Birth of Heavy Metal Boxed Set

by Michael Todd

  “I wanted to run tests of my own before I handed it over to people who would abuse it for serious money,” he said reasonably. “Anyway, we decided to help a team out of the Zoo after they were caught in a bad run-in with a bunch of Zoo critters. One of them stole my pack and I ran in after it. I…uh…almost got myself killed.”

  “Huh,” the armorer grunted. “And by almost got yourself killed, you mean there’ll be a shit-ton of work to be done on your suits, right?”

  “His suit more than mine,” Kennedy interjected smugly. “He’s the one who charged in to get his pack back. I was the one who had to go in and save him, remember?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” The armorer’s good mood evaporated as her mind ran through the kind of supplies she would need to repair the suits.

  It was late by the time they pulled into the compound but the lights were on, which indicated that someone was still awake. The Hammerhead parked in the garage reassured Amanda that Anja had managed to make it home reasonably unharmed, although she blurted a couple of curses in Spanish when she saw a few dents on the sides. Anja hadn’t been kidding, apparently. She honestly didn’t know how to drive a vehicle that big. All the pictures of the tiny little cars people drove in Russia came to mind and had the armorer questioning the choices she had made so blithely.

  They moved into the common room after they deposited the suits in the workshop and carried the pack inside. Anja waited for them and fidgeted idly with her phone. The soft sounds of a game could be heard but they quickly stopped when they entered.

  “Did you tell them?” she asked Amanda.

  “I thought you should, since you know more about it,” the other woman replied and continued to the kitchen to start the coffee machine.

  “Tell us what?” Kennedy asked.

  Anja quickly related the details of what she’d found as she dug into the Pegasus records. Her friend had also contacted her during the day.

  “The money’s final resting place was somewhere in the Cayman Islands,” she explained. “But the source was easier to track down. Once we sifted through the shell companies, we found that the original payee into the account was…well, Pegasus.”

  “So… Pegasus has some serious investment in Courtney’s company, somehow,” Sal said and sat, his mind ticking over. “Do we know what they are interested in?”

  “There was a fair amount of chatter regarding some intellectual properties produced and created by a scientific research team run by Courtney’s father. Nothing really specific was mentioned. They basically wanted anything the team were able to acquire.”

  He nodded. “We have to talk to Courtney about this. She’s in this whole situation up to her knees, so she has to know a thing or two about what’s happening.”

  The hacker tilted her head in inquiry. “Do you want me to set up a secure line for you to contact her?”

  “You can do that?” he asked.

  She didn’t reply and simply raised her hands as if to indicate that the question was stupid.

  “Right, yeah, that would be great,” he agreed. “Something else I want to you to start on is to try to find a buyer for this baby.”

  Sal removed the container from his pack and placed it upright on the counter for the other two women to see. Amanda looked entranced, but the Russian, less interested in the plant itself, turned to face him again quickly.

  “What kind of parameters are you thinking about for the sale?” she asked.

  “Well, I think I’d prefer to have someone make the sale for us.” He spoke slowly as he considered it. “A middleman to make sure that the name of Heavy Metal is never associated with the sale. We make it common knowledge that we have a Pita plant, and we’ll be swarmed by people who’d like to relieve us of it in a violent fashion.”

  “You know that they will want a finder’s fee, right?” Amanda pointed out.

  “Sure. That’s the cost of doing business. A quarter of the world’s population are middlemen and women, and they probably wouldn’t be so happy if they are cut out of the business, you know?”

  Anja nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Well, it must be a blind auction, which is actually better since we need the plant to grow a little before we put it on the market. We also have to make sure that the person handling the money and the plant delivery is at least respectable. It’s important that we can trust them, at least enough to know that we get the full payment due and our client gets what they paid for.”

  “I think I know the perfect guy. And let me guess—you want me to vet our buyers to make sure that we don’t sell to Pegasus?”

  He winked. “That is correct.”

  The hacker nodded and stood quickly. “I’ll get started right away. When the secure line to Courtney is open, I’ll send you a message.”

  “Thanks Anja.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what you pay me for.”

  He nodded. Kennedy had handled the payments wired to their employees, so he would have to find the paperwork and see if they didn’t need to pay Anja a little more for her work.

  Sal made his way up to his room and fifteen minutes later, his phone buzzed to advise him that a secure satellite connection had been opened between him and Courtney.

  A couple of voicemail messages from her hadn’t been delivered until he reached a delivery zone. He listened to them quickly before he dialed her number.

  The call went to a voice machine almost immediately and he shook his head and dragged in a deep breath. “Hey, Courtney, it’s Sal. We’ve dug into what happened to your father and we actually found something that might interest you. It’s probably not the kind of thing to talk about over a voicemail, since it is delicate, so give me a call when you’re around. I…miss you.” He killed the connection almost immediately once he said that. There was enough sentimental bullshit these days and it was all he could do not to let it overwhelm him.

