American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent

by Parker, Brian

  As I applied a liberal amount of hand sanitizer to my palms, I decided that diplomacy was not my strong suit. I was better suited to breaking down doors, not building bridges. I pulled the car onto the road and accelerated up the on-ramp. Time to go let Chris know that he needed a new plan to highlight the NAR’s incompetence at governance because this one actually worked in their favor.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I felt silly dressed in head-to-toe camouflage wearing my gas mask as I crept through the bushes. Besides keeping me hidden from human eyes, the suit was supposed to hide my thermal signature as well. From personal experience, Chris and I knew that the government used drones over Patriot Estates to keep an eye on things. We’d seen them in the air back when we lived there, but Taya had no way of hacking into them since they were a closed system, not on any of the federal networks that she knew of.

  I carried a small cylinder of compressed gas and had a short hose with a spray wand on the end of it tucked into my belt. I wasn’t entirely sure how I would get the gas inside the house, though. I’d have to cross that bridge when I got there. For now, creeping through the shadows of Goodman’s back yard was trying enough.

  I had no idea if she had motion lights in the back yard or if she owned a dog or anything like that. Taya allegedly had the cameras off, but she said it had been much more difficult to hack the network this time around as the CEA and NAR were employing cyber defense agents to safeguard the networks against rogue agents like her. I didn’t understand all the technical aspects of what she did, but I know it wasn’t easy to do and we’d been very lucky so far. It was only a matter of time before they stepped things up.

  The so-called ‘twenty-pound brain guys’ over at the University of Texas had cooked up a sleeping gas based loosely on chloroform according to Chris. That’s what I carried in the cylinder. I was supposed to deploy it into Goodman’s bedroom and then wait about ten or fifteen minutes. She should be out like a light and I could bundle her up, then call in the car to grab her.

  I patted the other small handheld device banging against my hip. Dr. Parnell, the veterinarian who’d helped me out a few weeks ago, had provided an RFID detection paddle for me to use. The paddle was used to identify microchips in pets and display their identification number to return them home safely. A pet’s microchip and a radio frequency identification chip, an RFID, were different and utilized a very different type of signal, but Dr. Parnell assured me that the device could at least detect the presence of an RFID microchip. While I was reasonably certain that Goodman didn’t have one of the microchips implanted in her based on comments she’d made back when I was at the Agency, I didn’t want to be wrong and bring the entire weight of the CEA down on us.

  After what seemed like an agonizingly slow movement to the director’s house, I assessed the situation. There weren’t really many options for getting the gas inside that didn’t involve breaking a window. As I leaned against the back of the house, I thought about the directions I’d been given about getting it into the master bedroom. Taya had pulled the floorplan from the appraisal and tax assessment filed with the county, so I knew exactly where the bedroom was located. I shuffled along the wall to the bedroom window to see what my options were.

  As I neared the window, two things became clear. One was good, the other was even better. Goodman must have liked having her window open a crack to let in the fresh November night air. That would make my job infinitely easier since I could just deploy the probe inside and let the spray do the rest. The second thing I noticed was Jesse Newman’s lanky form on top of the director. He was plowing into her, as evidenced by her soft moans of pleasure and his bare ass pumping up and down. I could bag two birds with one stone—or one canister of knock out gas in this case.

  I opened the small folding knife I carried and slowly made a small incision about the width of a quarter in the screen. I had to force myself to breathe normally or risk hyperventilating inside the mask. Then, I put the knife back in my pocket and twisted the safety valve on the gas cylinder. The end of the wand fit perfectly through the little cut in the screen and I squeezed the trigger gently to avoid any loud noises that would alert either of the occupants.

  Thankfully, they were in full-on coitus and the sounds they made would have drowned out three or four times the amount of noise I was currently making. I stood, holding down the trigger, listening to the two of them go at it for several minutes. There really was someone for everyone, it seemed.

  Suddenly, the director gave a shout that froze my heart and my testicles leapt into my stomach. Had she seen me or the probe? Did she smell the gas? It was supposed to be completely odorless, but that wasn’t always the case when I’d used things like “odorless” paint or other chemicals before.

  “Yeah,” her voice came from inside. “That was good. That was really good. Now get off me.”

  “But I’m not finished yet,” Newman protested. Hearing his voice made me want to strangle the asshole even more.

  “I’m finished with you. Go jack off in the bathroom or something.”

  “Please, Madam Director. I’m so close.”

  There was a rustling of sheets and Newman grunted. “I told you to get off of me. I needed the release, but now I’m done with you. I’m not in the mood for your bullshit. Go finish in the bathroom.”

  She seems like a lovely person, I thought as the sheets rustled again and then a door closed somewhere inside. There was more movement inside and then I heard the flick of a lighter as Goodman lit up a cigarette. I wondered if the gas I was pumping into her home was flammable. Even if it was, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it now.

  I checked the cylinder’s gauge. It was almost empty. Inside, the bathroom door opened. “Did you wash your hands?” Goodman asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Good. Get over here and hold me. I’m tired and want to go to sleep.”

