The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset: 1-6

by Ethan Cross

  Demon looked down at his own naked torso, which was now covered in another man’s blood. Then he looked to the pool and back to the pair of awestruck convicts.

  He said, “Come on in, boys. The water’s fine.”

  *

  Maggie had taken charge and organized their group as best she could. She had given her Glock pistol to Powell and her .357 Magnum to Jerry Dunn and instructed them to lead the way to the Control Center East. Then she hauled the three UFL prisoners into the middle of the caravan, with her and Ackerman taking up the rear with the M4A1 assault rifles.

  She hated giving Ackerman a gun at all, but he had proven himself before. And Maggie chose to swallow her pride a bit, rather than put herself in greater danger. The bottom line was that, in a crisis like this, Ackerman was the kind of guy you wanted on your team. Although, she hated to admit that in even the smallest way.

  She could see the questions in Ackerman’s eyes. He knew that something was up with her. She said, “So what’s so important about the control room if the software is down?”

  Ackerman said, “We haven’t had a chance to just chat recently. How are things?”

  Maggie clamped down her jaw so tightly that she felt something pop in her eye socket. She said, “Things are just great. I’m filthy, bloody, and covered with billions of disease-spreading microorganisms which are currently injecting me with Lord knows what kind of exotic diseases. Not to mention the fact that I signed up to be an investigator, not an action hero!”

  “You seem tense.”

  She said, “Ack—”

  She stopped herself as she realized not to use his real name. But what was his false name? Then it hit her. She had given him a name to represent an old friend of hers. She had wanted to remind him that she hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. Now that had backfired on her as she was forced to remember her old friend and the fact that she wasn’t entirely innocent in his death.

  “Alexei, I don’t have time for your crap. Now what about the damn control room?”

  “You still don’t see the potential of this? Think about it a second. This place is wrapped in concentric circles of security and covered by cameras at every angle. If they get that system back online and turn it against their keepers and the outside world…”

  Maggie said, “They would be able to see any attack coming. So they would be able to force a prolonged stalemate.”

  “Foxbury is the perfect storm to become the FBI’s next infamous and bloody standoff. If Lash or whoever is involved takes that control room, then there will be no resistance. There will be no rescue. They will own Foxbury.”

  The ramifications of such a sophisticated security system being used to keep people out rather than in had just started to sink into Maggie’s head when Powell called back, “We hear voices ahead. Several of them.”

  *

  Lisa Spinelli tried to throw up as quietly as possible, which was not an easy thing to do. When the security system went down, she had decided to go straight to the source and access a terminal connected directly to the servers. Whenever possible, always go to the source. Her brother, Peter, had taught her that.

  Once, back in their young and stupid days, Peter had tricked a professor’s grading system. He did it not by hacking the encrypted database but by loading a Trojan onto the teacher’s computer, which then changed the printer font to one of Peter’s design whenever the Spinelli name was detected. Which basically gave him the power to turn c’s into a’s and d’s into b’s. And the funniest part was that the school’s secure server had everything correct, and when the teachers checked their programs, everything would seem in order. Until the grade cards were printed.

  They had eventually been caught, but it was still a lot of fun while it lasted. And the lesson that she and Peter had taken away was that eyes couldn’t be trusted. Only source code could be trusted.

  So she had opened up the maintenance hatch in the back corner of Control Center East and had climbed down into the server room, which was located directly below the CCE.

  She had just started the long and arduous process of backtracing the intrusion and the corrupted code when the screaming started.

  And by the way her coworkers in the CCE had screamed, they must have seen Satan himself up there. And then Satan must have tossed them into a wood chipper.

  If she lived through this, she would never forget the sound of those screams. It had been like she had overheard a wizard transform men and women into squealing pigs and then into whimpering canines and then into silence. Into the silence they fell.

  She began to weep and then threw up again.

  But once her fit of near-silent heaving was over, she returned to work at the terminal. Maybe she could still save Foxbury, and her own life along with it, by doing what she did best.

  The voice that called to her from the top of the access hatch dashed those hopes. The voice was deep and raspy with a thick Scottish accent. “Come on out of there now, love,” the voice said. “You won’t like it if I have to come down after you. You have thirty seconds.”

  She burst into tears and spent the first ten seconds freaking out and trying to wake up from this nightmare. The next ten seconds were wasted on trying to find a weapon. As if she would have had the slightest clue of what to do with any kind of weapon. Then she used the last ten seconds to ascend the maintenance ladder back to the control room.

  In the CCE, the overhead fluorescents were all out, but the light from the display screens, which now showed only an army of loading and error messages, filled the space with a blue glow. Chairs and equipment had been toppled. Terminals and keyboards had been smashed to pieces. The whole room smelled strongly of rust, like the old 1978 Mercury Bobcat she had driven in high school. The car had been born ten years before she was and, by the time it had come into her possession, it was more rust than car. The smell of the CCE reminded her of driving to high school on a hot day.