  Some things were better talked about in person, he thought with a nod, placed the phone back on his bedside table, and lay down.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Hey Sal.” Courtney sounded well rested and perky. “I received your message. Is everything okay?”

  Sal took a moment to rub the fuzziness from his eyes. He’d barely had five hours of sleep before his phone buzzed incessantly to tell him that Courtney tried to contact him from the other side of the encrypted connection.

  “Right…hi, morning,” he growled.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “A little…uh, yeah,” Sal admitted. “But that’s not a problem. It’s nice to hear your voice again.”

  “Ditto, big guy,” she said with a soft giggle that she immediately regretted. Big guy? What was she, a preppy sorority girl? “Anyway, I dropped you a couple of documents about the sale of some intellectual property between my dad’s company and some vague and hard to track down buyers.”

  “Our IT specialist actually ran into something similar,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “Some documents that were apparently signed by your dad before he died but only submitted into the records after he passed away.”

  Courtney nodded but remembered that she was on the phone and he couldn’t see her. “Huh. What do you make of these documents popping up all over the place right now?”

  “It looks like someone is trying to clean shop,” he said. “You have made some waves there, so whoever it is, they probably want to move everything they need out of the company before anyone notices that you have it. They had the sales records already printed and signed, but they need them to be a matter of record for them to be legally binding.”

  “I think I know who you’re talking about,” she said and her good mood vanished almost immediately. “There’s a woman working at my dad’s company called Andressa Covington. She’s given me a hard time ever since I got here, and when I retaliated, she backed down a little too easily and accepted a nominal and useless position in the company. Do you have anything that I can set as a trap for her?”

  “We could alwa
ys send her into the Zoo,” Sal said, only partially joking. “The beasties in there have a way to fix problems like that without too much fuss.”

  She chuckled. “I wish. Although we might want to revisit that idea later. No, I thought about some kind of intellectual property of my dad’s that she might not already have filed and that would make her come to us—or me, rather—to deal with personally. If I can get her to agree to pay me off, that should put her in hot water with the authorities around here.”

  “You only need her to show up, really,” Sal said. “Tell her that you have something of the company’s and you know she’s the one who’s disposed of the rest of the stuff, so you want her to include you in the action. Make it believable so that she thinks that she has to buy your protection in this situation—something that she can’t do without.”

  “Right,” Courtney agreed. “But I don’t think I have anything I can access easily. I’m still new around here, and while I’ve been given free access, they still keep very close tabs on me.”

  “I think our hacker might be able to help you with that, actually,” he told her. “She has the technological equivalent of the nose of a bloodhound, which means that we should have something for you within a day or two. No promises, though. She’s the expert.”

  “Great,” she said. “Call me as soon as you have something.”

  “Will do. Talk to you later.”

  He hung up and shook his head before he gathered some clothes to throw on quickly and left his little apartment for the server room. He wasn’t sure why he knew that Anja would be there, hard at work, but when he saw her still glued to the screen of her computer, he wasn’t at all surprised.

  “Hey, so,” he began, “I know we’ve increased your workload around here a lot lately, but I wondered if you could take some time to run a quick search on someone.”

  “Andressa Covington,” she said and tapped her headset.

  “You were listening to all that?” Sal asked.

  “Of course,” she retorted. “It’s my private comm system, so I have to make sure that nothing is shared in it that I don’t approve of.”

  “Okay.” Sal was anxious to move past this topic of conversation. “Anyway, do you have a way to check for anything that might be along the lines of bio-secure tech that’s connected to her that we could use?”

  “I’m already on it,” Anja said, her gaze still fixed on the screen.

  “Huh, right.” He realized that he seriously needed to give her a raise when he had the chance. “Thanks.”

  She nodded but remained entirely focused on her work. He decided that it was time to get the hell out of there.

  “Pita plant, freshly removed from the Zoo, healthy and blooming and available for purchase to the highest bidder,” the man in the blue jacket said and dusted the snow from his shoulders. “Do you really believe that someone might have one of those? Do you know that they’ve tried to get one of them out ever since the damn plants were discovered and nobody who tried has even made it out of the Zoo?”

  The man in the red jacket nodded and pulled his hood back to reveal fresh good looks with only a hint of salt and pepper in the stubble on his chin. “I know who the people making the sale are. They have worked in the Zoo for a while and have brought good material out for almost a year now. They can be trusted.”

  “If you say so,” Blue Coat responded with a chuckle. “And they aren’t above fabricating something to raise cash when they’re in need? Please, we need evidence that they actually have a plant before I can even consider putting in a bid.”

  “It’s a somewhat roundabout reasoning, but the way they said that all bids are subject to inspection should the sellers not want to do business with certain buyers led me to track them down,” Red Coat replied. He shook his head as he looked out over the vast expanse of snow outside. No matter how much technology in the world advanced, there would always be people who came to Switzerland for the resorts and stayed for the agreeable banking laws.

  “So, this…Heavy Metal,” Blue Coat asked and glanced at a pad he carried. “What do you know about them?”

