There are three rules of knife fighting. One, don’t get in a knife fight. Two, didn’t you hear the first rule? Don’t get in a knife fight! And three, if you’re stupid enough to get into a knife fight, accept the fact you’re going to get cut. Just make sure that your cut isn’t fatal.
And then the man had taught them every trick in the book to ensure that. And one of the primary rules was to make sure the opponent’s knife had something to cut other than your flesh.
Dan’s free hand swept out, searching for anything that wouldn’t bring him within Diesel’s reach. Diesel, knowing a good idea when he saw it, did the same. As soon as their hands found something, they charged each other, the blades low, plunging, slicing, and plunging again like pistons.
What Dan had grabbed by happenstance was his thick, heavy, wedding album. What Diesel had grabbed, because it was the only thing left he could find, was the “embrace the pain, love the pain” pillow.
The knives flashed out like saw-scaled vipers—the snakes that kill more humans than any other. Diesel’s blade sunk into the wedding album like a spike, and stuck there. Dan’s blade went through the pillow like it was cloth and feathers, which it was, then sliced open Diesel’s arm from the end of his elbow to the tip of his pinky.
Diesel tried so hard not to scream that he nearly cracked his teeth. He managed to hold onto his knife, but couldn’t prevent himself from dropping back to the floor as if in the middle of an epileptic seizure.
“Remember, you bastard,” Dan barked as he stepped back. “You can’t spell Diesel without D-I-E.”
Dan tried to keep a careful watch on the man. After all, although painfully wounded and spurting blood, he was still a figurative and literal backstabber. Even so, the man’s pathetic contortions and pitiful noises aroused both sympathy and disgust. After all, the man had once been a fairly dependable fellow fighter. Dan tried to remember if Diesel had ever saved him.
That was a mistake. When he looked back, Diesel had managed to use the remaining splintered table to block Dan from seeing him reach behind his back with his uncut hand. The knife was no longer in it. Instead, there was a Beretta Nano—a nine-millimeter automatic designed for concealed carry, stopping power, and never getting stuck in a holster, boot, or belt. And despite his knife wound, the gun was steadily pointing in the middle of Dan’s face.
Diesel let Dan see his pained, victorious, mocking smile, and started to say “never take your eyes…” when his gun hand exploded off his wrist, taking the Nano with it.
A stunned second later, Diesel was back writhing and howling on the ground, unable to use one filleted hand to stop the bleeding of the other bloody stump. A second after that, Alexandra Morgan came marching in, slinging a McMillan CS5 “Stubby” sniper rifle, complete with suppressor, over her dark-gray garbed shoulder.
She took one glance at her father before stepping over to where Diesel contorted, pulling a med kit out of the messenger bag slung over her other shoulder.
“How are you?” her father asked with honest interest.
“Better than him,” Alex told Dan with not much irony as she brought out a tourniquet, bandage pad, crazy glue applicator, and painkiller syringe. “Cougar picked me up right after he dropped you off.” She took a second from her medical ministrations to point at her ear. “Listening to your escapades was better than any iTunes playlist.”
Dan came around the other side, kneeled, and gingerly picked up the blood and gut-flecked Beretta and boot knife between his thumbs and forefingers.
“What’s the crazy glue for?” he wondered.
“You think I’m going to stitch that cut up?” she retorted. You’ve seen my sewing skills. Besides, we don’t have all day.”
Dan watched as Alex held the sliced flesh together with one hand and smeared the glue on it with the other. Soon, his attention wandered to the nearly hysterical, bleeding betrayer.
He couldn’t help thinking about a scene in one of his favorite Westerns when a character advised, if you’re going to shoot, shoot …don’t talk. But he didn’t say it aloud because he wanted Diesel to talk, really badly.
“Got any truth serum?” he asked his daughter.
“Do I got truth serum?” she answered. “Does Yogi Bear love picnic baskets?” She glanced up at Dan. “That was the purpose of this exercise, wasn’t it?”
