by Mike Leon
“Walter Stedman,” she says. “How long has it been?”
“Since before you were peddling sarin to third world yahoos.”
“That’s a long time. You look terrible.”
“Likewise. Let’s get to it. I know you didn’t call me up to ask me to the prom.”
“I already have a date. He’s on the football team.”
“Really? You’re kind of a butterface.”
“I got my older brother to buy us beer.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the back of the limo, but I only put out if you get me something shiny.”
“Okay, cool it with the prom thing. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with a certain rogue agent of yours. I think you know which one; Victor Hansen.”
“I have no idea who that is.”
“Right. Well, anywho, he’s exceedingly brainless, but he has managed to get me somewhere very interesting. Namely, the bottom of the Russian Dead Hand complex.”
“I don’t buy it. Tom, where is she?”
“Uncertain. She’s routing a signal through South Korea using a 2048-bit encryption key.”
“How long will that take you to hack?”
She snorts. “The number has an e in it.” Walter doesn’t know what that means, except that an e pops up on a pocket calculator when you try to multiply numbers that are too big to fit on it.
“If Moore’s law isn’t breakable, and we run a GNFS algorithm on every computer ever built, I think the lower limit is around five hundred thousand times the age of the universe.”
“Can you do it in an hour?” Walter asks.
“No,” Tom says. He seems uncertain if Walter was serious.
The Philistine chuckles. “You have one hour, Mr. Scott.”
“Alright, what’s your angle?”
“Quid pro quo.”
“I flunked Latin. Give it to me straight. And I want a reach around.”
“As you know, I’m very, very close to worldwide Islamic genocide right now, and there are very, very few things that I want more than worldwide Islamic genocide, Walter.”
“There must be something or we wouldn’t be talking.”
“There are things.”
“So spit it out.”
“I want your vault.”
“Nope. We’ll kill every raghead ten times. Fire up the ovens.”
“Walter, we both know this thing is going to be messier than that. Victor means well, but he’s a child. This is going to end in nuclear winter. No one wants that.”
“And you can put an end to it?”
“Of course. I practically have a knife to his back right now. He doesn’t suspect a thing.”
“Kid’s a God damned super soldier. You can’t just shoot him dead like anybody else.”
“That does seem to be true,” she laughs. “But it’s no matter. I have ways to deal with him.”
“And say you do pull it off? What do you want with the stuff in the vault?”
“You already know the answer to that question. Of course I don’t have the complete inventory list, but just the items I know about should grant me power to rival even the people who order you around. Really, Walter, I don’t know why you didn’t try it years ago.”
“Cause I’m a soldier, not a psychotic cunt like you.”
“You would rather see Armageddon than hand over a few museum pieces to me? Do you hate me that much?”
“What’s to keep you from double crossing us? How do I know he isn’t in on this whole trade?”
“Oh that’s easy. I’ll kill Victor first and deliver his head to you in a plastic bag if you like. Then I stay down here with this beautiful apocalypse machine until my men have secured the goods away where I want them. You try to fuck me, and I push the button.”
“How do I know you won’t push the button anyway?”
“No one wants to rule a kingdom of the dead.”
Walter leans back in his chair and scratches his chin. He turns to Ivan, hidden away in the corner of the room where the Philistine can’t see him.
“What do you think?”
“I say you take the offer,” Ivan says. The plastic faced creature on the video screen perks up instantly at the sound of his voice.
“Ivan? Ivan Hansen is that you?” she says. “If I’d known, I’d have put on my Sunday best.”
The black bearded grizzly of a man slides his rolling chair across the room next to Walter.
“Hello Allison,” he says. “It has been a long time.”
“Too long.”
“Not long enough.”
“Whoa,” she says. “Let’s not forget who told me about this place.”
“Van?” Walter says.
“It was a mistake,” Ivan says. He shrugs.
“Yeah. So were the kids you made with that whore.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Or you’ll what?”
The old man glares at her with a kind of hate that Walter has never seen from him or any other man ever before. He can’t see the Philistine’s face, but he knows she’s afraid. There’s no way anyone could not be afraid.
“Yeah. So I was thinking I’ll just ignore that comment and let you give me what I want. When should I send the moving truck?”
“Hold your horses,” Walter says. “We want his head first. Like you said.”
“I can have it to you in ten hours.”
“That is easier said than done,” Ivan says.
“I have an ace up my sleeve,” she says. “Ten hours.”
The transmission blinks to black and she’s gone. Just like that.
“You really think she can pull this off?” Walter says.
“Hell no,” Ivan says as he stands from his chair. “She might buy us some time if we are lucky.”
“Then what?”
“I will need guns. And a jet. I need a jet.”
“No. No way.”
“If you won’t help me I will fly myself there,” the old man says as he limps from the room.
“Is he being serious?” Victoria says.
Walter leaves her behind to chase Ivan down the hall, but he already knows there’s no stopping him.
