by P. R. Adams
“What about ramming? Could that van be heavy enough to knock these SUVs around?”
“One. Maybe.”
Morena snorted and glanced at me. “These PSS guys, they know what they do. No van gets close enough to do anything dangerous.”
It was true. The whole operation seemed unnecessary, but Stovall knew something. The Agency wouldn’t stand up a team of contractors otherwise, especially not an expensive one, and my team was premium.
I took our channel private and encrypted—no Stovall snooping. “This is just us. I need your thoughts. Norimitsu? Jacinto? Danny?” I glanced at Morena and twisted around to look at Clemens. “Does this seem odd?”
Clemens shook his head.
Morena shrugged. “Yuh makes three attempts on Rhee, right? The Agency stops one, the Koreans the others. This just another attempt. Right?”
Roberto wouldn’t say anything different. It was all a paycheck to him.
Danny whistled. “I’ve got the vehicles in sight, doing eighty and accelerating. I got two birds at high altitude over the expressway. Hey?”
“Yeah?” I wanted opinions, not updates, but I needed both, and it was always tough keeping Danny talking, especially if he’d let his meds dispenser run low.
“Uh, no helicopters in the area. No drones, either. We own the sky.”
Jacinto said, “He’s right. Clear for miles.”
Norimitsu’s voice was silk on the line. “Rhee has enemies. Within the military. Hardliners.”
I flipped the display over and pulled up Rhee’s files. His rivals wanted tighter security, more clamping down on NoKos, greater alignment with the corporate giants like Samsung and Hyundai.
And liquidation of NoKo political prisoners.
I looked down and to my left, trying to put the pieces together. “What’s the angle for the Agency? Are they being played?” Were we being played?
Danny said, “Yeah, um, we’re out of time, guys. They’re not much more than a mile back and closing fast. I don’t have a clean shot on anyone, but I could try for the van driver.”
“No.” At the speed they were going, it sounded too risky. “Roberto, let Norimitsu take a look at them.”
The image on the display shifted to a slightly delayed feed from the camera in Norimitsu’s glasses. Roberto had slowed until parallel with the lead car. Thermographic video showed two human forms within. Backscatter imagery showed potential assault weapons between the front seats. Roberto drifted back to the second car, and the imagery showed the same.
“We’ve got assault weapons in the cars.” I drilled down to examine the passenger. “Extra magazines in thigh pouches. What’s in the van?”
The Sparrow drifted back and adjusted speed to match the van.
Norimitsu sighed. “If they have assault weapons…”
He didn’t need to finish. The decision was already made, but I had to know—
Machine gun fire flooded Norimitsu’s channel at the same time a hole erupted in the van’s side. I was barely aware of Roberto’s head and shoulders spraying across the dashboard and windshield before the video cut out.
I flinched, for a second unwilling to accept what I’d seen. Morena twisted around. “What was—”
The trailing Sparrow twisted and flipped, then it went airborne, arcing end-over-end. Shattering. Shedding plastic panels, spraying glass like rain. Leaving only the chassis. Twisted, crumpled.
Norimitsu.
The NoKos’ rentals accelerated.
I brought Stovall back onto the channel. “NoKos have engaged. Jacinto, hit them with everything you’ve got.”
Clemens didn’t wait for my signal. He pulled two R60s and twisted around, tracking the closest car and opening fire. The vehicle between our Sparrow and the car braked and swerved, clogging the lane, leaving the NoKos exposed. The R60 bullets tore through the Sparrow’s body and shattered its rear driver-side window, and blew out the Kia’s windshield. Armor-piercing rounds punched neat holes in the driver and passenger. They seemed unaffected at first, the passenger hauling up her assault rifle, then they both spat up blood and slumped in their seats.
Morena jerked the wheel to the right to cut off the second Kia car as it came around the failing lead vehicle. I had a good look into the smoked glass of the driver’s side, then opened fire. Glass exploded, gloved hands flew up, and blood tracked down the driver’s lifeless face. The Kia drifted into the retaining wall, and the scream of twisted metal and cracking plastic reached me over the drone of the engine and tires.
