Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  Even as Jeff crossed to join her, the floor beneath the desk and couch spun as if on a turntable and the image disappeared. From couch and movie screen, the area transformed into a desk facing a curved wall of monitors. The couch now faced the rest of the room.

  He looked at her again, wondering if it was the same person. Miss Hard-as-Steel Military and this exquisite room were two different people.

  A movie—and a girl-movie at that. Notting Hill. Master Sergeant Thomas, no, a young woman named Shelley, had recently been lounging on this plush, sky-blue couch watching a girl-movie.

  Master Sergeant Thomas, however, was presently studying the images on the wall while perched on a small leather stool before an executive’s desk. Her fingers were tapping away on the glass surface. No, she was typing on the outlines of keys projected onto the surface of the desk.

  He focused on the wall.

  “Shit!” Maggie Hadderly wrapped in fire. Julio holding on to his own throat so tightly he appeared to be strangling himself.

  And Phillip’s face with two silhouettes crouched over him. He recognized the two hands even though their owners were out of the shot, his own and Mandy’s. Her fingers hadn’t changed much with the years, always slender and delicate. Always slightly callused from working in the garden, her one great solace.

  Jeff dropped into a chair. He looked at the other screens reluctantly. Half afraid he’d find himself on one of them, or even worse, Mandy. His requests to contact her had fallen on deaf ears as if Shelley didn’t know who he was talking about. Or that he was even speaking. There’d conspicuously been no telephone in the guest level. Of course he’d never thought about the possibilities of the entertainment system having more than one function.

  Shelley was typing rapidly, proving that her personal movie screen was also a very sophisticated computer system.

  No pictures of Jeff’s dead former lover. A good sign.

  A row of six faces lined the top of the screen. All were similar in their complete lack of noteworthiness. Any one of them could be Joe Normal.

  The videos started running in loops beneath each one and he tried to look away but couldn’t. The horror of those moments returned. Again he watched two pretty girls and two friends die, his oldest friend who had died in Jeff’s stead.

  Phillip rattled through his death throes, his body thrashing and twitching time and again. Julio and the girl from the audience fallen to their knees, both clutching their throats, tears rolling down their faces for long moments before they collapsed forward never to move again. That they had landed in a position close enough to be a lover’s embrace had been the ultimate irony. Maggie Hadderly was once again unclothed by flame. Others trying to help were bathed by the fire extinguishers refilled with gasoline, which had put signed and sealed on several death certificates.

  Julio and the girl. Poison. Fire. Phillip. Poison. Mandy. Jeff himself—

  Jeff sprinted for the bathroom. If there’d been a door, he’d not have made it to the toilet in time. He barfed up what little he’d managed to eat of the cheese and vegetable omelet MRE this morning for breakfast. The hash browns and bacon had been noxious, but he had managed to keep down the cinnamon scone, until now.

  He rinsed with some mouthwash he found behind the mirror before daring to even look around. The bathroom was isolated from the bedroom by simple turns of the wall. No shower door, just a walk-around glass block corner and the shower filled the area without splashing the rest of the bathroom. There was a Jacuzzi tub, luxurious in size, as well as commode and bidet. It was all done in the shades of lavender and yellow yarrow. The top row of tiles along the half wall had distinctly Old World Italian images. It was exquisite and feminine at the same time.

  Checking himself in the mirror did little to build confidence. Mid-fifties, graying ponytail, eyes that had seen more in the last week than anyone should see in a lifetime. “Pull yourself together man.” The image in the mirror didn’t respond, or look much more confident. “You’re a survivor.” That brought some life to the eyes that watched him. “You have to get back to Mandy.” Ah, there was a hint of the old Jeff the Chef Davis. Straightening his shoulders as best he could, he returned to stand beside Shelley.

  She’d moved their images off to the side and frozen the video loops.

  She made no comment when he finally returned to her side and sat on a second stool. Quid pro quo. He wouldn’t mention her choice of bedroom furnishings and she wouldn’t ask how he was doing.

  A fair deal, as he still wasn’t sure about his stomach.

  Now the six faces dominated the screen, some sort of a search program was running, flashing hundreds, thousands of similar faces on top of each.

  “The two at the left,” Shelley spoke without looking at him, “were in the audiences of Maggie Hadderly and Chef Julio respectively, the two in the middle were at your show.”

  He stared at them, but there was nothing familiar about them. Of course during the show most of his attention had been on Mandy.

  “They were the very first to depart when people started dying. They didn’t rush forward. They didn’t try to see what was going on. They knew and they left.”

  The murderers. These were the faces of the killers.

  “We’ve got to get them to the police. I’ve watched the news, the murders are ancient history. Only Maggie’s final moments are making any ripples at all because of the Christian Right suing the news station for broadcasting pornography.”

  “No police.”

  “What!?” He jerked from the stool and shoved her shoulder to face him. “What do you mean no police?”

  She didn’t react, didn’t slap at his hands, nothing. She simply pointed back at the screen.

