Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  He almost laughed to himself. The whole thing would be legendary, and there would soon be programs on the Discovery Channel that mentioned the Yekaterinburg conspiracy with the same breathless style of docu-drama narration they used for treasure hunters and ancient aliens.

  He wondered if any of them would try to track him down and interview him anonymously, a silhouette in a darkened room. He doubted it; though those programs sometimes got wind of something interesting, they never seemed to really be able to penetrate into the secret stuff people were actually hiding. In this particular case, only the sheer difficulty of concealing twenty-ton dinosaurs would give the conspiracy hunters a hint of the truth. Even then they’d probably go off on a silly tangent like concluding that the closed-off valley, undiscovered for tens of millions of years, had preserved the dinosaurs and allowed them to survive.

  And the bunnies would watch the drivel in droves, inspiring yet more annoying pseudoscientific babble on channels that were supposed to be documentary-focused. People were morons.

  Selene, however, wasn’t. She was extremely smart, and it would have been suicide to follow her in his cart. Fortunately, there was only one place to go from there, so instead of following the track, he abandoned the cart and cut across the hill and through the forest to watch her, trying not to make any noise. Being mentally tough enough to walk for any length of time was one thing. Being good at forests was quite another. A misstep onto a twig could make him dead.

  He turned to Chiffon. “Be very quiet,” he said, feeling a little bit foolish as he did. This was an animal that had been born and raised—and more importantly had survived—in the Darien Gap. It would be silent. Park was the problem.

  He reached the top without incident and waited.

  Selene parked the cart next to the one the soldiers and Marianne must have taken and started up the path. Park let her get out of sight before following. There was still only one place for her to go.

  When he reached the top of the hill, Selene was standing thirty meters from the chairlift, looking around. To Park’s horror, the lift was working, which meant that all she needed to do was to grab a chair and she would be out of his reach. He couldn’t risk taking a seat behind her: if she saw him, he was a dead man.

  That left only one option. He pulled out his gun and ran in her direction, betting on the noise of the chairlift to hide his approach. He needed to get close enough to actually hit her.

  So, despite the gun being in his hand and pointed in the right direction, he didn’t fire. He got inside the fifty-meter range that most competent shots would have felt comfortable with and kept going. Chiffon loped beside him, apparently amused at this new game.

  At forty meters, Selene must have felt something amiss, because she began to turn. At thirty-five, she saw him and hesitated for a second. At thirty, she went for her gun.

  He fired.

  She fell.

  Still, he didn’t stop running. He crossed the distance between them, panting like he’d completed the Olympic marathon instead of running less than the length of a football field. Kneeling beside her, the first order of business was to take the gun from her nerveless fingers and place it in his pocket.

  The bullet had hit her in the right part of her chest, below her left breast. She was bleeding quite badly, but it didn’t look like a wound that should have killed her directly. He felt for a pulse and found it immediately—strong and fast.

  He couldn’t leave until he knew she was dead, so he put the point of his gun against her head.

  Park found that he couldn’t pull the trigger. This wasn’t self-defense, it was the cold-blooded murder of a defenseless woman. Well, defenseless unless she woke up and killed him with her bare hands.

  All that remained was to wait for her to die. He was in no hurry, and the wound looked serious enough to kill her unless someone operated on it. Then he would be free, utterly free, to make a run for it.

  Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed her under the arms and pulled the unconscious woman towards the open door of the white house that held the motor for the chairlift.

  As he dragged her, he wondered what had become of the giant spider. He looked up the hill to see whether it was in sight, but all he spotted was some unusual movement in the trees near the top of the hill. Could that be it? He didn’t know, but it was no longer his problem. After months of study, he was off to do what he should have done in the first place: talk to the man who’d built the monsters. Park was on the last leg of his long Russian sojourn. Soon, he would be following a very different trail, one that began in Western Africa.

  The darkness and noise of the motor building enveloped them. He left the door open to allow at least a little light to fall on them and placed Selene on a concrete floor where he could watch over her.

  And there she lay, in a ray of golden afternoon light, her hair looking honey-colored in the illumination. If he hadn’t known her, he would have found the sight breathtaking. The pallor of her skin made her look like an angel and, unconscious, she appeared much younger. When you worked with her, you forgot that she was still a young woman, in her early thirties at most; the hardness of her expression made it feel like you were talking to an ageless evil.

  He almost walked away, leaving her to live or die as the fates ordained.

  But he couldn’t live with the uncertainty, even if the price was to watch the light go out of an angel’s face.

  ***

  Somewhere below the conscious level, a part of her brain was screaming that something, somewhere was terribly, terribly wrong. But she just didn’t have the energy to deal with tedious realities at the moment.

  Selene recalled the one time she’d failed on a mission. It hadn’t been her fault, but she’d been convinced that the powers-that-be in Moscow would pull her off of active duty and recall her. That was the fate that awaited failures and burned agents.

  But they hadn’t burned her, her superiors had understood, and she was still around to crown her field career with an assassination two years later.