The van shot past, and Clemens blew out the windows on the passenger side. I looked past Morena, saw tears streaming down her cheek, and I knew I didn’t have to tell her what to do.
The Sparrow leapt forward and slammed into the van’s front passenger wheel well. I grabbed at anything and everything as we fishtailed, then she had us under control.
Something moved in the back of the van—big, heavy, rocking the vehicle.
Morena braked and slammed the wheel to the left just as a machine gun tore chunks of concrete out of the road ahead of us. I had a vague sense of something quadrupedal, almost cat-like, and then the Sparrow was jumping forward again, even with the van.
“Clemens, the driver,” I shouted.
The big Swede was already firing. The van twisted and jerked, and a part of the sliding side door crumpled and fell away, giving us a clear look at the slumping driver.
And the robot in the cargo area.
It was half again the size of a tiger, with armored plates covering joints and chest. The feline impression came from the head, which was like a puma’s thanks to the armor.
Three eyes at the center of the face locked onto us. The thing leapt through what remained of the door, tearing it off like so much aluminum foil.
Morena had time to mutter a curse before impact. The robot’s metallic front paws punched through the windshield and into her chest. Blood shot onto the dashboard. The impact rocked the Sparrow up onto two tires; I fell against the belt and door. Concrete whipped past, unnaturally close to my right.
I pressed a hand against the window for balance.
Clemens fired, but his bullets couldn’t get through the robot’s armor. The metal cat’s claws dug into the Sparrow’s failing frame, then Morena’s seat, to get closer to Clemens.
My window shattered, and my right hand flailed against nothing but air, touched concrete, then exploded in pain as my arm was pinned between the Sparrow and the concrete.
The feline jaws opened, clamped onto Clemens’s head, and bit down.
Servos whirred, gears ground, and bone crunched; metal and plastic scraped against concrete beneath me as I gagged on blood and brains. I had the vaguest sense of my lower arm tearing off, then my shoulder was scraping against the road. The carbon mesh of my coat dug into my skin, then melted away.
Flesh was pulped. Muscle. I blacked out, then woke to the car coming to a core-rattling stop.
The Sparrow groaned beneath a great weight.
“Stefan? Stefan?” It was Danny. A million miles away. Panicked.
He never panicked.
“Can…see…” I was drifting. “Robot…”
“It’s, uh, moving away. I lost Jacinto. Stefan? Stefan? I—I need to bug out. We’re compromised.”
“The…” We had something else. A last trick up our sleeves. My trick. I heard distant gunfire. PSS. Why stop? The robot couldn’t catch them, could it? “The…robot?”
“Moving toward the presidential convoy. Stefan, you gotta get out of there.”
I tried to move, nearly blacked out. “Can’t.”
“I—I can get to you. I can.”
“No…” Someone screamed, and I wished I could see what was going on. I could feel my glasses gouging into me but couldn’t see. I wondered what the drones were feeding— I remembered! “The…drones! Drop…”
“Drop the…” Danny gasped. “I—I could save the drones. Nothing’s in the airspace—”
“Drop…on…ro
bot.”
“Oh.”
I heard huffing and grunting, and then I heard the Ninja’s engine come to life. Danny had abandoned me. There were only two people I had ever come to truly trust in my years in the military and at the Agency and now as a contractor—Norimitsu and Danny.
And now I had lost them both.
I blacked out again for a moment and woke to a minor earthquake. Glass skidded and bounced inside the ruined Sparrow. Time seemed to drag, then faces entered my field of vision. Gold-skinned. Stern. Humorless. They pulled the pieces of Morena and Clemens out of the wreckage and after a long time came back for me. They spoke among themselves, men in business suits and military uniforms. Finally, they seemed to agree on something, and the Sparrow was brought back upright.
What remained of my right arm came off in all the jostling, and I finally passed out completely.
