by Sean Robins
Yep. Kurt von der Hagen, the legendary freedom-fighter, tyranny-battling rebel, ruthless terrorist, deadly super-assassin, and number one on every security agency’s most-wanted list was sitting right there in the middle of my freaking living room. Right when I was about to propose. King Kong wrench, thrown.
Liz looked at me with wide eyes. “Why’re you two talking like you know each other?”
“Sweetheart, meet Kurt, whom I’m sure you recognize from all the wanted-dead-or-dead posters,” I answered. “Newsflash: He’s my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were in elementary school. Kurt, this is my girlfriend, Elizabeth.”
Kurt stood up, grimacing with pain and clutching his side, and in perfect Spanish—which I could mostly understand but couldn’t speak—said, “It’s a pleasure meeting you, Elizabeth. May I say you look absolutely stunning.”
Liz looked lost for words, but one didn’t become an acrobatic pilot/stunt woman without fast reactions and the ability to think under pressure. “Charmed, I’m sure”—she said in English—”but in case you haven’t noticed, you’re bleeding all over our furniture. Let’s patch you up, and then you can tell me what Public Enemy Number One’s doing in our living room.”
I snorted. “Public Enemy Number One? Huh! John Dillinger ain’t got nothing on Kurt. Mr. Super Assassin eats the likes of him for breakfast.”
“With all these movie references, I confess half of the time I have no idea what Jim’s talking about,” Kurt said, “but I can already tell the two of you are perfect for each other.”
Liz asked, “You’re ‘best friends’ with someone who doesn’t watch movies?”
“It’s a very long story,” I said.
Liz had some medical training and had dealt with many wounds and injuries in her career. She went to our bedroom to bring her bag of medical tools.
“Cordelia?” I said.
“Yes, Jim?”
“What’s going on outside?”
“Nothing much. All quiet,” she said.
“Did anyone follow Kurt?”
“Not so far as I can see, and you know I can see a lot.”
“Full lockdown mode,” I said.
Half-inch steel sheets covered all my housed windows and doors. The only way someone could enter now was using explosives.
“This won’t stop SCTU, you know,” said Kurt.
“True. But Cordelia can see them coming, and it’ll give us more time to figure out what to do,” I said.
Liz came back to the living room. Kurt took off his trench coat. I got my shoulder under his arm and helped him walk to our dining table and lie on it. Liz slashed Kurt’s shirt with a pair of scissors. She unwrapped the piece of cloth around Kurt’s waist and examined the bullet wound on his side. I tried to look over her shoulder.
“Give me some room,” she told me. A couple of minutes later she added, “It isn’t bad, but you’re losing too much blood. Hold still.”
She debrided the wound and started patching Kurt up.
“Before I forget, Cordelia?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to inform me if an armed man tries to enter my house?”
She asked with concern in her voice, “Jim, are you all right? Have you had brain trauma recently? Do want me to call a doctor?”
Much like her owner, Cordelia was a wise-ass. Liz couldn’t stifle a laugh.
Kurt flinched. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.”
Cordelia continued, “This is Kurt, your oldest friend. He’s been in this house 523 times already. The last time he was here he was covered in blood and heavily armed too, and he was accompanied by Allen, who was carrying a grenade launcher.”
Liz laughed. “What? No bazooka?”
My face grew hot. Kurt pressed his lips together and averted his eyes. Cordelia had just reminded us of the last time we’d seen each other, nearly two years ago, right before Kurt started his campaign to bring Zheng down. He’d come to ask me if I’d consider joining the Resistance. I told him starting a revolution against Zheng was suicide, and I did my best to convince him not to go down that road either. I also said I didn’t agree with his methods. I was a soldier, not an assassin. I’d killed plenty of people in combat, sitting in the cockpit of my fighter jet, but I just couldn’t do it with a sniper rifle, or worse, a bomb, especially if innocent bystanders were at risk. I was a very good fighter pilot, but I’d make a terrible freedom fighter.
That was the day I turned my best friend down.
