by Noah Mann
The mob, it appeared, was complete.
“Fletch,” Perkins said, and pointed the revolver at me.
Click.
“Well, this just gets more interesting by the second,” he said, swinging the weapon to Neil for the fifth pull of the trigger.
Click.
An audible gasp rippled through the crowd. Five trigger pulls on five empty chambers. Every single person knew what that meant. They waited, watching as Perkins shifted his aim to me again.
I stared at the man past the barrel of the revolver, one eye lined up with the weapon’s blade sights. He smiled at me as his finger rubbed the trigger, up and down, a simple application of pressure all that was needed to end the game.
To end me.
Then, without warning or explanation, he pulled the large handgun away from me and placed the muzzle against his own temple. Someone in the crowd screamed ‘No!’ Perkins, though, did not heed their plea. Nor did he stop grinning at me as he pulled the trigger a final time.
Click.
The gasp from the crowd this time was different, a mix of horror and relief in it. Perkins lowered the revolver to his side again, still fixed on me.
“Oops,” he said. “I guess I only had five bullets in it.”
He began to chuckle. Slowly, those who followed him began to let their shock subside and laugh along with him. It seemed to me right then that he’d cultivated more than followers—they were worshipers.
Perkins slid the revolver into its holster angled across the front of his belt and let his gaze moved between Neil and me. He held a hand up to quiet the crowd, and when their burst of giddiness ended he spoke.
“Gentlemen, where is BA Four Twelve?”
Neil’s head bowed a bit, as if he’d been posed this very question before, over and over again. I, too, wanted to ask him the very same thing. But not as it was being done now, by this man.
“One of you knows,” Perkins said. “Maybe both of you know. But eventually, and by that I mean soon, at least one of you will give me what I want.”
Biological Agent Four Eleven was the blight. Four Twelve was its cousin meant for the human population of planet earth. Tyler Olin, Neil’s former CIA colleague, if the man was to be believed, had told the tale of my friend stealing a sample of the deadly pathogen so that the government would not be its only possessor. Somewhere along the way between that action and his leaving Bandon, the man next to me had, apparently, hidden that hideously valuable item for safekeeping.
There was no guarantee that ‘safe’ would hold any meaning in perpetuity. Not with someone like Perkins on the hunt for Four Twelve. In a movie I might have screamed out to the man that he was mad. But this wasn’t a movie. It was all too real, and the reason he wanted it was no mystery to me.
“Even if we knew, and we told you, you couldn’t use it to take Bandon,” I said.
“And why is that, Fletch?” Perkins challenged me.
“It’s persistent,” I told him, recalling what Tyler Olin had shared about the deadly biological agent. “Once it kills, the virus will still be there. On the bodies. Maybe in the air. The only thing you accomplish by using it on Bandon is creating a ghost town.”
“That’s a scary story,” Perkins said. “But it also sounds like a load of bull.”
Behind him, Sheryl Quincy climbed onto the flatbed and approached, standing next to her man.
“He’s lying,” she said. “Weatherly never said anything like that about Four Twelve.”
“This is the same Weatherly who led the Unified Government into annihilation?” I asked.
Quincy stepped forward and brought a hand hard across my face, leaving my cheek stinging. When I recovered, I looked her straight in the eye and spit a wad of blood drawn by the blow onto the truck bed at her feet. Sensing that she might react, Perkins put a hand up, stopping any further assault.
“We need them able to talk,” Perkins said. “He can’t very well do that with a mouthful of broken teeth.”
Sheryl considered his order, delivered more gently to her than I suspected it would have been to any other. After a moment she drew her own mouthful of pure spit and let it fly at my feet before turning and hopping down from the flatbed. I watched her push fast through the crowd, disappearing in the darkness beyond the burning barrels.
“I could have just let her loose on you,” Perkins told me. “You can ask your friend there how much fun that can be.”
I turned toward Neil briefly. His bowed head angled toward me, and for the first time I noticed the remnants of old bruises, jaundiced patches on his jawline where he’d been struck repeatedly. And viciously.
They tried to beat it out of him...
“But Sheryl teaching you a lesson won’t give me what I need,” Perkins said. “Not on its own. See, I realize that you may know where it is, or you may not. You may have fed Weatherly a load of bull to drive him away from Bandon the first time, but Neil here, he most certainly knows where the virus is. And your presence allows me a new way forward.”
The tyrant wanted the answer to Four Twelve. He wanted its location. And now he had both the man who could give it to him, and leverage to make that happen.
Me.
“Fletch, you are going to be instrumental in convincing our mutual friend here to be more forthcoming,” Perkins said. “We can get started on that in a couple days. Before then, maybe you can convince him to open up. That would spare you from a great deal of unpleasantness.”
The crowd chuckled at that word—unpleasantness. They knew, as did I, that it was a highly sanitized description of what I was facing. If Perkins couldn’t get what he needed from my friend through the infliction of pain, he might be able to do so by doing the same to me. Or worse.
