by Joseph John
Chad swallowed. “Echo-7 evaded us again in Oklahoma. We lost two more agents. He stopped at a charging station in—”
The director cut him off. “What? Did you misplace them?”
“Sir?”
“The agents. You said we lost them.”
“What I meant to say was—”
The director placed his palms on the desk and leaned forward. “Say what you mean, Dodd. Don’t talk like they’re your goddamn slippers. Walter Lee and Rob Olson. Rob’s married and has two boys. Am I right?”
Chad’s cheeks flushed with heat. He nodded.
The director made a vague waving motion with one hand. “Go on.”
Chad told him how they’d tracked Echo-7 to the charging station. “Lee and Olson were the only agents close enough to intercept. But when they tried to neutralize Echo-7, he disarmed Olson and shot them both. Afterward, he took the cash from the register and, uh, used a box cutter to remove Olson’s thumb.”
“Jesus.”
“He left his truck and used the thumb to take their car. He’s headed east on I-44. Should be near Tulsa by now. And there was a security camera in the store.”
“Tell me we have the feed.”
Chad shook his head. “They’re running it pretty much twenty-four seven on all the major news sites. You can watch the whole thing online.”
“Splendid.” The word was a flat tire.
Chad said, “I’m still not sure where he’s headed, but we’ll track him until he stops for the night. Take him while he’s asleep.”
“Good. And just so we’re clear, no one moves in until we’ve got every team in a two-hundred-mile radius on this.”
Chad opened his mouth to protest, but the director cut him off with a wave. “Yeah, yeah. I know. They got other fish to fry, other irons in the fire, other plots and plans on their hands. But I don’t give two shits if they’re in the middle of stopping the next Cuban Missile Crisis or giving the Secretary of Defense a hand job. Just do it. You know what happens if Joe Public gets wind of this son of a bitch. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good. Make it happen. Now get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Five
Shawn Jaffe rubbed a hand over his jaw, the stubble as rough as hewn marble. The glare of oncoming traffic cut a swath through the darkness like a chisel. The burning in his eyes reminded him he’d been on the road for over thirteen hours. He blinked and stifled a yawn.
He’d stopped two times since Oklahoma. The first had been just over the Missouri border, where he’d paid a grand in cash for an ultra-compact two-seater with an odometer that read just shy of two hundred thousand miles. He transferred the pistol to its center console compartment and left the Tesla in the parking lot of a Synthcorp burger joint.
In Saint Louis, he stopped to recharge, paying with cash, and pulled away without incident, no signs of pursuit in the rearview as he merged onto the interstate.
That was an hour and a half ago, and now the weight of the day ground into him. Shawn wore it slumped forward in his seat and strained to keep his sagging eyelids open and his attention focused on the road.
Darkness filled the jungle. A dense canopy of leaves blotted out the sky, the stars, and the heavens. The night hung like a blackened veil, still and silent but for the buzzing of tiny insects. He lay in the mud on a bed of foliage and swatted at his face, a gesture as futile as this entire godforsaken war. He groped for the canteen on his hip, slid it out of its canvas sheath, and took a long pull. It tasted like dirt and rust.
An audio alarm went off, and the steering wheel vibrated and moved of its own accord. His heart pounded inside his chest like a caged beast, and at first he thought they’d hacked into the navigation system and were routing him toward a trap on a backcountry road. But he’d dozed off, dreaming he was in some war in a jungle, and the compact’s lane-keeping system had steered him off the shoulder and back between the lines.
His head nodded into the mud, and he jerked and resettled it on his M16 as he shifted around and fought back the weight of his eyelids. He lay in a jungle in Vietnam, a million miles from his wife and daughter, not because he was drafted. Oh no. He’d volunteered for this.
The audio warning brought him back to reality again. What the hell was going on? He hadn’t dozed off. That was no dream. It was more like a vision. But why of Vietnam, a war that had happened a half-century before he’d been born? And a wife and daughter? Not Victoria. It hadn’t been her. They’d never had children.