Chapter 2
Death took its sweet time coming. I woke to the smell of alcohol and puke, latex and gore. A bitter, sharp medicinal taste drifted across bruised and broken gums. I danced between gagging and choking on the blood collecting at the back of my throat. Machines hissed and pinged, a strange, life-sustaining symphony. The pain was too intense to truly sink in, so it settled for running jagged claws through my brain and guts. I couldn’t see anything, but I had the sense I was in a surgical ward. The voices were strange, distorted by acoustics and drugs.
When I felt something tearing through the flesh of my remaining arm, my body jerked against restraints. When the tearing became grinding through bone, the darkness came again.
There were days after that where I would wake, feel the raw nerves and the ruined flesh, taste the bile in my throat, smell the chemicals keeping me alive. I could hear the pathetic rasp of my breathing, the faint groan of cushions as someone shifted. My mind would teeter toward snapping because I couldn’t see what had been done to me. That was when I’d cling to the realization that Stovall had done this. He’d betrayed my team. He’d gotten Norimitsu killed. Clemens. The Porto twins.
I would fantasize about breaking his neck and watching him slowly die.
Then I would succumb to the drugs.
The periods of awareness lengthened. My surroundings changed—the machines sounded different, echoed strangely. Voices came in snippets. Men, mostly. Harsh, choppy. Korean. They slacked back the medication until I couldn’t sleep, and my awareness compressed down to the core of my shattered body. I compartmentalized my thoughts the way the Agency had trained me to, focusing when I could on the mission and my duty to the Agency and country.
No training was enough, though. My arms demanded my attention. They wanted me to move them, but when I did I couldn’t feel anything below my left shoulder and less from my right. My hips ached, and my legs felt like lead. Acid-laced lead.
I wanted the pain to go away. I wanted to sleep.
My hosts wanted something else.
The first day that truly carried an almost normal clarity with it came with a special sensation. I was moved. Not for a bath. Not to check my injuries. I was vaguely aware when those things happened.
I was moved to a chair. Sturdy. Rigid. Anchored. Uncomfortable. With hard leather straps that bit into flesh that was nowhere near healed.
A voice—Korean, deep, brusque—asked, “Who you work for?” The words echoed off concrete or stone.
I felt—heard, smelled—other bodies around me. Breathing. Clothes rustling.
Something heavy and hard cracked against my thighs, and I realized something was wrong with them. I caught a soft sound just before the pain lanced through me. Intense pain. Bone-broken pain.
“Who do you work for?” A different voice. Refined. Sophisticated. Almost accent-free.
My face shook, and I struggled to shout something, anything. I would confess to whatever they asked of me if I could. But I couldn’t. I could barely whimper. It was the conditioning, the months under chemical and psychological stress. There was no betraying the Agency. “Fuck you.”
It was all I could manage. A solid, defiant curse. It felt good.
The strike against my thighs came again, and the bones cracked the rest of the way.
I screamed, and it was like running rusty blades over raw vocal cords. Then I passed out again.
It went like that for too long to keep track. I had no sense of days or hours. My awareness was a feverish, terrified suffering that made me wish for death interlaced with numbness. I would recover in a drugged-up coma, then wake to someplace that sounded like it might be a prison. I would receive just enough care to regain my strength, then discover an all-new hell. Their approach varied wildly. After breaking my legs, they switched to my ribs. While those healed, they pulled out the last of my remaining teeth. After that, they snipped away pieces of my ears. Then they ruptured my testicles.
Only the questioning remained: “Who do you work for?”
Sometimes, the pain became so extreme that I could hear Stovall’s snobbish East Coast drawl. “You know what’s wrong with you, Mendoza? You think you know everything. You think you’re better than everyone else. Want your cake and eat it, too. How do you feel about that now?”
That was Stovall’s thing, and it had been for as long as I’d known him. He hated the way I could call bullshit on his political views without access to the finest education money and being a legacy could grant. He’d worked hard to be born into that. In his view, you had to have that lifetime of special access and treatment to see all the layers, all the nuance and contradictions. It was the only way to justify his belief that it was fine interfering with another nation’s politics. For me, it was all hypocritical nonsense. I worked for a paycheck, and I knew the day would come when Stovall and his type would cost the country terribly.
