by S W Vaughn
Blade whirled on him. “Oh, yes you can. Soldier.”
“Son of a…” Jaw clenching, Tom limped to the first stair and grunted hard as he dragged himself up. “You’re dead men,” he said without turning. “Don’t you know that?”
“Save your breath for the stairs,” Ozzy said.
Tom stiffened. He managed two more steps and stopped with a gasp. Then he started laughing softly. “They’ll hunt you down,” he said. “You and everyone you ever thought you cared about. They’ll wipe you from existence.”
“Who’s they?”
“Like I’m going to tell you.” Tom labored up another step.
“David Corvair,” Ozzy said. “Colonel Matthew Fischer.”
The man froze.
“We know they’re involved.” Ozzy caught up and stood on the stair next to him. “What’s this about, anyway?” he said. “How many girls have you sick bastards kidnapped and tortured and raped? What do you do—pass them around like party favors until they’re all used up?”
Tom faced him slowly, with haunted eyes and a crazed grin. “You have no idea what you stepped in,” he said. “Think you have it all figured out? You know nothing. And now you’re worse than dead.” The grin widened. “Besides, those girls want what they get.”
Ozzy didn’t even think about it. He blinked, and his hands were around Tom’s throat.
“Stone!”
Blade’s shout reached him just before he could snap the man’s neck. He relaxed his grip—a little. “Why shouldn’t I?” he snarled. “You heard what he said.”
“Because you’re not them, man.” Blade came around to the stair above him. “You’re not a monster.”
“Oh, but I am. You don’t know how many people I’ve killed.”
“That was your job. It’s not anymore.” Blade reached out and hesitated, then touched his arm briefly. “Stand down,” he said. “Leave the dirty work to your brother.”
For a minute he thought he wouldn’t be able to let go. Finally, he released the slimy bastard with a shove. Tom crumpled against the wall, coughing and retching.
He turned a dry stare on Blade. “That’s why I drink,” he said. “Because when I’m sober, killing is easy. And I am extremely sober right now.”
“Fine. We get him to the cops, I’ll buy you all the shots you want. I’ll even D.D. for you. But let’s bring him in alive.”
“If you insist.”
In an apparent bid to save his neck, Tom remained silent as they clambered up the stairs and across the main room. Ozzy held the ropes at his wrists before they went out to the parking lot, in case he wasn’t as lame as he acted. Now he wished he had broken the man’s kneecap—and a few other bones along with it.
They filed out of the club, and Blade paused to lock the front door. “Maybe he should ride in the trunk,” he said. “Think there’s enough air for him to make it downtown?”
“I’m willing to risk it.”
Tom threw a sullen glare, but he didn’t say anything.
“Come on, before I change my mind and kill him.” Ozzy shoved the man into a stumbling walk, and Blade moved around them, headed for the car.
They hadn’t got ten feet when a rough, grinding voice behind them said, “Let him go.”
Ozzy stopped. He turned toward the sound, and his jaw nearly dropped when he saw the speaker—face horribly distorted, skin white as milk, shirt soaked with blood.
The man looked like a walking corpse. But the gun Jerry held pointed at him was steady as a rock.
Chapter 37
Roman had been rushing back to Stone, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw the bloody specter with the gun. It took him a minute to realize that was Jerry.
Apparently, Tom really sucked at killing people.
“Let him go,” Jerry repeated in his horrible, rasping voice.
“So you can shoot us?” Stone said.
The gun cracked. Gravel exploded next to Stone’s feet, and thunderous echoes rolled across the lot. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t.”
“All right.” Stone released the ropes and stepped back, raising his hands.
Tom fell hard to his knees. He looked almost as pale as his partner.
Jerry stared at Roman, and then Stone. There was a chilling blankness in his eyes. “Stand aside, please,” he said.
As they both complied silently, Tom let out a high-pitched whimper and tried to get up. “How…” he sputtered.
“There’s a reason people who commit suicide put guns in their mouths. Not under their chins. You can miss the brain that way, if you tilt it just wrong.” A strange, calm smile settled on his bloodied lips. “Haven’t you ever seen Fight Club, Tom?”
Tom squirmed awkwardly back half an inch. “Jerry, you have to shoot them, right now,” he said. “They know names. They’re a threat.” He wobbled, almost falling over.
“I’m aware of that,” Jerry said. “And you were, too. So why don’t they look shot?”
“You know I wasn’t trying to kill you, right?” Tom’s voice held a shrill, desperate edge. “You never liked wet work. I was just going to handle it myself, and keep you out of it.”
“You’re right. I don’t like wet work.” Jerry adjusted his aim slightly. “But protocol is protocol, Tom.”
The gun roared. And the back of Tom’s head blew out in a spray of blood and pulp.
This time the echo seemed to go on forever. Tom toppled over slowly, eyes bulging and glazed, to land in the gravel with a dull crunch.
“He disobeyed an order.” Jerry hadn’t moved since he fired the shot. His dead stare was still fixed on the spot where Tom’s head had been. “We were supposed to take you out clean. He was specifically told not to play games.”
