by Brandt Legg
For the first time since they went over the Shasta Dam, Wen was able to find a private corner where she could try the Antimatter Machine.
“Nothing,” she said, fighting tears. Although they couldn’t see any water, obviously some moisture had seeped in.
“The waterproof, shockproof case didn’t protect it?” Chase asked.
“Apparently not.”
“Then the Astronaut owes us a new one.”
She looked at him, confused.
“This thing must still be under warranty.”
“There’s no warranty on an Antimatter Machine,” she said incredulously. “This is a custom-built, one-of-a-kind piece of precision equipment. And even if there was a warranty, it most certainly would not cover being thrown off a six hundred foot dam into a waterfall only to be pummeled by millions of gallons of river water!”
“I don’t think it was the jump off the dam that ruined it,” Chase said with a straight face. “I’m pretty sure it was the smoke. The Astronaut neglected to install smoke filters. The thing was probably already dead long before we went over the dam.”
She stared at him disbelievingly until he began to laugh. “You’re being funny?”
“I thought so,” he said.
She forced a momentary smile.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “when we get to my parents, we’ll look at it. I can fix anything, remember? And if I can’t, my mother definitely can.”
An official came by a few minutes later and told them they couldn’t stay there. “Turns out they aren’t letting people sleep here tonight. Got a school bus leaving for the airport right now. They still have space.”
Chase, whose clothes were still damp, couldn’t wait to get to his plane. Wen’s clothes had already dried, but she was anxious to get to the plane for another reason—she had more guns on board.
It took almost five more hours, but just after ten PM they were cleared for takeoff. The pilot, who had been well rested and waiting for them all day, assured them it would be a quick and easy flight. As Chase’s Bombardier-8000 private jet climbed into the air, they looked down at the fires still devouring the forest.
“We’re damned lucky to be alive,” Chase said quietly.
“Lucky,” Wen agreed. They had both showered, changed into fresh clothes, and eaten. Even though Chase never liked sleeping on planes, before they reached cruising altitude, both were asleep in each other’s arms.
Less than half an hour later, as the Rifters played “Freight Train” to finish their set, Tess stepped off the dance floor at the Sagebrush Inn in Taos, New Mexico, to take a call. Flint watched her carefully, and after a few moments she looked up and found his eyes. “Chase is alive,” she mouthed to him.
After the call she explained that he and Wen had somehow lived through the jump.
“They’re on his plane en route to San Francisco as we speak.”
Tess and Flint finished the dance. After talking the band into playing one more song, they too were on their way to San Francisco.
Thirty-Six
Westfield had watched the footage of Chase and Wen jumping off the dam twenty-three times. He’d even had it enhanced and analyzed multiple times. So when he got word around midnight that Chase Malone and the former MSS agent had boarded a plane at the Redding airport, at first he couldn’t believe it. Everyone agreed surviving a leap off the Shasta dam at a height of over six-hundred feet was impossible—one hundred percent it could not be done. And yet facial recognition had positively identified the two of them getting on Malone's plane.
“Incredible,” Westfield said out loud to the empty room. “These two really are superhuman. I sure wish they were working for me.”
He pushed a button and waited for Ryker to come on the line.
“Turns out Cox really did screw this one up,” Westfield began. “Chase Malone and his girlfriend are alive.”
“But Tarsoni’s film . . . I saw it.”
“Maybe Malone can fly, and you had better learn how to yourself. His flight plan says he’s going to San Francisco.”
“As you know,” Ryker said, “we just landed in DC.”
“I know where you are. And I know you were at Redding airport at the same time as Malone! Now get back on a plane, get your asses to San Francisco, and finish this job.”
Ryker broke the news to Damon and Tarsoni. Using special credentials, they’d previously gotten to the airport hours before Chase and had been fortunate to catch a well-timed nonstop flight to Washington.
Ryker was exhausted, and now they’d be on the red-eye all night and then they’d have to find Malone again. “We’re starting with the parents’ house,” he told Damon as they headed back to the terminal. “I’m tired of this guy screwing up my life.”
“What’s his deal?” Tarsoni asked.
“You should have killed them at the dam when you had the chance. Man, they were like ten feet in front of you!”
“He didn’t want the thing in their pack damaged, and hoped to question him if possible,” Tarsoni said, wiping sweat from his face. Even at midnight, Washington’s July humidity was sweltering.
“Well, none of that this time. We take every shot. We finish this job. Kill him and the woman. I don’t care who or what gets hurt.”
Wen woke from a nightmare and reached for Chase, waking him from his own tense dream. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“I don’t know . . . The running.”
“We made it.” He kissed her and felt her tears on his cheek. He’d rarely seen her cry. “What’s really bothering you?”
“All the . . . killing people. I can’t keep doing . . . ”
Chase held her. “You’ve kept us alive.” He knew she’d been trained since she was a teenager to kill, to do whatever was necessary to complete the mission. The paradox of Wen had baffled him. She was, at once, the warmest, sweetest, gentlest, woman he’d ever known, yet also a cold machine while in survival mode. Chase believed the Buddhist teaching that one should not kill a living being, but the world was not a meditation—at least not theirs.
