Sleeper Agent

by M. Anthony Harris

  “I think I got them,” I could barely hear myself say.

  “That was amazing!” Sasha yelled and planted a kiss on my lips. “Thank you so much!”

  I might need to blow up terrorists more often. I grinned like an idiot.

  “Hey! Hey! Come back to earth!” Helena hissed, breaking me free from my reverie. “I’m sure that there’ll be another team on its way.” She had barely finished the sentence when a technician’s chest burst open with a red spray as the fifth story windows shattered inwards. The second strike team had arrived.

  I rolled toward the windows as bullets tore up the floor where I had just been. A flying food tray from Sasha distracted them long enough for me to snatch up a piece of the shattered glass and shove it into the thigh of the soldier nearest me. He screamed and bent over in pain. I drove my shoulder into his gut and fell to the ground with him. He reached for the knife strapped to his foot and arced it to puncture my neck. Sasha dove and grabbed his hand, twisting it until it snapped. He let out a howl of pain that was cut short by Sasha dragging the knife across his neck from the carotid artery to the Adam’s apple.

  I ripped my eyes from him and saw Helena and two of the techs wrestling another member of the strike team to the ground. One of the techs, whose name I couldn’t remember, took a bullet to the thigh as he helped to tackle the terrorist.

  As the others ripped and tore at the soldier and eventually took the upper hand, Helena broke free of the tussle and grabbed the IV stand. She wielded it like a staff from an old kung fu movie to gather momentum before she slammed it into the knees of the soldier who had just killed another of our companions. He fell to the ground, cursing as his knee shattered with an audible pop. I jumped on him and pummeled him with my fists as Helena turned back to the first attacker and stabbed the pole through his chest.

  “Watch out!” I heard Sasha scream. Her warning gave me just enough time to roll off of the soldier, causing a bullet to blast through my hospital gown instead of burying itself into my abdomen. The soldier I’d just grappled corrected his aim and fired at my center mass.

  Time crystallized, and I watched the gun being raised and his finger slowly tighten around the trigger. It was odd having survived so much to realize that it was all about to end. Some part of my mind registered a scream of rage, and I looked to see Sasha diving at the soldier with a shard of glass shimmering in her hand. The muzzle exploded with fire, and I saw Sasha’s shoulder turn crimson as she rammed the shard into his chest. It shattered as it bounced off his Kevlar vest.

  “No!” a feral scream ripped from my throat as he pointed his gun at her head. I dove toward them, praying that I would make it in time. A deafening crack let me know that I was too late.

  I let rage flood me like a tsunami and grabbed his head and slammed it into the floor with all the strength that I could muster, fracturing it on impact. I smashed it over and over until my hands were slick with blood. I was so enraged that I didn’t even realize that he’d been the last of the strike team.

  Helena’s loud shout finally broke through my still ringing ears. “Stephen! He’s dead! Calm down! Sasha’s OK!” Helena’s voice snapped me back to reality.

  “She’s alright?” I bellowed. My heart did a one-eighty.

  “Yeah, I am, though it feels like I lost my shoulder,” Sasha grimaced in pain as a tech disinfected her bloodied clavicle.

  “How is everybody?” I surveyed the bullet-riddled room.

  “It’s not good. Bryson didn’t make it. Neither did Michael, and it’ll be months before Antwon’ll be able to regain full use of his legs.” Helena visibly deflated as she surveyed the room. The bodies of our friends lay tangled with those of the strike team.

  “What were they after?” Sasha’s eyes searched mine for answers. The whole room looked to me for some way to explain the devastation.

  14

  “It’s time to give you some answers.” Arthur’s figure cut a grim visage as he stepped into the room, his shirt torn and stained with someone else’s blood.

  “Answers?”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re wondering why you were attacked and what Clayton is planning,” he shrugged.

  “Yes, we are, and now we’re also wondering what part you play in all this mess,” Helena spoke for the rest of us. She was just as shocked at his blood-soaked entrance as the rest of us. “Who are you really?”

  “That’s not an easy question to answer,” the older man said with a grim smile. “Let’s just say it’s a long story and that I have a much longer history with this program than possibly anyone left alive.”

  “What exactly is this program?” I asked, hoping to get the answers that I’d been searching for since the moment I’d realized my unique ability.

