Blades of Winter

by G T Almasi

  “Now we have a line on XSUS One’s comm signal and that of XSUS Two, which is how we picked up this rather heated exchange between the two of them less than a minute later.” Harbaugh fills the screen with six lines of text.

  One to Two: “I got your message, but the meeting was broken up.”

  Two: “I heard. We will take care of it.”

  One: “What have you done to alert the Americans?”

  Two: “What makes you think they know anything about this?”

  One: “Because it was your organization he—”

  Two: “Quiet! Someone may be listening. Why do you think I sent our man?”

  Fredericks wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. His face is pale.

  “Jakob, are you all right?” Chanez asks. “Do you need some water?”

  “No, no,” Fredericks insists. He stuffs his handkerchief back in his pocket. “I’m fine, Bill.”

  Harbaugh gives Fredericks a few more moments. Then he says, “Finally, we have this.” The screen displays one last line.

  One to Two: “But they didn’t send just anyone. They sent his daughter.”

  Harbaugh and Chanez have already figured out what this final line means, so they don’t react. Fredericks turns as white as a ghost. His forehead gleams with sweat, but he remains silent while the rest of us all start jabbering at once.

  CHAPTER 8

  SAME MORNING, 9:28 A.M. EST EXOPS HEADQUARTERS, HOTEL BETHESDA, WASHINGTON, D.C., USA

  Cleo covers her mouth with both hands and turns to me. Tears roll down her cheeks and across her fingers. Everyone else is still talking over one another except for me. I’m too busy hyperventilating.

  “Mom?” I gasp. “Who is …” I can’t catch my breath. “Is it really …”

  She pulls me to her, presses our foreheads together, and whispers, “It’s Daddy, honey.” She takes a sharp breath, “Oh, my God, it’s your father.” She sobs, “He’s alive, Angel.”

  Now I’m crying, too. Trick leans over and puts his hands on my shoulders.

  Fredericks accepts a glass of water from Chanez while Cyrus peppers Harbaugh with questions.

  “Where is he, Bill?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Cyrus growls, “What do you mean we don’t know?”

  “Calm down, Cyrus.” Harbaugh holds his hands out. “You know our record with Carbon.” Harbaugh sits on the edge of the table. “Since we found out Germany had a cloning program in ’56, all we’ve gotten is what little has been in their news.”

  Mom gently wipes some tears off my face. I grab a napkin and blow my nose. Then I ask Cyrus, “Why are they still calling my dad the Beast?” Cyrus opens his mouth, but the answer comes from the other end of the table.

  “Because they’re still angry!” It’s Fredericks. His colorless face can’t seem to decide which expression to wear. It begins with surprise, slides over to confusion, and then makes a brief stop at terror before starting over again.

  He continues, “The German press labeled him the Beast of Berlin because of his foolhardy conduct during the oil embargo crisis.”

  Cyrus’s voice resonates more deeply than normal. “Philip was under your supervision at the time, Director.”

  Fredericks explodes. “I never told him to kidnap women and children, dammit!”

  Oh, Christ, not this old argument.

  The German oil embargo began as a pissing match between Washington and Berlin. It eventually escalated into one of the worst diplomatic crises of the last forty years. Greater Germany got ticked off about the way American officials were haranguing them for enslaving Europe’s Jewish population after the war. So the German Foreign Trade Ministry shut off our supply of petroleum from the German half of the Middle East. The Russians, who own the other half, sure as shit weren’t gonna sell us any. The U.S. had to get by on reserves and whatever we could suck out of Texas and Alaska. But that wouldn’t last forever.

  President Nixon told the CIA to end the embargo by any means necessary. The CIA unleashed ExOps, and it wasn’t long before things went crazy. German officials got snatched, and German buildings got bombed. Then the Gestapo retaliated and started doing the same things to us. Not to be outdone, a senior ExOps field agent launched a kidnapping campaign against the families of German politicians and high-ranking civil servants. That ExOps agent was my dad.

