by Dima Zales
“Should we get through some of these trees first?” I ask. “Then Mr. Spock can scope out the rest of the area.”
As one, they start walking. Taking that as a yes, I pick up Mr. Spock and cautiously lead the team toward the edge of the reserve.
The others walk so quietly I have to turn a few times to make sure I didn’t lose them.
Eventually, Gogi places a hand on my shoulder, silently telling me to stop.
I put the rat down, pet him, and whisper, “Go.”
“Got it,” Ada says and does whatever she needs to do to make Mr. Spock scurry forward.
As soon as Mr. Spock is a few feet away from me, I can no longer see him with my naked eye—a good thing since that means the guards won’t see him either.
I can, however, see his digital mood aura, and a few moments later, it turns the blackest color of anxiety I’ve seen so far.
Scanning the screen, I see what he’s frightened of, and I get scared both with him and for him.
On the rat-vision screen, the source of our angst looks like a true monster, a mountainous blur of teeth, fur, and muscles.
In the night-vision screen, I see the obstacle for what it truly is—two hundred pounds of running dog.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Ovcharka,” Gogi whispers.
“That’s Caucasian Ovcharka,” Mitya tells Ada pedantically. “But I guess a man from the Caucuses can be excused for just saying Ovcharka. And in case you aren’t up to that point in your Russian studies, Ovcharka means Shepherd dog, though these doggies don’t just herd sheep. With their five-hundred-pound bite force and deadly ferociousness, they make lethal guard dogs, and they’re so dangerous they’re banned in some countries.”
I mentally search the breed and see Mitya isn’t exaggerating. Though fluffy and cute in some pictures, these dogs have been used to hunt bears and whole packs of wolves.
It’s not just Mr. Spock who’s in danger. It’s the whole team.
The huge dog stops running a few feet from the rat.
Its giant head turns in Mr. Spock’s direction, and its snout seems to sniff the air.
Mr. Spock’s aura turns a paler color that I don’t even have in my notes, though I’m sure it means something along the lines of, “I just soiled myself.”
“Don’t move,” Ada whispers to Spock. “Don’t even breathe.”
Despite her words, or the Augmented Reality, or whatever Ada’s using to control the little guy, it’s obvious he’s about to bolt, and if he does, the dog will spot him, leap on him, and probably eat him in a single gulp.
I resist the temptation to pull out my Glock. We’re not using weapons during this part of the plan, because even with silencers (which the Glock now has), the guns will still make too much noise. Instead, we’re all equipped with air-based tranquilizer guns that were carefully tweaked and deemed silent enough.
I grab my tranquilizer gun, but I’m aware of a problem. Due to the lack of ballistic data on this nonstandard weapon, my friends didn’t get a chance to update my aiming app to work as flawlessly as it does with a regular gun. The aiming line appears, but it’s worse than a laser point.
Seeing no other choice, I point the aim-assist line at the dog and pull the trigger.
If I did hit the Ovcharka, its thick fur must have protected it, or maybe the human tranquilizer isn’t effective on canines.
Mr. Spock hasn’t moved. I suspect it’s because he’s frozen in fear at the towering behemoth of a dog.
In both camera views, the Ovcharka’s teeth are exposed, and saliva is dripping from its maw. Mr. Spock is about to feel like Ripley from Alien.
To my surprise, Nadejda springs into action.
Her tranquilizer weapon isn’t a handgun like mine, but a rifle. She brings it to her shoulder and takes careful aim.
The shot is accompanied by a barely audible pop, but nothing happens.
The dog leaps and lands three feet from the rat.
I wonder if I’ll see Mr. Spock’s life play across the rat-vision screen as the dog comes toward him.
When the wooly monstrosity is just a foot away from Spock’s head, it stops, tilts its head to the side in that “confused dog” manner, and falls down, its giant clawed paw missing Mr. Spock by a couple of inches.
I realize I didn’t breathe the entire time, so I allow myself the luxury of inhaling air.