  “You all know about MK-ULTRA, but what you don’t know is my part in it,” Arthur’s voice drew us in. “It was started when I was still a young man. It was just like you’ve read in almost every story: a failure. We would take homeless people from the streets and drug them up, hoping that we could find the chemical solution to unlock the brain’s quantum potential. We were determined to create the ultimate spy, someone who would jump at every order and who could go anywhere in the world unnoticed. We wanted to create the perfect sleeper agent,” he sighed. “But we were constantly failing, and the government funding was drying up, so we put the subjects on ice, and it was then that we had our breakthrough.”

  “On ice?”

  “We had been working on remote viewing for years with nothing to show for it except for a bunch of nameless addicts so wrecked by drugs that they could barely function without constant care, so we put them in a medical coma and forgot about them. Then one of the nurses noticed that Patient X, the first one we’d experimented on, was speaking despite being in a coma. At first we thought it was just babbling caused by the drugs, but one day as the doctor was working on him he started to speak aloud the notes that were being written. We knew then that we had finally found what we were looking for, the perfect sleeper agent. Imagine the irony of finding out that the key to the perfect sleeper agent was a good nap,” he chuckled. “Patient X was an overwhelming success. We had funding again, and we trained him into the perfect spy. We would give him an assignment and then put him in a medical coma for months at a time, and he would come back with critical information. His work actually helped to end the Cold War, but it took a toll on him. He started to break down. He blamed us for the violence he witnessed, and each mission we sent him on took him to darker and darker places until all that remained was a bitter shell of what he once was.” Arthur shook his head at the memories. “But still we trusted him because he was an invaluable intelligence asset. It wasn’t until his information led a team into a slaughter that I began to question his loyalty. He’d lied to us and let them pay the price. After a series of interviews I conducted on him, I became convinced that he’d turned, and I insisted that he couldn’t be trusted anymore, but my comrades wouldn’t listen to my warnings. He provided just enough helpful information to keep himself from being ‘iced’ —put in a coma— again, but he kept making ‘oversights’ that cost lives. It was around then that I was kicked off the program. I insisted that he’d turned against us, but they wouldn’t listen. To them, those who’d died were a small price to pay for the illusion of security that he offered.”

  “They sound just like Clayton,” I muttered under my breath as my mind drifted back to our encounter before the attack on the hospital. He’d sacrificed his men coldly and without remorse, all to trick me into giving him our location. I wondered if death was just a game to him.

  As if reading my thoughts, Arthur said, “He’d seen so much violence and darkness that death became something which he scoffed at. He once told me that we’re already halfway dead, so why should he care about whom he hurt? He laughed at the look of horror on my face. He blamed me for what he’d become and told me that if it wasn’t for our work, he would just be some nameless hobo living off whatever he could find in the d
umpsters, but what we’d done to him had opened his eyes to the truth of the world. If you have strength, you act on it. He’d been weak, and we had used him as our pincushion, and we had every right to. We had the strength to act, so our actions were justified. Now he was the one with power, so why shouldn’t he prey on those who were weaker than him?”

  “So Clayton just saw the researchers as toys?”

  “I don’t know. Patient X isn’t Clayton. Clayton was our military liaison. I’m still not sure how he got pulled into this mess, but I can assure you that he’s not the one responsible. He was one of the most upstanding men that I know. He practically worshiped honor.”

  “So he somehow goes from being a paragon of virtue to leading a cell of domestic terrorists?” Sasha scoffed.

  “I don’t know how it happened or when it happened. From that conversation forward, I made it my life’s work to see X imprisoned. He was a rabid dog that needed to be locked away. It wasn’t until they found out about his involvement in 9/11 that it finally happened."

  “9/11?”

  “That’s a story for another time.” He waved dismissively. “As I was saying, we locked him up and threw away the key, literally and metaphorically. He’s been kept awake since the day we locked him up over a decade ago.”

  No sleep for over a decade? I was surprised that he was still alive. It must’ve been due to all the drugs they’d pumped him with when they’d first began their experimentation on him.

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?” I asked.

  “I tried to convince them to, but they were sure that they could somehow recondition him.”

  His clinical manner of speaking of torture sent a shiver down my spine. It was frightening seeing the dark side of a man that’d become like family to me.