  “How about those two on the right? Do you recognize them?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “They are the pair that grabbed you and dragged you out into the alley. They were shot to death only moments later as another group grabbed you. You appear to be quite the prize, Mr. Davis. One worth killing for.”

  He dropped back into his seat.

  “For the love of God why?”

  CHAPTER 50

  “I’m more concerned with the who. I have two IDs so far.”

  Jeff turned back to the wall screen. Names had appeared under Maggie’s unknown and one of Jeff’s audience members who’d left early.

  Special Operations Forces of the United States Army. His own country’s super-warriors were killing chefs.

  Another two cropped up, Julio’s and his own other missing audience member.

  “Each is from a different squadron. They’re usually assigned to different places on the Earth, almost no chance they’d ever meet.”

  A skills-set roster appeared below each name. Maggie’s murderer specialized in explosives, communications, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Julio’s was medical, weapons, and Farsi. His guys’ were Russian for one and Portuguese/Spanish for the other, one weapons, one engineering, and both had medical.

  “This is insane. Why would they be hunting me?”

  “Well, first, it’s illegal for them to operate on US soil. Even the partial repeal of the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus that Bush the Second forced through shouldn’t have released them.”

  “The what?” The room was spinning about him, as if Shelley’s desk and couch turntable had rolled into overdrive. He was about to be flung against the wall like a piece of soggy spaghetti right down to the accompanying splat and slow slide to the floor. The photo search on the other two faces became a steady, fast-paced blur, washing their faces out with a thousand possibilities.

  “Two laws that said the President can’t use the military to enforce law and order on US soil. Think of it as an anti-coup rule. President Bush repealed a whole section of that in 2007. He did it pretty quietly as a subsection of the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill.”
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  “But they tried to kill me!”

  “Yes. That’s bothering me.”

  “Bothering you? Bothering you! It’s doing a damn sight more than bothering me. The absolute, number-one toughest warriors on the planet are trying to kill me?”

  Shelley nodded. Simple as that.

  He dropped his arms to his sides and rested his forehead on the glass desk. It was cool as he rolled his forehead back and forth across its surface. Not all that different from the stainless steel desk in his concrete cubicle in Chicago.

  Was the circle shrinking? How much smaller would it get before, poof, Jeff Davis was snuffed out and no one noticed? Already they’d had to post a canned show because he wasn’t there. Only two of those existed, and then what? They’d give his time slot to some sultry, Southern belle doing God alone knew what with okra, or Dr. Pepper with peanuts and he’d never get it back.

  Get a grip Jeff, that’s if you are still alive to get it back.

  “Why me?” he asked the desk.

  “It still requires a finding.” Shelley responded.

  “A finding of what?” He rolled his head to the side and looked at her sideways, just as he had the first time they’d met. He knew little more about her than that very first time.

  She lived underground and her job was training Air Force security forces. She also had a crazy gang kid that was half in love with her and a mother she didn’t like who gave her top-secret helicopters for Christmas.

  “The President creates this thing called a ‘finding.’ He and the FBI director clear it with this tiny committee of buddies in Congress, then he can send the Special Operations Forces wherever he wants. Legal or otherwise.”

  “The President? As in ‘of the United States’? White House? Air Force One? That President?”

  She nodded.

  He rolled his forehead back onto the cool glass and stared through it to his sock-covered feet on the lavender carpet covering the fifth floor of a secret, underground missile silo. His feet were not planted on the firmest of ground.

  “So, the most powerful man on the planet is illegally using the most deadly men on the planet to kill television cooking show hosts?”

  “Not just any host. I think the others were simply a distraction, a misdirection if you will. It would appear that you were their ultimate target based on the number of operators involved.”

  What the hell had Phillip done to him? Colonel Peterson. Shelley had called him Lieutenant Colonel Peterson. Had Phillip been the target and Jeff had been, what did they call it, collateral damage? No, that wasn’t it. They’d been killing chefs, not scientists. He was the target.

  “Here we go.” Shelley followed the statement with a low whistle of surprise.

  He looked up at the screen. There was finally a match under the names of the two men who had dragged him from Phillip’s side. The ones who had dragged him from Mandy and had died for it in a back alley in Manhattan.

  British Special Air Service. The SAS. After that, their skills lists looked like the tally beneath the other names.

  “You’ve gone global, Jeffrey.” Mandy was the only other one who used his full name.

  British SAS had tried to kidnap him.

  From the Special Operations Forces who had tried to kill him.

  Only to be killed by a third party even nastier than the first two who’d locked him up in Chicago.

  A harsh tone warbled in the room, far louder than Shelley’s cell phone.

  But he really didn’t care anymore.

  CHAPTER 51

  “Oh, shit!”

  Shelley’s quiet curse drew his attention where the loud warble hadn’t. She didn’t sound happy. Okay, she never sounded happy, but she also had never sounded nervous in the two days they’d been together. That change struck Jeff as probable cause for full-blown panic from a mere mortal like himself.

  The screens were now filled with views he recognized. The helicopter bay, with a half-a-dozen men wearing green-and-gray camouflage in it.