“Phew.” Ada’s avatar rubs her forehead in an exaggerated fashion.
“I can’t believe she saved him,” I whisper. “I thought she hated rats.”
I guess I whispered too loudly, because Nadejda leans in and says in my ear, “He’s part of the team. We came together; we leave together.”
“Still,” I reply softly. “Thank you.”
Nadejda nods and looks back at her tablet screen.
I stop pretending to look at my phone and focus on the AROS screens in the most convenient manner—with my eyes closed.
Using my mind to place the mental screens all around me, I wait for Mr. Spock to resume his recon.
He doesn’t.
It takes a few minutes of soft pleading from Ada before Mr. Spock twitches a single muscle. Eventually, Ada has to resort to a stronger motivation and makes a virtual rat appear (probably Uhura), and that does the trick. Mr. Spock starts crawling after his friend.
“It’s a rat race,” Mitya says.
“For someone who has important work to do, you sure comment a lot,” I tell my friend, irritated. “Did you figure out a way to talk to my mom?”
“I figured out how to show her one of those air bubbles with text of our choosing,” Mitya says, “but not a way to communicate back and forth. That would take hours to put together.”
“We’ll have to use what we have,” I say. “Anyway, she’s probably sleeping right now.”
In the quiet that follows, I watch Mr. Spock make his way to the large two-story facility that’s our destination.
Step one of the reconnaissance part of the mission is for the rat to walk around the building so we can see how many guards are around and figure out other critical details. Since we now know dogs are in the picture, this part will take ten times longer than we originally planned, but the precaution should be worth it.
We start by having the rat sneak into the facility parking lot, since it’s near our current location and there aren’t any dogs or guards in Mr. Spock’s way. He discovers a large minibus parked there, proof that the hostages are nearby. This is likely how they were transported here. There are a couple of other cars in the lot as well, helping us estimate the number of guards within walking distance.
After he’s done with the parking lot, Spock locates as many outside guards as he can. There are ten or so, which is less than what we estimated. According to Gogi, this is good news. I’m less sure, because this could mean there are up to ten people guarding the hostages inside the facility. On the bright side, Mr. Spock doesn’t come across any more dogs.
“Let’s move on to step two,” Ada says and leads Mr. Spock toward the building.
It takes the rat only a minute to get into the drainpipe, but what feels like forever to crawl up it.
Once Mr. Spock is in the drainage system of the roof, Ada has him navigate his way into the air ducts of the air-conditioning system.
The rat is halfway to the first floor when Muhomor finally speaks through my earpiece. “In position.”
Touching his earpiece like a Secret Service agent, Gogi replies, “You’re behind schedule.”
“I figured stealth trumps punctuality,” Muhomor retorts. “Now leave me alone so I can do my thing.”
The sounds of keyboard strikes are audible through the earpiece, and we listen to them for a minute before Muhomor says, “They don’t have much in their systems, but I see purchases for beds and a lot of scientific equipment that has to do with the brain—fMRI and the like. Most of this stuff is in the target facility, so I can extrapolate that the hostages are sleeping on those purchased beds in the h
ighlighted area.”
An email arrives on my phone, and when I look at the attachment, I see a blueprint with red circles around a bunch of rooms on the first floor.
“I’ll have Spock investigate,” I whisper. Into the chat, I type, “Did you get all that?”
“On it,” Ada says, and Mr. Spock changes direction in the air duct, crawling toward the nearest room in question.
Even though the room is dark and the vent blocks most of the rat’s vision and the camera’s view, I can make out the bed.
I squint at the blurry picture and recognize Mr. Shafer’s sleeping form.
“You’re right,” I tell Muhomor in an excited whisper. “Let’s locate my mom and complete this mission.”
For the first time, I let myself hope Gogi’s plan will actually work as seamlessly as he envisioned.
Mr. Spock crawls to the next room, and I recognize another test subject. Then another and another.
