Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  He was surprised to see her in his special place, but sat away from her, eating popcorn one kernel at a time and watching out of the corner of his eye.

  Once, she turned and smiled at him. He liked her smile.

  He told her that his name was Hannibal. She said her name was Indra, and that she was something called a Siddhi. He had no idea what the word “Siddhi” meant.

  When he awakened, he knew that somehow she was still there in his mind. Sometimes when he went back he could not find her, but sometimes footprints indented the rugs, or some of his toys had been moved.

  He would find her. Would find Indra, the Siddhi girl who played with his things. And then …

  And then …

  Odd. He wasn’t sure what he’d do.

  And in its own way, that was fun as well.

  CHAPTER 5

  Olympia picked up a sausage croissant and a too-sweet mango smoothie at Burger King, then hit Atlanta’s freeway network, a concrete web layered over ancient trade routes from a time of plantations and rolling farms. She’d once heard that the entire system was based on a maze of ancient deer trails, and she could believe it. Even more probable to her was the possibility that Native Americans had simply lied to the encroaching white men, and laughed their asses off at the prospect of settlers circling in endless loops, wondering how the hell they got so lost.

  The major consolation to the twisty paths is that they did, eventually, get you there.

  The Central News Service’s production offices were housed in a seven-story building located on Marietta Street and Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta. Its parking lot was accessed through a key-card gate, and although Olympia Dorsey didn’t rate an assigned space, it was usually pretty easy to find one on the second level of the covered parking garage.

  It was the best, most promising job she had ever had, a world away from the concrete playgrounds and fragile hopes of her childhood.

  Mom and Dad would be proud, she thought. Well, Dad might have been disappointed that she hadn’t followed him into civil rights law … but under the scowl would be joy, she was sure.

  And Mom would have been ecstatic.

  She locked her car, walked to the elevator, and rode up to the fourth floor, where for the last two years she had been a floating personal assistant, moving between health and financial sections, not at all what she had hoped for when she had migrated north from The Miami Herald.

  Still, it was a long way from Liberty City.

  By the time Olympia entered the staff meeting room her stomach was growling that the sandwich she’d wolfed down simply wasn’t going to cut it, and the gleaming silver tray on a side table contained the answer to her stomach’s increasingly rude demands. “Anyone get the last bear claw?”

  The white-paneled room was dominated by a long, low table, around which almost twenty reporters and assistants and on-air personalities clustered. Christy Flavor, one of the younger researchers and a friend and failed diet buddy, grinned. “Saved it for you. Mmm. Fried sugar.”

  “Breakfast of champions.” Olympia grabbed the bear claw and took a seat at the staff table’s black rectangle. She’d be as lumpy as Christy if not for the fact that her body apparently had a long and forgiving memory concerning her Atlanta Rocks! gym regimen.

  Chief editor Grant Sloan glared at her from beneath his bushy shelf of Groucho-level eyebrows. His expression suggested that this was not genuine anger, more a matter of annoyance that he hadn’t snagged that bear claw for himself. “Thank you, Ms. Dorsey, for gracing us with your presence. Finally, we can proceed.”

  She graciously inclined her head. Some of the other reporters laughed. Joyce Chow, CNS’s financial face, even smiled.

  “When your pixilated visage appears on the six o’clock news buying crack at a barbershop across the street from a grammar school, you, too, will earn a free pass,” he said to the others. The Smyrna PD corruption story had been her greatest coup at CNS. Terrifying, surprising herself with just how far she’d been willing to go, Olympia had dressed down and hung around the shop until they trusted her, and then convinced them to sell her enough cocaine to lead her to their source. From there, CNS researchers had been able to observe and record until the police exposed themselves as freelance protection services for the largest drug ring in the Atlanta area.

  Devastating, intoxicating, and one of those precious moments when she really felt like a reporter. They’d needed a black woman who could plausibly play the ghetto queen and had never been on air. Liberty City to the rescue. It had taken two weeks to wear Sloan down to the notion, but it had been worth it all around.

