by A P Bateman
“Fuck them! They don’t fit into the plan anyway. They’re cash cows. We’ll take their hundred-million and the world will laugh at their claims! Like they’d be able to make that kind of claim look remotely plausible,” he paused. “Besides, there are bids coming in from potential viewers who want more middle-east uncertainty. The last thing they want is peace out there. It’s good for western weapon contracts and oil reserve pricing. Bids have been placed taking oil pricing into account. The Saudis for instance.”
“And Iranians with the sanctions now lifted.”
“Exactly. Get onto the Iranians, talk oil and get their bid raised for more cameras.”
The woman got back onto her keypad and worked away. Both of them had their back to Stone, who had taken a while to come round, but was now fully conscious, his eyes closed and his head lolled to one side as he took in all he could hear. He could feel his hands bound tightly in front of him, his legs either bound or taped to the chair legs. He eased his hands upwards, felt them pulling at his knees. He squinted and saw silver duct-tape wrapped around his knees and his wrists. He wasn’t getting out of the chair any time soon.
He looked up and studied the monitors on the wall. Ten high and twenty wide. Two hundred HD television screens. Many were showing footage of the island, in particular the jungle and beaches where the game had been played out. But twenty screens at the centre were blank. At the console were ten computer monitors and a series of keyboards. There were telephones by each monitor and a switchboard in front of the woman. She was slim and had short black hair. Stone knew who it was before she reached out and touched the giant dog on top of its head. The animal sniffed her hand and whined. The dog looked at Stone and growled. Stone noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye and saw an equally large dog, its snout just inches from his elbow. This dog also growled, its teeth bared in a sneer.
The woman turned around, swivelled in her seat. She smiled, then looked at the door as the ginger-haired man walked in, gripping Kathy roughly by the arm. Stone could see his fingers dug deeply into her flesh, red marks underneath. The woman looked back at Stone. “Hello, lover,” she said softly. “Wakey, Wakey…” She smiled as Stone opened his eyes fully and took in the scene. “Sorry to have run out on you back in DC…” She got out of the chair and walked over. The dog followed.
Stone looked at her, the change of accent a little unsettling. The southern-belle never seemed right to him, but that thick antipodean twang wasn’t going to hide in a performed accent too subtly. “Did you? I can’t say I noticed.”
She stared at him, then looked at Kathy, who was smiling at the comment. Kathy stopped when the woman stared into her eyes. “Oh you liked that, did you?” She nodded to the ginger-haired man. “Bring her over here.” She pointed at the floor between them and strode over quickly to meet her.
The man gripped her and she let out a wail. His grip did not relax and he dragged her over. Kathy was smaller than the other woman. But Stone noticed how much prettier she was. When he first met the woman he had known as Kathy, he had been awestruck at how attractive she had been. But compared to Kathy her features were harder and her eyes were predatory. It was as though she had been prettier back then, her features changing slightly as part of the act. Or maybe Kathy was so genuinely beautiful as to cast a shadow on this woman.
Stone did not see the slap coming and nor did Kathy, who recoiled clasping her cheek. She straightened up and was struck again with lightning speed. There was practised martial arts knowledge behind the move. A sort of straight punch that whipped sideways into an open-handed slap as it neared her face. The force was incredible. The third slap was just as fast and Kathy fell backwards into a work desk. A jug of iced water and tall glasses rested on a tray along with some paper napkins and a plate of sliced lemons, and the whole tray went with Kathy smashing on the floor. She rested on all fours, shocked and hurt and breathing hard. She pushed herself up slowly, carefully, her hands among the broken glass and chips of ice. When she stood she was glaring, her teeth gritted in determination. She took a step forwards at the woman. Both dogs growled.
“Don’t!” Stone shouted. “It’s what she wants!” Kathy hesitated and looked at the dogs. They were salivating, both coiled back on their haunches readying themselves to pounce. Stone looked at the woman, who was smiling sadistically. It was the same smile he had caught briefly when her dogs had killed the man impersonating the cop. She had changed her expression quickly then, but not now. Now she was enjoying it and was free to do so. “The dogs will kill you,” he said. “She’s let them do it before.”
