Callsign: King II- Underworld (4 page)

An hour later, he had signed for a parcel delivery. The package had contained only an ordinary looking smart phone, sent from an address in France two days earlier. As soon as he had powered it up, the electronic conversation had begun in earnest.

The target was a man named Jack Sigler, but his employer chose to utilize the code name “King.” King, he was told, was in all likelihood, a covert special operations soldier for the US Army. A concerted effort had been made to erase all evidence of Sigler from the public record. The only picture of him that Sokoloff’s anonymous new employer could provide was from a courthouse video surveillance camera—King had participated in a child custody hearing and his image had been captured as he left the building. Nothing was known about his current whereabouts, but Sokoloff’s contact had amassed a great deal of unofficial information about the man, including King’s close friendship with an archaeologist named George Pierce.

Pierce, Sokoloff realized, would be the key to executing the contract, and unlike King, the archaeologist’s life was an open book.

It had taken nearly three weeks to put all the pieces in place. Pierce’s drug-addicted brother had been located in New York City, and it hadn’t been too difficult to arrange for his arrest on a completely valid charge of petty larceny, or to subsequently see that he was sent to a court-ordered stay at a rehabilitation facility. Sokoloff knew that Micah Pierce would reach out to his brother, and the elder Pierce would probably make contact with Sigler. Sokoloff had been right on both counts. Shortly after the call from his brother, Pierce had made an untraceable phone call to someone in the United States, and thereafter booked a flight from Athens to New York.

Armed only with a grainy picture of the target, Sokoloff had stationed himself at the reception area of La Guardia Airport, awaiting the arrival of Pierce’s plane. King had been there as well.

Sokoloff probably could have pulled off the hit right there, outside the secure terminal, but the risk of immediate capture was too great. He had brought the target into the open and he had gone to great lengths to set up the ambush at the rehab clinic; as eager as he was to be done with this one last job, he wasn’t about to throw ten million dollars away—to say nothing of his own freedom—with an impetuous act. So instead, he had followed Pierce and King through the city to the brownstone where Micah Pierce, having already played his role—albeit unknowingly, waited for a reunion with his older brother. While that was going on, Sokoloff had gotten in position on a rooftop across the street, deploying the Remington he’d purchased at an upstate sporting goods store earlier in the week. Then he made a call to his local connection.

He had no doubt of his ability to end Sigler’s life with a single pull of the trigger, unaided by any reinforcements. He was likewise certain of his ability to slip away unhindered. But bringing in members of the local Russian organized crime syndicate would add a layer of protection to the job that would completely deflect all suspicion from himself, and perhaps more importantly, from his employer. At his signal, the locals would stage a very public, very visible attack on the clinic, and the ensuing confusion would lead authorities to believe that King was simply a victim of bad timing. They would eventually realize that the fatal bullet had come from a high-powered rifle, and not from the pistols or sub-machine guns wielded by local mob foot soldiers, but that would be a mere detail. The shooters would be arrested and sent to prison, as a matter of course, and the authorities would be satisfied that justice had been served. For their part, the young
mafiya
soldiers would willingly accept incarceration, because there was no better way to make one’s bones in the world of organized crime, than to serve a prison sentence for killing someone. They would do their time and emerge wearing an intaglio of tattoos as a badge of honor, and no one would ever imagine that the crime had had nothing at all to do with drugs or the Russian mob.

Sokoloff was quite pleased with the plan, mostly because he felt it was the best way to get back to his idyllic retirement with only the barest minimum of exposure. With ten million dollars added to his nest egg, he might even be able to do a better job of avoiding future compulsory offers of employment.

It was only now, as he cradled the rifle and peered through the scope, that he remembered the thrill he had once gotten from taking another man’s life.

Don’t get used to it
,
Ivan
.

The door opened and two men emerged from the clinic building.

Then again,
he thought
, there’s no reason not to enjoy it a little
.

He pulled the trigger.

3.

