Christopher Golden

by Codename Wolverine X-men

  “Despite your relationship with Patrick Lipton, Agent Cassidy, and despite the deep respect we all have for the man, he isn’t bureau chief here anymore. Hasn’t been for over two years, as you know,” Locke replied.

  “I’ve tried to call ye time and again, so I have, but ye’ve not returned my calls, sir. I’m through with me leave now, and it’s a return to active duty I’ll be wanting now. If it’s all the same to you.”

  He was polite enough, was Cassidy. But Piers could see the wildness in the lad’s eyes and it set off an array of alarms within him. He’d always favored Sean Cassidy. But now Piers pitied him, and feared for him as well. The boy had grown up in a good family, with money and title, though nothing of any real political value. He’d earned his degree from Trinity in Dublin with the highest honors, and joined the agency right out of college.

  He’d had a passion for the game, had Sean Cassidy.

  But that had died along with his lovely wife, Maeve. The fire in Cassidy’s eyes on this day was far different, far darker than the one it had replaced.

  “Please sit down, Sean,” Piers began, and saw the cloud of suspicion pass over Cassidy’s face at his use of the man’s Christian name.

  But Cassidy didn’t argue. He sat in silence on the edge of one of the pair of leather chairs facing the bureau chief’s desk.

  “So, you feel you’re ready for active duty again, then?” Piers asked, trying to find a way to the real subject of this meeting.

  “Aye,” Cassidy replied. “I cannot grieve forever, sir.”

  Piers saw the lie on Cassidy’s face. As far as the man was concerned, he would be grieving forever.

  “There is a concern, I must tell you, Sean, that you might use active duty status to further your own ends,” Piers told him bluntly. “In effect, that you will pursue some vendetta against those you believe responsible for Maeve’s death.”

  Cassidy’s eyes narrowed. He was breathing through his nose, Piers noticed. He realized, for the first time, just how dangerous a man Sean Cassidy could be. Once, it might have been a comforting thought. Now, with the man as volatile and unpredictable as an animal, Piers found Cassidy’s wildness disconcerting, to say the least.

  “Agent Cassidy?” Piers ventured, returning to less personal, more familiar territory.

  “Sir?”

  “What do you have to say to address such concerns?” Piers asked.

  “I’ll be honest, Chief Locke, as ye’ve always been straighi with me,” Cassidy said. “I don’t believe that my Maeve’s passing was anything other than a horrible tragedy, an’ nobody’s fault. But what haunts me, sir, is only that I wasn’t here. ‘Twas her birthday, y’know, only days before she … before the explosion. I promised her I’d be home, but I missed it, sir. Again.

  “I missed it because that witch from the KGB led me a merry chase across, half of France,” he said grimly.

  Cassidy would say no more, and Piers knew better than to ask. The KGB agent was little more than a slip of a girl. Cassidy had been embarrassed when she had snatched the defector. Dr. Smitrovich, who had chosen to leave his country with the aid of Interpol—a service they vehemently denied, of course But worse, during that operation, in which he was to capture the girl, she had hurt him, and Cassidy had ended up in hospital in Nice.

  He was there, healing, when Maeve had died. Cassidy blamed the girl, Romanova, for the fact that he hadn’t been ai home when Maeve died, that he wasn’t there to stop it or a! least to be with her when it happened.

  “Sean,” Piers began, but Cassidy cut him off.

  “I’ll never forgive her that, sir. If that makes me a vigilante or some such thing, I suppose that’s what I’ll be.”

  Piers stared at Cassidy, “astonished as much by his forthrightness as by his obsession.

  “You understand, Agent Cassidy,” he said, “that you might just as well blame Interpol for your absence. It was on our behalf that you were attempting to capture this girl to begin with.”

  Cassidy’s eyes narrowed again.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. “But we are the law. It’s our duty to bring people like Natasha Romanova to justice, to shed light on the atrocities of killers and spies and thieves, and this girl is all three.”

