“Where’s yours?”
“That is mine. And I’m offering it to you.”
She made her way slowly toward the bike. Toward him. “What’s your name?” she asked, as if they were having some normal conversation, some normal exchange like two people in line at the supermarket. Just two unarmed people. No tracking bug and no Bill Clinton mask.
“My name?” he said after a pause. “I don’t know . . . Kendall?” He shook the helmet impatiently. “Come on, let’s go.”
She slipped the helmet over her head. It was too big and it slid around with every movement.
“Come on.” He straddled the motorcycle and patted the seat behind him. “Hop on.”
Carly hopped—rather, slid hesitantly onto the bike behind Kendall.
“You can touch me, you know. It’s okay.” He fired up the engine with a low guttural roar of bwap bwap bwap. He revved it higher, louder. “If you don’t want to hold on to me, that’s fine,” he shouted over the engine. “It’s your neck to break.”
The motorcycle started moving and Carly had no other choice but to accept her fate, the repulsion of wrapping her arms around the driver. It made her arms and chest feel sick, as if she was holding on to death itself.
Why couldn’t she be on vacation with Tansy somewhere? A cross-country tour, this time not in a rented carpet-cleaning van, but on Tansy’s plush touring bike, her arms wrapping around his sculpted torso and not around the hateful pudginess of this masked idiot.
They drove back to the interstate, turning onto it and speeding toward Vegas, their sweaty hug already becoming intolerable. Quite a few times during the ride, Carly wondered what in the motherfucking fuck she was doing. Why was she allowing this to happen? Her hugging on to this disgusting pig, her breasts pushed up against his back. Why was Tansy allowing this to happen?
And where the fuck was Tansy?
She focused back on her situation, wondering how much danger she’d just put herself in by leaving with Kendall. The one bit of good news was that he seemed unarmed. At least, he had no sidearm strapped to his waist. She would have noticed. She tried looking elsewhere, where the cuffs of his pants met his boots, leaning over to look at each in turn, but she found nothing.
Kendall—or Bill Clinton, or whoever the hell this militia guy was—finally veered off the interstate at the outskirts of Las Vegas, taking a bypass road that was seldom driven by tourists to a considerably less-touristy part of town. They turned away from all the glitz and glamour, away from all the money, and safety, and instead headed toward the run-down environs of North Las Vegas.
Carly stretched her back while they waited for a red light, and for a disheveled homeless person to hobble across the intersection. The reprieve from constant contact with Kendall was woefully short. She’d almost worked up enough courage to pull out her microdot pen when the light changed and they continued on, delving deeper into what appeared to be a nearly vacant neighborhood. Along one side of the road were houses without tenants, hell, without windows. There were piles of mattresses all strewn about. Cardboard. Shopping carts. On the other side of the road was a large parking lot. It was brightly lit but empty, with sun-baked weeds growing through the cracks. It was the most depressed-looking strip mall she’d ever seen.
The motorcycle growled its way into the parking lot, curving around to the rear of the lot—which looked even more ominous than the front. Along a cinder-block back wall was a long string of aggressive-looking graffiti. The roadway was spattered with shiny bits of broken glass. The back of the building was shadowed despite the daylight, the sickly pale glow from a security light creating ominous points of darkness behind a dumpster.
“We’re here,” he said proudly. Carly was just barely able to hear him over the bike’s engine. He parked the bike, cut the engine and then spoke again. “We’re here. Home sweet home.”
“Home?”
“Well, home to a few thousand pounds of old computer scrap.” He stepped off the bike with a groan, still wearing the mask. “It’s an electronic salvage station. We take in anything. Old TVs and monitors, cell phones, smart phones, computers, incriminating hard drives.”
That feeling came back again, the urge to punch his mask into his face.
“You wanna look around for it? Yours is in there, somewhere.” He laughed, this time sounding as wheezy as an old man. “I’m just kidding. I know exactly where it is.”
He guided her through a metal security door, past two separate security alarm consoles that needed decoding, and a slobbering ninety-pound Rottweiler that snapped as they walked past.
“Mind the guard dog.” Kendall opened one of the doors in a long hallway and corralled the animal into the room. “Good boy,” he said, before closing the door.
“Nice dog.”
“Yeah, he dudn’t do shit.”
He gestured at her and Carly took a cautious step forward, making sure to leave several feet of space between her and Kendall. In her head, she heard all the warnings about how deceptively fast someone can close in on you. Faster than you can draw a weapon from its holster. She wasn’t sure if it had been her father or Tansy who had made that warning. Maybe both.
“Alright,” he said, taking off the mask. “Enough with the theatrics.”
Carly looked at the face now staring back at her. He was older than she’d imagined, his skin sun-baked and dry. Reddish, as if permanently burnt from the desert sun. He had a faint goatee. Prominent crow’s feet.
He smiled with yellow teeth. “Are you gonna take off yours?”
“You already tried that joke.”
“Oh, yeah?” He turned, opened another door, and motioned her inside. “Step into my office.”
“No.”
He frowned, and a few dozen more wrinkles appeared. His face looked like candied glass.
“Thanks, but this is far enough.” She knew better than to get cornered.