Shawn shook his head and tried to tell himself it was exhaustion. He needed to stop and get some sleep before he got himself killed. He took the next exit toward a Holiday Inn Express in Effingham, Illinois, less than a mile off the interstate, tucked behind a copse of evergreens amid a scattering of other hotels; their glowing logos thrust upward in a competitive array of colors.
He steered the compact into the parking lot of a charging station on the opposite side of the street. If they discovered he’d bought the car and tracked him here using its navigation system, they’d find the car but have no idea which hotel he’d checked into or if he’d checked into one at all. For all they knew, he’d ditched the vehicle, thumbed a ride toward Nowhere USA, and was a million miles from here. He jammed the pistol into the waistband of his jeans and hauled himself out of the car.
Wind and darkness rushed across the otherwise empty road that led back toward the interstate. No one followed him. He hurried across the street toward the hotel and wove his way through a scattering of vehicles in the parking lot. The automatic doors slid open as he approached, and he trudged through them like a weary shadow.
The lobby’s white marble floor gleamed beneath the ceiling’s glow, its walls a contrast of green and peach. A handful of matching checkered chairs stood in a meticulously haphazard arrangement around squat tables topped with crystal vases. A late-night talk show played on a holo-screen that stretched the length of the back wall, the host behind his desk chatting with a lanky actress seated on a couch. The lobby was deserted save for the clerk, a paunchy bald man with round wire-rimmed spectacles who sat behind the front counter on the opposite side of the room. He rose to his feet as Shawn approached.
“Good evening,” he said with a nod, his voice a soft trill. “Welcome to Holiday Inn Express. How may I help—” His voice cracked like a thin sheen of ice, and his face went ashen.
Shawn turned and scanned the room, glancing toward the entrance. There was no one else but him. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
The clerk shook his head, eyes wide and unblinking behind his spectacles. “Nothing’s wrong.” He strained a smile. “What can I do for you?”
Shawn furrowed his brow. “Um, do you have any rooms available?”
The clerk’s head bobbed up and down like a jackhammer. “Yes, of course. Lemme see.” He went to work on the digital countertop, typing and swiping through the menus. His hands were shaking. Badly. “Did you want a single or double?”
“Single. Just for myself, please.”
“Your, uh…can I get your name?”
“Shawn Jaffe.” He shook his head. “No wait. Ryan Marshall.”
The clerk blinked at him.
“Sorry. That’s Marshall with two l’s.”
The clerk bobbed his head again and shot him a broad smile that looked about as genuine as a forced confession. “Of course. No problem.” His fingers sashayed across the digital keyboard.
Shawn frowned. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he asked.
Automatic gunfire split the night and tore him from his reverie like the talons of a bird of prey. There was shouting, not all of it in English. A flare rose into the blackened sky and illuminated a line of shadows in front of him. Conical hats tilted this way and that in bewilderment. He aimed and squeezed the trigger. The weight of the M16 hammered into his shoulder. He gritted his teeth and kept firing as he watched them fall.
“Sir?”
Shawn staggered and caught himself on the counte
r. The jungle was gone, replaced by the hotel lobby. The clerk had taken several steps back, sizing him up the way he might’ve sized up a rabid dog.
Shawn blinked and shook his head to clear it. “I’m sorry. What?” he asked.
“Can I get you to press your thumb on the counter, please?”
Shawn peered down at the counter and its digital glass top. If he checked in with his print, they’d know he was here. “Can I pay with cash?” he asked.
“Um,” the clerk said.
“I lost my phone.” He wrestled a wad of bills out of his pocket. “How much is it?”
The clerk regarded the bills with a dubious eye. “Room is two hundred fifty.”
Shawn counted out the bills and laid them on the counter.
