Joe Ledger (25 page)

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

His eyes bugged, and he opened his mouth to let out a scream of warning.

Chap. 4

There are times in combat when you have options. You can take someone prisoner. You can use some hand-to-hand stuff and subdue him, leave him bound and gagged. Or you overpower him and juice him with some animal tranquilizers.

Those are options that let the moment become an anecdote for both of you, to allow it to be a story—however painful or embarrassing—to tell later on. Maybe over beers with your buddies, maybe at your court martial, maybe to your wife as she holds you to her breast in the dark of night.

Those are moments when mercy and a regard for human life are allowable elements in the equation. They’re moments when even if blood is spilled, it’s merely a price to be paid. A small price. No one dies. The price doesn’t pay the ferryman’s fee.

This wasn’t one of those moments.

This was the kind of moment when there is no allowance for human life, for compassion, for choice.

The guard opened his mouth to scream and I killed him.

That’s the only way the moment could end because there wasn’t time for anything else. If he screamed, I’d die. If he screamed, the artifact would slip beyond the reach of people who wanted it stored and studied rather than used.

So he had to die. This young man. This peasant-soldier working for people who had no regard at all for his life.

Nor, in that terrible moment, did I.

As his mouth opened I moved into him, intruding inside his personal envelope of mental and physical safety. My left hand cupped the back of his neck, and I struck him under the Adam’s apple with the open Y of the space between thumb and index finger. The blow slammed the side of the primary knuckle of the index finger against the eggshell-fragile hyoid bone. He stopped breathing. His face instantly turned a violent red and seemed to expand as he tried to drag air in through an impossible route. I swung him around, turning him so that his panicked face was pointed to the ceiling as I dropped to my right knee and broke his back over my left.

It all took one second.

One bad second that changed his world and broke a hole in the lives of everyone he knew and everyone who loved him, and slammed the door on every experience he would ever have. Bang. That fast.

And it chipped off a big piece of my soul.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would see his young face watching me from the shadows of my deathbed when it was finally my time to go. He would be waiting for me, along with too many others whose lives had ended because of the necessities of my job.

Yeah, I’m a good guy. Tell anyone.

Fuck.

Chap. 5

Tick-tock.

I laid him down on the floor and moved on.

Grief and regrets are for after the war.

I raced to the far end of the chamber, pulled the keycard scanner, reprogrammed my master key, and slid it through the slot.

It went green on the first try.

No, I wasn’t going to suddenly start believing in good luck.

The door opened.

I stepped through.

The room was a lot smaller. Maybe twenty by twenty.

There was a big steel table in the exact middle of the room. A whole lot of weird-looking equipment was grouped around the table. Scanners and other stuff that looked like they came from a Star Trek movie were arranged to point at the thing under a glass dome on the table.

The artifact.

Right there. Closer than I could have hoped. Not hidden beyond an airlock, not wired up to fifty kinds of alarms.

I could have taken four paces and touched it.

Except.

The whole damn room was filled with people.

Three little guys in white lab coats. Not a problem.

Six bigger guys in uniforms.

Problem.

Chap. 6

We all went for our guns at the same time.

I was already totally wired, so I was maybe one heartbeat faster than the others.

The Snellig gas pistol fires tiny, thin-walled glass darts filled with a fast-acting nonlethal nerve agent. A new synthetic version of tetrodotoxin. Granted you fall down and shit your pants, but you do not die, so put it in the win column.

I was firing as I moved, rushing to put one of the lab coat guys between me and the guards, hoping they wouldn’t want to risk shooting them. That bought me another heartbeat.

Two of the guards spun away, their eyes rolling high and white within a microsecond of the darts bursting on their skin. They went down hard. One of them collapsed against a third guard, dragging him down, too. The other three clawed at their side arms. I shoved my human shield against one, fired over the scientist’s shoulder and took another guard in the cheek. He dropped and I closed on the one soldier left standing and pistol-whipped him across the chops. Teeth flew and he spun around so hard I thought he was going to screw himself into the floor.

