by Alex Irvine
Maybe that was melodramatic, but it fit the facts. And it gave April the consolation of knowing that Bill’s work had survived him to help give rise to the treatment that would offer a new future to the people who had survived. She was surprised by how much that meant to her. After all, Bill was still dead.
But having seen so much meaningless death, so many people suffering and breathing their last with no one to care or even notice . . . being able to believe that Bill’s death had meaning gave April hope. It closed a circle, demarcated a boundary between her past and her future. She wouldn’t get him back, but that just made her one of millions who had lost someone they loved.
All of them had to live for tomorrow now.
That was the thought in her mind when she saw Aurelio come back into Professor Chandrasekhar’s office.
39
AURELIO
The thing that made Aurelio especially angry was that he’d been starting to second-guess his assessment of Ike Ronson. Was it worth the deaths of fourteen people to make sure the world knew that help was coming? That the Black Friday virus, the Dollar Bug, the Green Poison, was soon going to be a bad memory, built over by the rising future of a new America? That wasn’t a call Aurelio could make. He wasn’t sure it was a call Ike could make. But that was the problem. He’d been sure in Manhattan. He’d been sure all the way across Pennsylvania and Ohio and Lake Erie and Michigan. He’d even been sure last night.
Now, this morning, he wasn’t. Maybe he’d misjudged Ike. After all, he had protected April and made sure she got here.
The only thing hanging Aurelio up was the question of who Ike was talking to. Was it a rogue element inside the SHD? Was it another government agency that didn’t trust the SHD? Or was it an outside actor—and if so, what did they want?
Without answers to any of those questions, Aurelio had only his eyes and his ears and his gut to go on, and they were telling him that Ike Ronson was sincere.
The problem was, Ike’s sincerity didn’t make those fourteen people in the elevator lobby by Duane Park any less dead. There was still something Aurelio didn’t know, a critical piece of information without which he could not in good conscience act.
Lieutenant Hendricks provided it. She pinged him while April was talking to the professor, and he went out into the hall. “Diaz.”
“Agent Diaz, consider this an armor-piercing warning to get the hell out of wherever you are if that place is within a mile of Ike Ronson.”
“That’s quite a greeting, Lieutenant.”
“I’ve been working the problem of Ronson’s encrypted conversations. Every sample gives me a little more to work with, and this morning at about oh six twenty he contacted his handler, by the name of Mantis. Listen close, Agent Diaz, because you don’t have time to ask me to repeat it. He fed her Kelleher, the drug, the location. Mantis is sending in a team to, and I’m quoting here, ‘capture the product and extract you’—‘you’ meaning Ronson.”
I should have shot that son of a bitch right when I saw him, Aurelio thought. “Go on,” he said.
“That’s it,” Lieutenant Hendricks said. “Except for these two final pieces of possibly redundant advice. One, you should be ready for that location to get very hot very soon. And two, we recommend you neutralize Ike Ronson immediately.”
She broke off the call and Aurelio counted slowly backward from ten, getting his breathing and his fury under control.
Then, as casually as he could manage, he walked back into the lab. The professor and April were talking. Ike was leaning against the wall just inside the door, to Aurelio’s right. He caught Aurelio’s eye and nodded. Aurelio nodded back.
Then he pivoted and knocked Ronson out cold with a left hook that carried all his vengeful anger about everything Ronson had already done, and everything his actions were about to cause. The punch banged Ronson’s head off the door frame and he dropped without a sound.
“My God, Aurelio,” April said. The professor stood at her desk, eyes wide and one hand over her mouth.
“Get me something to tie him up with,” Aurelio said. “Then I’ll explain.”
* * *
• • •
Ike began to stir after two or three minutes, but by that time Aurelio had found three extension cords in a supply closet and used them to tie Ike’s hands around the back of a chair in Chandrasekhar’s office. The professor stood back, staying out of the conflict, but April got right in his face. “What are you doing? I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”
“I believe you,” Aurelio said. “But ask yourself why an agent out of Manhattan just happened to be waiting to escort you the last twenty miles to Ann Arbor.”
He saw the implications of this register with April. “Wait,” she said. “He told me he was deployed around Ohio and Pennsylvania.”
“When he said that, it was true. But he left Manhattan three days after you did, with specific orders to find you.”
“Orders from who?”
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out when he wakes up,” Aurelio said. “You should also know that when he got the call to follow you—‘engage and assist’ was the specific order—he bailed out in the middle of a firefight after calling in a bogus SOS. How do I know that? Because I was the agent who responded. I finished the job he quit on, and I was the one who had to count the bodies of the civilians who got killed because he ran out on them.”
The shocked expression on April’s face told Aurelio he needed to throttle back a little. “Look,” he said, more calmly, “I know this is a lot for you to take in. Ike did save your life. He did some other good things along the way, too. But he’s also a double agent, and according to a call I just got from JTF intel, he’s called in a strike team on this location.”
This got Professor Chandrasekhar’s attention. “He has what?”
“You need to get your people out of here, Professor,” Aurelio said. “And whatever research you can carry, take that with you. If I had to guess, I’d say by tonight this building won’t still be standing.”
