by Michael Todd
“You’ve been a problem for me over the past few months, I’ll admit,” the man said with a smile as he removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses nonchalantly with a handkerchief from his pocket. “But you’ve been a lot more profitable than problematic, which is the only reason why you’re still alive. And, incidentally, the only reason why I’m willing to give you this one chance. Give us the plant, walk away, and you’ll be allowed to live.”
Rodrigo studied the young man with real interest. His file had placed his height at a couple of inches over six feet tall, which made him three inches shorter than Rodrigo himself. But with the armor he wore, Jacobs now stood a good foot taller than him. With the darkened, hybrid suit that looked sleek compared to the chunky and heavy armor his own men wore, he thought it was funny that Sal was the one at a disadvantage.
“That’s an awesome deal, it really is,” Sal replied with a quick nod and swept his gaze over the men who surrounded him. “You should know something about me, though. Something the government wouldn’t want you to know but I feel it’s only fair to warn you. When I was a teenager, they kidnapped me from my home and housed me in a secret base deep inside the Appalachians. They experimented on me in there. All in all, they did some spooky stuff to me. Annoyingly sexual stuff too, but I don’t like to talk about that. The point is, they turned me into a deadly mutant with telekinetic powers—not to be underestimated, I might add, no matter how outnumbered and outgunned I might seem to be.”
Rodrigo narrowed his eyes. Jacobs didn’t seem the type of man to play for time like this, and honestly, it was ridiculous and more than a little pathetic.
“Take your rifle out of the holster and toss it on the ground,” he ordered and folded his arms in front of his chest. “Once you do that, we can have a therapeutic talk about what happened to you in this secret government facility.”
The scientist nodded and calmly drew the rifle out of the holster and tossed it into the sand a few feet away from Rodrigo’s feet. He immediately raised his hands to point finger guns at the armored men around him. His eyes were narrowed, and he looked deadly serious.
“It’s time for you to make a choice, boys,” Sal said and deliberately edged his voice with a low growl. “You gotta ask yourselves one question. Do you want to walk away from this fight alive, or do you want to simply be another story in the legend of the…dangerous Zoo Experiment?”
“That’s a terrible superhero nickname,” Rodrigo pointed out blandly. “But enough of this childish game. Hand the plant over, and we’ll drive away, Jacobs.”
The scientist didn’t respond and instead, aimed his right hand with its finger gun at the man at the hatch. The merc, who aimed a real weapon at him, simply smirked and shook his head.
“Pow,” Jacobs said, narrowed his eyes once again, and cocked his thumb’s ‘hammer’ forward.
Against all kinds of logic and sanity, the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood, brain matter, and destroyed ceramic armor.
“No fucking way,” was the only thought that went through Rodrigo’s head as he turned to make sure that he’d actually seen what he thought he saw. Sure enough, the man who had manned the hatch of his ATV had lost most of his head.
Jacobs cocked his finger gun again and another man dropped soundlessly—and another, and another. Rodrigo’s logic warred with the apparent evidence of his own eyes. He almost began to question whether or not it was time to believe in real superheroes with actual powers. Stranger stuff had been known to come out of the Zoo, after all.
In the shocked silence, he heard the distant report of a shot from a high-powered sniper rifle. Jacobs hadn’t rushed out of the blockade at a whim, he realized. He’d deliberately planned to be intercepted and set up a trap for anyone who might come after them. And he’d made up that whole stupid kidnapped kid story simply to fuck with them. It was some interesting thinking on the man’s part.
Unfortunately, by the time he had processed everything about the situation, the seven men who had come with him were down and he was the only man left standing.
He drew a pistol that he’d secreted inside his jacket pocket. It was a personal favorite, an older .44 Magnum Colt revolver that had been gifted to him by one of the Saudi sheiks whom he’d worked with in his early years as a mercenary.
He balanced the heavy weapon easily in his hand and cocked the hammer. Jacobs would die out there. Rodrigo had made up his mind that he would not be killed by some geek out in the middle of a desert. That was so…lame!
Heavy, steel-reinforced and hydraulically powered fingers wrapped around his wrist and twisted his arm savagely. Rodrigo managed to fire a single shot and the slug spun into the desert somewhere as the bones in his arm and wrist shattered. The same heavy, armored fist rose and he closed his eyes to block out the sight as it descended remorselessly.
Bone crunched as Sal hammered his fist down as hard as he could. The way the man’s head snapped back was more than enough to confirm that he was dead. He didn’t even need to see where the skull had caved in or the neck had snapped to tell him that. The body slumped, a limp and useless corpse.
He keyed his comm line and opened one to Kennedy. “How’s that for some action?”
“I really liked the part where you tried to pass my shooting off as superpowers,” she replied, and he could hear a grin in her voice. “I recorded that shit for posterity.”
“Come on, it was cool, you have to admit it.” He retrieved the large pistol the man had dropped after he’d had broken his arm. “Besides, seeing the man’s face when, for a second, he actually thought I had superpowers made it all worth it.”
