Alyssa was friendly, and made their duty pleasant enough. She cooperated with their standard operating procedures and visibly fought her tendency to become frustrated and impatient with delays. Wacksman gave her a lot of credit. They had been living in a safe house while her home was undergoing repairs, and she was taking the entire situation, including her new and unfamiliar surroundings, quite well.
And while she was quite attractive, undeniably a positive in Wacksman’s book, she wasn’t his type. She wasn’t snooty—very down to earth, actually—but she was too much on the egghead side for his taste. The way she spoke, her enormous working vocabulary and effortless sophistication with the language, made this just as clear as did her medical degree. And physically, she was a little too petite. Which was actually a good thing. While he’d like to believe that he was professional enough to guard a woman he found enticing without letting this distract him, every man learned at a young age that the body had a mind of its own.
They had been told that a man named Brennan Craft might come after her, and to prevent this at all cost. But they had also been given other orders, not to be shared with Alyssa Aronson, that Craft’s capture was more important than her protection, assuming such a choice should be forced upon them. Orders that didn’t sit well with Stan Wacksman. So he had spoken with Gorgas, and convinced him they had no other choice but to disregard orders they deemed to be unlawful.
Wacksman had grown up in Ohio and had signed up for ROTC while attending a small college near Cincinnati. Originally, he had set his sights set on the Air Force, since his older cousin was serving in this branch as part of a missile combat crew, a group tasked with manning nuclear missile silos around the clock. These were the soldiers who were trained to authenticate orders, and then turn a key simultaneously with a partner, to destroy the world—or at least launch a nuke that would ensure other parties continued to launch theirs, leading quickly to this outcome.
Wacksman had asked his cousin, Eli, if he would really do it. And while Eli had been carefully trained and screened to ensure he would do what was required of him, he had hedged in his answer, enough so that Stan Wacksman became convinced that he wouldn’t do it, after all. That he would refuse to contribute to the almost certain extinction of the species that carrying out such orders would catalyze.
Wacksman approved. Despite occasional exceptions, sanity still seemed to reign supreme among the vast majority of those who served in the military, including, at the moment, he and his partner Lieutenant Gorgas, who weren’t about to make protection of this helpless woman a secondary priority.
But while Wacksman had always imagined himself in the Air Force, he had ended up going Army instead, at the advice of his cousin, who complained that manning missile silos, despite the steady barrage of drills, could be exceedingly tedious.
It had been a great decision. Wacksman was restless, and a bit of an adrenaline junkie. And he enjoyed putting his skills to the ultimate test. He didn’t drink coffee because he didn’t need to. He was wired enough as it was.
He had served in every major terrorist theater, but was currently between assignments, so he had been tapped to protect this woman, for reasons that weren’t fully disclosed. Chances were that no hostiles would move against them. But if they did, he would likely need to marshal all of his training, and all of his creativity and problem solving abilities, to come out of it alive. Matching his skills against those who would seek to challenge him, for the ultimate stakes.
Now that would be a rush. So while he hoped that the assignment would remain routine, he couldn’t deny that a part of him wanted the chance to test his mettle.
“Alyssa!” shouted a young girl, holding up a Tall Cafe Mocha in an instantly recognizable Starbucks container. Alyssa Aronson broke through the milling crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea and took the proffered beverage gratefully. She took a small sip, breathed a sigh of contentment, and then headed for the exit, with Gorgas following close behind.
Both bodyguards were dressed casually and tried to blend in. But not too hard. They had been told that if Craft did come after her, he would expect her to be guarded, at least for a week or two, so a show of force wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Wacksman exited the store ahead of Alyssa and his partner and surveyed the area. Nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary. He hadn’t expected there to be. But he knew that in the bodyguard business, you had to be careful not to let hours and hours of tranquility seduce you into lowering your guard. He wasn’t about to do so. He was exceptionally well trained and alert, and he had absolute confidence that he couldn’t be taken enough by surprise for an attack to succeed. Not that he expected one to take place in the middle of the parking lot of a suburban strip mall.
