Russians Came Knocking

by Spangler, K. B.

  THE RUSSIANS CAME KNOCKING

  K.B. Spangler

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 K.B. Spangler.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook version of The Russians Came Knocking was sold online via Smashwords. The file may not be re-sold or given away. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com or kbspangler.com to learn more.

  The Russians Came Knocking is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com

  Cover art by Jenny Romanchuk of The Zombie Hunters, found online at thezombiehunters.com

  I apologize for the squirrels.

  TRANSCRIPT 1 OF 8 FROM THE PERSONAL FILES OF JOSHUA GLASSMAN, FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR (2006-2016) AND DIRECTOR (2016-2021) OF THE OFFICE OF ADAPTIVE AND COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGIES (OACET).

  RELEASE OF THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CONDUCTED UNDER THE U.S. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT. THIS TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS NO DETAILS RELATED TO ONGOING OR CURRENT THREATS TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES OR ITS ALLIES.

  AS THIS TRANSCRIPT IS A PERSONAL RECORD, ALL INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS DOCUMENT REFLECTS AGENT GLASSMAN’S OPINIONS, PERCEPTIONS, AND MEMORIES OF PAST EVENTS, AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED PART OF THE OFFICIAL OACET RECORD.

  RELEASED JANUARY 18, 2056

  ONE

  I love people. Love them. Cannot live without them. Human beings are wonderful, complex, complicated. Our lives can be entirely the same and completely different, each and every day. We hate boredom; we can’t stand challenges; we go crazy from both. And every so often will come one of those rare events that will change every single thing about your soul. We’re as close as we’ll ever come to real magic, folks, and don’t let anyone ever tell you different.

  So, let’s see. Mare—that’s Agent Mary Murphy, to those of you watching this—she’s told me to record this story for the OACET archives. Maybe because of the dead bodies. Or the squirrels. Yeah, probably because of the squirrels. She never did believe me about the squirrels.

  But, Mare, let’s be honest. Nobody else is going to watch this video. This is just for you and me, and I know you. I know what you want. I know what you love. So I’m going to give it to you. I’m going to describe every single detail, every twisted moment, and I am going to be as graphic and salacious as I can. And then I’m going to deliver this to you bright and early Monday morning. Gift-wrapped, with some nice, thick ribbon.

  I’ll be waiting in the supply closet.

  This is the story of my first wife. Davie Costello, she…

  Okay, let’s back up a little. All of this happened right after OACET went public, and I mean right after. Those first few months were brutal. I think it would have been easier if we could actually jump a building in a single bound. People know how to react to things they can see, but they have no clue how to deal with something that happens outside of their immediate frame of reference. So here comes OACET, a top-secret government agency made up of cyborgs whose only superpower was the ability to control all technology on the planet. Which is an incredible superpower, really, but since we didn’t prove our mighty wrath by yanking a satellite out of orbit and hurling it straight at the White House, a lot of people thought we were con artists.

  Honestly, even if we had flattened Pennsylvania Avenue, they probably still would have assumed we were just excellent hackers.

  Then, after Congress realized we had them backed into a corner, they finally confirmed that cyborgs were real, and all hell broke loose.

  I was the public face of OACET. Anything media-related went through me, so in those early days I was everywhere. For reference, I’m a white guy, six-foot even, roughly a hundred and ninety pounds. All muscle; I’ve been running marathons since I was seventeen. Brown hair, light brown eyes. Dark glasses, of course. I wear my hair a little longer than I did when I was with the FBI and I make a habit of sweeping to the side to keep it off of my face. I spent too much on my clothes—I think my suits helped put my tailor’s kids through college—but I usually wore them slightly rumpled. People underestimate you if they think you can’t be bothered to find your iron.

  I loved my job. Back then, the politicians still thought they could manipulate us. It took them a few years to get it through their heads that we weren’t lying, that all we wanted was to be left alone, but, oh! Those early days! I could have bought my own private banana republic with the amount of money they tried to slip into my pocket. They were almost clever about those bribes, too. One time, a certain Secretary of an unnamed Treasury treated me to a round of golf. After, he insisted I take his brand-new Lamborghini for a test drive. When I went to adjust the sun flap, a piece of paper fell in my lap and Hey! Lookie there! It’s the car’s title, and it just happens to be made out to a certain Joshua Glassman. No idea how that could have happened. Have a nice day.

  Gorgeous car. Absolutely beautiful craftsmanship. It killed me to put it in the water trap on the fourth hole.

  That was a typical day for me. It was bribes and mind games from the moment my feet hit the floor in the morning to when I rolled back into bed at night. I usually started my morning with a power breakfast hosted by some of Washington’s elite, then a press conference or two, followed by various meetings and social functions.

  The nights were spectacular. There was always a party, always an invitation to some new club or billionaire’s yacht or five-star restaurant. The perks of fame in Washington, right?

  And the women. Oh. My. God. So many women. Yeah, they were all groupies, but still. It was a never-ending river of vaginas.

