by Blake Banner
I heard Athena whimper and wondered if it was fear for her own safety, or for the computer. She rattled something at the guards in French that was too fast to follow, then said to me, “What kind of virus?”
Her voice was unsteady. I counted off ten seconds. I figured I was coming up on three minutes and fifty seconds. She said again, “What kind of virus?”
I played for time. “What’s your worst nightmare, sister?”
“If you want to negotiate, you must tell me what kind of virus!”
I put my lips close to her ear and whispered, “A neutron bomb.”
“No!” She shook her head. “No, it is not possible. How?”
“It’s possible. Believe me. Now, I’ll tell you what we are going to do. You are going to tell your boys to back out of the room…”
It was a microscopic shift in the position of her head, but I knew instantly that she had seen the USB drive in the wall opposite. She said something in French and the guy on my far right turned to look at the panel. I snarled, “Move and she dies.”
He looked at me and then at her, like he was asking her a question. Her voice when she spoke was quiet, resigned—dead.
I didn’t hesitate. I shot him through the eye, then charged at them, firing wildly with the Glock and pushing Athena before me, knowing they couldn’t shoot back. Two of them went down, but that still left nine. And they charged me. The closest seized Athena by the shoulders and ripped her away from me. As he did it, I shot him in the eye and he fell back against his two pals behind him. As he went down, I saw a third running for the panel. I threw myself on the floor and rolled, knowing as I did it that it was a bad idea. I came up on one knee and shot the guy who was reaching for the drive.
There were now seven of them ranged against me and I had no computer behind me to stop them from shooting. I jumped as they opened fire and I felt a burning, searing pain in my right leg. I crashed into a chair and sent it reeling across the room. I tried to ignore my leg and looked up as six monsters in black charged me. The seventh was dragging Athena out of the room. She was screaming something that sounded like, retrieve the USB, don’t kill him.
I fired two rounds into the nearest trooper and then I was being punched and kicked, seized by my arms and legs, and my Glock was being ripped from my fingers. I tried to fight back, but the pain in my right thigh was crippling. They dragged me toward the door. I looked over at the computer screen and saw the green line reach the end and the dialogue box wink out.
Athena was scrambling back into the room, screaming at them in French to let her go and not to hurt me. She went and grabbed the USB, ripped it from the port, and stood staring at the computer. Nothing happened.
She turned to me. “What have you done?”
I smiled in spite of the pain. “One billion dollars in a numbered account in Belize, and I’ll tell you.”
She went over to the terminal where she had been working and sat, rattling at the keys, looking into her databases, then turned to the soldiers who held me. In French, she told them to take me upstairs to an office.
They dragged me to the elevator and she followed. We rode up to the top floor. The doors slid open and I was shoved into a large, luxurious office with panoramic views of the woodlands to the north of the town. The walls were paneled in dark wood, but the plate glass windows that took up a third of the room made it light. There was a mahogany coffee table, and a chesterfield suite set around it. She snapped something and the guards shoved me onto the sofa. I inspected the wound in my leg. The slug had not penetrated, but it had torn the muscle.
Athena went to her desk and sat at the computer there. She worked in silence for five minutes, maybe more, then she laughed, shook her head and looked at me.
“Is it a bluff?”
I smiled, though the pain made it difficult. “I’m curious. I thought I knew about everybody. Who are you? Athena Noctua? What the hell is that?”
“I am the Librarian. Shall I tell you what you have uploaded to our mainframe?”
“Sure.”
“Nothing.”
“Cool. Can I go now? I need a doctor.”
“Tell me why I should not have you executed right here and now.”
“It would spoil your chesterfield.”
“Who are you?”
“Your nemesis.”
“How do you know so much about us?”
“I’m nosy.”
“Do you have Zeta?”
I was feeling light headed and I began to laugh. “It sounds like the name of a high class whore.”