They arrived at a white, four-door sedan, which sported a reinforced body and bulletproof glass, and all three approached the passenger’s side. Wacksman pulled the keys from his pocket and stood near the door, with Alyssa just behind him, and John Gorgas behind her. Both men surveyed the area one last time.
Alyssa had gotten used to this routine, and waited patiently to be let into the car. The area appeared clear, as expected, and Wacksman nodded at his partner. He pulled open the door, waited for Alyssa to seat herself, and then closed it again, while Gorgas let himself into the back.
As Wacksman pulled his hand away from the door, he realized his fingers were slightly wet. He rubbed his thumb and fingers together, feeling the slippery liquid. What was that? It felt exactly like motor oil.
That was odd.
He sniffed his now amber-colored fingers, but smelled nothing.
Wacksman glanced anxiously at Lieutenant Gorgas, now seated in the car behind Alyssa. Gorgas was examining his own hand with a puzzled expression.
Wacksman’s heart raced frantically as he realized the truth. The world began spinning madly around him. Waves of horror hit him like a hurricane.
He was dead! And Gorgas as well. Just like that. They both had less than a minute to live.
They had been told Craft avoided deadly force, but this intel had been utter bullshit.
They had been totally blindsided! Craft had used a tactic they could have never predicted. Fucking VX! The most potent nerve agent ever discovered. A nightmare substance that was rarely used even in the most desperate of war zones, because it was classified as a weapon of mass destruction, and the international backlash against those discovered using it was too great.
VX was rare in a war zone. But it was unheard of in the middle of Bloomington fucking Indiana!
An image of Nicholas Cage staring at a glass globe filled with liquid VX flashed into Wacksman’s mind, from an old movie he had seen: “The second you don’t respect this,” Cage had said, “it kills you.”
It wasn’t fair, thought Wacksman, a tear forming in the corner of one eye. He had incredible respect for this substance. But he was dead, nonetheless.
VX could be heated and turned into a gas, but was a liquid at room temperature: a liquid that was readily absorbed through the skin. Craft had coated the underside of the door handles with it. He had watched their routine. He had known that Wacksman and Gorgas would be touching the door handles, but Alyssa would not.
The tactic was utterly despicable. Horrifying. It was cowardly and an atrocity, even among killers.
But it was undeniably brilliant, Wacksman couldn’t help but admit. And undeniably effective.
Ironically, if he were in Iran or Syria, he would survive this attack. He had identified the VX in time to counteract it. In these theaters he would have carried an auto-injector with the antidote in his ruck sack. A combination of atropine and diazepam, which, if injected immediately, would save his life. But here in the fucking heartland of America, he had no ruck. All he had was a Starbucks.
I’ll take an atropine and diazepam latte, he thought, beginning to lose touch with reality. And put that in a syringe please.
He fought to cling to rationality. To steady his spinning world.
&
nbsp; Focus!
Even in death, he was better than this. He forced his panic into retreat and suddenly knew what he needed to do. He needed to open the car door again. To give Alyssa Aronson the keys. Warn her not to touch the outer door handles, and tell her to drive away as fast as possible.
But as he reached for the door the contents of his stomach exploded from his mouth and onto the pavement. He had just enough time to note that John Gorgas had begun vomiting inside the car as well, and that Alyssa Aronson’s face was curled up in horror, but he was unable to even mouth the word run to her as his entire body began convulsing.
Seconds later, Lieutenant Stan Wacksman fell to the pavement, breaking his nose in two places.
The last thought he had, before the nerve agent induced paralysis and respiratory failure, was that he couldn’t believe he was really going to die in the parking lot of a strip mall in Indiana, gasping for air in a pool of his own vomit.
14
Alyssa was too paralyzed by shock to even scream. Both of the bodyguards that had been assigned to her, men she had come to know as strong, decent human beings, were retching their guts out at the same time.