  The squeaking of the bed springs as Newman got into bed was the perfect cover to pull the probe back out of the screen. I set the canister down and then checked my watch. Since there were two of them in there, I decided that I’d wait the full fifteen minutes to give it time to take effect.

  It was a long, boring fifteen minutes, made to seem even longer since I constantly checked the time. When my watch finally clicked over, I tapped lightly on the window to see if they were asleep. They didn’t respond, so I walked over to the patio and picked up a lawn chair. Placing it under the window, I tapped even harder on the frame. There was still no response.

  “Hey,” I whispered harshly through the small crack in the window. The two forms inside seemed dead to the world. That was a good thing. “Hey!” I said, much louder this time.

  Neither of them moved, so I pulled out the knife once more and cut away the entire screen. Then, I slid the window up all the way and used the lawn chair to climb up through the window.

  Newman had one arm flopped over Goodman’s naked body. For an older woman, she seemed to be in damn good shape. I assessed the situation for a few seconds, then decided that I should handcuff Newman first. He’d be the bigger threat if he woke up in the middle of all this. Goodman did not have her prosthetic on, so I doubted she could make a run for it, but I grabbed the appendage and moved it across the room just in case before I slid open her bedside table. A pistol sat in the top drawer, so I took it and dropped it into my waistband. I didn’t want her waking up and shooting me when I was dealing with McFuckety Fuck.

  Newman was limp as I handcuffed his arms behind his back. I used two pairs of flex cuffs to keep him from being able to break one, then rolled him roughly off the bed. His head thumped loudly against the nightstand as the momentum carried him to the floor.

  “Whoopsie,” I said. The asshole had been one of my main torturers when I’d gotten arrested. I didn’t feel bad about him getting a little bump in the slightest.

  Next, I secured Goodman’s hands with my third and final set of flex cuffs. I’d meant to secure her feet together to keep he
r from running away when I selected my loadout for the mission, but seeing her missing limb, I was reminded how dumb that idea had been. She didn’t even have a second foot to attach the cuffs to. I was an idiot.

  Once she was tied up, I used my knife to cut away a long strip of her sheets and used that to gag her. Then I repeated the process with Newman and cut a third strip to tie his feet together. I’d decided to take this bastard with me too.

  I dragged him to the front door and dumped him onto the entryway tile, then went back and got Goodman. I flipped her limp body up onto my shoulder and began walking to the front. Even though I hated the bitch, part of me—a very small part—felt bad for carrying the nude woman through her house. Then the pressure of my shoulder in her stomach made her fart and my moment of weakness was gone. I was thankful for the gas mask.

  I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and sent a one-letter text to Garrett, the driver of the van that was going to take us away from there. That was his notice to come get me. I prayed that Taya’s computer magic held up and she was able to alter the guard’s authorized access database to allow him in.

  While I waited for the van to arrive, I activated the RFID detection paddle. I passed it over Goodman’s body, covering every inch of her, front and back. As I suspected, she was clean. She hadn’t liked the idea of being microchipped and tracked by an unknown third party and made that fact very clear, so it wasn’t a surprise that she hadn’t allowed them to chip her.

  Newman, on the other hand, was a different story. The RFID detector lit up when I passed it over his left hand. I flipped him over and checked the rest of his body. The NAR seemed to think one device was sufficient.

  My knife wasn’t exactly sharp, but it was good enough for Newman. The blade split his skin and I shined my light into the hole I’d created. I couldn’t see shit, so I dug around with the blade inside. He began to struggle against me and then screamed through the gag.

  “Now, now,” I mocked. “This will only hurt for a minute. Let me do my work.”

  He fought back, fully awake now. I had to pull the knife out of him or risk cutting too deeply. I didn’t want him getting off that easily. I stood and brought the heel of my boot down savagely onto his jaw, sending his head slamming into the tile. His struggling stopped and I returned to fishing around inside his hand with my blade.

  I still couldn’t find anything inside, so I ran the detector over his hand. It came up blank. “What the—”

  On the floor, there was a lot of blood and little bits of flesh, so I passed the RFID detector over the mess and it lit up. The microchip was out of his body and on the floor somewhere. That was good enough for me, so I wiped the blade of my knife against the pale skin on his thigh. “Oops,” I grunted as I accidentally cut a thin line in his skin. I really hadn’t planned to do that, it was an accident.

  I stood and went to the window to watch outside and wait for the van. Movement behind me made me turn. Goodman was pulling at her hands. She was clearly still drugged up, but her eyes went wide when she saw me coming over to her. She pleaded through the gag, but I couldn’t understand her.

  “Hello, Director Goodman,” I hissed. The mask distorted my voice enough that I was confident she had no clue who had her yet.

  I decided to let her wait for the big reveal until after we got to the barn outside of town where the neo-Nazis had kept Patricia and were taking Cassandra when Rogan came upon them. Chris had decided that it was the best location to keep Goodman since it was so far removed from everything and had been secluded enough that those dickholes had kept Patricia hostage out there for so long with nobody bothering them. Cassandra hadn’t liked the idea one bit, but it really did make the most sense.