Kathy looked at her, held her stare. “I’m sure she has.”
Stone studied the man who was watching the monitors. His back was to them and it was broad, well-muscled. He turned around slowly, stood up and walked over. His stride was uneven, he favoured a leg.
“Marnie,” he said to the woman. “Go and get the Sunnis to confirm their bid. And get North Korea’s money. Now’s the time.” He looked at his watch. “We have less than fifteen minutes.”
She broke off her stare with Kathy, then bent down and kissed Stone on the mouth, her lips wet and open. When she pulled away, she patted his cheek and smiled. “Bye-bye, lover-boy,” she said. “Sorry to have run out on you again, but business is business.”
Stone said nothing, ignoring her. He looked past her like she wasn’t there and watched the man, who was now leaning against the back of a solid wooden chair. The man was six-five and Stone figured him to be about two-hundred-and-thirty pounds. Twenty or so down on when he had last seen him.
The man looked down at Stone and smiled. “I’ve had fun with you this past week.”
“What happened to your leg?”
The man pulled up his trouser leg and exposed a prosthesis. “Blood poisoning. An infection.”
“You have to be careful where you step. Especially in the forest. All kinds of traps out there. Dumb prey just fall in and get stuck. Must have been a bitch to get out of. Sharp spikes, dirty.”
“But I got out,” he said sharply. “That’s more than you’ve done in this trap I have set for you.” He waved his hand elaborately around the room.
“It’s not over yet.”
“Oh, but I think it is. The end of the game, Agent Stone. The last act.” He shrugged. “Well, maybe not the last act, but a pivotal one. With only a mere footnote to go.”
“Your head looks interesting.” Stone stared at the curious looking valley running through the centre of the man’s head. It was a considerable inversion, almost devoid of hair and the hair on both sides of it was thick. “I should have hit you twice.” He looked at Kathy. “This man and I have history. He was part of an experiment of freaks…”
“A project of elite special agents serving the government…” the man interrupted.
“Assassins…” Stone countered. “You never got to serve your country. Just some self-serving scum involved in the project and making money and gaining favours from running you.”
“You did me a favour, as it turns out,” the man smiled. It was the smile of a crocodile, full of menace and wishful opportunity. “That rifle butt you smashed against my skull woke everything inside me. All the drugs, the hypnosis, the implanted false memories; it all moved aside and gave me my life back. I can remember my real life, my family, lovers, friends. All gone now, they mourned me a decade ago, thought I’d died in a desert war, when really my life had been stolen from me by the government. But I can live my life now and I can make my own decisions. I discovered I was resourceful, ambitious and ruthless.”
“Ruthlessness was never a problem for you.”
“Your brother would know all about that,” the man smirked. “If you could ask him.”
Stone shrugged. “My brother’s dead. I have dealt with it. Now you deal with knowing I beat you, and I could beat you again. Any time.” He looked back at him. “I knew it would be you when the computer virus your pet bitch released into the computer mainframe was named Ares. The Ares Virus wa
s far too big a coincidence.”
Marnie started to protest at what Stone had called her but the man snapped at her. “You got North Korea yet? One hundred million. Get it done!” He looked back at Stone. “I’ve had a fun two years. I managed to find my handler’s files on the project. He had all sorts of contacts, bank accounts for my taking and assets for me to make use of. A little research and tweaking and I set up something new. Completely new. Something that my particular set of skills could create ownership over.”
“A game of death,” Stone said. “Gladiator games for the internet age.”