  One of the abductions was interrupted by the Berlin police, and during the confrontation a young girl was badly hurt. This triggered a huge anti-American protest, which turned into a riot and then became the storming of the American embassy in Berlin. The entire embassy staff was taken hostage. Dad took part in the rescue attempt, which failed, but its spectacular violence shocked the German administration. The situation was spiraling out of control.

  The chancellor’s office secretly reached out to Washington and hastily negotiated a truce. The CIA withdrew all American agents, including those from ExOps. The kidnapped families were sent home. In exchange for signing a gag order they received financial compensation that was discreetly distributed from a numbered account in Zurich. The American hostages were released. The oil started flowing again, and American politicians stopped crabbing about the enslaved Jews.

  Meanwhile that young girl lingered in the hospital for over four years before she died. The German press and public had followed her progress all those years, and her passing sparked a new round of cries for revenge on the Beast. They were still pretty mad.

  That happened in an election year, and the resurrected crisis nearly wrecked Nixon’s campaign. In the summer, my dad left on a mission. That November, the Germans announced that they had captured and executed the Beast of Berlin. The diplomatic situation settled down and everyone went back to being self-serving dickwads.

  But Cleo and I were left devastated. To add insult to injury, some Washington bean counter denied us Dad’s death benefits because no one ever actually produced his body. Mom went to see Jakob Fredericks for help, but they got into a big fight instead. Fredericks drummed my mother out of his office, shouting that his career had been ruined by her husband’s recklessness and that he wouldn’t help us if hell froze over.

  Fortunately, Dad’s best friend was a Level 18 Vindicator. This best friend paid that narrow-minded bean counter a visit. At midnight. In bed.

  We got our first check the next day.

  You’d never think someone Cyrus’s size would be such a good second-story man. He credits it to the dance lessons he had to take with his five sisters when he was a kid. My dad used to joke that Cyrus could be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s biggest ninja. Cyrus would lean back from our dining room table and laugh that my dad was already in it for having the world’s hollowest leg.

  Now Cyrus glares at Fredericks while he stalks around the table to sit next to my mom. She turns from me and wraps her arms around his neck. He holds her while she cries into his shoulder and looks at me with his eyes burning.

  He comms to me, “We’re getting him back, Alix.”

  I close my eyes and nod. All I can comm is, “Yes, sir.”

  Director Chanez returns to the front of the room. “Okay, people, I know this is a big revelation, but let’s try to focus on our next step.” He turns to Harbaugh and asks, “Bill, we really have no idea where Philip could be?”

  “No, sir. Like I said, we’ve got a lousy batting average with that program.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Our deepest contact was when we assisted Germany during the Warsaw Confrontation. We picked up a lot of intel about Carbon, but it’s been pretty dry since then.”

  Harbaugh tells us that while we were helping Germany fend off a Russian invasion, our people were given surprisingly broad access to their classified materials. U.S. Army Intelligence found out about Carbon and hoovered up as much of it as they could. When the crisis ended, so did our classified access.

  We didn’t hear anything else about Carbon until three years later, when they unveiled the first-ever successful hu
man clone. The U.S. countered a year later with cloned triplets, which absolutely floored the Krauts. Then our stunning cloning program—based on all that intel we swiped—suffered a disastrous scandal and imploded. Congress mired itself in the moral issues that surround cloning like a black swamp. Greater Germany, unconcerned by silly things like human rights, vaulted back into the lead.

  “That’s our assumption, anyway,” Harbaugh concludes. “A research project that big leaves a shadow. We see the shadow sometimes, but that’s it. Once we abandoned our own cloning research, tracking Carbon stopped being a priority.”

  “Well, that’s about to change.” Chanez looks at Fredericks. “Jakob, what was Philip’s last mission again?”

  Fredericks presses his handkerchief to his mouth, then holds it in his lap. “He was investigating Russian covert activity in the German sectors of the Middle East.”

  “That’s a pretty broad assignment.”

  “Philip was a Level 20 Liberator,” Fredericks says. “Most of his Job Numbers had flexible parameters.”

  “Where was his mission centered?”

  “It wasn’t. He changed location almost every day.”