  Piers sat back, stared intently at Agent Cassidy, and tried desperately to think of an alternative to what he was about to do. Short of dismissing Cassidy altogether, he couldn’t think of anything. And even if he did that, Piers suspected it wouldn’t prevent Sean from pursuing the Romanova girl on his own.

  “What is it, sir?” Cassidy asked. “If ye have something else to add, please share it. Otherwise, please give me your decision: can I return to active duty, or not?”

  Piers nodded quickly, resolved. “Indeed you may, Agent Cassidy,” he replied. “But there is one condition.”

  “I suspect I know what ye’re going to ask, sir, and ye know I cannot vow—”

  “Let me finish, Sean, please.”

  Cassidy nodded.

  “It isn’t what you think. Actually, I rather think you’ll be pleased with this assignment. But even within the assignment itself, there are conditions.”

  The wild-eyed Irish man was silent.

  “More defectors,” Piers explained.

  That got Cassidy’s attention.

  “A man and woman, according to our sources,” he went on. “They’ve stolen some kind of computer disk. The information stored on that disk will tip the balance of power in the Cold War toward whichever side gets to it first.

  “A covert unit codenamed Team X is being sent into East Berlin to retrieve the disk. The disk, Agent Cassidy. Not the defectors. But the Zhevakovs have asked for Interpol’s help. Officially, of course, we can do nothing of the sort. It would undermine our position as a law-enforcement agency. But that doesn’t mean we won’t help. That disk, and the agents themselves, could be invaluable to the Western effort in the Cold War. That’s where you come in. Papers are being prepared which should get the Zhevakovs past the Berlin Wall. Your job is to make certain of it, and make sure that disk is retrieved as well.”

  Cassidy’s eyes narrowed. “The KGB will send a team of their own, of course.”

  “No team,” Piers replied, and looked away. “Just one agent.”

  “The Black Widow,” Cassidy whispered, almost to himself.

  “You realize I should not do this, Sean,” Piers said. “I should assign someone else. But you’re still the best I’ve got. Just remember that we want the Widow alive.”

  “If possible,” Cassidy replied.

  But Piers could see the hatred, the fury burning in Cassidy’s eyes, and he knew that Interpol had already lost one of its best agents.

  Piers Locke turned to glance out his window and saw thai the London sky had begun to cloud over. What a surprise, he thought bitterly. And he prayed that his last week as bureau chief would pass without incident.

  * * *

  “Guess we’re gonna find out what this is all about,” Wolverine snarled. “Move it!”

  He grabbed Mystique by the hand and got her moving toward the kitchen. They had a few seconds before the hallway outside would be filled with troops. If he wasn’t certain Maverick had reinforced the apartment’s outer walls, he’d be concerned about small-arms fire just blowing the wall in.

  “Windows?” Mystique asked.

  “They’d have come in that way if they could have,” Logan said, shaking his head. “No, they’ll be coming right through that front door.”

  Mystique kept glancing over her shoulder as Wolverine led her into the kitchen. He went immediately to the white refrigerator, its face as blank as the life of the soldier who owned it, and put his shoulder into sliding it back. The fridge rolled easily—testament to the fact that something was hidden beneath it. The average refrigerator would have torn up the ancient linoleum. This one was made not to.

  Beneath it was a large, black metal square on the floor. The strongbox had no obvious seams, handles or locking mechanis
ms. Logan didn’t have time to figure out the trick. Adaman-tium claws descended, carving through metal in one smooth stroke. With his other hand, he reached down into the tear in the metal and pulled. The top of the strongbox came away as the few strands that still held it to the rest of the box snapped.

  “Tell me that’s what I think it is,” Mystique said.

  In the main room of the apartment, automatic-weapons fire popped and Logan could hear the crack of wood and the shattering of ceramic as the place’s furnishings were obliterated.

  “This building has been sealed by order of the Department of Defense,” a voice shouted. “Come out with your hands up, and you will not be hurt.”

  “Yeah,” Logan snarled quietly. “If you’d said that before you started shootin’, I mighta believed ya.”

  He slammed an AR-18 ArmaLite assault rifle into Mystique’s waiting hands, and watched her face light up with a smile that made her exotic blue skin and yellow eyes seem more savage than ever. He then handed her a MAC-11 submachine gun with the stock removed, and she slipped it into her waistband.