  Several more in the kitchen.

  Even as they watched, a solid green bowling ball shot upward from the center of the floor, with enough speed to reach the kitchen ceiling. But this time it shot up directly into the face of a man who’d looked down as the small trap door clicked open.

  Shouts of “Man down!” echoed from the speaker. A moment later, two others had grabbed the man with the broken face. In five more seconds another bowling ball, blue this time, launched up from the same hole and almost nailed another one who’d been inspecting the opening.

  Shelley tapped rapidly on the keypad projected on her desk. An e-mail window appeared on the screen and she quickly attached the information she’d gathered. Then a quick note, “Raid in progress.” It was gone before he noticed where it was addressed.

  No shit, raid in progress. The screen showed a guy with a torch was presently working on the sealed door to Level Three. Wonder what they’d think when they found a workout gym. Maybe one of them would be stupid enough to stand in the second lane.

  Shelley cleared the screen and shoved him toward the door they’d entered.

  He stopped and stared; the greatest wonder in the entire living area finally registered. A huge collection of polar bears. Little stuffed ones, the size a girl might tuck under her arm. Big ones of a size she might nap on. A wooden one with a pull string on wheels painted with a holiday harness of red and green. One in body armor, fierce and deadly, with a little girl scratching his ear.

  The collection went on and on filling hundreds of cubbyholes on either side of the door. It had to be the planet’s leading collection of polar bear memorabilia. From cruddy little two dollar toys to . . .

  A glass case, atop a pedestal a foot square and three feet tall. The interior space was lit from below.

  In the case there was only one bear . . . actually two. Just one single piece of crystal: a mother bear grooming her cub.

  Swaronski crystal resting on purple velvet. He’d recognize it anywhere.

  “C’mon.” Shelley grabbed at this shoulder.

  He didn’t budge.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I don’t know. Long time ago.” She pressed a button on the side and the top slid open. She pulled the statue free. The crystal statue was just big enough to cover her open hand. She wrapped it in a shirt and stuffed it into a small day pack she then strapped it over her shoulders.

  “Now. Let’s move.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Jeff sprinted after her, though she took time to seal the double steel door on this room most carefully. Locked both doors with another palm print, just like her desk.

  “Where did you get it?”

  She didn’t answer, but plunged down the stairs. Down, not up. He hesitated only a second, just long enough to hear the pounding from several levels above and a thump that could only be an explosive.

  He sprinted after her, the metal grate grabbing at his socks and scoring his feet as he ran.

  There was something. Something beyond the pounding of his feet and his heart. Something that—

  He threw himself flat until he lay back on the stairs and an orange bowling ball shot past inches above him, rocketing downward as if it too wanted to escape the raiders above. A single bounce at the foot of the stairs, apparently landing on a rubberized pad as there was no harsh clang of bowling ball on metal grate, and on the rise, it disappeared into the wall beyond.

  He sprinted after Shelley.

  “Where did you get that bear?”

  He’d given that very sculpture, mother and cub, to someone a long time ago. The perfectly cut crystal, made by a true artist from liquid crystal so clear that you could imagine seeing the whole world through it. All the way to their beating hearts.

  He stumbled to a halt close behind Shelley. He hadn’t kept track of how many sto
ries they’d descended in their gasping rush.

  They stood on the edge of a great pool of water. The entire bottom of the silo must be filled. It looked black, cold, and forbidding.

  “Any crocodiles?”

  “How good a swimmer are you?”

  “Not good enough to out swim a crocodile.”

  “No crocs. How good?”

  “Where did you get that bear?”

  Shelley looked at the ceiling and counted to five in a mutter.

  “How good?”

  “Where?”

  “Trade?”

  He nodded.

  “My mom gave it to me. When I was a little girl. Three or four. Don’t even remember. How good?”

  “Very good.” But the words were spoken by someone far away. By someone who shared his voice but not his insides.

  He’d once given that bear to a little girl.

  “Davis! Snap out of it. You need to hyperventilate, now, if you want to live.”

  She was heaving air in and out of her lungs hard and fast. He followed suit, quickly becoming light-headed.

  “There’s a tunnel.” She gasped out between breaths. “Right beneath our feet. At the very bottom. Twenty feet down. Long tunnel. There are rungs on the bottom. To pull yourself along. When you run out of rungs. You can surface. Don’t try. To go up. Before that. Got it?”

  He nodded and gasped in and out some more. It gave him something to think about. Something other than the girl who had taken the bear from his hands and danced with it about the room in joy.

  A girl who didn’t remember him.

  CHAPTER 53

  The water was warm. Almost as big a surprise as the glass of water must have been to Phillip when he’d expected vodka.

  Jeff dove down, followed Shelley until he lost her in the darkness. Cleared his ears twice before he reached bottom. There, as she promised, was a tunnel four or five feet across.

  Flailing around, he ripped a fingernail on a rung and lost some air to a curse. Then he grabbed the rungs and towed himself forward into the darkness.