by Michael Todd
When he got back home. As of right now, he needed as much help as he could get to cope with his day to day struggle. And it would be worse from here on out. He’d received the message last night. That had been what prompted him to crack open the bottle of scotch he’d bought his last time at the bar, and…yes, there it was, empty in the trash. He didn’t remember much about the night before, but he knew that he would, on occasion, get drunk enough to be aware of the problems that he faced. At other times, he would simply dump the rest of the liquor down the drain as a promise to himself.
One way or another, he wouldn’t have much access to alcohol for the next few weeks. If that wasn’t a support structure, he didn’t know what was.
He dragged his errant thoughts back to reality—in this case, the message that pushed him to drink in the first place. It had been something of a surprise—the timing rather than the inevitability of it. He knew it was coming. It was merely a question of when.
The message had read, New testing green-lit. Operators and engineers returning to base tomorrow to start testing new suits.
Tomorrow was now today, unfortunately, and he was hungover and felt like shit at the start of it. At least that would cover how he would feel as the testing proceeded.
He smirked and shook his head as he moved back into his room to pull on a clean uniform that his assistant had left out for him while he was passed out. With a smile at his own foolishness, he completed every small task as slowly as he could in an effort to delay the moment when he would have to leave the cool comforts of his tiny little room.
The colonel stepped outside and shielded his eyes against the glare. This early in the morning, it was still way too bright to be comfortable, even if he wasn’t hungover. The wall construction had moved past them and left their little section sandwiched between Walls One and Two and completely isolated from the rest of the world, which made it ideal for the black ops and illegal testing of new equipment.
The one advantage of having a base directly beside a massive fifty-foot wall was that it provided some outdoor shade to hide them from the horrors that would come when the sun began its inexorable climb and slow-baked everything.
Anderson made his way quickly to the shady part of the base as his assistant—a new one whom he still couldn’t put a name to—hurried over to him.
“Good morning, sir,” the young lieutenant said and proffered a mug of steaming coffee.
“Morning, Lieutenant,” he responded. Working for the military meant one didn’t need to remember names if you could read insignias. There were, after all, some small mercies.
“The first load of suits has arrived on schedule, along with the rest of the engineers,” the younger man said and fell smoothly into step beside him.
Another twenty paces and then shade. Keep it together, Anderson.
“How do the troops look?” he asked, mainly because he lacked anything else to say.
“They’re excited to be back at work, sir,” the man stated cheerfully and sounded rather glad to be back on duty as well. “Vacations are nice, but when you love your job, there’s not much that’ll keep you away from it.”
If only. Fortunately, Anderson had the good sense not to say it aloud.
“Colonel Anderson,” a familiar voice called. He turned quickly and paused as the scientist strode over to him.
“Dr. Bial, nice to see you again.” He offered the first genuine smile that he’d felt in weeks. “Nice to have you back.” Bial was one of the only men assigned to this damned base that Anderson actually liked talking to. It was odd, since he usually only felt that kind of bond with military men. Still, with as long as they had worked together, Anderson was more than willing to give the man that honorary title.
“It’s good to be back,” the scientist said with a chuckle as both of them settled under the shade of the wall. “Too much time spent away from our little project has only helped me feel more and more anxious to get back to it. How have things been around here?”
“Quiet,” he replied honestly. It had essentially been a ghost town while everyone had been gone. Amazingly, that hadn’t made anything better—not for him, anyway. Still, it had given him time to plot and work against his current employers.
“So,” the colonel said after a sip of his coffee, “what is it about this armor that has people running in three weeks early to set it up for combat?”
“Well, they finished the design and built the prototypes,” Bial said, clearly happy to be in a place and with people whom he could talk to about this without having all kinds of legal hell rain down on him. “They want the teams to wear and test a new type of armor.”
Anderson narrowed his eyes and watched as the engineers set the various pieces up before they moved them to a storage location. “They look different. Sleeker designs, which look nice, but how does that make them more useful? This isn’t Hollywood.”
“Obviously,” Bial said. He rolled his eyes and patted what looked like a small external hard drive that lay amongst the mess strewn on one of the tables. “Well, I’ve only looked at the specs a couple of times and I don’t know all the details yet, but there’s an exciting new IP in the metal that the company making the suits designed themselves from their own research and development sections. The designs aren’t perfect since the engineers in a lab can’t really account for all the variables that we’d see out here in the field. That’s why I prefer to do my work out here.”
“So you can nitpick the work of others once it’s already done?” the colonel asked and turned to look at the man with a small smirk.
“Quite,” his companion replied and would have continued if a loud hiss hadn’t interrupted him. They both looked to where the suits were being assembled. The engineers rushed away from a boot that flickered and jerked on the ground. After a few seconds, something ignited and what looked like a rocket fired, while the piece of armor catapulted away in the opposite direction. The engineers laughed as they raced after it.
“There will always be a few bugs.” Bial shrugged. “If you’ll excuse me, Colonel?”