  “Just like old times, huh?” she said.

  “Try not to kill anyone,” Wolverine replied gruffly.

  “Maybe not so much like old times at that,” she muttered, then turned and went to the kitchen door.

  Logan reached into the strongbox and pulled out a pair of nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch semiautomatics and several grenades he had determined to be concussion rather than fragmentation.

  “I’m going to count to three,” the loudmouth in the other room was shouting.

  “Three?” Mystique muttered. “What happened to ten? Even five?”

  “We ain’t gonna let him get to three,” Wolverine said.

  They looked at each other, a pair of warrior-spies who’d come to grudgingly respect one another over the years. Respect, true, but they didn’t like each other, then or now.

  “One!” the loudmouth cried.

  “Go,” Wolverine said.

  Logan went high—he could survive getting shot—and Mystique went low. The nines barked in his hands even as he surveyed their opposition: half a dozen hard-looking, professional soldiers in Kevlar jumpsuits. Just what he’d expected. Anyone with the guts and the smarts to nab Sabretooth and Maverick had to be very good.

  But very good wasn’t enough. When it came right down to it, Wolverine was the best there was at what he did. Bar none.

  He loved the Kevlar. It meant he could shoot at the soldiers without worrying about killing them. All he needed to do, for the moment at least, was hurt them.

  Wolverine took two bullets in his lower abdomen and one in the shoulder, which bounced off his adamantium-laced clavicle. He advanced into the room, and the pair of nines grew hot in his hands as he focused on a trio of soldiers in the front. They stumbled backward under his barrage. Two of them fell. The other, a mountainous human being, was forced back into the hallway.

  Mystique had dived through the door, landed on her belly, and opened up at the legs of the three soldiers on her side. Part of him wanted to think she was doing as he’d asked, trying not to kill anyone. But as he heard the shouts of pain and saw the three men’s legs shattered and torn up by bullets, he wondered if he was being naive. Mystique was probably just shooting for whatever wasn’t protected.

  Of course, she could have gone for head shots.

  “Logan, drop it and back off!” the man-mountain in the hallway roared, and Wolverine realized it had been him speaking to them before. “You and Darkholme don’t have a chance of getting out of here. The place is surrounded. You’re both coming with us.”

  As if to punctuate the soldier’s words, Logan heard shouting and running on the stairs outside the door. He looked around the room quickly. The three men Mystique had shot were either out cold or writhing in pain. The two Logan had knocked down were winded, trying to get up. Neither was stupid enough to go for his gun at the moment.

  “We should get out of here,” Mystique said quietly, her eyes and weapon trained on the shattered apartment doorway.

  “Not without some answers,” he replied, and took a step toward one of the soldiers he’d knocked down.

  The man recoiled in fear, began to slide himself back toward the wall, wincing with the pain of the many bruises that Logan’s shots would leave him with, Kevlar or no. Logan himself winced slightly at the pain in his gut where the flesh was knitting back together. It was a pain that would have crippled anyone else. But Wolverine lived with it every day.

  “Tell me, bub,” he snarled. “You don’t want me to make you.”

  The soldier’s eyes were wide, his mouth opened slightly.

  A pair of grenades popped through the shattered doorway and rolled across the floor. Frag bombs, too—not nice, gentle concussive explosives.

  “Mystique!” he thundered.

  Without waiting for a response, he took three strides toward the window, used both arms to slash a huge hole in the wall, and turned just in time to catch Mystique as she slammed into him. They tumbled out the window into the darkness together, an eyeblink before the grenades exploded, blowing the hole in the wall much wider, and killing everyone in the room.

  They fell, then. As they plummeted toward the ground, Wolverine did everything he could to keep Mystique above him. Finally, he pulled her to him in an embrace, and was about to close his eyes when they slammed into the roof of a white cable van, crumpling the metal.

  Mystique was off him in an instant, but Wolverine was completely disoriented at first. His bones wouldn’t break, but the flesh of his back and legs would be bruised and broken, lacerated and torn. At least for several minutes.

