by S L Shelton
Emrick rushed up to him and grabbed Gallow’s arm. Gallow pushed him away, sending him rolling to the ground.
Emrick righted himself and ran up behind Gallow as he reached the edge of the roof. He grabbed Gallow by the collar again.
“What have you done?” Emrick screamed, his breath coming more easily now in the open air as he realized his labored breath had been a panic attack.
“I’ve destroyed twenty-five years of research to protect the world from you and your masters,” Gallow said, pulling away from him.
“My masters?” Emrick spat incredulously. “My ‘master’ is the Pentagon. My master is your master.”
Gallow chuckled. “Your masters are a consortium of billionaires called Combine,” he said, a sly grin spreading across his face.
The color drained away from Emrick’s face as his chest constricted again.
“How do you know that name?” Emrick hissed as his hand closed around Gallow’s neck.
Gallow reached up, still smiling, and spritzed Emrick in the face with a small bottle, about the size of a perfume sampler.
Emrick stumbled backward, frantically wiping the substance from his face. “What is that?! What did you do to me?!”
“Mike Nance sends his regards.”
Emrick’s face went numb. He wasn’t sure if it was the spray or the name Mike Nance, but in a moment of fury, he charged Gallow, shoving him backward to the edge of the roof.
“Mike Nance is dead.”
Gallow smiled, seemingly unconcerned about his precarious stance on the edge of the roof. “You know, Albert, it would be in everyone’s best interest if you just terminate all of your assets…kill them all, then put the gun in your mouth and kill yourself.”
Anger rose in Emrick’s gut, but it shifted to horror as he realized Gallow had pulled backward, tipping over the edge of the roof. Emrick released him in panic, with a slight shove so he wouldn’t go over the edge as well. The look on Gallow’s face terrified him; smiling, peaceful. He dropped the eight stories, smacking a concrete loading dock divider that sent his body spinning the last few feet. He landed on the concrete of the loading pad, his arms and leg spread in grotesque, unnatural angles.
Stunned, unable to tear his eyes away from the spectacle, he bent over the edge wondering what had driven Gallow to this insanity. A new thought sent him upright, scanning the scene for another enemy—surveillance cameras.
There was one on the edge of the building, pointed toward the edge that Gallow had just fallen from.
With no other thought but escape, he dropped his head, pulling his jacket over his face and ran to the stairwell door. When he reached the ground floor, he was alone in the main concourse. The alarms echoed off the expensive tile and glass as he ran through the empty space.
Once outside, he pushed through the crowds gathered in the parking lot and climbed into his car. He sat there for several moments, trying to catch his breath and calm his mind. But calm wouldn’t come. Instead, he started the engine and slowly backed out of his spot.
As he merged with the slow-moving traffic leaving the facility, his eyes began to burn and he gasped. Lowering the window, he stuck his head out and took in the fresh air, in deep, rapid breaths.
“Antivirals,” he muttered. I have enough antivirals at Detrick to kill anything he contaminated me with.
Once clear of the gate, he sped out toward the highway. “I have to get to Detrick.”
**
9:30 p.m. — Safe house, Rue du Sablon, Lyon, France
WOLF helped Seifert get Mac into his room at the back of the house. John rolled down the hallway in his wheelchair behind them and stopped at the door.
“Are we going to need more pain medication?” John asked.
Seifert shook his head. “He’ll be fine with what we have unless there’s a complication.”
John shook his head. “We should have aborted this mission.”
Wolf dropped Mac’s bag in the corner and then pushed past John, nodding him toward the kitchen. John turned in the wide hallway and followed. When they got to the kitchen, Wolf opened the refrigerator and saw it fully stocked—John had been busy.
He took a block of cheese and a package of meat, then sat at the table next to John. “This doesn’t change anything.”
John lifted an eyebrow. “Down two before we even start? That’s two thirds of our tactical support.”
Wolf shook his head. “They weren’t here for what I need to do. They were here as security for you.”
John’s tired eyes sharpened with anger. “And why am I here?”
“I told you. I need your voice in my ear.”
John reached over and sliced a chunk of cheese from the block. As he bit into it, he draped one arm over the back of his wheelchair and glared at Wolf.
Wolf grinned at the posture. He could tell it was intended to display mature, calm reflection. But he wasn’t fooled—John was scared.
“I’ll give Seifert a list of equipment to pick up in the morning,” Wolf said. “The systems you have are fine for communication, but you’ll never be able to run a data stream on encrypted proxy at the same time.”
“That doesn’t sound like insurgent harassment talk.”
Wolf shrugged. “I just need to know what’s going on around me and you can’t tell me that if you’re blind.”
John shook his head and leaned forward. “Bullshit.” The word was gentle, delivered with a smile—a bluff called.
Wolf grinned, but when he didn’t reply, John took another piece of cheese and sat back. “You’re after something that’s not operational in the US, but it’s important enough for you to be here, splitting our forces.”
Wolf continued to stare, stone-faced, a slight grin tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“So, you aren’t going to tell me?”