The professor got moving. She was already shouting orders when she got into the hallway, and her voice echoed away back toward the glassed-in side of the building.
“You’re probably right about that,” Ike said.
Aurelio took a step back as Ike lifted his head and added, “You hit hard, Aurelio. Even if it was a sucker punch.”
“You play people for suckers, sooner or later you get sucker-punched,” Aurelio said. “Who’s Mantis?”
Ike smiled. Aurelio could tell it hurt. “I don’t know,” Ike said. “And before you ask, I don’t know the name of the group she’s working with, either. I’m supposed to find all that out later today, after . . .” He angled his head back and forth, taking in the room and by extension the building, their mission, all of it. Aurelio noted that his speech was a little slurred, probably because his jaw wasn’t working right from the punch. “After all this is over,” Ike finished.
“How’d they get you on board?” Aurelio asked. “How’d they get you to run out on a bunch of kids in New York?”
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Ike said. “I drew the DPF out thinking I would get them riled up and shooting, and use that as cover to get out of town. I didn’t know there were people in the building until it was too late. That’s . . . that’s on me. It was a bad mistake.”
“But you still ran out.”
“Yeah. I did. Because there was one chance to be part of this, and that was it. If these people can save a million lives, and those people had to die to make it happen . . . Look, Aurelio. You want me to be a turncoat, some kind of villain, fine. Like I said last night, punch my ticket. It’s your call.” Aurelio felt April shift and out of the corner of his eye he saw her looking at him. She hadn’t known about that conversation until just now, and right about now she would be figuring out that Aurelio hadn’t arri
ved by chance in Ann Arbor any more than Ike had just happened to be passing through Milan at the right time.
“Both of you were looking for me?” she said. “And neither one of you could tell me. What am I, a goddamn chess piece?”
“We’re all chess pieces,” Ike said. “Some of us are just clearer about what side we’re playing. Me, I know that things are going to get uglier before they get better. You saw DC, Aurelio. Nobody’s in control there. You tell me, who do people turn to when they need to know what to do? Who’s leading this country right now? Nobody. And somebody has to. In the end, you and I—you, too, April, and probably the professor, too—we all have the same vision. We want things back the way they were, only maybe a little better. I tried the Division way. It’s not working. So now I’m trying another way.”
“I see you had a lot of time to work on your rationalizations while you were following me,” April said. She was flexing her fingers, the way people did when they were so angry the primitive part of their brain was about to take over. Aurelio shifted a little closer to her, so he could intercept if she went after Ike. He might deserve whatever he got, but Aurelio wasn’t going to be part of beating a bound man.
“Maybe they are rationalizations,” Ike said. “But I could have cut your story out of you yesterday down in Milan, or last night on that roof deck. I didn’t. And the JTF doesn’t go around wearing white gloves, either. You heard what happened with the quarantine down in DC, right, Aurelio? How many people died because of that? Same thing happened in other places, too. Our hands aren’t clean.”
“No,” Aurelio said. “We’ve all got blood on our hands. But we choose whose blood.”
“Yeah, we do. Like you said, I lost those people in New York. That was bad. But . . .” Ike wriggled in the chair, trying to shift his weight and get his blood moving. “Listen, man, either shoot me or leave me alone. I’m done trying to justify myself, and you’re not listening anyway.”
Aurelio went around behind the chair. He saw Ike tense, but Aurelio wasn’t going to hurt him. He squatted and unbuckled Ike’s SHD watch. Its circle was still orange. “You won’t be needing this,” he said. “Or this,” he added, picking a grenade from Ike’s belt.
“Wait,” April said. “You’re not going to shoot him.”
“No, I’m not going to shoot him.” Aurelio was looking at Ike as he spoke even though the words were addressed to April. “I’m going to leave him right here, and we are going to help all the white coats around here evacuate. Then we’re going to call in an armor-piercing SOS to Detroit, and hope we’re still breathing when the cavalry arrives.”
“Better move fast,” Ike said. “Mantis’s people are. Couple of weeks from now, they’re going to seize fuel supplies up and down the East Coast. They’ve got it all planned out. South Portland, New London . . . I can’t remember all of them. And a couple weeks after that . . . Well, I’ll be honest. They haven’t told me any more than that. But things are going to get real different.”
Seizing fuel supplies meant only one thing: Mantis’s people had large numbers of vehicles. That in turn meant they were a much more organized force than the run-of-the-mill militias scattered all over the country. And if Mantis’s people controlled fuel supplies, that was fuel the JTF wouldn’t have.
“You know what that means, right?” Ike grinned again through the pain in his jaw. “Yeah, you do. Mobility wins wars, Aurelio. This war is already won, whether I’m around to see it or not.” His eyes went out of focus for a moment, then he blinked and came back. “You hit hard. Did I tell you that already?”
No wonder he’s talking so much, Ike thought. He’s concussed and his inhibitions are down. That’s why he was slurring, too.
He would have pressed Ike for more information, but a sound drifting through the open window caught Aurelio’s attention and tied a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. In the distance, but coming closer, was the unmistakable thump of helicopters.