  But he didn’t have several minutes. His brain was a bit scrambled as well, but that too would pass shortly. The moon wasn’t bright, but he closed his eyes a moment against the meager light nevertheless. He smelled the acrid odors of the explosion, and a strong whiff of Chinese food from the restaurant across the street.

  “You saved my life,” Mystique sneered as he dropped to his feet from the van’s roof. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Not much to worry about there, darlin’,” he replied. “Special circumstances and all.”

  “What was that all about?” Mystique said. “I thought they wanted you alive.”

  “They do,” Wolverine replied. “They just don’t want any of their own boys giving anything away.”

  “You mean they expected you to live through that?”

  In answer, three soldiers, a man and two women, rounded the corner of the building, led by man-mountain himself, spotlit by a streetlamp. They’d gotten downstairs quickly, but Wolverine saw that the explosion had already garnered attention, particularly from several people who had come out of the Chinese restaurant, and now huddled near the front door of the place.

  The soldiers opened fire.

  Wolverine reached for the concussive grenades he’d hooked to his costume, but only one remained. He pulled the pin and lobbed it toward them. The seven-foot soldier took the brunt of the blast. It threw him back nearly ten feet and when he hit the pavement, he hit hard, and didn’t move.

  The others were coming on, but Mystique opened up with her ArmaLite, strafing across their bodies. One took a bullet in the cheek, but didn’t go down, and Mystique glanced at Logan as if in apology.

  A dark sedan screeched to a stop in the middle of the street and the three soldiers ran for it, laying down suppressing fire which forced Logan and Mystique to take cover behind the cable van until the sedan had already pulled away.

  Wolverine growled, low and dangerous. “Not what I had planned,” he said angrily. “We needed someone to—”

  They looked at one another, glanced around the van again. Man-mountain was lying in the street, completely unconscious.

  “I’ll cover you,” Mystique told him.

  Logan wanted to turn, to search her eyes, to see if he could trust her in a way he never had before. He didn’t dare; he knew what he would find. But he went
anyway.

  Ignoring the onlookers in front of the Chinese restaurant, and the others he assumed were staring out some of the windows above, Wolverine loped across the moonlit pavement. He knelt by the side of the fallen man and felt for his pulse. It was strong, despite the bloody wound on the forehead where the man’s head had smacked the tar.

  In the distance, police sirens began to wail. Time to move out.

  He tested the soldier’s weight. Logan was short, but stronger than he looked. However, this guy was going to be way too much for him. And now he was becoming increasingly aware of the attention of witnesses all around. But if he couldn’t carry the big goon out of there, maybe Mystique …

  Even as he turned to look for Raven Darkholme, he heard the near-silent thump of stealth chopper rotors against the air. It was dropping down on them from way up, and fast. Logan moved for cover instantly, but he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Automatic-weapons fire exploded from the chopper, and Logan tensed to take the bullets, heard them biting chunks out of the pavement.

  Then he was diving behind the cable van, rolling, staring up at Mystique as he realized he hadn’t been shot at all.

  “What…” he began.

  “They want to make sure we stay in the dark,” she said grimly.

  Wolverine knew before he looked that the man-mountain would be dead. But he wasn’t prepared for the way the big man’s body had been torn up by the attack. Hollow-point rounds, he figured. Or even exploding rounds. The guy was a mess. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, but it really ticked him off.

  The police sirens had grown closer, and he heard tires screeching not far off. Suddenly, an NYPD prowl car skidded around a corner, lights blazing, siren blaring.

  “Meet me back at the White Horse,” Logan drawled.

  He watched as Mystique shapeshifted into a disgusting-looking old homeless woman, dressed in rags and smelling of sickness and waste. Raven Darkholme was a very clever woman. In this guise, the police wouldn’t even detain her long enough to give an eyewitness statement.

  Wolverine melted into the shadows, even as Mystique walked straight across the street toward the gathering crowd of people who would claim to have “seen it all,” even though most of them had probably been hiding during the entire firefight.