An alarm sounded in her mind, cutting through her fear and concern for these two men. Were they being gassed?
What else could explain such perfect synchronization of symptoms?
But that was impossible. One of the men was inside a closed car, and the other outside.
Lieutenant Wacksman crashed to the ground, hard, convulsing as he did so, and Alyssa’s panic intensified further. For a moment she had thought their symptoms were akin to food poisoning, but she suddenly had an even sicker feeling that what they were experiencing was far more deadly than this.
She threw open the heavy armored door. Wacksman’s fall had been hard, and he was now writhing in his own vomit. She had to help him somehow.
She pulled her phone from her pants pocket to call 9-1-1 and slid out of the car. She was about to kneel down beside the lieutenant when a large man grabbed her from behind, startling her so completely she thought her heart had stopped, and knocking her phone to the pavement.
Where had he come from?
And then she realized where. He had jumped from the side of a large white commercial van that had just arrived next to them. She had been too preoccupied to even notice.
She tried to scream, but she was feeling sleepy, and vaguely noted that a damp rag was being held over her mouth. The word chloroform entered her addled mind for just a moment before she blacked out and was tossed, like a chord of wood, into the back of the white van.
15
Alyssa awoke with a start and her head jerked to the side of its own volition.
The man kneeling before her removed the smelling salts he had been waving under her nose and tossed them in what looked like a medical bag.
Smelling salts? Again? How many times was she going to be snatched off the ground by a man with an iron grip this week? How many times knocked unconscious and revived with smelling salts? How had her life possibly come to this?
She was on the floor of the oversized, windowless commercial van she had seen, her back against one wall, facing the sliding door. She was unrestrained, as if her abductors didn’t take her the least bit seriously as a potential threat. Blood seeped into her pant leg, and from its location, whoever had taken her had already removed the tiny transmitter that Major Elovic had implanted in her thigh.
The van wasn’t moving, and Alyssa decided they must be parked. The interior was lighted, but there were no windows, so she had no idea where they were.
Two men were standing before her, watching her with great interest. Neither one was Brennan Craft, but it was likely they worked for him. One was a brute of a man, who must have been injecting steroids with a horse needle for years, and who had a face that could only be described as cruel, with soulless gray eyes that were predatory and seemed to stare right through her.
The Yin to his Yang was a short, spindly man, fastidiously dressed and manicured, clean-cut and prim, with a slight olive complexion. GQ and Tree Trunk, she thought. Quite a mismatched pair.
“Rise and shine,” said GQ, almost cheerfully. He spoke softly with an elegant accent, but one she couldn’t quite place. It was somewhere within the British accent lexicon, she thought. Something about him screamed education and refinement, and Alyssa suspected he had attended school in England, and that his accent was a mixture of his native accent, whatever that was, and the Queen’s English.
“What did you do to my friends?” she demanded.
“We killed them,” said the thin man matter-of-factly, and this statement brought a malicious grin to his burly associate. “VX nerve poison under the door handles,” he explained. “Horrible way to go,” he mused, as if talking about the weather.
“Since I didn’t tell you the rules,” continued GQ calmly, “I went ahead and answered your question there. But that’s the last time I will. You see, we’re here to learn about you. We’re not here so that you can learn about us. So you can ask questions, but only to help you clarify what we need. Not to get information to satisfy your own curiosity. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because my colleague here is a sadistic bastard from the depths of hell who gets an almost sexual thrill from inflicting pain.”
“Yeah. And how do you get your jollies?” spat Alyssa, trying to burn a hole in the back of his head with a withering glare.
Tree Trunk backhanded her across the face so hard she thought her neck might snap. She turned back in time to see a predatory delight flash across his otherwise dead eyes.