Roman tried to calculate how fast he could get to the guy with the gun. He didn’t think Jerry would be able to react too quickly. In fact, the kid seemed to be talking more to himself than anyone else, so maybe he wouldn’t pay attention. Heart pounding, he tensed for a sprint.
The gun trained on him instantly. “Stay there,” Jerry said. “I don’t want to kill you. But I will if you make me.”
“Okay,” he said carefully. “I’m staying.”
The kid turned his head jerkily toward Stone. “I need your car,” he said. “I want you to drive it over here, and park it next to him.” He waved his free hand at Tom’s corpse. “If you try to leave, or come at me with it, I’ll kill Blade. Then you.”
Stone nodded once. “All right. But Blade has the keys.”
“Toss them to him.”
Roman dug in his pocket and threw the keys over. “He’s going to kill us anyway,” he said. “If you get the chance, run him over. Let him shoot me.”
“If I wanted you dead, you would be already,” Jerry said. “But go ahead and make me kill you. I don’t care either way.”
“I’ll just get the car.” Stone gave Roman an unreadable glance and walked away.
Roman thought about putting his hands up, but decided that might constitute not staying. Jerry was obviously much better at killing people than his partner. He remembered Tom saying this guy didn’t want to go along with the program, that he thought Caesar was a god. But that probably just meant Jerry wasn’t into torture. It didn’t preclude shooting him in cold blood.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
The kid couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he sounded ancient. Under different circumstances, Roman almost might’ve felt sorry for him. “What wasn’t?” he said.
“You’re Caesar,” Jerry said. “You’re a legend. They should’ve been recruiting you, not targeting you. It’s all wrong.”
“Recruiting me for what?”
Jerry shook his head. “They won’t, though. You’re a deviant—the enemy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t tell you that.” A small, bitter smile tugged at his lips. “Tom might’ve missed my brain, but I’m a dead man anyway. Even if I survive. I’m afr
aid you and your friend are, too.”
“So you are going to shoot us,” Roman said.
“No. But they’ll find you.”
The sedan pulled up alongside Tom’s crumpled form. Stone turned the engine, climbed out slowly, and held the keys out to Jerry.
He took them. “Put him in the trunk, please,” he said. “Just you. I’m sure you can handle it.”
Without a word, Stone reached into the car and popped the trunk. It took him a minute or two to lift Tom’s dead weight, but he managed and headed around to deposit the body.
Jerry moved toward Roman slowly, pocketing the keys. The bitter smile was back. “I could’ve beaten you,” he said. “If Tom hadn’t fucked everything up, no one would’ve gotten hurt.”
“Yeah, right,” Roman said. “Except Teryn.”
The name made the kid flinch.
“Tell us where she is,” he said. “Please.”
Somehow, Jerry blanched whiter. “You can’t save her,” he whispered. “She doesn’t want to be saved. None of them do.”
“We can try.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then help me understand. What is going on here?”
“No!” Jerry’s eyes widened, and he held the gun inches from Roman’s forehead. “No more questions,” he said. “The ambulance is down that dirt road, off in the bushes. Take it if you want. They can track it, of course. I have to go.”
“All right.” It wasn’t easy to speak casually with a gun in his face, but he tried. “Listen, kid…thanks for not killing us.”
“I’m only delaying the inevitable.” He held out a hand. “Arno.”
It took Roman a minute to realize he was offering to shake. Stunned, he took the hand. “Arno?”
“My name is Arno Hirsh. Not Jerry, or Johnny…or kid.” He squeezed for a second—and Roman felt something press against his palm that wasn’t flesh. A scrap of paper. “All I can tell you is that you’ve got about twenty hours before they move her,” he said, glancing at the faint dawn light that stained the sky. “I can’t help you. But maybe you can help yourself.”
Roman held onto the paper as the kid, Arno, released his hand. Only then did he realize Stone was right behind him. He managed not to gasp this time.
Arno walked to the open car door and climbed into the driver’s seat, still pointing the gun at Roman. As he fished the keys out of his pocket, he said, “You only survived this long because you have potential. Both of you. Keep that in mind when they find you.”
With that, he closed the door, started the engine, and drove away.
“Jesus Christ,” Roman said. “I’m not sure which one was crazier. You okay?”
“Define okay.”
“Still breathing and in one piece.”
“Yes.”
“Works for me.” Roman opened his hand and looked at the strip of paper. It was crumpled, but there was something written on it. “Jerry—I mean Arno—gave me this,” he said. “And he said maybe we can help ourselves.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s find out.” He smoothed the paper as much as possible, and found a string of characters written in careful block print on one side.
546865204d616769
“Hm.” He looked toward the end of the parking lot and the dirt road leading out. “He said their ambulance is down there. Maybe it’s a password for the equipment in the back.”
“That would be helpful.”
“Yeah. But I think…” Roman stared at the paper for a minute. “Holy shit,” he said softly. “It’s hex code.”
“What?”
“Hexadecimal code. The base-16 number system.” He covered the 20 with a finger. “That’s a space, so this is two words.”
“And those words would be…”
He plotted it out in his head, and frowned. “The Magi.”
