Archangel grabbed Zen's chair and pulled himself forward. Sphinx pulled a submachine gun out of the trunk.
The submachine gun barrel stretched over the front seat. Archangel said, "I'll take that."
Sphinx laughed. "Fat chance, pretty boy."
"There are at least three six-person vehicles ahead," Zen said.
"What do they look like?" I asked.
"Black trucks or vans of some kind."
I nodded. "Can the computer tell us which vehicle he's in?"
"The signal is centered on the middle vehicle, but that could be off by 25 meters."
"Sphinx, does our car have a laser?"
"No," she replied.
I hit the button for the locals on the phone. "We could use a little more help."
The man at the other end chuckled. "There are only four patrol cars in this county on duty."
"Four is better than zero. You're looking for dark colored vans or trucks." I gave him the latest GPS info. According to the panel, we were only two kilometers from them.
I pushed the car faster.
Chapter Forty-One
The GPS said we were within a few hundred meters, and up ahead, a black van raced down the road. Sphinx moved her body into the front and triggered the sunroof, then she poked her head up with the submachine gun in her hands.
There were two cars in between. Our police escort pulled up behind the first vehicle. The rear window shattered, and a man in a three-piece gray suit fired a machine gun at the patrol car. It spun off to the side. Sphinx let loose with a three round burst. The guy splattered blood and fell out of the window. I tried to not run him over, but I think I hit his arm. Or there was a bump in the road.
Sphinx shot out a tire on the rearmost vehicle. It tried to keep going, but there was too much drag. I watched the tracking signal for Jack as we drove past. Jack was in one of the two vehicles in front. I downshifted and gunned the gas. Sphinx plugged the right tire of the vehicle in front of us. It jerked out of control. I passed it. Glanced at the GPS. Jack was behind us. I slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel to the left.
A grenade impacted the left front of our vehicle halfway through the turn. Sphinx fell back out of the sunroof. Three men were pointing a grenade launcher and two machine guns at us. I drove straight for them. Another grenade launched at us, and both machine guns were firing. The grenade impacted our front right side.
Zen rolled down her window and fired a round. It hit the vehicle behind the men, and the explosion from the round knocked them down. We were maybe thirty meters from them. I slid the car to a halt. The four of us were out in no time. The men scrambled to their feet. I plugged the center one in the chest. He went down.
Zen shot the one on the right, and it made quite a big mess. The left one drew a pistol and shot me on the chest. Sphinx got him. We ran up to the van. Jack was hog-tied with duct tape in the back seat. His right leg was bleeding from one of the explosive rounds, and his shirt was blood stained. I pulled a knife and cut him loose. His face was a mess like they'd beaten him.
Fucker smiled at me. "Bear… Did Sam get out? What about GreenMel?"
"Relax," I said. "Sam is fine. Another team is on GreenMel."
"Do you have any painkillers?"
Then he closed his eyes and passed out. Sphinx ran back towards our car. "I'll call an ambulance."
I wanted to check Jack's pulse or do something to help him. He seemed content to simply lie there and breathe. A siren in the distance broke my attention away from Jack. The paramedics hooked up an IV to Jack and fed him a solution of something. He opened his eyes and groaned. They gave him something to quiet him and hauled him off. I sent Sam a text. "We found Jack. He's alive."
She wrote back. "This means maybe, just maybe, I'll sleep with you again."
There was a question before whether she was going to sleep with me again? I didn't text her back. A wrecker came for Centurian's van, and more paramedics came and collected the bodies. Our car appeared drivable, so I drove.
We made it home around three am. I wanted to wake Sam, but I didn't.
In the morning, I pulled up the Agency dentist on the terminal and scheduled an appointment to have the two teeth Jackal knocked out replaced. She scheduled me the same day and extracted what was left of the teeth. Both had broken just above the gum line. She promised once the gums healed she'd do the implants.
I went through the food line and sat at Sam's usual table. Nancy joined me. "They found GreenMel."
"Alive I hope?"
