I was not happy, then, when Sarah asked me to step outside during lunch on day six and dropped her bombshell: “Centurion has a job for us.”
“A job?” I said. “When?”
“As soon as we’re briefed and outfitted.”
“Purdy said nothing before one month. It hasn’t even been a goddamned week.”
Sarah raised a hand to her squinting eyes, turning slightly so the sun wasn’t hitting her full in the face. “They said it’s urgent.”
“Of course it’s urgent,” I scoffed. “They don’t want to lose whoever the client is.”
“The client is a small town in southern Mexico. El Rosario. You asked about pro bono? This is about as close as it gets.”
“So it’s a résumé builder. Regardless, we’re not ready.”
“We’re all they have. Something down there is abducting children.”
I had been preparing to return to the chow hall, but now an ice floe slid into my stomach. I turned back toward her. “Do we know what?”
“No. Some investigation will be involved.”
“Are they sure it’s not human traffickers?” Sophisticated underground networks spanned the globe, and children fetched especially high prices. The thought roiled my stomach.
“I asked the same question,” Sarah replied. “Centurion says no. I read a preliminary report. They’re sending over more information now.”
I squinted back at her, not saying anything for several moments. I was responsible for the lives of my teammates. No matter how potent some of our powers, or how clear cut the case might be, we weren’t a team yet. We were a liability. On-the-job training could get us—and anyone in our vicinity—killed. The prudent course would be to hold off on taking any assignments.
Until I considered the victims. Children.
“How did the town know to contact Centurion?” I asked.
“Centurion reached out to them when our algorithm signaled probable Prod 1 activity. A team met with their mayor and police chief yesterday. They signed the contract yesterday evening. Like I said, as close to pro bono as it gets.”
Something about the whole thing came off as desperate. Centurion had its competitors in defense contracting, and I wondered if we were witnessing a race into the monster-hunting-for-profit space as well. Whatever Centurion’s motives, though, it didn’t change the equation.
Children.
I gave a reluctant nod. “I’ll tell the others lunch is extended for an hour so you and I can take a look at the info. Just a look,” I stressed. “I’m not committing to anything yet.”
“Meet in my office in ten?”
As Sarah crossed the compound at a fast walk, her boots kicking up dust, I ducked into the chow hall to tell the rest of the team that the afternoon exercise had been postponed, then stopped off at the barracks to check my email. A message from Dani said she was fine, which I took to mean she’d seen no signs of Kurt. Still nothing from Segundo, though.
Dammit.
Either his brother was taking his sweet time, or Segundo was out on a mission. I had no doubt he’d come through, but the last thing I wanted was to head out not knowing Kurt’s reason for being back in town and what he’d been up to in the years since he’d left.
I sent a two-word message to Segundo—“Anything yet?”—and shut the laptop.
Sarah’s office was in the same building as the conference room, along the outer corridor. I rapped a knuckle on the doorframe. Sarah was sitting at a desk off to the right and waved for me to enter. As I ducked inside, I looked around. Every square inch of desk and shelf space in the small room was filled with books and binders, while still managing to look organized. On a windowsill near the ceiling, I was surprised to see a row of potted plants. Sarah didn’t strike me as a plant person. Then again, how well did I know her?
“Have a seat,” she said, inching her chair over.
I sat on a folding metal chair behind her so we were both facing her computer.
“Here’s the preliminary report,” she said, angling the monitor so I could read it.
I stooped low, my eyes moving back and forth across the screen. When I reached the bottom, I turned to Sarah.
“Clowns?”
“We have an assignment,” I told the team in the conference room. It had taken two hours of reviewing the information and weighing the need against the risks, but in the end I agreed. “Sarah’s going to give us an overview.”
The lights dimmed as I took a seat. A map showing Mexico appeared across the LCD screens.
“El Rosario is a small town in the mountains of southern Mexico,” she began. “Population twelve thousand, if you include the surrounding villages. The people are mostly indigenous, descended from Mayans. The town is located inside a cold zone—an area that has seen no recent Prodigium 1 homicides. The closest activity has been in Guatemala City, over five hundred miles to the south. That said, eight children have gone missing from El Rosario in the last month, and there’s a high probability the abductors are Prod 1s.”
Yoofi made an ominous sound as he peered from his smoke.
“The abductions began at the conclusion of a festival that El Rosario hosts each year. The festival coincides with the feast day of St. Paul, the town’s patron saint, but it mainly celebrates the people’s Mayan origins. Actors dress up in colorful costumes and enact stories from their cosmology: the creation of the sun and moon, the myth of the Corn God, etcetera. But because there are so many children in El Rosario, the festival also features modern-day clowns.”
Sarah brought up still shots from the festival, showing the five different clowns. Much like their Barnum and Bailey counterparts, they were men with colorful wigs, face paint, and costumes, but each clown had his own characteristics. One’s face was painted to look like a skull, while another had features of a rat. A third’s face looked downright homicidal. But the kids who crowded around them were laughing, arms stretched up for balloons and treat bags.
“Never have cared for their type,” Rusty said.
“What, Mexicans?” Yoofi asked with a concerned face.
