by Michael Todd
The two bouncers moved toward the door when they heard that last sentence. They knew what would happen and only wanted to make sure that no company property was broken in the inevitable ruckus.
“Touch my food again,” Kennedy said coldly, “and the stories that’ll make the rounds this time will be about how you had your ass beat by a woman. One hell of a woman, of course, but I think that the sexist fucks you call your team will still hold that shit against you.”
The corporal smirked and she resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. Guys like this were too fucking predictable—drunk and with bruised egos that needed them to assert themselves over what they saw as the weaker sex. To attempt to teach him a lesson would be a waste of time since nothing would be learned, but sometimes, that didn’t really matter.
The man’s hand reached toward her plate again in the sluggish, slow movements of someone who had abused their liver all night. Madigan attacked with the speed of someone who had hoped for a fight.
She grabbed his fore and middle fingers, twisted savagely, and grinned at a crack that confirmed that both had popped out of their sockets. Brandon dropped to the floor and gripped his hand. His mouth opened but no sound emerged since the sudden agony had sucked the breath out of him. He began to push to his feet in an effort to escape her wrath. He probably didn’t even consider that she could move around the table to continue the fight, she realized.
The bouncers opened the door a split second before the man was unceremoniously tossed out. They didn’t need to lift a finger themselves except that Kennedy would have ruined the door with Brandon’s head. That would come out of their paychecks, whether they were off or on duty.
The corporal scrambled to his feet and stumbled as he tried to staunch the blood that flowed copiously from his nose before he collapsed once more. He probably had a concussion, Kennedy thought coolly as she stepped out of the bar herself.
“Some dipshits never learn.” One of the bouncers chuckled as she stepped past him.
“Are you talking about me or him?” she asked.
“Him,” the man said and laughed. “As for you, you’re around here so often I wonder why the boss don’t hire you as a bouncer and save all of us some time and money.”
Madigan smirked. “You’d best call an ambulance for this dumbass.”
“Don’t break him too bad,” the bouncer said, and both men stepped back inside. She had essentially finished her meal and damned if a fight wouldn’t relax her. It wasn’t as good as a great fuck but it was way better than only a meal and a beer, she mused.
Brandon pushed himself onto his hands and knees. He mouthed something at her but she couldn’t make it out. Quite honestly, she didn’t much care to, either. Instead, she hammered her boot into the side of his head.
He dropped without a sound and a few seconds later, quiet snores indicated that she hadn’t killed him.
Small mercies. The paperwork would have been insane, and she would have probably had to pass on the trip to the U.S.
“Sweet dreams, asshole,” she muttered and marched off to find her apartment for a nice, long nap.
Carlson studied the latest report from the Zoo with a deep frown. While they had managed to get the suit production to pay for the exorbitant expenses, that didn’t change the fact that the project hemorrhaged almost as much money as it made. He had a board meeting in less than two weeks and he wanted to be able to explain the situation without the risk that the investors would jump down his throat for how much money was invested in a product that was already on the market.
Did he need to worry about this? Probably not, he decided. His vice president—some kid just out of Harvard whose father was on the board—could take care of it as well as handle the damned fallout from the amount of money that it drained from the coffers.
But it was his pet project. He’d started it from the research and development stage and followed it all the way, and damned if he would allow some trust-fund-dependent frat boy to take credit for it when it did eventually come together. This would be his legacy. It was his retirement plan, and he wanted his name stamped on it. It would change the world, and the name people would put to that change was Robert Carlson, CEO of Pegasus.
That said, fires had started that would be difficult to explain to a bunch of assholes who hadn’t been around from the beginning, and he wanted them out before he had to address the board. If all was well and good on the bottom line, all would be well and good when the time came to sign off on company expenditures.
Carlson leaned back in his ergonomic seat—commissioned by his second ex-wife back when the hag had wanted to try her hand at making the damn things. The woman had absolutely no business sense but damned if her chairs hadn’t turned out well. He’d ordered half a dozen after he was forced to bail her company out and kept them in reserve for when he needed them.
He tapped the call button on his screen and it went dark for a moment as a secure comm line was created and tunneled to the office that he now contacted in Barcelona.
“Rodrigo,” he said with a chuckle. “How’s the Mediterranean lifestyle treating you, my friend?”
“I can’t complain,” said the tanned, good-looking man on the other side of the call. “Sunlight and fresh sea air are precisely what the doctor ordered. What can I do for you, Robert?”
“Well, what I have in mind for you is a lot of sunlight but a lot less fresh sea air.” He gave him a sly smile. “I take it you’ve been updated on the Zoo situation?”
“Of course.” His contact nodded and his tone turned serious. He was the owner of the company that had provided the mercenary pilots for their new armor. There had been complaints about the men, of course—mostly from that idiot Anderson—but so far, they had been worth every single penny.
And there had been a satisfying number of pennies.
“I’ve been updated by our contacts in Morocco that someone else has looked into the metal we’ve extracted,” the CEO said and rocked back and forth on the chair. “I don’t need to remind you that we don’t need any competition before we have it locked up.”
