by Rick Partlow
He was relieved when he reached the Intelligence section and the crowd thinned out: the Intelligence Service was small and very selective, particularly under General McKay. The people who worked there were mostly specialists and involved in their work, less likely to be wandering around trying to look busy. But those few he did run across were in some ways worse than the faceless, nameless throngs he’d come through earlier. They did know him and they did know what had happened. Their furtive glances, awkward nods and hesitant waves were worse than accusatory glares.
He felt a sense of gloomy fatalism descend on him as he made the turn into the Command Suite, where General McKay and Colonel Stark’s offices were, as well as the situation room. He had pretty much accepted the fact that Colonel Stark was going to take him out of the field after this…what worried him the most was the possibility that thousands of innocent people could die because of his failure.
Abshay stumbled to an abrupt halt as he entered the Command Suite. The reception desk at the center of the cluster of offices was usually manned by a junior officer---he knew them all by name and sight---but at the moment that chair was vacant and Captain Drew Franks sat on a corner of the desk, arms folded, frowning ominously. Franks had a boyish face and a boyish charm to go with it, but Abshay knew better than to underestimate the man.
“Sir,” Abshay came to attention and saluted his superior officer. Neither Franks nor their superiors, McKay and Stark, were big on spit and polish or bracing junior officers, but this was in garrison, not the field.
“The others are already in the Situation Room,” Franks said once he’d returned the salute, motioning back at one of the doors behind him. “I wanted to catch you before you went in, though.” Franks had always seemed supremely confident to Abshay, but right now he appeared hesitant. “How’s the leg?”
“Just about healed up, sir,” Abshay assured him, absent-mindedly rubbing the spot where the bullet had entered. “Should be good as new in a couple more days.”
“Sorry I wasn’t able to visit you in the hospital. I had to supervise the prisoner’s interrogation…and run interference with the police about all those dead bodies.” Franks leaned back against the desk again, looking down at the floor. “That was some good shooting out there, by the way.”
“Not good enough to save Arellano,” Abshay blurted, the feelings that had been churning in his gut for the last two days finally escaping in a gush of words that he couldn’t bottle up any more. “I fucked up, sir…I let a bunch of street criminals just walk up to us and blow his head off and now we have nothing.”
“Abshay,” Franks said quietly, shaking his head, “this is on me. Sgt. Manning and I were pulling security for you…I should have spotted the hitters sooner. I should have had Tanya out there patrolling on foot; I thought that would be too obvious, but I should have risked it. You did your job: you have nothing to feel guilty about.”
Abshay blinked, not knowing how to respond to that. He wasn’t sure Franks meant it or if he was just taking responsibility because he’d been in command.
The Captain sighed, pushed himself upright off the desk. “Let’s get inside.”
Franks palmed the door plate and waved for Abshay to enter before him. The Situation Room was Spartan and unadorned, bare walls and a smart table with a dozen chairs arrayed around it, and three women waited inside. Seated in the chair closest to the door, Sgt. Tanya Manning looked as efficient and dangerous as usual in her grey Special Operations field utilities but she smiled warmly at Abshay as he entered. He’d always thought of her as a humorless, efficient hard-ass NCO; but working with her the last couple weeks, he’d come to know her as a surprisingly friendly and compassionate.
Around the table towards the opposite wall was Agent Caitlyn Carr, looking somewhat out of place in her tailored civilian suit among all the uniforms. She was attractive in a businesslike sort of way, he supposed, but the perfunctory nod she gave him was cold and detached. He wondered if she blamed him for Arellano getting killed…
Standing on the other side of the table was Colonel Shannon Stark, the ranking officer present. She had hair the color of sunset in the mountains, eyes like the emeralds set in some pagan idol and she looked as lithe and deadly as a tiger as she leaned with both hands against the surface of the smart table, fingers splayed. When he was being honest with himself, Abshay had to admit that he’d been half in love with her since the moment he’d met her.
Abshay came to attention and saluted, and from the corner of his eye he could see Franks doing the same.
“At ease, gentlemen,” Stark said as she straightened and returned their salute. “Have a seat.”
Captain Franks fell into a chair beside Tanya Manning---Abshay wasn’t certain, but he’d come to suspect that there was an attraction between them.
“Good to see you up and around, Lt. Patel,” Manning said to him as he chose a spot halfway around the table from her.
“I should thank you for saving my life,” he told her earnestly. “I saw the security video; that shooter would have finished me off if you hadn’t taken him out.”
“They would have killed both of us,” Caitlyn Carr declared, her voice flat and her eyes cold. “It was a damned miracle they didn’t.”
“Before we start,” Shannon Stark interrupted, her voice pitched to cut across all other conversation---what Abshay thought of as a “command” tone, “I want to get something straight immediately. What happened in Trans Angeles was my responsibility, no one else’s. Everything that happened was on me.”
“Ma’am,” Franks protested, frowning as he leaned forward across the table, “I was the officer on the ground, I made all the calls. This was my op.”