“I hope that you saved that shit for posterity too,” she said as she strode across the sand toward him. Gutierrez had filled Kennedy’s suit impressively, but there was something about the way that Madigan moved that set her apart, even in the altered sniper suit they’d claimed from a man who had tried to attack their base. It had been altered with software meant for long-distance shooting, so that any soldier who knew their way around these suits could make shots at over a thousand yards with impressive accuracy and little trouble. A skilled marksman—or woman, in this case—could take it over fifteen hundred, which made it a long walk for her to reach him where he waited beside the vehicle.
“I think this baby’s FUBAR,” Sal said with a grin and tapped the hood of their Hammerhead that had been shot through the engine block.
“Yeah, Gutierrez is already on her way.” She shook her head. “They took care of the guys there too easily, I think. She already didn’t like the idea of having to ram one of her babies into that blockade, and then to have the other one shot up besides?”
“I think we need to give her a raise,” he suggested. “And hey, after this, we can even afford it without having to make daily runs into the Zoo, right?”
“Right.” She turned to examine the merc’s ATV. “In the meantime, we can probably commandeer this Hammerhead. It looks…mostly intact—if you take out the dead man inside, of course. We can still make the drop.”
Sal smiled. “Well, we wouldn’t want to keep our new clients waiting.”
Kennedy raised her pack to reveal the container with the Pita plant inside. “Our little baby was happy to get some sunlight.”
“Do you think we should name this one too?” he asked they scrambled into the ATV.
“No, I think naming the first one Madie was more than enough, thanks.” She took the driver’s seat and started the vehicle.
“This is amazing,” the man said and leaned in closer to the container as he adjusted his glasses to peer at the plant. “I never thought that I’d actually ever see one of these in person.”
Sal nodded and glanced at the three men who had come to the meeting immediately outside the Staging Area. They were dressed in heavy armor—better than the suits Sal and Kennedy wore—but they seemed to be there only to transfer the plant to the buyers. Of course, before that could happen, they needed to bring a specialist in to confirm tha
t it was precisely what it had been sold as.
The British man’s enthusiasm was refreshing, if a little odd considering how the rest of their day had gone. He was older and wore a pair of round glasses and had a graying, pudgy appearance. That, along with the way that he swept some of his hair over his head to cover a bald spot made him look like he would have been a lot more comfortable in a laboratory or a university lecture hall than all the way out in the middle of the Sahara.
“See, the image that was presented to me for the sale only had two budding flowers, but you can see another one already starting to grow here, look?” He pointed and tapped a pen at the glass. Sal looked more closely. He hadn’t noticed the new bud in the morning, and since he’d given it a good, solid inspection, that meant it had appeared while Kennedy hiked through the desert out to where she had set up her sniper hide.
“Dr. Andrews, can you confirm that the item is, in fact, authentic?” one of the armored men asked. He had clearly grown more and more uncomfortable while standing out in the open like this. They appeared to already know about what happened during the transit, and while they seemed to appreciate the danger that Sal, Kennedy, and company had gone through to get the merchandise to them, they weren’t quite so willing to undergo the same kind of hardship.
Sal studied the surroundings to determine what they were looking for as he gripped his rifle.
“Of course it is,” Dr. Andrews said with a soft huff that made his stomach wobble under his clothes. “Look at the way the flowers glow, even when under direct sunlight. If you look closer, you can see the way that the plant itself glows due to the presence of the goop inside. It’s authentic.”
The man nodded and said something quickly that was isolated by the helmet he wore. Kennedy was able to unravel what he’d said, however, and pulled her phone up quickly on her HUD, connected wirelessly, and checked the bank account that had been set up for the payment. It had been created as both a way to have the money transferred through the various types of red tape that were involved in overseas transfers as well as a way for the third-party salesperson to take out his share. The account itself could not have any withdrawals without consent from both parties who had opened it, those being Anja and the man she’d hired.
“The money has been transferred,” the lead soldier said in a terse tone. “We’ll take our leave now.”
Kennedy nodded confirmation that the money had indeed been deposited in the account.
“I must say, Dr. Jacobs, Sergeant Kennedy,” Andrews said as the solders collected the plant and began to walk it back to the Staging Area. “I am a massive admirer of your collective work here in the Zoo. I am employed full time for the company that has purchased this marvelous specimen from you, and I hope that you think of us when you feel the need to sell anything else of value that you might have. Here is my card. Next time, please contact me personally.” He held out his card, which Sal pocketed immediately.
“We appreciate that, Dr. Andrews, and we might take you up on that offer,” he responded cordially.
“He’s not a doctor yet, though,” Kennedy interjected.
“And she’s not a sergeant anymore,” Sal added. “But that’s not the point. We’ll be in touch, doctor. And have a nice flight back to…London?”
“Liverpool, in point of fact,” Andrews said with a grin. “But I appreciate an American’s attempt. I hope to hear from you lot soon!” He waddled cheerfully away. From the way the soldiers seemed to wait for him and pay him almost as much consideration as they did their package, Sal could tell that the man had to be a high-ranking member of his company.
“If that’s the guy in charge, I feel a lot more comfortable working with these people in the future,” Kennedy said approvingly.
