Project Phoenix

by D. C. Fergerson

  “Dead?”

  “Everyone,” Cora replied. “My team, the staff, the customers - all dead. I put down at least three subjects, all wearing Vulkan Group uniforms. I confirmed one shooter for Vulkan against the registry. I need to come in.”

  The holographic screen in front of her flickered, changing the miles and exit in the directions.

  “I’ve sent new coordinates to your GPS,” the man replied. “Stay on the 158 for another two miles, then exit left and find the veterinary clinic a half mile down on your right. I’ll be waiting.”

  Cora opened her mouth to speak, but the line was already dead. Her body felt like jumping off the bike and running the rest of the way. She tingled and shook. Her heart pounded. Richard was dead. Giovanna. Drake. Doctor Nielsen. Her stomach buckled. Images continued flashing in her mind. The blood all over the walls. The way the two Vulkan soldiers crumpled to the ground when she shot them. The detached feeling of dragging her katana across a man’s throat. She pulled onto the shoulder. Saliva filled her cheeks as bile rose in her throat. Cora doubled over the side of her bike and spewed out the contents of her lunch on the ground.

  Her grunts and moans worked to steel herself and get back control. She knew this sort of thing...killing people...came with the job, but in all her time doing it, pulling her Predator from the holster had never been necessary. Her bike growled in neutral, as eager to be back on the road as she was. Her handler would get her back to the UNS, so she could grieve, and the good guys would get justice for her team. She wasn’t naive enough to think it were that simple, but saying it to herself allowed a moment’s peace to get her stomach under control and start riding again.

  Whatever data Vulkan was looking for, they hadn’t found it. Cora wondered if she already had it. She pulled the wet drive card from Drake in the hopes it contained visual data to identify his killers, but with his wrist computer and rig gone by the time she got there, they were still looking for something. He might have hidden the data elsewhere.

  The exit ramp brought her to a traffic light in a more metropolitan area. People walked the streets under the safety of street lights and holograms. A twelve-foot blonde woman in lingerie projected onto evening sky, inviting everyone to check out the hottest dancers in the city. On the opposite side of the street, pedestrians walked around a gang of three men huddled against the wall of a produce shop. They were disheveled and holding signs that begged for credits. Drool traced down their chins, their vacant eyes staring off into space. Berlin had a serious problem with Sim addicts, although this group had more teeth than most Cora had seen.

  The light changed and she continued on, finding the veterinary clinic. She pulled into the lot and parked, letting out a sigh. She’d have to recount the horrible events of the night in graphic detail, then debrief before getting on a plane back to the States.

  As she walked into the clinic, a woman in her early thirties smiled from behind a counter and slid a glass partition open to greet her.

  “Guten Tag,” she said.

  “Hello,” Cora replied, checking out the waiting room. It was empty. “I need to see someone in handling.”

  “You were expected,” the woman nodded. She pressed a button behind the counter, and a door beside Cora buzzed.

  She opened the door marked ‘Staff Only’ and walked into a small hallway. There was more glass on her right, and the secretary joined her there.

  “Go straight ahead and I’ll buzz you in,” she said.

  Cora walked to the end of the hall, to another door that shrieked out a buzz and a click. Inside, an American man in a black suit sat on the edge of a table. A lone chair was set in the middle of the cramped room. Two more men stood in the two back corners of the room, hands folded in front of them. Their posture wasn’t exactly threatening, but it made Cora uneasy. They didn’t look like they were there to take notes on her story.

  “Please come in, Agent 71280,” the man at the table said. “We’d like to discuss your version of the events.”

  No Sanctuary

  “What’s going on?” Cora said.

  The man stood up from the table. Fluorescent light bounced off the ample forehead of his receding hairline.

  “We would like to talk,” he said. “We have some concerns.”

  “You have some concerns?” Cora said, raising her voice. “Bigger concerns than my team being murdered?”

  The man nodded, pulling his lower lip across his upper. “It’s a sad day for our country, and our agency. They were heroes. Please, take a seat.”