  “Until then, quiet down,” Sloan said, interrupting her thoughts. He warmed up a PowerPoint screen. “All right. Metro, we have the streetlights article. Needs attribution. And there’s a tie-in with the sports page and financial. Looks like there may be a connection between the Lakers sale and the NBA stock fraud…”

  “The McMillian case?” Christy asked.

  “That’s the one. Athletes dumping their money into pyramid schemes is sexy. Jump on it.”

  “Will do.”

  Sloan thumped his fist on the desk, and Olympia jumped. He almost seemed to regret the next item on his agenda. “Now we have something interesting, and I’m not sure where to put it. Exhibit A.”

  “This”—an image of a Web site appeared on a wall screen. A document of some kind—“popped up on an Indonesian server three days ago. Manifesto from a group calling themselves the Children of Light. They reprinted this article from Rolling Stone magazine, listing the hundred worst unindicted criminals. You remember that?”

  “Good ink,” Christy said.

  “Good electrons,” Olympia said. That list was exactly the kind of thing she hoped someone would consult her on one day. She had a few names that would fit perfectly.

  “Well spoke.” That was Joyce Chow. As a floating researcher, Olympia rotated between department heads. Joyce was one of her most frequent and enjoyable assignments. “It was on their blog, not in print.”

  Sloan continued, “They said that ‘from this point forward the wicked will be punished, and so that all will understand, we begin with the monsters on this list.’ You’ll recall that said monsters included the president of Russia, the prime minister of Israel, and the president of the United States.”

  “Our previous vice president, too.” Christy angled for a honey-glazed donut. Joyce smoothly hip-checked her out of position. Good. Let them get distracted, while she concentrated on the potential of this new story. “Let’s not leave him out of it.”

  “Heaven forbid,” Joyce said. “That got the Secret Service interested, but the Web site was a dead end. Traced it as far as Nigeria.”

  “Where,” Olympia said, “they are also holding millions of dollars for me, as soon as I get around to sending them my bank routing number and password.”

  “Let us know how that works out,” Sloan said. “Anyway, someone bounced the order around until the trail looked like a plate of spaghetti.”

  “Well,” Christy said. “Nobody’s dead, right?”

  Sloan shook his head. “That’s not exactly true. The former governor of Chihuahua died yesterday morning. Some kind of convulsion.”

  Now Olympia remembered hearing a radio news item during drive time. “He was on the list?”

  “Number seventy-eight. Now, the Elite, whoever the hell they are, promised that one person would die the first day, then two the second, and four the third, and so on … until Christmas Day, when, among four thousand others, the twelve worst criminals will die.”

  Leaning against the wall, Joyce clucked her tongue. “Twelve Days of Christmas. In reverse. Someone has a sick sense of humor.”

  “We want something on this for the six o’clock segment … and on the blog by seven.”

  Olympia’s mind was whirring with possibilities. She shot her hand up. “Put me in, Coach. I can pull a rabbit out of this hat.”

  “You have an angle?” Sloan
asked.

  “I see dead people,” she replied.

  * * *

  Olympia’s cubicle was just another nook in the maze, indistinguishable from the others except for a few Christmas cards, the framed picture of Nicki and Hannibal taped on the right side of her computer, and an endearingly clumsy drawing of a hilltop castle on the left.

  She sat on her Hello Kitty chair pad and began reading her top handout aloud:

  “‘Then … the power will be handed over to the people. The towers of government and finance will fall. This is just the beginning: all “leaders” must die. And then the rest of the world follows…’”

  Suddenly realizing she wasn’t alone, Olympia turned to find Christy Flavor reading the printout over her shoulder. The backs of Christy’s arms were noticeably slacker than in her wall-climbing days. “Pretty fruity stuff,” Christy said. “But they got lucky with the convulsion.” She paused. “Poison, maybe? Doesn’t strychnine cause convulsions?”

  “I guess,” Olympia said. “Does seem like a story.”

  “What kind of story?”

  She shrugged. “Just general weirdness, but I think we can make it sing.”

