes that were a little too close for comfort. She let the guards fill the hallway, and before any of them had a chance to turn back, she spun around, released the pressure from the levers in both hands, and chucked them down the hallway. The cluster of guards scattered, but it was too late.
The grenades clunked against the concrete for a few skips, knocking into the toes of the guards’ boots before the detonations. The casings around the grenades erupted, and the force of the blast emitted hundreds of pounds of pressure faster than the blink of an eye. The combination of the explosions cut into the flesh of their victims, severing limbs, ripping stomachs, filling the hallway with the combined stench of blood, smoke, and fire.
The narrow hallway compounded the effects of the blast, sending a wave of shock that almost knocked Sarah onto her face, but she managed to keep her feet under her and made it to the end of the hallway with nothing more than a slight ringing in her ears.
The glasses continued to adjust to Sarah’s route, and the yellow path below her kept its long, winding trail to Vince’s location.
“The stairs to the left will take you down,” Bryce said. “He’ll be at the first door to your left. Heat signature shows four guards.”
Sarah leapt down the steps five at a time, the soles of her boots catching on the edges of the staircase on her way down. Her knees buckled slightly with each landing to absorb the blows. Shoulder-checking the door at the bottom of the stairs, she gripped a pistol in each hand and made her way into the hallway.
The four guards waiting for her barely had time to lift their weapons before she squeezed off twelve rounds, firing two into each of their chests and one in the head for good measure. The marionettes fell to the floor, their strings severed from the hands controlling them.
Sarah slapped one of the C-4 devices onto the door handle, changed the explosive setting to minimal, and flipped the switch, which set the timer into motion. Two seconds after she ducked around the corner, the solid, six-inch steel lock was cut in half like a stick of butter, and the door swung open. Sarah stepped through the smoke, the alarms still blazing around her, and saw Vince huddled in the corner, looking unconscious and beaten.
“How are we on that transport?” Sarah asked. “I’m gonna need a quick way out.”
“Inbound in sixty seconds,” Bryce answered.
Sarah knelt down by Vince’s face and patted his cheek. “Hey, time to wake up, Vinny.” His only response was a moan and a slight shudder through the rest of
his body. Bruises and blood covered most of his arms and face, but she noticed a light padding over his ribs where a fresh bandage had just been placed. She gave his shoulder another shake. “Vinny! Now’s not the time to hit the snooze button.” But still there was nothing. “Okay, you made me do this.” She pulled a square piece of adhesive that almost looked like a bandage from her belt. There was a clear piece of film that covered one side, which she peeled off slowly and then applied to Vince’s neck.
Six seconds later, Vince’s eyes popped open with an alertness that was akin to the average person having a bucket of ice water dropped on them in the morning. He jumped to his feet, taking in his surroundings, his breathing speeding to the point of hyperventilating. “Holy shit!”
“Oh, look who’s awake,” Sarah said. “How are you, Vinny?”
“Transport forty seconds out,” Bryce said.
“Well, no time for chitchat,” Sarah said, yanking Vince by the arm and to the door, peeking her head around the corner to check the hallways. The glasses highlighted another path that appeared on the ground and took her to a side exit. With the coast clear, she pulled Vince through the hallways, keeping him at arm’s length as the two of them sprinted down the corridors.
“Did you really have to give me the patch?” Vince said, his voice screeching in a fever pitch, his bare feet smacking against the floors.
“Hey, you’re the one who didn’t want to wake up.”
“Have you ever had one of these things? The withdrawals afterward are terrible. It’s like there’s venom running through your whole body.”
“Oh, I know. I once used a couple of them during an all-nighter in Rio.” Sarah shook her head. “Damn, those people know how to party.”
The doors to the exit were only a few hundred feet in front of them when the glasses beeped an alert, and a cluster of guards barreled out one of the hallway doors. Sarah knocked them all over like pins at a bowling alley. She and Vince leapt over the bodies and out into the streets. They followed the sound of the thumping helicopter blades, and just before a caravan of bad dudes in cars made their way around the side of the building, the chopper appeared, laying down a blanket of machine-gun fire that turned their black sedans into Swiss cheese.
With the chaos around them, the chopper didn’t have time to make a proper landing, so it dropped down a net, which both Sarah and Vince clung to for dear life as the wind whipped their faces and a few of the dispensed hot shells from the machine gun rained down over them, singeing their shoulders and arms.
“Nothing like a little copper rain to make you feel like you’re home,” Vince said.
“It’s almost as good as the agency’s Christmas party,” Sarah yelled.
The chopper touched down at a predetermined location that both Mack and Bryce had cleared for the events to come. The crew was a loaner, mercenaries who thought it was nothing more than a prison break, so once they were paid, they were gone and didn’t ask any questions. Sarah figured business was booming for them right now, and they had to get to their next meeting.
The small Polish house where they were dropped a few miles from was at least a pleasant hike. Nothing but forests around them and the quiet of the trees and animals. It was a polar opposite to the concrete maze the two of them had just escaped from.
Vince’s eyelids started to close more often the longer they walked, and he stumbled a bit in the grass and leaves. The patch was wearing off. It wouldn’t be long before he couldn’t walk at all. Her eyes fell onto the padded bandages over his ribs.
“What happened at the safe house?” Sarah asked.