“Captain,” Shannon said, “the very last thing Sgt. Manning said to me before you left to take the shuttle to Earth was to ask me to bring the rest of her team along for support. I told her that we didn’t want to attract attention and that you four could handle it. That was a mistake…my mistake. You needed more eyes on the target, and you didn’t have them.” She shook her head. “Even one more person along could have been monitoring a wider view via insect drones or security feeds, but you didn’t have the luxury and that is on me.”
Shannon straightened and crossed her arms. “That’s the final word on this and there will be no more discussion, no more recriminations, no blaming yourselves or each other.” She speared each of them with a hard stare. “Am I clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” came the hesitant, antiphonal response, even from Agent Carr, Abshay noted. Neither she nor Captain Franks looked happy about it, though.
“Moving on,” Shannon said, touching a control on the table. “This is a recording of the prisoner’s interrogation.”
A cylinder of light a meter across and just as tall snapped into existence above the table’s projector, then coalesced into the image of the lone surviving shooter strapped securely into a padded chair in a small room deep inside the Trans Angeles Police Department’s Confinement Center. He was a young man---no older than Abshay and probably younger---with a sharp, angular face and a depilated head, decorated with the active tattoo of a stylized wolf bounding after a lamb, pouncing on it and devouring it in a spray of blood, over and over.
The young man’s eyes were dark and hooded and glazed over from the psychotropic drugs he’d been administered and his head was slack against the restraints that held it in place. The camera angle was fixed, showing only the prisoner; when the interrogator spoke it was as if his voice was disembodied, coming from everywhere.
“You are Ramon Aguilar?” the voice asked. Abshay realized immediately it was Franks speaking.
“Yes,” the prisoner responded with dull disinterest.
“Where do you live?”
“Kibera,” Aguilar replied drowsily. “The ten-eighty-seven.”
Shannon paused the playback with a palm through the image. “Kibera is the unofficial nickname of one of Trans Angeles’ most notorious slums,” she told them. “The public
housing blocks are known locally by their numbers. Building 1087 is in the northeast corner of the district.”
Another pass of her palm and the recording continued.
“The other men who were with you,” Franks’ voice went on. “Are they from the same building?”
“Ya,” the man tried to nod, but his head yanked abruptly against the strap holding it in place. “They my vatos. We grew up together. We score some coin together trading fab’ codes and shit like that. Sometimes we gotta’ crack some heads for some guys, you know?”
“Had you ever killed anyone before today?”
“No, man,” Aguilar seemed disturbed by his words, despite the cushion of the interrogation drugs. “No, I never even had a gun before.” He shrugged slightly, the motion truncated by his restraints. “We worked for the fabshops sometimes, bringing in people that need guns, but we never used them ourselves.”
“So how did you wind up killing Timothy Arellano?”
“We got orders,” Aguilar said quietly, almost resentfully.
“Orders from whom?”
“Don’t know,” he mumbled. “They used a dummy account, wanted all four of us and said they’d pay…” Aguilar trailed off and fell silent.
“Did you ever meet them?” Franks pressed.
“They called us to a rental place…big apartment. We were supposed to meet them there to pick up the guns.” The youth closed his mouth again, face blank.
“Then what? What happened at the apartment?”
“After we got the guns, they told us to wait for a call, and when they called, we were supposed to go where it said and blast that rich guy.”
Abshay noticed that the young man hadn’t actually answered the question and wondered why. Was he so afraid of whoever had hired him that even the drugs couldn’t make him talk?
“And you just did it?” Franks asked, disbelief in his voice. “You said you hadn’t even touched a gun before, but you just went and killed someone you didn’t even know?”
“Yeah,” Aguilar answered so quietly the recording almost didn’t pick it up.
“Why?”
Aguilar frowned, his brow knitted in concentration, then shook his head.
“I don’t know…we just never even thought not to.”
There was a long pause and all you could hear was the sound of the young man breathing. Then Drew Franks leaned close enough to Aguilar’s ear for the camera to pick him up right at the edge of its view.
“Do you remember what happened in that apartment, Ramon?” he asked softly, eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Aguilar swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his neck.
“No,” he rasped. “I don’t remember any of it. None of us did.”
Shannon Stark touched the tabletop control and the recording froze.
“They’d been chemically conditioned,” Franks said, looking tired. “We’re still running their contacts down, but that’s probably a dead end. If they had anything to connect them, they wouldn’t have been used for this.”
“Why?” Abshay asked before he could stop himself. Four pairs of eyes turned to look at him and he took a breath before continuing. “I mean, ma’am,” he continued to Shannon, “we know the bratva are behind this, together with the Protectorate possibly. They know we know it. Why go to the trouble of brainwashing these nobodies to do their dirty work?”
“Not a lot of Russians in Trans Angeles,” Caitlyn Carr said with a shrug. “Maybe they thought these guys would attract less attention.”