With each participant, I’m relieved we found yet another person, but I’m also disappointed that the person isn’t Mom.
As the rat discovers more people, my elation and disappointment grow.
When Mr. Spock discovers the next to last hostage, who annoyingly isn’t Mom either, I mentally type, “This is it. She has to be in the last room down the hall. There are no other people left.”
“I’m so glad everyone’s alive,” Ada says in subdued tones. “After what happened to Mrs. Sanchez, I feared the worst.”
She stops talking because Mr. Spock scurries up to the final air vent.
When I look at the night-vision screen, my blood pressure rises.
“No,” I whisper and examine the rat-vision screen, hoping against all hope I’ll somehow see a different image.
The result is the same, however.
Mom’s bed is empty.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Where is she?” I mentally type into the chat. “Where’s my mom?” I whisper for the benefit of the people on the other end of the earpiece, as well as those near me.
When no one responds for a couple of beats, I step up to the edge of the trees, but Gogi’s rough hands grab my shoulders, keeping me in place.
“Mitya,” I frantically type into the chat. “Do you have a way of speaking with her yet?”
“No,” Mitya says. “I can only show her a textbox, but no back-and-forth communication.”
More desperate ideas ignite and flicker out in my head, and I say, “Ada, can we pinpoint her location with the help of her Brainocytes?”
“It’s a bit like using one of those ‘find my phone’ apps,” Ada says. “We know she’s in this building, probably on the south side, but a more detailed location would require a brand-new app. And even if we did develop it, that app would have to run off your mom’s AROS, meaning we’d need your mom’s cooperation, which is a catch-22 since we have no way of contacting her.”
“Muhomor,” I whisper into the earpiece. “Is there a lab or control center in the facility? Maybe they’re studying her or questioning her.”
I hear a flurry of keystrokes through the earpiece; then an email arrives from Muhomor with a picture attachment. Through the earpiece, he says, “There, on the second floor, is where the fMRI machine is.”
The email contains the blueprints with the room in question circled in red. I forward this to Ada and type, “Can you get Mr. Spock over there so we can have a look?”
“On it,” Ada says, and the rat starts crawling through the air ducts again, only, to my deepest annoyance, he’s moving as fast as a turtle overdosing on Xanax.
“There,” Ada finally says. She’s stating the obvious since we can all see the large ventilation grill a foot away from Spock. “That’ll give us a view into the room.”
On my night and rat vision AROS screens, the video changes from a view of the air vent to that of the room. Unfortunately, only a portion of the large room is visible from this angle.
All I can see is a single guard—not a complete failure since a guard indicates something is happening in the room. There are also some sounds, but they’re even less useful. All we can pick up on are some muffled voices talking in the distance.
I subdue the urge to punch the innocent birch tree in front of me and scan the screens again.
“Muhomor,” I whisper a little too loudly in my excitement. “There, in the left corner, you see that camera?” I start to gesture at the screen in front of me before I recall that Muhomor wouldn’t be able to see it even if he were next to me, which he isn’t.
“I see it,” the hacker says, and I hear his crazy typing again. “I’m tapping into their video surveillance system now.”
After what feels like an hour, Muhomor sends me a link. I click it and get a view into the room from that camera.
My first reaction is a wave of relief, because I see Mom very clearly, alive and well. But right on the tail of that relief is a flood of adrenaline, chased by a huge dose of anger.
It’s the other four men in the room who bring about these new emotions.
In addition to the guard I saw earlier, there’s a pudgy, gray-haired man who’s busy speaking with Mom. I can’t see his face because his back is turned to both Mr. Spock and the security camera. Aside from standing a little too close to Mom, this guy isn’t the source of my concern. That would be the two brutes who aren’t looking at Mom. I glimpse their faces and right away guess who they are, thanks to the fifth and final person I see.
My blood begins to boil because it’s Anton, the man who abducted Mom over my knocked-out body—the man who, if it were up to me, wouldn’t survive the night. Logically, the other two guys must be the people whose pictures we couldn’t identify.
