by Greg Rucka
I hoped to God that Alena knew where I was, that she was out there, somewhere, armed and ready and waiting and with a plan that could pit her against seven and bring her out on top. It was the walking patrol she’d have to worry about first; once she targeted the house, she wouldn’t want anyone at her back.
Sean and the others pinned me in the snow, knees on my neck and back, forcing me facedown. The snow was deep, maybe three to four feet in places, and it stole the heat out of me immediately. One of the heavies had demonstrated the foresight to bring some clothing shears, and they used those to cut my shirt and pants off me. It was better than using a knife, at least, and they didn’t break any skin. They left me my underwear, that was all. Adrenaline and fear notwithstanding, I was shivering before they actually started in to work.
Then they used the bucket, and the bastards filled it with hot water before dumping it on me, which made the cold all the worse. The water in it probably hadn’t been that hot, but it didn’t need to be. It felt scalding all the same.
They worked me over one at a time. They stayed away from my face for the most part, not out of concern for my rakish good looks, but more out of desire to protect their hands, even though they all wore gloves. When I tried to stand they were quick to put me down again, on my back or my knees or my face. Mostly, they used their fists, though the one who wasn’t Sean threw a couple of kicks at the start, one of which caught me hard on the hip, almost exactly where I’d been shot. Remembered pain lanced my middle and down my legs, and the one who did it liked the reaction he got so much, he got ready to do it again, but Sean put a stop to that. I couldn’t tell if that was because Sean was playing the good cop in this routine, or because he was afraid a kick would do too much damage and might keep me from talking, or because he had less of a taste for the affair than the others.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t keep him from delivering a savage jab to my kidneys when his turn came.
What they did to me hurt.
It hurt a lot, and in many different ways.
It made me angry, and it humiliated me, and it was, of course, just plain old painful as hell.
None of that was the worst thing.
The worst thing was the doubt that began to creep in as the beating seemed to go on and on, as the time stretched and contracted all at once. As their gloved fists beat me again and again, as my skin, raw with cold, stung and split and broke.
She wasn’t coming.
Either she couldn’t or she wouldn’t, and it was the wouldn’t that had the hooks, that dug into my mind and my thoughts, tangling itself until I couldn’t silence it or ignore it. Nothing else had weight in its face, nothing else mattered; not everything we had between us, not all of the things we had shared and said. I was seeing the display on Bowles’s laptop, the file less than five months old, telling me all the things I’d been a fool to let myself forget.
She was a professional, she was one of The Ten, she was Drama, and couldn’t it have been an act all along? Why should she care about what happened to me? Why would she care about what had happened to a woman who was my friend, not hers?
Why would she risk her life and her liberty for these things?
She had warned me. She had tried to convince me not to do this, not to draw them out, not to give myself to them. She wasn’t coming, that was what she’d been trying to tell me. I was on my own.
She wasn’t coming.
They made me doubt her.
For that, I hated them more than anything else.
After a while, I don’t know how long, they quit, and Bowles emerged from the house with a cup of something that steamed invitingly in his hands. He’d put his overcoat and his gloves back on, as if to demonstrate all the more to me that he was warm and I was not. He crunched through the disturbed snow to where I was shivering and bleeding, dropped down to his haunches, and waited for me to meet his eyes. It took some will to do it, because mostly I was considering passing out, but also because I was having a hard time focusing. The ambient light had turned the snow a blue that seemed to rise up around where I rested. Where my blood had spilled it had turned black.
“Where is she, Atticus?”
My teeth were chattering so much it was hard to say the words.
“Who gave the order?” I asked.
He shook his head sadly, then poured out half of his hot coffee on my still-bound hands. The heat exploded through the numbness, sent sparks and shards into the bone, and I screamed, tried to lunge for him. He’d expected it, backing up, and I went down face-first, my hands still burning with the cold, with the heat.
I lifted my head from the snow, seeing him standing a foot away, seeing the four others gathered outside the front door of the cabin, the warm light spilling from within.
Bowles moved his mug so that he held it over my head, tilted it slightly, as if readying to dump the remaining contents onto my neck and back.
“In a few more minutes, we’re going to take you back inside,” he told me. “We’re going to let you warm up. We’re going to clean you up. We might even let you nod off, go unconscious.
“Then we’re going to take you back out here, and we’ll do all of this again. Except this time, I won’t bring a mug of coffee. I’ll bring a fucking kettle hot off the stove, do you understand me, you stupid piece of shit?”
My chattering teeth wouldn’t let me respond, so I nodded.
“You tell me right now, you tell me where Drama is, where I can find her, and this is over, it’s finished, we’ll be done. That’s all you have to do, Atticus, that’s all you have to tell me. Where is she?”
“Why?” I asked. It took effort just to get that much out.
He looked honestly disgusted by the question.
I shook my head, realizing he’d misunderstood me. They needed us both, yes, I’d gotten that much, I understood that much. It was why they’d hit the safe house at the same time they’d ambushed me. They were trying to kill us, that wasn’t news, not to him, not to me.
