Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  For now, the nose of its business end was pointing to the sky, but the moment it started spitting lead, it’d be game over.

  “Hang on, Three,” said the voice in his earpiece. “There are two more coming out of the school. Go, go, go.”

  Connelly shot out of the ditch like a lethal jack-in-a-box from hell. He pushed hard as he sprinted toward the truck, his boots making scraping sounds as they dug into the sandy ground with every step. As he accelerated, he heard the almost simultaneous whistles of two subsonic bullets punctuated by wet plops as they found their targets. The two guerrillas in front of the building collapsed, causing a momentary confusion among the newcomers.

  Connelly cut down two more fighters by the side of the AM General with a short burst from his MP5 and sprinted toward the Hilux with Smith breathing down his neck and laying suppressive fire. One of the fighters dashed toward them and jumped on top of the pickup truck, reaching for the machine gun only to find himself at the wrong end of Smith’s submachine gun.

  “Cover me,” Connelly shouted to Smith and without stopping, catapulted himself onto the truck. He slung the MP5 to his back, swung the platform around to aim at the AM General, pulled the charging handle back in one fluid motion and let go. A bullet nicked his helmet as his thumbs found the trigger shaped like an upside-down V and squeezed.

  The night exploded in fire.

  The roar of the 50-caliber machine gun ripped the silence of the night as if the god of war himself descended from the dark skies above and unleashed his wrath upon the puny humans. Half-inch-wide bullets capable of ripping a man’s arm with a shockwave while passing the person within five feet bit into the truck, punching fist-sized holes.

  As Connelly moved the barrel in a long, sweeping semicircle, his body shook from the mighty recoil of the machine gun. He watched the truck disintegrate as if in slow-motion. The tires blew out, and the driver’s door flew open, swaying and bending as if made from silk rather than metal. Then the gas tank caught, and the fire blossomed through the sides of the truck, showering Connelly with glass shards and knocking him off his feet and over the side of the Toyota Hilux.

  The automatic fire thundered from one of the school’s windows, hitting the pickup truck and biting into the dust next to Mike’s feet. He scrambled to take cover behind the Hilux truck and Smith joined him a second later.

  “That was some crazy shit, dude.” Smith exhaled, his face stretched into a wild grin.

  “I know.” Connelly found himself grinning back, bumping fists with his partner.

  “It ain’t over yet.” Smith nodded at the school.

  The shooting stopped now, but the moment they’d stuck their heads out, it would resume.

  “One, can you get the fucker in the window? Second floor, right above the entrance,” Connelly said into the microphone. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

  “I can’t see him, but I’ll cover you guys until you’re inside.”

  “Four? Are you good?” Mike called out to the two-person team flanking the school from the east.

  “Ready when you are.”

  Connelly nodded to Smith and swapped the MP5 for the tactical H&K Mark 23 pistol with a suppressor.

  “Let’s do it.”

  The glass windows above the entrance exploded as the sniper team laid suppressive fire and Connelly, Smith in tow, dashed toward the front door.

  Garcia and Jenkins, from Team Three, were already by the entrance, their rifles trained on the second-floor window, ready to push back on the insurgents. The windows remained empty, and Garcia threw a flashbang into the dark of the school’s hallway and a split second later, Connelly rushed in, the reassuring heft of the Mark 23 in his gloved hands.

  His eyes caught a movement, and he spun around in time to see two fighters wielding AK-47s coming down the stairs. Connelly’s pistol barked twice, and one insurgent collapsed, head first, as two red spots appeared on his dirty shirt. Garcia cut down another guerilla with a short burst of his MP5.

  They cleared the ground floor first, not meeting any resistance, and then Connelly signaled the rest of the crew to take the stairs. They ascended in a line, their weapons covering all angles until they spilled out onto the second floor. The hallway was empty. In the middle of it, above the entrance into the school, the window was broken. Pieces of glass covered the windowsill and the floor. The walls and the window frame were pockmarked with bullet holes, but the shooter had seemed to have escaped the assault as he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Connelly, come here,” Garcia whispered, pointing at one of the rooms.

  Something in the tone of his voice made Connelly tense. He walked over to Garcia and looked through the opened door. Connelly had been an operator for a long time, but the sight of two dead bodies in the corner of the room made him recoil. The older man’s head was bashed in with something blunt. The woman’s heavily bruised body was naked, and her dark hair was slick with blood from what appeared to be an execution-style headshot.

  “Filthy bastards,” Smith muttered under his breath and pointed at the bloody tracks leading to the room. “Fucking savages dragged the bodies from somewhere else.”

  “It’s not her. We still have to find the woman and the boy. Let’s go,” Connelly said, regaining his composure.

  The team searched the rest of the second floor and continued to move on. They found the rooms where the hostages had been held captive and where the administrator was executed in the eastern wing of the third floor, but there were still no signs of the American woman and the boy. As the team prepared to ascend the stairs to the last, fourth floor, the speaker in Connelly’s ear cracked with the voice of one of the snipers.

  “This is One. Guys, we might have a problem.”

  “What’s up?” Connelly felt as his grip on the MK23 tightened.