“At first,” the man said. “But it’s evolved. It’s so much more than that. Since I made you my target. We’ve managed to tap into a wealth of world-wide contacts and have a unique auction in place as we speak. My god, what an opportunity!” He laughed, it was maniacal and Stone realised that the blow he had struck him in the forest two years before hadn’t cured him, it had merely made him worse. “I brought you here to finish you off, to have you hunted to the point of exhaustion. I have you watched, almost constantly for three days. Our virus, The Ares Virus…” he grinned. “Has taken down the Secret Service, the agency which shut down my handler’s plans…”
“Your handler was using you!” Stone raged. “He would have pulled the plug on you as soon as he made his money from the anti-virus and there was no more use for your skills!”
“As I was saying…” he continued, unflustered. “Not only have I shut the Secret Service down, but I have drained their accounts, and left you with your hand in the cookie jar. Killing you would have been the icing on the cake, but two separate projects have overlapped and I can think of nothing better than to bring you into the second project. It’s genius, really it is.” He looked at his watch and smiled. Then he turned and waved a hand to the screens. “Marnie, let’s go live!”
The bank of blank monitors in the middle flickered into life, some of the screens were split-screen with multiple camera angles, others were single images, some magnified on the same image. One of the screens was a series of colours. Stone recognised this as thermal imaging. The blue areas were cold, the red and yellow denoted higher heat sources.
The man looked back at Stone. “Recognise this place?”
Stone did. He recognised the speaker as well. Luke Cheney. Vice President of the United States. The man had lost his son in the first of the Twin Towers to fall. Stone admired the man. Not because he was a career politician. But because speaking from the auditorium at the memorial he was standing on meant that he was standing in the last place his son had been alive. The place where his son had taken his final breath. The site where his son and four souls short of three-thousand lost their lives on September 11 2001. It would be an emotional experience and the man was holding up well.
“Over to assets,” the man said. “Position one, check?”
“Check.”
“Position two, check?”
“Check.”
“Position three, check?”
“Position three compromised. Relocated to tier three.”
“Further problems?”
“None.”
“Standby.” The man looked back at Stone. “My masterpiece. And you’re here to watch it happen.”
Stone watched Vice President Luke Cheney speak. There was a low volume audio running. Stone knew when he had finished speaking then the President would enter the stage, take the auditorium and stand at the podium. He would make his speech about the years since 9/11. It was a fine speech, Stone had heard parts of it in the West Wing, but it would concentrate on the building of international relationships, especially with Islamic nations, and not the rhetoric of US and coalition forces battling extremism around the globe. That wasn’t working out so well lately. It was time for a different approach. The President was on his outward journey, nearing the end of his second term. Cheney was tipped as the man to run the most successful presidential campaign, and was more or less a shoe-in for the presidency. As much as politics could dictate. And Cheney would carry on the stance of building over battling. It could be a new era.
Stone’s heart raced, a sinking feeling in his belly. He looked at the man, studied the expression on his face. “What is this?”
“Progress,” the man said. “I watched some television when I regained my memory. I failed to see what all the fuss was about. I watched pay-per-view boxing and saw an opening. With the internet as it is, a growing and evolving entity, it was possible to up the game to a platform without rules and regulations, without censorship. Pure visual freedom. The people who started experimenting with this, by auctioning methods of execution…”
“The ISIS terrorists in Syria,” Stone interrupted. He looked at the man’s surprised expression. “We know all about it. We know more than you’d think.”
The man scoffed. “You know nothing. Clawing your way in the dark, no doubt,” he said. “Well, the ISIS people were taken out swiftly. Afterwards, I took their efforts and gave them new audiences. And then a whole new format.”
“You killed them?”
