Sacrifice

by Dakota Banks

  Maliha closed her eyes. Why shouldn’t I pass this off to the government? I’ve done my best, I got this far, someone else can cross the finish line triumphantly—or pay the price on their conscience, not mine. For a moment her spirits rose. Why not?

  Then she realized that this was the life she’d chosen, to place herself in danger to save others. She started to say something when Hound spoke up.

  “I’ve considered it long enough,” Hound said. “And my vote is no. I’m involved in secret government work I can’t tell you bunch of security risks about, and besides, you don’t have any need to know about it. Let me tell you the first thing that would happen, be it our government or Interpol or whatever. They’d start pulling together their response team of scientists plus establish a military task force. The scientists would want to study the nanites and their effects—problem is, we don’t have any. Mogue made off with the canteen, remember? Fynn would be pulled in for theoretical discussions. Are they going to find an antidote? No, because none of us knows exactly what the hell triggers ’em. The best they might do after a few months is find something that strips Fynn’s coating off the nanites. Big whoop. The task force would start looking for the remaining members of the council. Their first action would be to raid the Keltner Building, finding nothing. Then they’d start sending around photos of council members in an effort to locate them. Do you see a lot of wheel spinning going on here? Given enough time, they’d probably get results. I say shoot the single arrow at the heart of the beast rather than slowly prick it to death with little needles.”

  “Hound’s not normally that poetic, but he is right. I have to do it.”

  Yanmeng said, “It had to be asked. We should always question decisions that are so potent.”

  “Damn, that sounds good,” Hound said. “Any sentence with potent in it gets my vote.”

  Maliha flew to Boston. There was a political fund-raiser coming up in three days, a benefit for Laura’s campaign for U.S. senator. She stayed in her hotel most of the time, resting her ribs. She had to be ready for action by then. She went for an experimental run on her second day there and found that she could do a half mile in about a minute with no problem, but she was going to have to be faster than that. Fast enough to be unnoticed.

  What I didn’t tell my friends is that I’m doing this as the Black Ghost. Get back into assassination mode. One strike, one kill, as Master Liu taught me.

  Maliha kept up with her practice runs until she could appear as a blur to human eyes. There was considerable pain, but nothing she couldn’t tolerate for the short time necessary. Working through several links of a chain, Maliha was invited to the fund-raiser, sort of. One of the party officials had gone through a bitter divorce and wouldn’t mind showing up with a beautiful woman on his arm to spite his ex-wife, who would also be there. With a little planning, he’d “bumped” into Maliha at a coffee shop.

  On the night of the event, she left her long black hair loose, accented her green eyes with luminescent shadow, and shaped her lips with Kiss Me Now Red, going for a classy call-girl look. Her dress finished the effect. It was flowing black, cut low front and back—but covering the vestiges of her shoulder wound—and with a deeply slit skirt that showed a lot of thigh. Her shoes were barely there sandals with tiny black straps that crisscrossed their way up her calves. Her escort loved all of it, and all of her. It would make his ex livid. It was a practical outfit, too—slit skirts and no heels are better for running. He wanted his photo taken with her, and she obliged, managing to turn her face toward him so that a cascade of shiny hair hid her features. As for the rest of her body, there was nothing unique about what showed in the photo. She’d made sure of that.

  Laura Bertram stood at the podium to make a speech. There was a spotlight on her and the room lights were dimmed. Maliha took a reading of the woman’s aura, checking to see if there was any possibility that her information had been wrong. There was a dull black cloud around Laura, with fiercer, polished-looking black and red tendrils snaking outward. Maliha looked hard for Laura’s loving nature toward her family, but it wasn’t there, meaning the husband and kids were props in her political ascent.

  She took note of the security arrangements in the room. Coverage was adequate but nothing special. She located all the plainclothes agents, including the two near the dais. None of them threatened her plan, and she thought the security barely adequate for a political event, much less one involving a member of a secret organization.

  The council could be trying to get rid of her. This could be a trap for me.

  Searching around the room using aural vision, she could find no streaks—no Ageless were here.

  Maliha excused herself to use the ladies’ room, stroking her escort’s arm and smiling as she did so. He patted her hand while listening to the speech and she took off. The instant she rose from the table, she used her supernatural speed to make it to a bathroom stall.

  After slipping on black evening gloves from her small handbag, she assembled the pieces of the plastic pistol hidden innocuously as stays in her skirt and added the few metal pieces needed, disguised in the hinged jaws of her evening bag. The single bullet she needed was part of the clasp of her bag.

  When the ladies’ room was empty, she dashed back to the meeting room, leaped atop a service table in the back, and shot Laura Bertram between the eyes.

  Still moving fast, she dropped the weapon, stripped off the gloves and shoved them in her bag, and settled back in her seat at her escort’s side in time to gasp along with everyone else as Laura slid down to the dais floor, dying.

  Since everyone was told to remain seated, it gave her ample time to rest from the exertion of using extra speed and to let the pain of movement fade to discomfort.