"She's in a regeneration chamber pumped full of Chor'Tan blood. If that works, great, on a conditional plan, we're growing some tissue for her."
I didn't even want to know what they did to her. "What did they do?"
"You don't want to know."
But I asked! No, I didn't want to know. Knowing would give me nightmares.
JenSix from Los Angeles came through the food line. She was maybe the tallest woman I've ever met. Muscular, too. Triangular face. She smiled and sat with us.
"Looks like a waste of a trip," she said.
Nancy shook her head. "Both of our agents were taken to buildings. We're getting search warrants on those structures right now."
"Search warrants? Damn a warrant," JenSix said.
I took a bite of a sausage link. "I agree."
Nancy took a long drink of coffee. "We'll have warrants by nine o'clock. It's a two-hour drive. If you're in such a hurry, you could be on the way."
JenSix and I started paging our teams. Breakfast, then road trip.
JenSix leaned across the table and whispered in my ear, "You're a healthy man."
I said, "Thank you."
She leaned in close and nibbled me on the ear. Sam was just coming through the food line, and she saw.
Chapter Forty-Two
Sam approached our table. I looked JenSix in the eyes. "I'm in a relationship."
"Not anymore," Sam said.
I looked up. "Please, honey. She just came on to me. It's not my fault."
"Yes, it was totally inappropriate," Nancy said. "If you want to file charges…"
"No, it was nothing." My mind began to plot and scheme a way to get both JenSix and Sam into the same bed.
"I know that look," JenSix said. "I do apologize, Bear. I just thought you were available, and since we almost never work closely together. It was a mistake."
"A big mistake," Sam said. She sat down next to me.
I leaned over and kissed her. She bit me on the lip. Hard. I didn't cry out in pain or even make a sound. What the fuck was that?
"Two-hour drive. Coordinates are in the vans," Nancy said.
I said, "Bye," to Sam, and ran.
Thomas, Archangel, Zen, Sphinx, and GeoSix met me at the van. Weapons were loaded. JenSix shouted, "We'll hit ours first. You're slow."
We moved fast after that. Hitting the freeway. JenSix's van was in the lead for the first hour, and I didn't try and pass. She headed north when we went east.
"What are we up against?" Zen asked.
"Two three-man teams," I said. "You, me, and Archangel going in the front. We're toting submachine guns. You take a stunner."
"That's crap. I'm a better shot than either of you."
"Not according to range data," Archangel said.
She hit him on the arm.
I drove fast. Nancy loaded a search warrant to the onboard computer, but we had no printer.
We drove into a small community. The building was made of brick, with maybe ten cars in the parking lot. GeoSix, Sphinx, and Thomas raced around to the rear. I stepped through the front door. There was a glass window with a receptionist behind it. I fired a round high up in the glass to try and shatter it so Zen could stun the man. The glass did not shatter. It didn't even spider web.
The receptionist ran after hitting some button. I pushed on the door that clearly led into the back. It did not budge. I backed everybody up and threw a white phosphorous grenade right at the door. It came crashin
g down. We ran into a hallway.
Gunfire erupted at the other end. A few 9mm bullets pelted my chest pushing me back, and Archangel and I returned fire. We cut down two men wearing some kind of body armor, but our 5.56mm rounds went through it. Like maybe it was designed to stop a 9mm or a knife. It looked like we were in a doctor's office with exam rooms and some equipment I didn't know the purpose of. The treadmill I recognized.
I radioed to Sphinx. "Find anything?"
"Two civilians. Stunned and tied."
Zen pointed. "Stairs."
We walked past an elevator. Zen pushed the button, and the door slid open.
"Booby trapped," Archangel said.
We headed up the stairs. A bounce of metal on concrete echoed from above, and a grenade was coming down the stairs at us. I fired at it and boom. Shrapnel bounced off my jacket and helmet. I ran into the smoke, hoping the others followed. Another metal on concrete bounce, and Archangel shot this one. A piece of shrapnel nicked my hand. It wasn't bleeding that bad, so I continued to ascend.