It was harder to say it the second time. “Why us?”
Bowles wavered in my vision, then shook his head, declining to answer. This time, I was sure he’d understood what I was asking, but even now, he wasn’t willing to give me the motive. Whatever crime Alena or I or we together had committed, whatever the threat was that either of us alone or together might pose, he wasn’t about to explain it.
He moved the mug, let another dribble of his coffee spatter out onto my back. I heard a scream, and I thought that it might be mine.
Then I heard it a second time, and I knew it wasn’t.
It rolled out of the trees and the darkness from somewhere behind me, awful with fear and pain. Bowles, Sean, all of them froze in place.
“Son of a bitch,” Bowles murmured.
I blinked several times, trying to convince at least one of my eyes to focus on him. I wondered if, this time, I had lost a contact.
“Okay,” I said. “You win. I’ll tell you where she is.”
Bowles threw down his mug, reaching into his overcoat with his other hand, spinning in place all at once even as he brought out his pistol. He did not look at me.
“It’s Drama, it’s fucking her, that fucking cunt is here, she’s come to get him,” he said quickly to the others. “She’s fucking out there and she’s taken the overwatch and you are going to find her and you are going to kill her.”
They started moving all at once, Sean directing them. Two ran back to the house, the third staying close by. Bowles pivoted back towards me, kicking up snow as he did so. He grabbed hold of me by the Flexi-Cuffs around my wrists, shoved the gun against my temple.
“Get up,” he told me. “Get on your knees!”
I struggled with it, and not only to buy time, but because most everything hurt, and those parts that didn’t were silent only because they’d gone numb with the cold. I’d be dealing with frostbite in another few minutes, if I wasn’t having to deal with it already. While Bowles muscled me to my knees, th
e two who had gone for the house reemerged, carrying three long guns and three sets of NVG between them. Everyone but Sean and Bowles got a long gun and the goggles.
Bowles rammed the pistol into the side of my neck.
“You don’t want to do that,” I told him.
“Shut up,” Bowles snapped. “Shut the fuck up, call her, call—”
A third scream, more broken than the two that had come before, the voice issuing it already threading with strain. It sounded awful and piteous. It sounded like someone not only in agony, but in terror, and all of them heard it, and none of them liked it.
“Jesus Christ,” one of them whispered. “That’s Ryan. What the fuck is she doing to Ryan?”
Sean ran his free hand in a cutting motion across his throat, angry, indicating to all that he wanted them to shut the fuck up. They gave him his silence, and in it he flashed out a sequence of hand signals, deploying the three men. They began making towards the line of trees surrounding the cabin, and I’d been right about their pedigree. They moved well, spreading out to keep from bunching up while still keeping each other in sight enough to provide backup. Hand signals flashed between them, and maybe they had a line on the screams, where their friend Ryan was, because they seemed to know where they should go.
“Drop the gun,” I told Bowles. “Listen to me.”
He glanced down at me, then dug the barrel harder into the side of my neck. I was so cold it didn’t feel like much other than pressure against my skin. “Call to her. Tell her to come out.”
If I’d been able to, I would have laughed. As it was, I coughed and snorted all at once, ejecting more blood and mucus.
To my right, just at the edge of the cabin, one of Sean’s men staggered at the same moment that the wooden wall behind him splintered, sprayed with a coat of gore and blood. The sound of the shot came at almost the exact same moment, the concussion of a Magnum round rattling the trees. The man fell to his knees, then dropped face-first into the snow.
“Seven o’clock!” one of the others shouted. “Muzzle flash, seven—”
The top of his head shredded before he could finish the sentence. The report chased after the echoes of the first.
Both Sean and the last of his men dove to the ground. Sean was smarter about it, staying clear of the cabin, using the deep snow. It was a good move; unless Alena had taken a position with elevation, and I knew that she hadn’t, the snow would keep him out of her line of sight.
The last one wasn’t as lucky, and when he went for cover, he tried to use the cabin, to get around the corner. He almost made it; if he’d been a little faster, or Alena had been a little slower, he would have.
But he didn’t.
Bowles balked, then dug his pistol deeper against my neck. The thought of taking it from him, freeing myself, flicked through my mind, but I ignored it. The condition I was in, the posture I was holding, I’d never be able to manage it.
“I’ll kill you, she doesn’t come out.” Bowles still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ll kill you.”
“Then she’s gone,” I said. “If you get the shot off, she’s gone. And you want us both, remember?”
He swore softly.
“Drop the gun,” I said again. “Please, Matthew.”
“Shut up! Sean! Sean, do you see her?”
“I need answers,” I told him. “You can give them to me. Drop the gun, don’t do this.”
The pistol left the side of my neck, and for an instant I thought he’d seen reason, that he’d let it go. He backed away from me a step.
“I know you’re there!” he shouted into the trees. “I know you’re there, I’ll kill him if you don’t come out! Give yourself up!”