  “It’s run by a couple of veterans,” Red Coat explained. He flipped the images to the pictures of a younger-looking man and a military-looking woman. “Salinger Jacobs, one of the most prolific authors on what comes in and out of the Zoo over the past six months. He’s young and only a doctoral candidate. Then there’s Madigan Kennedy, formerly part of the military complement on the base there and gave up her position to join with Jacobs full time. They have more members on their team, but it has been difficult to find anything resembling details on them. Anyway, they were responsible for the first live animal brought out of the Zoo and handed it over for a significant fee to one of our competitors. From the looks of things, they’ve established ties with companies in the United States. We think that government contracts are their eventual goals, but if they have an item this rare up for sale now, there’s no telling the kinds of benefits that could be acquired if we were to make ties with them now, while they’re still starting up.”

  Blue Coat scowled as he studied the various reports of the missions run by the two. They were fairly active in the area and more than a little connected with the bases already established there. Which meant that they would only continue to grow. If they had connections with major companies in the US, they would grow much faster.

  “How many bids have been placed?” he finally asked.

  “Six, so far,” Red Coat replied.

  “What kind of money have they put on it?”

  “Unknown,” Red Coat growled. “It has been a blind bidding process so far. I can make some inquiries, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll find anything of note before the auction comes to an end.”

  Blue Coat nodded and sighed deeply. “I need to look into what funds I can move. I’ll get you an exact figure tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The stories about the Zoo and the creatures living inside proliferated to the point that people began to buy into them—in the commandant’s office and even in the budgetary department, which prided itself on its supreme indifference and self-isolation. Of course, it only added fuel to the fire when more bodies were brought in and more teams dropped off the radar with a quick warning to say that they were under attack before comms went dead.

  The administration now faced the problems involved in how to explain to the family members of the soldiers who died in the Zoo what had happened—and, potentially, what could eventually become a horde of lawsuits regarding wrongful deaths. Finally, the people in charge reconsidered their stance on how many people would be sent into the Zoo. They also began to run drills with the newcomers to ensure that they knew the advisable tactics if they were engaged.

  Niels didn’t mind the fact that they had only one specialist on this simple Pita plant run with a dozen gunners to protect the man. That, in itself, wasn’t too much of a problem, except that they had rapidly run out of specialists who wanted to head into the Zoo, which made it almost impossible to find qualified personnel.

  The specialist they were stuck with now was a doctor with a sheaf of credentials back in the States and who appeared to be quite the catch on paper. When the problems with his assaults—sexual and otherwise—emerged, though, the reason why he’d elected to join the teams heading into the Zoo became clearer.

  What hadn’t been clear before the moment of no return was the fact that the man was about a hundred pounds overweight and seemed to have a smoking habit that couldn’t be helped. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the Zoo as the pungent smell would attract the very animals they tried to avoid. Sadly, the harsh reality that he had to quit at the same moment he entered the jungle made an already disagreeable fellow almost impossible to work with.

  Niels had dealt with smokers before, and while they could get edgy when they were forced to quit for a couple of days, most had been professional enough to make sure that their habits didn’t interfere with their ability to do their j
obs. This man had no such professionalism and made it a point to render everyone’s life miserable until he finally had the smoke he so desperately needed.

  Of course, Niels wasn’t one to judge someone for their vices of choice. Hell, he had a couple of his own. He merely demanded professionalism from the people he worked with and this specialist seemed utterly incapable of delivering that.

  He adjusted his grip on the rifle and scanned the jungle once more. One of the first lessons he’d learned about survival in the Zoo was to keep an eye on the treetops. There wasn’t always something there, but when there was, it was way better to see it before it chowed down on you. This wasn’t something that he would have learned in the quick lessons they gave first-timers, but rather something that was only learned through tough experience and, usually, lost lives.

  Panthers now used the trees as cover to attack unsuspecting travelers, but other beasts had begun to employ the same tactics. They were annoyingly effective, and the only real way to handle beasts like that was to anticipate their movements. The trees were tall, which made them difficult to navigate without triggering all kinds of motion sensors. If you were watchful and careful, that advance warning would enable you to gun the creatures down before they were able to kill anyone on your team.

  Of course, these days, the smarter option was to move away from any curious panthers and make sure they knew that they had been seen and would not be able to rely on ambush tactics when they attacked. They tended to take that sort of stuff seriously and backed away from any kind of confrontation in which they didn’t have the element of surprise. These were creatures on the hunt and wouldn’t charge any potential prey that could defend themselves.

  But there was sometimes another way in which the Zoo reacted. Niels checked his weapon for at least the tenth time as he recalled the two major attacks he’d survived. Both still were vivid enough in his memory to make him nervous about the next one. And there would always be a next one, he accepted morosely. That was why the teams were double their usual size and ran with more gunners and fewer specialists. It still made him sweat to recall how the animals reacted—fought together, joined forces, and used complementary tactics to drag the teams down. They didn’t always defeat the teams they attacked, as evidenced by Niels himself, but they did always manage to decimate the ranks before they slunk away.