  It was a long evening of questioning and fingerprinting, but Maliha had come prepared with a solid identity based on undetectable “skins,” sheaths covering her fingertips and heat-sealed to her skin. The worst part of it was turning her back and not crying out when her scale marked a reward. She managed to be in a corner of the room at the time and luckily, no one spoke to her right then.

  She let her escort take her to his home when the police released them. To do anything else might have raised questions as out of the ordinary. She got him drunk while hanging onto every word of his story about his divorce. When he fell asleep, she left her panties on the floor to make him think they’d been intimate and slipped out, satisfied with a job well done.

  She didn’t take the two thousand dollars he’d left for her on the nightstand. As she’d said to Jamie, she didn’t work for money.

  Walking the streets, her evening’s kill a success, Maliha felt elated. The perfect way her plans had played out was exciting. Aspects of her Ageless life pulled at her. She was deliberately slipping into her Black Ghost persona to bring down the ones who were planning to use the hitchhikers. The Black Ghost came as a whole package of behaviors, why take just one behavior, like picking one cherry from a box?

  After a successful kill, the demon’s slave had enjoyed sex to take the edge off. Maliha was wearing a revealing black dress and shoes with tiny straps up her calves. She’d already lost her panties—so much the better. She ran her fingers through her hair, put some sway into her hips, and walked into a bar.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Too easy. If Mogue was there last night, he could have stopped me or caught me afterward. So he’s not guarding the council. Yet. After this initial strike, he might be.

  By the next morning, Maliha was holed up in a downtown St. Louis hotel. Her guiding principle after shooting an up-and-coming political figure was to get out of Dodge. Walking a few blocks, she found a storefront McDonald’s, drifted in for the pancake breakfast, and bought a St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On page one she found a headline about the slaying, attributing it to political motives. The article mentioned the victim’s two surviving children, something that gave Maliha a pang of guilt. She’d changed their lives forever.

  She ch
ecked the news on her computer, watching videos of the anguished husband. The anguished partner from her law firm. The anguished political figures who decried a life of public service cut short. It was assumed that it was “a vicious political slaying perpetrated by an ideological extremist,” and the Department of Justice was looking into the murder as a hate crime because of the victim’s stance on illegal immigration. Although according to Maliha’s memory, there hadn’t been anyone at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner who would have disagreed with Laura’s stance on that topic, which was “Send them all home except my housekeeper and my nanny.”

  In other words, no one had any clue about Maliha’s participation or motivation except maybe the other council members, and that depended on how much, if anything, Mogue had told them about her. One death out of a group wasn’t enough of a pattern to be frantic about.

  Maliha was beginning to regret taking the low-hanging fruit first. The others might go to ground even if they weren’t convinced there was an active conspiracy against them, and would be harder to find. What did they have to lose by sequestering themselves? Since they had Fynn’s advanced coating, they were surely in the manufacturing stage on the hitchhiker project, if not already into global distribution. And Maliha still didn’t know two crucial pieces of information: what triggered the hitchhikers to begin turning their hosts’ bodies into gray goo, and who the “Leader” was.

  Her cell phone rang. It was Jake, texting her. He wanted to talk about Randy.

  She and Jake had met through a blind date set up by Maliha’s friend Randy, but Maliha didn’t think he knew Randy well. According to her story, she’d only met Jake the day she set up the blind date. She called Jake right away.

  “What’s wrong with Randy?”

  Oh no. Not Randy. Mogue didn’t get to her…. Please, oh please, not Randy.

  “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, you had me worried. That happens about every three weeks.”

  “She was falling for this guy, or already fallen. Said his nickname is now Dickhead.”

  She talks about nicknames with Jake? I thought that was our private girl talk.

  “Did he used to be Power Balls before he got his new nickname?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t she call me herself?”

  “I think she’s really hurting. I’m only so much good here. I happen to be of the same sex as the vile Dickhead. Can you come here and talk to her?”

  She sighed. Maybe I can talk her through it on the phone.

  “Can you get her to talk to me on the phone?”

  “She threw her phone down and stomped on it. Then she locked herself in the bathroom. I think it would be best if you came in person.”

  “If this doesn’t work, I’ll be there in person, I promise. Give her your phone. Get her out of wherever she is and tell her that Doodles wants to talk to her. Then stay in her apartment but out of sight somewhere. Don’t leave until she’s okay. You let anything happen to her and I swear I’ll rip your fingernails out, and that’s for starters.”

  “You say that like you really would. Do I have to say Doodles?”

  “Yes! If you don’t, I’ll…” He hung up the phone.

  He hung up the fucking phone! She took a deep breath. Calm down, he just went to get her. It’s strange talking with Jake as if nothing happened between us. Only for Randy…

  Five nerve-wracking minutes later, her phone rang. She slid open the phone and shouted into it.

  “You better have handled this right, you…”

  There were some sniffles and blubbers on the line. “Doodles? Is that you?”

  “Sweetie, it’s me. Tell me everything.”

  “Listen, if you have something else to do, it’s okay. I can manage.”

  I just have to stop nasty chewing things from eating peoples’ guts, but what are friends for?

  “You’re number one for me, Noodles.”