THE PHILISTINE
Allison waits for the answer and she’s giddy like a child. She has grown tired of playing her little game with Victor. She’s ready for it to be over now so she can claim her prize and walk away.
Walter leans back in his chair and scratches his chin. He’s sizing her up. She can tell.
Then he looks to someone else, someone off screen. “What do you think?”
She can only guess who might be there with him – probably one of his bosses. Maybe one of his lackeys, though he wouldn’t have taken precautions to keep them off screen.
“I say you take the offer,” says the disembodied voice. She only needs to hear those brief words to place it. Even though she hasn’t spoken to him in nearly two decades, she knows that grumble right away.
“Ivan? Ivan Hansen is that you?” she says. “If I’d known, I’d have put on my Sunday best.”
The black bearded grizzly of a man comes into view next to Walter.
“Hello Allison,” he says. “It has been a long time.”
“Too long.”
“Not long enough.”
“Whoa,” she says. “Let’s not forget who told me about this place.”
“Van?” Walter says.
“It was a mistake,” Ivan says. He shrugs.
“Yeah. So were the kids you made with that whore.”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Or you’ll what?”
He lowers his brow and glares at her in such a way that, for just a second, she’s afraid he’ll kill her. She actually forgets about all the thousands of miles between them and worries that somehow he can do it right now. He could reach out of the monitor and strangle her maybe, or throw a knife into low orbit so
that it curves around the Earth and plummets from the sky and into her throat the moment she goes out for some air. Reality washes her fears away quickly.
“Yeah. So I was thinking I’ll just ignore that comment and let you give me what I want. When should I send the moving truck?”
“Hold your horses,” Walter says. “We want his head first. Like you said.”
“I can have it to you in ten hours.”
“That is easier said than done,” Ivan says.
“I have an ace up my sleeve,” she says. “Ten hours.”
And then she ends the transmission.
She needs to act quickly. The Philistine snaps closed the aluminum case containing the communication equipment she used to make the call. Victor doesn’t know she has this gear. Victor doesn’t know about a lot of things she has.
Case in point: the object in her other briefcase. It’s a high frequency sound emitter she co-developed as a Department of Defense contractor in 2000. It causes immediate paralysis to anyone within a radius of fifty feet.
She sets the brief case down on the desk and spins the tumblers of the combination lock. Flipping the case open, she confirms that the device was not damaged during any of the fighting upstairs, or the haul through the mountains. She thumbs the power switch and a green LED lights up just as expected. She removes the device’s sleek black remote from the case. All she needs to do now is invent a reason to send Victor in here alone, trigger the machine to knock him out, cut off his head and put it on a plane with one of the Bosnians – a walk in the park.
The problem with guys like Victor Hansen, and really his father as well, is that they don’t understand subtlety. They stomp through life with no regard for the little details, stepping on anything that gets in their way. The trick is just to stay out of their way until there’s a chance to get behind them. They have no patience for manipulation. When it happens, they never see it coming.
“That looks like an interesting gadget.”
Her eyes lurch up from the machine. Victor is already here, standing in the doorway.
“What does it do?” he says.
Her heart almost stops. Could he have heard her talking to Walter? How much did he hear? It must not have been that much. He probably would have killed her already.
“It’s a portable interface,” she says. She could throw in a little jargon to make it more believable. “I was using it to calculate possible improvements to launch trajectories.”
“Good. Good,” Victor says. “Did I hear you talking to someone?”
“I was singing.”
“Singing,” Victor says. He cringes with disgust. “A waste of time.”
“You really should try to broaden your horizons just a little.”
“My horizons are broad.”
“I’ve never seen you do anything besides murder and torture.”
“You forgot rape.”
“Sorry. I lumped that in with torture.”
“No. Torture is just inflicting pain. Rape is a level of dominance beyond that. When I come in some dumb slut, she knows her flesh belongs to me.”
“How romantic,” she says. She reaches across the table to stroke his hand, but he pulls back.
“There is no time for that now,” he says. “We have work to do. We’re setting up a choke point outside the elevator.”
“Mmmmm. Choking.”
“I’ll choke you later, whore. First, I need you to talk to the Bosnians. Some of them are asking questions I don’t like. Come up with a good lie. Say we’re working for the Americans, or we’re recovering computer parts – whatever you think they’ll believe.”
“I can do that,” she says. He’s leaving her the perfect opening. “Can you watch this equipment while I’m gone?”
“Why?”
“I caught that stupid werewolf messing with it earlier. He was remixing Skrillex or something. I can’t have him playing with my gear.”
“I suppose.”
“Great. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“Don’t rush. We need them to believe this, Allison.”
The sound of her name strikes her like a bullet to the spine. He couldn’t know her name unless he heard Ivan call her that earlier. If he heard that, he heard everything…
Allison darts for the door, but she doesn’t make it two steps before he has her by the throat. He lifts her into the air with one impossibly strong hand.