What I was going through felt like a special hell designed by Stovall and his pledge brothers.
Weeks passed that way, perhaps months. I wondered what they were using to keep me alive and how they had arrived at such a science to know the limits of the human body.
Finally, they gave up.
I woke in a hospital bed. A pale green gown felt itchy against my chest, and a stiff gray blanket covered everything below that. Sunlight slipped through louvered windows, turning a floral display at the foot of my bed gold-white. Empty leather chairs lined the wall opposite me—painted the sort of pale yellow you would most likely see in a hospital—and curtains blocked off a glass wall to my left. Condensation collected on the side of a plastic pitcher resting atop a rolling tray just beyond my reach. My throat ached for a drink.
A nurse came into the room, granting me a glimpse of a busy hallway before closing the door behind her. Her slender frame was hugged by a tight, blue outfit. With pale, soft flesh, full lips, and large brown eyes, she could have been a mail-order bride.
Or a facsimile of Tae-hee.
The nurse bowed slightly and said, “Kamsa Hamnida. Mr. Smith, you are thirsty?”
“Yes,” I rasped, taking relief in the knowledge I hadn’t cracked. They had to have acquired my true identity from all the DNA they had access to. Or maybe they hadn’t.
She pulled a cup from behind the pitcher with delicate hands ending in blood-red nails. The water was diamond sparkles splashing, and it was sweet and cool as she tipped it into my mouth.
“You are better today? Your eyes are recovering?” She leaned in enough that I could see down her top and smiled when I did. “Maybe we can do something about your arms, hmm, Mr. Smith?”
She set the cup down and gently patted my chest next to the sleeve—tied shut—where my right arm should have been. “You have money for regrowth? We have excellent clinics. Top doctors. From the war. We learned so much. You would like it.”
“I’ve got money.” The desperation in my voice was pathetic. “Not enough for…” I closed my eyes.
Her hand moved to the center of my chest. “Maybe your friends could help? You have friends, Mr. Smith?”
Norimitsu? Danny? Not anymore. “Can you just let m
e check out?”
She chuckled and her fingers drifted across my chest, back to the sleeve. The bright nails slipped inside the strings closing the sleeve. Feather strokes of delight shot along my stump, drawing a deep, throaty laugh from her.
“You like that, Mr. Smith?”
I shook my head.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said as she untied the sleeve. She pulled it back, revealing the puckered, ruined flesh. “Who do you work for?”
Fury replaced her smile. Her fingers turned into razor-sharp scalpels that she dug into the scar tissue.
Blood spurted. The scalpel-fingers found nerves and shredded them.
My scream transformed into plastic and steel tearing. Glass shattered, and my arm fell through a hole where the Mitsubishi Sparrow’s window should have been. My fingers scraped along concrete, instinctively trying to hold the rest of me up. The Sparrow fell the last few inches, pinning my arm, twisting and mashing it and tearing it free. The car groaned with the puma robot’s mass. Its gory jaws opened and reached for my head.
Then the robot was gone, replaced by the cruel nurse.
“Who do you work for?” she asked.
And then I was in the hotel elevator with Norimitsu. Sweat sheened his forehead, and the color seemed drained away by the bright elevator lights. His slicked-back hair was thinner and gray-streaked.
He looked up at me, wrinkled and tired. “Who pays for all this?”
We all did. The whole world. He knew that. It was part of the contract.
The doors opened, and we exited on the second floor, the Porto twins just behind us. Walls blurred and sharpened around me. The entry to the parking garage glowed.
And his question ate at me. Who had financed the whole operation? So long to think it through and shift the puzzle pieces around, and it still wouldn’t come together. Someone paid me good money for what I did.
Why? Who? And what were we doing there?
Why protect Rhee? Why not tip off the Koreans? Why didn’t we know about the robot?