Vince looked as though he was trying to find the story that had brought him here but was having trouble. Sarah wasn’t sure if that was because of the patch or because he was trying to figure out what lies to come up with.
“I got the alert when the satellite went down. I entered the passcode into my mobile and retrieved my failsafe instructions. Then just hunkered down at the safe house to wait until we were back online. I just assumed that whoever triggered the alert, whoever attacked HQ, were the ones who found me. Or it could be a mole.”
“What makes you say that?”
“C’mon, Sarah. If it’s crossed my mind, then it’s crossed yours.”
Sarah stopped walking, letting Vince get a few steps ahead of her. “It has.” Vince froze, his foot crunching on a pile of leaves. He turned around, his eyes immediately going to the pistol in her hand.
“I was captured, Sarah. Look at what they did to me,” Vince said, gesturing down to his body.
“That could have happened before, during the blackouts. I know you had your hands full in Moscow. If you’ve thought about there being a mole, then you would have had to think you might be suspected.”
“They tortured me, Sarah.”
“You had all the intel and relationships needed to make a move with Russia. All you needed was the right buyer to sell us out.”
“Are you crazy?” Vince’s voice was growing more dramatic, more desperate. Sarah had never seen him like this before. He took a step back, pointing at her, a tear forming in his eye. “Bryce in your ear? Hmm? Giving you a reading of my vitals? Telling you if I’m lying or not?” Vince turned his face up to the sky, spreading his arms wide, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Well, Bryce? Am I lying?”
“I don’t need the satellite, Vince,” Sarah said, aiming the pistol at him.
Vince dropped his arms and offered a sad, twisting smile across his face. “I’m not the mole.” He took a step forward, slamming his hands into his chest with each word. “You hear me? I’m. Not. The mole.”
“Who patched your ribs up, Vince?”
Vince’s hands fell to his sides. “They did. They did it to keep me alive, so I would talk, but I didn’t.”
Sarah kept the pistol aimed at him and took a few steps forward. She had control of her hand, but there was a force in the back of her mind that wanted to make her lose what control remained. “You know what happened to my family. I will find out who gave them up, and when I do, I’ll kill anyone who helped put them there. Do you understand me?”
“Sarah, there isn—”
“I said”—her voice grew louder, but she cut herself off, forcing restraint—“do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Sarah holstered the pistol and walked past Vince. “The house is just over the ridge. Bryce says it’s not farther than two miles.” She didn’t bother keeping an eye on him after that. She trudged forward to the safe house, knowing that she was one step closer to getting her family back.
“You don’t think he did it?” Bryce asked.
“No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think he did something else,” Sarah answered. “Tell Mack I’ll keep him here until we need to move. There should be enough supplies in the house to last us a while. Let me know when you locate Demps. I’m getting tired of this little cat-and-mouse bullshit.”
11
The caravan surrounding Andrea’s vehicle stretched farther than she could see in front of her or behind her. She had insisted on being present when the next shipment of supplies arrived in Berlin and chose to work part of her day at one of the relief centers that was set up at a local hospital. The hospital’s resources provided an excellent epicenter for many of the relief efforts, and that’s where she had sent the bulk of her men who weren’t busy fighting the Russians in Ukraine.
The lack of communications had made things difficult, but with the help from the Americans and her new team of hackers, they managed to set up a few channels through which the allied European forces could relay information. It was slow going, but it was a start.
Andrea’s chief of staff rode in the car with her, and just like her, Alexander was transfixed at what they passed in the streets. Smoke from fires in alleyways and from burning structures in the distance, looted storefronts with trampled merchandise strewn about the sidewalks, shattered windows, smashed cars, and anything and everything that could be carried away with a
pair of hands seemed to have disappeared. And this was the area that was supposed to have been “contained.”
“My god,” Andrea said. “No wonder we’re always at war. Look at us. Look at what we do to each other.”
“Not everyone’s like this,” Alexander answered. “You’re not like this.”
“Not everyone has the privilege of being the leader of a country,” Andrea retorted. “I imagine most of these people did it to save someone—at least that’s what I hope they did. But there will always be the few who prey on the weak in times like these. It’s unavoidable.”
“It’s reproachable.”
“That too.”
The car finally came to a stop just outside the hospital. Ever since her career in politics had started, every event, no matter what the circumstances, had always had press. They would snap pictures, shout questions, and shove their lenses and microphones into her face, asking for a comment.
But the moment Andrea stepped out onto the asphalt of the hospital parking lot, there were no reporters. No cameras, no pleading questions about what her political adversaries were doing across the aisle. The only things that greeted her were the faces of the sick, tired, and dying. None of them even seemed particularly pleased that she was there or even recognized her.
“Chancellor, this way,” Alexander said, guiding her past a few of the tents set up outside to help accommodate the overflowing amount of patients that the hospital had received.
“What’s this hospital’s capacity?” Andrea asked.
“I’m not sure, but that would be a good question for the chief of medicine.”
The trucks of food, water, and medicine had arrived and along with them hordes of people. The moment the truck came to a stop, it was surrounded by starved bodies, grabbing at anything they could get their hands on. Rice, flour, corn, water—all of it being doled out as fast as possible until there wasn’t anything left except the disappointed faces of those who didn’t receive the food they’d hoped for.
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