The call had come only a few minutes after Pierce had gone upstairs to visit his brother.

King—known to a dwindling few by his given name, Jack Sigler—didn’t need to look at the caller ID; all the calls he received on this phone came from the same place. He answered without hesitation.

“It’s Lew, King. Blue’s…ah, otherwise occupied, so it looks like I’m on point for the moment.”

Lewis Aleman was the resident all-purpose tech guy for Chess Team, the ultra-secret, off-the-books covert ops team of which King was the field leader. King wasn’t sure if he was more surprised by the fact that Aleman had stepped up into a more administrative role or by the circumstances that had necessitated it. The last time the man known by the callsign “Deep Blue” had been “otherwise occupied,” the possibility of human extinction—due to the spread of the lethal Brugada contagion—had been in the balance. Deep Blue, otherwise known as Tom Duncan—the former President of the United States—was the brains, eyes and ears of Chess Team. As the Chief Executive, he had created and nurtured Chess Team as a highly mobile, highly capable Delta unit, and when circumstances had forced him to relinquish his position as the leader of the free world, he had made running the team, now completely independent of the Department of Defense, his full time job. It did not bode well that he was out of the office.

King took that news in stride. If Deep Blue’s absence was part of some new unfolding crisis, he would deal with it; that was what he did.

“Sorry to intrude on your vacation,” Aleman continued, “but this one can’t wait.”

King almost laughed. He hardly thought of his extended-weekend fishing getaway with George Pierce as a vacation. But with King’s girlfriend Sara Fogg working to establish a new HIV treatment protocol in Africa, and his adopted daughter Fiona staying with a new friend for the weekend, King had almost no reason to take personal time. If not for George’s unexpected visit on short-notice, he would have been talking to Aleman in person…and he would have a better grasp on why Deep Blue was absent.

“Not a problem, Ale. Spill it.”

“Yesterday afternoon, there was an incident near Phoenix. The official report is that a highway accident led to the release of an unspecified chemical contaminant. They’ve shut down a ten-mile long section of US Highway 60, just west of a little copper mining town called Miami, and established an exclusion zone. Nothing gets in or out.”

“When you say ‘they’ you mean…?”

“The army. And while I grant you it’s a little hinky that the military is running the show, that’s not why I called.”

“I take it the official story isn’t the real story.”

“That’s what you need to find out.” Aleman took a deep breath as if gathering his thoughts. “At 1435 local time—roughly thirty minutes after the accident—a video was uploaded to YouTube from the crash site. It took about fifteen minutes to go viral, but then…whoosh…it was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Someone erased it completely from existence. Or at least they tried very hard to. A targeted borer worm virus hit the worldwide web and hunted down every permutation of the original. And I mean every single one, everywhere in the world, even still pictures taken from screen grabs.”

 “Is that even possible?”

“Believe me, it is, but to do it, you need some serious mojo—NSA mojo.”

The capabilities of modern computer systems were not King’s bread and butter, but what Aleman described sounded like the ranting of a conspiracy nut. For years, paranoid rumors of the government’s, and specifically the National Security Agency’s, ability to seize control of the flow of information on the Internet had spread like wildfire. King had always been skeptical; trying to control lines of communication was like trying to catch the wind in a bottle, and when you tried to do it, it almost always came back to bite you in the ass. Still, he trusted that Aleman knew what he was talking about. “So what’s so important about this video?”

“I’m sending it to you now.”

“How did you manage to get your hands on it?”

“I constantly monitor the Web for anything unusual, and this one certainly qualified. Normally, I would have dismissed it; it looks like something lifted from a horror movie. But when the virus hit the firewall, I decided to take a second look. Knowing where it came from, and how badly someone wants to keep it under wraps, I think it’s worth checking out.”

King’s phone chirped as the file arrived and he held the phone away to watch the clip. For all the buildup, he was a little disappointed. As Aleman had indicated, it played like something from a low-budget experimental horror movie. He held the phone back to his ear. “It looks like Blair Witch Meets Bigfoot.”

