Accelerated

by Heppner, Vaughn

  Blake looked up at me. “I wish I’d met her.”

  I stared at him, but I saw Kay in my memory. I saw her lying on the floor four years ago in Switzerland. Even with the exposure making my bones ache, I had found her as she stared at an outline of Dave. As we watched together, bewildered, Dave had phased in, become solid like a normal human being. That’s when Kay had started screaming.

  On my boat in San Francisco, I wondered what I was going to do about the cube lying on the bottom of the ocean. I frowned, and I realized that Blake had just asked me a question.

  I picked up the glass and slurped my answer. I was going to drink to Kay’s memory. I was going to think about all the pleasant things we’d done together. I was going to have an Irish wake if I could.

  I reached for the bottle, but the bottle betrayed me. It was empty.

  “I’ll catch you later,” I muttered.

  “I’m sorry,” Blake said.

  I nodded, grabbed some clothes and headed for a bar.

  ***

  I could say I never saw them coming. Instead, Kay’s death had frazzled me. I moved like an automaton on the sidewalks, hardly looking up. I’d seen friends die in combat before. It left you bitter and terribly glad you were still alive, that death had missed you one more time and taken someone else. You felt guilty for surviving and empty because of the friend you would never see again.

  I was six steps from entering a bar. Before I made it five, a powerful hand closed on my left triceps, digging into flesh.

  “Herr Kiel, the Chief would like a word with you.”

  The accent and manner of speaking froze my limbs. A Shop commando was here! Before I whirled around and drove a fist into his gut, logic took over. If the Shop had wanted me dead just now, my first inkling of their presence would have been a rifle shot. In that split-second, I realized several things. Something had changed with the Shop if they were approaching me like this. It seemed that Kay had told the truth about that. I also recognized the voice. The Chief was sending me a not-so-hidden signal by using this monster as his errand-boy.

  I turned my head fractionally. The hand on my skin wore gloved leather. Nice. I wore my A’s hat, sunglasses and a blue Hawaiian shirt.

  I swiveled around, but I did it too fast and too far, ripping my shirt under my left armpit. I usually wore baggy or easily stretched clothing these days, but even so, with my increased density I was always ripping too many.

  I faced a tall man wearing mirrored sunglasses. Jagiello had spiked blond hair and Slavic features. He wore a navy-colored suit and tie, with matching blue leather gloves. He was a lethal killer, and he was Lithuanian. Behind Jagiello were two others like him, but they wore black suits.

  “The Chief insists,” Jagiello said.

  I wanted to beat him, but if I tried, the other two would pull out guns and begin firing. All my instincts told me to flee. Yet it was strange standing here in the open, speaking with Jagiello. For one thing, this wasn’t Europe. Kay had said something about American agents working against the Shop. Did that mean Jagiello and his men were on a leash? The idea was appealing.

  “Where’s the Chief?” I asked.

  “If you will follow me,” Jagiello said, “I’ll show you.”

  “Not a chance. Tell me first and I’ll think about it.”

  A hint of a frown touched his lips. Jagiello was like a tormenting demon, used to having bound prisoners in his power. This must be a new experience for him, and I’m sure he found it annoying.

  “The Chief is nearby in a café drinking coffee, waiting to speak with you.”

  “Out in the open?” I asked.

  “Would you agree to meet anywhere else?”

  “Is this about Kay?”

  He nodded stiffly and his gun-hand twitched.

  I hesitated, not sure what to do. I had been running from the Shop for a long time. The Chief—I had no desire to speak with him. In the end, however, one thing persuaded me to go: Kay had opened my prison door four years ago. Now she was dead, likely murdered. It seemed more than possible the Chief could tell me something new about Kay and about her death.

  “Sure, let’s speak with the Chief,” I said. “But those two and you have to walk ahead of me, not behind.”

  The fact I could lay conditions nettled Jagiello. His watched me silently for several seconds. Then he turned, snapped his fingers at the other two and motioned them ahead.