“It will be quite a show for my people, Fletch,” Perkins said, and his followers erupted, applause and cheers rising. “With you as the star.”
Perkins eyed me for a moment, smiling. He was in a position of power, and he knew it. But it wasn’t ultimate power. If it was, I would be dead. As would Neil. We still had something to offer him, which was why we were alive. For now.
In a small way, which might seem inconsequential, we still held that power over him. Denying him what he desired would keep us alive. All that remained to be seen was how long Neil and I could manage to resist.
“Put them back in their cages,” Perkins said.
Bryce and Jake climbed onto the flatbed and untied us from the metalwork at the rear of the cab, leaving our hands and arms bound like angel wings as they hauled us down from the truck. I glanced back toward Perkins as we were manhandled through the crowd. The man was almost giddy, joyously smiling from ear to ear.
Until he wasn’t.
His expression turned harsh as the sound of the bell clanging rose. I looked toward it, and thought it seemed to be coming from atop the bank building we were being taken back to.
“Aircraft!”
Someone in the crowd shouted that, and things switched into some oddly non-chaotic quickened motion. Bryce and Jake picked up their pace, pulling Neil and me along, while behind us a half dozen people grabbed five-gallon buckets that had been pre-filled with water and poured them into the burning barrels. As the fires were quenched, others put lids atop the steel containers and flipped them over. Up and down the street, the few artificial lights that had been on went dark, and people ducked quickly inside the blacked-out buildings.
By the time Neil and I were hustled back into the bank, the world outside was swallowed by night, dark and silent.
A few minutes later, the plane came.
Three
We were locked back in our cells, our hands and arms unbound, as the aircraft buzzed the town at low altitude.
“You’re wondering,” Neil said.
“A lot of things,” I confirmed.
I sat against the wall of my cell, close to the bars, straining to see out of the vault to where Jake stood guard, his warming fire doused with every other source of light in to
wn.
“They have scouts two miles out,” Neil told me. “Eight of them. One every forty-five degrees. If they hear or see anything they send a signal on their radios. No words, just clicks on the mic. Three for intruders on land, four for aircraft. A sentry in town rings the bell if it’s aircraft. Otherwise the warning is passed by word of mouth.”
“That’s comprehensive,” I said.
“I’ve had a couple years to absorb their tactics,” Neil said. “Their procedures.”
I looked away from the vault’s opening to my friend. In the near total darkness I could only make out the faintest features of him as he lay on the floor near the bars, head resting on one thin arm like some bony pillow.
“He doesn’t think they’re ready,” Neil said, his gaze angling upward as the aircraft made another low pass over the town. “They need time to prepare before making their move on Bandon. That’s why hiding is an art form for his people. Perkins has them drill getting to cover constantly.”
“This isn’t a drill,” I said.
“No,” Neil confirmed. “It’s not. Is the plane from Bandon?”
“No,” I said.
That answer brought with it new questions. I knew that Chris Beekman could not have both reached the abandoned aircraft he’d spotted and made one of them airworthy already. Even if he had, which was impossible, that he could have received word from Bandon on our location was even less likely. The calls that Dave Arndt and I had put out announcing our intention to land near Klamath Falls hadn’t been acknowledged.
Yet there was a plane overhead, a single-engine aircraft by the sound of it. It had come from somewhere, and carried at least one person. One person who was very interested in the dead town below.
“Do they get many air warnings?” I asked.
Across from me, Neil eased himself up and shook his head as he sat resting near the bars.
“This is the first,” he answered.
That bit of information only added to the oddness of the event. The oddness of everything.
“Neil, listen...”
“Soon all that drama Perkins went through won’t be for show,” he said, ignoring my request. “The gun won’t be unloaded.”
“Neil...”
“They’ll kill us, but first they’re going to hurt you, Fletch,” he went on. “Probably worse than they hurt me. And they hurt me in ways that...”
He stopped there, abandoning that thread of explanation and looking to me.
“Fletch, tell me about Grace. And Krista. And...”
He began to choke up as he tried to utter the name of his son. The child he’d hardly had any chance to know before Grace and their children were sent back to Bandon as Neil remained with the Unified Government forces.
“Brandon is terrific,” I said. “Grace and Krista, too.”
He smiled through the threat of tears, his gaze thick behind the puddled emotion. It was a burst of happy relief he was showing, but would it remain as such if I continued? If I told him more of those he cherished. More about Grace and the life she’d lived when it was believed he was dead.
I would not share that. Not yet.
“Neil, I need some answers,” I said, and my friend nodded slowly, a few errant tears finally spilling.
“I would think you do,” he said as he wiped his cheeks. “You said you saw me die.”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “Tyler Olin shot you.”
Neil snickered, a quiet flourish of gallows humor as he shook his head. “Ty Olin.”
“He slipped into Bandon during the Unified Government siege,” I explained. “He said your Ranger signal was some sort of warning.”
Neil stared at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, adding what I’d said to some collection data points that seemed to be building some understanding within.
“I imagine he told you all about me,” Neil said, eyeing me through the din. “About who I really was.”
