by Alex Howell
It’s a start, Kyle. It’s a start.
“What’s crazy is, you see,” Kyle continued. “Even when it comes to secret religious groups and societies, these guys are completely off the radar. They’re like a religious cult of lepers that nobody wants to acknowledge. It’s like, uh, you have the official Catholic church, then you have the offshoots, then its offshoots, then its, and then—”
“All right,” Mason said, stopping Kyle from rambling. “What do we know about this leper colony? What exactly are they up to? What are they saying? What’s it all about?”
“Yeah, sorry,” Kyle said. “From what my contacts can gather… It seems that they plan to release the virus at an upcoming speech by Pierce Richards. I guess they aren’t quite dumb enough to announce the exact time and place of their attack, but they did divulge that at some undetermined time, they would strike at a Pierce Richards speech.”
That was a problem, because the polls right now were showing that Pierce Richards was so far ahead of the other candidates that every speech had become less of a “vote for me” speech than a “here’s what American will look like soon” speech. The time frame, then, didn’t extend to mid-November—it extended until inauguration day.
And that was a true worst case scenario. Election night would elate half the country and piss off the other half. But inauguration day would elate half the country, just be something to be witnessed by about a third of the country, and something to be hate-watched by the remainder of the country. A terrorist attack on such a day would truly raise hell.
But the more Mason thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that they would wait that long to strike. If the terrorists already felt compelled enough to announce that they would strike at one of Pierce Richards’ speeches, then it was unlikely they were just going to leave that threat hanging without following through. Something was going to happen.
“When is the Richards’ next speech scheduled?”
Damn, Raina, asking the smart questions. Ahead of me already.
“Four days,” Kyle said.
As far as Mason was concerned, that was the new deadline—because if they were planning on doing something, they probably wanted to do it sooner rather than later. A plot like this would get unraveled sooner or later, if for no other reason than stress from the enemy. Striking sooner relieved them of their concerns.
“Four days, then, is our deadline to neutralize the threat,” Mason said. “I’ll get word out to the rest of Onyx. We’re going to have to fan out—search the city high and low to see if we can find any clues as to where these jerks are holed up. Kyle, where is the speech?”
“Lincoln Memorial.”
“I’ll assign someone to the Lincoln Memorial then. It’s possible that they could have already put something in position there as well.”
But if we do this now, then we can uncover that position and neutralize them before they act.
“I’ll start making calls. We can—”
But then Raina grabbed his arm.
“Mason—I know we’ve talked about this and I’ve tried to come around to it… but I still think it’s a bad idea for operatives to go it alone. I think at the very least, we need to split into pairs of two.”
Now that they had more intel—to say nothing of knowing what kind of a target the terrorists wanted to work on—maybe there was something to be said for doing just that.
But the Lincoln Memorial did not mandate that the terrorists strike at the memorial. It just meant that a strike somewhere in D.C. would disrupt Richards and possibly kill him if the outbreak spread across enough of the city. If he was in Chicago, for example, it wouldn’t have done any good.
At most—at most—Mason decided he might put two people by the memorial, but that was the maximum.
“No, Raina. It would just draw attention.”
“But it’s too risky not too pair up.”
Mason sighed.
“Look, we’re going to split up, and that’s final. I appreciate your concerns, I really do, but Marshal has given me the reigns on this one. And as the leader, I say we split up. We’ll remain in close communication throughout, OK?”
Raina could only shake her head, and it was not the kind of passive head shake of someone that felt defeated. It was the kind of head shake that one wanted the other person to get a message on.
“I, uh, I’ll see if I can dig anything else up,” Kyle said, using the excuse to leave.
“I’m right behind you, Kyle,” Raina said. “Seeing as Mason wants us to split up.”
Mason felt a cold chill in the room as he was left to himself. That was not the kind of comment Raina would have made if she was intending to come around later. It was the kind of comment one made as another way of saying “good luck.”
He just had to hope that he had made the right choice, especially after learning how badly going at it alone could have gone his first mission in D.C.
11
September 15th, 2028
6:02 p.m. EST
Washington, D.C.
Just because Raina could understand Mason’s point didn’t mean that she couldn’t also think that he was being a complete idiot who needed a smack upside the head.
In her time with Onyx, she had come to realize that there was no such thing as accomplishing a mission alone; even when Mason had gone to Kansas and taken out Warrior, he had only been able to do so because of the work of the rest of Onyx. Hell, even his own daughter had played a major role in erasing the threat; without her, Mason would still be in Manhattan, watching the news of war with North Korea escalating.
He was just being too damn stubborn right now, and she suspected it had everything to do with his daughter leaving for college. She didn’t begrudge Clara for going to California—quite the opposite, in fact, she was thrilled that the younger Walker was going to the top college in the world to give her a career boost like no one else had. But Mason, though, had to get his head back in the game.