40
APRIL
Aurelio hustled April back outside. The calm atmosphere of the building had been shattered by Professor Chandrasekhar’s alert—just like that beautiful glass facade was going to be shattered as soon as the shooting started. Aurelio felt sorry in advance for anyone caught on that side of the building.
“You’re just leaving Ike there?” April had heard Ike’s confession, but she still was having trouble squaring it with how she had seen him act.
“He’ll be free inside twenty minutes, is my guess,” Aurelio said. “You can’t keep someone tied up if they have the use of their hands and they can find something sharp.”
April imagined Ike scooting the chair around the office until he found . . . what, a pair of scissors? “And what if he doesn’t? Or what if that’s not enough time?”
“That’s his problem,” Aurelio said. “I cut him a break already. He’s still breathing.”
Outside, the JTF garrison was scrambling into defensive posture. They could hear the chopper blades, too, and one of them was pointing toward the northeast.
“If Mantis’s people have helicopters and pilots, plus fuel, this is going to be a problem,” Aurelio said.
“I don’t understand why they’re attacking even though the samples are gone.” They were at the perimeter fence now. Aurelio scanned the sky.
“They don’t know the samples are gone,” Aurelio said. “And by the time they find out, we need to be a long way from here.”
She saw him wrestling with conflicting mission objectives. Help the people here in a fight they were likely to lose, or get out and make sure news of the BSAV got to the right people. Whoever they were.
Small-arms fire from the south tore into the fence and ricocheted off the Jersey barriers. As she ducked, April glanced that way and saw black-clad soldiers weaving among the cars in the parking lot off Fuller Road. The JTF returned fire.
Three helicopters came into view over the trees to the east. “Black Hawks,” Aurelio said. “Don’t see any missile pods. My guess is, they’re carrying more troops. Together with the force in the parking lot, we’re looking at maybe fifty hostiles, with close air support.”
Watching the helicopters, April said, “Translate that into civilian.”
“We’re cooked,” Aurelio said.
He tapped his watch face and then his ear. “This is Division agent Aurelio Diaz, current location Ann Arbor near intersection of Fuller Road and Beal Avenue. JTF position here under assault from platoon-strength paramilitary force with helicopter air support. Request immediate fire support, all agents and all available assets.”
He listened for a few seconds. “Yeah, I did say helicopter air support,” he said, raising his voice over the approaching helicopters and the escalating firefight in the direction of the parking lot. “No, I am not kidding. You can hear them, right?”
Another pause to listen. “Well, you better hurry. If it takes that long, none of us are going to be around.”
Glass shattered behind them as stray rounds started to find the building’s front walls. Aurelio popped up over the fence and fired two quick bursts. “See what we can do here,” he said, mostly to himself.
April felt useless. Her shotgun wasn’t much use in this combat environment, and if fifty men made it inside the walls, she had a feeling it wouldn’t help then, either.
Two of the Black Hawks swung around to the south. The third stayed behind, holding its position several hundred yards away. “I’m going to touch base with the local commander,” Aurelio said. “See if he happens to have a roomful of RPGs somewhere.”
He ran off, keeping his head low and staying close to the wall. After he ducked behind a shorter wall of sandbags, April lost track of him. She could see some of the approaching soldiers hopscotching among the cars in the parking lot. They popped up to fire, then ducked away as the JTF defenders fired back. Frustrated and scared in equal measure, April stayed at one
corner of the barrier, keeping her head down and wondering where Aurelio had gone. She couldn’t hit any of the soldiers attacking the gate or the JTF emplacements over toward the Beal side of the building. She also couldn’t get out. All she could do was sit tight and wait for a chance to either fight or run.
One of the two approaching helicopters reached a spot about a hundred yards due south of the building entrance and hovered there, a hundred feet in the air. A heavy machine gun mounted in its side door opened up, chewing through the wooden walls of the JTF positions. The second chopper came around behind it, easing down until it hovered less than three feet off the ground, about halfway between the main entrance and April’s corner. She saw soldiers clustered in the door, their feet hanging over the side, with others standing behind them.
Finally April saw an opportunity to do something. She rested the Super 90’s barrel on a Jersey barrier and braced herself. As the chopper’s skids touched the ground, April unloaded its full magazine, eight loads of buckshot, at the open door. The helicopter was fifty yards away, so there was a lot of scatter in the loads, but she saw some of the black-uniformed soldiers drop to the ground. Others dodged away from the door as sparks flew from the Black Hawk’s fuselage.
Unfortunately her fire drew attention from the other helicopter. Its machine gun swung in her direction. April pressed herself against the Jersey barrier and got as low as she could. Bullets hammered into the concrete, stinging her with flying shards, but the chopper couldn’t quite get an angle on her. It wouldn’t be long, though. She had to move.
When the machine gun’s fire swept on to another target, April scrambled to her feet and ran around the west side of the building, pinning herself to the wall just past the corner, where she could still see part of what was going on. From the roof just over her head, she heard rifle fire. Impact stars bloomed all over the windshield of the closest helicopter. Other JTF soldiers concentrated their fire on the same helicopter, and eventually it heeled over and took up a position farther away to the southeast. Now its machine guns raked the front of the building, turning the two-story windows into a waterfall of glass shards.