by Rawlin Cash
“It’s a fucking bullet, Hale,” Walker said.
“Maybe,” Hale said.
Walker had had enough. “People have been firing bullets since forever. Sign the fucking clearance and quit grandstanding.”
All Walker cared about was getting back to the city and getting in front of the television cameras. He wanted the people to see him take control.
Hale didn’t like it. He didn’t like having to confront Walker directly.
“They’re after you, sir,” he said.
“Do you have proof of that?”
Hale didn’t but his gut told him he was right. He couldn’t believe the other agencies weren’t going to stand their ground.
“The White House intrusion,” he said.
“That intruder was killed,” Walker said. “He was a crackpot acting alone. You told me that.”
“He killed two people.”
“The secret service says the White House is secure.”
“It was secure last night when it was breached.”
Walker sighed. “What are you saying, Hale?”
Hale looked around the room. He was alone. Goldwater and Antosh were safe. The airspace was cleared by NORAD and all they had to do was pass on the clearance. The secret service was doing whatever they were told to do by the president. Fitzpatrick was the one who should have been backing him up.
“Fitz,” Hale said. “What have your people got on this type of bullet?”
“It’s too early to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
Hale looked at the president as if that was enough.
“Fitzpatrick has already signed off,” Walker said.
“That’s because he’s being a pussy,” Hale said.
Fitzpatrick turned toward Hale but didn’t say anything. Hale didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid of him.
“His job is to assess this threat,” Hale said. “My people are telling me we’ve never seen anything like it and that we don’t know who made it.”
“You’re right,” Walker said. “It’s Fitz’s job to assess this.”
“And he’s not fucking doing it,” Hale said.
He knew he’d lost the argument. Being the last holdout made him look unreasonable. Loosing his temper clinched it.
“Just sign off,” Walker said, “and let’s all get back to work.”
Walker already had the document on his desk and he slid it in Hale’s direction.
Hale looked around the room.
“We don’t know who made that bullet,” Hale said. “We don’t know what it’s capable of. I’m not signing.”
“I’m not going to let you keep me hostage,” Walker said.
“I’m not signing that document,” Hale said.
“If you don’t sign it, I’ll get someone who will.”
That was a big statement. Going over the CIA director’s head on an issue like this was a vote of no confidence. It meant the president would expect Hale’s resignation.
“You do what you have to,” Hale said. “And I’ll do what I have to.”
Hale walked out of the room without being dismissed. He made his way through the great hall. If he was going to be dismissed, he needed to get to Langley as fast as possible and tie up some loose ends. There were standing orders in place to cover this eventuality and one of them was a hit on Hunter.
He left the lodge and made his way for the tunnel.
“You can’t leave until after Marine One,” the secret service agent told him.
“I understand,” Hale said as he was escorted into the elevator.
A moment later he was on a golf cart being taken back to the airfield. He had no cell reception and couldn’t call Fawn until he was through the tunnel.
“It’s me,” he said as soon as she picked up. “Are you still at the White House?”
“I’m on my way back to Langley.”
“Good, there’s something I need you to do.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The president’s going to ask for my resignation.”
“What?”
“Yes. I think so. I won’t give him the all clear to leave the safe house and he’s pissed off.”
“It’s your job.”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“You’re doing it to protect him.”
“There’s something else to it. I think he’s got one of his own people tapped for the job.”
“Someone who does what they’re told?”
“Exactly.”
“Fuck,” Fawn said.
“I know.”
“If you’re out, I’m out,” she said.
It was true. Fawn was too close to Hale to survive this. Whoever came in to replace him wouldn’t trust her. He’d clean house.
“I’m sorry, Fawn.”
“Fuck,” she said again.
“Who knows. Maybe they’ll give you the job.”
She laughed. “Right.”
“Anyway, you remember what we talked about? The standing order?”
“Of course I do. I had to write it.”
“I’m thinking maybe I was wrong.”
“Thank God,” Fawn said.
She’d argued bitterly with him over it. It wasn’t right to take your own operatives down with you. She’d likened it to a new alpha male in a pack that goes around killing all the young. She wasn’t exactly right about the details of pack behavior but it got her point across.
“You want me to rescind that order?” Fawn said.
Hale hesitated. He was torn. Hunter was the one big uncertainty in his career. He’d trained the man to kill anyone. Then he’d gone and given him a reason to kill him. He knew the time would come when Hunter would find out everything. He had a fatalistic attitude about it. There was very little doubt in his mind that when his end came, it would be at Hunter’s hand. And yet, every time he had reason to order Hunter’s death, he stopped himself.
“Yes,” he said. His heart was pounding in his chest. “Rescind it.”
“You’re a good man, Jeff Hale. You’ll be able to sleep better in your twilight years because of this.”
“If I have twilight years,” he said.