  “How did Rolling Stone put that list together?”

  Olympia beetled her brows, pretending to search her memory. At times, it was useful to conceal just how “on top” of things she tried to stay. “They surveyed a couple hundred reporters and bloggers around the world. Asked for candidates, and chose the ones mentioned most often.”

  “Hmm. Know any of the sources?”

  “Nope. Think I should find someone who does?”

  Christy reread the handout. “End of the world stuff, huh? Counting up that way it would take a couple of centuries to thin us out.”

  Olympia laughed. “Give that woman a D in math. Doubling the number every day would lead to … five million or so in a month, and billions soon after. I would say the world would be empty in about … fifty days.”

  “Guess I can forget that diet,” Christy said. “Just in time for the holidays!”

  “The end times diet.” Olympia sighed. “You don’t lose weight, but there’s nobody left alive to call you Blimpy.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The Atlanta Racing Federation’s open track east of Smyrna hosted go-kart and motocross on weekends, and rented out their facilities during the week. When Terry Nicolas pulled his green Subaru up next to the van with the ATLANTA STUNT TEAM sticker, he could already hear the roar of the engines above his radio’s Morning Zoo chatter.

  By the time he parked and walked up through the tunnel to the stands, his blood was racing faster than the vehicles below. Down in the dust, a truck was looping around the track, pursued by a black-and-white sedan. Rows of orange cones cutting across the curves forced both vehicles into tight swerves and turns.

  Perched high in the stands, a skinny man in a wheelchair watched a computer screen divided into sections. That was Ernie Sevugian, their computer god, and Terry knew the computer displayed the scene below from different remote camera angles. One of the screens showed the vehicles moving over computer-generated terrain different than the racetrack below.

  Beside the man in the wheelchair was Terry’s roommate, Mark Shavers. Somewhat Georgian, his Stalinesque facial features hovered, intense, deeply tanned. Late thirties, massively built, the muscle was not as bouncy as it had been when Terry first met him in Iraq, doing dirty and dangerous things with remarkable flair. He had lost a step or two compared to then, but so had they all. It had been Mark’s first combat tour when they met. Those dark-ringed eyes had seen three lifetimes of carnage since then.

  “Quite a show,” Terry said.

  Mark chuckled. “Just a kid who used to like blowing shit up.”

  “Slice yourself sideways and count the rings,” Terry said. “That kid is still in there.” Terry had never told any of the others, but his private name for his companions was the Pirates, less in reference to their current enterprise than in honor of an old Milton Caniff newspaper cartoon his father had collected in a series of scrapbooks and shared with his son, one of Terry’s fondest early memories.

  Terry and the Pirates.

  And Dad.

  The trail vehicle expertly “pitted” the lead vehicle, ramming its left front bumper to the targeted right rear, spinning it. As the lead vehicle began to spin the trail vehicle braked, kissing the passenger side with its front and pinning the doors shut as they both stopped. On the computer-generated screen the lead vehicle was pinned against a guardrail instead of a row of cones.

  “All right!” Mark barked into his handheld radio. “Twelve seconds and controlled the vic. Good. He is almost as good as you, Terry.”

  The man in the wheelchair grinned. Terry sometimes thought he looked like Rorschach from The Watchmen. Ernie Sevugian was his former warrant officer. He was affectionately known as Father Geek. Geek was pale and prematurely bald, his head dotted with perspiration. “You’re still assuming they’ll take the firebreak.” He spoke with an Afrikaans twinge, a bit of confusion about his f’s and s’s that suggested his Cape Town childhood had never completely faded away.

  Mark nodded. “I know Colonel O’Shay, and I know his crew. We have been fine-tuning this, Terry. We just got the latest intel.” O’Shay and his crew. Thieving bastards who were going to suffer a very nasty surprise in less than two weeks. Payback was going to be quite the bitch.

  Mark began to brief them as if they were in a J-Bad team house instead of a Georgia racetrack. He pulled up a PowerPoint slide with Google Earth imagery and graphic overlays.