I run the face recognition app on them and on the guard, and I learn their names are Denis, Yegor, and Ivan. I also glance at their bios, but I’m not sure why I even bothered. In a nutshell, their profiles say, “Highly dangerous dirt bags. Steer clear.”
“So, what do we do?” I ask, looking at Gogi as the man with the plan. “We have to get her out of there.”
“We could also wait,” Gogi suggests. “They’ll let her sleep at some point.”
“We don’t know how long that’ll take,” Nadejda replies, and it’s clear her smoke-damaged vocal cords have trouble whispering. “Why don’t we use the gas I brought, like they did in the Dubrovka Theater?”
“No to the gas, unless there’s no other option,” I say after a quick mental Wikipedia search. The Russians used that solution during the infamous 2002 Nord-Ost siege. “Mom’s health isn’t perfect, and the gas harmed some of the hostages.”
“Some of those damage reports are propaganda,” Nadejda says, though she doesn’t sound as confident as usual.
“If we can somehow cut the power to the room,” Gogi says, “we can come through those windows.” He points on his screen at the two windows in the camera view. “If we also storm through the door, we can make this work quietly enough.”
What he doesn’t need to say is that a single gunshot could alert all the guards in this facility, and that would be the end of us.
“I think I can take care of the lights,” Muhomor says, “but they have this annoying redundancy system I’m having trouble with. The best I can do is keep the lights off for about a minute. We’re lucky they’re still in the middle of setting up the security in this building, or else the lights would simply flicker and come back on.”
“A minute is enough,” Gogi says and scratches his neck. “Still, I vote we wait.”
“They might detect my activity in their system at any moment,” Muhomor says. “You know the deal with the plane, and you know about the explosives that are just waiting to get discovered. I vote we go in.”
“We also don’t know when and if they’ll let her sleep,” I chime in. “Or when the guard might change. I guess we can wait a few minutes, but after that—”
“We’re going in,” Joe says with a finality that reminds everyone our mission isn’t a democratic one. H
is unblinking lizard stare is focused on his screen, and his other hand is white-knuckled around the grip of his tranquilizer gun.
I think I understand what’s going on. As I suspected, he didn’t just come on this expedition because of his warm feelings for his aunt. He probably wants to make an example of the people who, as he put it, dared to fuck with his family.
“Right,” Gogi says, all hesitation forgotten. “We start by taking care of all the guards we find.”
He proceeds to explain the finer details of the plan, and once he’s done, Muhomor prepares to turn off the lights at the most opportune moment, while Gogi, Joe, and Nadejda slither away to put tranquilizer darts into the guards Mr. Spock located.
“Can you use Mr. Spock to find the guards inside the facility?” I type to Ada. “Then, given what’s about to go down, you should have him evacuate the building.”
In response, I see movement on my mental rat screen.
“I can’t believe they didn’t let me help with tranquilizing the guards,” I whisper, both for Muhomor and my New York team.
“The app doesn’t work well with these dart guns,” Ada reminds me. “And you can’t move as stealthily as they can.”
Muhomor sends me an email that proves Ada’s right.
Using the links, I open mental screens to see what’s happening via Joe’s, Nadejda’s, and Gogi’s head cams. Their movements are indeed stealthy, though stealthy doesn’t really cover what they do, especially Gogi. His movements remind me of Snake, a badass character from the Metal Gear video game franchise, where a master spy has to save the world.
I spread every view around me, using the AROS interface to tame the out-of-control screens, and as my allies work, I forget my other worries.
A guard on the northwestern side of the building gets a dart in his neck; then his southeastern colleague gets a dart in his left butt cheek. Immediately after, Nadejda and Joe run into a problem.
Instead of being at their separate posts, two guards are smoking together by the entrance.
Nadejda and Joe exchange a few hand gestures, crouch, and then slowly make their way toward the guards.