He hung up the phone as the president and the rest of the entourage came out of the elevator. The helicopters were lined up, ready to fly back to DC, and the president was brought directly to Marine One.
No other member of the succession line could fly with him, heightened security protocols were still in place, but Hale watched as Goldwater got into the helicopter with him.
He wondered what that meant.
He wondered who’d be taking his place as CIA director. His had been a very short tenure. One of the shortest in the agency’s history. So be it. He’d rather be fired for making the right call than compromise his own instincts. The president of the country had been assassinated on his watch. He couldn’t forget that.
The helicopter revved up and he watched as the propellor accelerated and the craft hit that moment when it’s upward thrust exactly equaled its mass. It was the moment of weightlessness, like the zero gravity of a projectile at the peak of its arc. It was neither rising nor falling. The craft rose an inch and hovered for the briefest second, before rising further into the air.
He could see the president, sitting there comfortably with his wife, Goldwater, and a few senior advisors. He looked the part, Hale thought. President Walker. The all-American, meat and potatoes president that the people could get behind.
He would have liked to continue serving under him.
Walker looked down at Hale and ever so slightly nodded his head.
That was the moment Hale knew it. His tenure as CIA director was over.
And then the president’s head jerked unnaturally sideways, like he’d been smacked by a baseball bat. A pink mist sprayed the air, getting into his wife’s face. The Scottish terrier struggled in her lap, barking wildly and trying to free itself from her grip. Nancy Walker took one look at her husband and her face turned to a perfect picture of
horror. She began to scream and Goldwater reached for her. The helicopter swayed as the pilot turned back to the passengers to see what the commotion was.
An impossible shot.
Hale looked around frantically.
The location was completely secure. No one knew the president was there.
No one could get within five miles of them without setting off alarms.
Hale realized he never even heard the shot.
And that was it. President Walker was dead less than twenty-four hours after he was sworn in.
Twenty
Hunter woke with a start. He was drenched in sweat. It was the same routine, night after night, only this night was different. This night, he remembered.
He got out of the bed and went down to the beach where he stripped out of his night clothes. The moon lit up the water and he waded into it.
After swimming he lay naked on the sand and lit a cigar.
No one was around.
There was no sound but the water.
He looked at the stars and blew clouds of smoke up toward them.
He knew what had happened to the other operatives. He finally remembered that last mission. That final task. A mission so secret he’d been given memory inhibitors before performing it. He didn’t remember everything, but he remembered enough.
The mission hadn’t been especially personal. He and the other Mantis operatives hadn’t known each other in any meaningful sense.
They’d never been told each other’s real names. They were forbidden from speaking about themselves or their backgrounds. They’d trained separately, at different facilities, and they’d each been subjected to different enhancement procedures. No single psyche team worked on more than one operative. Each had their own handler. Most people involved directly with an operative didn’t even know how many others there were, or if there even were others.
Everything was experimental. Hale had designed the program as a way to see which set of enhancements was most effective. Everyone knew most, if not all, would fail.
The operatives themselves knew there were others, but they never knew exactly how many, or what the overall parameters of the Mantis program were.
They knew they’d been trained and equipped for specific missions, or specific roles within missions. They knew there had to be others with complementary skill sets. They’d each been subjected to specific enhancement procedures that on their own were incomplete. Eventually, when they were brought in to work together, they met and got to know each other in an impersonal way. They didn’t have barbecues or play football, but they did put their lives in each other’s hands.
They might not have known the other men’s names, or where they grew up, but they knew their lives depended on each other. It was the unique intimacy of soldiers.
There had been debate within the CIA about which technologies to test in Mantis, which combinations might give the desired effect, and the final cocktails used were eight unique sets of enhancements that the government scientists believed would create a very specific type of soldier.
At the time, Hale was the CIA’s director of black ops.
Now, he was director of the whole show.
Most of the enhancement processes being tested were unstable at the time. Everyone knew that in all likelihood, all eight operatives would have to be destroyed. But the potential gains were seen as more than enough to justify the risks.
The goal of Mantis had never been simply to develop super soldiers. They called the subjects enhanced operatives, and the true test of their success was not whether they were more effective or lethal than other elite units, which they undoubtedly were, but whether they were more ruthless, more obedient, more willing to push the envelope.
There were always going to be casualties, and Hunter remembered now that he’d been told that in advance. He’d agreed to all of it, the risk of death and disfigurement and mental trauma. He had to assume the other operatives had been given the same opportunity to accept the risks. So in a sense, Hale had been fair.
But they’d always been led to believe the goal of the program was to increase effectiveness. Obedience had never been mentioned. That was the big secret of the program, the thing the CIA worked so hard to keep hidden.
The men had agreed to everything. That justified the government in doing anything. That was the theory.