Four guards down.

I pivoted toward the one who’d been accidentally dragged down and kicked him in the face. Twice. Real damn hard.

That left the one who was trying to push away the scientist I’d shoved at him. I shot the scientist in the back and when he crumpled I shot the sixth guard.

It was all over in the space of those salvaged heartbeats.

Bang, bang, bang.

That left me standing with the gun in my hand and them with their dicks in theirs. Metaphorically speaking.

They spent a couple of seconds being shocked, which is fine. I wanted them to fully appreciate the situation.

But all I could spare was a couple of seconds.

Then I said—in reasonably passable Korean, “Give me the device.”

The two scientists looked blankly at me. Shock or training or good poker faces, it was all the same to me.

I pointed the gun at the closest guy’s face.

“Now.”

In this situation, you think they’d say, fuck it, we lost. All their security guys on the floor, snoring and shitting their pants. Them looking like book nerds. Me looking like the big hulking thug I am. Gun looking like a gun. You think this would be easy math. A no-win situation so clear that it was almost no-fault. They couldn’t be expected to do anything here but acquiesce and hand it over.

That’s what you’d think.

That was what logic and sanity dictated in no uncertain terms.

It didn’t play out that way, and I knew it when one of them smiled at me.

This was not a smiling situation. Not even for me, and I had the gun.

The guy farthest from me—he was a half-step behind the other scientist—smiled. A small, ugly little smile.

Then he shoved his buddy right at me. It was so damn quick that it caught us both off guard. The closer man fell right against me, and I shot him more by reflex than intention. But his body was already falling, and it was a crowded room with bodies on the floor.

We both went down in a tangle.

Even little guys are a bastard when it comes to dead weight, and the dart made him totally slack.

I fell with him on top of me.

The other guy hit two buttons. One popped the glass dome over the artifact, which he scooped up and tucked under his arm, like a wide receiver.

The other was the central alarm button.

Fuck.

Klaxons began blaring with an ear-crushing loudness. Red lights slid out from slots in the walls and flashed with hysterical pulses. If I’d had epilepsy this would have triggered a fit.

I heard the hiss of a hydraulic door, and just as I shoved the unconscious scientist off of me I saw the other guy vanish through the doorway. The door began to slide shut.

I flung the guy off of me and shot to my feet, ran over several bodies—stepping on chests and faces and crotches as I fought to beat the close of that door. I leapt through a gap that didn’t look anywhere near big enough, tucked to make sure I didn’t lose a foot, hit the ground in a roll, felt the jolt as the concrete floor found every goddamn exposed piece of bone in my body, came up onto my feet, and pelted after the scientist. He was heading for another security door at the other end, faster than I ever saw Calvin Johnson run when there was nothing on the clock and the entire defensive squad on his ass.

He was already halfway down the hall when I capped off three rounds. Two hit the flaps of his lab coat and burst harmlessly. The third grazed him. He jerked sideways but didn’t go down. Must have grazed him.

I fired again and got nothing. The magazine was out.

I dropped it, fished for a spare, slapped it in place, and emptied the whole thing as I tore up the hallway. The Snellig has a twelve-shot capacity. I think I hit him with number eleven, because he dropped and my last shot passed right over his head.

The artifact dropped, too.

It hit the ground and bounced.

I think my heart stopped.

It landed and rolled awkwardly against the wall while I skidded to a stop. Until now it had been a lumpy chunk of silver metal with no discernable seams or openings, no lights, no switches or dials. In every photo I’ve seen of it, the device looked like it had been molded rather than assembled.

Now it looked different.

Now it had lights.

When it hit the floor something happened to it.

As I bent over it a series of small green lights suddenly flicked on all along its sides.

The lights were intensely bright; the colors more striking than LED Christmas lights.

I hesitated before touching it.

I mean…of
course
I did. Who wouldn’t?

After all, no one knows where this thing is from.

And right there I swear to God I heard a voice say, “Don’t touch it.”

I whirled, reaching for my last magazine, swapping out the old one with the speed borne of constant practice. But I brought the gun up and pointed it at nothing.