“Not entirely,” he reminded her. “But it’s a good start.”
“And for a finish?” Alex inquired as she reached for a second syringe.
“Find AZ43-I, and AZ04-D,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know about your favorite Beacon Hill buddy,” she said while administering a narcoanalysis injection. “But remember what I promised when you left for the fragrant island?”
“I do indeed,” Dan answered, an expectant, relieved smile growing on his face.
She looked ready to reveal the results of her search, but was then distracted by the way Diesel stiffened.
“First things first,” she reminded Dan, nodding toward Diesel, who seemed to be drifting into a state of hypnosis, a coma, or both.
As they waited for the drug, or mortality, to take effect, both Morgans found themselves looking at the wreckage all around them.
“My, my, my,” Alex tsked. “Look at the mess you’ve made of your life.”
Dan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry until his eyes settled on that pesky picture that had bothered him when he’d first entered. The one that now lay on the storage unit floor, its gunmetal frame bent and its glass cracked.
Dan leaned over and peered at it, hoping the damage didn’t obscure the other person in the shot. It didn’t. Dan Morgan looked down to see his smiling, happy wife, with her arm around the shoulders of AZ04-D herself—Diana Bloch, Zeta’s head of operations.
Chapter 32
When Dan saw what was on the back of the picture, he all but forgot about Diesel.
They didn’t get much out of him anyway—not even his name, rank, and serial number. Nor did Dan expect them to. If ever there was the personification of a “need-to-know agent,” it was Diesel. Anyone, Alpha or Zeta, could throw him farther than they could trust him.
Dan figured Diesel was just one of many biodegradable operatives Alpha had assigned to watch for Cobra at any number of his haunts and hangouts. Even the idea of following Diesel to get to Paul Kirby was a nonstarter. Just about the only thing the wounded, drugged prisoner coughed up was that he was ordered to wait until Dan walked in front of him before trying to kill him.
They left the handless man at a hospital after anonymously informing the Boston P.D. that he was one of the men responsible for the Beacon Hill bombings. The Morgans had little doubt that even if Diesel had been in one piece and at full strength, a lowly assistant district attorney would be able to nail him for decades, if not centuries, behind bars. And if he tried to invoke the name of Cobra as some sort of state’s evidence, Alpha or Zeta could flip a coin to see who would serve Diesel his own death penalty.
Once Diesel was out of their sight, Dan forgot him. They were too busy with the six letters and fourteen numbers on the back of the photograph.
“Six letters?” Lincoln Shepard exclaimed in their ears from back in the Fox Burrow. “Are you sure?” The Morgans’ ominous silence was all that was needed to make the I.T. wiz backtrack. “I just thought maybe all the destruction inside the storage unit had smudged the writing or something…”
“No smudging,” Dan assured him. “No mistake.”
Speaking of haunts and hangouts, they had collected Yuri’s Ford Focus Hatchback from Dan’s secret garage and decided the best place to drive it was The Bar With No Name, which, conveniently, was open twenty-four-seven. That was also the best place where a father and daughter in dark gray outfits could disappear into a booth and seemingly talk to themselves.
Thankfully the squabbling couple Dan had met there before
were nowhere in sight, although Dan couldn’t help but wonder how they would have reacted if they saw him again.
“Well,” Peter Conley drawled in their ears from his undisclosed location, “the fourteen numbers are most likely longitude and latitude again. Read ’em to me, and I’ll work on that while you brainiacs work on the letters.”
“Back to square one,” Linc moaned after Dan read the numbers.
“I don’t think so,” Lily Randall countered from over Linc’s shoulder. “Smith said that it was Diana who planted the TAS on you, right, Dan?”
Dan and Alex shared a look over their beers, then the young lady returned to ravenously attacking the surprisingly good huevos rancheros.
“Right,” Dan said.
“So, as with everything before, Smith and Bloch were working together,” Randall surmised.