  The man’s detached calm enraged Cora further. She sat down in the chair with a huff. Her expectant eyes stared at the beady little bureaucrat, waiting for him to ask a question.

  “Who hit your hotel?”

  “I explained on the phone,” Cora snapped. “I did not confirm the shooters. I locked myself in my room when I heard the elevator.”

  “How did you know they were a threat?”

  “I got a phone call a minute before they hit, warning me,” Cora replied.

  The man furrowed his brow. The answer caught him off guard. He pulled up his wrist computer and swiped through a few screens.

  “I don’t see any records of incoming calls to your floor after 2 pm,” he said.

  Cora tapped her foot and clicked her tongue. “I thought it was a prank call at first. Wouldn’t stop calling back. I ripped the cords out of the phone, and it kept ringing anyway. My guess is a powerful magic-user.”

  The man nodded. “I see. Traffic cams picked up your arrival on the street.”

  “Then you should have the shooters, too,” Cora replied. “I could see them in my rearview as I took off on my bike.”

  “You seem defensive, agent,” the man said.

  “You seem accusatory,” Cora shot back. “I have a body count. Photographs. If you’re suspecting I was involved in any way, you need to say so now.”

  The man sat back down on the table. His posture was cocky, and it was annoying Cora.

  “No one is accusing anyone of anything,” he said. His hands motioned towards the ground. “Let’s start over a little bit. My name is Luke. I’m trying to expedite handling here so we can act fast to sweep this restaurant and control the flow of information. We do not want your team’s work compromised.”

  “I’m Johanna,” Cora replied. “Right now, Luke, I don’t like how you’re handling anything. Are we going to get to the part where an APC full of Vulkan Group massacred twenty-plus people, including civilians, indiscriminately during dinner?”

  “Of course,” Luke nodded. “We already have people en route to Steakhaus Günther. First thing is first - was your hacker’s equipment there?”

  Cora cocked her head. “No.”

  “Do you know if the data was decrypted before your hacker’s...passing?” Luke asked.

  The lack of respect for the dead grated on Cora. She rolled her neck to relieve the tension in his muscles. Her hands still shook.

  “I have no reason to confirm or deny that,” she said. “I wasn’t at the meeting.”

  “Are you aware of a fallback plan your team had in place if the data was compromised?”

  Cora leaned forward in her chair. “I didn’t even know what our mission was until two hours ago.”

  Luke stared at her, expressionless. If he was trying to make her uncomfortable, it was working.

  “Let’s change gears,” he said. “What was your relationship like with the hacker on your team?”

  Cora gritted her teeth. “I didn’t have a relationship. He opened doors for me.”

  “That’s all?”

  She wanted to jump out of the chair and punch that beady-eyed son of a bitch in the mouth. None of these questions were relevant now. Drake was dead. She took a second to exhale the fiery breaths from her nose.

  “That’s all,” she said.

  “What do you know about the Sons of Earth?”

  “Sons of Earth?” Cora asked, stunned by the question. She cleared her confusi
on, and pieced together from memory what she had heard on GNN. “They’re an extremist political organization, made up of Native Americans. They’ve been tied to numerous terrorist acts against the UNS. Do they have something to do with this?”

  Luke stood back up and swiped his wrist, projecting a document in the air in front of Cora. She leaned in to read it.

  “NSA received this a week ago from your team lead,” Luke said. “It’s a fitness report for Agent 71280 that indicates, in detail, concerns with inappropriate conduct among members of your team, political commentary that could be taken as sympathetic to Native peoples, and growing signs of erratic and unstable behavior. He requested you added to the deactivated list.”

  Cora looked over the words in disbelief. The document was addressed from Richard to a personnel liaison with NSA. She skimmed past words like, ‘promiscuous’, ‘heavy drinker’, ‘prone to impulsive behavior’, and ‘lack of focus’. It was enough to know it was a fake. If she had behaved like that in front of Richard, even once, she’d have known what it was like to run up the thirty-two stairwells to her hotel room every day for a week. He wasn’t a man who tolerated less than perfection, and he made Cora strive to achieve it for him.

