“Yes, let’s get right on that…” said Jesse, but I interrupted him.
“If the launch is tomorrow morning at oh-eight-hundred, the engineers must be very busy. Right?”
“That’s absolutely right,” said the mercenary officer. “Everyone is.”
He wasn’t hostile about it. If anything, he was mildly sympathetic. But he did want to make it perfectly clear to the two of us that we were superfluous to his requirements.
“Where are the controls for the building security systems?”
“Up there,” said the captain, pointing to an office on the second floor. “That’s the Systems office. The electric fence, the air conditioning, the electricity itself… it’s all run from up there.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. Since we were sent here by the boss, we might as well do our best to contribute something useful whether you really need us here or not. I’ll stay up there tonight, and make sure no one attempts to interfere with any of the essential systems.”
“Suit yourself,” said Captain Rideout, clearly considering this less than useful, but at the same time at least relieved that I’d be out of the way. He turned to go. Jesse Spindrift turned to me, and said “I don’t know what you’re up to Holder, but if you’re staying up there in that office tonight, then so am I.”
“Suit yourself,” I said.
Chapter 42
I hope you get this in time. Launch is tomorrow morning at 0800, unable to get info earlier due to need-to-know policy. Am in position, will disable electric fence and security system. Attack immediately!
It was two in the morning in the Systems room, a small office with bay windows overlooking the command center one floor below. Jesse Spindrift had drifted off after many long hours of watching me like a cat watching a mouse-hole as the overnight Systems guy quietly ignored us and did his work. I pulled out my laptop as soon as I heard Jesse breathing deeply and evenly like a sleeping person. The Systems guy didn’t seem to care, so I accessed my shinobimail account over VPN and sent my message. I didn’t expect an answer right away. Based on past experience, they might not even get this message from me for a few days, in which case the rocket would already have launched, and we would be too late.
I had been watching the Systems guy closely all night while aping the behavior and mannerisms of a micromanager, a boss who’s always watching over your shoulder whether he understands what you do or not. I needed to see how the system worked, so I could shut it all down successfully when I got my opportunity. At last, he yawned and stretched his arms, said he was going for a quick coffee break, and left the office. I locked him out, clicked on the drop-down menus a few times, and shut off the electric fence. My own computer beeped at me, but I was so busy looking for the menus to shut down the alarm systems and open the gate locks that I didn’t respond right away.
“What’s this, Holder?” asked Jesse Spindrift sharply, and I noticed too late that he was now awake and staring at the screen of my laptop.
“Get away from my computer!” I snapped, but it was too late. The little worm had his gun out, a black 9mm. He had it pointed in my direction, while he clicked on the email I had just received and read it. It wasn’t easy for him to do both at the same time, but with my body turned toward the computer systems, I couldn’t just rush him.
“Don’t move a muscle,” he said, “or I’ll just shoot you right now.”
He read the message while I sat there watching him, and the locked-out Systems guy started knocking on the door and calling out to us. Then Jesse laughed to himself, a quiet laugh of satisfaction.
“We’re already there,” he said. “That’s what your message says. Who’s already where? Just who have you sold us out to, Holder?”
There was a sudden BOOM, the unmistakable sound of a powerful explosion from outside. Jesse Spindrift flinched, and I took the fraction of a second that gave me to throw myself back out of the line of fire. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet blasted a hole in the door to the office. The Systems guy on the other side stopped knocking, having been shot clean through the heart and killed instantly.
I got my footing, but by that time Jesse had reoriented himself too. He fired again, and the bay window behind me exploded in a storm of flying glass shards. He had missed, and that was all I needed to close in on him. I grabbed his arm, got one hand over the slide on his handgun, and clamped down hard so he couldn’t fire. Then I twisted my hand with all the vicious strength I could, ripping the weapon out of Jesse’s hands and breaking his wrist at the same time.
He screamed in pain, and in frustrated rage as well. Despite his broken wrist, he ran right at me in desperation and knocked me backward through the broken window. We fell together, and I landed directly on the pile of broken glass several feet below. All the air rushed out of me and pain blossomed everywhere at once, but Jesse was too stunned at what had just happened to do much of anything in the next few seconds.
There was shooting everywhere, explosions everywhere, men and women dying. I couldn’t see what was going on, but vague shapes ran here and there with bullets streaming from them or into them. My right hand shot out and attached itself to Jesse Spindrift’s windpipe. His eyes bugged out, and I squeezed his Adam’s apple like I was trying to crush a tick between my fingers.
Something hit my face, a hammer blow that rendered me half-blind. It was Jesse’s left fist, striking me desperately to break my grip on his throat. If he’d known anything useful about how to fight instead of the over-stylized nonsense he’d been studying for years, he would have known how easy it really was to escape a single-hand chokehold from below. But he knew nothing, so he tried to escape by just beating on my face. It didn’t work. I squeezed even harder, and the strength went out of him. He kept trying to struggle, but the punches he threw at me got weaker and weaker. At last, he passed out, and I rolled him off of me and stood up on weak legs as blood rolled down my body from multiple wounds.