“I thought the same thing,” Sal replied. “How much will we end up with, when all’s said and done?”
“Well, Anja’s friend running the auction said that he was willing to accept a lower percentage of the sale,” she replied as they strolled to the Hammerhead they’d appropriated from the Pegasus thugs. “His condition, of course, was that any future sales we might have had to go through him as well. He took a fifteen percent cut from the sale total. That, plus what we’re paying our muscle boys—who took some injuries that we’ll cover too—as well as what I think is a well-deserved bonus for everyone involved, you and me included… I feel confident in saying that we’ll have about three million to add to our current buffer.”
“I’ll be honest, I’d hoped for a lot more than that.”
“Well, you have to spend money to make money, Jacobs,” she reminded him. “With all that said, we still have the Hammerheads we appropriated, and the weapons, armor, and ammo we picked up should give us an extra bonus on the side—although we should probably wait for a while before we unload them. We don’t want a huge killing spree of mercs to be on everyone’s minds while we sell suspiciously blood-stained armor and ATVs.”
“Right.” There would have been a time when he felt horrified by the amount of death that had come from the single sale of a plant, but he had become jaded to it, used to the fact that you couldn’t make money out in the Zoo if you weren’t willing to defend what you’d acquired.
“Do you want to get a drink to celebrate?” she asked and nudged his shoulder.
“I’d love to. But no drinking competitions, though.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Anja wasn’t the most trusting of people. She had studied in a field that was mostly famous for annoying and untrustworthy teenagers who thought it would be a laugh to disrupt government buildings and national security. Experience had been an excellent teacher and she had developed a series of tests that she ran people through before she decided whether or not she was willing to work with them.
Very few people passed her test, as simple though it was. She mostly ran them through a gauntlet of innocent-sounding questions. The degree of braggadocio involved usually had a direct correlation to whether she trusted them or not. People who liked to brag about what they’d done—how they’d broken into the NSA or FBI sites on a dare or simply because they could—usually wouldn’t show any discretion about any large amounts of money they made and where it had come from.
As a result, there were only a handful of people around the globe whom she trusted, and ironically enough, she’d never met any of them face to face. Whenever she needed something done in person, she contacted one of the few people on her list and asked them to provide her with high-quality recommendations. It was a charged service, in most instances, but it was usually worth it. Not always, of course, but it was definitely better to trust people she’d worked with before than some random unknown on the internet.
A quick conversation with her friend who had mob ties in Southern California told her that there was someone available in the area with the kind of skills Sal and his friends needed. The reality was that people didn’t like breaking into the houses of the very rich anymore. The risk-reward ratio was simply too high. Those wealthy individuals who actually kept anything high-value and easy to dispose of for a good profit—worth stealing, in other words—in their homes also fitted some of the highest-rated security systems in the world. Occasionally, however, something specific had to be acquired illegally, which was where the recommendation came in.
The gender of the thief was never revealed, but the resume was fairly impressive. While Anja had never heard of any of the heists mentioned before, a little research revealed that they had happened and mostly been covered up to avoid some kind of embarrassment or another. Someone who didn’t need to advertise their work and only worked when referred by word of mouth was the kind of contractor she felt she could trust. It didn’t tick all the boxes in her little gauntlet of questions, but it was one hell of a start.
She checked the security cam footage that she had used to keep track of Courtney’s progress through the city. Her intention had always been to stage the robbery once it was known that the other woman wasn’t in town. It seeme
d supremely logical to ensure that she had one hell of an alibi to fall back on if there was any fallout from this escapade.
Dr. Monroe acted with extreme caution, and from the sounds of things, had good reason to do so. Her assistant was a tall fellow who, even with glasses, gave the impression that he was very dedicated to his body. The fact that he would travel with his boss to meet them in the Zoo made Anja shift uncomfortably in her seat as she leaned in to watch their progress.
They simply waited around at this point, drank coffee, and talked constantly before they climbed into a small town car which took them to one of the smaller airports, where Courtney’s company kept a couple of jets on hand and ready for hasty travel needs. They had a few at the larger airports like LAX as well but considering the kind of schedules those places worked with, one would have to request a trip days, and sometimes weeks, in advance. The smaller airports outside the city were a lot less convenient to reach but far more flexible about hours.
She waited until they pulled into the airport garage before she contacted her friend in the encrypted chat room.
Tell your contact that they can expect the down payment, and the balance when the piece is delivered, she typed quickly. She had been known to be able to input almost a hundred words per minute. While it didn’t sound that impressive, it was quite a feat considering the fact that she was usually coding while she was on a computer. These were two different skill sets that both required an extensive knowledge of a keyboard and quick fingers.
My friend agrees to your terms, came the reply. Although they would prefer to do a quick scout of the house in question before taking any money. They’ll contact you with the details once they’ve finished. We’ll be in touch.
Anja sent a thumbs-up emoji before she deleted the chat and closed the room. She would obviously need Sal’s approval to spend that kind of money but she was fairly certain that either he or Courtney would be willing to make good on the offer. It would be money well spent considering what it was that they were after and how difficult it would be to get their hands on it.