by Brandt Legg
They escorted him to the steps of the plane. He suddenly remembered reading somewhere that if you were ever abducted, you must never let them get you to a second location, because if you did, your chances of survival were almost none. His mind flashed quickly on every option. The nearly deserted tarmac was not a great place to make a stand against eight armed men and however many more were on board the jet.
How far away could airport personnel be? he wondered, trying not to panic. If they get me on that plane and fly away, I’ll have no hope.
Halfway up the steep staircase to the open door of the jet, Chase decided live or die now. Assuming the role of action hero again, without thinking through any kind of plan, he kicked backwards, connecting with the shin of one of the armed men behind him. The man, caught off guard, went backwards, colliding into the two following him. Chase rammed his shoulder into the lower back of the man in front of him, then spun around and attempted to leap the tangle of thugs below him.
Someone’s arm hooked Chase’s leg midair, causing him to crash into a railing, and with his wrists restrained, he landed badly on an elbow. Something hard hit his jaw at the same time. His daring escape thwarted, Chase was being dragged up the remaining stairs before he realized it. Barely able to get his feet down before hitting another step, they’d pulled him into the cabin of the aircraft, where bright lights greeted him. No longer even feigning politeness, the men pushed him down a corridor of the corporate-style jet and shoved him into a conference room, where a stern looking woman was waiting.
Thirty-Three
Chase stared at the woman with complete contempt and not an ounce of the fear that others might have felt after being abducted at gunpoint and brought to a plane on a secluded runway. “Do you know who I am?” he asked, less as a question and more as a threat. “Get these handcuffs off me.”
“Mr. Malone, of course I know who you are. I’m not in the habit of picking up strangers at gunpoint and bringing them to my plane. The question is, do you know who I am?”
“I don’t care who you are,” Chase snapped, even more annoyed that the woman did know his identity and yet had still kidnapped him. “Since you know who I am, then you’re obviously some sort of confused official, and seeing how we are still in the United States of America, I have rights, and I plan to use them. Now give me my damn phone back so I can call my attorney, my senator, and the FBI.”
“Mr. Malone, please sit down,” Tess said, summoning all her patience. “And we can see about getting those restraints removed.”
“No! I don’t want to sit. I demand to be let off this plane right now. And then you can tell my attorneys your name, and—”
The woman walked over, looking him in the eye. “Chase, I don’t have a lot of time, and we have quite a few things to discuss.” She motioned toward the chair in one final attempt to get him to sit and cooperate.
Chase saw something in her eyes which made him realize he might not want this woman as an adversary. Maybe his best option was to hear her out. Curious as to why she’d gone to so much trouble for this meeting, he sat down.
She returned to the seat across from him. “Good. Let’s start over. My name is Tess Federgreen. I do apologize for the way in which you were brought here, but we really had no choice. I work for a division of Homeland Security that doesn’t exist, and the very fact that we are speaking right now means you are in a world of trouble.”
“I don’t need some bureaucrat with an overinflated sense of self-importance to tell me that I’m in trouble,” Chase said, unimpressed. “But seeing how I’m being held at gunpoint, why don’t you just get to the point.”
She smiled curtly. “My, you are an arrogant one, aren’t you?”
“See how you’d act if you were met on the runway at gunpoint and dragged onto a plane in the middle of the night.”
“Yes, I see your point. However, it’s in your best interest to be on your best behavior. Chase, you need to work with me.” Her eyes were black glass, and then they softened. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“Really? Why don’t you start by telling all your friends with the guns to go get me a pizza?” Although his angry front was genuine, at the same time Chase wondered if he was about to be arrested for the Vancouver massacre. For security reasons, the suites had been reserved under assumed names, but eventually that might fall apart, and the concierge had recognized him. He still shuddered at the thought of Rong Lo cutting off Bob and Dave’s hands and ripping out their teeth.
“My job is to make certain that all the corporations in the world, many of which are now bigger than countries, play nice together,” Tess said. “You may not be aware of this, but corporate espionage is a far bigger industry than the CIA, and their counterparts around the world, combined. I know that you’re smart enough to figure out that what follows espionage is often war. That’s not going to happen on my watch. I’m determined to make sure that the corporate wars stay cold.”
“Happy to hear it, but you may be a little late.” He thought of Porter. “Either way, what does this have to do with me?”
“Oh, Chase, you do disappoint me. But it has been a rough day, so I’ll give you another chance, and please remember, I don’t like games.” She handed him a bottle of water.
“Neither do I, so what do you want?” he asked, realizing he was as thirsty as he’d ever been, but before he took a sip, he re-capped the bottle and set it down.
“You need to make a deal with TruNeural.”
“For my life?” Chase shook his head. “Are you sure you don’t work for Franco Madden? Because I don’t believe the US government is advocating extortion to avoid murder.” He rested his chin in his hand and squinted his eyes.
Tess laughed. “If you only knew.” She absently clicked a turquoise bracelet she always wore. “But, Chase, don’t flatter yourself. The government doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead. What does concern us is avoiding an all-out corporate war.”
“Yeah, well, that’s the least of your worries,” Chase said, thinking of the RAIN storm brewing and wondering what they knew about the MSS.
