by A. D. Winch
The last man fought as Eric clambered on to him. The knife was still in his hand, and he waved it towards Eric’s head. He thrust and slashed, but Eric was too fast for him, and he only cut air.
“Don’t,” Eric punched the man hard in the head.
“Mess,” he punched again.
“With,” he punched again.
The man was already unconscious. Johan tried to pull Eric off, but the boy was too strong.
“Me,” Eric uttered quietly but did not hit again.
The man gurgled as he breathed. Blood poured from his broken nose and bubbled into his mouth. Cats screamed down the alley, and Eric jumped up. The exercise had warmed him up, but he was still cold. He removed the man’s jacket and put it on. ‘Azteca’ had been sewn into the faded denim. The man’s Mexican football cap lay beside him. Eric took that too and placed it on his head.
“That was unbelievable and shocking. After all, you are only young,” Johan said. “I knew from the reports that I had read that you were extraordinary but this… well… I don’t know what to say.”
“No one is going to stop us,” Eric told Johan, ignoring what he had said, and stormed off into the street.
Johan found the money that the gang had stolen and followed. He struggled to keep up.
Central Camionera, Cuidad Juarez’s main bus terminal, was still open by the time they reached it. Cleaners were busy washing the floors, and the tiles gleamed under the bright lights and neon signs. Above their heads, large grey pipes kept the main hall warm and the hobos who had ambled in appreciated the heat. They weren’t alone. Eric and Johan were pleased to be inside too.
Before they did anything else, Johan insisted that Eric go to the bathroom and clean himself up.
There was a large man by the sinks. As soon as he saw Eric’s jacket he quickly left. Eric thought nothing of it and looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were steely and had lost their childish spark.
“I’m not a little boy anymore,” Eric whispered to himself.
The skin covering his knuckles was broken and sore. Dried blood caked the back of his hands, and the water ran red as he washed it off. When he had finished, he could see that his flesh had already started to bruise around his wounds.
Eric found Johan pushing his glasses up his nose as he stared at the departure board. There was a bus leaving for Mexico City within an hour. They bought tickets, stocked-up on supplies for the twenty-four hour journey and sat in a dead burrito bar waiting for their time to leave.
Eric stuffed the food into his face; he washed it down with a soft drink and Johan had to buy him some more.
“Do you have enough money?” Eric asked. He had seen how little Johan had left after paying for the coach tickets and was concerned that he would soon run out.
“Don’t you worry about it, Eric. I have more than we need just here,” and he patted his chest where he had strapped his essential items.
Johan picked at his food. He wasn’t very hungry, but he knew he had to eat something.
“Why did you help me?” Eric asked his mouth of food.
Eric could sense Johan’s reluctance to say and did not push him to respond.
“You don’t have to tell me. I’m just really grateful that’s all, and surprised. You were part of them – the OSS. I heard you. I think you called me a ‘lab rat’ too, then you help me escape. Why? It doesn’t make sense.”
Johan took a mouthful of insipid tea. Once he had swallowed, he replied, “We are not very different – you and me. You have been a prisoner of the OSS for a few months. I have been a prisoner for almost my entire life. I just didn’t realise it. Your cell was made from concrete and iron. My cell was built from lies and,” he paused, lost in thought, “my lack of desire to escape. Recently, I discovered these lies. Buddy Angel had my wife killed; I am convinced of this, but I have no proof. I am also in no doubt that I have a son who I never knew about until recently,” he paused again, searching for the right words. “I am an old man who does not want to die without righting his wrongs.”
“I don’t know what you’ve done that is wrong, Johan, but you helped me escape. Thank you. You’re correct – we aren’t very different. I think the OSS killed my parents, and they will pay for that. I’ve also realised that I have lost the only people who may actually care for me,” Eric considered what he was going to say next. “I don’t think I’ve been very nice at times either.”
“When I saw you awake in the operating theatre – your eyes full of hatred and pain - I thought that you could have been my son, the son I have never met. I looked at you, your anguish and…”
Johan had not quite finished when a voice over the tannoy announced the departure of the bus to Mexico City.
They left the restaurant, walked through the ‘Acceso Exclusivo Pasajeros con boleto’ and boarded one of the silver coaches waiting to leave.
They did not continue their conversation. Eric sunk into a chair by the window. It was padded and comfortable, unlike his cell had been. It also had a view to the outside world. Admittedly, the view consisted of a bench, rubbish bin and people waiting to board, but comparatively it looked great.
“What will we do when we get to Mexico City?” Eric yawned, he looked exhausted, and there were a few more grey hairs on his head.
“I don’t know yet,” Johan replied sleepily. “I am sure together we can figure it out.”
Eric was already asleep, and the memory foam had formed a perfect pillow for him.
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***
Chapter 22 – Fallout
“How on earth did you let this happen?” roared Agent Angel.
The meeting room had never been big but right not it felt tiny. Jean Kurtz didn’t dare look Agent Angel in the eye and avoided his gaze as best she could. The two soldiers who had been working in the cellblock at the time of the escape were sat next to her. They had already had their grilling. Two other soldiers, who had been stationed at the base’s check-point, were sitting beside them.