I rubbed my temples. “How did he get in?”
“He asked nicely,” answered Cordelia.
“I need clean towels,” said Liz, still working on Kurt’s injury.
I said, “On it,” and darted towards the bathroom.
New York - December 24, 2047
Allen knew something was very wrong.
He was in one of Resistance’s safe houses, a small studio flat with a tiny window and cheap, battered furniture that looked like it’d been bought in a yard sale. Allen was sharing the place with Mark, a young man who had recently joined the Resistance. Mark kept walking back and forth and looking out of the window, his tall frame hunched. He was sweating profusely even though the room wasn’t hot, and he kept sneaking furtive glances at Allen’s Glock 55, which Allen had been dismantling and cleaning while sitting behind a small wooden dining table in one corner.
It looked like the younger man was trying to make a decision. Allen chose to move things forward. He put down the Glock on the table, leaned back in his chair and asked, “They got to you?”
Mark averted his eyes. His shoulders sagged. He muttered, “They’ve got my family,” and took another glance at the dismantled gun. Then Mark pulled his own sidearm, cocked it, took a step toward the dining table, pointed the gun at Allen’s head and yelled, “Don’t move a muscle, old man!”
“Fatal mistake,” said Allen.
Allen shot the young man from under the table, several times and in quick succession. Splinters of wood flew up in the air. Mark was hit in the chest and belly. He fell backward on the floor, blood gushing from his wounds.
Allen stood up, a smoking Smith and Wesson M&P Bodyguard in his hand. The muscles around his mouth twitched. With sadness in his voice, he told the dying man, “Ankle holster, rookie.”
The door of the flat was kicked open with a loud bang, and several SCTU soldiers rushed in.
Allen’s mouth went dry, and beads of sweat appeared on his bald head. Trapped in the small flat with no other exit, he was doomed. His adrenaline soaring, he took aim at the first soldier’s head, right between his eyes. The barrel flashed, and the SCTU goon toppled. Allen shot another man. His gun clicked empty. The soldiers rushed him. He hit a man in the face using his gun like a club and kicked the second in the balls. Two other soldiers grabbed his arms. He went down under the weight of the attackers. They handcuffed him and stood him up. He kept struggling, but there were ten of them.
That was it then. Allen never thought he’d run forever. Still, he was disappointed that he’d let himself get captured, especially so soon after the Resistance’s greatest victory, killing Palermo. He thought about Kurt and wondered if he’d managed to escape.
An SCTU captain, wearing the force’s dark brown uniform, walked in and stood in front of Allen. “Where is von der Hagen?” he asked.
Allen spit out blood. “With your mother.”
The officer nodded to a spectacularly big soldier, with shoulders wide as a bull. The giant swaggered closer to Allen and hit him in his belly, chin, and nose. Allen felt his nose break. With blood pouring out of his nostrils, he thought he was about to lose consciousness. These guys weren’t kidding around.
He shouted, “Okay! Okay! I tell you! Jesus!”
The captain held up a hand, and the soldier stopped. Allen looked the officer in the eyes and smirked. “With your sister.”
The captain rolled his eyes and was about to say something when a young STCU lieutenant ran in and saluted. “Sir! We got him. He’s hiding out
with a Major Jim Harrison, an air force fighter pilot.”
Allen thought, Jim Fucking Harrison? Really?
“That Major Harrison?” asked the captain.
“Yes sir, unless there’s two of them,” answered the young man. The captain gave him a hard look. He blushed and averted his eyes.
“Is he a Resistance member?” the first officer asked.
“Unknown, sir, but we don’t think so,” the lieutenant said. “He’s an old acquaintance of von der Hagen. We interrogated him a couple of times right after von der Hagen founded the Resistance, but he didn’t seem to know anything.”
The captain looked at Allen and flashed a satisfied smile. “Well, it appears today’s our lucky day. Let’s go.”
He walked out of the room, followed by the other officer.
Behind them, Allen growled, “Yeah, you better run.”