“Yeesh,” Karen O’Neal chimed in from her station in Fox Burrow’s information center. “I can’t even begin to imagine what complex convolutions that brain trust could think up…”
“No worries,” Alex assured them between bites. “They both knew that they still had to make it clear to the likes of us.”
“And only us,” Randall reminded them. “Not Alpha. So I’m guessing, and hoping, that this code is in the same Taiwanese puppet theater language.”
“It’s not,” Dan informed them. “These letters look completely different than the other letters.”
“Dad blast it,” Linc complained.
“No, it makes sense,” Randall suggested. “Once we revealed the Taiwanese puppet language key, Bloch and Smith couldn’t have been sure that one of the double agents wouldn’t get word of it.”
“Read them to me,” Linc asked. “We’ll take it from there.”
Dan stared down at the back of the picture, trying to ignore his daughter’s eating noises. “I can’t,” he confessed. “They’re some sort of hieroglyphics.”
His daughter stopped eating and there was a silence along the R-comm.
“Well,” Linc continued. “Can you take a picture and text it to me?”
“Of course they can’t,” O’Neal interrupted. “They trashed their phones as soon as the Zeta Disaster Protocol was invoked.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Linc agreed. “Of course.”
“The R-comm wouldn’t happen to have a video component you didn’t tell us about, did it?” Dan inquired to the air.
“Sorry to say, no,” Renard answered without shame. “Facial recognition scrambler, pulse rate monitor, location finder, yes. Camera, no.”
Silence descended as each remaining Zeta agent racked their brains for an answer. Even Dan tried, only to be interrupted by his daughter clutching his arm. He looked over to see her shining eyes, which were wet and bright with realization and memory.
“Dad,” she said, knowingly using that term instead of Dan or Cobra. “When I was a little girl, Mom and I had our own unique language. So we could communicate and no one else would understand us.”
“A written language?” Randall quickly asked.
“Yes!” Alex answered. “Every day she’d include a note in my lunch box. It started as a game, but became a habit all through kindergarten and grammar school.” Alex looked down at the wreckage on her plate. “But I stopped when I got to junior high. I was too cool for that…”
Dan saw his daughter blush, and his heart went out to her. But then, his hand did too, holding the picture.
“I guess it’s about time you looked at this too, huh?”
She did, and within a minute she had the translation. The six letters were B, I, G, D, I, and G. When that was done, Conley informed them that the latitude and longitude was a spot surprisingly close to The Bar with No Name.
Breakfast forgotten, the Morgans were out of the booth and the bar faster than Diesel could’ve pleaded the fifth.
* * * *
“The Big Dig,” Dan muttered in the dawn’s early light, while looking at a locked chain link fence surrounding a refuse-strewn patch of broken concrete and metal near the Seaport across from Logan Airport. “Started way before you were born,” he told Alex, who was already trying to figure out the best way to get inside without alerting any passing authorities. “It was supposed to make car travel easier.”
“Doesn’t look so big to me,” she commented, trying to see if any street kids had beaten her to making a slice in the fence.
Dan yanked the chain links far enough from the right wall of a building that he could slip between the two. “Took twenty years longer than it was supposed to, cost triple what it was supposed to, put a bunch of people in jail, and killed an innocent bystander when a hunk of it fell on them.” He grimaced at his daughter as she slipped in behind him. “Your tax dollars at work.”
“So why are we here?” Alex wondered as the two moved quickly into the shadows created by an unfinished elevated roadway and the side of an unfinished abutment.
“This is where the longitude and latitude numbers pinpoint,” Dan reminded her, checking the area for any curious on-lookers. He could see none.
The two stood facing the corner of a wall, with crumbling concrete to their right and rusting steel to their left.
“So what now?” Alex wondered.
“I’m surveying maps,” O’Neal informed them from thousands of miles away.
“And we’re hacking security cams in the area,” Renard added.
“But it looks like you two are the key,” Randall reminded them.
“If it were me,” Linc sad. “I’d start digging around like a rabid dog.”