Something small and dark hurtled out of the jungle and landed next to him with a wet thump. A pineapple grenade, half-buried in the mud. His eyes widened with alarm. He scuttled toward it, grabbed it, and flung it back into the darkness with all his might. It exploded, a blinding flash like Armageddon and a thunderous roar that left his ears ringing. He pressed his face into the mud as the shrapnel rained everywhere. A sharp, burning pain tore through his left arm. He ignored it and squinted into the night. A line of Vietcong advanced on his platoon’s position through the smoke and haze. He tried to prop himself up and aim his rifle, but his arm refused to obey. From his right, gunfire tore into the enemy. Two or three stumbled and fell, but others advanced from behind to fill their ranks. He struggled to his knees, lifted his M16 with his right arm, and fired from the hip, sweeping left to right, right to left. Someone yelled at him to get down, get the fuck down.
“Sir?”
“Hm?” For a flicker of time, Shawn forgot where he was or how he got there.
“Your keycard?”
The bills had disappeared from the counter, swept away by the hotel clerk. In their place lay a keycard tucked inside a foil sleeve. Shawn reached for it.
Something hit him like an invisible sledgehammer, a sharp blow to the chest that lifted him into the air and sent him sprawling into the mud on his back. Stars twinkled in the night sky, and the rain fell, soft and cool against his face. He licked his lips and tasted the coppery tang of blood. Someone grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him backward. His heels carved two divots through the mud. He cried out, tried to tell them to stop, leave him. Nothing was supposed to hurt this much.
“—last door on your right.”
Pinpoints of light danced in the air, and the colors in the room took on a surreal, saturated quality, like in a dream or overdeveloped film. Shawn wiped at his eyes. “I’m sorry. What?”
“I said, you’re in room 134. Down the hall, turn left, and—”
“Thank you,” he said and spun away from the clerk. He had to get out of here, get to his room, and get these visions or whatever they were under control.
The doors lining the hotel’s inner hallways were indistinguishable from one another save for the illuminated numbers projected onto the wall beside each. He stopped in front of the door to his room and waved the keycard in front of its sensor. The lock clicked, and he pushed his way into the darkness beyond.
Chad Dodd squinted at the moving map on his glass multi-touch interface. He zoomed in on Effingham, Illinois and the Holiday Inn Express where Echo-7 had holed up for the night. The GPS tracker pinpointed his location and gave Chad a ten-digit grid coordinate accurate to plus or minus a meter.
The comms control panel lit up, and a tinny voice echoed from its speakers. “We’re three klicks out, people,” it said. “Team leaders, give me a functions check.”
“Heartland Team is green.”
“Pandora Team is green.”
“Gunstone Team is green.”
“Roger. Understand all teams are green. Get your asses ready, gents. It’s time to earn your paychecks.”
“I’m more stoked than a midget at a mini-skirt convention.”
“Save it, Maloney.”
“I’m telling you. They’re gonna write epic hymns about this shit right here.”
“Or at least memes.”
“Dreyer, don’t encourage him.”
Chad switched to live satellite imagery. The window displayed two sedans and two SUVs racing down the interstate. They took the exit for the Holiday Inn Express, pulled into the parking lot, and stopped alongside the hotel like a funeral procession.
“All right, you want them epic hymns or what?”
“Hell yeah. Let’s do this.”
Vehicle doors opened, and from within emerged a dozen men in dark suits carrying rifles, the automatic kind—M16s, M4 carbines, Uzis. They started toward the hotel, rifles held at the ready.
A flashing spray of blue and red lights lit the edge of the screen. Chad’s eyes widened in alarm, and he swiped the map, scrolled right, and zoomed in.
A police cruiser raced down the road toward the hotel.
“Oh, shit,” Chad said, spitting the words through clenched teeth. What the hell were the cops doing here?
It was because of that goddamn video from the charging station in Oklahoma. It had to be. The hotel clerk or someone in the lobby must have seen it and recognized Echo-7 and called the police.
Chad tapped the push-to-talk icon on the multi-touch interface. “Heads up, boys. You got company.”
The agents spun around as the cruiser whipped into the parking lot and raced toward them. As it drew closer, Chad’s speakers picked up the faint warble of its siren, echoing like an unimpressive battle cry.
So much for the element of surprise.