“John, I’ve told you why we’re here. I told you before we left West Virginia, and I brought who I thought we’d need to get it done. I’ll be bringing a lot of heat and a lot of attention. I needed my backup team to be capable.”
John scoffed. “Then we should abort…or at the very least, delay until we can get a replacement for Hawkins.”
“Not to sound cold, but I didn’t need Hawkins. I took him because Nick didn’t want him and Marsh was already junior-petty-officer heavy,” Wolf said. “He was backup for the backup.”
“Mac’s down now too.”
Wolf shook his head. “Mac will be back and ready to fight in a few days.”
John looked away, down the hall where Seifert was now certainly just sitting, staying out of the way while Wolf and John chatted. “You’re sure about that?”
“No. But who would you take off Nick’s team or Mark’s team to replace him?”
John tipped his chin down, as he pondered that question. Wolf knew he was right, and damn him for figuring out Wolf was hunting something specific. You can’t keep secrets from spies, even when you’ve been trained by one.
“Okay, we’ll put a pin in that for a moment,” John said, leaning forward and lowering his voice again. “Why are you here?”
“I told you, John. To draw the heat off the other two teams.”
John shook his head. “You lie better than anyone I’ve ever met. There’s never a twitch, a microexpression, or a drag in your pulse. But you and I both know that you could’ve come here by your lonesome with a bag of dynamite to take the heat off the other two teams. And you wouldn’t need tactical oversight in your ear or our best fighters as back up to do it.”
Wolf continued to stare directly into John’s eyes.
“Tell me now or I’m done,” John added.
Wolf chuckled. “I would be here even if you’d said no back in the states. Even if you’re right, what makes you think backing out would change anything?”
“Because you wouldn’t have put me on a plane to Europe by myself if it weren’t mission critical.”
Wolf just shrugged.
John grinned knowingly. “Though I
have to admit, there were times over the last forty-eight hours that I thought you were just feeding me to the sharks…I know nothing about what’s going on, so I lift right out without a ripple.”
Wolf frowned. “You really think that?”
John stared at him for several long beats then shook his head. “No…but it did cross my mind.”
“It never crossed mine.”
Something akin to a smile flashed to John’s mouth for a split second then hardened again. “Then tell me. I need to know why I’m here.”
Wolf shook his head. “At some point in the near future, I’m going to need you as bona fides.”
Anger swept John’s face. “The one thing I have going for me right now is that everyone thinks I’m dead, and you didn’t think it was important enough to tell me that before dragging me to Europe?”
“I didn’t even assume you’d agree to it. So, don’t get hot because I answered your question.”
John slammed his hand on the table. “Goddammit, Scott! This isn’t how you run an operation!”
Wolf smiled. “Funny, because I seem to remember you hanging me out as bait at Camp Peary without telling me about it. And letting missiles go that Nick purchased. And—”
Like a punch to the face, John sat back. “Fuck you,” he said so softly it scarcely made a sound.
“I have a narrowing path of choices to get to the end of this, and a timeline that’s shrunk exponentially,” Wolf said. “I’m not fighting any battles I don’t have to. If you won’t or can’t cooperate, I won’t hold it against you. But you can’t expect me to hang around while you try to formulate an alternative with only a tenth of the information you need to do it.”
“Then tell me the other ninety percent!” If John could have stood, he would have certainly been standing at the end of that sentence.
“I can’t,” Wolf replied quietly, calmly.
The red in John’s face began to subside. “Why? Why can’t you tell me?”
Wolf shook his head. “Because I’m just barely holding on to each thread in this fucking spiderweb. There’s no way to explain it that you’d understand.”
John squinted at Wolf, a slight tug at the corner of his lip, as if there were a question there he struggled to voice. “How?” He asked eventually. The word was so weak it almost seemed as if John didn’t really want to ask it.
Wolf’s smile evaporated. “Don’t ask unless you really want to know the answer.”
John sat back and stared at Wolf for several seconds before leaning forward again and resting his hands on the table—a simple subliminal gesture to indicate he was about to speak truthfully. “When I first went to work for the Clinton administration, I had the unfortunate job of ranking and grading JSOC operations after the fact,” he said slipping into storyteller mode. “It was mostly just doing after-action-reports with the clarity of hindsight to tell us what went right, what went wrong, and why.”
Wolf’s face remained impassive.
“Anyway, there was this action group out of DIA, except they weren’t part of DIA. The unit identifiers were from a chemical research division out of Fort Detrick,” he said, then paused to see if there was a change in Wolf’s demeanor—there wasn’t. “So, this DIA group that wasn’t a DIA group had a pretty high-level of success, but there were never any SpecOps personnel involved. I thought that was odd.”
“Contractors?” Wolf asked.
John shrugged. “I never got a straight answer, but I did get curious enough to ask once…I asked Matt Burgess about the mystery group out of Detrick.”
“You were a low-level naval intelligence liaison during the Clinton administration and you just thought you’d ask the CIA who their guys were on these black ops?” Wolf asked, grinning.
