“I wasn’t about to let it leave, actually.” Vickie made another gesture toward the desk. The top drawer opened obediently, and she slid the pages inside. She etched a small inscription against the lock, effectively sealing it beneath the quantator. “Now, all we need to do is pretend that we don’t know anything about this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Enemy Mine
MERCEDES LACKEY AND CODY MARTIN
Sometimes it felt as if for every single thing we learned, we uncovered three more mysteries.
One of those mysteries was why the Thulians never seemed to fully commit to anything. Another was why some of their people seemed to have agendas of their own . . . agendas that came at us out of nowhere.
* * *
Commercial airline travel sucked. It had all the discomfort of those jump seats on the Echo cargo jobs, with none of the legroom. At least on Echo standby flights, you got something to eat. And you didn’t have a kid kicking the back of your seat the whole time. And a screaming baby three rows up.
But John Murdock wasn’t with Echo, so although CCCP was technically “allied” with them, anything that wasn’t a screaming emergency or a stealth mission meant . . . commercial air. Currently, he was flying back to Atlanta after checking on a weapons shipment that had gone over its allotted timetable. It wasn’t too much to worry about, and he’d set everything to rights; the people involved with the container ship were all Russian, and having the CCCP badge did wonders for making sure everything went smoothly. The thing that bugged him the most was that he felt that being sent on this errand was, for starters, boring, but more importantly a waste of his time and skill sets. But, perhaps fortunately, it was up to his betters to decide where his time working ought to be spent.
He was doing his best to sleep fitfully through as much of the flight as possible, despite the cramped conditions and droning noises of screaming babies and overtalkative businesspersons. Right when he was finally about to nod off, a voice chirped in his ear.
“Got bad and good news for you, comrade.”
“Is the good news that you’re a dream, and I can keep on sleeping?” He scrunched up his face, readjusting himself in the seat and sitting up straight. “Lay it out for me. What’s up?”
“The good news is that you get to jump off the cattle car at the next stop, the better news is that I have a car with a meal in it picking you up. The bad news is that you have a job.”
“I thought that developing an exquisite contempt for commercial travel was my new job.”
“Naw, that’s for standup comedians.”
“Bella said I oughta pick up a hobby.”
“Here’s the skinny. Seems the Rebs have been doing out-of-town recruiting since you ran them out of Atlanta. We think there’s a base. I’ve already sent Zhar-ptica out with a vehicle. He’ll meet you at the airport and he’s got all the briefing materials with him.” There was a dry laugh. “If you turn on your comm to double-check me with Gamayun, the stewardess will have a coronary, and you’ll end up getting arrested by the Sky Marshal, so it’ll have to wait.”
“Okay. So, remind me, where am I getting off again? An’ who’s this Zhar person?”
“Brand new with the advantage of having a genuine USA education. Minor firepower, too minor to interest the home team. Speaks good English, as opposed to Pavel English and knows how to read a US road map. By the time he gets there with the miserable excuse for a vehicle that Nat authorized, you’ll be at the curb.”
He mulled over the information for a moment. “So, the new guy is my sidekick and support. I do a snoop and scoot on this base, report back, and wait for more instructions. Right?”
“Pretty much. It’s halfway between Savannah and Atlanta.”
“Anythin’ more of import ’bout this mission that y’need to tell me?”
“The important stuff is in the briefing you can download when you hit dirt.”
“Good. Then quit yer yappin’. I’m gonna pass out. Y’might want to call the cops, though; I’m gonna kill the rug rat that’s kicking my seat. Slowly.”
◊ ◊ ◊
If John hated the actual process of commercial flying, he utterly despised what it took to get out of an airline terminal. Jostling and bumping through thousands of other tired, cranky, and overcaffeinated travelers did nothing to improve his mood. When he had finished collecting his single bag, he wanted nothing more than a hot shower, some strong liquor, and a bed. A soft rock would’ve sufficed, but a bed would be better. It was while he was waiting at the curb for his comrade to meet him when he noticed something from the corner of his eye.