She stood and came around the desk. She sat next to me and plunged her thumb, nail and all, into the wound on my leg. I didn’t wince. Instead I bellowed. The agony was excruciating. My foot went into a spasmodic dance on the end of my leg. I grabbed her arm and one of the guards shoved his HK G36 in my face.
She took her thumb out of my leg and said again, “Have you got Zeta?”
I was panting. I grunted a couple of times, centering myself. Preparing myself for the next wave of pain, and said, “Yes… but they’re treating me for it.”
Her thumb went in again. I had told myself to do something different, but the reflex was too strong. I screamed out and grabbed her wrist again. Again the guard shoved the barrel of his rifle in my face.
I shouted, “OK! OK! OK!”
“Where is Zeta?”
I looked her straight in the eye, panting and light headed with the agony. I said, “Fuck you, Athena Noctua…”
This time she gritted her teeth and smiled as she rammed her thumbnail into the open wound. This time, I felt the nail tear the muscle and penetrate. But this time, I didn’t grab her wrist. This time I screamed and grabbed the barrel of the assault rifle with my left hand, shoved it a foot to my right and leaned forward to hammer his index onto the trigger with my thumb. The rifle stuttered and her pretty head exploded like a watermelon.
I had all the leverage, and while he struggled to regain control of his rifle, I smashed my fish into his balls with all the savagery and rage that Athena Noctua had aroused in me with her red thumbnail. It took half a second. I stood, putting all my weight on my left leg. My right leg danced and quivered, but I leaned the G36 on his shoulder and sprayed the six soldiers standing just seven feet away with twelve rounds a second, for three long seconds, until the weapon was just clicking and the only sound in the room was my insane bellowing.
I dropped the rifle and looked at the shredded bodies lying in the spreading pool of red blood that was obscuring the parquet floor. My leg was trembling like crazy. The guy in front of me dropped to his knees. I reached down and took his sidearm from its holster and put a single round through the back of his head. Then I fell back on the sofa.
I don’t know how long I sat like that. Too long. Eventually I pulled myself to my feet and struggled over to the sideboard behind the sofa. There, I found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label and poured myself a large measure. I downed it and started to feel a little better. A second slug and I was able to limp over to the PC on the desk.
It was like no operating system I knew, but by applying common sense, I began to open and examine the data bases on the computer. There was nothing happening. No files were being deleted, no nuclear devastation was being wreaked. The virus was a dud.
I levered myself to my feet and crossed the room to the elevator. It opened at the touch of the latex thumbprint and I rode it down to the lobby. As I limped across the large, hexagonal room, people glanced at me and frowned. I guess I looked a mess. I pushed out through the big, glass doors into the bright afternoon sunshine. My cell was switched on and I knew if they were looking for me, they would be able to lock onto my position. Their computers, their satellites, their communication systems were all operational. Omega Europe was unharmed.
I pulled my phone from my pocket as I struggled slowly up the hill toward Avenue JF Kennedy. I dialed Njal. He answered instantly.
“Yuh.”
“I did it. I upload
ed the virus.”
“Wow.”
“But it’s a bust. It didn’t work.”
“Shit.”
“Where are you?”
“At the doctor’s apartment.”
“Take him down to the street. Tell him you’re putting him in a taxi for the airport. Tell him it was a bust. Call me when you’re downstairs.”
“OK.”
He hung up. At the corner of Berlaimont and JFK, I found a low wall on a patch of scrub and sat to wait. Fifteen minutes later, my cell rang.
“Yeah, talk to me.”
“We are walking to the the Avenida Al Andalus. There we will catch a taxi to the Jerez airport.”
“OK. Listen to me. Give him his cell and a hundred bucks. Walk away. Go back to the States.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “OK.”
He hung up. I sat for five minutes, watching the traffic, feeling the September sun on my face, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my leg, and the throbbing emptiness in my gut, wondering vaguely what I was going to do next. After five minutes, I dialed one and sat staring at the phone, thinking of a street a thousand miles away where a man had just had his heart blown out.