The cruiser turned hard to the left and skidded sideways, rocking to a halt behind the procession of vehicles. The driver’s door opened, and two uniformed officers spilled onto the pavement like a pair of snake-eyed dice, scrambling to their feet and crouching behind the cruiser. They fumbled for their sidearms and clutched them like rosaries on Judgment Day before aiming over the car, and the muzzles of the agents’ weapons swung toward them in riposte.
“Do not engage!” Chad hollered. “I say again, do not engage!”
In the background, one of the cops shouted, “Drop your weapons and put your hands on your head!”
Chad ran his hands through his hair, his mind racing as he tried to figure out how to stop the scene from reaching a violent conclusion.
Shawn Jaffe sat in a thick, upholstered armchair beneath the dim glow of a shaded floor lamp. He steeled himself for another vision, another blackout, but another didn’t come. They seemed to have stopped. For now.
The small hotel room was dominated by an unmade bed. On the far side, a short hallway ended at a wooden door, and a curtained window stretched the length of the wall next to him. Beneath the window, an air conditioner banged and rattled like a pair of old sneakers in a dryer.
He leaned his head back, sighed, and rubbed at his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Two competing sets of memories, one of a life that had led him to New York, and another that had led him to Amarillo. And now this, visions of a war in a foreign land that had happened over fifty years before he’d come kicking and screaming into the world.
Someone had done this to him. They had done this to him.
False memories. It was the only explanation that made sense. At first, he’d thought of the split as a crossroads, but that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t different paths but different layers, all stacked on top of each other, as if he’d been reprogrammed and reused, his hard drive overwritten but not erased.
Amarillo was the clearest because it was the most recent. Before that had been New York, which came through in bits and pieces. Were other layers of memories hidden beneath, like fossils waiting to be uncovered?
And why did he have memories of Vietnam? Were they the first of the false memories, implanted as practice, a kind of dry run? Or maybe his memories had been overwritten so many times he couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction, and he was mistaking movies he’d seen and books he’d read for experiences he’d lived. It
was like Apocalypse Now, starring Shawn Jaffe as Captain Benjamin L. Willard.
It was even possible his memories of Vietnam were real, and he was some kind of time traveler, a character straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel, manipulating events and history to suit the whims of his puppet masters. Crazy, yeah. But so far, crazy had been behind every door he’d opened.
The blare of a siren ripped Shawn from his thoughts. Strobes of color shone through the drapery like neon lights from a city of sin. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed the hanging fabric aside to peer through the window.
They were here.
Men in black suits carrying automatic rifles stood alongside a line of black cars parked next to the hotel. A police cruiser had slewed to a stop at a severe angle behind them, and two officers squared off on its far side, using it for cover as they leveled their pistols at the other men.
Shawn let the drapes fall closed and stumbled backward. They’d found him. He’d ditched his phone, his truck, the Tesla, and left the compact at a charging station across the street, yet somehow they’d still found him.
From outside the window, someone yelled, “Drop your weapons and put your hands on your head!”
“We’re FBI!”
“Stop right there! Lower your weapons! I said lower your weapons, goddamn it!”
Shawn spun away from the window and raced toward the door, twisted the handle, yanked it open. It caught on something with a violent, metallic crack, like splintering steel. He’d left the swing bar lock engaged. He slammed the door shut, slapped the swing bar aside, and wrenched the door open again.
The hallway beyond was empty. He stole along it and slipped down a side corridor across from his room. It led to a glass door that opened on the other side of the hotel. He cupped his hands around his face and pressed his forehead to the glass. Silent cars with dark interiors lined the parking lot in neat rows. He prayed no one lurked in the shadows, pushed his way outside, and dashed away from the hotel, waiting for cries of alarm and sounds of pursuit to follow. But none did.
A row of pine trees stood sentry at the edge of the parking lot. He shrouded himself in their umbrage and wove between their trunks as he slunk toward the road. The night wind stirred through the boughs above but carried neither shouted voices nor gunshots from the other side of the hotel—a foreshadowing of differences settled between the cops and the FBI. Soon they’d burst into his room like the Gestapo and find him gone. And then they’d come for him. His time was running out.
