The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  I watched them for a few minutes, letting them power through some kind of terrorist camp where the bad guys never noticed their fellows being blown up ten meters away and the guards walked back and forth in a set pattern. I was appalled. Aidan looked over at me, smiled, then did a double take and his jaw dropped. “Whoa, Big Bear.”

  Declan’s shooter got blown up. “Big Bear? Holy sweet Jesus. The man himself? Guys, I’m out.” He pushed a button and his side of the screens went dead. Aidan followed suit and I was suddenly facing two sets of hungry eyes. They got up, dusted off crumbs and a couple of pieces of cheese. Then they started hugging me.

  I’m not much of a hugging soul, but the brothers A&D subscribe to something they term The Bro Code and apparently bros hug other bros. They think I’m some kind of steroid induced Alpha bro and thus I am expected to deliver epic hugs. Which I did.

  They call me Big Bear. I have never understood how bros receive their nickname, but it’s apparently supposed to make me ‘delish with the ladies’ and also alert other bros to my Alpha male status. It might also have something to do with how I met the brothers. I had been moving between locations after a blown op and was meeting a gun runner who could get me some IDs and untraceable currency. These two scraggly kids, literally thirteen and fifteen, came in from the rain to hide in the biker bar I’d picked.

  Behind them came five very large adult males full of liquor and confidence. One of them had a baseball bat. The point of contention being that Aidan had been tea-bagging the leader of this posse for some six months, fragging him often, and then deleting him from the leaderboard. I had no idea what any of that meant but it sounded petty. I did understand a group of drunk men meant to beat the crap out of a pair of snarky kids over a computer game.

  Neither brother would back down. When cornered and about to get the snot beat out of them, they were insulting, defiant, and incredibly funny. So funny I found myself laughing. The drunks heard me and made the mistake of involving me in their little dispute. Here’s what sold me: Aidan, the thirteen year old-kid about to get flattened with a wooden bat for something he started, looked me in the eye and told me—Sorry sir, we didn’t mean to get you involved. When I was done, all five were on feeding tubes for six weeks and two never walked again. I realized then how much I despised bullies.

  Once I connected the skinny teenagers with the skilled computer programmers who’d erased their own identities, I’d taken a more earnest interest. I’d helped them out from time to time, got them components, or loaned them some money when the bitcoin values had plummeted. Early in their career, I pulled some strings and redirected some legal investigations into a Pirate Bay clone they had been running from their basement. Then I’d sat them down with a hacker friend of mine and gotten them properly educated. To me these were small favors, the kind never mentioned in The Web. To the brothers, I was some kind of avenging angel made of testosterone and liquid assets. I was Big Bear.

  Aidan stepped back and looked me over. “Agent forty-seven look, very modern dude. Like it.”

  Declan nodded, and then saw my shoes, covered in smoke, dirt and dark stains. Blood but I’d hoped they wouldn’t recognize the stuff. “Bear, you’re lots of bad road, bro. You like need a shower or something?” I did need a shower and maybe even a drink and some food. I just nodded. “Got some lady problems or what?”

  I cocked my head. “Lady Problems?” I’m not sure I even knew what those were for a self-declared bro. Or what they would consider Big Bear’s version.

  Aidan nodded. “Def laaaaaady issues. Look at his sad face.” I doubted that I looked anything other than tired although my neck might look black and blue. “I’ll get us some white pizzas.”

  Declan motioned me to follow him, then stopped when he saw me staring at the demolished living room. “You never seen a blanket fort before?”

  “No. It’s called a blanket fort?”

  “Dude, you gotta get out more. You’re like, still in the nineties or something.” I followed him while Aidan started making rapid fire calls on a phone made to look like a flying squirrel. He took me upstairs to an outsized bathroom done out in black marble and chrome and, when he flipped a switch, blue neon. The mirrors cascaded the light into a thousand fractal images, creating a strangely fascinating effect. He flipped another switch and a second set of low lights turned the blue into shades of green and purple.