  Her failure had taken place in London. On a fine spring morning, Selene had been assigned to walk to a specific park bench in Princess Gardens, that tiny park surrounded by the buildings of Imperial College. She arrived much too early because the last time she’d walked there, Selene had gotten lost among the maze of tiny streets and mews to the west of Harrods.

  This time, though, she’d gone straight up Exhibition Road, not taking any chances, with the result that she arrived while the courier who occupied the link on the chain immediately before her was still present.

  Dressed in a grey suit, looking like a civil servant, the courier had light, thinning hair and sallow features. He was pretending to read a newspaper but, as she watched, the man casually bent forward and placed something under the bench.

  Selene walked past, of course. She wasn’t supposed to cross paths with the courier at all, much less spot him during the dead drop. But something about the way he did it set off every one of her alarms. He should have been more careful, checking if anyone was watching before executing the drop. If he had, he would have seen her—a stranger to him—walking past less than ten meters away, and simply waited until she was out of sight.

  But he hadn’t, and that scared the crap out of her. Instead of doing what she’d originally planned, which was to turn left at the north end of the park and return for the package ten minutes later, she turned right when she reached the northern end and walked towards a convenience store located across the street from the park’s northeast corner. She bought herself a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes, some beastly British brand, and pretended to enjoy a quick smoke while leaning on the railing at the top of the ramp that led up to the store, slotting between two clumps of students.

  It gave her an excellent view of the park.

  Five minutes later—and only five minutes before Selene was scheduled to appear in Princess Gardens—the courier stood and headed away, walking south.

&nb
sp; A man walking a dog turned to look, following him and, without making a production of it, pulled a phone from his pocket and made a call.

  It was all perfectly natural, and had he not had to force his dog—a big yellow Labrador—to move in the direction the courier had headed, she wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss.

  But as the man jerked at the leash, his sudden hurry was completely at odds with his cover. He needed to get out of the park now… and there was only one real reason she could see for that: the courier walking away.

  Selene tried to keep her eyes off of the man. She didn’t want to get spotted herself.

  What now? If they had the courier under surveillance, they’d also be watching the bench. They couldn’t have missed the drop; if she’d seen it, a professional watcher would have been certain to notice.

  So she went to Harrods, abandoning whatever valuable piece of intelligence the courier had dropped to its fate. She bought an expensive hat and fought to keep her ever-present rage under control.

  Then she went home and waited for the call.

  “I didn’t run into James,” she said. It was the code phrase for a botched pickup. “I think he was with some friends.”

  Silence on the other end of the line greeted this admission as some poor analyst had a panic attack. A moment later, another voice came on the line, slightly deeper, older.

  “Did you happen to run into anyone else?” the new voice said in patrician tones. This man, whoever he was, would have passed for British nobility by his accent alone.

  “No, I had a lonely time of it, I’m afraid. Just some people I thought I recognized, but who didn’t know me,” she responded.

  “Ah. That’s too bad, but it can’t be helped. Maybe I can take your mind off of things. Would you like to get together for a drink? Say around seven in the usual spot?”

  “Are you sure your wife wouldn’t mind? You’re normally home by seven.” Selene was ad-libbing, trying to warn her handlers that it was possible she’d been spotted and followed. She didn’t think so—she’d looked around obsessively on her way home, and taken a roundabout route—but the possibility existed. The British government could have flown a drone with decent cameras high above her head and she wouldn’t have seen it.

  “I’ll deal with her,” he replied.

  The car that picked her up at fifteen minutes before midnight was a black Volvo; the driver said nothing, but handed her a card with a single name scribbled on it: Ignatius. Then he drove her past stately Georgian houses in the direction of Clerkenwell before turning off into a tiny dead-end lane or mews. The car stopped and the driver solicitously opened her door.

  As she descended into the darkness—only the headlights bouncing off the brick wall in front of them gave any light—she was certain that it must be the end of the line, that she had been brought there to dispose of her, and that, from out of the darkness, a bullet would enter her head and she would be gone.

  None of that happened. The driver just indicated, still silent, the door to their right, a numberless black-painted steel panel set in the bricks of what appeared to be a warehouse. Then he backed down the narrow street and disappeared, leaving her temporarily blinded by the headlights.

  This was her chance. The driver didn’t stop to see if she went inside; she could run in any direction she wanted, disappear into one of the less-well-policed places on the map and hope the Russian government lost track of her.

  Of course, that could be exactly what they expected her to do. This could very easily be a test, and if she failed, a knife in the back before she even made it onto the main road would be her fate.

  Better to play along.

  She knocked on the steel door through which she could now hear the faint strain of music. It opened instantly to reveal a tiny foyer, maybe three meters long and two wide, mostly filled with a large blonde man who beckoned her inside and closed the door behind her.

  “Who’re you lookin’ for?” he asked in a thick northern accent.

  “Ignatius,” she replied.

  The man nodded knowingly and winked. “All the way in back. Just beside the kitchen entrance.” Then he hesitated for a second. “And I’m sorry, miss, but I need to search you. For weapons, you know.”