“Central Intelligence Agency,” I said. “You’re a spy.”
“I was,” he corrected me. “Now I’m just...I’m this.”
He gestured weakly to the gaunt frame that defined his physicality.
“Yeah. But you’re alive, and I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
Neil glanced briefly through the vault door, to where Jake stood near the front of the bank, peering out its shattered windows as the sound of the aircraft began to recede. The man was out of earshot, and that seemed to be what concerned my friend—privacy. What he was about to share with me he wanted no one else to know.
“You didn’t see me die, Fletch,” he said as he looked back to me. “You saw a man named Riley Grimes die.”
I didn’t question his statement. I simply waited for some further explanation which would make what he’d just shared believable.
“If you lived in the world that I did, and you did the things that I did, certain things were extremely helpful,” he told me. “It was a benefit to be seen in one location, doing a completely ordinary thing, while also working half a world away gathering intelligence on a drug cartel’s links to Philippine terrorists.”
It took me a moment to process not just what he had said, but what it suggested.
“A double,” I said.
“He was paid handsomely to fill in for me in the mundane things that Neil Moore the mid-level diplomat might do,” my friend explained. “Take my place at social events. Personal appointments.”
The way my friend looked at me after those last words hinted at something he was both embarrassed by, and proud of.
“What do you mean ‘personal’?”
“Remember the Seahawks game we went to?” Neil asked.
I did. It was several years before the blight appeared. A boy’s weekend trip to Seattle to take in a football game, which we had.
Or, which I had.
“That was him?”
Neil nodded. I shook my head.
“I spent forty-eight hours with...”
I couldn’t finish the statement. Neil could sense the sudden doubt rising within me.
“That was his job, Fletch. He’d been briefed on every aspect of my life so he could slip into it when that was required. It wasn’t done to fool you, it was done—”
“To protect you,” I said, finishing the explanation for him. “I get that. It’s just that...to me that was you. We talked about things going back decades.”
And we had, comparing the game we were watching to our own exploits on the field in high school. There was no way then that I would have known that the person I was sitting next to was not the friend I’d grown up with. Even now that possibility bordered on the unbelievable.
But it made sense. All that he was telling me did. Except for one thing.
“That was all before, Neil. How did this Grimes guy end up getting shot down by Olin?”
“When things started falling apart, Riley made a choice,” my friend said. “As the Unified Government rose and ours fell, he sought out Weatherly. By that time the good general had shifted his own loyalty. He was the real deal to Riley. Once they hooked up, Weatherly had all the information he needed about me. He had his spies inside our military reach out when we were in Skagway.”
“You told me that when you left Bandon,” I reminded him.
Marines had come in on Ospreys to evacuate some of the survivors in the ungainly tilt-rotor aircraft. As had some covert liaison from the Unified Government.
“Black is white,” Neil said, repeating the mantra he’d shared in those last moments we’d shared before leaving with Grace and Krista.
“And white is black,” I said, completing the statement for him. “Were you talking about your double when you said that?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Neil said. “But I was worried. To have Weatherly send people to me, trying to get me to switch sides, I knew he had to have more information than just my dual life. He was deeply enmeshed in military and intelligence before the blight, so he could have known about me. But after Skagway
, I was afraid there were more turncoats already in place.”
“There was,” I said.
“You said something about me being traded for Sheryl Quincy,” Neil said.
It was becoming clear to me that much of what I’d seen my friend do, or say, had not been him at all.
“Weatherly paraded you on camera,” I said. “Over an amateur TV transmission. You were bruised. He said you were going to be executed for betraying him.”
“That wasn’t me,” Neil said, drawing a long breath that ended in a shallow, wet cough. “Weatherly played his hand there to get his spy back. He knew you’d do anything to save me.”
I nodded. But I wasn’t pleased with myself for understanding that. It was quite the opposite, in fact.
“And all I did was invite your double into Bandon,” I said.
“It sounds like Ty Olin took care of that for you,” Neil observed.
“He wanted to kill you,” I told my friend.
“I know,” Neil said, quieting for a moment before going on. “That wasn’t me putting out the Ranger call.”
“I get that now.”
“Weatherly was only afraid of one thing,” Neil said.
“Four Twelve,” I replied.
Neil nodded and pulled his frail body closer to the bars.
“He knew that Ty and I worked together to get samples of that and Four Eleven,” Neil explained. “When I wasn’t being forthcoming with my answers, he had Grimes record the Ranger warning.”
“That was a long shot,” I said. “That Olin would even be alive, that he’d be close enough to receive the transmission.”
Now my friend shook his head, dismissing my downward quantification of his old partner’s drive and ability.
“Having met Olin, you should understand that’s not even close to being accurate,” Neil said.
I stared at him for a moment. There was truth to what he was saying, I realized. But there was another truth as well—Tyler Olin had underestimated me.
“I killed Olin,” I said.
Neil straightened a bit where he sat, absorbing what I’d just told him.
“I killed him because he killed you,” I said. “Except he didn’t.”