Liz, putting fresh bandages on Kurt’s wound, asked me, “So how did you end up being best friends with William Wallace here?”
“Huh! I got that reference,” said Kurt.
“We went to the same elementary and high school together, right here in New York,” I said. “After my parents died, I spent most of my time in Kurt’s house. You remember I once told you my father was a politician?”
“How can I forget? That’s almost the only thing I know about your dad,” said Liz. “You never talk about your parents, so I decided not to ask any questions.”
“Good decision,” said Cordelia. “Do not go there.”
I ignored her. “Some thirty years ago, Kurt’s father and mine used to work at what was then known as the United Nations. The two of them came up with the idea of the United Earth. After my dad passed away, Kurt’s father vowed to continue the work in his memory. You know how that turned out.”
She did. Everybody knew. It’d be hard to miss the rise and fall of the United Earth’s government unless you lived in a pineapple under the sea.
I looked at my best friend, lying injured and in obvious pain on my dining table. He looked older. No wrinkles or gray hair, but his eyes were weary, and a hardness had replaced their youthful joie de vivre. I remembered how ecstatic he was when his father Thomas von der Hagen was elected as Earth’s first president after a world-wide election some three years ago. The whole world rejoiced. We all thought humanity had finally put its destructive tendencies aside and was ready to unleash its full potential. It was a global party from Sao Paulo to Tehran to Cape Town, Paris, Sydney and San Francisco. The Unification was going to start a glorious era of peace, cooperation, advancement and economic development for the human race that would last forever.
It lasted less than a year.
Thomas’s fatal mistake was to appoint General Graham Zheng, an influential American general of Chinese descent, as the director of SCTU. Right under Thomas’s nose, General Zheng gathered the most ruthless people on the planet around him and turned SCTU into an uncontrollable monster.
The dream of lasting peace on a united Earth died when Zheng put a bomb in Thomas’s car, killing both Kurt’s parents. Zheng executed all the United Earth’s high-ranking government officials, declared himself ruler of Earth, and with the army and SCTU’s support butchered whoever stood in his way.
Earth’s national governments quickly fell in line. With both the army and SCTU concentrated in North America, the USA and Canada didn’t have a choice, and the East Asia Coalition was more than happy to support Zheng. Zheng bribed the other world powers by offering their leaders enormous economic rewards. With the major countries in the world in Zheng’s pocket, the smaller countries’ only option was to capitulate.
The national governments bowed down to Zheng, but ordinary citizens had a different idea. They fought back, spear-headed by Kurt and a French-Canadian former Green Beret, Allen Jonson, who used to be the Thoma’s head of security. These two founded the Resistance, which later spread like wildfire all around the planet.
The Resistance wasn’t a Gandhi-like pacifist movement. In the beginning, Kurt and his followers were hopelessly out-matched and out-numbered; they were a bunch of suicidal guys fighting the might of Earth’s collective military and security forces. Kurt decided the only way to do this was an-eye-for-an-eye policy. He went on a rampage of political assassinations, sabotage, and general mayhem the likes of which had never been recorded in history, and he proved he was really good at it. I never understood how the mild, idealistic young man that I knew turned into a super assassin. Allen trained him, and Kurt did have some military experience—he voluntarily enlisted during the war—but he had to have a natural inclination for violence to do it so well.
After Zhang’s coup, I thought about leaving the air force, but flying jet fighters was my passion, and what else was supposed to do with my life? It was the only thing I was really good at. Fortunately, the air force wasn’t involved in the battle with the Resistance; that was the Security and Counter-Terrorism Unit’s job. If one day we were asked to bomb a Resistance stronghold, I’d walk away, court-martial or not. That was my red line. Since the coup, the air force’s main function had been to stop national governments from thinking about secession, which would’ve caused another war, so I’d convinced myself by staying in the air force I was promoting peace. A few months after Zheng’s coup, I met Liz, and my dilemma faded in importance. The stronger our relationship became, the less I thought about leaving the air force.