  She shrugged. “This is bullshit. It’s not real.”

  “This was an encrypted channel message to NSA headquarters,” Luke replied, a tone of condescension in his voice. “It contains your agent number, an above-top-secret bit of information. Put yourself in my shoes, agent.”

  A phone rang in the room. Cora’s head darted around to locate where it was coming from. Luke turned around and faced the table. His hand balled into a fist before reaching for the receiver.

  “This had better be damned important,” he said into the phone.

  Cora didn’t hear the voice on the other end, but her handler turned around after a few seconds. His eyebrows were raised, his mouth hung open. He covered the receiver with his hand and held it to his stomach.

  “The person on this line is asking for you,” Luke said. “Who did you talk to since I directed you here?”

  Cora stood up and held out her hand. Her gaze fixed to Luke’s eyes, she said, “No one. Now, give me the damn phone.”

  She stepped forward, snatching it from the agent’s hand. Putting the phone to her ear, she rested her head against her shoulder.

  “Who is this?” Cora demanded.

  “I had a dream about you,” the unearthly voice said. “In my dream, the man to your left pulls his service pistol on you. He tries to arrest you and put this crime on your head. In your struggle, the guard behind you goes for his weapon, followed by the man to your right.”

  “That’s a great tip,” Cora replied, side-eyeing Luke. “You have proof of that?”

  There was a pause, filled by the unearthly chorus of white noise. “Do you still have Die Without You on your music player?”

  Cora’s heart skipped a beat, her breath robbed from her. She loved classic music, but that song held a special place in her heart. She remembered falling in love with it on a car trip with her father when she was seven. She made him play it over and over. Only a few people in the world knew of that song and what it meant to her after he died. She swallowed her shock.

  “Good enough,” Cora said.

  The line went dead. Cora shut her eyes.

  “Anything else before I put him on?” she asked. She needed to buy time to focus, gathering magical energies from her body and turning it into a spell. The claustrophobic space of the room kept Luke close to her, close enough not to see the swirling ball of twinkling dust gathering in her palm.

  The guard behind her shouted, “Sir, her hand!”

  Cora opened her eyes. Luke stepped back from her to get a view, drawing his service pistol. Cora dropped the phone and stepped into him, using her free hand to push his weapon to the side. The guard behind her went for his pistol. Cora ducked under Luke’s arm, yanking him forward. She used his momentum to throw him towards the other two men in the room. With her other hand, she threw the ball of energy at their feet. The ball smashed like a snow globe. A pulse burst from it, throwing all three of them back into the wall.

  Six seconds.

  Richard’s words echoed through her mind. The average person takes six seconds to recover from a Stunbomb spell. What she did with those six seconds would determine whether she spent the rest of her life in UNS Federal Prison or on the run as a fugitive. Cora hated small spaces.

  She turned the handle and dashed out the door. The commotion in the room must have alarmed the woman at the front desk, as Cora heard the exit door click locked. She drew her Predator and took aim at the glass window at the end of the hall. The woman at the desk was no secretary, she was the third guard with this handler. Cora took the shot on the run, taking out the glass with her only remaining bullet. The blast in the small hallway deafened her, leaving a ringing sound and the pounding of her blood in her ears.

  Cora holstered the weapon and dove over the counter, through the empty space. Bits of broken glass skidded across her forearms like razors as she slid over. The female agent was already reaching for a pistol under her desk. Cora landed on both feet and paused, waiting for the agent to spin around and take aim. As her arm came up, Cora deflected with a palm strike to the back of her hand, tossing the gun back onto her desk.

  Her six seconds was up. Cora had to run now, before the other three reached her.

  “I’m sorry,” Cora said to the agent.