“Buddha said, ‘All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.’ Then what am I?”
“None of us is perfect,” Chase said. “Wen, you’re a beautiful person. You’ve got to forgive yourself.”
“I’m not beautiful.” She cried more. “I’m an ugly killer.”
“That’s not how I see you,” Chase said. “You’re my hero. You stand up to the worst part of the world, the people who are trying to hurt others, trying to destroy things. You are a light in the darkness . . . We can’t let the evil win.”
She grinned. “Did you write for Hallmark in a former life?”
“Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘Yesterday is already gone. Tomorrow is not yet here. Today is the only day available to us; it is the most important day of our lives.’”
Along Route 360, night had long closed in on northwest Austin. Powder crouched, waiting. This job reminded him of the first one in Crystal City, except there were no fireworks—at least there wouldn’t be until he pressed the detonator. But the similarities unnerved him for some reason—standing atop a multi-story building not far from a river, surrounded by similar structures, waiting for the fire crew below to finish evacuating the few remaining occupants. Even the warm breeze felt the same as that first night.
Powder shook off the strange feeling. It’ll be an easy repel, he thought, looking over the ledge. He had to be in Phoenix tomorrow. It would be their first back-to-back strikes three days in a row. It was partly in an effort to keep law enforcement guessing, but also because a tight schedule needed to be maintained. Still, the constant pressure that someone in the government, whether they were admitting it or not, had the same target list that Gunner was using bothered him more than anything else. Gunner had said not to worry, but Powder could tell Gunner himself was worried.
Powder dropped over the side of the building an
d was on the ground jogging across the landscaped lawn almost before he even realized he was safely down. Halfway to the waiting vehicle he had a nagging feeling something wasn’t right. There were only supposed to be three security people in the building, but as he recalled passing one of the windows he’d seen five people walking down the hallway. In the instant he blurred by them, his mind had assumed they were the security guards being ushered out by the firemen, but, as he got into his vehicle, he realized none of them had been in uniforms.
Might be time for plan b, he thought. The contingency, in case the bogus firemen were caught or couldn’t get the building emptied, called for contacting the real police, who would evacuate the building and send in a bomb squad. But the Doomsday explosives they were using, coupled with their custom amplification system, had to be protected. The orders were strict: if their bombing methods were at risk of detection, the building had to be blown regardless of potential fatalities.
Crystal City had gone like clockwork, he thought, trying to figure out what to do, suddenly feeling this job was nothing like the first one.
Then the text came. His worries had been for nothing. The fire crew gave the “all-clear.”
Powder immediately hit the detonation button. An explosion lit up the sky and built in intensity as the Doomsday was boosted. He pulled away from the curb and within a few blocks, Powder was already thinking about the Phoenix job.
In a few days we switch to auto-pilot, and then the war really begins.
Thirty-Seven
Trying to decide between two favorites, “blackstone scramble” or “banging pocket,” during a late breakfast at Vovomeena restaurant, not far from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, Powder overheard a couple at the next table discussing the latest firebombing in Austin. Normally he would have tuned it out, but one of the diners said, “And this time they killed a lot of people.”
Powder waved the server away, left a twenty on the table, and left immediately. Once outside, he didn’t bother checking the news on his phone or heading back to his hotel, he just stood in the Arizona heat, already over ninety degrees, and called Gunner. It took a couple of minutes to get through the relays and encryption coding, but as soon as the connection to Gunner was made, Powder asked, “How many?”
“Media is reporting eleven deaths,” Gunner said.
It was even worse than Powder had feared. “But I got a text, all was clear.”
“Then it wasn’t your fault, Powder. We knew this was possible. You gotta shake this off.”
“I just killed eleven innocents,” Powder hissed as he paced around the hot sidewalk of a parking lot.
“No one is innocent,” the militia leader said, abandoning his soothing tone. “Especially people working at these companies.”
“But that company wasn’t on the list.”
“They may not have been on the list, but they are on a list. I asked you, before this all began, if you trusted me, and you said yes. I don’t tell you more than you need to know, and you like it that way. But our mission, this war, has more than one front. We are working multiple agendas. Every strike is critical in taking the country back.”
“I saw those people. I knew something was wrong. I should have—”
“Collateral damage. You know how it goes.”
“In war maybe, but we’re making the calls here.”
“This is war. This is a bigger war than you’ve ever been part of before,” Gunner said, trying not to sound like the military history teacher he believed he already was and actually planned to be whenever this revolution was over.
“This is your war, Gunner. Your machine wars. AI, technology, every modern evil thing.”
“I need you to do Phoenix.”
“Then we go on autopilot?”
“We stick to the plan. Autopilot doesn’t finish your job.”
Powder wiped his sweaty brow. “I might be done after Phoenix.”