And now here I was facing all these questions on the night I planned to propose. The luckiest man on the planet, that was me.
Liz, narrowing her eyes, asked me, “We’ve been together for a year and a half, and you never once bloody mentioned your friendship with Kurt?”
I lifted an eyebrow with a control that would make Mr. Spock proud. “How was I supposed to bring this up? ‘By the way, honey, you know this terrorist guy who’s killing people left, right and center? He’s my best friend.’”
“I only kill the bad guys,” said Kurt, color rising in his cheeks.
“Yeah. You’re the Punisher,” I said.
Once Kurt stopped bleeding and it looked like he was in no imminent danger, a thought rose in the back of my mind. “You saved his life. That’s great, but now it’s time for him to leave. If he gets caught here, both Liz’s life and yours will be forfeit.”
But where was he supposed to go? Out on the street swarming with security forces? He was my best friend, and I still felt guilty for leaving him alone in the first place. Plus, there was no way Liz would allow an injured man to be sent to certain death, whatever the consequences.
It was Kurt’s turn to tell us how he had ended up in my house. “I’d been after Palermo for nearly two years—”
Liz and I asked together, “Who’s Palermo?”
Kurt rolled his eyes, then sighed and said, “Cordelia?”
“Nobody important,” she said. “Really. There’s no reason for Jim and Liz to know him. He’s only the director of SCTU and General Zheng’s right-hand man.”
“Tomorrow, I’m going to call the technicians and ask them to change Cordelia’s personality from ‘annoying’ to ‘docile,’” I said.
“On second thought,” said Cordelia, “Palermo always works in the shadows, so there are very few people who know about him.”
“He worked in the shadows,” Kurt corrected her. “Allen and I assassinated him last night. While escaping, I was separated from Allen, and later I was shot. With no safe houses in the immediate area, I ended up here.”
He talked a little more about the chase through the city streets, his evasion tactics and concern about Allen. Then Liz said she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore and retired for the rest of the night. This was probably an excuse to leave Kurt and me alone to talk and catch up.
“It’s good to see you, old friend,” I told Kurt, “but I honestly wish it was under less dangerous circumstances. I don’t particularly wish for us to be put up against the same wall they’ll put you up in front of a firing squad.”
“I’m
sorry, Jim, but I didn’t have a choice. It was either this or passing out in the street. I feel much better though. I can go now.”
He was obviously lying; he was still pale as a vampire. It made him look younger, more innocent. As much as I wanted him out of here, I wanted him alive more. “SCTU hasn’t kicked our door down yet, so I guess we’re safe. You know my home’s your home. You can stay as long as you want. You need to get some rest.” I wiggled my index finger at him. “But if I get executed over this, I promise my ghost will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
Kurt smiled. “You still crack jokes when you’re nervous, I see.”
“And sad, and angry, and frightened. A joke a day keeps the doctors away. Want to catch some sleep?”
“Way too excited to sleep tonight,” said Kurt.
“Want some beer?”
Kurt chuckled. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”
“We don’t have any Paulaners though,” I said. “In our defense, we didn’t expect a visit from you.”
Kurt was born and raised in New York, but Thomas was from Munich. Kurt had inherited two things from his father’s birthplace. One was his love for a Bavarian beer called Paulaners.
“How’re Bayern Munich doing these days?” I asked.
“Europe’s Champions three years in a row, and Super League quarter-finals this year. They wiped the floor with the other teams in the group stage,” he said with a hint of pride in his voice.
I grabbed a few bottles of beer. We made ourselves comfortable on my not-bloodstained sofa and clanked our bottles. Sipping my beer, I said, “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I was when I heard about Janet.”
Kurt’s bright eyes turned dull, and he stared into the distance. “She didn’t have a violent bone in her body. I don’t know what I was thinking when I let her join the Resistance.”
Only then did I realize his cologne smelled familiar. It was Dior Men Dangereux. I was with them when Janet gave Kurt the same brand for his nineteenth birthday ten years ago.