“Would it make you feel better if I let you pull your gun out?”
“What?”
“Go ahead. Pull your gun out.”
She didn’t.
“Go ahead,” he implored, his voice lilting musically. “It’s okay.”
The back of her neck prickled and Carly quickly turned around. The hallway leading to the exit was empty, but when she turned back around, Kendall was gone.
She drew her weapon.
Carly held the gun in front of her, tucked close to her belly in a defensive position. She crept up to his office doorway and swung around the corner, the gun now fully extended and ready to aim and fire on Kendall and whatever bullshit he was up to.
But he was just sitting at his desk.
“See?” he said calmly. “Don’t it make you feel better?”
She scanned the room for danger.
Nothing. Just a filthy mess of computer parts and paperwork.
“Don’t it? Don’t it feel safer?” He was thumbing through a stack of papers. “You got your gun trained on me. I’m defenseless. Can’t move.” He grabbed a few pages and then stood up, folding the paper and slipping it into his pocket. “Well, alright. . . . Ready for the tour?”
She eased up with the gun, pointing it down. “If it ends with me getting the hard drive.”
“You and that hard drive.” He shook his head as he walked back around his desk and toward the doorway. Carly gave him his space, and then she followed him down the hall and into a large warehouse. “So what do you think of my little operation here? Pretty nice, huh?”
She didn’t bother to inspect it too closely. Her only concern was to avoid tripping over the odd keyboard or inkjet printer. If she was on the ground, she’d lose what little advantage she had. “It’s a pile of junk.”
“Another man’s treasure, Darlin’. Another man’s treasure.”
Her grip tightened on the gun.
“Take a good look, though. It’s all gonna be gone soon. I actually came to just grab some last stuff.”
“What about your dog?”
�
�My dog? No, he ain’t mine. He came with the place.”
They rounded a few junk piles and ended up at a workstation. Long tables covered in dust, plastic, and frayed wires. Kendall pointed to an opened computer tower, some relic of a thing hooked up to an old CRT monitor. A keyboard lay on top of the tower, and a mouse on top of that.
“There she is.” He knocked on the dusty glass of the monitor. “I hooked it up so you could explore it and make sure it’s the real deal.”
He powered up the machine and they waited for what felt like ten minutes.
“This startup’s a bitch, ain’t it?”
Carly ignored him and instead looked behind her for the twentieth time. When she turned back, a Windows 2000 OS screen was staring back at her.
“Ta-da,” Kendall said cheerfully.
She moved in to start navigating through the machine, but he was standing so fucking close. “Can you fucking back off for a second?”
Kendall turned and walked away without saying anything. No jokes. Nothing.
In his absence, Carly sped through the contents of the hard drive. It was indeed, as Kendall said, the real deal. The original, too.
“How many copies did you make of this?” she hollered across the room.
“Why don’t you go ahead and check,” he called back. “I know you know how.”
Carly checked.
It was un-copied.
“You must think I’m a real son of a bitch,” he said, laughing. Carly unplugged the machine and ripped the hard drive out of the case with her bare hands.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the tour. Good luck with the move.” She turned around to look for him. “Kendall?”
He was gone.
“Kendall?”
The lights turned off.
“Tansy?!”
25
Tansy
He heard the screams over his radio. And then other voices, men, several of them sounding as panicked as Carly. Something was definitely wrong.
The lights were out?
He heard mass confusion, the sounds of people scrambling around in the dark. He heard Carly calling for help.
Armed with night-vision goggles and an AR-15, Tansy slipped in the rear door, careful not to let the metal door clang shut behind him. He was immediately faced with a long, empty hallway. Along it were several closed doors, and at the end, at the opening, a figure holding a gun flashed by.
“They’re raiding us!” someone cried. “Fucking raiding us!”
Crap. It was the worst possible outcome. Instead of beating the FBI to the militia compound, they’d simultaneously converged into one giant shit show. He had to find Carly and get them both out of there, fast.
“Everyone hold your positions,” he whispered into his headset. He didn’t need any more of his people in the potential kill zone. In fact, it might even be a good idea to have one of his men make contact with the Feds, update them on the plot twist, the presence of friendlies in the warehouse. But there was an even better idea—grabbing Carly and getting the fuck out of there and not having to explain themselves at all. The hard drive would be a bonus.
“Start up the generator!” someone cried behind him.
Tansy needed to act fast, keep his advantage. He hustled down the hallway, along the wall, all the way to the end where he took a peek around the corner into the warehouse area. At first, all he could see were tall piles of computer scrap, but around one of them stepped an armed thug in military fatigues. He had both hands stretched out in front of him, a handgun in one of them, and he was walking slowly like a zombie toward a row of work tables. Tansy watched him nearly trip over a bunch of power cords. But there was something else by his feet. A woman, crouching on the ground.
Carly.
A horrified look on her face. Hands shakily gripping a revolver. She looked around blindly, as blind, confused, and scared as when he’d rescued her on that cliff in Northern Nevada.