But Hunter knew agreement only went so far. The law never allowed a man to agree to his own death. It didn’t allow a man to sell himself into permanent slavery. It didn’t allow him to sell his vote, or his rights under the constitution.
Hunter had signed documents purporting to do all that. Documents Jeff Hale had drafted.
He didn’t know all of what had been done to the other operatives, he didn’t even know all of what had been done to him, but he knew now he’d been lucky. However much he’d been fucked up, and he felt that interfering with a man’s memory was a particularly invasive measure, he knew others had suffered worse.
There was one operative, Tinkerbell, who’d received retinal implants. Hunter remembered working with him on a nighttime insertion into Taliban territory. The man’s eyes looked normal on first glance, but when he looked right at you, you could tell they’d been altered. They were supposed to let him see in infrared and ultraviolet, but the technology was barely more than experimental and more than once, Hunter saw him doubled over in agony as the implants wreaked havoc on his optical nerve.
“They really fucked you,” Hunter said to him at one point.
“Between you and me,” Tinkerbell said, “the eyes aren’t even the worst thing they did to me.”
Another operative, Cinderella, had had the pain and pleasure receptors in his brain altered. He had a scar on one of his arms that made the flesh look like soldered steel. He said it was a burn that he hadn’t noticed happening until he smelled the smoke. He said it smelled like pork chops. He said that removing pain was supposed to make him more willing to take risks, but because he was so paranoid of what could happen, he was actually more hesitant than he’d been before.
“They thought I’d miss the pleasure,” Cinderella said to Hunter, “but you know, I miss the pain more. Pain is what gives life meaning. Pain isn’t just a defense mechanism, it’s the fucking point of life itself. You know who doesn’t feel pain? A dead man.”
Hunter didn’t love these men. But they respected each other, and they shared the sense of community that came from knowing they were a fixed group, eight of them, and that they were all ultimately in the same boat.
Hunter remembered the day he called them in. They trusted him. They never suspected a thing.
He couldn’t remember Hale telling him to do it, but he knew he was following an order, and he knew why.
There was a black site in Kabul that they’d often used for mission briefings. It was a secure room underground that required entry through an airlock. It was the most secure location the military had in Afghanistan. When high-ranking politicians flew in from DC, it was there that they were briefed. The president had been there.
With the increase in insider attacks, where Taliban members got recruited as coalition soldiers and then blew themselves up inside secure locations, the air-locked room became the preferred meeting place for all high-level gatherings.
Hunter called in the seven Mantis operatives and if they suspected anything, it didn’t stop them from obeying the order. Perhaps they’d known they were going to die and had accepted it. He didn’t know because by that point he’d ceased being one of them.
He stood apart.
Mantis had been eight prototypes. Seven were being cancelled.
He remembered making the call. He remembered them reporting in, one by one. He remembered entering the sealed chamber with them.
They were waiting for Hale.
They were calm.
If anyone knew what was coming, they never showed it.
It became quiet in the room and they heard the sucking sound of the door being sealed.
Then they heard the fans stop.
Air stopped coming into the room.
“I guess Hale’s not going to make this one,” Cinderella said.
“I always knew our last meeting would be something like this,” Tinkerbell said.
“At least no one can say we didn’t all stand together,” Cinderella said, looking pointedly at Hunter.
Hunter was the turncoat. He was the traitor. He was the one who’d betrayed them. He knew then that was the reason he’d agreed to the memory inhibitor. How could a man, how could a soldier, live with himself after doing something like this?
The air in the room grew thinner, the carbon dioxide level rose. All of them had been trained on what to do in that situation. There was very little a man could do other than die a little more slowly, with a little more dignity. They sat still. They didn’t speak. They looked at each other with blank faces, expressionless, emotionless.
By that time they were long past the point of caring. They’d signed their lives away long ago. They’d signed them over to Jeff Hale and now he was coming to collect.
They’d all done so many unspeakable, unthinkable things that death was a release. It was the only respite they could ever hope for.
The air thinned to nothing and one by one they nodded off, losing consciousness. Hunter had undergone oxygenation in advance and that was what allowed the medical team to come in and resuscitate him afterward.
That was the point in the plan he now remembered he’d had doubts about. He hadn’t known for sure if Hale would come through. If he’d come back and resuscitate him or if he’d let him die with the others. It was that fact alone that had allowed him a shred of belief that he might not have been a traitor. Maybe they’d all die together after all.
It was only when he was resuscitated, when consciousness came flooding back to him in an overwhelming torrent, that he knew for certain he was a traitor.
As soon as he woke, he wished he hadn’t. It would have been better to die with the others than to live knowing what he’d done.
When he was fully resuscitated, he saw that Hale was present.
“It’s not over,” Hale said, handing him a 9 millimeter Glock.