Then I switched off my phone and hailed a cab to take me back to the airport. There were no sirens, no choppers, no dark Audi SUVs screaming up to surround me and arrest me.
Nothing.
It was like nothing had happened at all.
All the way there, the driver kept looking at me in the mirror and talking to me in French and German. I heard the word ‘doctor’ repeated a few times and realized I must look a wreck with a bloody hole in my leg and blood spatter over my face and shoulder.
I looked in the mirror. He was still watching me and talking. I managed something like a smile and shook my head. “It looks worse than it is.”
He shrugged and after five minutes, we pulled into the airport compound. I paid him, climbed out and watched him drive away. I was unsteady on my feet and the pain in my leg was making me dizzy. I walked into the main hall, spotted the toilets, pushed in and washed the gore off my face and my shirt. A couple of the men in there were looking at me like they weren’t sure whether to offer help or not.
I ignored them, pushed into one of the cubicles and locked myself in. There, I pulled my pants down and examined the wound in my leg. There was a furrow an inch long and half an inch deep, where the slug had torn out a chunk of muscle. Fortunately, the heat of the lead had largely cauterized the wound, but the crazy bitch Athena, with her red thumbnail, had made a real mess of it.
I took toilet paper and cleaned away as much of the blood as I could, but there was nothing I could do for the jeans. The whole area around the hole was saturated.
I took five minutes to rest. I was aware that my mind was not working properly. I was not focusing, and I knew my planning was not logical. I struggled to focus, planned out my next steps and then limped out into the airport main concourse. I stood a moment, looking around me, not sure suddenly what I had intended to do. I had thought about finding a chemist, a clothes store to buy some jeans. But the echo of voices under the immensely high ceiling was making me dizzy. I was aware that I needed sleep. I tried to remember when I had last slept, but the days seemed to run into each other, it was hard to find definition, to know what was what and who was who.
Ahead, I could see two cops. They were walking toward me, walking fast. I knew this was it now. They had caught up with me. Now they would take me to a cell and kill me. Flashing lights caught my eye on a TV screen suspended from the ceiling. It was ironic. It said, ‘cancelled’. There were three of them saying, ‘cancelled’. It was ironic because I knew that now I was cancelled, like the flights.
The cops were practically on top of me. I had expected more. There were only two. I could probably handle two. I had to fight. You didn’t get to Valhalla unless you went down fighting. And I had to be there for when Njal arrived. They took hold of my arms and then everything went black.
When I came to, I was lying on a couch. It dawned on me slowly that I was in an office. I frowned, trying to squeeze memories back into my mind. I had been in the can, my leg was a mess. There had been two cops. I had been arrested. I lifted my head and looked at my leg. Where the hole was in my jeans, it showed pristine white, instead of red and black. I turned my head and saw a green steel desk. Behind it, there was a middle-aged man with a pencil mustache. He was wearing a dark blue uniform and watching me with no expression on his face.
I sat up with difficulty and realized I had a headache.
“Mister Lacklan Walker.” He had the kind of German accent that makes grown men weep under interrogation.
I couldn’t think of anything smart to say, so I said, “Yes, that’s my name. You bandaged my leg. Thank you.”
“You had a bullet wound. You had many bruises. Perhaps you should explain.”
I said the first thing that came into my head: “I was mugged.”
He shook his head. “In Luxembourg, we have the muggings, but not with the guns. This is more serious than a mugging.”
“What can I tell you? I was in town, near the Place Guillaume II. I asked a guy for directions and he started screaming at me that I was an American Satan, Allahu Akbar, all kinds of crazy shit. Then he pulled a gun and I ran. He shot at me and hit me in the leg. After that, I was kind of disoriented and sick. I don’t remember how I got to the airport, but what I really want is to get home.”
“Can you describe this man?”
