by Terry Mixon
Harry had to admit that the raw, untamed wilderness made for an attractive location for something like that and provided ready access to gates that could take him anywhere.
“I suppose if he had to leave me anything, that makes more sense than most. Is that it?”
Weller shook his head. “Not quite. There are some other smaller mementos that are detailed in packet one. Nothing of great monetary value but of personal import to him. He also left you 39% of the shares in Humanity Unlimited, bringing your stake to 49%. He felt that Miss Cook might make for a better senior partner but wanted your shares to be of similar value.
“The packet in your possession has the 11% ownership stake in Humanity Unlimited that I mentioned, Miss Cook. You are now the majority shareholder with a 51% stake in the company. The entity is chartered in the Republic of Nauru, and the laws governing things there do not require any kind of inheritance tax, so the shares pass cleanly to you, as does the title of chief executive officer.”
Jess rubbed her face. “I’ve got a lot on my plate. Can I delegate that?”
“Of course. I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a list of suitable candidates for that position, as well as for the slot you currently hold, chief operating officer. I suggest you pick people that will provide oversight on one another. Perhaps even select a chief financial officer that will ride herd on the company and other executives.
“The elder Mister Rogers always wanted people on the lookout for top leaders manipulating the company for their own ends rather than the good of the shareholders, whether that was himself or the general public.
“A strong board of directors can also assist in that, so I’ve compiled a second list of industry movers and shakers with the kind of experience that would benefit Humanity Unlimited. That should allow you to focus on the important work you’re already doing.”
Frankly, Harry was happy with that. He really didn’t care who called the shots or how much money was earned. After a certain point, it was just keeping score. Like Jess, he just wanted to do what needed doing.
“And the second packet you gave me?” he asked.
The other man’s face wrinkled in distaste. “That’s far more problematic, I’m afraid. I feel that I should warn you I see the contents as being as dangerous as a nest of cobras. That is your mother’s last will and testament.”
Harry almost dropped the second envelope on the floor and leapt to his feet, but he settled for slowly setting it on the table. “Why do I need something like that?”
“Your mother was far less fastidious in updating her will,” Weller said. “In fact, she last changed it over three decades ago. Both you and your brother were small children at that time, I believe.
“Boiled down, she left everything to be split between you and your brother Nathan. Should either of you predecease her or die at the same time, the whole would go to the survivor. In this case, that means she left all her worldly possessions to you, Harry.
“Your brother’s will is also in there. It left everything to his mother with no codicil about her predeceasing him. In fact, it explicitly makes his holdings part of hers and dictates that it be disposed of by her or her heirs.”
There was a long silence in which no one said anything.
“Based on the enmity between you,” Weller said softly, “I’d wager that the possibility his mother would leave you anything at all never entered his mind. Whoever wrote the wills was competent, and I expect them both to pass muster. In fact, the only person with standing to challenge them is… you.
“The state of your mother’s businesses is in flux, as the US government is attempting to seize much of it. She purchased your father’s Rainforest holdings, so I foresee extreme volatility in the inheritance and challenges from several governments.”
The other man smiled sadly. “I’m afraid even with all the pressing matters on your plate, it’s going to become a sinkhole of your time, Harry. If you’d like, I would be pleased to offer my services as an assistant to help in these and other matters. I’m quite good and come with an excellent set of references, and a very competent staff.”
Harry’s head spun at the unexpected grenade that had landed in his lap. What a nightmare. He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I think I speak for both of us in saying we’d welcome your assistance.”
Weller started to respond, but a sharp knock at the door preceded it abruptly opening. Anthony Brighton-Jones stuck his head in. “My apologies for interrupting, but several of our lookouts are reporting suspicious individuals moving into the area. They express doubts about them belonging to the police. May I suggest a well-ordered withdrawal before these new people get into position to do whatever it is that they have in mind?”
Immediately after his words, Harry recognized the unmistakable sound of a helicopter coming close. Too close. Without looking out the window, which might be dangerous, he knew that someone was about to put people on the roof.
Harry jumped to his feet. “It’s time to go down that rat hole of yours, Mister Weller. The enemy—some enemy—has found us.”
3
Jess wasted no time handing her envelope back to Mister Weller so that he could secure it with Harry’s and following Brighton-Jones out of the office. She knew Harry would be bringing up the rear and making sure that Weller was right behind her.
She drew the pistol she’d put into a holster at the small of her back as she moved. It was one of two on her person today. She’d been caught unarmed too many times and had vowed that that wouldn’t happen again.
She kept the muzzle low because the pistol was one of the Asharim flechette weapons and so was extremely dangerous. It wouldn’t be much use to her if the people trying to get to them were the police or FBI, because she had no intention of shooting innocent people, but Brenda Cabot had made note of other people at play.
The Chinese had blown up Area 51 and the US government’s cache of Asharim tech that they’d seized from Kathleen Bennett and her company, BenCorp. There was also the unknown group of heavy-worlders seen in the area, no doubt searching for Brenda Cabot or her base. Those people had also been of Asian appearance, so they might very well be connected to China as well.