“Holder! My God, man, what happened!”
This was Captain Rideout, staring at me in horror as I drew my gun. He couldn’t have been horrified by my gun, so it must have been something about how I looked. Jesse opened his eyes, struggled to breathe for a moment, then fell back as my gun roared and his brains burst out the back of his head and all over the concrete floor.
“This motherfucker was a spy,” I said. “He disabled some of the systems, then came after me when I interrupted him.”
“I would never have believed it, but we just got hit by a terrorist attack squad,” said the captain.
“Is the facility secured?” I asked. He had used the past tense, implying that the attack was already over.
“It’s secured. All attackers were killed, so it’s kind of unfortunate you didn’t leave this guy alive for questioning. We lost three of our own.”
All attackers were killed. The Sōhei Faction had failed; the FBI had failed. I had lost yet again. It seemed like nothing I did against Vitalius Kohl would ever succeed. But that wasn’t all. Before they sent me to their doc to have my wounds attended to, the mercenaries let me examine the bodies of the dead Sōhei Faction paramilitaries. With their black masks off, they looked like any random collection of scruffy politicized young people. One was a white guy with a little blond ponytail. One was a woman with her head shaved. And one was a dark-skinned woman with Asian features.
Tomoe Johnson was dead.
Chapter 43
Human nature is a funny thing. Nobody could possibly know better than I did that I had shut off the electric fence myself, or that I had personally contacted the Sōhei Faction and asked them to attack immediately. Even so, it irritated me greatly to be blamed for what had happened, because I hadn’t been given any real authority and therefore should not have been held responsible for any failures in security.
When I was a kid, I lived for a while with an angry man who would constantly accuse me of sneaking and lying to him. Sometimes I really had been sneaking and lying, and sometimes I had
n’t. But I felt equally indignant either way.
It was kind of like that. But it was really more like the Stalinist purges when the Soviet secret police killed almost 700,000 people on suspicion of being spies or counter-revolutionaries or saboteurs. Among all those people, some of them must really have been spies or counter-revolutionaries or saboteurs. But I’ll bet they still felt indignant anyway when the NKVD showed up at their workplace to haul them away to the Lubyanka building for interrogation and execution.
“You need to go back,” said Captain Rideout, after my wounds had been dressed and tended to. “The boss wants to talk to you about what went wrong.”
“What went wrong?” I said. “What are you talking about? I didn’t have anything to do with what went wrong!”
“You were in charge of the security infrastructure. The electric fence went down.”
His tone was patient, a military man explaining consequences to a clueless civilian.
“I can’t exactly drive,” I said. My wounds were minor, but I did have stitches in four different places from the broken glass. My body was stiff and bruised, and that would only get worse on the road.
“I’ll send a man. I can’t spare more than that, but Kohl wanted you escorted anyway. Sorry, Holder.”
I wasn’t exactly a prisoner, at least not yet. But I was something very similar, and I spent most of the drive home with my eyes closed and my head against the passenger side window, pretending to be asleep to avoid any need for conversation. We didn’t stop except for absolute necessities for more than twenty-four hours. I was acutely aware of the passing time. The rocket had launched, and the satellite was already in orbit by now. Time was running out, and unless Emily Alvin got the Feds into action, a horrific disaster was about to happen.
“Where is everybody?” I asked my escort, a mercenary named Greg Voss.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But this is spooky.”
The Quod Corporation headquarters was almost entirely deserted, a silent place of empty hallways and humming air conditioners. There was no one there, or so it seemed for the first few minutes. It made me think of one of those movies where a man wakes up from a coma and finds the whole world empty and abandoned.
Of course, it’s never too long before the zombies show up in that scenario. Greg called downstairs on one of the wall intercoms.
“This is Voss. I’m here with Holder, but the place is empty. Anything I need to know about?”
“Yeah, we’re at Code Blue,” said the voice on the other end.
“Okay, roger that.”
He turned to me. “Kohl sent everyone home,” he said. “There’s no one here except essential personnel. Heavy security precautions. I’ll need your weapon.”
Things were not looking up. I didn’t have much choice except to either hand my gun over or try to use it on Greg Voss, and if I did that, I would never get the chance to talk to Kumar about that favor I had asked him to do for me. My only real option was to hand it over, but that meant walking straight into the bear’s cave without so much as a flint knife.
“Don’t worry so much,” said Greg. “It’s just a precaution.”
I handed it over, and he walked me to the door that read “Flying Car Project.” We got in the elevator, and I noticed as we rode down that he made a quiet point of standing in a position where he could preempt any sudden move I might decide to make. It was starting to look like I might be a prisoner after all.
“Holder!” said Barbara urgently as the doors opened. She must have heard the intercom message and come to wait for me. Greg put his hand up as if to tell her to back off.
“I need to bring him to the boss,” he said.
“Holder, they’ve detained your buddy Kumar,” said Barbara. “They’re saying he’s a spy!”
“I need to go to him,” I said. “Right now!”