It was a woman approaching him; everything about her posture said that she was nervous. She looked like someone’s secretary, dishwater blonde, a little dumpy, getting wide in the hips from sitting at a desk all day. What was out of place about her was that she had a bodyguard with her. He was easy to spot for what he was when you knew what to look for; part of it was the fact that although you couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses, there were tiny telltale motions of his head as he scanned the crowd like a preprogrammed machine.
Shades at night? What a putz. John turned to face them, setting down his bag and shrugging off his backpack. “Somethin’ I can help you with, ma’am?”
The woman, despite looking like she was about to come apart at the seams, managed to sound very bored. “Look at this, Mr. Murdock.” She handed him a PDA. On it was a picture of a young man, probably in his early twenties. He was bound and gagged, tied to a chair, and looked like he had been beaten up pretty thoroughly. That day’s newspaper was being held under his chin. “If you don’t come with us, we will kill this individual. Make your decision.” John groaned internally. These goons weren’t Blacksnake; Blacksnake, thankfully, wasn’t this cheesy. And while this woman could conceivably be connected with someone or some organization that he knew nothing about, he got the sense immediately that this was Thulian.
“Firming up the visual.” The familiar voice was very quiet in his ear. He was awfully glad there was nothing for these bastards to see that would let them know he was wired.
“Whaddya think I’m gonna do?” Let’s see how this plays out.
“Positive on the hostage; Reb bagboy, minor police record. Negative ID on the contacts.” A car pulled into the curb with a screech of brakes. “Nat says your call, go or no-go.”
They could’ve killed me with a car bomb or a drive-by or any other number of methods; if they wanna risk talking to me like this, there’s a reason.
John stooped as he bent down to get into the car, looking at the bodyguard. “Get my bags, Fritz.”
* * *
The car ride took close to an hour and a half. John was fairly good at keeping time internally, but the bag they had put over his head had made it difficult. The entire ride was silent, without so much as a sniffle or throat clearing from the other three in the car. This was all very cliché, but he didn’t allow that to lull him into any false sense of security. These people were all enemies, and he could end up very dead very quickly; it didn’t matter if it was by the hand of an amateur or someone with experience and brains.
It was a good thing his lifeline to Vickie was an implant now. Nothing for them to see. Nothing for them to hear either; Vickie was being as silent as he was. That was probably smart. If either of them had meta-powers they might hear something if she spoke.
Then they stopped, although the car was still running. He heard the bells of a railway crossing, then the approaching train. When it was near enough that the sound actually rattled the frame of the car, the voice was in his ear again.
“Zhar’s behind you by a good bit, and I have your loc. Looks like you’re heading for the same place we wanted you to go. Got more backup on the way now, but they’re at least two hours at top speed.”
Which means I’ll either be clear or dead by the time they arrive. At least someone might be able to clean up whatever’s left, in the case of the latter. The thought of th
e angel flashed across his mind. Strangely . . . being dead had an entirely different slant to it now. The fear wasn’t so much that he would have lost, as it was that he would have lost seeing her again. He’d been doing nothing but surviving for so long, that these past few months of . . . well, really living, had sort of crept up on him. What would she do if he was killed?
And if . . . if she really, really was an angel . . . would it matter?
He got a brief flash of her, hands on her hips, scolding him for getting killed the way his ma used to for getting into something, and nearly choked on a laugh.
The train passed; the car was in motion again, bumping over the tracks, then taking a right onto what felt like a dirt road. “Are we there yet? I’m getting hungry.” He uncrossed his arms, fidgeting intentionally in the seat. Distracting them had its own perks, one of which was that annoyed people sometimes let things slip. And this bunch didn’t exactly look like the cream of the crop.
“Shut up.” Male voice, directly to his right. The bodyguard.