Chapter 38
The ambulance wasn’t hard to find. While Blade tried to work with the equipment, Ozzy sat on the floor behind the passenger seat and started going through the toolbox that had been left in here. It was Army issue—and from its contents, he guessed it had been Tom’s. The things in here didn’t paint a pleasant picture.
But he had to do something to distract himself from the sinking feeling that time was running out fast. Twenty hours wasn’t long when they had nothing to go on.
“That hex code was the main system password,” Blade said without turning from the monitors. “I’ve got access to everything. Problem is, I’m not seeing anything to access.”
Ozzy smirked. “This surprises you?”
“Not really.” Blade sighed and went back to typing. “So…The Magi,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”
“No. Could be a project name.”
“Or what they call themselves,” Blade said. “Wise men, my ass.”
Ozzy pulled a spool of thin wire from the toolbox and pocketed it. Might as well be prepared—though it was frustrating not to know what they were preparing for. “Maybe it’s not the Bible,” he said. “There’s that story.”
“What story?”
“The Gift of the Magi.”
Blade glanced at him with a raised eyebrow. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a literary type.”
“High school English.” He set a package of sandpaper aside and grabbed a Swiss army knife from the box. “That one always stuck with me. You know it?”
“Yeah. Some dude buys some combs for his wife.”
“It’s a little more complicated,” Ozzy said. “He sold his watch to get the combs, but she sold her hair to buy a chain for his watch. Those two things were pretty much all they had. So they couldn’t even use the gifts, after they sacrificed everything to get them.”
“I guess they weren’t too smart, then.” Blade cycled rapidly through a bunch of file menus, and stopped abruptly when he came to a list with just one entry. “Hey,” he said slowly. “What’s the name of the guy who wrote that story?”
“O. Henry.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“What?” Ozzy shoved the toolbox aside and moved awkwardly across the van, until he could see the monitor Blade was working on.
The single entry said: O.HENRY
“This must be it. Whatever it is,” Blade murmured. He clicked on the entry, and it launched a password box. “What a surprise. Well, let’s stick with hex code. I’ll try The Magi.” He typed in numbers, hit enter, and got Password incorrect.
“Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. All right—how about O. Henry?”
Password incorrect.
“Shit.” He looked back at Ozzy. “How much of the story do you remember? Names?”
“Della and James, but she called him Jim.”
“All right. Hang on.” Blade tried a bunch of different number strings. None of them worked. “Damn it,” he said. “If it’s not related to this story, I’ll have to try running a password cracking program. That could take days, if it works at all. Anything else you can think of?”
Ozzy frowned. “Well, there’s the husband’s full name,” he said. “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”
“Why not?” Blade said under his breath. The string he typed went on long enough to fill the field and then some. “Cross your fingers,” he said, and hit enter.
The password box vanished, and a larger black window with columns of short text entries took its place.
“Jesus Christ,” Blade said. “It’s a darknet.”
“A what? Let’s pretend I don’t speak tech.”
“Sorry. It’s a partitioned, private file sharing network. A subsection of the Deep Web, what they call the ‘invisible Internet.’ All the stuff that isn’t indexed by search engines,” he said. “In other words, you’d never find this on Google. It’s how people get away with sick shit like kiddie porn.” Blade tapped one of the columns of text on the screen. “These are all files. From the size of them, I’d guess they’re video.”
Ozzy looked at the file names. At first glance they seemed like
random characters, but there was a pattern that wasn’t hard to pick out. The first file was s1e1, followed by s1e2, s1e3, and so on to s1e8. Then another set started with s2e1, up to s2e8. The last file on the page was s6e1.
“Like television shows,” Blade said, and pointed at the first entry. “Season one, episode one. And they’re on season six now…”
Ozzy felt like he’d been sucker punched. “Teryn.”
“Huh?”
“Season six is Teryn,” he said with horrified certainty. “I’ll bet one of these…seasons is the girl I saw with Fischer. They’re just getting started with Teryn, so there’s only one episode.”
“Fuck,” Blade whispered. “I really wish that didn’t make sense.”
“So do I.”
Blade stared at the monitor for a long moment. Finally he said, “I think we have to watch these. Not all of them. But no one’s going to explain this…so it’s the only way we’ll know what they’re doing.”
“Yes.” The word dragged itself reluctantly from Ozzy’s throat. “I guess we do.”
“Fucking hell.” Blade closed his eyes. “Where do we start?”
“At the beginning.”
“Yeah, that’s…” He drew a deep breath, and his hand shook as he opened the first file.
The video started right up. One girl, naked and tied to a wooden armchair, with a black hood over her head. She was breathing rapidly but making no attempt to escape. Occasionally she flinched, and her head moved within the hood as she reacted to small sounds.
“Oh, Christ,” Blade said weakly. “This thing is four hours long.”
Dull weight settled in the pit of Ozzy’s stomach. Four hours for one so-called episode, and there were forty-one of them here.
On the monitor, a hand reached into the frame and pulled the hood off. The girl cried out briefly. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked a few times.
“That’s not her,” Ozzy murmured. “Do you know her?”
“No,” Blade rasped.
“Who are you?” the girl on the screen said.
“You can call me Teacher.” The male voice came from off-camera. “We are all Teacher. Each of us has a lesson for you.”