“GlobeTec is not isolated. If they come after Balance Engineering, it sets into motion a chain of events we may no longer be able to control.”
“And that’s my problem?” Chase asked, annoyed she was still missing the larger issue. “I don’t see why your priorities matter to me.”
“The objectives of the government, in this case, are actually aligned with yours.”
“Isn’t that convenient,” Chase said contemptuously.
“It is, if you wish to stay alive.”
Thirty-Four
Tess Federgreen had released Chase with a final warning. “This was a courtesy call. Next time we won’t be so friendly. Our mandate is clear, our demands non-negotiable.”
As if to demonstrate her seriousness, at dawn the following morning, CISS agents raided Balance Engineering headquarters, carting off boxes of hard drives and other materials.
Hours after his tarmac interrogation with Tess, Chase and Dez met secretly in an airport motel room. Chase checked his watch—almost three a.m. Thankfully the noise from air traffic had slowed down. Still, the moments of quiet unnerved him while they took a count of the lives lost in their effort to stop TruNeural.
As Chase filled his partner in on his encounter with Tess and laid out the covert CISS agency’s mission, Dez sat astonished.
“Can the government just kidnap a citizen?” Dez asked.
“Apparently.” Chase fiddled with his multi-tool. The goons who’d grabbed him at the airport had taken it. When Tess released him, she returned it. He’d asked her if she’d been afraid he was going to “unscrew” her guys or maybe stage a coup with pliers. She wasn’t amused.
“Then you were right,” Dez said. “The government isn’t going to help us.” The “Gourmet Geek,” as Chase sometimes called his partner, had brought some pecan-wild rice-stir-fry with purple daikon pickle and an arugula-pomegranate salad with tangy citrus dressing—a
favorite of Chase’s. But although both were hungry, neither had much of an appetite.
“Quite the contrary, it seems,” Chase replied, pacing in front of the powered off television. “Tess is pretending to help us, but it was clearly an ultimatum that we aren’t to get in GlobeTec’s way.”
Dez, reclining across the bed, staring at the textured ceiling. His face seemed hollow, his eyes filled with anxiety. “Then it’s just us?”
“We have some help,” Chase said.
Dez looked over at him as if he’d said something impossible, as if they were already beyond any kind of help.
“The Garbo-three,” Chase continued. “Once they get us the codes, I can use my back door—”
“The Garbo-three?” Dez echoed, exasperated. “They’re likely already dead. And we’re next. Remember our offices? The entire network has been compromised. Franco Madden probably knows where we are right now along with all the ingredients in the salad!”
“I’m not convinced the break-in was Franco’s work,” Chase said. “That was more likely the MSS.” He thought bitterly about the results of Rong Lo’s brutal attack in Vancouver.
“Oh, well, that makes me feel better,” Dez said, plunging his fork into the rice as if to disintegrate it with a stab. “The detectives investigating the break-in are pretty sharp. I bet by morning they’ll connect the dots to that bloodbath in Vancouver and figure out Bob and Dave worked for us and that you were there. You might be lucky enough to get arrested before Franco has a chance to kill you.”
“Dez, I need you to stop panicking. Quit assuming the worst,” Chase said, standing above his partner. “We need your brain in this fight. We can win. Tess told me CISS is concerned this situation between us and TruNeural could lead to a worldwide corporate conflict of a scale and scope we can’t fully understand. She said, ‘CISS knows enough to realize the aftermath of such a conflict would almost instantly mean the end of US dominance in the world.’”
“More good news,” Dez said, sitting up. “You’re a regular laugh-a-minute.”
“Don’t you see?” Chase asked. “She’s not telling us something. Balance Engineering isn’t big enough to mess with TruNeural—they have GlobeTec behind them. They could squash us in a minute. And she must know about Porter—I could tell—yet she ignores it. She doesn’t care.”
Dez began to pick at the food again. “So you’re saying GlobeTec is going against somebody else?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Chase joined Dez with a mouthful of salad.
“Who?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I bet Adya or her father can figure it out.”
“She’s on her way to New York as we speak.”
“Her dad’s in the country?” Chase asked.
“No, but we thought it best to get her out of town.”
Chase nodded. “You should go, too.” Then he looked warmly at his old friend, motioning with a fork full of picked out pomegranates. “This food is delicious. Thanks, Dez.”
“I’m thinking about it,” Dez said. “What about you? And don’t pick out all the pomegranates.”
He started picking out the pecans. “Waiting to hear from Wen.”
Dez forked the pecan Chase was reaching for. “Man, you really do have a death wish. Franco Madden . . . a secret government agency . . . they aren’t enough? You really want the Chinese Gestapo after you, too?”
“Twag said something before he died,” Chase said, staring into the dark flat screen on the dresser. “Wen told him I had to stop the RAIN.”
“She knows about TruNeural plans? How?” Dez asked, visibly surprised.
“Something else,” Chase added, still looking deep into the screen. “Wen said they’ve already got CHIPs on the street.”
“CHIPs? Does she mean implanted?”
Chase nodded without turning around.
“How?” Dez asked in a whisper. “That’s a decade away, at least.”