I reached the landing to the second floor, and a bullet hit me right on the face of my helmet. Archangel cut down the gunner.
Zen shouted, "Fucking stunner!"
"We have to capture as many as humanly possible," I said.
"I feel like I'm naked at a cacti convention."
"I'd feel safer there than in your current situation," Archangel said.
"Thanks. That makes me feel better."
Sphinx shouted across the radio, "Cut out all that chatter."
I kicked the door to the hallway open. Empty.
Archangel said, "I'm going up a floor."
"We shouldn't split up," I said. He was already moving. He did have a stunner in a hip holster.
Zen looked like she was debating.
I moved into the hallway. "Stick with me. I may need you."
"And my damn stunner."
I kicked in door after door. Each room was empty. Looked like offices. Mostly legal or accounting firms. The last door in the hall was locked. It looked too solid for a grenade.
Zen, beautiful Zen, pulled out some metal strips, flat metal arms, and different kinds of sticks. She went to work on the lock.
"Since when do you pick locks?" I asked.
"Since forever, you just haven't been paying attention."
I pay attention, damn it.
The lock clicked, and I raised my gun. Zen stepped backward and kicked the door open all in one smooth motion. Inside was a data center. Three rack-mounted server clusters and a few big disk arrays. Cooling apparatus. Goldmine. Assuming we can hack the servers.
Zen must have read my mind. "We can hack the servers. It's just a matter of time. Will the data still be good, though, by the time it's hacked?"
Archangel radioed, "I bagged two."
"We got one more," Sphinx said.
All in all, quite a profitable day, but I did wonder if we got ours before or after JenSix got theirs. We called in Joe to look at the servers, and locals hauled off the men we captured.
Chapter Forty-Three
Joe pulled up a chair to a terminal attached to the servers. "This will be easy. They're using a commercial operating system, and the makers give us universal keys to get in. I just have to look up today's sequence."
He produced a cell phone and started tapping away at it. I thought about texting Sam, but the word stalker echoed in my mind.
"The data sections of these hard drives are blank," Joe said.
"Can you look deeper?" I asked. "Maybe pick something out of an application's data directory or some other subdirectory."
"I could look at the other servers. It's just this one is totally wiped clean. I assume the others are the same way."
"We have to check every one, Joe."
He went to work switching his terminal from one server to the next. He whispered, "Wiped," over and over.
I caught Zen's eyes with mine. "Seriously, you've been picking locks all these years, and I've never noticed."
She patted the pouch on her hip. "When I retired, it's a skill I picked up for some reason: something to do with the mind-wipe."
Nancy rang my phone. "Do you remember Jackal?"
"How could I forget him?" I asked.
"We found him dead in his cell a few minutes ago. He had poison in a tooth or something."
That isn't right. I said, "Thanks, Nancy."
"What is it?" Zen asked.
"Jackal's dead. Poison."
Joe pushed away from the terminal. "The thing is this operating system comes with a secure wipe command to clean data out. It runs simultaneously on every server in the cluster. There is nothing on these servers."
I began to question whether or not Joe was going to ask for food, but I shrugged the thoughts off. "Can we ship the physical devices back to Phoenix, load an Agency operating system on them, and utilize the computational power?"
"That's a damn fine idea. Grab that first rack, unplug all the cables, and it's on wheels. I brought a van." He went to work on a different rack. The thing was set up with just four cables leaving the structure, and every server plugged into the structure, instead of having dedicated wires. I wheeled it out to Joe's Van. Zen followed with one.
We drove back to Phoenix. I met up with Sam at dinner. Jack was still in medical, and GreenMel was drifting in a regeneration chamber.
I held onto Sam's hand with my left. "Movie night?"
She leaned in and kissed me on the neck. I knew that meant yes.
I finished my food, and Sam and I were halfway back to my quarters, when the intercom shrieked. "Bear's team to conference room A. Right Fucking Now."
I was first to the conference room. Nancy said, "We have to wait."
One by one, people joined us.