“My old man is kind of a wanker, but he did teach me never to trust anyone – especially those who have proven themselves skilled manipulators. You are that, aren’t you Allison?”
She cannot answer. His grip is like a noose around her neck. Only a gasping, sputtering sound erupts from her mouth.
“See? I promised I would choke you later.”
He laughs.
She tries to thumb the disabler remote in her hand, but Victor is quick to tear it from her fingertips and send it skittering across the floor.
“I knew I would have to kill you eventually. I figured you would try to stop me from launching the missiles, but it seems you won’t even make it that far.”
“It… It… won’t…. work…”
“It won’t work,” he says, mocking her desperate rasps. “What? My master plan to wipe out all the ragheads? I know. What did you take me for, a child?”
She shakes her head.
“I’ll let you in on my little secret. I’m going to launch the missiles – all of them, no matter what the Russians and the Americans do.”
She shakes her head. No. No.
“Fuck. I don’t even care if they saw the message we sent them.”
“Why?”
He laughs again.
“Because, you stupid cunt. I just want to kill everyone.”
Allison feels Victor’s knife in her guts before she sees it. Then she feels something warm running down her legs. She has a thought that she’s shit herself, but then she realizes it is her intestines spilling out and dangling to the floor.
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
“Hold still,” Tom says from atop a Rubbermaid step stool. He holds a socket wrench up to Ivan’s head and cranks down, turning a big steel bolt into place on the housing of the battery pack attached to his back.
Walter looks on with growing uncertainty. They’ve bolted the old man into a contraption the likes of which should not appear in Wired magazine for another three years, at best, to create a technological Frankenstein that Walter does not like one bit.
It’s just his little group here: Deadeye, Victoria, Tom, Ivan, the ninja and a man from Exocorp Inc. The hangar is a barren slab of sprawling concrete, emptied of all personnel before the arrival of their highly classified equipment. Kill Team Two is already waiting outside, aboard the plane that will take them across the Bering sea and into the Siberian wilderness for what may be the last firefight anyone has – ever.
“What do you call this thing again?” Deadeye says.
“This is the Aegis Mk 2,” answers Steve Highland, the suit that came along with the suit. Steve is a scrawny man in his fifties with a thick blond beard. He’s one of these Silicon Valley tech bubble bitches that Walter can’t stand. Nerds are not, and never will be, cool.
The machine is a seven foot, blackened steel, humanoid form with foot holds between the bar of the shins for Van to stand on like stilts and straps around his limbs to hold him in. Long skeletal bars accompany his arms and legs like splints. Metal plates cover the chest and most of his legs in the front, but the back of the suit is largely left open and all of the joints leave wide exposed areas where the plates don’t come together. The back is a mess of tangled wires and hydraulic pumps. Attached to the left hand of the machine is a shield taller than Walter. It rests now, arm lowered, against the ground. Walter knocks on it expecting a metallic clang, but it feels and sounds like tapping his knuckles against solid rock. Battle tanks feel that way to the touch, and nothing else Walter can recollect.
“This can’t be safe,” Walter says as he w
atches Tom poke some kind of needle into the base of Ivan’s skull and cover it in medical tape.
“It was your idea,” Victoria snaps back.
“I said can we get him some kind of technological edge. I meant optic camouflage, or one of those guns that shoots around corners...”
“Aegis Mk 2 can be equipped with one of those,” Steve says, interrupting Walter. The man smiles cockishly. He’s still trying to sell them the damn thing.
“Did you hear him Vicky? It has a shoot around corners gun. That’s great. We’re sending the guy on a suicide mission crucified to a metal skeleton, but it’s okay. He has the shoot around corners gun.”
“Actually, that’s not on this particular configuration.”
“We’re doomed.”
“You asked, and this is what we have,” Vicky says.
“This isn’t what I meant,” Walter snaps.
“Enough,” Ivan calls out. “It was my idea. Now you both shut up.”
Ivan is a god damned stone wall of a man through all of this. He’s still bruised, burned and bloodied from whatever Blood Drinker did to him. He’s wrapped in gauze and Band-Aids under the dragonskin body armor they practically had to funnel him into. His leg is still hobbled and he hasn’t gotten any younger. None of that is stopping him.
“We’ll communicate with you through this,” Tom says as he fits a microphone headset band over Ivan’s head. Zap speaks into a microphone behind them.
“Test. Test.”
“I can hear you,” Ivan says.
“You’ll probably lose us once you get down into the mountain,” Zap says. “There will be too much interference.”
“I’ll see if I can find a way into the facility’s communication software to use their hardware as a relay,” Tom says. “It shouldn’t take too long. The encryption is most likely only sixteen bit.”
“Excuse me,” Steve chimes in. “Uh… You aren’t actually planning to use this equipment for a live operation.”
“What’s it to you, Steve?” Walter asks.
“I was told this was an exercise only. That suit is Exocorp property and has a pretty hefty price tag attached to it. If there is any kind of damage…”