“By all means,” he said with a smile, and the scientist rushed off to join his colleagues in the mad scramble to retrieve the errant boot. Anderson, for his own part, looked furtively around. It wasn’t difficult to see that there weren’t any cameras built into the base—the idea was complete discretion—and all eyes seemed to be focused on the recovery of the piece of tech that had flown away.
That left him alone with what looked like a pile of misplaced crap. He stepped up to the table and smoothly palmed and pocketed the external hard drive that Bial had pointed out earlier. Of course, he’d return it once he’d taken a quick look to check if there was anything his new friends could use on it.
“What time is it?” Madigan asked. She rubbed her eyes as she and Sal were herded into the server room by their suddenly very enthusiastic IT expert. The Russian had crashed into Sal’s room and tried to haul the two of them from the bed before she realized that they were both naked. After that, she showed a little restraint and gave them time to get dressed before she dragged them down to the dark room full of screens.
“I don’t know,” Anja replied honestly, dropped into her seat, and rolled the chair over to the screens. “Seven-thirty in the morning.”
Sal resisted the urge to say, “Fuck all this,” and head back to bed for another couple of hours. It had ended up being a longer night than he thought it would be, and since they hadn’t scheduled any other trips into the Zoo until they heard from Anderson, he had hoped to be able to sleep in.
“I found some information I think the two of you should be aware of.” She peered at them, her expression definitely on edge. “And since I need to get some sleep myself, I don’t think it can wait until we all are nice and rested.”
“Fine,” Sal muttered and shook his head. “What’s this important news?”
“I didn’t make much headway in tracking the payments made to the mercenaries that you killed in the
Zoo,” the hacker explained. “Well, nothing that we could have used, anyway. The leads on the metal exports led to similarly dead ends, so while I set some programs to dig into those, I decided to look into the problem that Dr. Monroe sent our way. You know, the woman who wants us dead—the one who was a part of the company that her father owned?”
“Right.” He sat on the spare seat beside her and Madigan remained standing. “What did you find?”
“Nothing at first,” Anja said. “There wasn’t much of anything to explain why this woman stole from the company, considering that she has a large amount of her money sunk into its stocks. That was until I realized that the company had been tied up in litigation over the use of intellectual property—one that Dr. Monroe pursued personally.”
“Courtney was doing this?” Sal leaned in to see the dates involved. “She couldn’t have been. She was right here when these things started.”
“Not her,” she corrected. “Dr. Monroe, the father. He was the one who said that they were stealing from his company’s work to inflate their stock prices. The rest of the company was willing to take a million-dollar settlement, but Dr. Monroe, with his control of the majority of the stock, made them continue the litigation. He wasn’t interested in the money. He wanted them to pay for stealing his work. All this came to an end, however, when Dr. Monroe died, and the company settled the litigation for a cash payout before Dr. Courtney Monroe took control.”
“Wait,” Sal said. “Who was it that they were in court against? I see a lot of shell corporations but no real tie to a major player in the stock market.”
“They hid themselves well, but eventually, all the shells fall back to a single parent company by way of CEO ownerships. Pegasus International.”
“Pegasus,” Madigan muttered. “Them again. That’s bad news.”
“Wait, so what are you saying here?” he persisted. “The reason that Monroe’s company dropped the lawsuits was because Dr. Monroe died. Was there any kind of indication that there was foul play involved there?”
Anja pulled up the autopsy report on the screen. “The autopsy…wasn’t particularly thorough. It was well known that Dr. Monroe had lung cancer, and when there was a large amount of fluid found in his lungs when he died, the medical examiners ruled it a massive pulmonary hemorrhage, so death from natural causes. He was cremated, so no further details can be found on the body.”
“Wait,” Kennedy said and narrowed her eyes. “Are you really trying to say that someone murdered Courtney’s father?”
“She told me that he was paranoid about security,” Sal explained. “He’d installed advanced security measures in his house, and the police reported multiple calls from him over the previous weeks before he died. They chalked it up to a side effect of the medication that he was on, and when he died, nobody really investigated it. Courtney arrived, and someone broke into her house and tried to kill her too. It makes sense—to me, at least.”
Anja shrugged. “It sounds plausible to me as well.”
Madigan dragged in a deep breath before she fixed him with a hard look. “You know that your thought process is full-on aluminum foil hat, conspiracy-theory-shouting paranoia here, right?”
He nodded. “I’m aware of that. But coincidences like these aren’t the kind of thing that we can afford to ignore. Not out here. Not with our lives at stake.”
She shook her head and acknowledged that she had worried that he would have this kind of reaction. He wasn’t thinking with the logical side of his brain that put him head and shoulders above everyone else, even though she had to concede that he’d raised a couple of good points. The coincidences and the fact that everything constantly tied back to Pegasus somehow was definitely an avenue to explore, but what he thought about now was vengeance for someone he cared about.
“It’s not easy to kill a billionaire and get away with it,” Madigan finally said and shook her head. “She’ll be well-protected, and from what you told me about Courtney, the woman probably knows we’re coming too.”