Her eyes wandered towards the guard manning the door.
“Look at me,” boomed Agent Angel and threw a pen at Kurtz. It hit her on the cheek and scratched her skin.
“I can hardly be held responsible for this,” Kurtz said unwisely. “How was I to know what he had planned?”
Agent Angel’s face turned from pink to scarlet.
“If you hadn’t been down there, none of this would have happened. You were the switch. Without you, White King would still be three floors below my feet. Luckily, I don’t think you are an accomplice. If I did, you would already be six feet under. I just think you’re an idiot and guilty of gross stupidity. You let your personal rivalry with Schwarzkopf blind you to being used. He always knew he was more intelligent than you. Now he has gone and proven it. What are you going to do without him? What are we going to do without White King?”
“I think you’ll find that we collected enough DNA from White King to begin initial attempts at creating Identical Hybrid Beings.”
“You do, do you? And what happens when we exhaust that batch of DNA? Something that Schwarzkopf kept drumming into me. What is going to happen then? Let me remind you at this point, Miss Kurtz, that it was you who persuaded me to change my approach to the lab rat and to bring it back to full health. Shall we take a moment to judge the success of that decision? Or shall we wait until our collection of samples runs out and see if White King turn up on the base and kindly donates his body to us for medical research? Don’t even think about answering!”
Agent Angel paused and breathed in deeply. The veins on his huge neck pulsed under this beard as did those on his forehead. Jean Kurtz contemplated saying something and decided that it was best not to.
“It is my understanding that one of the pods, the one you are rebuilding, is still open. The one that I can only assume White King was hiding in. When you have finished putting it back together again, what are you going to do with it? I heard a suggestion muted that you would
try to fly it, despite that you can’t even open the damn thing without Schwarzkopf. Tell me, how are you going to solve this problem?”
“We are now missing one component, but I am sure that, in the process of rebuilding the second pod, we will discover this answer.”
“Bull! You know damn well that the only person who stood any chance of helping you answer my questions was Schwarzkopf.”
“Well, if you find Professor Schwarzkopf…”
Agent Angel brought his fist down on the table with such force that one of the legs buckled, and it fell to the floor.
“Do you think I look like an idiot?”
“No, Sir.”
“I have command over more intelligence, present company excepted, than most countries could even dream of. The moment I found out about this sorry state of affairs, I employed that intelligence to discover where Schwarzkopf and White King are and do you know what I have discovered?” He breathed in deeply. “We don’t know. We know that they have crossed into Mexico, but that is all we can say with any certainty. Last time I looked, Mexico was a pretty damn big country and looking for two needles in a haystack is going to take some time.”
Agent Angel breathed in deeply again and turned away from the people in his presence. He gazed at the Stars and Stripes, flying on the screen in front of him and tried to compose himself. Once again he was left to sort out someone else’s mess.
“Hoover,” he muttered to himself and then bellowed, “Dismissed!”
Agent Hoover was sat at his desk as usual, in front of the surveillance screens. The screens could all be watched live, but he had never thought to record the footage. To do this would require an astronomical amount of memory space and, even for the OSS, the cost would be prohibitive. Even if they had recorded the footage from the last six hours, he doubted it would have helped. Professor Schwarzkopf and White King’s head start was too great. He only knew they were in Mexico because a guard at the border had remembered seeing a jeep with an old guy behind the wheel and a boy beside him.
A firm hand clasped Hoover’s shoulder. He hadn’t even heard Agent Angel enter.
“Hoover, I want the following four individuals put on our most wanted list – Professor Schwarzkopf, Eric Meyer, Ursula Benjamin and the elf woman. Circulate their profiles to Interpol again, and other police agencies around the world,” Agent Angel ordered.
“Already done, Sir,” replied Agent Hoover.
“Good work, Hoover.”
“Status report on Black Queen’s grandparents.”
“They’re still at Temera in Morocco
Agent Hoover pressed a button on his computer, and the Benjamins appeared on a screen in front of them. They were in their room. The woman was knitting contentedly while the man watched football on the television.
“The Benjamins are still bait. We keep them where they are,” said Agent Angel.
“Do you want them moved to a less comfortable cell?”
“Not yet. They are still helping us gather a considerable amount of intel on Black Queen. I do want to compromise this.”
“We still have our Ace in the hole,” said Agent Hoover smugly.
“Thanks to you, Agent Hoover. Thanks to you.”
Sasha had taken some convincing, but she eventually walked up the train tunnel. She was not pleased when they entered the door marked ‘Pozor / Danger’ and then had to walk along another wet tunnel into the Meyer’s cellar. However, her only comment was, “This is terrible. I don’t have a signal on my phone.”
Once inside the main cellar room, she had relaxed a little. Alexander did not. He ran between a small room and the large pile of objects on the floor. None of them looked as if they had been created on Earth, but she could have been mistaken. He stopped in various places, sifting through the objects; trying to find parts to repair Andrea.
Sasha watched and tried to take her mind off the stale curry smell. A bin bag in the corner of the main room had not been taken out when the cellar had last been vacated. Inside it were the contents of the last meal that had been eaten, and they spilled out of the top. Green mould covered the polystyrene boxes, and they looked like rectangular aliens.