  She pulled the agent into her by the wrist and ducked down. In one motion, she slammed her shoulder into the agent’s gut, taking her legs out from under her. Balancing all of her body weight across Cora’s shoulders, she stood up and flung her forward. The agent sailed through the air, over the desk. The thin glass partition gave no resistance as the guard’s back slammed into it. She passed right through, shattering the entire pane. Her body slammed to the concrete floor covered by industrial carpeting and laid motionless in the waiting room. Cora jumped the counter and ran for the door. She shot a quick glance at the agent, making sure she wasn’t bleeding profusely. Satisfied she’d only wake up with a massive headache in the morning, Cora pushed through the door and got on her bike.

  One hand hovered near her hip as she started the bike, ready to draw on anyone that came through the door. Or maybe she would throw the gun to the ground and surrender. She had no bullets left, so the threat would be empty. She couldn’t see actually firing on an NSA agent, even if it started to appear there was a frame-up going on to put this on her. Her bike roared to life and she kicked it in gear. She was already in motion, doubling back the way she came before anyone emerged from the building.

  Cora hit the stop light in front of the onramp for the B158. Thinking quick, she turned to her side, yelling into the gang of Sim addicts still camped in front of the produce market.

  “Who can ride a motorcycle?” she shouted over her engine.

  A messy-haired German man in his early twenties blinked and twitched as he stepped forward. He stumbled to her as if he was in a drunken stupor.

  “I ride, ja,” he said.

  Cora pulled off her wrist computer and dangled it in front of him. “How much Sim can you buy if you sold my bike and this Arcadia XT-9?”

  “Ja, I know guy! We split!” he replied in his broken English.

  “No,” Cora said, throwing out her kickstand. “Take it, now. It’s all yours. But if you want to keep it, you need to run. Go!”

  The man snatched her wrist computer from her hand and took her seat on the bike. She pointed ahead to the onramp.

  “Hurry!” she shouted.

  The addict raced off. Cora turned the corner at the produce market and ran away. She had no idea where she was going and no ammo. A katana strapped to her back seemed silly compared to the firepower that would be brought down to take her in.

  Sirens wailed behind her. Cora looked over her shoulder down the road, back the way she came. Half a block down, local police raced down the street, th
rough the traffic light, and onto the highway. Several black cars without license plates followed suit. Good. They were following her GPS signal. It was all they’d have to go on, as not one of Richard’s team had personal information chips embedded in their wrists.

  Moments passed with Cora walking backwards, watching and waiting, hoping they were gone. Another car appeared at the light. It was black with no markings, as well. After a pause, it turned down the road she was walking on.

  “Shit!” Cora said, spinning around and running ahead.

  She ducked into a parking lot on her left, racing so fast she had to grab the rear bumper to wheel around behind a car. She took cover and watched the unmarked black sedan move at a crawl past the lot. Pleading to herself, she waited for it to move along. No one could have seen her. She was half a block past the traffic light and shrouded in darkness.

  The car parked in the middle of the street. The door opened. Cora looked around, trying to find better cover, or a path out of the lot, anywhere to lose this agent if he got close.

  “Cora?”

  The scratchy, tough-as-nails voice sounded much too familiar. Her heart in her throat, she peeked around her cover and checked him out. In the faint illumination of the security light at the edge of the lot, Cora couldn’t make out his face. He wore a black suit, white shirt, and black tie. The oiled shine of his black hair was styled to look crisp and professional at all times. There was no mistaking him. It was Johnny Clean.

  Johnny Clean

  Johnny Clean wasn’t an NSA agent. He might have been, a lifetime ago, but the same could be said for FBI, CIA, or some kind of special forces. In his early fifties, a fool would mistake him for being past his prime. Any time spent at a shooting range with Johnny quickly revealed he could take the wings off a fly at 100 yards, a feat he showed off with a Barrett M115 sniper rifle specifically customized for him. He sipped his first cup of coffee at five in the morning before hitting the gym for an hour. It would be difficult for anyone to keep up his hustle, but Johnny lay the credit on a good Italian mother and a rough upbringing in the Brooklyn slums.