  Dutifully, each killer withdrew a hand from inside his jacket. One of them studied me as he walked past. The other—the one with grease in his hair—pretended I didn’t exist.

  Jagiello set a brisk pace, and I could tell he was still as athletic and purposeful as I remembered. He’d fired reinforced darts into me on two different occasions. Once, he had clubbed me from behind with a shock baton until I’d crumpled in a beaten mass. Jagiello’s expressions had never changed, although during my beating, he had clenched his teeth and beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead. I had once told the Chief that the Lithuanians had made the most famously brutal SS camp-guards during Hitler’s reign.

  “You mean the Latvians,” the Chief had said in his strange whisper. “But I accept the compliment in the spirit it was given.”

  Jagiello and his men led me to a little tourist café. The Chief sat on a gilt-iron chair in a shadowed patio under a plastic palm tree. A decorative iron fence surrounded the area. The Chief sipped coffee, read his Blackberry and sent texts.

  “Buy yourself a cup,” Jagiello said, pressing a five into my hand as he stared down into my sunglasses.

  “We’re not in Milan,” I whispered.

  “Not today, no,” he said.

  I gripped his fingers, squeezing as I crumpled the bill. He grunted painfully. The others drew guns with long silencers screwed onto the barrels. They held the guns close to their bodies and in such a way that I saw them, but no one else nearby did. I shoved Jagiello from me so he staggered. The wadded bill fell to the sidewalk.

  “No,” Jagiello told the others. “Put them away.”

  They did, making it seem like a magician’s trick. It left me in no doubt that these two belonged on the A-Team. If the Chief needed to act, these two would prove dangerous.

  Jagiello regarded me as he cradled his injured hand against his chest. “The time will come when you will be mine again.”

  More than anything else he said, that told me they were on a leash. I would be a fool to trust that, but it did give me a little working room.

  “You’re a scorpion, Jagiello. Get too close to me and I’ll stomp on you.”

  He whispered something in Lithuanian and backed away. Then he nodded at the other two before fading into an approaching crowd.

  I entered the café and soon stepped onto the patio, with my coffee in a tall paper cup. Jagiello and his two killers were out there, I knew, watching and making sure no one interrupted our tête-à-tête. I wondered if CIA operatives or FBI agents watched them.

  The Chief was the same as ever, the white goatee trimmed as perfectly as it had always been and his dark suit of the finest cut and weave. I had mixed feelings concerning the small man. He was ruthlessly brilliant and single-minded in his pursuits. He also ordered killings as remorselessly as ordinary people called for termite exterminations. He had built an efficient secret organization: something to admire and hate in equal measure. I would not underestimate him. I wondered if someday for my own self-preservation I would have to kill him.

  “So good of you to join me, Herr Kiel,” the Chief whispered as I sat down.

  A bullet had once caressed his throat, doing permanent damage. He had an ugly scar on his larynx that darkened when he became angry.

  I nodded in lieu of a reply and tasted my coffee. It was excellent, which didn’t surprise me. The Chief demanded excellence in all things.

  “I am saddened to inform you of terrible news,” he whispered “Your former colleague has met with an untimely accident.”

  “I hope he heals well,” I said.


  There was no upturn at the corners of the Chief’s mouth, no tic across his features, nothing except that viper stare into my sunglasses.

  “You know it is not a he, but a she,” he whispered.

  “Is this what you’re here for?”

  There was a fractional pause before he said, “You have been weakened, Herr Kiel.”

  “I’ve become more human is what you mean.”

  “Weakened,” he said sharply. He touched his cup, and there might have been the tiniest frown, the smallest of movement with his eyebrows. He removed his fingers from the cup. “Let us not mince words. Letting you live is a mistake. Letting you freely range among the sheep is an even worse affront to logic. If I tap my finger so—” with his pale hand on the table, he tapped his index finger. “If I do that three times in rapid succession, a laser shall burn through your skull. I will have neatly cleaned the mess your presence makes.”

  “No,” I said. “An ambulance will arrive and the medics will discover some astonishing anomalies concerning me, including a burn-hole through my skull. That will create several sensations.”