Dan’s brows knitted. “This was a fairly dangerous place even before the Big Dig screwed it up even more,” he mused, looking down. “It’s mostly landfill, with subway tunnels, utility pipes, demolished house foundations, and even parts of sunken ships stuck in it.”
Dan was about to throw his hands into the air and go back to the bar for another beer when Alex took three steps to the right, two steps back, then dropped to her knees. Dan caught up with her just as she wiped some dirt off a metal plate, then yanked it up to reveal a half-circle sewer entrance.
“Damn,” Dan growled. “That thing must weigh a…”
By then Alex had gripped the center of the half-moon top, and pulled it upward, revealing a pipe. It went down and off out of sight like a water-park slide, but was just big enough to fit them if they went one at a time. Alex looked up at her father with bright eyes.
“How the hell did you know that was there?” he asked, just as he realized the answer.
“Mom told me,” Alex Morgan said.
There was no doubt or delay after that. Even if Dan had wanted to go first, just in case, he was too slow to stop his daughter, who hopped over the opening and slid down, her arms above her head. Dan followed quickly, his arms crossed in front of him.
The pipe brought them down twenty feet, then curled up just enough so they could land on their feet in the darkness.
“Damn,” Dan repeated as he pulled his ten-in-one tool from his pocket. “I feel like Maxwell Smart.”
“Who?” Alex asked, doing the same.
“Google it,” Dan suggested as he brought the tool’s high-powered, highly charged flashlight up to reveal an abandoned underground construction site. “If we get out of this.”
“Yeah,” Alex responded, pointing her all-in-one tool’s flashlight in the opposite direction. “I sure can’t Google it now. I bet there are no bars down here. Right, Linc?”
Linc didn’t answer.
“Linc?”
Again, he didn’t answer. She didn’t bother going through the roll call.
“You’re kidding,” Dan said. “Even the R-comm doesn’t work?”
The two looked at one another, and saw in each other’s faces that even so, neither considered leaving.
“Your mom told you, right?” he said to
her as a way to start their search.
Her eyes were still bright. “And I quote: ’Three right, two back, wipe pull, pull.’”
“She saying anything now?”
To his surprise, Alex answered with a huge smile. “One word. ‘Cold.’”
Dan’s eyes widened. He wasn’t sure whether to accept what was happening, or worry that his daughter had gone crazy and regressed to childhood.
“Really?” he exclaimed. “A game of hot and cold? Now?”
Alex and Jenny had driven him crazy with that game twenty years ago, running all over the house trying to find something the other had hidden by telling the other whether they were hot—close—or cold—far.
Alex giggled. “Really. Now,” she told him, happy to cling onto anything positive in this situation. “Come on, Dad,” she urged. “Let’s get hot.”
So they tried. Alex marched fearlessly forward through the eerie, twenty-foot-high and fifteen-foot-wide tunnel while Dan took a more careful approach.
“Seems like they’re using the abandoned I-six-ninety-five project as a hiding place,” he muttered. “I don’t know if it’s crazy or genius. Probably both.”
“I-six-ninety-five?” Alex repeated.
“Yeah,” Dan explained as they went farther and farther away from their starting point. “It was supposed to pass west of downtown, connecting Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, and even Somerville, but after destroying hundreds of homes, and threatening thousands more, it was canceled.” He waved his flashlight beam across the circumference of the tunnel. “And abandoned. They didn’t have the time or money to dismantle it.”
“‘Warm,’” Alex said.
Dan did a double take. “Warm?” The look on his daughter’s face reminded him of the look on his wife’s face when she’d told him she was pregnant. “Then let’s go.”
They moved with more certainty and speed through the tunnel, seeing more broken tools, vehicles, rebar, and even tracks. They were getting into the devised, but abandoned, plans to extend several subway lines. Dan saw broken, faded signs that featured flecks of red, blue, green, and silver. He seemed to remember talk of an Arborway Line Restoration, but that, like the rest of it, was gone and buried.
War of Shadows Page 22