John decided that it would be all right to gamble. “Make me.” The guard clamped his left hand on John’s shoulder, which was what he had counted on. The guy was big, bigger than John, and was used to intimidating people that way. In a blink, John had locked his left hand onto the guard’s wrist and pulled him forward. After twisting the wrist just a few inches, he applied his elbow to the guard’s outstretched arm, hyperextending it until he heard a loud pop and a strangled cry. The bag was very suddenly snatched from his head; the woman was pointing a small pistol at him, the driver was turned around in his seat, and the guard was nursing his broken appendage. After a second of studying it, John realized that the pistol was Thulian; one of their weird rayguns. It further confirmed his suspicion about who these goons were. “What?” He shrugged nonchalantly, as if the violence that had just taken place had nothing to do with him at all.
“Get out of the car, Holz. And you. Do not move quickly. I can choose to make you hurt very, very much.” The woman didn’t look frightened now.
The bodyguard fumbled open the door, hissing his pain as he did so, and got out, leaving John with a clear view of his surroundings.
It looked to be what was left of a farm; John wasn’t at all familiar with farming equipment to identify what sort of farm by the old, rusted-out hulks of machinery parked beside what remained of a wooden barn, but the blowing bits of white fluff everywhere did that for him. Cotton, and it must have been abandoned for a long time, to have built up the little drifts of dead, grayish fiber against the weed-infested fence line and the base of the barn timbers. The driveway they were parked on was mostly crabgrass with only a hint of the original gravel.
There was a second barn next to the wooden one, in somewhat better shape; sheet metal over steel, it looked like. And big. Probably where the cotton bales had been stored. John got out, taking his time. The whine of what sounded like a million cicadas filled the air.
The group—minus the bodyguard, who was leaning against the car—strolled through an open door in the second barn, guarded by an equally serious-looking and for-show-big tough guy. Cotton lint was everywhere; cotton fibers and dust were so thick in the air it looked like a Ridley Scott film. The guard nodded to the group, stepping aside to let them inside. The barn looked a lot bigger from the inside than from without; big enclosed spaces had that effect. The place was almost completely empty, except for several scattered stacks of crates, some more bodyguards and the “hostage” sitting in the center, still tied to a chair. The hostage was dressed plainly enough; he almost looked like a college kid instead of a no-account piece of Reb scum. The question was, why hold one of their own guys as a hostage? Unless, of course, they were counting on him to think the kid was a civvie.
“So, what’s the play here, folks? I haven’t got all night, and I’m still hungry.” He crossed his arms and rolled back on his heels. “Your hostage isn’t much of one; should’ve told the Reb to bathe before y’tried to set this gig up.”
“And what makes you think he is a Reb, schweinhund?” Something very like a Teutonic god leapt down out of the upper story and landed in a cloud of dust and cotton lint. John knew that particular Teutonic god though. Ubermensch.
Oh. So that’s why they went to the trouble of dragging me out here. John was immediately uneasy. Ubermensch, while probably not the smartest man John had ever met, was definitely one of the strongest. John shrugged, again trying his best to appear unconcerned. “Couldn’t have been plainer than if you’d stuck jackboots on him, Fritz. Beer, sauerkraut an’ back bacon on his breath.” John wasn’t about to give away the fact that his “eye in the sky,” Vickie, was the source of the information. He uncrossed his arms, taking a step forward towards the Thulian and the bound Reb. “What do you want?”
The Thulian stuck a thumb at him. “You shamed me. You shall not shame me again. This time we fight—”
“Not to interrupt what sounded like a towerin’ righteous rant, but y’ought to have your barber here fer shamin’ ya. That haircut went out in the seventies. Nobody wears mullets anymore.” Piss him off. Couldn’t really make things much worse. John tensed, readying himself to see how the big—the only really appropriate word to describe Ubermensch—meta would react.
He was disappointed. Ubermensch’s brows knitted. “Was ist ein ‘mullet’?” he muttered to the woman. She shrugged.
“I wouldn’t be too quick to talk about fighting, Adolf. You’re talking to a real man here, and you couldn’t even take out one little slip of a Russian girl.”