  When Spinelli saw the first of her coworkers’ bodies, she let out an involuntary shriek and quickly clamped a hand over her mouth.

  The man’s name had been Bill. She had seen pictures of him at his son’s soccer games. She had given him advice on an anniversary present for his wife. And now he had been torn apart. She tried not to let her eyes linger for too long on the body and the mutilation, but she had seen more than enough. Bill’s insides were now his outsides.

  And Lisa Spinelli had a terrible feeling that she was about to endure a similar fate.

  A voice from across the room—a voice with that same Scottish accent and same frightening rasp—said, “Come sit with me.”

  She willed her legs to move. She ascended to the next level of workstations, moving toward the voice.

  The man who had summoned her was turned away so that she could only see him in profile. He sat in one of the many office chairs lining the row of terminals. The same kind of uncomfortable chair that Mr. Powell had purchased in bulk at a heavy discount to stock the retrofitted prison. From where she was standing, the light from the wall of monitors lit his profile and obscured his features. He was just a vague black outline of a man.

  He kicked out the chair beside him and said, “Sit.”

  She complied immediately, and then she looked across at him. It was the first time she had gotten a good look at the man who had murdered her coworkers. The face she saw across from her truly was that of the devil. His features were distorted. His skin was caked in dried crimson. The whites of his eyes glowed in contrast to his other features, which were covered in blood, both dried and freshly spilled.

  They sat in silence long enough to give her cause to jump when he said, “I’m in a grumpy mood, Ms. Spinelli. That’s not your fault, but I’m going to take it out on you just the same.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know lots about you, Lisa. And I know lots about your brother, Peter.”

  “What do you know about Peter? Did you kill him?”

  “Simmer down now, lass. I didn’t kill
your brother, but I think you know why he died.”

  She said, “He would never.”

  “Oh, please. Darling, he sold out even cheaper than we had budgeted for. And you know it’s not even the first time he’s done something like this.”

  “My brother was a good man.”

  He laughed. His teeth glowed like the whites of his eyes. “There are no good men. Just those who have done evil and those with the capacity for it. Those who have already screwed you over, and those who are about to.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because the Legion demands it.”

  “That’s cool. I’m a big fan of the Legion. What exactly do you want from me?”

  He leaned forward in his chair very slowly. She could see a strange glimmer in his eyes. A lust. A hunger. He said, “Do you really want to know?”

  She couldn’t find words.

  He continued, “I would like to wear your flesh. And I mean that in every possible way. I want to tear you open and slip inside of you.”

  She laughed nervously and said, “That’s very flattering, but I am engaged. And we’re in love. Umm. So I’ll have to pass, but let’s still be friends.”

  He chuckled slowly. “I like you, Ms. Spinelli.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  He leaned forward and sniffed her hair. “Let’s just see where it leads us.”

  *

  Marcus sat atop the passenger seat of the sheriff’s SUV. He had ridden to the scene with Bradley Reese, and it hadn’t felt right to use the man’s car, especially after the way he had treated the dead man. That was, if Reese was truly dead, a fact he wouldn’t fully believe until they found a body at the bottom of that pit.

  He said to Sheriff Hall, “How long until you can retrieve the body from the mine?”

  Hall said, “I have someone at my office working on figuring out the proper legal way of doing it.”

  “Can’t you just find one of your guys who has been rock-climbing before? Send him down that hole?”

  “Oh no. Insurance would never allow that.”

  “Come on, I know you’re an elected official, but—”

  Hall said, “About that. I consider myself a straight shooter.”

  “I can see that.”

  “And so I need to come clean about something.”

  Marcus said, “Tell me it’s not as bad as you’re making this sound. I really don’t need any more complications.”

  “Yesterday, a man came into my office. He had made an appointment under the guise of representing a civic action committee wanting to sponsor my next campaign.”

  Hall paused a second as he guided the SUV onto the highway, lights flashing and sirens blaring. Raindrops pelted the windshield. Andrew had told Marcus earlier that they were here for Arizona’s monsoon season, which ran from June to September and often promised some short but heavy downpours.

  Once on the highway, Sheriff Hall dug into his pocket and pulled out a business card. He handed it across to Marcus. One side of the card was a painting that Marcus recognized as a hellish scene painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The other side was even more disturbing. It detailed a hellish torture session in a flowing, precise, handwritten script.

  Hall said, “The man who came into my office said that’s what would happen to my two daughters if I didn’t comply.”

  Marcus said, “Have you had the card analyzed? Dusted for prints, DNA, traced back the card stock?”

  “Yeah, but everything so far came back negative.”

  “What did this man want you to do?”

  “He wanted to be on the next transport going into Foxbury. And he wanted me to put together some fake transfer documents.”

  “And you complied?”

  “You have to understand, at the time I thought Foxbury was the most secure place on the planet. He showed me a live video feed of a man in a black mask with a sniper rifle. Then the video panned over to what he was looking at. It was my daughters’ school.”