  I heard the soft squeak of brakes as the van backed into the driveway. I bent to pick the woman up and she squirmed, trying to worm her way away from me. I grabbed her arm and jerked her roughly toward me. “Stop resisting. This will be so much easier for her if you just go along quietly.”

  Part of me wanted to punch her, to do things to her that would make her pay for the torture she’d inflicted upon me a few months ago. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t ever be able to live with myself if I did something like that. I knew that once we’d restored the US Government, people like Goodman and Newman would be brought to trial. They were the villains in this story, not me.

  I lifted her from the floor and threw her over my shoulder like a sack of grain once again. Depositing her roughly into the back of the van, I told Garrett to hold on because we had an extra passenger. I jogged back inside and put the RFID paddle back on my belt and picked up the empty gas canister. It wouldn’t do to leave any evidence at the scene. I passed the cannister to the driver and grabbed Newman’s feet. His head thumped satisfyingly over the door’s threshold and down onto the concrete porch four inches below.

  With Garrett’s help, I lifted Newman’s body into the back of the van, thankful I wore gloves and a full body camouflage suit as his flaccid dick slid along my arm. I may or may not have purposefully threw him on top of Goodman before closing the doors gently and walking around to the van’s passenger side.

  Hey, I said I wouldn’t torture them, not rough them up a little during the course of the arrest.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I poured a bucket of ice cold water on Goodman’s nude body. She sputtered and coughed, jerking awake from the fitful sleep she’d endured on the hard-packed floor. There was an old mattress and a blanket just one stall over, but I wanted her to be uncomfortable for now. I set the bucket aside and sat down on a camp chair I’d found in another part of the barn.

  “Wakey wakey with a little shaky shaky,” I sing-songed. I wasn’t entirely happy with my little rhyme, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Wakey was a relatively hard word to rhyme anything with besides achy, bakey, and flakey. None of those were any good and she didn’t have a dick, so ‘hands off snakey’ wasn’t an option. Geez, I’d make a terrible kids’ book author, I thought.

  “What do you want with me?” she screeched, turning to cover herself as best as she could with her hands still zip-tied behind her back.

  “I… Ah, goddammit. Hold on.” I’d seen a blanket somewhere. Where was it?

  I left the horse stall that we’d converted into a jail cell and went to the next one, where I believed they’d kept Patricia based on the items scattered across the ground. A dirty mattress lay against one wall. The remnants of plastic plates and cups and a bucket half full of piss and shit sat in the far corner. But the blanket wasn’t in there.

  I left the stall and searched around the barn for a minute to find something to cover the director with to no avail. Then I remembered where I’d seen the blanket. It was outside, near where I parked. I ensured that Goodman’s stall door was locked before going outside to retrieve it.

  We hadn’t had any rain in a few weeks, so I was reasonably sure it was dry. After shaking the blanket out to make sure there weren’t any surprises inside, I went back into the barn and opened Goodman’s door. Tossing the blanket over her, I said, “There. Is that better?”

  “Fuck you,” she responded.

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “You fucking kidnapped me in the middle of the night, asshole. I don’t have to be nice to you.”

  “Okay, so I guess you’re not ready to talk, huh?”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Goodman said. “I will fillet you like a fish. I’ll cut your intestines out of your stomach and choke you with them. You will regret the day you ever met me, Haskins.”

  I tilted my head. How the fuck did she know who I was? I still wore the mask. “That’s right. I know exactly who you are. Your little getup doesn’t fool me. We’ve known where you were all along. We’ve been tracking you. You were microchipped at the Training Course, one of those many shots that they gave you. That’s right. Heard we got your family down in Alabama too. Aww, that’s a shame. Poor Bodhi Haskins doesn’t have a family anymore. Are you gonna cry now, you little bitch
?”

  I sighed and loosened the bottom straps holding the mask in place. Then I pulled them up over my head around the mask like Rogan had taught me so I could have quicker access to the mask in an emergency. I took a deep breath of unfiltered air as I dropped the mask and tucked it into the carrying case I wore on my hip.

  With my mask off, she smirked. “I guess I was right. You know that I didn’t really even know if it was you, right? It was just an educated guess. God, Haskins. You were bad at being an agent and you’re bad at being a kidnapper. You suck at life, you insignificant piece of shit.”

  “Well, you’re a pleasant person,” I responded.

  She adjusted her position under the blanket, then looked around the stall quickly. “Where’s my leg?” Goodman demanded.

  “Back at your house. I didn’t bother to take it.” For barely a second, her eyes betrayed her. Without her prosthetic, she was vulnerable and wouldn’t be able to escape. Then, the iron visage of hate returned.

  “You are a loser, Haskins. A fucking disgrace to the human race. Go kill yourself.”

  I chuckled. Her insults had taken on a less menacing tone now that she realized how hopeless her situation was and how vulnerable she really was. “I’m okay with being a loser,” I said. “Most of my biggest lessons in life have come from my failures, not my successes.”

  “That’s cute. Did you read that on a motivational poster somewhere?”

  “Actually, yeah. I did. But it’s the truth.”

  She shifted to get the blanket up around her shoulders. “So, what now? Are you going to rape me to show your dominance over me? Or did you do that already while I was passed out? I can feel that—”