He looked back to the armed militia member. He’d moved carefully to one of the desks and was feeling around for something. A flashlight appeared in his hands. He shone it down the aisle between scrap piles. The light was not yet at Carly. But it was close, zigzagging along the ground as it moved closer. He could see her body stiffen. Shit! She was freezing up. He silently pleaded for her to shoot him. Shoot him. Aim and fire at the light.
But she didn’t.
She probably couldn’t see his gun, had no idea of the danger she was in.
He stepped closer.
Shoot him!
But she was still frozen.
And so Tansy had no choice but to put a small red dot on the center of the man’s chest, and then double tap the trigger.
He dropped immediately and without a sound. When Tansy looked back to Carly, she was gone.
Tansy felt someone’s body slam into him hard from behind, the momentum knocking him over onto the cool tile floor, his rifle rattling loudly as it skipped away from him on the ground. The pressure was still on him, someone’s full weight pressing him down. And then hands at his face, and then arms around his neck, choking him. Tansy shot one of his arms up between his neck and the attacker, peeling away the attacking arm. It slipped greasily, landing back around his head this time, his goggles bending and snapping off his head. When he squirmed out of the headlock, the room lights came back on. And when he wasn’t grunting, he could hear the distant drone of a generator engine. But the grunting returned as he spun his attacker by the shoulders, an old wrestling reversal. On top of his attacker now, and with a knee pinned against his belly, Tansy took a second to look at the face of the bank robber. Goatee, red and wrinkled face, hateful beady eyes.
“Tansy!” Carly cried from across the room.
His attacker slipped out of Tansy’s pin like a snake through a child’s hands. He watched as the man dove for the AR-15.
Carly screamed again, but it was silenced by a loud gunshot.
Somehow during it all, all the grunting and screaming and the mad dash for an AR-15, someone had been able to sneak up on Tansy and club his arm with a hard and heavy object. The force of it knocked his arm forward, the concussion rocking through his body. But the odd thing was that it didn’t hurt. It only bled.
He wasn’t hit. He’d been shot.
Tansy looked back to Carly, who had a gun in her hands and a horrified look on her face. She’d fired the miss, the almost catastrophic miss, from twenty-five yards. And the man who’d picked up the AR-15, who was raising it to aim at Tansy’s head, was a lot closer than twenty-five yards.
And then another gunshot rang out.
The man dropped fast, his body thudding against the ground on top of the rifle. No more movement.
Tansy looked back to see Carly. She didn’t look scared anymore.
The sounds of voices from the hallway kept Tansy from congratulating her, from running up, grabbing her and holding her, and from thanking her. And then another sound, the tinny squawk of someone’s voice coming through a headset that was lying on the floor. Tansy grabbed it and held it against his ear, a warning about the Feds and their tactical unit that was arriving sounding in his ear. He was glad he’d kept his men on the roof. Not so glad about putting Carly through the shit show.
Although she already looked accustomed to it.
“I get to drive,” she said, thrusting her hand forward. Her hand . . . holding a beat-up hard drive with cables still dangling. “Let’s go.”
Yes, go. They should go now and leave the rest to the FBI. Let them clean up the stragglers and the bodies. Let them try to piece it all together. They finally had their missing puzzle piece.
They hustled to the back entrance of the store, Tansy taking a quick look behind them before unlocking the door. When they emerged into the morning light, Tansy was sure he’d be staring at a few dozen gun muzzles of an FBI tactical unit.
But the parking lot was as empty as it had always been.
26
Carly
Carly was staring
out the window, looking down at the frenzied hive of activity that was Las Vegas. It was a nice view. They were on the top floor.
Except it wasn’t an executive suit.
Or even a hotel.
“Hey, Jasper,” said a woman’s voice from the doorway. “We’re closing up.”
“Yeah, I’m just about done,” Jasper said, putting the finishing touches on Tansy’s bandage. “You’re lucky it was just a graze, or we’d be here a lot longer.”
Carly moved away from the window and walked over to the bed where Tansy had been sitting for the last twenty minutes. She felt horrible.
“Cheer up,” Tansy said, smiling at her. “I’ve had a lot worse than this.”
“Yeah,” said Jasper, applying the final layer. “Both of you should be happy. You didn’t hit anything serious.”
“Yeah, she did,” Tansy said with an evil grin.
The image of a man’s lifeless body flashed before her eyes.
“Saved my life,” Tansy jumped down off the bed. His arm—his good arm—wrapped around her and wrestled away her morbid thoughts. “You saved my life,” he said again, this time sounding as serious as the sentiment.
Carly thought of how he’d saved hers—without shooting her in the arm while doing so. And despite the odd feelings of it, the new feeling of killing someone, she was glad she’d been able to return the favor. She was also glad that there was one fewer terrorist for the world to deal with. The hard drive was theirs. And they were both alive. And together.
“I have a contact that can take care of that thing for you,” said Jasper, rubbing a squirt of anti-bacterial soap into his hands.
His “contact” turned out to be a janitor. “That thing” was the hard drive. And the hospital incinerator would “take care of it.” But still, Carly couldn’t help but give Jasper a suspicious look. “How well do you trust your friend?” She had gone through too much to not wonder.
“What?” asked Jasper, sounding a little confused.
“Your guy,” she said. “Can he be compromised?”
DARC Ops: The Complete Series Page 40