  “How do you know it was a live feed?”

  “The man with the scars spoke to the other two men.”

  “But it could have been a recording, and he just set it up to appear live.”

  “I suppose, but the time of day corresponded with it being a live feed. The girls were at recess.”

  “How do you know it was two men? Did you see both of them?”

  Hall said, “No, but from the way the video was shot, it looked like at least two men. Or one man and one woman.”

  “So if you had tried to arrest him, then he kills them right then. And if you don’t get him into Foxbury, he kills them in the way he explained in detail on this card.”

  “Right. He gave me instructions from there on what to do. And I did it. I figured having him locked up in Foxbury would at least buy me some time. Now, with all this going on, I can’t help but feel responsible. I’m thinking of stepping down as sheriff.”

  Marcus rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No, Sheriff Hall. You’re a good man who was protecting his family. I don’t want you to step down. I just wish you had said something sooner.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  Marcus said nothing.

  When they reached the outermost security checkpoint, Sheriff Hall stopped the vehicle and met briefly with his men. They were already establishing a perimeter, but Hall was more concerned with taking back the prison. He picked a handful of men from the tactical unit to enter Foxbury through the manufacturing facility and regain control. Marcus geared up alongside Hall’s tactical team and jumped into the back of their SWAT van.

  Sheriff Hall was at the front of the van, sliding into his tactical gear with as much ease and habit as most men have when slipping into a pair of mesh shorts. Marcus dropped down beside him and said, “Just like riding a bike.”

  Hall said, “Listen. I really appreciate your understanding.”

  “You probably shouldn’t thank me yet. You see, one of the reasons I don’t want you to step down is because now I have something to hold over your head. We may have to do some things that the insurance company is not going to like. For instance, going down into the mine to verify that Bradley Reese is actually dead at the bottom of that hole. And I don’t care if you have to tie a rope around your secretary and lower her down there in order to get it done. Just make it happen.”

  *

  Ackerman and Maggie traded places with Dunn and Powell. An old metal door with a small, reinforced security window inset in its center separated them from the next corridor. Ackerman moved up to the window first.

  He popped his head up for about a second and then pulled himself back out of sight. In that quick glance, he had analyzed and quantified the entire scene.

  He returned to where Maggie was covering the door like a pro, the M4A1 assault rifle at her shoulder and fire in her eyes. He was so proud of how she was coming along.

  She said. “What are you grinning about?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “So, about the corridor full of bad guys … You saw … ”

  “I was just thinking about that time when we were in Chicago and—”

  “First of all, don’t make it sound like we were working together in Chicago. I was there working. You were creepy stalkerizing us.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “How many bullets were exchanged between our group and you while we were in Chicago?”

  “Several, I suppose. But it’s not really a party without a little exchange of gun fire.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just shut up. You always do this. You think it’s funny that other people are afraid and you’re not. It amuses you that I’m scared to death right now.”

  “No, little sister, it most certainly does not.”

  She said, “What did you see?”

  “There are five enemies in the corridor. It appears that they have instructed some of the other convicts to remain in their cells. They are also armed with Tasers that they acquired from the
guards they are holding hostage. Beyond this point is a larger corridor, likely a nexus point for a couple of Foxbury’s different wings. There are a few stairs leading up right after you go through the door, and they have the high ground. My assessment is that they are using this as a holding area for hostages before moving them on to one central location.”

  “You think they’re that well organized?”

  “I think a very powerful man is facing a death sentence, and even after appeals and all the circus, he can’t hope for anything better than his sentence being reduced to life in prison. Or twenty years, which is close to the same thing. He doesn’t like any of those options.”

  “We can’t go in there guns blazing. Not with hostages.”

  “Well … We could.”

  “I won’t risk it. Using your rifle is a last resort. This is not time for shoot first and ask questions never.”

  He said, “The longer we wait, the more complicated things get. They could be reinforced or the dynamics could change. And we don’t have time to go back and find another way around. I’ll give you another five seconds to decide before I take action.”

  “Stand down. You will take no action without my go ahead.”

  “I’m trying very hard to work in a team-based environment right now.”

  She said, “How about you start working in a do-every-damn-thing-I-say environment. And by the way, your promise to Marcus not to kill anyone should still apply.”

  “I won’t kill anyone. Unless, of course, one of them has some kind of medical condition. I can’t always account for every variable. I mean, shit happens.”

  “I don’t want shit to happen! We’re going to double-back and find another way around.”

  Ackerman nodded, and then he ejected the magazine from his rifle. He held it out to her. She looked confused, but she took it from him.

  He leaned forward and said, “I know you’re scared, little sister, and you think that my lack of fear clouds my judgment. But believe me when I tell you that I don’t want you to be afraid, and although I lack fear, that doesn’t mean that I compensate with stupidity. Let me demonstrate.”