“Not anymore.”
“But how?” Dez asked again, standing up.
“I don’t know, but we created this monster.”
“We had no idea . . . ” Dez started to argue before giving up the point. “If CHIPs are out there . . . ”
“We can still stop it.”
“You’re going to outsmart CHIPs?” Dez asked incredulously. “Impossible!”
“There is a way,” Chase said, turning slowly to face Dez. “But you’re not going to like it.”
Thirty-Five
Ninety minutes before dawn, Dez slipped out, heading to a friend’s boat. The Wadogo was no longer safe. Chase had been asleep for less than two hours when, just after sunrise, a knock on the motel room door woke him.
“Who is it?” Chase said groggily.
“Flint Jones. Mars sent me.”
Chase unbolted the door and cracked it open a couple of inches.
Flint Jones looked like an NFL player who’d put on a suit for an off-season television interview—no matter how well tailored, it still appeared as if any sudden movement might result in him bursting out of the fabric. Chase thought linebacker—solid muscle stuffed into sleeves. His hand-tooled brown leather cowboy boots seemed a better match to his leathery face than they did the suit. As he opened the door wider and Flint took off his shades, his keen eyes were revealed already searching for threats, opportunity, any edge, any angle to work.
“Don’t ever open the door without a weapon,” Flint said, extending his arm.
“You said Mars sent you, and I was expecting you,” Chase said defensively, taking Flint's hand.
Instead of shaking hands, Flint pushed Chase into the room and quickly re-bolted the door. “Doesn’t matter who you think someone is, or who you trust, everyone can be compromised.”
Chase would have thought this was overkill a few days ago, but after Bob and Dave, Vancouver, Twag, he knew he needed something beyond the traditional BE security team members. His needs now required a specialist who could anticipate and neutralize threats from the MSS and GlobeTec’s hit squads. Chase had done what he always did when he faced trouble he was unsure how to handle—he turned to Mars.
“What happened to your last security detail?” Flint asked Chase as the two men stood facing each other, Flint at least three inches taller.
“I ran into some problems in Vancouver,” Chase began, not sure how much to say or how to put it.
“How many bodyguards were with you?”
“Two.”
“Did they survive?” Flint stared at Chase, his eyes eliciting the truth. And in that exchanged glance, Chase knew he was in the presence of a man who could handle almost anything—had probably seen just about everything. Flint Jones exuded the calm of someone who’d lived with bad news for a long time. He understood why Mars had recommended him. He recalled something his old friend had once told him, that you could always tell a man who’d been in prison, who’d killed someone, had handled turmoil on a regular basis, been in combat, or nearly been killed himself—there was something in his look that he never lost. Those traumatic things change a person indelibly, not always for the better, but it also conditioned them for certain tasks or difficult lines of work. Flint Jones was such a man.
“No,” Chase answered the question. “Unfortunately, they were both killed.”
“Then how did you survive?” Flint asked, as if this kind of thing happened every day. It wasn’t as though Flint didn’t care about the loss of life, but if people had died doing the job he was considering accepting, he needed details. Flint understood that death was part of life, especially his life.
“Someone else showed up to help me,” Chase said, remembering Twag’s heroics and split-second decisions, which were always right. “Someone sent by a friend.”
“And what happened to him?”
Chase was silent for a long moment, then finally said, “They killed him, too.”
This time Flint nodded slowly. He could sense that Chase had been affected a bit more by that loss. He added the fa
ct to the dozens of others he’d already ascertained about his potential client—information that he might use to keep Chase alive. “Same question. How did you survive?”
“It took him a while to die. He got me to safety first.”
Flint heard the bitterness in the reply. “Seems these men did their job well enough,” he said, then looked Chase in the eyes. “I’ll take the job.”
“Don’t even want to know what we’re up against first?”
“Don’t have to. Three men dead trying to protect you. Obviously not anyone too friendly. This is what I do. Doesn’t really matter if there’s an army after you, my job is to keep you alive. I get three-thousand dollars a day, plus all expenses. If you’re alive at the end of the year, I get a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus. You good with that?”
“Looking forward to writing you that bonus check.”
Thirty-Six
Wen had been driving for nine hours, stopping only for gas and food, although she thought the word “food” was often too loosely applied. She’d managed to get a new set of plates from a car the same make and color as hers. Good thing so many people preferred their automobiles to be white, she thought as the Trans-Canada Highway vanished in the rearview mirror.
Along the way, she’d sent word to Chase via a few “friends,” like an old-fashioned game of telephone. Eventually the message landed in the lap of the Jamaican man Chase had met at the Wreck, his favorite fish and chips place. He passed it to the restaurant’s manager, who actually knew Chase’s assistant’s phone number from her frequent takeout orders. His assistant made the final contact to Chase, along with a sentence that verified it could only have originated from Wen. “Remember when the star fell over the lake at Beihai Park?” No one else knew of the summer night they’d spent on a luxurious rowboat, and promised love forever. Sometime around two a.m., a brilliant shooting star streaked across the muted sky, somehow cutting through the haze, pollution, and glow from millions of lights. They’d made a wish. He still hoped it might come true.