As she exited the room with Kyle, she begrudgingly sighed and did her best not to show her emotions.
“Are, are you OK?” Kyle asked, clearly uncomfortable with asking someone over a decade older than him of their feelings.
It was kind of sweet, but there was no time for that now.
“It’s fine,” Raina said. “I think Mason is being stupid, but he’s in charge right now.”
“So… are we going to follow his orders then?”
Raina was shocked by the audacity of Kyle’s question but in a more admiring way. It wasn’t a question that was meant to suggest a coup; rather, it was meant more as a way of seeing if Raina and he were going to do as they were directed.
“For now, yes,” Raina said. “But…”
She thought of how Kyle wasn’t really a soldier in the sense that she and Mason were. He didn’t have any combat history; he was more of the tech guy in the van who was listening to everything going on, providing intel and feedback into the earpieces of each individual. In that sense, it wasn’t so much pairing up as it was just having a natural command of things.
Raina would go out and provide the de facto perimeter physically, while Kyle could provide a virtual one. Kyle, in fact, could probably provide a virtual perimeter for all of Washington D.C.; he could use his extensive hacking and computer skills to follow the cameras and sensors of everything in and around D.C. If he could, for example, trace a credit card to a suspected member of the cult, he’d be able to ring up every purchase of theirs on the dot. Raina or Chris or Mason could be there in a heartbeat.
“Kyle,” Raina continued. “We are going to do what Mason said. But I think you can best serve us by helping from the computer room.”
“Yeah?” he said, admittedly sounding relieved to avoid having to use a weapon.
“Yeah,” Raina said, sounding more assured.
What she said next wasn’t something that she was especially proud of… but given how Mason had just made her feel and how distant he seemed to want to be, she
had no regrets about it.
“And Kyle, this is just going to be between us right now. Mason has chartered his path. OK? I don’t want him to give you a different direction and then suddenly change his mind. So we’ll all stay in touch. We’ll call Mason if we get a lead. But I just want you to keep this plan between us, OK?”
“Oh… OK.”
Kyle didn’t seem especially disagreeable. And Raina knew that what she had just suggested was a little bit subversive.
Maybe she was being affected by Mason’s attitude as much as he was affected by his stresses in life. Raina had learned long ago not to let such matters get in the way of her job, and for the most part, she had done that by refusing to fall for team members or anyone. Romance was the most complicating emotion of them all, and so long as one kept that away, clear heads were usually easy to keep.
But with Mason…
There was just something different about him.
It should be fine. All I’m doing is making Kyle go to the computer room. Mason wants us all to be separate? Fine. We’ll be that way.
I just hope this works out.
I really hope.
12
September 15th, 2028
9:49 p.m. EST
Washington, D.C.
Mason sat at Round Robin, where he frequently met with one of his top informants.
Right now, he was feeling a little stressed and disappointed in himself. The way that he and Raina had ended their conversation felt nothing short of a little childish, from the way Raina had walked out to the way he seemed so intent on dismissing her. He knew that if he was a leader, he had to do a better job of communicating his plans.
But right now, there wasn’t really much time for debate. Marshal had put him in charge, and since they now only had but four days to go, Mason couldn’t wait any longer for a plan to be put in place. If they deliberated, it would be September 20th before they came to a decision, and then 80 percent of the city would be in the hospital or in the cemetery.
Like it or not, Mason had a region he had to focus on, and he had chosen to give himself the area right by the bar Onyx had frequented, given its proximity to many of the historical buildings in D.C. He was going to go alone, because to wait for anyone else was to just give the terrorists a greater chance to strike.
And there was going to be none of that.
And so, tonight, Mason started as he always liked to start missions where more intel was needed. He would ask questions—and who better than one of his favorite informants.
This informant was not some master of espionage or secret agent. He was not a former military buddy; in fact, he was someone that only went back a few years. Instead, Mason’s greatest source of underground D.C. information was nothing more than a simple bartender.
Sam Johnson, the current owner and bartender of the Robin, was a man who was often more in the know about the coming and goings of D.C. than the NSA, CIA, FBI, and police combined. He did this not through some massive covert surveillance program but by simply keeping an open ear while tending bar. While Mason wasn’t exactly someone who was going to just blindly trust a relative stranger, he was someone that had proved, more often than not, to be helpful.
Mason was hoping that Sam’s rock-solid recollection could be of service to him as well. It was something of a risk, sure, and Mason knew that after the information Kyle gave, there may not have been much of a reason to suspect that the dark-web crawlers would be the same people who frequented a bar like this, but given that they had four days and Mason had an evening without any further intel, he didn’t see the harm.
Worst case, Sam would tip him off to something that would lead him to something else, which would lead him to the terrorists.
Actually, the worst case was that Sam knew nothing, but for how valuable Sam was, it was worth the price of one drink to take that risk.
“Hey Sam,” Mason said when he saw Sam coming. “You got a minute?”