“No, clowns.”
“The clowns are known as the Brothers Payaso,” Sarah continued. “Their names are Baboso, Calaca, Loco, Rata, and Torpe. They’re very popular with the children, as you can see, but when the festival ends, the wigs and costumes go back into storage and the actors playing the clowns retire their roles until the next year. However, in the days following this year’s festival, children reported seeing the clowns around town, always at dusk. They appeared to be trying to lure the children into the woods. Adults didn’t pay the stories much heed until Miguel Bardoza, age six, disappeared following a clown sighting.”
The child’s smiling face, two front baby teeth missing, appeared on the screen. The instant I’d seen him on the computer in Sarah’s office, I knew I couldn’t deny the people of El Rosario our help.
“Miguel and his nine-year-old sister were returning from their grandparents’ house after dinner when the sister reported that the clown Baboso appeared at the edge of a field and waved to them,” Sarah went on. “In his other hand, he was holding up a bag of chocolates. Though the sister liked Baboso and the other clowns as much as any child in El Rosario, she said something seemed off. ‘His eyes looked dead,’ she told the police. She tried to steer Miguel away, but he broke free and ran toward the clown, crying out for a chocolate. The clown turned and disappeared into the woods with Miguel following. By the time his sister reached the far edge of the field, Miguel and the clown were gone. A search by the local police and townspeople turned up nothing, and Miguel never returned.”
“Were the actors questioned?” Takara asked.
I turned toward Takara. Her interest in the case was a pleasant and welcome surprise.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “The five who played the Brothers Payaso were with other people at the time of Miguel’s disappearance. The closet in the municipal building where the costumes were stored had been broken into, howe
ver, with the face paint, wigs, and outfits cleaned out.”
Yoofi shook his head. “Ooh, that’s bad.”
“So someone stole the disguises to lure the children,” Takara said.
Sarah nodded. “It looks that way. The next abduction happened two days later. The victim was an eight-year-old girl named Isabella. No eyewitnesses this time. Her bicycle was found at the edge of a soccer field, close to some woods that climb into the foothills. After that, the town instituted a nighttime curfew. The small police force increased their patrols. Kids were told that the clowns were dangerous and if they saw one, they were to run away and tell the nearest adult. But despite this, the disappearances continued. The remaining victims were three boys and three girls, all between the ages of five and nine.”
“Like something out of a damned Stephen King novel,” Rusty muttered.
“As of last week, children are forbidden from being out alone at any hour, and that seems to have halted the abductions. The town remains shaken, though. Understandably,” she added, as if in afterthought.
She clicked the remote, and the screen changed to a satellite image of the town, red crosses marking the disappearances. The crosses were all on the outskirts of El Rosario where fields and dusty lanes ended and the forested foothills began. The dense green foliage stretched up into a stony ring of mountains.
“How do you know the clowns are supernatural beings?” Takara asked.
“Police patrols sighted clowns on three separate occasions,” Sarah said. “On the first, a clown outran a cruiser going forty miles per hour. That’s roughly one and a half times the speed of the world’s fastest sprinter. On the second occasion, a police officer on foot spotted a clown in an orange grove. He emptied his service pistol into the clown from less than fifty yards away. He claimed he saw the bullets impacting his body, but the clown only hissed and ran away. On the final occasion, a police officer riding shotgun in a cruiser shouted that he saw something and jumped out before his partner could bring the vehicle to a full stop. His partner watched the officer disappear into the woods. He parked the cruiser and ran to catch up. About fifty feet into the woods he found the officer facedown in the leaves, dead. In the ten or so seconds it had taken for him to park and locate his partner, something had snapped his partner’s neck. In sum, we have evidence of speed, constitution, and lethality that are far beyond the capacity of normal humans.”
“So how many clowns we talking?” Rusty asked with a shudder.
“Based on the descriptions, it sounds like there’s a creature for each clown personality, so five.”
“And what are we thinking, creature wise?” he followed up.
“From the scant evidence, Centurion has narrowed it down to something in the undead or lycanthrope class of being. The problem is the MO. Nowhere in its database of cases can Centurion find an example of these classes of creature going to such lengths to disguise themselves.”
“That’s where the investigation phase of the operation comes in,” I said. “After setting up a surveillance perimeter around the town, we’ll spend the first few days fact finding. Try to learn as much as we can about what we’re facing.”
“When do we deploy?” Takara asked.
“2100 hours,” I said. “Which means we have a full slate between now and then. We’re going to the armory first, where Rusty’s been putting together our kits. Then we’ll run through several situational exercises in full gear. The rest of the time will be spent packing.”
Rusty broke into a clumsy skip as he led the way to his domain. We filed through the armory’s front door and into a fluorescent-lit space the size of a small warehouse. To our left stood racks of weapons: all makes and calibers of firearms, with drawers of corresponding attachments and ammo shelved beneath them. One section held nothing but combat knives. In the back corner was a workshop for weapons modifications, and across from us storage for protective suits and body armor with a curtained-off changing area. The other side of the armory was devoted to electronic equipment, with Rusty’s computer-crammed office visible through an open door.