  “There are two tangos on the roof, and it looks like they have a hostage.”

  10

  July 2007

  New York

  The windows of the apartment that she rented on the second floor of a two-family house looked toward the East River. From her kitchen, that most days doubled as her office, Chen could see the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, better known as the Triborough Bridge, as it gracefully stretched over Astoria Park. Late in the year, when the trees shed their leaves, she could see the water and make out the edge of Randall’s Island on the other side. Now, with the park still covered in green, she could only glimpse the bright spots of the bridge’s lights reflected on the dark water of the East River, blinking in and out of existence as the night’s breeze swayed the leaves.

  Nowhere as swanky as her late sister’s apartment, the place was not without charm, and she’d been calling it home for almost five years now.

  When she first moved back to New York after college, she’d moved around for some time, crisscrossing the town while resisting her parents’ suggestions to stay at the family home.

  At first, she stayed in Downtown Brooklyn, where she shared a three-bedroom apartment with an ever-rotating crew of roommates. Then she briefly ventured to the city, renting a shoe-sized studio in Battery Park City that consumed more than half of her monthly income, and finally settled down in Astoria. Later, when her mother passed away, and then two months later, her father, she considered moving back, but couldn’t bear the idea of staying in the same place that once housed them all.

  Neither of the sisters had it in them to sell or rent out the family house either, and it had been sitting vacant ever since, and Chen occasionally stopped by to wipe the dust off the furniture covers, mop the floor, and browse the library.

  She turned on the light in the kitchen and put on a kettle. One part of her wanted to frantically start digging for whatever information she could find on Guardian Manufacturing, to try to understand how it fit into her sister’s death or the hack of the Department of Defense. But she knew better—she had to be in the right state of mind and look at things from a ten-thousand-foot view to create a logical explanation for what lay ah
ead and not invent some wild conspiracy theories that would lead her nowhere. Going down that rabbit hole would be a waste of time, and she had no intention of doing it.

  The kettle started to whistle, and Helen went about the routine of making gunpowder green tea that her father had taught her when she was only eight. She remembered being confused by the name at first. Gunpowder tea wasn’t made from real gunpowder, of course, her father told her. Its English name came from the resemblance of its leaves, rolled into a small round pellet, to grains of gunpowder.

  Her father, always a man of particular tastes, only drank a rare variant grown in Sri Lanka, at altitudes over six thousand feet, its tiny pellets still rolled by hand rather than by modern machines. Helen wasn’t as picky, but the routine was her special link to her father; something that went far beyond the simple making of a drink. She suspected for all his ramblings about how special the tea was, and how the impossibly small pellets signified the highest quality, he cared for the drink much less than for the fact he made it with his youngest girl.

  Finally, she set an off-white teapot on her desk next to the laptop, poured herself a steaming cup of fragrant tea, and opened a Google page.

  “Let’s start with the basics,” she said out loud and typed Peter Shultz and Associates into the search bar and hit Enter.

  On the top of the results page was a LinkedIn profile of a man with a broad, clean-shaven face and spiky red hair. There was also a link to the company website and Chen spent a few minutes browsing the pages filled with stock images of people in business attire, windmills, and wide-angle shots of New York’s skyline. The page with a corporate client list read like a Who’s Who in the business—Peter Shultz seemed to be doing well for himself.

  She returned to the Google results and scrolled down the list. There was a different Peter Shultz, a physician, a White Pages link that claimed to have 75 people named Peter Shultz in its database, and a newspaper article with a story of a murder-suicide in Westchester County. Chen inhaled sharply as she read the first few lines of the article.

  Peter Shultz, of Peter Shultz and Associates, death an apparent murder-suicide—note left; housekeeper found…

  She clicked on the link, her calm concentration out the window, scanning the article and trying to control her rapid breathing.

  …Housekeeping staff found Mr. Shultz, a successful mergers and acquisitions guru, inside his Westchester County residence.

  Law enforcement officials told the news channel that it appeared that Mr. Shultz strangled his mistress and then proceeded with shooting himself in the head with a black-market Glock pistol. As per detectives, evidence, including the condition of the estate and the presence of a note, pointed to a murder-suicide out of guilt. Mr. Shultz is survived by his wife and two daughters.

  Chen stopped reading and rummaged through her purse for the business card she got at the precinct. The phone only rang twice before it connected.

  “Detective Sanchez.” He sounded crisp and alert despite the late hour.

  “Hi, sorry to bother you so late,” she said timidly, but then collected herself. “This is Helen Chen, Mary Chen’s sister.”

  “No bother at all. What can I do for you, Ms. Chen?”

  “You told me to get back to you if I find something suspicious. I think I’ve got something.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “I’ve looked through my sister’s things today. Were you aware that my sister hired a mergers and acquisitions firm?”

  “No, ma’am. Do you think it’s of any significance?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. I’ve found the engagement letter hiring Mr. Peter Shultz of Peter Shultz and Associates.”

