World Without End

by Chris Mooney

  A canister hooked up to what appeared to be a remote-control device, the nozzle hissing air.

  Get out of the car.

  Raymond rolled down one window, tossed the canister outside, and using the automatic controls, rolled down the other windows. He drove faster.

  His eyes started to burn.

  Don't scratch them. Keep driving.

  Minutes later, his chest felt tight. He tried to suck in the cold air but it was becoming too difficult to breathe. Tear gas, was that what was inside the canister? Or was it something worse? He kept trying to breathe. It was getting worse. He pulled the Durango to a side street. He couldn't call the police or go to the hospital, but if he could just lie somewhere and wait for the effects to wear off, he would be fine. Raymond collapsed against the steering wheel, against the horn, struggling to breathe.

  A moment later, the car door opened.

  Raymond Bouchard saw a pair of latex-covered hands grab him and push him back against the seat. He couldn't see the person, but he could hear the guy's voice breathing against his ear.

  "It is finished," Angel Eyes whispered.

  When Cole heard the automatic gunfire, the rain of bullets ricocheting off cars, ping! ping! ping!" glass shattering everywhere, people shouting orders and screaming for help, he knew a rescue operation was being staged. His men were here. Behind him Mr. Mark "the Elf Alves engaged in a desperate struggle to free himself of his situation.

  "Get it all out now, Mr. Alves," Cole said, calmly.

  "When I get you up north, I'll have you screaming for weeks."

  The heavy thud of footsteps rushing up the stairs caused Cole to look toward the half-opened door. Outside in the dark hallway, he saw a flashlight zigzagging across the dirty floor and broken walls and ceiling.

  "In here," Cole yelled.

  The footsteps slowed to a walk. The beam of light hit the floor near the door, turned inside, and shone directly into Cole's eyes.

  "They brought Owen Lee to the hospital," Cole said, squinting.

  "Conway just left via helicopter. He still has his Palm Pilot. We can listen to it, get his location. You need our van get that goddamn light out of my face."

  The light moved away. Cole blinked, his eyes readjusting to the darkness.

  Standing before him was a man dressed in black combat gear, his face and head covered so Cole couldn't identify him. Then his eyes focused on the weird looking rifle the man carried. Wires ran from the butt of the rifle and fed directly into the base of the bulky backpack strapped across his back.

  The scene from the bridge: his men stumbling about in a daze, screaming that they had been blinded. This one belonged to Angel Eyes.

  The man reached down and grabbed the boxes of matches that had been left on the floor. He opened the box.

  Cole, a man used to wielding terror, was not used to feeling it. In that quick moment, he tried to sum up the man standing before him, tried to figure out the key to disconnecting his present agenda in the only way he knew how: through greed.

  "You let me go, you can name your price."

  "Some men don't have a price." The man struck a match and tossed it into the air.

  Cole watched it turn around in slow motion, like a baton, not believing what he was seeing until the small flame gently bounced on his lap.

  It was like being swallowed inside a cone of fire. His clothes and hair went up first, and when the flames started to eat at his skin, the pain became unbearable, so searing in its intensity that he screamed and screamed for it to stop, screamed and screamed for help until his voice burned away. Inside the flames he saw his mother's smiling face come for him, her bony fingers forming a claw that reached out to drag him down into her world, a place where he would forever burn.

  Major Dixon did not want to open his eyes. Every time he did he saw (his two missing fingers, they're gone, Dix, GONE) something that made him scream so loud he blacked out. He never thought such a thing was possible, but when the Russian guy who looked like a boiled ham in a bad suit raised the cleaver above his head, Dix's mind screamed out:

  This isn't happening this is just a bad nightmare good God DON'T DO IT! and the cleaver came down crashing down with a hard clank against the steel table and separated his fingers from his hand.