Whoever they were, they’d be inside shortly, based on the noises coming from the roof. The helicopter was hovering there above the building, probably dropping armed intruders near the stairs. It would likely only be moments before someone broke in the front and rear doors as well.
“Down here,” Brighton-Jones said as he stood beside a nondescript door, aiming a lethal-looking rifle back toward the front of the building. “Go straight down and keep any noise to a minimum.”
Jess was happy that there was a light on as she descended the narrow stairs. After having the Mayan pyramid collapse on her and Harry, she’d not done so well in dark, confined spaces.
The stairs let out into a wide, dimly lit, cluttered room with a bare concrete floor and rough brick walls. It looked decades older than the building above it and seemed not to have been cleaned in about the same amount of time.
The brick walls in particular could’ve done with a few good scrubbings and a liberal application of bleach. Even that might not have killed off the green stuff growing on them, but maybe it would’ve cut it back some.
Harry and Weller came out from the stairway next. The older man headed unerringly behind the stairs themselves, motioning for them to follow him. There was a large hole in the wall just out of sight from the basement proper. From the lack of bricks nearby, it had probably been opened some time ago.
He picked up one of four flashlights sitting beside the hole, turned it on, and handed it to Jess. “Go in and take the right-hand turn at the sewer.”
“You first,” she said. “I’m armed, you’re not.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Harry said, pointing at Brenda’s people. “You’re up front with Mister Weller. Anthony, Jess, and I will bring up the rear.”
The two men looked as if they wanted
to argue but didn’t. Especially after hearing a muffled thump from upstairs.
At almost the same moment, the bare bulb that had been illuminating the basement went out. “That was me,” Brighton-Jones said as he came slowly into the light, probably so that someone didn’t shoot him by mistake.
“I took the liberty of locking the office door,” he added. “That noise would be a breaching charge taking it down. It won’t take them long to realize that we’ve flown the coop.”
Weller and the two men from the Families led the way into the tunnel. Brighton-Jones gestured to a wooden frame with a paint-splotched canvas thrown haphazardly over it.
“Help me move this over the breach. It will make them have to search harder for where we disappeared to.”
Rather than get in the way, Jess stepped back and provided light for them to work.
It only took them a few seconds to pull the cover over the tunnel. It wouldn’t fool anyone for long if they were really looking, but it was enough to fool a casual observer.
Harry grabbed the last of the flashlights and motioned for Brighton-Jones to lead the way. He and Jess followed closely behind.
The tunnel itself wasn’t new. The slime on the walls was ample proof of that. She wondered who had built it and why. She was also curious how Weller had known it was here for them to use. Questions for later, she supposed.
Whoever had built the tunnel hadn’t been concerned with making it neat or pretty. The stones in the walls were of odd shapes and often protruded from the surrounding stones. The mortar between them was crumbling too, so the engineer in her wondered about the long-term stability of the structure. Definitely not professional work.
Thankfully, it was good enough to get them to the sewer. It was an arch of stone that rose almost two meters over her head, had a channel in the middle of the flow to carry the noisome sludge, and concrete walkways on either side.
It also had the stench of something dead that was strong enough to just about knock her over. She clapped her free hand over her mouth, but that hardly helped, as she still had to breathe.
Weller and the other two men had turned right, and she could see the two lights bobbing ahead, so she turned and followed them, praying that the source of the disgusting odor was behind her.
No such luck. The smell grew stronger until she saw the dead animal in the middle of the trough that carried the sewer water. It was too far gone to determine what it had been, and that was probably a blessing.
A muffled shout from far behind them told her that the enemy—whoever they were—had found the hidden exit from the building. So much for their ruse delaying the pursuit long enough for them to get away. She sped up her pace, trying to balance the need to get clear with not slipping on the moisture-slick concrete.
Everything around her seemed to jump as something exploded ahead of them and the pressure wave shoved her back. The loud noise made her ears ring.
“If they’re blowing a sewer entrance, it isn’t the police or FBI,” Harry shouted, his voice sounding oddly muffled to her ears. “Be ready.”
A burst of automatic weapons fire cut both of Brenda Cabot’s people down without warning. They’d been right in front of Mister Weller, and their bodies shielded Weller and herself from the hail of bullets.
Jess grabbed Weller by the shoulder and threw herself to the left. Her intention had optimistically been to jump over the disgusting contents of the channel, but her foot slipped on the slimy stones, sending them both tumbling into the sewer.
The cold, filthy water covered her head for a moment, but she came up to her knees and found it was only a foot or so deep. She brought her pistol around and opened fire on the man who’d killed their Family escorts.
Harry and Brighton-Jones were already shooting at the man and had him pinned down behind a corner ahead, but Jess’s angle let her put several flechettes right into him. He fell into the water with a splash, still twitching after one of the darts shattered his skull.
“Keep them pinned down,” Harry yelled, racing ahead toward the connecting tunnel.