The hallway was empty except for the scientist who’d dropped the package. The room on the other side of the closed door was filled with his colleagues and their guards, and everyone was sleeping.

The alarms blared and the red lights flashed, but there was no one around to speak those words.

The voice repeated the warning.

“Don’t touch it.”

Here’s the thing. The voice I heard sounded like my own.

Chap. 7

Granted, I make no claims about being sane. Or even in the same zip code as sane. On my best day I have three different people living inside my head. The Civilized Man—who is the innocent and optimistic part of me. The one who wasn’t destroyed during the childhood trauma that otherwise turned me into a psychological basket of hamsters. Then there’s the Killer, that rough, crude, dangerous part of my mind, always looking to take it to the bad guys in very ugly ways. And there was the Cop, the closest thing I have to a sane and sober central self.

Each of them spoke in a particular voice inside my thoughts.

This wasn’t any of those voices.

The voice I heard was the one I use in normal conversation.

My regular voice.

Clear as day.

I spun around, bringing the gun up in a two-hand grip. There was an empty hall in front of me, and an empty hall behind me. Just the sleeping scientist on the floor. Red flashing lights on the walls. Nothing else.

No one else.

That voice, though…it had been real.

There’s nothing in the playbook on how to react to that kind of situation. I didn’t feel like I’d suddenly gone crazier than I already was. There was no way on earth the North Koreans had somehow sampled my voice and rigged a playback just to screw with me. It was too improbable and there was no point. So, that wasn’t it.

The voice, though.

I
had
heard it.

I switched the gun to one hand and slowly knelt beside the artifact. The little green lights were pulsing now. Steady. Like a heartbeat.

I swallowed what felt like a throatful of dust.

“Fuck it,” I said, and gently scooped up the object.

It weighed almost nothing. It felt like metal, but there was no heft to it at all. Lighter than aluminum or magnesium. Lighter than Styrofoam. I had to press my fingers against its planes and angles to assure myself that it was actually there.

That alone is strange. If this was some new alloy, then someone had broken through the ceiling of superlight design. If it was durable—and given the thing’s history I had to believe it was—then that alone would be worth billions to the aeronautics industry. Durable superlight materials are the dream, the holy grail of metallurgy. If it could be studied and reproduced, it would totally revolutionize military aircraft. Maybe space travel as well.

And yet that was, as far as my team was concerned, a secondary benefit. An unknown benefit. It added another element of mystery to this thing. Science, as it’s known by the teams working with the Department of Military Sciences—including the
über
-geeks at DARPA—couldn’t do this. The energy discharge alone was freakish. Now this.

The artifact was warm to the touch.

Creepy warm.

Not warm like metal.

Touching it was like touching flesh. If I closed my eyes, that’s what it would have been like. Skin, at normal body temperature.

Not metal.

“Jesus,” I said, and I wished I could have dropped it right there and then. I wanted to. It was repulsive.

“Do it,” said the voice. My voice. “Drop it and get out.”

I whirled around again.

The hall was still empty.

“Fuck me,” I told the emptiness.

The clock was ticking. I needed to be at the extraction point in ten minutes.

So I clutched the package to me, and I ran.

The corridors fed one into the other. I ran up flights of stairs. I ran down. I burned seconds I could spare bypassing locks on security doors.

Twice I encountered security personnel.

Twice I put them down before they could get off a shot.

After I dropped the last one, I passed through another door that took me out of the lab complex and into what was clearly an administrative wing. There were vault-style doors on that level, and the place was entirely deserted. Not sure if it was because of the hour—local time here was three in the morning—or because of the alarms. North Korean military protocols sent workers into secure bunkers during emergencies. I’d passed several locked chambers. Any staff working this late was probably squirrelled away in there. Good. Better for everyone concerned. Besides, I was down to three rounds in the Snellig. If I met any real resistance I’d have to switch to something lethal. I’d already killed one poor dumb son of a bitch; I didn’t want to compound my crimes.