  When he came to later minutes, hours, he had no idea, time had no meaning here he felt a warm stream of water hitting his face. Dixon opened his eyes and saw his torturer, the boiled ham, a big grin on his face as he finished urinating. Laughing, he zipped up his fly and walked out of the basement. Dixon was still lying horizontally, still naked and cold and wet and bound to the torture chair, but the pain was gone. A bad dream, that's all it was, just a bad dream, he told himself, and a bubble of hope built in his chest. He tilted his head to the side and saw the IV bag and the line hooked into his left arm, and when he raised his left hand up, his wrist still bound to the armrest, he saw the missing fingers, the stumps blackened, and the bubble burst.

  It had happened. He was a prisoner in this gray dungeon and would be tortured an inch at a time until he delivered up the decryption code to the military suit a code he didn't have.

  He lost it later that night.

  "You want the fucking code?" On and on until someone walked into the basement, a guy who had sleepy eyes and wore a bandanna and two gold hoop earrings. It was Chris Evans, Dixon's jump instructor and partner the same guy who had sat in a chair in the corner and enjoyed a Twix candy bar while Dixon begged and screamed for the torturing to stop.

  "Spill it," Evans said. He was dressed in some baggy jeans that showed off the stitched Calvin Klein band of his underwear. The guy was a spitting image of the steroid meatheads from Dixon's youth, guys who liked to kick him around because he was weak. Dude probably lifted weights without his shirt on in front of a mirror and then jerked off because he thought he looked so good.

  "Conway knows the fucking code."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said Comvay knows the code. You want him, not me. I've got nothing to do with this!"

  "I can't believe you called me down here for this." Evans shook his head, agitated, turned and walked back up the stairs. Lights out, and Dixon was back alone in the dungeon of permanent midnight where time didn't exist.

  Time passed.

  Through his anger and pain, a voice came to him and said, You can't change what happened, you can only go forward. Conserve your energy, eat the food they give you, and use this time you've got to think of a way out of this mess.

  "It's hopeless," Dixon said into the dark.

  It's not hopeless.

  "Yeah, easy for you to say. You didn't have two of your fingers hacked off."

  You can indulge in a pity party, or you can think of a way out of here before they remove another body pan. Like an arm or a leg.

  Time passed and Dix tried to think of a way out. The Russian never came back down. No one did. In fact, it seemed like everyone had lost an interest in him. Only one time did anyone come down, and it was Evans. He set up a TV, turned it on loud to some annoying twenty-four-hour Southern gospel show, Evans saying he was sick and tired of listening to Dixon cry and yell and scream like a pussy and needed something to drown out the sound. It was keeping him up all night.

  Then they brought the girl down, and it all went downhill from there.

  Dixon had been awake the entire time that had happened. When that guy with those gentle blue eyes bit the girl's ear off and then picked up the circular saw, Dixon clamped his eyes and tried to ignore it, wanting to black out. But he couldn't shut off his hearing. He heard the whining bite of the saw as it caught skin and bone and the way that girl screamed it wasn't like in the movies or on TV where they tortured someone, the way she screamed, it was like her soul was being ripped out of her an inch at a time, and when Dixon felt her blood rain down on him, he screamed along with her and plunged into a blackness that severed any permanent ties to reality.

  And you know what? He didn't care. Dix was than
kful for the void.

  Deep in the void, he had a companion, the one true friend left over from his childhood with that idiot slob of a father whose only talents lay in drinking and the kind of systematic verbal humiliation that if you weren't careful could strip you of your humanity. This is the deal, Dix, straight up, no bullshit. No matter what your captors say or do, they can't touch your mind. Your imagination, its contents and powers, they all belong to you. You control them. Just like the Holodeck on Star Trek, you can program your imagination to take you wherever you want.

  As he lay in the pitch-black basement that bled with its awful smells, his missing fingers still twitching like phantom limbs, Major Dixon blocked out the sound of the fat hens singing their gospel songs on the TV and transported himself aboard the captain's chair of the best ship in the fleet, the USS Voyager. A dreaded Borg cube had entered the Delta quadrant again and had somehow found an opening in its shields and transported aboard a team of drones. The drones had destroyed several of Voyager's power grids; the bridge was dark and so were the hallways. Battle in the darkness. Screams. Human screams; the Borg was assimilating members of the Voyager crew. Hurry. Dixon ran down the hallway, phaser rifle in hand as he led his strike team to overtake the Borg. Wait. There was a distinct, muffled sound of a suppressor masking the gunfire of some twentieth-century automatic weapon. The gunfire ended. Silence. Darkness.