  “I know, dude, so cool right?” I nodded because Big Bear would and because it was oddly cool. Outside my imagination to ever want such a thing, let alone spend money on it, but pleasing nonetheless. He brought me some terry cloth towels and showed me a modest closet stacked with clothing. I looked it over. They were old cast-offs from my prior trips. Things I’d told them to donate. Instead they’d had them mended, laundered, and pressed. I had clothes and, gods, they had several pairs of shoes and a proper autumn coat.

  “Thank you, Declan.”

  He smiled, punched my arm and laughed. “We knew you’d like that.”

  I showered for a good long while, using the scrubbing gels and a plastic loofah to get the stink of death out of my skin. I shaved using something dubbed a platinum five blade super max and didn’t slit my own throat. In the mirror, I saw a hungry wolf staring back at me. I’d not stopped and really taken stock since the building dropped in NYC. Sure, I’d had down time in the Canadian cabin, but I’d been banged up and trying to plan for every future contingency, not to mention shot full of drugs while fighting fever and infection. I’d not given much thought to what was going on or what had happened.

  The man I saw staring back at me hurt. Thankfully Dieter’s attack on my neck had left an almost indistinguishable mark. The other injuries from small nicks to the weeping hole in my ankle had healed rapidly. My hands, face, and neck were still passable in public. I’d acquired a fairly nasty bruise along my right outer thigh and what looked like a scorpion strike on my left calf. The wound had some infection and when I pushed on the hole it oozed. I applied antibiotic cream and a bandage I had found in the medicine cabinet, wiped down all the cuts with witch hazel and iodine, then washed them off five minutes later. I brushed my teeth.

  Then I dressed in old clothes from underwear to sport coat. I found them a little roomier; I’d lost some bulk as a baker and just dropped weight over the last two weeks of running and fighting. I had only brought a single Glock, an extra clip, the fighting knife and the phones. The rest of my gear lay in the sedan’s trunk under a blanket. In this bathroom, surrounded by the play of light and steam, they felt out of place. I felt out of place. Wounded perhaps, uncertain.

  I missed the man who spent weekends feeding geese and playing with his goddaughter. The quiet baker with deft hands. Mostly I missed my family, little that I had seen of them over the years. Something ached in me and I slumped against the counter. Physically I felt excellent, headache free, burning with adrenaline, ready for go time. But losing Sonia—no, losing my place in the world as her Cookie burned. I couldn’t even feel the agony of losing Sonia and Arkady and Olga. Until the op was over and I was dead or on the side of right, I’d shove that so far down a well nothing could touch it.

  Peripheral feelings; the strange need to protect my hacker, the attraction of Pina, the promise I’d made to Nadya; the sadness at losing Mika; they all pushed on me in unacceptable ways. I was vulnerable, weak and unprepared. I’d cried in front of an operative. I’d shot Cassandra without meaning to and lost the chance to put Zeus in his grave. I’d been making human mistakes, emotional miscalculations. I’d been on the run and A&D could see it, sense it.

  More than that, my moment in the bathroom made me realize I was off my game. I might have felt in top form and was making drop shots like an expert, but I doubted I could recall the layout of the data center in Rochester or, for that matter, the color of sailboat I’d stolen. I’d been breezing through dangerous situations relying on instinct and momentum to get me to the next logical position. I’d intuited much from Morris Moses, but what if I’d
missed something? What did Pina want? Why did she want it? That was a better question, one I might have had an answer for if I was focusing more on details and nuances and less on survival.

  I knew that, logically, I’d needed to keep moving and likely I’d gotten ahead of Wickham, Zeus and Hans precisely because I’d gone too far, too fast. But I was somewhere unknown, off the grid and out of the war, safe if I chose to be for days or weeks depending on how careful I was. I had time to reflect and reevaluate. I had time to put my emotions back in a box and lock them tight. I finished dressing, rubbed some aftershave that made me into a lavender scented sex god (so the label promised) and went down to eat pizza.