“It’s not over until we stop horUS.”
“Can we ever really stop it without destroying everything?”
“Everything only matters if we can.”
As the sun lifted above the horizon, Chase and Wen were already driving to his parents’ house.
“I just received a message from WOLF,” Wen said. “They’ve picked up information that a crew has been engaged to kill you.”
“Wow, they really uncover some major secrets,” Chase said. “We’ve been dodging bullets ever since we landed back in the States.”
“Yes, but they know who.”
“Who!?” He slowed down involuntarily, the sky red-streaked and intensely bright as they headed north to the accordion lovers town of Cotati.
“I thought you didn’t care about WOLF?”
“This isn’t something to joke about.”
Wen laughed. “It’s only a code name. Someone called Gunner ordered the hit. They are working on more. The dead man at Denver worked for him.”
“Ask them to run with that. Find out if Gunner has anything to do with the Fire Bomber.”
“Do you think WOLF works for you?”
“You’re always saying we’re on the same team.”
She laughed again while typing into a phone.
“Is your phone safe?”
“Nothing is safe, only degrees of safety,” she said while looking at the Antimatter Machine. “That’s the best there is, but I was trained, remember? I take precautions.”
“Maybe WOLF isn’t so useless after all.”
“Are you going to help them now?”
“Depends on if they find out who Gunner is before it’s on cable news.”
“One other thing—they say that the NSA is looking for a hacker named Bull.”
“Another blind screen name. WOLF sure is consistent with tantalizingly useless information,” Chase said, taking the exit. “And why would I care about this hacker?”
“WOLF believes the hacker has information related to the Fire Bomber.”
“Really? And how do they know that?”
“They don’t say.”
“Of course not.”
“They did say that Bull is now a target.”
“Of the Fire Bomber?”
“No. Of US intelligence agencies. There are orders to eliminate Bull.”
After the call with Powder, Gunner contacted his source, the person who had provided the list.
“How are the deaths playing?” Gunner asked.
“Not great,” the source said. “Public opinion is going especially negative. Knocking out a bunch of billion-dollar tech companies when you were just doing property damage—people pretended to be upset, but no one really cared. In fact, some people, I think, were secretly rooting for you and how careful you were to avoid loss of life. Now that’s out the window with cable news doing nonstop coverage of eleven families suffering and ripped apart based on the senseless act of violence by some horrible unabomber-like terrorist.”
“One day they’ll know the truth.”
“If and when the public learns what you are doing and why, you’ll already be dead or in prison.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Come on,” the source said. “There are so many people after you, I can’t even keep track of them all. Most of these corporations you’ve been going after have their own security forces.”
“More like private armies,” Gunner said, kneeling by a fire pit, cleaning a gun. “That’s the problem, the public is all caught up with right versus left, are we a democracy or a republic, when America is actually a Corporatocracy. The elites control the banks, who in turn control the corporations, who dictate all government policy.”
“I’ve heard your sermon before.”
“Do you disagree?” He looked down the barrel and blew into it.
“You know I don’t,” the source said. “But your little war just got a lot hotter. They’re going to find you.”
“Et primo consummare.” He shot at a target.
“What’s that?” the source as
ked.
The bullet pierced the exact middle. “Latin, for ‘I’ll finish first.’”
Thirty-Eight
Chase and Wen arrived at his parents’ home in Cotati, the upscale little town about forty-five miles north of San Francisco, in time for breakfast. His father, Zack, famous for his pecan pancakes, doubled the batch when he saw how hungry his son was.
Wen and his parents had met briefly before she and Chase disappeared to Nuku Hiva. Daisy Malone was the type of mother that would have liked anyone Chase brought home. The family often teased that she’d never met a person she didn’t like. His father, a bit more discerning, had been instantly captivated by the sweet, strong willed, highly capable ex-MSS.
Both parents were thrilled whenever one of their boys visited, with Zack shouting out his standard, “There’s my boy! My boy is home.” However, their moods slipped once Chase explained the situation in more detail than he had been able to on his last phone call.
“We’ve lived here more than thirty years,” Daisy said, wiping maple syrup off her son’s chin. “You can’t just go run away every time someone’s after you.” Daisy had built a successful car repair business, and over the prior twenty-nine years, had probably repaired at least one vehicle for every resident of Sonoma County.
“Flint Jones, my head of security, is sending a team here today. I want you to do whatever they say. If you won’t leave, at least do that for me. Any more flapjacks, Dad?”
“Yes,” his father said, meeting Chase’s eyes and flipping a few more onto his syrup-puddled plate. Zack Malone was much more practical than his wife. As an accountant, truly brilliant with numbers, he could take credit for that part of Chase’s brain—although clearly the mechanical side came from his mother.
“Thanks, Dad.” Chase, knowing his mother’s stubborn independence, had been expecting pushback on his insistence that they accept a security team. But his father could see his pain and concern, and gave a look to Daisy before she could object further. Then she, too, took note of the strain on her son’s face.