  (You like that, Mare? I came up with that line when you asked me to make these tapes. “Never-ending river of vaginas…” Hah! I can hear your eyes roll.)

  At the time, I had a top-floor condo in The Lexington. It was luxury, and worth every penny. Hand-scraped hardwood floors, imported travertine tile, cathedral ceilings eighteen feet high. A whirlpool tub big enough for four… or eight if everybody was friendly. The view was insane. I’d take my dates out on the balcony and point out each monument on the National Mall. I had never lived somewhere that nice.

  Now, the thing I really liked about The Lexington was that it had recently been fully redone. That meant computerization and Wi-Fi automation. Stuck in traffic on the ride home? Use your smartphone and have a hot bath waiting for you. Not sure whether the eggs from the local farmer’s market are fresh? Check the digital grocery list on your fridge to see the last time you scanned in a carton. Lower the blinds, run security protocols, prepare your coffee, let the delivery guy in to drop off a package… The Lexington sold these as convenience features, but for me, it was a playground. The building might as well have been made for cyborgs; I could control every inch of it with a thought.

  I bought my condo before OACET went public, which meant that my neighbors suddenly discovered that the nice man who held the elevator door open for them and helped them with their groceries was actually part machine. I got death threats, eviction notices, the usual stuff. None of it came to anything except a few sleepless nights for me as I sat in the dark with a loaded gun.

  But nobody smiled at me anymore. I’d gone from friend to freak overnight. Believe it or not, that hurt me more than any anonymous promise to kill me. I’m probably the most social guy you’ll ever meet. It hurts me—literal physical pain—to be alone. Isolophobia, my therapist te
lls me, or monophobia, depending on the book. Whichever label you stick on it, I need to be around other people or I feel like I’m burning from the inside out.

  The link helps. My connection to the other cyborgs through our link lets me get through the day if nobody else is physically present. The nights, though… Ugh. We have to disconnect from the link before we go to sleep, and that’s when it’s the worst for me. Lying in bed, in the dark, alone…

  There is nothing worse than that.

  But, as I said, I had my groupies.

  The management at The Lexington tried to use them as an excuse to throw me out, but we’re a few decades past the day when an active sex life was permission for social shaming. (For men. Yes, Mare, it’s a horrible double standard, and no, Mare, I do not want to have this same fight with you again.) Each night, I would walk a lovely lady or two past the doorman and through the lobby as my once-friendly neighbors glared.

  Except for that one neighbor who didn’t seem to judge. She was very pretty, so I would have noticed her anyhow, but she always had a smile for me. At first, I pegged her as another groupie, but I realized she seemed to have a smile or a kind word for everybody. Genuinely nice people are hard to find; I couldn’t help but watch her.

  Our schedules were similar. We left early and arrived home late. I’d see her picking up her mail, or shopping at the corner market. She moved like a dancer, light on her toes. When her dark auburn hair was down, it hit just below her shoulders. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, maybe a trace of eyeshadow and lipstick, which was such a change for me that I found it absolutely erotic.

  I was a little obsessed, I think. I tried to weasel information out of anybody who’d talk to me. Some said she really was a dancer. Davie Costello, recently returned from four years with the Moscow Ballet. No, wait, was it the Boston Ballet? She was going back to school while teaching dance, or maybe she was teaching kindergarten. The doorman thought Davie wanted to be a doctor. The barista at the local Starbucks swore she was already a skilled physical therapist.

  Their ambiguity infuriated me. I didn’t want rumors; I wanted to know about her. For the first time in years, I wanted a specific woman. Not just someone random I plucked from the lineup at a club, but Davie herself. I wanted to know everything about her, learn about her past, hear about her future, maybe become part of her hopes and dreams and desires…

  I told myself I was romanticizing the idea of her, not Davie Costello herself. I reminded myself that I hadn’t run any data searches to find out who she was or what she did, and I should take that as a sign that I already knew we were incompatible: cyborgs don’t do well in normal relationships. Besides, I was in my late twenties and I was enjoying my old-fashioned playboy lifestyle.

  Then the Russian mob showed up, and things started to get weird.

  TWO

  In the background of The Lexington’s global system was a security script of my own design. This script had started out as an automated face recognition program I had swiped from the FBI, but I had adapted it to let me know when strangers were in the building. The script constantly monitored each person who entered The Lexington, and compared them to an internal database. If more than two strange faces appeared at the same time, a little chime would go off in my head, and I’d tap into the system to check out the newcomers.

  (Since I’m being honest, I’ll admit I used this program to know when my neighbors were having parties. I was determined to win them back, and I wasn’t above gate-crashing and bribing my way in with a stupidly expensive bottle of scotch.)