“Of course not,” Rodrigo agreed.
“I’m not worried about accidents.” Carlson waved away the concerns that he could already see in his friend’s eyes. “Six thousand people and their families all depend on the solutions that we come up with. Don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to, but if it comes down to it, we’ll mark them down as…necessary losses. The cost of doing business, understood?”
“Of course.” The man laughed coldly. “Although it should be noted that I strongly suspect there will need to be more than a few…happy accidents, shall we say?”
“You’re my fucking Bob Ross, Rodrigo. But get it done.”
“Will do, boss,” Rodrigo said before he terminated the connection.
Carlson didn’t like being hung up on. He preferred to reserve the pleasure for himself, but in this day and age, it wasn’t worth it to squabble over such petty things. He shrugged and leaned back far enough in his seat that he could look at the ceiling.
These were some damned good chairs.
Chapter Nine
“So, the doctors were happy to let you simply walk out?” Madigan asked.
“Well, not happy, obviously.” Sal chuckled. “You know, they wanted to run a bunch of other tests. People don’t recover from concussions that quickly, so they said they need scans and blood screens to make sure it wasn’t a false positive, you know?”
She smirked. “I guess you didn’t want to tell them that you suspect that your improved recovery comes from chowing down on some blue goop from a plant you pulled from the Zoo yourself, right?”
“How would you even begin to explain that to someone, anyway?” he asked with a shrug. “Without giving away company secrets, of course.”
“Wait, so only your concussion is better?” she asked and glanced away from the road for a second. “What about your broken ribs and bruised bones? The lacerations?”
“Everything is well on the way to being completely healed.” Sal nodded. “Although I think the trauma to the brain heals faster than broken bones and lacerated muscles. That makes sense since concussions tend to take a couple of weeks, while bones and muscles take a couple of months.”
“That’s really not the point, Sal,” Madigan growled as she pulled the JLTV into the compound. “Are you sure you’re in a safe condition to travel? I’m sure that Courtney would understand if you pulled out. I mean, you did almost die and go through the digestive tract of a massive lizard.”
Sal shrugged. “The concussion symptoms have all disappeared. I’m good to go, although I do need to be a little sedate when it comes to rushing through airports.”
“Rushing through airports?” she asked with a raised eyebrow as they stepped out of the vehicle. “Bitch, please. I scored us some direct flights straight to SoCal.”
“Bitch?” he repeated and tilted his head in challenge. “SoCal? Hi, I’m looking for my friend with occasional benefits, Madigan Kennedy. Have you seen her around?”
She grinned and shook her head. “Okay, serious faces. Our friend’s dad just died. We need to be supportive.”
He nodded and his expression shifted to something more somber as they moved into the building.
“Hey, sweetie,” Kennedy said to Courtney in a soft voice that Sal had never heard her use before. “How are you feeling?”
The woman looked like she had been crying as she stood from the couch, came over to them, and wrapped Kennedy in a hug first before she moved on to Sal.
“I’m so sorry,” he said softly as he pulled her close and stroked her hair gently.
“I was working on a project that I wanted to show him, you know?” she said, her voice hoarse. “I don’t generally believe in stuff like that, but it was so weird. I was writing up some memoirs—kind of like he did when he was my age—when the call came. I’ve been away from him so long that I almost forgot he was human. I built him up so much in my head that I almost didn’t believe it.”
Sal nodded. He didn’t quite understand something like that, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be supportive. He smiled as Kennedy sandwiched Courtney between them.
“I got us a flight to Los Angeles tonight,” Madigan said softly. “We should get there in time for the memorial.”
“Thanks, Madie,” Monroe said softly and shifted to hug her too. It was something of a touching moment, he realized. Sure, they all knew each other and were all friends individually, but this was the first time that they were all friends together, the three of them.
The moment lasted longer than he thought it would, but it came to an end when the buzzer announced that there was someone outside the compound.
“Well, that’ll be Gutierrez,” he said as they broke the hug up awkwardly. “I told her we’d be headed out for a couple of days. Since she already signed off with the rest of the Staging Area and is officially on our payroll, she agreed to stay at the compound.”
They stepped out of the building to greet the armorer, who had arrived with the JLTV that he had left at the shop.
“Hey,” Sal said with a smile. “Thanks for coming. We really appreciate you keeping an eye on the place while we’re gone.”
“I should thank you,” Gutierrez said with a chuckle. “Having the place to myself for a while to get all my stuff moved in has to be the best deal I’ve gotten in a while.”
He smirked and handed her the access pads to each of the buildings. “Either way, thanks.”
“Do you really trust me enough to take care of this place in your absence?” Amanda asked.
“With my life, and more importantly, with that of my teammates out in the Zoo.” He smiled. “This is all just stuff. I think you can handle it. Besides, our choices were you or leaving it open to attack from whatever the fuck might come out of the Zoo, right?”
The woman smirked. “Well, you know how to make a girl feel accepted in a new working environment. You all fly safe, you hear?”