  “I will control the medics.”

  “The wrong police officer might interfere. The laser-sniper might miss.”

  “Jagiello is a champion marksman.”

  I leaned back as my neck prickled. Coming here had been a mistake, one I wouldn’t willingly do again. My grief had made me incautious. But I didn’t want to squeeze out every human feeling from my heart. I didn’t want to become a monster like Jagiello, like the Chief. That didn’t mean I had to take reckless chances. It seemed Jagiello aimed a laser at my head. I didn’t doubt the Chief about that. To keep calm, I told myself the Chief wanted information. That was my guarantee Jagiello wouldn’t fire yet.

  Therefore, I forced a grin, and said, “You’ve no idea how much I’ve missed your charm, sir.”

  “Your present sorrow has unhinged you.”

  I leaned across the table, making it creak. Maybe if I kept moving, twitching, I would present a harder target.

  “Kay is dead,” I said. “Now you’ve interrupted the drunk I was going to have in honor of her memory. I don’t want to be impolite to you, sir. Not because I care about hurting your nonexistent feelings, but the possibility of those three little taps is making me nervous. If I become too nervous, I might become jumpy. Do you remember that I’m fast? It’s possible I’m faster than Jagiello’s trigger finger. That means I could crush your brain before he burns mine. But it still leaves me dead, and it would deprive the Shop of your sweetness.”

  His dark eyes bored into mine. “What did she give you?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?” I said, as my stomach tightened.

  He glanced at his Blackberry. “The twelfth of June, eleven fifty-eight A.M., Kay Durant jumped aboard the Alamo with a box in her possession. She left thirty-seven minutes later minus the box. You followed her.”

  I sat back as the Chief highlighted the rest of the early afternoon of June 12, including my boat trip into the ocean. I should have realized I had been under Shop surveillance. Why hadn’t they boarded my boat while I’d been tailing Kay? Why hadn’t they stopped her long before that and simply taken the box, the cube? Something didn’t add up. Maybe the CIA or FBI had been trailing them hard.

  “Let me repeat the question,” he said. “What did she give you?”

  “Some books she borrowed a long time ago,” I said. “She’s quite the reader.”

  “Your American quips have become annoying, Herr Kiel, and infantile. I expect better from you.”

  “Whereas your tactics are dehumanizing, so I don’t see how you have room to complain.”

  “We could bring you in for questioning or I could sign a paper and have you returned to the Reservation for further tests.”

  A cold stab of fear bit through me. I hated the fear, hated the Reservation and their inhuman tests. If it had been night, I might have tried for the Chief, killing him here and now. Then I would have gone after Jagiello and finished him, too.

  “It’s unwise to threaten me,” I said.

  “You used to control your emotions better. This display, it embarrasses you.”

  I bared my teeth. “You’ve tried to eliminate me three times already. Each attempt failed.”

  “I have never ordered you eliminated…yet,” the Chief said.

  I laughed. “I know Shop operatives when they’re shooting at me.”

  “Apparently, you do not. When did these incidents occur?”

  I thought about it. “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t buy your act. That would mean someone else has been trying to kill me.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “I’m curious who this someone is.”

  “You’re trying to imply you don’t know who?”

  “I imply nothing.”

  My eyes narrowed. No. I didn’t believe this cunning intriguer. Shop operatives routinely worked to shift the blame of their actions onto someone else. It was almost standard operating procedure.

  “You have a right to be wary of me,” I said. “I could hunt you, Jagiello and every Shop operative in San Francisco, killing the lot of you.”

  His lizard-like eyes seemed to darken and his breathing quickened. “You are a freak, Herr Kiel, a mutant conceived through dangerous experimentation. It is madness letting you range among the sheep. My superiors…they lack my understanding of the situation. Wisely, you have refrained from advertising your difference. Nor have you engaged in some of the foolishness the others insist on committing.”

  “You mean Kay?”