“Don’t!” I shouted, as much to Alena as to Bowles, and I tried to get to my feet, tried to rise up and block the shot that I knew would come, because I knew what Bowles would do next.
He raised the pistol on me, leveling it with both hands at my head.
“You’ve got five!” Bowles shouted.
“Just put it down!”
“Four!”
“Dammit, Bowles—”
“Three!”
Then the hole opened in his chest, high on the sternum, and Matthew Bowles dropped like a marionette whose lines had been cut. Foamy blood blew out from his mouth, dripped over his lips, into the snow.
He rattled out the last of his air, and died.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” I told him. “All we wanted was an answer.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
While you were always, in your way, alone, you were never on your own.
Always there were others, the people giving the orders or the people teaching the lessons or the people in support of the operation. At every stage, there was a network.
You may have been plucked from an orphanage in Magadan at the age of eight, or seconded from the SAS, or recruited from Detachment Delta. When it began is irrelevant. You were chosen, or you volunteered, or you fell into it by circumstance, but at some point a decision was made, and you went from soldier or guardian or child to assassin, and that was when the divorce took place. Partially, this was a psychological transformation, a necessary stage in your education as dictated by those who instructed you, a need to remove you from the herd. The wolf doesn’t run with the sheep, after all, and even were it in the wolf’s mind to do so, the sheep would have none of it.
It is a survival mechanism. What you do now, at the behest of your government or group or cause, is dangerous in the extreme. It must be performed in secrecy and anonymity, and the best way to be anonymous, to keep a secret, is to keep the number of people involved to one. You work alone.
Or you pretend that you do, because, in truth, you have support. Be it from your government or group or cause, there are people who stand behind you, people to secure the things that you need to do your job. They do this not because they like you or because they care about you. They do it because you are a tool, and you must be directed, and you must be properly employed. If you are their hammer, they don’t simply point you at the board and say start pounding; they must provide you with the nails. That they pay you a wage—if they pay you at all—is incidental, just another means of directing the tool.
It cannot be stressed how vital this network is. They give you purpose, for without them, you would not be used. They designate your target. They provide the intelligence, the means, the wherewithal to reach it. Plane tickets and weapons, identification and money, maps and photographs, everything you require to perform your task. And should you complete the job they have given you successfully, they are there at the end, to tend your wounds, to continue honing your skills, to, in fact, maintain the tool so that it may be used again and again and again either until it is so worn as to be useless, or until it is lost to damage or circumstance.
You are alone, perhaps, but never on your own.
Until you decide, for whatever the reason, that what you do for government or group or cause is best done for yourself and yourself alone. Until the day that you find that the world has changed, that your usefulness is coming to an end, and that you are soon to become a liability. Until the day you discover that the wage you are paid for the task you perform is not commensurate with the risk you undertake. Until the day that you realize the only pleasure in your life lies in taking the life of another.
It is unlikely that your decision is based on any moral argument, on a question of right or wrong, or good or evil. You are what you are, what they made you to be, and one of the first things they did upon removing you from the rest of the herd was make it clear that such concerns no longer matter to you. Tools are not concerned with how they are used; it isn’t the gun that kills, it is the person who pointed it at the victim’s head and then pulled the trigger who does. The gun is the mechanism. The shooter is the killer.
They have worked very, very hard indeed to convince you that you are the mechanism, nothing more.
And even if such arguments have failed
to completely wash away your questions or to utterly still your conscience, you have discovered that it is better not to press the subject. Not with your masters, nor with yourself.
So, be it for survival or fear or greed or kink, you take what they have given you, you take what they have made you, and you leave. And because you are a tool that has cost tens of millions of dollars to create, and because to make you what you are you have learned things that are dangerous to others, that threaten their security and their position and their futures, they are, shall we say, loath to let you go. It would be different if you maintained your loyalty, but for whatever the reason, that time is passed, all loyalty is dead.
So you cannot simply leave.
You must run.
For the first time, now, you are truly alone. There is no one to help you, no one to turn to. There is no network; there is no support.
You stand in the world with a handful of secrets and a set of skills that are, putting it mildly, highly specialized. Marketable skills, when marketed to the right people, of course, but therein is another problem; how do you find those “right” people without revealing yourself to the government or group or cause you have—in their eyes, at least—now betrayed?
If you are smart, if you are at all wise, you have money. Perhaps you even have a lot of it, acquired during those jobs performed for your masters. If you were very smart, if you prepared for this day, some of that money might even still be safe. But regardless of how much or how little you have, it will not last, because the things you need to continue to survive are expensive. Much that you require is illegal, and that brings with it a tremendous surcharge. You are a person without an identity, because every identity you have ever been known by is known also to the people you have just betrayed. And so you must create a new shell, a new name. This is crucial, because without that foundation, you can acquire nothing you need to survive. How can you rent an apartment if you cannot prove you are who you pretend to be?
Your money will not last for long, if at all.