Wiping out a glass, and without missing a beat, Sam came right over. If he had concerns about Mason appearing, he sure had a great poker face.
“Hey Mason, my man—sure. I have all the time in the world. What’s up?”
“Have you seen anything unusual around here lately?” Mason said, getting right to the point.
“Unusual? Like Democrats and Republicans sitting down and having a drink together?”
Any other day, Mason might have laughed. But with the deadline having moved up from two months to four days because of the new information, there was nothing to laugh about here. There was only complete and absolute focus.
“No—I’m serious, Sam. Have any of your patrons stood out, or behaved in an odd manner.”
Sam stopped to think about it. He had a look that suggested something to Mason, but it wasn’t the eureka look—more like the look of someone who wanted to answer in the positive, but couldn’t provide complete certainty.
“Yes—now that you mention it. I saw a couple of guys the other day that were some real odd balls.”
“What did you see?”
Please let it be something good. Please let it actually be something worth considering. Please let it be something that will lead us to these damn fanatics so that I can end this myself.
“First of all, they tried to order wine.”
Given the chalice in Iran, that had Mason’s full attention.
“Nothing wrong with that. I stock plenty of wine here.”
Oh.
“But it was the kind of cup they wanted the wine to be drank out of that was just completely bizarre.”
And suddenly, Mason knew it was them. Even without another word from Sam, he knew that he had a lead. He lost all awareness of anything else around him, his full attention on Sam and what he had to say next.
“These guys wouldn’t go for the standard fare of a wine stemmed glass—oh no, they insisted on drinking it out of a chalice. I mean—you would think we were in the middle ages or something. A chalice like from King Arthur and the Round Table? It was just goofy.”
“Okay,” Mason said, trying to keep his nerves cool. He hadn’t gotten anything yet that he could act on, but it was a great start. “So then what happened?”
“Well—I told him, obviously—we don’t have chalices at this bar. It was the strangest thing. One of the guys just stared blankly at me for a second and then the other guy tells him, ‘Come on let’s get back to the church.’ You know I have a lot of weirdos here, but that one was up there for strangest activities.”
“What church?” Mason asked.
There would be a day later when Mason would come and thank Sam for what he did. But that day, ideally, was at least five more days away.
“I don’t know. But it couldn’t be far.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because as they were getting up to leave, I offered to call a cab for them. As soon as I did however, the one guy told me that they weren’t going very far—just down the street. The other guy didn’t like the fact that he was telling me this though. Because as soon as he heard it, he slugged his friend right in the arm and told him to shut up.”
“Wow.”
Sometimes, I think we give these guys too much credit.
Unless the weirdos in the church are just weirdos and don’t have anything to do with the Ebola attack. But… it’s a start, and enough people start talking, I’ll hear the right voice. I know it.
“Yeah—what a bunch of weirdos, right? Afraid to even let people know where they go to church.”
For Sam, this was just a random encounter with a couple eccentrics, but for Mason, he knew that it was much, much more. He now had a trail to the suspected terrorists and he fully intended to follow it. Mason folded a 100-dollar bill, placed it down on the bar as a tip, turned, and walked out of the pub, saying “there’s soon to be a much bigger tip for what you just told me.”
13
September 15th, 2028
10:06 p.m. EST
Washington, D.C.
Mason didn’t have to go far to find the nearby Catholic Church.
In fact, Mason could see the building from the bar.
That was no guarantee that the members of the cult, let alone the actual terrorists, were in the building, but there was no better place to start. It only helped matters that the church was rundown and obviously abandoned. The barred windows were almost all cracked, and the solid oak front doors looked as if they had been broken into on many occasions by homeless squatters. It all looked quite desolate and deserted. Mason was beginning to think that the only living things that even existed in this landscape of ruin were the large rats the scurried out from under D.C.’s sewer system.
In short, if a cult or a terrorist group wanted to make it a point to hide out, there were fewer places better than an old, decrepit church that was more likely to be razed in the next five years than raised in the name of some sort of revival.
For the next few minutes, Mason watched the church, waiting to see if anyone would emerge—even just a local practitioner might provide some valuable information. He wasn’t looking to go in guns blazing or to cause a problem, but he sure as hell was looking for a solution.
After a while, though, he was tempted to move on—since the whole place seemed to be completely abandoned. He thought of going inside, but at this time of night, without the proper gear, it seemed like a risk not worth taking. Better to wait until sunrise, understand the schematics of the building, and then make a move the next evening.
But temptation was starting to get a hold of him. Four days would soon become three and a half, which would become three, on and on until suddenly, Mason would have less than a couple hours to go without ever having checked out the church.
Like it or not, Mason had to make moves.
He crossed the street and came to the front entrance. A homeless man sat at the base of the stairs, wrapped in blankets. Mason let him be, figuring that the odds that this homeless man was somehow in cahoots with the terrorists were extremely low.