“Yeah, the monster kooks are all over this. The original video was probably only seen by a few thousand people, most of whom didn’t take it seriously, but now ten times as many people are talking about the fact that the video is missing; they’re sure someone is trying to cover up definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot.”

King pondered this. The video camera had captured only a brief glimpse of what appeared to be a hairy figure pounding its fists against the outside of a car window, but the image was blurred by movement. A moment later, the camera had presumably been dropped, and it thereafter recorded only sounds—human screams and bestial growls.

Because the video had come to him from Lewis Aleman, and because it was evident that someone had worked very hard to eradicate all trace of its existence, King had no doubt about its authenticity. He also knew why Aleman had brought it to his attention. “You think this might be Ridley’s handiwork?”

Richard Ridley was the founder of Manifold Genetics—officially defunct, but still very much active—and monsters were his stock in trade. In their first encounter with Manifold, Chess Team had squared off against the Lernian Hydra, an almost unkillable beast thought to exist only in Greek mythology. More recently, Ridley, had learned the secret of animating
golem
, granted life to inanimate creations of stone, clay, crystal and bone, and unleashed them on the world, killing thousands. Chess Team was still smarting from their bittersweet victory against the madman; Rook was still MIA after carrying out his assignment against a target in Siberia, though Queen was now hunting for clues for his whereabouts…or the man’s gravesite.

Stopping Ridley had become Chess Team’s primary objective. Unfortunately, it wasn’t their only mission. Recently, King had learned of a mysterious new threat with global influence, something they knew only as ‘Brainstorm.’ Aleman’s workload had doubled almost overnight as he took on the task of trying to find loose threads in the Brainstorm network, thus far to no avail.

“Serious mojo,” King muttered. Brainstorm had that kind of mojo. “Is there anything about this incident that definitively points to Ridley?”

“One thing,” Aleman said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “It’s hard to pick it out in the video, but if you freeze it at exactly the right moment, it’s clear as day.”

King’s phone chirped again and he looked at the image file Aleman had just sent him. His eyes were immediately drawn to the object hanging from a leather thong around the creature’s neck, and he realized that it was a good thing that George Pierce was already there.

4.

As they stepped through the doors of the rehab facility, King scanned the street for a passing taxicab.

“So,” Pierce said, matching his friend’s pace as they descended the concrete steps of the brownstone. “What can you tell me?”

King barely heard him. There weren’t any taxis, but he had spied four men sitting in a black tricked-out Mercedes directly across the street, and now alarm bells were sounding in his head. He could only make out the facial features of the two sitting on the left side—they were Caucasian, with high Slavic cheekbones that made him think
Russians
—but it was the barely glimpsed object one of the men fidgeted with that commanded his attention.

Gun
!

New York wasn’t Fallujah or Kandahar. It wasn’t even the same city it had been thirty years previously, in the grip of a war between criminal empires violently vying for dominance in the burgeoning crack cocaine trade. But no matter where in the world he was, King knew that a man sitting in an idle car, nervously playing with a gun, was a precursor to trouble. Whether or not it directly involved him, whether or not he was their target, he knew immediate action was called for.

His instincts took over. He spun toward Pierce and tackled his uncomprehending friend into the rose shrubs on the side of the stairs.

There was a resounding crack as something struck the side of the building, knocking a chip of stone loose. Half a second later, the sound of a distant shot reached King’s ears. The report had not come from the car; somewhere nearby, a sniper had just taken a shot, and only King’s dumb luck in spotting the potential ambush had saved him.

I am the target
, he thought.
Or George.Or both of us.

That was all the thinking he had time for. The vegetation offered no protection and hardly any concealment from the unseen shooter, and now the men in the Mercedes were entering the fray. Three of the four doors, every one except the driver’s, flew open to disgorge the passengers, all of whom carried old Soviet-era
Škorpionvz.
61 submachine pistols.