  The Chief looked away, and his right hand tightened into a fist so the knuckles became prominent. He was angry with himself. It took a second until I realized why. He’d just given away a valuable piece of information. Some of the others—by that he meant the particle accelerator survivors—engaged in activities of which he disapproved. One of the Shop’s primary goals was to keep a lid on dangerous technologies. Did those people represent such a thing?

  It was the Chief’s anger with himself that made me rethink. Could someone else have been hunting me this entire time? No. Kay had said the Shop—the Chief in particular—was still eager to have me killed. Yet his performance here…

  “I’m surprised you’ve come to me,” I said. “You know how I feel about you.” If someone else hunted me…I scowled as I said, “Kay asked for my help. I gave it to her.”

  “We know that,” he whispered.

  “Was her accident in Long Beach—a true accident?”

  “First, tell me what she carried in the box.”

  My scowl deepened. Did it even matter anymore? Keeping it secret wouldn’t help Kay now and probably not Dave, either. Yet what if I admitted to knowing where the cube was? Maybe that’s all he wanted to know. No. Maybe the Chief wanted to know if I had the cube or not, or could get it for him. Maybe the cube was so important that if he found out I’d seen it, he’d try to have me killed despite everything he’d said. Playing with the Shop while blind was a bad idea.

  What would the Chief do if he were in my place? Of course, I knew. He would spin a lie like a spider spinning a web.

  I forced away my scowl. “Since Dave is out of the picture…” I shrugged. “I wanted to get together with Kay in a romantic way. I think she was interested because of what happened to me in Geneva.”

  “Yes, yes,” the Chief said, for the first time sounding annoyed. I noticed he had minutely sat forward. He was eager, so eager he couldn’t hide it. That scared me more than any of his threats.

  “We met together for a time,” I said, “but it didn’t work. She wanted to end everything between us. So, she brought me everything I’d ever bought her. After she left my boat, I thought about all our hard words. I ran after her because there were some things I still wanted her to know.”

  The Chief held up a manicured hand. “You refuse to tell me?”

  “I am telling you.”

  “These are absurd lies. You followed her from a distance,
trying to stay hidden. This I know.”

  “If you know,” I said, becoming angry, “then why don’t you know what’s in the box?”

  “…you annoy me, Herr Kiel.”

  “Compliments won’t get you to first base.”

  He stood abruptly, took out a money clip and set a ten on the table as a tip. I wondered about that. Had he forgotten that he’d brought the coffee at the counter? Or was this a signal?

  “I give you a word of caution,” he whispered. “Keep out of Long Beach. If you interfere in my investigation, I will disregard my instructions concerning you and put you in a cage where you belong. The world is dangerous enough without monsters running loose.”

  I decided on the direct approach. “Did you kill Kay?” I asked.

  “Bah,” he said. “Preposterous.”

  I watched his reaction: a flicker of annoyance. He turned in a precise way then, and he took his leave just as he had left me long ago in the basement of a bank in Kabul.

  Then I was up, moving inside the café. The thought of Jagiello and his laser…I hurried into the restroom.

  Kay was dead, and the Shop was poking its nose into the affair. I knew then someone had pushed her into the street, had pushed her into traffic to die. Why had they—

  I shook my head, exiting the restroom. It was foolish to hole up in a place. I had to keep moving.

  Several people were entering the café. After a few long strides, I was among them, rudely pushing past. A woman complained. I weaved my head, ducked and sprinted along the sidewalk. People turned and glanced at me. I accelerated into another crowd, and I used them until I reached the entrance to a store, darting inside. If Jagiello was trying to target me, I wanted to make it hard on him.

  As I moved through the store’s aisles, I realized that I was less interested in why someone had killed Kay than in who had killed her.

  With the Shop in this, it would be reckless of me to go to Long Beach and try to find out for myself. I didn’t owe Kay anything. By reentering my life, she had brought me trouble all down the line. She was dead now. My nosing around wouldn’t bring her back.

  I exited the back of the store and made a fist, although I resisted the urge to smash the concrete wall. I’d done that once since the change. It had made my knuckles bleed down to the bone, as I’d struck many times, but it hadn’t broken any bones.