  The brothers run a no shoes household, so I’d opted for bare feet. Better in a fight and the carpet felt good on my toes. If I was going to stop and rest, I might as well soak up a little pleasure here and there. Autumn in Arizona feels like a Soviet Summer so my feet were warm. Downstairs, I heard banging and rattling and walked into a scene of domestic civility. In the kitchen, which resembled a marble and metal air craft carrier, the brothers had arranged four white pizzas on actual cutting boards and had some beer in a kind of fat low wine chiller. It was probably a new wave beer thing I’d not seen yet. The hipsters of Amherst would envy my entry into this secret world. Aidan was pouring some juice into a glass pitcher that had a swirl of green and red shot through—it looked hand-blown and expensive.

  They’d pulled out actual plates, forks, knives and cloth napkins. The last time Big Bear had come, they used paper towels and eaten straight from the box. Aidan looked me over, nodded with approval, and handed me a beer with an ugly decal on it. “Dark Lord Imperial Stout. This is only sold one day a year.”

  I took a swig and was fairly impressed. It was a Lamborghini in beer form. Stout, sweet thick beer, so perhaps a Bentley SUV would have been a more apt comparison. The brothers whirled about their kitchen pulling out some bowls of things that looked like olives and sun dried tomatoes, hand grated cheese, a few other bottles of what might have been flavored olive oil. They were keen to impress someone. They’d each changed into a clean T-shirt and, while I had no idea what the logos meant, I assumed they were something acquired via elite gaming or backstage at a concert.

  I turned to Declan. “Is this normal for you?”

  He saw me looking over the spread and shrugged. “We like to make it nice. Aidan’s friend Em has been real helpful in making some upgrade suggestions and hey,” he patted my shoulder proprietarily, “we want you to know how important you are, you know?”

  I thought about that for a moment. They’d laid out special beer and fancy condiments to honor me. The boys were growing up. It was also touching and that concerned me. Hours from then I’d have to go back to a place where touching and sweet got men killed. Where good beer slowed reaction time and bare feet meant you were vulnerable to glass and fire.

  “Wait, like Aidan’s dating Em?”

  Declan laughed. “No, she too much for him to handle and she’s what, twenty?”

  Aidan shook his head. “Nineteen but looks like she about to turn thirty. But you know, in a crazy sexy way.” I did know in some technical depth. The Defense Clandestine Service had a whole directorate of those kinds of women, mostly combat snipers and bent marines whose mere gender had kept them out of regular wars. Called them the Lysistrata Corps, which was ironic in the extreme given what duties they performed. Likely that was not what he meant. He smiled ruefully. “She hangs out, borrows some stuff, makes us decorate and take showers. Like a lady skills Sherpa.”

  That made me smile. The brothers had needed a lot of help and while I had sent some people their way, by nature of their anonymity, my resources were necessarily limited. I wasn’t exactly an expert on women. Having a lady skills Sherpa sounded like a step in the right direction. Anything to move them past neon and couch forts.

  I took some pizza that appeared to have prosciutto and caramelized onions, drizzled peppered olive oil, added some smoked olives and sundried tomatoes, and then sat at the table, back to the corner. I was on vacation for an hour or two, not dead. The lads joined me, making indiscriminate use of the condiments, tossing things on until the pizza slices disappeared under a mound of things that did not normally mix. That explained the fork and knife.

  We ate in silence for a few minutes and, finding that I was a ravenous, I went back, loaded my plate with more of each pie, poured what turned out to be truffle oil on a garlic white pizza (a new favorite I’d want to repeat if I lived through the week) and refreshed everyone’s beers. The alcohol worked wonders on my bruises and did something indescribable to the knot in my neck. There might not be much of a bruise showing but Dieter had almost killed me and I felt it every time I breathed, coughed, or turned my head.

  Declan polished off a fourth slice that he’d slathered with anchovies, shaved pecorino, and blue cheese stuffed olives, then accompanied with a red wine. Aidan had stuck to cheese, more cheese and pizza. With beer. I switched to juice after two beers and was surprised that he’d added sparkling water. Whatever it was, it was delicious. My bugs require lots of simple sugars, so juice had always been an easy way to feed them in a pinch.

  Declan: “All kinds of crazy out there, man. Federales up in arms, gamers gone nutters.”

  Aidan: “Totally. This tops Gamergate for whack.”

  Declan: “Yeah, Bear. It’s wayyyyy worse than that bee ess. Effin misogynists.”