I took a deep breath and made like I was thinking. “Mid thirties, medium build, short, dark hair, stubble, could have been Mediterranean, dressed in jeans and a brown leather jacket, but it might have been black. A T-shirt, blue? Gray? I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. I was real scared at the time.”
“What is the purpose of your visit to Luxembourg, Mr. Walker?”
“Tourism.”
“How long do you intend to stay?”
“I plan to leave this afternoon, as soon as you let me go.”
“You want to file a report against the man who attacked you?”
I didn’t answer straight away. I noticed he hadn’t pulled over his keyboard when he asked me. I also noticed his computer was not humming. I shook my head.
“It will only add to your paperwork,” I said. “And the chances of finding this guy are remote at best. What I would really like is to go home.”
He pursed his lips and nodded for a while. “I suggest you buy a new pair of jeans, Mr. Walker. You have a flight to London in one hour, and from there, you have many flights to U.S.A.”
I stood and he pushed a little stack consisting of my cell, my wallet and my passport toward me. As I picked them up, I glanced at his computer screen. It was dark.
“Computers down?”
He gave a single nod. “In the whole city. Not all computers, but some networks. For now, most of the air traffic computers are OK. Let us hope your flight is not affected.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Let us hope.”
TWENTY
It was raining. Thunder, like empty oil drums, rolled across a low ceiling of gunmetal clouds, becoming distant and faint, then erupting again overhead. I was parked on Woodstock Road, smoking and watching the main entrance to Green Templeton College. What I could see was a sandstone wall with an iron gate, and beyond it, the illuminated top floor windows of a long building with a black slate roof, slick and shiny with the rain.
The rain wasn’t torrential, but it was heavy enough to trigger the wipers every five or ten seconds, when the build up of drops turned the street into a tangle of distorted, twisted light, and wet shadows. They squeaked and thudded, and I saw Gibbons’ shadow move across his window, then return and sit at his desk.
I opened the car door and climbed out, dropped my cigarette on the sidewalk and limped across the road, wiping the rain from my eyes. I stepped into the small, college office, stamping my feet und pushing my wet hair out of my face. A woman with rosy
cheeks smiled at me from behind the desk.
“Isn’t it awful?” she said. “Why don’t you grab some paper towels from the loo? Just down the corridor on the left.”
I took her advice, grabbed some paper towels and climbed the stairs, wiping my hair with them. At the top, I reached a dark landing and found a long passage with a window at the end, where wet light was filtering in and making liquid shadows on the walls and the beige carpet. Gibbons’ door was the third one on the left. I didn’t bother knocking. I checked my phone, opened the door and stepped in.
Outrage was the default expression on Gibbons’ face and that was the way he looked at me now from behind his oak desk. The only light in the room was the gray light coming through his window and the amber light from his brass desk lamp, which now lit his face from below, making dark shadows of his eye sockets.
The office was small and cramped, no more than twelve feet from door to window, and eighteen or twenty feet long. There was an old couch against one wall, an armchair that was going to seed, and books, thousands of books everywhere. He said, “What the hell do you want?”
I threw the wet paper on his desk, pulled out a chair and sat opposite him.
“Hello, Gibbons. How are you?”
“I asked you a question.”
He grabbed the wet paper and threw it in his waste paper basket. I sucked my teeth and studied his face for a minute. His glasses glinted, adding to his air of barely controlled rage.
“You surprised to see me?”
He didn’t answer the question. He just repeated his own. “What do you want, Walker?”
“I came to kill you. Can you give me any reason why I shouldn’t?”
There was no trace of fear in his expression. All I could see was contempt. “That’s all you know how to do, isn’t it? Kill, destroy.”
I nodded a couple of times. “What is it you do, Gibbons? I kill and destroy, and while I am doing that, what is it exactly that you do?”
“Why the bloody hell should I tell you? Who the hell are you to come in here demanding explanations from me?”