Four metal tables for organizing weapons and gear stood in the middle of the armory. They’d been empty following the morning’s exercise, but now held open crates. Foam packaging littered the floor as though someone had torn into the crates with a little too much enthusiasm.
I turned to Rusty. “Are those …?”
He nodded as he ran ahead. “They arrived right before the meeting.” He peered into a box, angled his head as though reading something, and then announced, “Sarah McKinnon.”
She stepped forward. With a proud smile, Rusty lifted out a full-body Kevlar suit. For training we had been using standard wear, but this shipment from Centurion—which I hadn’t been expecting until the following week—was tailored to our sizes and was top shelf. Lightweight and highly durable, with extra protection over vital arteries, the suit featured Centurion’s patented digital camouflage that changed color and pattern to blend into the wearer’s surroundings—some sort of chemical patent. I watched the suit shift now.
“And here’s the rest of your getup, ma’am,” Rusty said, adding a vest, helmet, gloves, and boots to Sarah’s arms. She carried everything to a dressing room. Rusty went down the line of packages, doling out the remaining suits and gear to Olaf, Yoofi, me, and then himself.
“What about Takara?” I asked, looking over the empty boxes.
“I didn’t get her measurements until day two,” Rusty said. “Centurion must not have had time to put hers together.”
“We’ll have them ship it to El Rosario,” I told Takara. “In the meantime you can grab one of the standard sets.” But she made no move toward the protective wear. Instead, she began to undo the ties that fastened her billowing attire. Rusty gawked open-mouthed, while a giggling Yoofi covered his eyes.
But when Takara pulled the one-piece away she was wearing her form-fitting leather suit underneath. I noticed she’d stitched the tear over her right shoulder, bringing to mind the patch of burned skin I’d seen the week before. Her scent suggested the scarring didn’t end there.
“I brought my own,” Takara said, a hard edge in her voice.
“Whoa,” Rusty managed.
Yoofi hurried toward the dressing area. “This is too much.”
I shook my head at Takara. “That’s no protection against projectiles—much less the teeth or talons of a supernatural creature. We need to get you into something more durable.”
“You mean something that will slow me down?” she challenged.
Here we go again, I thought. “Remember our deal? I’m not asking.”
“A creature can’t bite or claw what it can’t catch.”
“Wanna bet?” I lunged toward her.
A pair of metallic snikts sounded as twin blades popped from the sleeves of her suit. The foot-long stilettos glinted behind her fists and gave off a scent of silver. Her lips quirked slightly as I pulled up, one deadly blade leveled between my eyes, the other at my heart. It was the closest I’d come to seeing her smile.
“I couldn’t have done that in one of Centurion’s suits,” she said.
I didn’t care for her backslide into insubordination, especially on the verge of a major mission, but I couldn’t not admire her speed and cunning. Her skills would no doubt be useful—if they could be integrated into the tactics of the larger unit. “Points taken,” I said as she retracted the blades into the suit and stood back. “But go pick out something anyway.”
Rusty laughed. “Nice, boss.”
Takara looked at me for another moment, eyes hard and black, then strode past the tables toward the suits and body armor, bumping Rusty’s shoulder en route.
“Hey, watch the goods!” he protested.
“Why don’t you change into your suit with the others,” I said.
As Rusty shuffled off, I turned to find Olaf shucking his clothes in the middle of the armory. I joined him—my hair hid everything—and then we took turns adjusting
each other’s vests. The fit of my new suit was snug but flexible, allowing me to fall to all fours. Even so, the wolf in me didn’t like the confinement. Maybe Takara’s scarred flesh made her feel the same way.
I sprinted back and forth across the armory several times, returning upright as the others began to emerge from the changing area, the patterns and colors of their camos shifting with their backgrounds. Shunning the Kevlar, Takara appeared with just a tactical vest over her leathers. I decided not to say anything.
When everyone had assembled, Rusty and I inspected their suits. Yoofi’s gear needed a lot of adjusting, and he insisted on wearing his long coat over the top to hold his many flasks as well as a wooden idol to Dabu. By the time everyone was fit, we looked impressively like a team.
Which was dangerous.
Sarah, Rusty, and Yoofi lacked field experience, while Takara’s background might as well have been in a foreign language. Though elements of ninjitsu overlapped with special ops tactics, too much of it didn’t. Strangely, Olaf was the only team member whose skills I came close to trusting at this point. Even so, we hadn’t trained as a unit long enough. I would need to manage everyone’s strengths and weaknesses in the field, and that began with weapons.
“Since we don’t know what we’re up against,” I said, “we’re bringing an assortment of weapons and ammo. We’ve been training with M4 carbines and M9s, which is what I want Sarah and Takara—and Rusty if it comes to it—to plan on carrying.” I turned to Yoofi, who had yet to meet minimal proficiency with either weapon. There was no way I was going to have him waving them around El Rosario. “How do you feel about using your staff?” I asked him.
“Staff very powerful,” he said, giving it a spin in his hands. “It’s enough for Yoofi.”
Blue Shadow (Blue Wolf Book 2) Page 7