  Randy burst into tears. It could have been from Maliha’s declaration of loyalty or the actual breakup. Maliha, a.k.a. Doodles, waited a while, saying soothing things like, “Everything will be all right,” until the crying lessened in volume. Then it was time to move in and make a difference.

  “Where are you?” Maliha said.

  “In the bedroom,” she said between sobs.

  Never stay in the bedroom where you made love after you break up with the guy. At least, not while it’s fresh.

  She pictured Randy’s apartment. It was of modest size, but highly personalized. Randy was an Earth Mother type, and everywhere there were natural fabrics, wall hangings, posters, and small pieces of art from around the world, some of them given to her by Maliha as souvenirs from her research trips. In the living room there was a comfortable organic pillow grouping on the floor that Dickhead had probably never touched, since it would have put him eye level with a display of fertility dolls grouped on a table. Odd, since Randy professed not to want any children for another decade so she wouldn’t waste her youth on breastfeeding and diapers. Cloth diapers, of course.

  Perhaps the dolls scared Dickhead off.

  “Would you do something for me?” Maliha said. She used her honey-sweet voice. This was the voice that had bought her entry to the home of European royalty when she arrived nude, wrapped in a thin blanket—no one there seemed to have heard of Cleopatra.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Take that box of tissues off the dresser, go on out to the living room, and make yourself comfortable on those floor pillows.”

  Gradually, the story came out. Randy and her latest boyfriend had gotten marriage-level serious, except that it turned out to be one-sided.

  “I loved him. I knew it. We were going to move in together sometime soon, and then I wanted to go shopping for a ring after that. He got me a new TV for our three-month anniversary.”

  Maliha picked up immediately on “I wanted to go shopping for a ring,” rather than “we,” and figured Dickhead hadn’t proposed. Randy was extrapolating the relationship. He had called her that morning and told her she was okay but he was moving on, and that she could keep the TV.

  “Like that made up for everything. Stupid TV.”

  “Throw a pillow at it, one of the little ones.”

  Maliha heard a thunk coming through from the other end of the phone. The TV, now a surrogate for Dickhead, had been punished. Randy was getting into the spirit of things. Maliha had to get some alcohol in her soon.

  “He came by to drop off the key but he slid it under the door when I was asleep rather than talk to me.”

  “Ooh, that’s cold,” Maliha said. She heard another thunk, and hoped the TV was securely anchored.

  “I hate men! I’m never sleeping with another man. They’re just big brutes. Big, brainless, inconsiderate…”

  The rant went on for a while. Maliha knew better than to deny anything Randy said. Her job was to hear anything and agree. She talked Randy into cleaning herself up with a hot shower and then donning her favorite pair of worn pajamas with stars all over them. She waited on the line.

  Jake panicked about this. Either she was a lot worse around him or he’s overwhelmed when it comes to women’s emotions. He made it sound like he had her on a suicide watch. He’s a seasoned field agent, not to mention Ageless. It just doesn’t mesh.

  Something else occurred to her. He might have just wanted me back there. Maybe thought I’d come in person. In fact he asked me to, twice. Does he have any connection with the hitchhiker project? Okay, that’s paranoid.

  “Noodles, do you have any wine?”

  “I have organic wine. And that’s another thing. He didn’t respect my desire to surround myself with untainted products of nature.”

  “He wasn’t good enough for you. Let’s drink to that.”

  They clinked glasses on the phone. Randy’s was full, Maliha’s empty. It was all over not long after that. Randy was still very sad. She would be for a long time, since this was the first serious relationsh
ip she’d had since high school, the first time since then when she’d said, “I love you,” and actually meant it. But she’d gotten her perspective back. She realized the tidal wave of pain would eventually pass and that no matter how hopeless things seemed now, there were other men out there for her besides Dickhead. The wine put Randy to sleep.

  She was a bit ashamed she’d even considered that Jake might have something to do with the hitchhiker project and had called to deflect her from pursuing the case. Of course he wasn’t much help to Randy. Few men would be. He just had a disadvantage in dealing with her at that moment, and it was in his pants.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Amaro had called Maliha with distressing news. An envelope had been found lying on the kitchen counter in her apartment. It was from Mogue: I can get to Fynn and your friends anytime I want. Really, you’re making this too easy.

  “The high-speed camera caught him coming and going, a blur I could slow down enough to make out a figure moving. That’s it—no alarms or anything. That cinches it—Mogue’s Ageless, if you didn’t know that already. Fynn’s whole family is wiped out and Mogue can’t leave it at that. Bloodthirsty son-of-a bitch. Kinda scary. I didn’t tell Fynn. By the way, Larry Maybry’s still alive. He went to Bora Bora or someplace.”

  “I…” Fear shot through Maliha and transfixed her, as though a bolt of lightning had streaked from her brain to her feet. She was unable to talk, unable to move. The phone dropped from her hand.

  Whole family wiped out. Mogue’s done with Fynn’s family. Now he’s going to come after mine, to torment me before killing me—exactly the way he did with Fynn. She pictured herself holding Amaro or Yanmeng or Hound as he died in her arms. The thought was unbearable.