  Chanez crosses his arms in front of his chest. “Where was Philip when he was captured?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Jesus, Jakob.” Chanez raises his eyebrows and holds his hands out to his sides. “Give us something. Where did he start?”

  Fredericks hesitates. Then he looks at the ceiling like he’s trying to remember. “Paris,” he finally mutters. “His mission started in Paris.”

  CHAPTER 9

  TWO DAYS LATER, MONDAY, MAY 5, 7:30 P.M. EST EXOPS HEADQUARTERS, HOTEL BETHESDA, WASHINGTON, D.C., USA

  “Here you go, dear,” my mother says as she sets a spoon and a bowl of soup in front of me. She arranges the bed pillows behind me so I can sit up straighter, then turns down the volume on the TV before walking back to the kitchen.

  “Thanks, Mom.” I pick up the spoon and start inhaling the soup.

  Mom’s voice ricochets from the kitchen: “Ladies don’t slurp, Alixandra!”

  I sigh and try to eat without making so much noise. One of Cleo’s self-appointed titles is etiquette coach, which normally bugs the living shit out of me. For now she can nag all she wants. Friday’s craziness completely rewrote my priorities, and I am totally not ready to lose my mother.

  I am ready to lose this cast on my arm, though. It itches like crazy. The Med-Techs won’t give me anything for it because they’re worried about how the antihistamines would react with the residual drugs in my body. They were only half joking with me when they said I’d voided my arm’s warranty by punching that last guy so hard. Apparently my upgrades are able to withstand only “reasonable force and stress.” I told the Med-Techs that we’d see how reasonable their behavior was after I’d kidnapped all their mothers. I think they’re just pissed at me for making them miss their golf games.

  I’m quite a sight. My arm is all wrapped up, and there’s also the big stupid bandage on my left cheek from that graze I took in New York a few days ago. This is the first time I’ve had to be rebuilt after a job. When my father was in recovery, he’d gripe nonstop about it, and now I see why. It’s only been a couple of days, and I’m so fucking bored! I’d be especially grumpy if it weren’t for my mom taking care of me.

  We’re in a two-bedroom suite in the hotel upstairs from Extreme Operations’ HQ. The hotel is mostly for VIPs, but it also is used as a hospital and halfway house for homeless recovering Levels and their mothers. It’s just as well that we’re staying so close to work. The Information Department has spent the entire weekend feverishly plotting a response to the mess I walked into in Manhattan and to Cleo’s kidnapping. One guess from Info is that Cleo’s kidnappers didn’t want my mom so much as they wanted information about my dad. Another guess is that they were supposed to snatch me and got us mixed up.

  This has all swirled around me without really sinking in. My father has been dead for eight years, and now we get news that he’s turned up alive in Carbon, the Germans’ high-profile yet highly classified cloning program. I don’t know what to think. I’m so used to how things have been that this feels like it’s about someone else. I’d be able to make better sense of it if I weren’t so tired from my surgery. I’m also too hungry to think straight.

  I hold the bowl in front of my face and chug the last half of the soup. As I bring the bowl down, I see that Cleo has appeared in the kitchen doorway. She puts her hands on her hips and clucks her disapproval. I grin sheepishly, then daintily dab a napkin on my lips with a very prim and proper look on my face. Mom takes the bowl away in a huff. Her mouth makes a thin, straight line not because she’s angry but because she’s trying not to laugh. My table manners are so hilariously hopeless that she can’t stay mad at me about them.

  Cleo goes into the kitchen to put the bowl in the sink, and as she walks back into my room, she finally bursts out laughing. She sits next to me on the bed, takes my napkin, and wipes my forehead. I guess the top rim of the bowl got some soup on me when I was drinking it. Now we both start giggling.

  “Angel, what will I do with you?” She’s still smiling as she takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes. After a moment, her smile fades and she repeats, more seriously this time, “What will I do with you?”

  “I’ll be fine, Mom. I’ll be good at this job. Better even than Daddy was.”

  After a pause, she says, “I’m not sure how to feel about that, Alix. Your father’s work took a terrible toll on him. By the time you were born, he wasn’t the man I met and married.”