  I was home that night. I don’t remember why; this was probably around the time when my therapist had told me to start forcing myself to spend one evening a week alone. I do remember I was actually getting around to putting away my huge stack of laundry. The pile of underwear moved and…

  Right. I should probably mention that while the human-type areas of The Lexington were gleaming glass and polished stone, the space behind its walls had been thoroughly colonized by squirrels. Jeremy, the maintenance guy, blamed the infestation on the greenway at the top of the building. The tenants had requested a small park, complete with miniature trees, to be built on the roof to help collect rainwater, offset carbon dioxide, that sort of thing. When I told Jeremy the potted trees were probably too small to have attracted squirrels, he narrowed his eyes and took out a crescent wrench the size of his forearm. I never brought up the topic with him again.

  Most of the other tenants never knew there was a rodent problem because the squirrels loved my condo. In fact, the only reason I was able to afford that place was because the sellers’ disclosure laws had scared every other potential buyer away. Nuts to squirrels, is what I said. My family grew up poor in a bad part of Chicago, and our neighborhood had one of the worst rat infestations on record. It worked out great for my mom, who used the threat of rats to motivate my brothers and me to keep our apartment spotless. “Make sure you don’t leave food out,” she’d remind us. “You don’t want Mister Squeaky to come back and give you more sharp kisses.” So when the real estate agent warned me that the price was low thanks to a persistent squirrel infestation, I laughed all the way to the closing.

  I rarely saw or heard them. Sure, I asked my housecleaning service to use plenty of bleach, just in case, but squirrels have a different diet than rats and there was no reason for them to come inside. They tended to hang out in my ductwork, the only squirrels in all of downtown D.C. with central heating and air. I had to keep an air filtration system going on full blast to get rid of their musty smell, but they were otherwise just a layer of fuzzy insulation which occasionally chewed through the wires.

  The squirrel in my underwear pile was a first. It poked its head out of a leghole and blinked at me, then tried to break for cover. I was faster; some people never forget how to ride a bike, others never forget how to snag a rat. Or a squirrel, as the case may be. I pinched off the cloth at the openings and held the squirming bundle of boxers at arm’s length.

  Now, catching a live squirrel put me in an interesting situation. Back when I was a kid, I would have resolved this scenario with a hammer, but I realized I didn’t want to kill this poor stupid animal. And I didn’t want to put it back in my vents: my mother would smack me from beyond the grave if I did that. I decided to take it over to the park across the street and release it. If the squirrel made its own way back, fine, if not, maybe it would give the genes of The Lexington’s horribly inbred squirrel population a chance to breathe.

  There was a service elevator at the back of the building. Tenants couldn’t use it, but hello! Cyborg. I reached out to the central computer and called the elevator. It was getting late. If I was lucky, I could drop the squirrel off at the park and get back home without anyone noticing I wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes.

  The service elevator was almost to the ground floor when my facial recognition script notified me that a group of strange men had entered the building. I took a quick glance at them through the security cameras: four big men, black hair, in leather and dirty jeans. One man had the handle of a gun poking out from under his jacket. They did not look like the type of people that would be invited over for drinks by any of my soft and timid neighbors. Behind them, the doorman was on the phone; I pinged the call and overheard him telling the 911 operator to send the police.

  Oh goodie. And me with my gun stashed back in my condo.

  I stopped the service elevator to watch the men through the cameras. They headed towards the stairs, fast. This was beginning to look like a professional hit, the kind where somebody wanted to leave a loud message. In and out, the villains obvious and memorable. Pros are rarely caught, but even if the cops arrived in less than five minutes, somebody in The Lexington would still have died a very messy death.

  They stepped out of the stairwell on the second floor.

  Davie Costello’s floor.

  I pushed the service elevator to the second floor as fast it could go, and remembered to cut the automatic sound effect
s before it dinged. The elevator doors opened silently and I padded on bare feet to the corner. I watched through the security cameras as three men went into Davie’s apartment, leaving the last to stand guard outside.

  I didn’t have time to think up a plan. As soon as her front door closed, I turned the corner, shouting at him in Yiddish.

  (By the way, if you want to confuse somebody, I highly recommend Yiddish. The consonants alone can cause the human brain to freeze.)

  That poor man. He almost got his gun out before he recognized the half-naked lunatic coming at him and panicked. “Cyborg!” he said with a heavy Russian accent. He turned to run, but remembered his gun a second time.

  By then, I was close enough to throw the squirrel at him.

  Just imagine a bunched-up pair of boxer shorts floating through the air, gradually unfurling. The head of the enraged squirrel came first, followed by its outstretched front claws…

  It was beautiful.

  The squirrel smashed into the hitman’s face and raked him across the eyes, then used his forehead as a launch pad for its escape. When the squirrel leapt at the wall, it couldn’t find any purchase on the glossy wood paneling. The squirrel had nowhere to go but back at the hitman, scratching and clawing as it fell.

  The hitman didn’t scream, but he did crash into Davie’s front door, shouting. The door opened from the inside, a second man checking to see if they’d been made. I kicked the first man in the throat and left his fate to the squirrel, then slammed into the door with as much momentum as I could put behind me.

  The door smashed into the second man. He flew a couple of feet backwards, then recovered. Like the first man, he almost got his gun up before he recognized me. Fame has its perks: he froze long enough for me to put him on the ground.