  Aidan—taking a long swig of beer: “Word, bro. Word. Know anything about all this stuff, Bear?”

  That was my cue. They knew I did something vaguely governmental and imputed to me the kinds of secret spy shenanigans boys think up for comic book heroes and movie stars. I had told them I was a low level courier for some computer agency, which they decided—whoa—had to be the NSA. I had overheard Aidan explaining to his brother one night a decade ago that I was so big because I was one of those embassy marines who got recruited after I passed an IQ test.

  They expected I knew why the government had mobilized and there were hot and cold running terror alerts on every news channel. If I’d told them the truth the brothers would have had more beer and gone on with their lives. Global shadow conspiracies were only interesting to them if you could convert them to a massive online player platform, monetize it, and cheat your way to victory. The real thing lacked the proper graphics package and plot to suit their needs.

  “Why don’t you ask me questions, and if I can, I will answer them.”

  Declan gave me a sly smile. “You mean if you’re allowed to, right?” Which was very close to the truth. What I knew would get them killed, and I had a responsibility to protect them. I had been certain no one could find me and my phones were better than burners. Even if I called Section 22 from the driveway, they’d see the location and assume I’d found a way to bounce my signal. Nothing of importance to The Web existed in Flagstaff, Arizona. Ergo, I was not there, could not be there. In my trade, no one ever goes where things are unimportant or unconnected.

  Aidan sipped some beer. “Okay. To start with, who the hell is Abu Minsayeed?”

  I had never heard the name before which meant he was likely the terrorist du jour. “The news said something about Minsayeed?”

  Declan shook his head. “Nah. They keep blabbing about a Chechen cell of Al Qaeda. We just kind of heard of him through the, you know, grapevine.” I sat quietly, trying to think of what to tell them. Nothing came to mind, which told me a great deal about my fatigue. He continued, “You know, the deep web places, where we buy and sell bitcoin packets. Somebody said he bankrolled the Toronto attack.”

  Aha. A clue. “Honestly I have no idea who he is. I take it he runs money through some banks for Anonymous?” Likely not, but it was a good way to open up the conversation.

  “Gah, no. Anonymous hates that dick.”

  Aidan agreed. “Totally. He like, lurks on crappy third party places. Bitbazaar and Torrentspace, sketchy parts of the net.” Neither brother seemed to appreciat
e the irony; bitcoin had a less than stellar reputation itself.

  “So not a banker. But he buys and sell bitcoin?” There were middlemen, low level functionaries in The Web who handled chores like this. Gray Bankers, they were called, transferring funds from within black banks into randomized digital currency then into fluctuating real currency, usually hedging exchange rates and paying the launderer by taking a bad rate of exchange. The Syndicate had ten global banks that facilitated these kinds of transactions and they made a solid income from skimming in both directions as people converted assets.

  Declan shook his head and poured more wine. “No, that’s why it’s weird, huh. Minsie has like his own money or something, he pays in bitcoins but he never like buys any. So he has somebody sending him packets or he’s stealing them.”

  “You worried he’ll hack yours?”

  They both snorted. Aidan took up the sword. “No way, dude. We have some good encryption and we have them like, what’s the word, sequestered. Anonymous is our banker, man. They take no crap from anyone. It’s how we know about him in the first place.”

  Fact: Anonymous had been tracking some kind of Gray Banker who was outside The Web financial system. Fact: they had found financial trails to Toronto, which meant Section 22 and the Cult of the White God. Fact: he was entirely unknown to Jeeves/Murray. Or had not been mentioned.

  I shrugged. “Likely Anonymous just found a money man for a splinter cell of the SEALs. There’s a rogue black operations team running around that might not be America friendly.” It was both the truth and sanitized to keep the brothers out of the real war.

  Declan whacked the table and fist pumped. “Dude, seriously?” He and Aidan did what they called a fist bump, and then offered me their knuckles. Big Bear, as the alpha bro, delivers a righteous fist bump. We congratulated ourselves with more drinks. I downed my juice and got another full glass. Something tired in my neck popped and I felt a pain that had been jabbing down my back ease to a dull ache.