The Thulian’s face screwed up in rage. “You insolent pig—” John snapped his right arm out almost instantly, fire cascading down it in a thick stream. The flames jumped and impacted directly in front of Ubermensch and the Reb “captive.” John had paid close attention to the cotton lint and dust that permeated this warehouse; such things were really, really flammable. The space around Ubermensch erupted into a mini fireball, causing him to throw his hands in front of his face; the Reb, still tied to the chair and gagged, had no such recourse. John didn’t waste any time; he darted immediately to his right, taking the half second to burn the nearest bodyguard with a spurt of flame large enough to swallow a Buick. Skidding to a halt behind a stack of crates, he waited and listened.
Everyone else scrambled; the aide went straight for the door, and the remaining bodyguards followed suit, sliding and slipping in the accumulated cotton lint. The Reb was the only one that remained still; he had begun to scream around his gag. Ubermensch brushed the ashes and soot from his armor. Although he did not have his sword, the rest of his armor was the same as the last time John had seen him. His golden helmet had been made in the shape of an eagle’s head, an extremely stylized, art deco sort of eagle’s head, with two equally stylized wings sweeping back from either side. The eagle theme was carried out on the breastplate, where another eagle was incised into the metal, a double lightning-bolt “SS” in one claw, a stylized skull in the other. In the way inconsequential thoughts had a way of intruding when you were under heavy fire, John wondered if this was the same armor that the first Ubermensch had worn—or if the new version had had a new look designed to match the power suits.
He lifted one gauntleted hand to the helmet, and raised the beak-visor, revealing a head that looked like it had been taken straight off of an old Third Reich statue, scanning the warehouse. His eyes settled on the stack of crates that John was hiding behind. “You’ll suffer for your tricks, pathetic worm!” In five great strides, Ubermensch was at the crates, smashing through them with his shoulder. John barely escaped from behind the bursting wooden boards, sending a jet of flame over his shoulder. The pile of broken crates began to burn around Ubermensch; the light cast reflected off of his gleaming armor, making him look even more like a raging devil.
John took a deep breath, still running, and his enhancements keyed. He moved at a blur, kicking up clouds of cotton dust. He stopped very suddenly, whirled, and braced his right arm. Concentrating and
relaxing, he let the flame on his arm build and coalesce; the blast lashed out to strike Ubermensch directly in the chest, splashing flames across his upper body. I’ve gotta keep him outta reach until I can get some good distance between us; then I’ll have time to really unload on the son of a bitch. The Thulian stomped after John, swatting away the fire from his face. “You cannot keep this game up forever!” He bumped into a metal support beam, one of dozens in the warehouse; stopping, he ripped out a meter-long section with one hand. Putting up his free hand to shield himself from the flames, Ubermensch side-armed the hunk of metal at John.
John dropped prone to the floor, shutting off his flames; the beam sailed overhead fast enough to create a violent vortex in the air above his head. It would’ve bisected him if he’d still been standing upright. John was back up on his feet just as quickly, but Ubermensch had seized the opportunity to close the distance. John feinted to his left, then juked to his right towards the center of the room. Ubermensch followed, unfazed by John’s feint. They met right next to the Reb, whose eyes had gone wide in abject terror. Ubermensch caught John in a viselike grip with a meaty hand inside his metal gauntlet; John wrenched his shoulder, barely slipping out of the hold. This is bad. He jabbed twice, connecting with his opponent’s jaw; it didn’t budge, but something in John’s hand almost cracked. He wouldn’t be able to hurt Ubermensch, not close-up like this.
The problem was that the bastard was so damned strong. John’s mind, flooded with adrenaline and moving faster than his enhanced body could keep up with, jumped back to training with Bella at Echo, teaching how to handle superior strength when you were just a weak human. All the CDOs had to take this training. The highlight had been when a small, unassuming man with a huge bushy mustache and coke-bottle glasses had instructed John to try to strike him with all of his enhanced might; the next thing John had known, he was on his back and halfway across the room. John was a fast learner; he’d picked up quite a bit in that one session.
Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle Page 38