“Did you not hear the part about no more questions?” said GQ. “You even confirmed you understood.” He shook his head in disappointment. “Since I’m feeling charitable, I will answer. You may have figured this out, but I’m highly educated and, at the risk of appearing immodest, quite bright. And while I’m accomplished at killing people, I prefer to use my brain. So I get my jollies, as you so eloquently put it, from intellectual stimulation.”
He gestured to Tree Trunk. “My hired hand here is a psychopath and a sadist. Not all that educated, but what are you going to do? He’s in it because the only thing better to him than torturing people, is getting paid handsomely to torture people. We make an odd team, I know, but I thought he was perfect to assist me on this job. When this man works alone, people tend to be butchered. Which is fine, unless you decide you need them again in the future. And he does tend to make a mess. So I help rein in his . . . zeal. And I’m not a fan of wet-work, which he loves. So it’s a marriage made in heaven.”
More like Hell, thought Alyssa, but she remained silent.
“So let’s begin, shall we?” he said, and Alyssa sensed if she didn’t respond Tree Trunk would make her regret it.
She managed to nod at him.
“Good,” said GQ happily. “Just so you know, stalling won’t do you any good. We removed your homing beacon and we’ve scanned for transmitting bugs. We left your cell phone back where we found you. And we’ve driven several hours from your favorite Starbucks, with no one following. So there won’t be any rescuers coming to interrupt our festivities.”
Alyssa’s eyes narrowed worriedly. These people were very dangerous and very sophisticated. But who were they? They must be involved with Brennan Craft. But how?
She decided she needed to risk activating the digital recorder that the major had installed inside a small fake mole glued to her upper neck, just below her right ear. It recorded, but didn’t transmit, so it was undetectable. She bent her right arm to the back of her neck, and while pretending to massage it absentmindedly managed to press down on the mole before returning her hand to her lap.
“So question number one: who are you?” said GQ.
“I’m Doctor Alyssa Aronson. I’m a professor at Indiana University, although I run a lab and don’t currently teach.”
“What do you study?”
“Human behavior.”
<
br /> GQ nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen your website. Interesting work, but very academic. Nothing too exciting. So what are you working on that isn’t listed on your website?”
“Nothing else. It’s all broadly summarized there.”
GQ gestured slightly with his head and his partner grabbed Alyssa’s arm and turned it so her hand was palm up. His other hand came across her forearm with savage speed and her blouse became wet where he had touched her.
She gasped as the pain signals from this action finally reached her brain after a moment’s delay.
Tree Trunk had sliced her with an exacto knife!
He had cut through her blouse like it wasn’t there and across her forearm, just under her inner elbow, and parallel to it. A deep, razor-thin line bloomed red as blood began to flow, soaking into her blouse and dripping to the floor.
“You see,” said GQ apologetically. “My associate can be a bit messy. The good news is that he is as precise as a surgeon. You’ll be just fine. But every time you tell me an untruth, he’s going to do that again, an inch closer to your wrist. I don’t know how many inches of arm you have, but when he gets to the wrist . . . .” He turned his nose up in disgust. “Well, let’s just say that nobody—well, other than my associate here—really wants that.”
He nodded at Tree Trunk a second time and he backhanded Alyssa viciously across the face once again, this time dazing her for several seconds. Tears came to both of her eyes and began rolling down her cheeks.
GQ eyed her tears with disapproval and nodded toward the expanding red stain on her blouse. “Careful,” he said with a cheerful smile. “You don’t want to leak too many fluids.”
GQ paused, as though deciding what question to ask next, when an excited gleam came to his eyes. “Do you know what I just realized?” he said. “I just realized that I’ve never interrogated an expert in human behavior before. So I think I’ll digress a moment from the main course. I’ve followed the debate about enhanced interrogation techniques with great interest. I have to say, the US government sure knows how to turn a euphemism. George Orwell would be proud. Peacekeeper missiles. Much better than war-mongering missiles. But while I admire the phrase, enhanced interrogation, let’s go with the word torture, shall we? It really is more accurate. I assume you’re familiar with the academic debate about the usefulness of torture, correct?”
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