  Selene grimaced to herself, but nodded. Normally, she would have maimed this guy before allowing him to put his hands on her… but this wasn’t her game, they weren’t her rules, and getting groped might conceivably save her life. Or it might just get her killed by her employers. She fought down the rage, the desire to see if her hand-to-hand training would work against a much bigger opponent, and submitted.

  To her surprise, the man frisked her quickly and efficiently, not spending an instant more than necessary on any part of her body. When he was done, he stepped back and opened the door behind him.

  She nodded in respect, and he returned the gesture. She had to assume a doorman wouldn’t have known who she was… and that told her a lot about him: he was a professional. Probably a murderer and a sociopath, but not a sleazebag who preyed on those who couldn’t defend themselves. Unless, of course, he was being paid for it.

  The door opened onto a scene that could have been lifted straight out of a mafiya club in St. Petersburg. A glass bar was crowded with men in dark suits. The baristas behind it were wearing the skimpiest of outfits, showing more cleavage than they concealed.

  But at least they were wearing clothes. The two dancers on the circular stages that served as islands between the tables were wearing little more than a few belly chains and earrings between them, and their motions were designed to make their nudity extremely evident, even through the clouds of cigarette smoke.

  Selene ignored them. She knew why they were there—to show that the place could operate without fear of official censorship, so that the people inside felt safe—and also know both where they were recruited—in the slums of Russian industrial towns—and where they ended up—dead of something violent or contagious, usually within a few short months. Most of the men ignored them as well. These were experienced operators who knew the truth: the meat on display was just meat. Only newbies and muscle that would remain forever at the bottom of the totem paid any attention to it.

  Selene was neither, so she walked confidently towards the indicated table.

  She passed a Babel of languages. German here, French there. Even Arabic, coming from the table of one Saudi who was openly staring at the nearest dancer and drinking Blue Label from one of a pair of open bottles. She smirked. There was a man who confused cost with quality.

  English and Russian were ubiquitous, forming the backbone of the language soup.

  Interestingly, in a place where the women were obviously decorative—girlfriends showing as much flesh as they could, waitresses in tight mini-shorts and, of course, the dancers—not many glances flashed onto her. People knew that a woman dressed in business attire in that place was likely to be in the business of death, not the business of love.

  They could get both elsewhere, so they didn’t stare, just glanced at her long enough to commit her features to memory.

  Ignatius turned out to be a pudgy, balding man with watery blue eyes. She sat across from him and stifled an urge to plunge a knife into his chest. The table in front of her was set, and it would have been the work of a moment. She hated him immediately.

  “We should have met somewhere else,” she said. “Now, every small-time jackass in the city knows my face.”

  “This place was convenient,” he replied, “for a number of reasons.” He counted on his fingers. “First, the driver says you weren’t followed. Second, no one saw me come in here. Third, no one here will ever talk about anything that has to do with me. They know better. Fourth, there are many people in here, and no one knows who you came in to meet with. And five, I was hungry. The only one that matters is five.”

  “And when the British come to take you away?”

  “Oh, they won’t. I’m not the kind of man the secret police takes away.�
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  “You’re just a functionary.”

  The man calling himself Ignatius laughed. “Perhaps it’s best if you continue to believe that. Now tell me what happened.”

  She went through the failed meeting. The man’s expression never changed, but his features began to swim in the smoky ambience.

  “I will report that you did well, and haven’t been burned. You will leave now. There’s a car waiting outside. But first, I have one last question: why are you here with me when you’ve just been shot in the chest?”

  Selene opened her eyes with a start and coughed. The entire left side of her body was numb and she felt cold. She was surrounded by noise, some kind of machinery. The place was dim, only a flash of sunlight entering from the door.

  Park Sun-Lee stood over her, a gun in his hand.

  “You won’t need that,” she said.

  “Would you believe yourself?” he replied.

  “Never.”

  Park nodded. He didn’t lower the gun.

  ***

  He looked down over her, feeling his body tense. He’d hoped she would slip off peacefully, but that didn’t seem possible now.

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “That depends. Are you going to attack me?”

  But Selene was no longer looking at the gun. Her eyes had shifted over to where Chiffon hid behind Park’s leg. “What the hell is that? Where did you find a monkey?”

  “It’s not a monkey,” Park replied, shifting to one side so Selene could get a better look at the creature. “It’s called Chiffon, and it was designed by the same man who built the big black monster.”

  “What for?”

  “He seemed to want a pet. I think there is something more behind it, but I’ll need to talk to him to find out what it might be. I think the man is hiding a great sadness.”

  “You seem to know a lot about a guy you only spoke to for less than an hour. Or did you lie about that as well?”

  Blood was beginning to pool on the floor around her, and Park looked away. It wouldn’t be long now. Blood loss would take her, even if the bullet hadn’t hit anything important. He didn’t want to shoot her again. “No. I reported the meeting exactly as it happened. But you’d be surprised at just how much you can learn from a person by studying his work and reading his file. Yes. There’s great sadness there.”