“I didn’t say it was smart. Lucky for me, Burgess liked me even then—this is years before I went to work for him. But, he told me that I shouldn’t ask questions that I didn’t really want the answer to.”
“It’s a common enough expression.”
John smiled. “I just thought it was odd that I got the same answer from two different people, years apart, for the same goddamned question that I wanted to ask.”
“And?”
“And I stopped asking back then…even when I had the CC list on the follow-up on those actions back in the nineties.”
Wolf could tell this wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. “What makes you think I’d answer even if you asked?”
John shook his head. “Maybe you won’t. But I’m going to ask this time because I’ve spent seventeen years regretting not pushing that question…and I knew Matt Burgess had the answer.”
“What would it change?”
John shrugged again. “Maybe nothing. But when the NSA showed up at Langley months ago and shot you and me down for looking into your father’s background—” he smiled broadly. “And then you tricked those smug bastards into revealing it was a DIA record that was sealed, I remembered something… I remembered a name…Henry Jacob Wolfe.”
Wolf shook his head and grinned. “Bullshit. You didn’t remember that. I’ll bet you kept the cover sheets on those transmissions and dug them out when the NSA shut you down.”
John set his jaw to the side, staring for a moment before nodding. “Actually, it was the authorized parties list…but yeah. That’s what I did.”
“So?”
John shook his head, microexpressions of anger dancing across his face. “So, your father was involved in those DIA project backed SpecOps missions I was so curious about back in the nineties.”
“Are you saying he was an operator?”
John laughed. “No. But you already knew that.”
“What does this have to do with our conversation?”
“Well, it’s funny because a few months ago I sat down across from Director Burgess…right after the NSA told us to cease and desist. And I asked him if he’d ever seen anyone like you before.”
Wolf shook his head, knowing exactly where this was leading.
“He said yes, but that I shouldn’t ask questions that I didn’t really want the answer to.”
“Smart man.”
John leaned back. “You’re enhanced.”
“That’s not a question.”
“I already know the answer.”
“Is that why you pushed me through the system the way you did? Because you thought I was enhanced?”
John nodded slowly as he leaned forward and folded his arms on the table in front of him.
Wolf grinned. “And you thought you could have your very own super soldier if you played your cards right.”
John just smiled thinly.
“I hate to disappoint you, chief.”
John held his hand up. “Don’t bother with denials. I don’t need your confirmation…I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
Wolf shook his head. “If you believing that gets us closer to wrapping this shit up, then more power to you.”
John sat back and smiled broadly, staring at Wolf for several seconds as if looking for any sign of acknowledgment. “So, you’re in charge because you have an entire analyst section’s worth of brainpower calculating what we’re up against, how they’re going to use it, and our ability to counter it…with machine-like precision.”
“Not quite that dramatic, but yeah…something like that.”
John smiled. “Then tell me something…why aren’t the superclusters at the NSA in charge of the government?”
“Because the NSA computers don’t have the ability to get up and execute an enemy. When they do, you can bet they’ll be in charge whether we want them to be or not.”
John laughed. “Touché.”
“I’m not sure what fictional, conspiracy theory you have swirling around in your brain, but if that’s what you need to put the pieces together then fine. I still need your help.”
“Okay…but I’m going to need a little more information. Unlike you, I need to wrap my head around something before I can commit to it.”<
br />
Wolf let out a long, frustrated sounding breath. This was so damned inconvenient. He regretted not just dropping Mac at the door and continuing on to BeauLac’s estate in the South of France.
“Combine isn’t an American company…there are Americans involved at the highest levels, but this is global. Uncovering their operation in the US won’t do anything but put a few traitors away.”
“Ever hear of first things first?” John asked, still grinning.
“Even with their operational funds gone, they were able to blow up Langley, stage a minor coup at JSOC, and frame everyone who threatened to expose them…do you think taking down one of their gas stations is going to keep them from doing it again?”
John thought about that for a second and nodded. “Who then? Who are we after?”
“Combine successfully moved more than a hundred billion dollars in and out of banks all over the world in a complex accounting scheme and were still able to locate—to the penny—the funds they were paying out,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “Somewhere, someone is managing the accounts…someone who has all operations on a ledger.”
John tipped his head sideways. “An accountant?”
“More like a chief financial officer,” Wolf said. “This operation is too big for one guy to manage all these funds, especially with the extra layer of secrecy that they’re using. He’ll have a team.”
“Wasn’t that what Frau Loeff did? Didn’t we already go down that road?”
Wolf shook his head. “Loeff was a specialist. She was the double-blind breaking the chain on the flow of funds so they couldn’t be traced back to their origins.”
“Why wouldn’t this CFO do that?”
Wolf smiled. “I wondered that myself until I realized Loeff’s sort of operation relies heavily on disappearing money. But organizations that handle accounting for big operations—like banks, mega-corporations, and the like—they have lots of government oversight. Setting up processes specifically designed to hide the origins of money would leave lots of clues for regulators to follow. You might be able to pay off a few government employees to look the other way but there’s no way you could pay off an entire government agency and all the employees who’d have eyes on those reports.”