“Maybe,” Shannon mused, “but I have a suspicion that the bratva are being used as much as these boys were.” Her eyes were looking at something beyond the walls of the room. “This feels like a power grab to me, and I don’t know if we have a handle yet on who’s pulling these strings.” She seemed to shake off the thought. “All right. The shooters are a dead end, you’re right about that, Captain Franks. We need to dig deeper into Arellano. Get the netdivers looking at his finances, at every connection he has at his job and in his personal life. Franks, you and Patel monitor the results: I want perspective on the data and I want it fast.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Franks acknowledged, coming to his feet. Abshay stood as well, stepping toward the door.
She turned to Caitlyn Carr. “Agent Carr, there’s something I think you might be able to help with, if you want to stay on the investigation.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Carr said with curt certainty.
“I’d like you to use your CIS connections to check out the system they used to spoof the shuttle registry,” Shannon said. “This can’t be the first time they’ve done this and it seems just too damn useful for them to give up all of a sudden. Maybe we can get some idea of their next target.”
“I’ll do what I can, Colonel,” the CIS agent told her. Abshay wasn’t as good a reader of people as Shannon Stark or Drew Franks, but he was fairly sure that Caitlyn Carr wasn’t happy about the situation.
“What about me, ma’am?” Manning asked. “What do you want me to do?”
“Get your ops team up here, Sgt. Manning,” Shannon told her. “Get them some training hours while we have the time. You’re going to have an assault shuttle at your disposal twenty-four seven and I want you and your team available for support if we find ourselves a target.” She smiled thinly. “As General McKay likes to say. I try to learn from my mistakes.” She gestured to the door. “Now let’s get to work.”
Chapter Twenty Four
Yuri sipped his drink thoughtfully, listening to General Sergei Antonov mutter incoherently in his sleep. The Protectorate dictator was strapped down to a cheap, plastic cot and heavily sedated; it was the only way to control him when he hit these manic phases. The two of them were alone in the old park building, with all the rest of Yuri’s men scattered, doing the things he should have been doing but couldn’t because of the hunt on for him.
Yuri held the shot glass up to the portable lantern hanging from the ceiling, swirling the centimeter of vodka still left in it as he read the inscription: “Denali National Park, Alaska.” He’d found the glass in what was left of a gift shop, abandoned with the rest of the clutter and garbage nearly two centuries ago in the panic and chaos that had followed the war.
“Ironic, is it not?” Yuri asked, half to the semiconscious Antonov and half to himself. “We two relics of the old world squatting here in the ruins it left behind.” He shook his head. “I wonder, my friend, if you are ever sane enough to wonder why I do this.” He chuckled softly. “I’ve often wondered myself, you know. At first, it seemed simple: confusion and hurt to our old enemies, profits to be made in the chaos as always. But somewhere along the line, General…somewhere along the line, it became something else.” He downed the last of the vodka in the glass, then reached for the bottle and filled it up again. He didn’t immediately take another drink, though; he leaned forward in his chair, staring at the cracked and fading plaster of the wall in front of him.
“But these days…I don’t find myself thinking about the money any more, or even about the power.” His mouth twisted with a look of bitter rage. “All I can think about is our people. We once ruled half the world, General; you once ruled half the world. We led the world into space; we led the way to exploiting its resources to save human civilization. We united a splintered Europe and gave them peace from the ethnic discord. We rescued them from an economic collapse and brought them prosperity.”
“And when we came into conflict with Chairman Xiang’s expansionism, did the West take our side? Did they come to our defense when the Chinese attacked our borders? No, they sat on their asses and made noises about peace.” He spat on the floor. “They talked of peace while our world burned and our people died by the tens of millions. And when it was over, when our nation had died, did they try to help those who’d survived? Did they lift a fucking finger for us? No, they left us to rot. They were generous enough to let those who could make it stay in the lands they’d abandoned, to live in their ruins…these ruins.�
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Yuri stood, downing the shot of vodka in a single gulp. “The ones who have aided me in this, the American traitors, they want more power, more control over the empire they built on our ashes.” He paced around the small room, running a palm over its cage-like walls. “They think they can use me as a tool for their purposes, and that my own desire for power and control will keep me loyal to them. They think I am just like them…and I probably was, not that long ago.
“I told myself I could use the power I gained to improve our lot here. Even now, these plans are in motion and hundreds of my people are risking everything to gain us that power. But sometimes, I just want to destroy it all, I want to bring it all down around their ears in a way they can never rebuild it.” He focused on Antonov’s face and for a moment those dark, recessed eyes opened and focused on him with startling clarity. “I can do it, you know. I have other things, things much worse than the nanovirus. I’ve told no one of this, of what these other things are capable. Even my most loyal men and women would think me insane if they knew. So, General, just between you and I, will this feeling pass, is it a transitory failure of faith? Should I give in to my better nature, such as it is, and continue to exploit the catastrophes I cause, to control them…or should I give into my malaise, my nonbelief, my apathy and burn it all down?”
Yuri didn’t expect a reply. Hell, he didn’t expect Antonov to be able to put two coherent words together at this point. So he was genuinely shocked when the General worked moisture into his mouth and spoke hoarsely but clearly, answering his question for him.