Watching Alexander was not a big enough distraction, so Sasha opened the duffel bag containing Andrea. She removed the broken body, unrolled it from the white sheet and laid it out upon the floor. The body itself looked untouched, but the head looked like it was beyond repair. Sasha knelt down and looked into the gaping hole on Andrea’s cheek. There was a mess of circuitry and wires inside. If she had been human, her brains would have been blown clean out, and there would be no coming back.
“Thank you for preparing her,” said Alexander as he sat down beside Sasha. He had a tool box full of the equipment he had collected in one hand and a laptop in the other.
“She is gone. She has no more robot brain,” Sasha told him.
“No, she isn’t,” replied Alexander, sorting through the tool box. “Her brain, her CPU, is not in her head.”
Alexander peered into another section of his duffel bag and removed Professor Larsen’s schematics that he had found in Lepley. He unrolled them and looked through until he found the one he wanted. The drawing on it was crude but illustrated his point clearly.
“Look,” he said and pointed to the paper. “On a human the most important organ is the heart. Nature has evolved, so this is shielded in our chest and protected by a ribcage. Andrea does not have a heart. She does not need one. Therefore, our mother put her CPU and memory behind a titanium rib cage.”
“If you get her to work she will be fully functioning? She will not be drooling vegetable?”
Alexander laughed. “Your choice of words is interesting sometimes, Sasha. No, ‘she will not be drooling vegetable.’ If I can repair the damage inside her skull, she should be fine.”
Over the next few hours, Alexander carefully opened up Andrea’s head. He had no desire to cause further damage and studied his mother’s notes intently before everything he did. He tried to leave the left side of her face untouched and worked on the damaged right side instead. He removed the rubbery skin on her cheek and gradually opened up the bullet hole until it reached from her eye socket to her chin. Sasha acted as a nurse and cleaned up the remaining black liquid that was caked around the area.
After six straight hours, Alexander was starting to lose focus. His eyes felt strained, and his back was aching.
“It is time to rest,” said Sasha and pulled him away from Andrea before he could answer. He did not complain, and his stomach was rumbling.
There was still food under the stone staircase. They found tins of ham and tins of mixed vegetables, and ate them hungrily.
“We do not have to finish this today. You must slow down,” Sasha said as she fetched them a drink of water each.
“I don’t want to stay here any longer than I need to,” Alexander replied. “If Eric Meyer is with the OSS, then there is no way we can know what he has told them. I want to do as much as I can here and then we will go.”
“We can stay. We will be fine.”
“No, we have to go.”
“Where to?”
Alexander took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and straightened it out until he could read the number.
“I need to make a call. There is a VOIP connection in the computer room,” he pointed to the doorway behind Sasha. “I will call from there.”
“Where is the bathroom?” asked Sasha, as Alexander got up.
He pointed towards the chemical toilet in the corner of the room and the flimsy curtain that could be shut to provide privacy.
“You are not serious!”
Alexander laughed and walked into the computer room.
The computers had been monitoring the house for the last six months. Before he made the call, Alexander checked over the log. There was nothing out of the ordinary. He wondered if he should listen to Sasha, and not be so keen to leave, but then he thought of Eric. Maybe the boy had yet to tell the OS
S about this place but that could all change in the next few days or even in the next few minutes. He was right to want to leave.
Alexander opened up a proxy server and an anonymous VOIP connection. He dialled the phone number on the paper and heard it connect. The phone rang and rang. Just before he was going to hang up, it was picked up.
“Hello,” greeted Captain Hudson.
“Hello, we need to keep this brief and try to avoid specifics,” Alexander told him.
Captain Hudson didn’t know what to say, and the line went quiet for a few seconds.
Finally, he said, “She is here. Thirty minutes from her grandparents.”
It was Alexander’s time to think. He did not want to return to Paris, but he felt a responsibility towards Ursula. If Sasha and he left Prague now, they could get a coach to Paris and be there in about twelve hours. His mind worked quickly as he tried to think of a rendez-vous point without giving an exact location.
“The night of the storm, we met and then quickly left. I was violently sick. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“I will meet you at this place, at this time tomorrow.”
“Agreed. Have a pleasant journey.”
The call ended, and Alexander looked at the screen. He hoped that there would be an overnight bus to Paris and searched on the internet until he found one. It left from Florenc bus station in three hours, and there were still seats available.
As he was about to leave, a message appeared over his VOIP connection. It was from Captain Wang, and he read it quietly to himself, When you were on the Orca, I received strange text messages. This one is less strange, but I think it is for you. ‘To The Nail Biter, Arriving in Cádiz, Spain in 8 days. The Spoilt Brat.’
Alexander typed back, thanks and pondered the message. It could be luring him into a trap, or it could be genuine. The use of ‘nail biter’ and ‘spoilt brat’ made him feel that it was more likely to be real than a fake. He stared at the screen and tried to work out what he was going to do. After a number of minutes, he decided that when he got to France they would have no option but to all leave for Spain. There was no meeting point given, and Cádiz was a big city. If necessary, they would be able to disappear, and it was probably safer than staying in Paris.