  "Dixon."

  A woman's voice, and she was close, too damn close, he could feel her breath and her words strong and loud and sharp against his ear. Had to be one of the Borg, maybe even the Borg queen. Phaser ready, lock and load, baby.

  Dix felt the distinct sensation of a cold blade sliding against his skin as it cut through the rope and tape that bound his hands, feet, and neck to the chair. Blood flowed back into his limbs. He moved his hands to his face and touched his nose and mouth and lips. He was free.

  It's a trap, it's got to be a trap, keep your eyes shut and get back down here where it's safe.

  The woman yanked back both of his eyelids and said, "Dixon, we need to get moving."

  The woman was part of the Borg; she was dressed in black tactical combat clothing and carried the kind of submachine gun popular with the twentieth-century unit known as the Hostage Rescue Team, once a part of the now-defunct government agency called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But this Borg drone also had a peculiar night vision device mounted across her face.

  "I'm not going to hurt you, Dixon. You're safe."

  Pasha Romanov flipped up the night vision and turned on the tactical flashlight mounted under the stock of her HK submachine gun. A bright beam of white light lit up the dark basement. She shined the light in Major Dixon's eyes. They didn't register. He was in shock, lost in his own world.

  Pasha shut the light off and slung the weapon behind her back. The entire house was dark from the small explosives device she had planted on the electrical box. After that, she had tossed a smoke canister through the window and then blew her way through the back door. The five men who had been guarding the house came running downstairs, and when they did, it wasn't hard to put them down.

  Pasha's cell phone rang. She knew who was calling.

  "Stephen?"

  "Dixon is being held at 27 Park Place in Lynn," Conway said. He was yelling above the thumping blades of a helicopter.

  "The house is guarded with a security system and " "I've got Dixon."

  Pasha moved her light to the corner of the room.

  "And the suit."

  "How did you " "I can't get into it right now, I'm running out of time." The neighbors had heard the explosion; some of them had ventured out of their homes, wrapped in jackets, to investigate the commotion. No doubt the police had been summoned.

  "Where's Raymond?"

  "Running for his life. Forget him. Angel Eyes is here. I think he's going to make a run for the suit."

  "He can't get it if he can't see it. You know the decryption code?"

  "Ralph Wiggim. Meet me at 100 Summer Street, on the roof. A helicopter will pick us up and fly us out to Logan. We're going to take a private jet to Virginia. I've already made the arrangements."

  "I'll see you there," Pasha said and hung up. She shoved the phone back into her jacket.

  A wool blanket was on the floor. Pasha picked it up and wrapped it around Dixon, and then with both hands picked up his thin, shaking body, and threw him across her shoulder. He was light, no more than a hundred pounds. Grabbing his legs and holding them close to her chest, Pasha Romanov walked over and picked up the long suitcase that held the military suit and moved into the backyard. As she ran down the driveway, her van parked across the street, she heard the sound of police sirens building in the frigid evening air, coming closer.

  Steve Conway crouched low in the alcove on the roof of the thirty-four-floor skyscraper on 100 Summer Street, uncomfortably high off the ground with the wind whipping around him like an angry storm, and watched Booker's helicopter fly away in the night sky full of stars, on its way to refuel. Far below and out of his view was the city of Boston, its downtown lights rising up and washing over the edges of the building's roof.

  The wind roared and whistled, roared and whistled. Conway still wore the headset, the phone clipped to his belt. He had traded his bank clothes for something warmer: jeans, sneakers, a sweatshirt, and a dark blue Columbia ski jacket. He backed farther into the alcove, out of the wind, and rested his back against the wall. The door next to him, according to Booker, led to a room full of electrical equipment. Near the opposite end of the roof, where the helicopter had made a tricky and uncomfortable landing, and in full view, was a similar alcove with a door, this one leading to the stairwell on the thirty-fourth floor.