  “Okay,” he replied. Chen could hear a pen clicking and then a rustling of paper as if he was taking notes. “Have you reached out to them?”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “Apparent murder-suicide in his house up in Westchester. A few days before my sister’s death. There’s an article in a local paper, but I’m sure you can get more information from the local police department.”

  There was a silence on the other side of the call, long enough to prompt her to take a look at her cell phone to make sure the call didn’t drop. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” he replied, the tenor of his voice changing from polite to business-like. “This is new information for us. I’ll reach out to the Westchester PD to see if there’s anything that can allow us to connect some dots.”

  “Thank you—”

  “I have to warn you, though,” he said, interrupting her, “I understand how something like that could look suspicious on the surface, but it could very well be a coincidence. I don’t want you to have your hopes up.”

  “I understand,” she said, unsure what else to add.

  “Was there anything else you found? You knew your sister better than anyone else. Was there anything unusual?”

  Chen mulled the question over. Her impulse was to tell him about the email she found in the trash bin, the words GUARDIAN MANUFACTURING pulsating in her mind’s eye like a huge neon sign. But the question was—how was she able to share that information?

  The email itself turned out to be a draft that had only one sentence: “Tomorrow at noon.” There was no recipient. And she couldn’t impress the significance of the find upon the detective without telling him how such significance occurred to her in the first place. The DOD hack and all the information about it was far above the detective’s pay grade and sharing it with him was going to land her in a whole lot of trouble rather than helping her to find the truth.

  “There was nothing else, Detective,” she said out loud. “But I’ll keep digging, and if I find it, you’ll be the first to know.”

  11

  July 2007

  Kenya

  Audrey Hunt hung up the phone and looked at the boy.

  “Are you okay, Dalmar?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, with courage in his voice that she suspected he didn’t feel.

  She went down to the boy’s level. “Some really brave people are coming here to help us,” she said, looking him in the eye, “but we need to make sure we do our part to help them.”

  The boy nodded, his somber eyes searching for answers in her face.

  After some consideration, Audrey decided to leave the broom handle behind and hid it in the closet. She looked around the office for anything that could be useful, hoping for a pair of scissors or a knife, but there was no such luck.

  She was ready to give up when she noticed a single-blade disposable razor next to a window that someone must have used to clean excess paint off the window glass. She picked it up and taped one side of the razor with some Scotch tape, glued the improvised weapon to her bare back with a Band-Aid, and covered it by her blouse.

  “What is that for?” asked the boy, curious despite the fear.

  “Hopefully nothing,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “Let’s go. We gotta make it to the roof.”

  She carefully opened the door and peeked outside. The hallway was empty, but she could hear the muted sounds of the soldiers talking on the first floor. They made their way to the staircase again and started their ascent when she heard an unmistakable sound of the boots coming up the stairs.

  “Quickly,” she whispered to the boy as they tiptoed their way as fast as they could without making any noise.

  As they reached the top floor, the muted sounds from below turned into angry shouts. By now their captors must have discovered the empty room where they were held before. There was no time to look for the roof exit anymore. Audrey looked around, trying to get her bearings, and ran to the window. She unlocked the sash locks, opened it, and looked outside. A ledge, jutting over a foot wide, ran around the building.

  “Come,” she said to Dalmar, putting her foot on the windowsill.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, pulling away and sitting down on the floor. “I can’t, Miss Audrey. I’m sorry. Please don’t make me.”

  She
stepped back and squatted next to the boy. She could hear crashing sounds from downstairs as the guerrillas were going room by room, looking for them.

  “I know this is scary,” she said, offering him her hand, “but we have to do this. You know these people are bad. We have to hide until the good guys come. Please. Trust me.”

  For a moment, she thought the boy wouldn’t comply, but then he nodded, took her hand and she pulled him to his feet.

  “Atta boy.”

  Audrey climbed out into the hot evening and pulled the boy up, helping him get on top of the windowsill. She closed the window behind them, and they slowly moved away from it just in time as the guerillas spilled out onto the floor, their shouts reverberating through the hot air.

  “Do not look down,” she whispered to the boy, holding his hand tight as they clung to the wall. “Keep looking at the wall, and follow me.”

  They shuffled their way toward the edge of the building, pausing before windows to make sure nobody was looking.

  “Miss Audrey.” Dalmar gently tugged on her hand, when they stopped again. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  She looked back at the boy, and his wide-open eyes told her everything she needed to know—he was barely controlling his panic.

  “All right,” she said, making a decision. “We need to sit down, okay? They can’t see us from below, so we are safe for the moment. But we cannot go back in just yet. We need to wait them out until they stop searching. I’ll sit down first and then will help you. Make sure not to make any sudden moves.”

  Audrey steeled herself and slowly turned away from the building. The height was dizzying. With great care, she lowered herself to the ledge and let her feet dangle in the void below. She let out a slow breath, trying to remain calm.

  “All right, do not let go of my hand and slowly turn and then sit down.”

  She maneuvered the boy and helped him turn around and then lower himself to the ledge as well. The sky, bathed in amber and purple of the setting sun, was getting darker by the second. A few birds, their wings burning in the last rays of the day, were circling in the sky above the group of trees so dark they looked like one-dimensional cut-outs.