“No way,” said Greg Voss. “My job is to bring you to Mr. Kohl, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“The hell you are,” said Barbara. “You’re not arresting him too!”
“That isn’t up to you. Now stand down, or you’ll be going where Kumar went.”
“Barbara…” I began, but I never got to finish. She went for her gun, just as loyal as I had thought she might be. But she never even got her hand on it. Without me noticing, Greg Voss had drawn his own weapon while we were still in the elevator. He raised his arm and pulled the trigger, and Barbara fell dead to the floor instantly. I just stood there staring. Barbara’s corpse was there in front of me, her eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling and her blood pooling rapidly on the floor beneath her.
Then Greg Voss grabbed my arm, twisted it up behind my back, and started walking me forward at a vicious trot.
“Get moving, asshole. Your rent-a-cops can’t help you now!”
Chapter 44
I was already putting my spiel together, rehearsing my arguments silently in my head. I’d been in this thing for months now, and I had consistently been able to fool Vitalius no matter how many times he got suspicious of me. I can’t say I wasn’t nervous, but deep down I think I just assumed I could keep on scamming the old man forever. Once upon a time, Father had been able to manipulate me, to make a chump out of me – until I started to think like he did. Now I was the manipulator, and he was the chump.
Or so I thought, right up until the door opened and Greg Voss shoved me in. Because I didn’t see Vitalius Kohl at all. I saw a woman, about as old as Vitalius, but far more frail. Her skin was jaundiced, and her eyes, from what I could see behind the veil she wore, looked cloudy and pale. She was wearing an old yellow wedding dress like some occult Miss Havisham. She sat in a chair across the room from the door and held her hands clasped as if in prayer. Her hands were shaking, and she was muttering something I couldn’t hear.
Theresa Shaara Kohl. Mother. The Empress of Ultima Thule. The one who decided on life and death.
“Theresa, meet Gavin Holder. Gavin, meet the Priestess,” said Vitalius. He came around the corner, and I heard the door shut and click behind me. Greg Voss had just locked me in with them.
“Uhh… hello Theresa. It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“You’ve met before,” said Vitalius. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything. But we were never introduced.”
Mother had been there when Jackie Cole killed Mike Croop and crippled Sammy the Straightedge by kicking him repeatedly in the head while he lay unconscious. She tried to tell Jackie to kill me too, but Jackie had refused to do it. Then the two of them had walked me to an abandoned construction site, and Mother had held the light for Jackie while she sewed me up. I had never seen her since that night, not even once in all these months in the bunker. Father had told me she was possessed, and even though I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, it certainly looked plausible once I actually set eyes on her.
Mother laughed, a Baba Yaga cackle I would have paid good money not to hear.
“Can we do thissss?” she asked, and Vitalius walked over and placed one hand on her shoulder gently.
“I’m afraid we have to. Our old friend Gavin here has some questions to answer.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll answer anything you ask. But I have nothing to answer for.”
“If you have nothing to answer for, then how do you explain that mess at the launch site? It was your job to keep it secure!”
“I had no effective authority over the security at the launch facility,” I said. “There was nothing I could have done under the circumstances. Now if you had sent me earlier, told me the launch date, and given me command over the mercenaries, I might have been able to do something. But as it was, I had no power to prevent what happened.”
“And yet Captain Rideout tells me you were personally responsible for the Systems room, where somebody decided to shut off the electric fence exactly when these terrorists launched their assault. A coordinated action.”
“That was Jesse Spin
drift,” I said. “A man I asked you to fire several months ago. If you had listened to me then, this would never have happened.”
“Oh, Gavin. Fool me once, as the saying goes. How many times do you expect me to fall for the same story? I send Frank Hill to keep an eye on you, and what happens? You come back alone, telling me that Frank Hill was a spy for our enemies and you had to kill him. So what happens the next time? I send Jesse Spindrift to keep an eye on you, and you come back alone. Telling me that Jesse Spindrift was a spy for our enemies and you had to kill him. Now, you know I’m not stupid, Gavin. You know that. So why would you treat me like I am?”
“The terrorists were led by a black woman with Asian facial features.” I was trying to throw anything I could into the works, hoping some random thing would grind the gears to a halt. Vitalius did look satisfyingly surprised.
“Were they really? Now that is interesting. I knew some organization was working against me all these years, some group with extensive knowledge of my activities. But I never guessed that one of my own former students might be behind it all. Poor Tomoe.”
“She must have wanted revenge for Mike Croop,” I said. “I haven’t figured out what connection Jesse had with her yet, but I’ll figure it out.”
Vitalius chuckled. “Gavin, you fool. You completely misinterpreted my earlier comments. Tomoe Johnson didn’t burn down my compound in Stillwater because she loved Mike Croop. She did it because she hated me, and wanted to kill everyone associated with my work. We didn’t tell her we had already killed Mike Croop – why expose ourselves to any unnecessary risk? We told her he had already come home to us and was in isolation while he meditated on what he had done wrong.”
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