  Once Pasha arrived, Conway would destroy the military suit dumping it inside an incinerator would probably be best and then they would fly to Logan where they would take a private jet that would fly them back to Virginia. One of Booker's men had made a copy of the CD recovered from the safety deposit box. That CD, along with the copy of Dixon's torture video, would be handed to the CIA Director himself. Let him clean up the fallout.

  And he -will. It's going to be an ugly, dirty affair, it's going to be in the national spotlight. No matter which way you look at it, you've ruined your career.

  It was true. The Agency wouldn't be so forgiving with his need to broadcast dirty laundry on television. Here, alone on the roof, Con-way accepted the sad fact that his career, the life he had built within the CIA, was over.

  Booker's voice crackled on the earpiece: "Six mean looking dudes just entered the lobby."

  Book and his men were watching the main entrance to the Summer Street building. The lobby layout a wide stretch of yellow and brown tile had three entrances: north, east and west, all with revolving glass doors.

  The east and west entrances were locked; the only way inside was through the main entrance on Summer Street. Once you walked inside, you had to check in with the building security behind the ornate, marble desk. Booker had replaced the building's security guards with his own men.

  "They belong to Angel Eyes?" Conway asked.

  "No combat gear, no blinding rifles."

  "Must be what's left of Cole's. The lobby lights dimmed?"

  "They dimmed any more it would be dark The suit offered the optical illusion of invisibility; it didn't change the law of physics. If Pasha walked inside a well-lit lobby, she would be invisible, but her shadow would be thrown against the floor. It would be harder to see her shadows if the lobby was near dark.

  "What about the entrances?" Conway asked.

  "All clear. Looks like everyone's inside two dudes just went down.

  Direct shots to the head."

  Pasha. She was already inside the lobby.

  "The rest are running into the lobby."

  Beats of silence, the wind howling above him.

  "Number three down. Four. We got gunfire," Booker said.

  "Five and six are down."

  "
It's Pasha. She's here."

  "Elevator door in bay one just chimed open, but I can't see anyone."

  "She's on her way up. How long until the chopper makes it back here?"

  "Fifteen, twenty minutes tops."

  But where was Angel Eyes?

  He's got to be close.

  If it came to it, Conway could destroy the suit quickly, right here on the roof. The Palm Pilot Cole had given him contained enough Semtex to blow the working military suit to bits.

  Conway removed his Palm Pilot and called up the program just as Cole had instructed him. The timer was defaulted at two minutes. Should be more than enough. Press the lower button on the left and he would have a small bomb. Rip the computer from the suit, fasten the Palm Pilot to it using the roll of electrical tape inside his jacket, fling it into the air and watch as the computer, this goddamn piece of hardware that had cost so many lives, exploded into hundreds of fragments. He slipped the Palm back inside his coat pocket and waited.

  Across the roof, the alcove door opened. Even in the dim light, Conway could clearly see the door swing all the way open and then shut. It looked like nobody had stepped outside. He kept staring, not wanting to blink, knowing what was about to come.

  And it did. The black-clad figure of Pasha Romanov suddenly materialized out of thin air.

  Conway moved out of the alcove. The wind gusted past him, howling, and knocked the headset down around his neck. His eyes watering from the cold air, he jogged over to her. Out of nowhere a gust of wind kicked him. He tripped and fell against the roof. He turned onto his back, the wind swirling around him, strong and howling. He thought he heard something, a thump-thump of helicopter blades, very faint. He looked around. He saw the dark sky.

  And then the sky was gone.

  Out of the darkness came the Blackhawk attack helicopter, the one Angel Eyes had stolen, the one Booker had sighted in Roxbury. The chopper flew past him toward the other end of the building. From the belly of the chopper a searchlight kicked on.