“Who says I have to kill her?” he asked, his tone challenging. “I simply have to tear her down piece by piece.”
“That’ll be even more difficult than killing her,” she pointed out.
Sal shrugged. “If all else fails, we can simply shoot her, if you like. For the moment, though…”
He laid his plan out for Anja, who nodded and made a couple of different faces ranging from impressed to questioning his sanity.
“Can you do this?” he asked once he’d explained everything carefully.
“Sure,” she said with a nod. “I probably need funds to put bribes out there. Contrary to popular thought, much of what people call hacking is merely exploiting human error and greed.”
“How much do you need?”
“Maybe…start with half a million dollars? I’ll let you know if I need more,” the Russian said after a moment’s thought.
“Do it,” Sal said firmly. “And don’t hesitate to let me know if you need extra funds. I’ll sell Madie if I have to.”
Anja looked up from her screen and turned to Madigan as confusion spread across her face.
“I can guarantee that it’s not what you think it is,” the other woman said with an encouraging nod. He hadn’t told anyone about having a Pita plant in his safe—and probably wouldn’t until he had finished his tests—but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t casually and inadvertently mention it to the rest of the staff. It was a good thing that he’d named it after her, or these little name-drops might pose something of a problem.
The hacker shook her head and immediately set to work. “I’ll never understand you Americans and your sense of humor.”
Chapter Eleven
“Sal, we need to talk,” Madigan said as they moved out of the server room. It was doubtful that they would have any more sleep today, so they might as well get their shit together—which meant coffee and breakfast. He started on the former while she worked on the latter.
“What about?” he asked and looked briefly at her before he turned to rummage in a cabinet.
“About…all this,” she exclaimed and waved her hands around. “You on a vendetta run. Courtney making enemies in the States. Everything is barreling too fast toward a disaster that we might not be on the right end of. It’s one thing to tackle the Zoo. But to take on a multi-billion-dollar weapons conglomerate like Pegasus is an entirely different ball game and I need you to see that.”
“I do see it,” he said, his voice softer than before. “And for the record, we’re not taking on the conglomerate itself, merely one of the minions and only because she tried to fuck with our friend.”
“Whatever,” she snapped in exasperation. “And don’t think for a second here that I’m not with you on that revenge wagon, because I am, one hundred percent. But you need to think about what you’ve built out here. It’s not only you and me anymore. How the hell will we actually fund this whole escapade of yours? Are you really thinking of selling Madie?”
“Hell no,” Sal said with a smirk. “That plant and I have been through too much shit together. She’s almost a part of the family.”
“So what are your ideas for getting the money?” Madigan asked and scooped the first batch of bacon onto a paper-covered plate.
“Well, I’ve worked on some designs with Amanda.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, unlocked it, and opened a couple of engineering designs before he handed it to her. “I realized that there’s a way to get around the way that the Pita plants release those pheromones that provoke all the animals and drive them to fight. Isolate the plant first and then uproot it.”
“Huh,” she said and took a moment to study the designs. “So you want to go in there, get another plant, and sell that instead?”
“A couple more plants,” Sal said with a grin. “Three, maybe even four. When we talk business, there’ll be people who’ll want to buy everything we have instead of only one rather than allow their potential competitors a possible advant
age—or at least an equal playing field. They’ll pay a lot more for all the items that we have than we’d get for each one individually, if only to screw over the competition. That should give us more than enough to pay that bitch back.”
She shook her head. “How do we know that someone else hasn’t developed something like this already?”
“If they have, they haven’t put it into use yet,” he said and shrugged, clearly unconcerned. “There would have been news about it if anyone had. My guess is that, at best, they probably already came up with some write-ups for a similar design but haven’t been able to find someone crazy enough to put it to a field test.”
“Enter us, the crazy people willing to test it out.” Madigan laughed and shook her head. The second batch of bacon was done, and she added eggs, toast, and a handful of other breakfast foods to the mix before she placed it all on the table. “Look, Sal, I admire this side of you, don’t get me wrong. You’ll do anything to take care of the people you care about, and it makes me think the world of you. But you have to realize that it’s a dog-eat-dog world that we might not be prepared to handle at this stage.”
“Dogs don’t survive that long in the Zoo,” Sal pointed out and joined her at the table with a couple of mugs full of coffee. “And neither would that bitch who tried to kill Courtney and threatened to kill us. Madigan—” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You know I love your face, and don’t think I don’t realize that this is you looking out for me, like a gunner should her specialist.”
“I think we’re a bit past that, don’t you?” she asked, and squeezed his hand gently in return.
“Damn straight.” He grinned. “But the point remains. I know you’re only looking out for me, and I appreciate that. But it’s a matter of principle at this point. She’s fucked with our friend, killed her father, tried to kill her, and thinks that her scrawny ass is untouchable because she’s in a position of power. I want to teach her a very valuable lesson. You don’t fuck with a PhD doctoral candidate. Will you help me to educate her?”