  “They’ll come in at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, get right onto Route 78, and head east to Carolina. Single vic, just O’Shay, Huddleston, and two or three security. Father Geek confirmed a rental for a large SUV. Assume one Secfor will be ready as a tail gunner. Assume all are armed with at least handguns. Automatic weapons are possible but unlikely—they are trying to keep a low profile and can’t afford extra attention. O’Shay is always the smartest guy in the room—just ask him.” This got several chuckles. O’Shay was pretty damned smart … but he had totally underestimated how long Mark Shavers and the Pirates could hold a grudge. A serious, possibly fatal error.

  “He will be assuming no one has a clue about him, otherwise he wouldn’t risk smuggling in the first place. The heaviest weapon is likely semiauto M4s or similar carbines or shotguns, things that could have been purchased in the last thirty days and not get them hooked up if stopped. My guess is they’ll drop a security man outside the base with a few gym bags of gear so they won’t have any issues on base, then pick him back up as they leave. Security is tight and random antiterrorism measures could blow it for him if they have weapons on base.”

  He traced the route with his fingers. “They will be traveling to Charleston. If we crimp Route 78 just east of Aiken … they’ll see the pyro in front and Geek running the blocking vehicle. Father Geek’s big fat Expedition will look just like what they expect to be a threat. Our American Steel there will aggress on their blind side. They’ll take the first bypass to avoid what looks like a kill zone, which will be the fire road. They’ll attempt to break contact as well as avoid police involvement. They won’t be expecting us, but once we engage they’ll be spun up and looking for help. Can you handle that, Geek?”

  “I can shut down their communications. No one will be able to call out on cell or radio for at least a three hundred meter radius.”

  Mark nodded his massive head. “Let me take the lead car.”

  “Be my guest,” Father Geek replied.

  Mark hopped down onto the track. The driver, a blond, whip-lean former master sergeant named Pat Ronnell, jumped out of the car and fist-bumped him.

  “Excuses, excuses.”

  “Let’s do this.” He waved up to Father Geek and Terry. “Terry, get down here and get to work! Full rehearsal—make a good single take! You know the director is a dick!” He winked as he said it, making reference to the cover story of being a movie stu
nt team, working second-unit choreography for a Vin Diesel flick. The track still had some staff mousing around.

  Father Geek worked the monitor panel on the right arm of his wheelchair, and the truck backed away from the transport mock-up.

  Terry’s heart raced. This … was the good stuff. He was behind the wheel of a Ford F-350 pickup. Unlike Geek’s Expedition, this would blend in on a Georgia highway but would still have the mass to kick ass. One vehicle pits and pins, the other assaults. Terry was the best driver and had the mission to pin O’Shay. This wasn’t one of the up-armored pickups they had overseas, but it was big enough to feel like home. The front end had been reinforced and it wore a rectangular, two-meter-square and twenty-centimeter-thick impact shield of Geek’s design and Lee’s construction, capable of absorbing multiple collisions before deteriorating. On the day of the actual event, there would be no shield. But on that day, they’d be wealthy enough to leave the wreckage behind without a tear.

  Terry slid in behind the wheel, belted into the shock harness, and grinned as the engine’s vibration tickled him through the seat. At home in an instant. Pat took shotgun, literally. His assault pump was between his legs, muzzle down. Both wore plate carriers—chopped-down versions of conventional military body armor. Holsters rode their hips, bright red training pistols instead of live sidearms.

  * * *

  He took it for a lap around the track just to peel off his skin and get the feel in his bones, and by the time he swung back around they were ready for him.

  The remotely operated truck spit exhaust and dust.

  Terry handled the mass of the pickup expertly, although it was entirely possible that he wouldn’t have this position on the critical day. The operation had redundancy built into it top to bottom. His primary job was to stop the target vehicle and keep it pinned. Terry was ready to provide covering fire and extract his teammates. He was also the designated medic and would have his civilian EMT gear in the truck. Each of them were cross-trained and ready for multiple contingencies in case something went south.