Nancy pulled up a map of the local area. "The paramedic ambulance transporting Jackal's body to the morgue was found on the side of the road. Jackal was not found, but both paramedics are dead."
What? A couple of hours ago, Jackal was dead.
"We implanted a wireless transmitter in his left pinky finger, and it's possible he knows the device is in him. We have his current location," Nancy said. "We need your team to recapture him."
Send somebody else. No, we were the best. "We're taking 5.56mm rifles with us. White phosphorous grenades. 9mm."
"I'm taking a grenade launcher," Archangel said.
"Good, you're with me. We go out in Jeeps, find that fucker, and kill him."
We raced to the armory and paired up into vehicles. We were wearing jackets, with helmets, and I had a knife on my hip next to my 9mm. I drove.
The vehicle had a monitor in it, giving us a location. Our three topless transports pulled to a stop where the monitor said to stop. It was almost twilight, and I hit the brights switch for my headlights. There was a big rock, and a smaller rock, and a damn left pinky finger and some blood.
"He can't be far. That blood is still wet," Archangel said.
I shouted, "Split up!"
Punched the gas down in our vehicle, and steered us in the direction of civilization. I figured Jackal would head that way. Archangel noticed tracks in the sand. We followed those to a dried out stream bed. The tracks ended there.
"We're making so much noise. So much light," Archangel said. "He will always be able to evade us. We have to go after him on foot, so he will come out and play."
Screw that noise. I mean, he had a point, but Jackal was somebody we needed to kill, not play games with. Not go hand in hand with. We need to call in air support and light up this desert with napalm and hotter incendiaries.
I hit the radio button to Nancy. "We need Apaches out here. They have infrared and can sweep large areas."
"I'll make it so," Nancy said.
I drove down the streambed hoping for a bit of luck. We drove until the wee hours of the morning, but even with the Apache support, there was no finding Jackal. I had a sick, sinking feeling that I was going to meet him again.
When I f
inally got to base, Sam was asleep, and the computer would not let me wake her.
Chapter Forty-Four
I met up with Sam at breakfast. She glared at me and pinched me on the arm. Hard, too. "No goodnight text. No good morning text."
"You said I was being a stalker," I said.
"Yeah, but you went from every half hour to never, like there is no in between in your universe?"
All or nothing, baby. "I can't win."
"Not against me, no."
Sphinx, GeoSix, and Thomas joined us. Nancy walked up to our table. "I need to see Bear, Sphinx, and Thomas in my office."
Thomas asked, "After breakfast?"
"Yes, this is a debriefing."
We ate. Sam kissed me goodbye as she was heading off to run or bike or something. I pulled her in close. "What's your schedule like today?"
"Exercise. Class. Practice. Repeat."
"I mean between then. Can we have sex?"
She grabbed my hand and squeezed. That wasn't really the answer I was looking for, but it was close. "Ten o'clock?" I asked.
"Be at my room," she said.
Yes.
Nancy finished her coffee, and the four of us headed for her office.
She punched a button on the computer, and very slowly, a 3D holographic image of Jackal took form. "This man is actually a GMO. We found a detailed file on him in our European database," she said.
"GMO?" I asked.
"Genetically Modified Organism. He was grown in a lab for a period of six months, then imprinted with a lifetime of memories. According to his best recollection, agents killed his wife and child. He's out for revenge."
That's just bloody great. Thomas asked, "How did he escape our custody?"
"Apparently, he had a cryogenic drug hidden in a tooth. The drug is used for interstellar travel, and it will cause a person to mimic the dead. That's the only explanation that makes any sense."
"Can't we get them in trouble with the interstellar courts?" Sphinx asked. "This is beyond the limits of the law. Genetically modifying humans has to be illegal."
Nancy sat down in her chair and turned on the recorders. "I'm promoting each of you. You're now the same rank as myself, and with that rank, comes knowledge that is of the highest clearance. We have been creating GMO humans for over twenty years. But our objective is to eliminate disease and life-shortening genetic defects. Not to create a super race."
Codename: Bear II: Secret Agent (Codename Universe Book 2) Page 14