“Will do,” he said and held out his hand. She took it and shook firmly.
Their bags packed, they headed into the Staging Area to catch the flight back to the States. Kennedy glanced down from the road as her phone buzzed for attention. Sal had chosen to drive and Courtney was seated in the back.
“What’s that?” he asked, his attention focused ahead.
“I got a message back from Gregor,” she said with a sigh. “I told him that we wanted to give our prospective member a test to see if he was everything we needed.”
“What kind of test?” Monroe asked.
“I asked him to dig into who might be exporting the metal from the Zoo,” Madigan replied. “We know that the armor manufacturers are getting it from inside, but we’ve hit a stone wall on who is actually digging it out. It’s not from the Staging Area, and we’re certain that it’s not the Russians. It might be all the new complexes that have sprung up all over the damn place, but they’re too recent to have been the ones that sent it out for the suit we got our hands on.”
“Well…leg, anyway,” Sal said. He didn’t really want to think about what they’d gone through to get that leg, but there were benefits from that little trip inside. They now had far more material to test the new alloy that had gone into these new space-age suits. He still wasn’t the right man to research it, which was why he had kept most of it saved for someone with the proper experience and tools to take it apart.
There was also the fact that there were a number of people who wanted an exclusive on the whitepaper of the big, four-eyed bastard, so silver linings abounded. He smirked. While he’d never needed glasses thick enough to earn that nickname, it still didn’t stop kids calling him four-eyes back in the day.
But the tables had turned and now, he was out there, risking his life for money. Maybe they hadn’t turned all that much, he mused.
“I’d be willing to bet that they used the Staging Area back when we were the only game in town,” Kennedy said with a chuckle. “Which means there have to be shipping records or something with details as to how they moved the stuff out. Bureaucrats love them their paperwork, so there has to be something we can use.”
“Not to be a killjoy or anything,” Courtney interjected, “but why do we care about this? Why the need to poke this particular hornet’s nest?”
Sal shrugged. “Because we’re a curious bunch.” He peered into the distance. “Besides, if someone is pulling any covert operations that they want to keep secret around here, it’s best that we know who they are, if only so we know who to avoid from this point forward. This kind of shit means a threat that we don’t know about, and with the Zoo, where most threats are stuff that we don’t know about and probably haven’t seen before, we don’t need any new ones.”
She raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Although if there are covert operations, you might want to keep in mind that any investigation we make into them would put us on their radar. Which means that they might come after us anyway.”
“In that case, we would definitely be better off if we know who they are,” Kennedy pointed out. “Anyway, our prospective applicant received the message and we should hear from him in the next couple of days.”
“Which lets us focus on what we’re going to the States for,” Sal said and glanced at Courtney from the rearview mirror.
She didn’t answer but squeezed his shoulder gently to acknowledge his support.
Rodrigo stepped out of his limo and adjusted his suit carefully before he walked toward the building that housed the offices where he’d worked over the past couple of months. Unlike most stereotypes, he really didn’t like working in a location with this much sunlight and warm weather. He’d grown up on a tiny beach town in Tenerife, and over those years, he’d had more than enough sunlight and beaches to last him the rest of his life. It was why he’d joined the army—to get away from that dead-end place.
That said, when he stepped into the air-conditioned o
ffices that had been bought out by Pegasus for him to operate from, he had to admit that there were worse places to be. While in the Foreign Legion, he’d worked out of tiny little tents in the middle of Syria and he still considered that the worst office he’d ever had. Anything else was an improvement.
One of his aides jogged in close and handed him a ringing cellphone. It was an old flip phone with no GPS tracking and absolutely no attachments. He would drop it in the furnace in the basement of the building after he’d completed this call.
“This is Rodrigo,” he said softly into the mouthpiece once his aide was out of sight. “I’m told that you’re someone with connections in the Zoo. No, I don’t care what kind of connections. I simply need boots on the ground. Your bill will be paid in cash—half now and half once the job is done. If you’re captured, there will be no ties back to me or my employers, do you understand?”
Rodrigo paused and rolled his eyes. Mercs could be such divas sometimes. If they were paid as much as they demanded, they had to know that they would absolutely be left to hang high and dry if they failed in their mission.
“No ties,” he repeated. “Go out into the Zoo, see what you can do, and call me back. You know the number. Expect the money to arrive within the hour.”
He didn’t wait for a response but killed the connection quickly and flipped the phone shut. With a smile, he took a moment as he marched to the elevators that would carry him down to the basement to remember how cool flip phones used to be. He couldn’t help it, but he still felt that they were cool, which was why, when he bought burners, he always went for those. What was the point of being filthy rich if you couldn’t indulge in the small pleasures?
Chapter Ten
It had been a while since Sal had needed to dress up. He’d had a moment to head over to where Caltech had put his stuff into storage to dig out his old suit, only to find that it didn’t fit anymore. He’d put on almost fifteen pounds of muscle which made it tight around the chest, shoulders, and arms.