“I leaked their whereabouts to serving CIA contacts of my former handler. The agency did the rest from the comfort of Nevada and a drone armed with Hellfire missiles.” Stone watched Cheney on the screens. Then he saw a screen with the aperture of a riflescope. The cross hairs were on Cheney’s chest. There were distance increments running down the side and a digital compass in the bottom left-hand corner. Directly below that screen another, from a more acute angle the same kind of aperture was visible. He looked back at the man, who was smiling at him, then looked back at the bank of screens and noticed a third screen. Much higher, the angle opposite from the second screen. Three sights, all focused on the same target and all covered from different distances and three separate angles. The man seemed to know what Stone had seen. He nodded. “The direct image is a camera feed through a recording enabled riflescope, placed at five-hundred metres with an elevation of three-hundred and twelve feet. It’s a .308 calibre. The image on the bottom screen is from a weapon placed at one-thousand-four-hundred and fifty metres with an elevation of five-hundred and fifty-seven feet. It’s a Barrett .50 calibre. To Vice President Cheney’s left is a 6mm long-barrelled assault rifle at three-hundred metres and eighty-eight feet of elevation. When all three weapons are fired simultaneously, the ballistic variables, distance and elevation will see all three bullets strike at the same instant. Three different weapons at three different distances and fired from three different locations. Utter confusion. Like I said, my masterpiece.”
“You’re sick,” Stone said quietly. He looked at Cheney, knew the man’s speech would end when he quoted a poem his son had once written about world peace in elementary school. The man would shed a tear, perhaps more. He wouldn’t be acting. Stone felt bile rise in his throat. He didn’t want to watch, averted his eyes, but looked back almost instantly.
“Like driving past an accident,” the man smiled. “You can’t help but take a look.” He looked at his watch again, then said to the woman, “Marnie, are we there with ISIS and Boco Haram?”
“It’s transferring as we speak. PDRK are close, they’re at eighty-million to claim it for North Korea.”
“Do it,” the man said. “Get their money and start it bouncing round the globe. They will look like idiots. Like North Korea could organise something like this!” He looked up as the giant black man with no nose and shattered teeth, and a wiry, compact Hispanic man walked in, both carrying assault rifles on slings and wearing pistols and combat knives on their belts. He nodded to them and they stood silently beside the ginger-haired man, who was still gripping Kathy firmly. Stone noticed his watch gleaming in the light and felt a flush of anger. For some reason the watch was taking his focus. He didn’t want it on the hideous sadist’s wrist a moment longer.
“It’s in!” the woman said triumphantly. “Islamic funding and organising to claim responsibility for the assassination. That’s the icing on the cake, with what we have lined
up.” She tapped the keypad and said, “It’s started its journey through the accounts. They can’t get it back.”
“Terminate the transaction in the South African account.”
“Ok.”
Stone looked at Kathy. Their eyes met and they shared a look of utter despair, but she turned back to the bank of screens. The ginger-haired man had a grip on her arm, but he was staring at the screen also, his grip loosening. Stone watched Cheney as the man got towards the end of his speech. He was talking about his son. He wiped a tear, started to recite the poem. It was hypnotic, the voyeurism strangely gratifying. He wanted to look away, but couldn’t. It may not happen, and he watched for that reason more than any other. Stone felt nothing but fluttering in his stomach and a heaviness in his chest. He willed the Vice President to break down with emotion, leave the stage. Step out from behind the lectern with its microphones from thirty different news networks. But he knew he wouldn’t. His tears would be real, but he was not prone to histrionics. He was not one for show-boating and could care less about public opinion. No, Luke Cheney would stand and finish the poem, and he would do so with dignity.
“How the hell have you got the snipers in place?” Stone asked. “Security is as tight as it gets.”
“Perhaps you should have been there, Agent Stone. Perhaps if you hadn’t requested to abstain from the nine-eleven memorial this year, then you would have been able to stop this from happening.” The man shook his head. “Poor Agent Stone… finding it hard to stand there, year after year, thinking about your poor fiancé with the second tower coming down on her. Your knee-jerk reaction to it all by turning your back on an engineering career and joining the army, going off to fight in Afghanistan. Your sense of duty taking you to the Secret Service…” He laughed. “Oh your face! I do hope you don’t play poker! Yes, I know everything there is to know about you. I’ve been doing my homework!”
Stone shrugged. “Ok,” he said. “So tell me how have you got three guns into play?”