With no choice in the matter, Jess kept up a regular fire of her weapon until he reached the dubious safety of the corner, stuck his pistol around it blindly, and opened fire.
Brighton-Jones was right behind him, so Jess stopped shooting, switched out the partly used magazine for a full one, and helped Weller upright, though she kept him in the water. He’d somehow managed to retain his grip on his briefcase. She hoped it was waterproof.
If she looked anything as bad as Weller did, she would need seventeen hot showers to ever feel clean again. And a tetanus shot. Maybe two.
Even though there was still fighting taking place ahead of them, she faced to the rear and stayed in the water. When the bad guys came, she wanted them to miss seeing her at first.
Disgustingly, that meant she had to use the dead animal as cover. The dead, maggot-covered carcass that stank like nothing else she had ever smelled in her life. Make it thirty-six hot showers, three tetanus shots, and a course of antibiotics.
Weller knelt behind her just as half a dozen men in dark suits and bulletproof vests came pouring out from the makeshift tunnel and into the sewer. She immediately realized they were heavy-worlders, at least genetically speaking, though they were dressed in perfectly ordinary clothes.
A momentary flashback of one shooting her in the gut at the French base washed over her, and then she was firing at them. Her flechette pistol made little sound and had no muzzle flash to reveal her position, so the enemy must’ve thought the fire from Harry and Brighton-Jones was what was taking them down. Maybe they were, but she was firing single shots like a metronome, taking the hostile men down one after another.
In seconds, the sewer was silent, though her ears were ringing from the normal weapons’ fire. The enemy behind them was down, some on the concrete and others in the nasty water with Jess. She waited a beat to see if more of them would come pouring out of the tunnel, but they seemed to have stopped for the moment.
“Let’s go,” Harry shouted. “We don’t have much time before more of them get here. Where to next, Mister Weller?”
“Keep straight on and take a left at the next intersection. That will lead to a similar tunnel in the wall that ends up in a warehouse. We have a van inside it.”
Jess stood and determinedly put the putrid sludge that covered her out of her mind. There’d be time to throw up later.
“Tell me there’s a hose to wash the worst of this off,” she begged. “Please.”
“Sadly, no,” the man said. “At least I’m not sure if we can find one in time. We’re just going to have to tough it out.”
They stopped long enough to empty the pockets of the dead, friend and foe alike. Then they hurried off down the sewer, Brighton-Jones in the lead, Weller behind him, and Harry behind her.
“Good shooting back there,” Harry said as they walked. “I didn’t think you’d be that good a shot with an unfamiliar weapon. Or perhaps weapons in general, since you don’t have a lot of experience with shooting.”
She half turned her head. “What do you mean?”
“The flechettes leave distinctive wounds. I could tell where you hit verses where we did. You took out four of them. Five counting the man ahead of us. All with head shots.”
That news made her blink. Had she? How? She wasn’t that good with guns of any kind, much less the alien weapons, which she’d only fired a few times, never with much luck.
So what he was saying was impossible. Yet, as she ran her mind back over the fight, she knew it was true. How could she have done that?
The thought kept eating at her until they arrived inside the warehouse. The ever-resourceful Brighton-Jones managed to locate a water hose and sprayed her off as well as possible in thirty seconds. It would have to do.
While he was giving his boss the same treatment, she joined Harry in the back of the van. “They were heavy-worlders. Not the ones from off planet, but the Chinese ones Brenda told us
about.”
He nodded. “I agree. No off-worlders would have the insight to even be looking for us, much less be able to find us.”
“How did that happen?” she asked. “Is the safe house compromised?”
“I rather doubt it,” Weller said as he climbed into the front of the van. “Sadly, I expect that they followed me, even though we took every precaution we could. I wasn’t in hiding, after all.”
Brighton-Jones opened the exit leading into the alley, drove the van out, and then closed it before climbing back behind the wheel. “We’ll go nice and slow. With all that ruckus, the police are going to swarm the area. Where should I go?”
“Out of DC,” Harry said. “I’ll make a call and get Brenda to come for us.”
“What if they have a tracking device on them?” Jess asked. “That would lead them right to us.”
“We checked, but I suppose that’s always possible,” Brighton-Jones admitted.
“Pull over and switch places with me,” Harry said. “Both of you in the back with Jess. Strip down to your tighty whities. Keep your wallets, keys, and other personally identifiable things, but check them to see if you find anything suspicious. We’ll dump everything we can in a dumpster on the way out of town.
“I realize that’s an indignity, but we can’t risk them tracking us back to the safe house. They cannot be allowed to get their hands on a gate.”
Jess was glad she wasn’t going to have to strip. The way her luck had been going, that hadn’t been out of the question. Though, she supposed her new and younger body would’ve been an improvement if she’d had to get down to the skin.
In the end, they managed to get out of the neighborhood without drawing any undue attention, though, as predicted, the police were out in force. She didn’t imagine that whoever had sent the attackers was going to be pleased with their failure or the fallout.