  “What was he like when you met?” It’s difficult to talk to my mother about my father because she and I had such different relationships with him. The two of them fought a lot, whereas Dad and I got along great on the rare occasions when I saw him.

  She gets up and slowly paces around the room. “When we met, he was more … balanced. He was strong and capable, but he also had hobbies, interests. He read books about architecture. We’d take walks around the city, and he’d point out different buildings and how they related stylistically. But by the time we had you, all he ever did was that work of his. Of yours.” She stops pacing and sits on the bed again. “This—” She waves at all the medical stuff around my bed. “—is the same as it was with your father.”

  “Not quite the same. You and I aren’t fighting all the time.”

  She looks down at her lap, inhales deeply through her nose, exhales through her mouth, then says, “True. You and I aren’t fighting all the time.”

  We sit quietly for a moment. I ask, “What was all the racket I heard when you guys fought?”

  “Oh, my.” Another deep breath. “He’d kick the dressers, break the lamps, punch holes in the door. We’d argue about him quitting ExOps and doing something else. He never hit me, but it was still … difficult to be around.” Cleo looks up at me. “Remember all the shopping you and I used to do together?”

  I do remember that. We were always on the lookout for inexpensive furniture at secondhand stores and yard sales. I never thought about what happened to it all, but it sounds like they went through their bedroom sets like other people go through bottles of laundry detergent. I guess I never noticed because when I went into their room, it was always at night. I’d crawl in with my mom after one of my nightmares. When I’d fallen asleep again, she’d carry me back to my room.

  “Why would he smash up his own bedroom?” I ask. It seems like a stupid question, but I can’t figure it out.

  “Oh, God … so many reasons. Mostly he needed to vent his anxiety from the field. He’d be alone for months under terrible conditions. Spying isn’t like the movies—you know this. There’s no room service or fancy cars.”

  “What was it like?” I talk quietly, the way you do at a funeral.

  “He’d be sent to some hellhole to retrieve someone or some item. He’d stake out an obscure little location for weeks, or they’d send him in to
do something fast and dreadful. But he’d always do it alone.”

  “Alone? No Info Operator?”

  “Back then Levels didn’t have IOs. They did everything by themselves. They’d be inserted alone, and they’d return alone.” She looks down at her hands in her lap, “If they came back at all.” I reach out with my left hand and wrap my fingers around hers.

  Nowadays, all ExOps Job Numbers include a dedicated resource from the Information Department. Exceptions are made for really short jobs, like the one for following Hector around. In those cases, the Level is entrusted with the entire mission, including data acquisition. Most of our missions are big mean mothers, though, and require Info support.

  The type of support depends on the job, which means it mostly depends on the Level’s class. Infiltrators typically operate in such deep, long-term cover that they have to get their Info support remotely. Protectors usually work as a security team that includes an Info Operator to synchronize their efforts. Vindicators like Raj tend to act as heavy muscle for larger missions that already include an Info resource.

  Then there are Interceptors, like me. We generally don’t work as part of a larger group, so we’re usually partnered with an Info Operator. Interceptors pull off deep penetrations that result in a lot of intel, but the missions are short, a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Most of the time we only need to maintain a surface cover, which consists of carrying a fake passport and remembering which language to speak. The Info Operator manages the harvested data while the Interceptor does everything else.

  I’m not a big rules person, but even I can see where this protocol comes from. I never would have kept my shit together during Mom’s rescue if Patrick hadn’t been guiding me through it. It hadn’t occurred to me that Extreme Operations didn’t always work this way.

  I ask Cleo, “What made ExOps start requiring Info support?”

  She takes a soft breath. “Your father. They’d been thinking about taking that step for a while, but his last mission is what made them finally do it. If he’d had a dedicated Info resource, he probably wouldn’t have been captured.” She pauses for a minute and almost whispers as she goes on. “He was one of the best they’d ever had. Him and a few others. They created a whole new rating for them. Levels used to only go to 19. They wanted to avoid 20 because it sounds like so much more than 19. But your father and two or three others really were that much better than the other Level 19s.”