  “So how did Clayton gain the abilities of your Patient X?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But I spoke to him! I saw out of his eyes!” I insisted.

  “Yes, but did you consider that he might have had someone else riding with him? You said you encountered him before the attack here. Did he sound like the same person whom you watched through weeks ago? Did he sound like the patriot who was angry at the mockery his nation had become?”

  “No. He sounded like a monster who didn’t care who lived or died as long as he got what he wanted.”

  “I suspect that Clayton has somehow been manipulated by Patient X.” Arthur’s shoulders went limp with resignation. The question of why and how his friend had turned clearly haunted him.

  “But what does he want? And why attack us?” Helena’s eyes bore into his.

  “My guess is that he wanted to get rid of the whole team. After the interrogations, he realized that Stephen was telling the truth, but he knew that we’d move heaven and earth to retrieve him.” He gestured toward me. “So he allowed the escape and followed him back to us and figured he could kill two birds with one stone. With Stephen and the rest of us out of the way, there’d be no one who could stop him.”

  Arthur continued to address every question we leveled at him. Each answer added a layer of depth to the person we used to think of only as the kindly grandfather figure of the team.

  He explained how he’d hoped to pay penance for the inhumane things he’d done in the name of science and how he viewed our work as a kind of penance. It was a chance to redeem himself from the monster that he’d helped create.

  He told us of many of the atrocities that Patient X was behind and how many lives his actions costed. With each new story, the pit in my stomach grew. I felt queasy and weak by the time he finished. He seemed more of an inhuman force of evil than a person, and he’d marked us. He would make it his mission to see us dead before we could hamper any of his plans. And with a phone call, our worst fears were confirmed. Patient X was free.

  What followed was a marathon session of surveillance and planning.

  15

  Muzzles flashed. I dove to the ground, pulling Sasha down by my side. I winced in empathy as she let out a cry of pain from her injured shoulder bouncing off the hard floor. My own body felt like one giant throbbing bruise. I rolled over, put my hand over her mouth to silence her, and whispered apologies in her ear. Arthur turned to us with a glare to shush us.

  Our strike team that’d tried to sneak in under the cover of the deepening dusk had found themselves surrounded by Clayton’s men. They’d fallen into a pincer formation and had cut off every avenue of escape except that of retreat, a retreat that led them right to where our surveillance truck was parked on an overgrown, empty lot that was adjacent to the federal colocation center that housed one of the main server farms for the United States sensitive information infrastructure. They steadily advanced on our retreating troops.

  The firefight was getting much closer to our location. Each series of deafening pops broke the silence of the night and caused us to cringe and crouch lower. I let out an involuntary cry of surprise as a bullet tore through the van where we had been sitting just mere moments before.

  That would’ve torn open my head! I panicked. They weren’t planning on keeping any prisoners this time. I’d already been offered that opportunity, and I’d proverbially spat in their faces when I’d heard it.

  It’d happened soon after Arthur’s series of revelations. The team had asked me to go under again and find out what X was planning. They were sure that he knew of his team’s defeat and wouldn’t give us any time to rest before he put his next plan into action, so I went to sleep to try to find out what those plans were. It didn’t take long before X found me watching through Clayton’s eyes. He tried to convince me to use my unique ability to join them. He said that we could become unstoppable together and that we could change the world. He told me that we could be like gods in the new world he would make, that we could change the destiny of nations as we saw fit. It was disgusting.

  When I awoke I’d told the team of the ultimatum that he’d given me: join him or die. We thoroughly examined everything that he had said for clues, and Helena soon realized that he was planning to target the federal server farms where so many of our nation’s secrets were housed. X believed that with the secrets of the country destroyed, he would be able to manipulate the flow of information. Whether or not he was right, a successful attack could be devastating.

  * * *

  X planned on destroying the global information network in order to create conflict and rule nations, and his first target was the nation that’d turned him into the monster that he was and had locked him in a sleepless waking nightmare for a decade.

  He planned on leveling America’s information infrastructure.

  After a series of phone calls by Arthur, who continued to surprise us, we were able to narrow down the location that Clayton and X were going to attack.

  “You have to know that it’s a trap,” Sasha had pleaded with me when I insisted on being there for the counteroffensive.

  “Of course I know that, but I don’t see any way of stopping them if Clayton and X are still free. I think that we need to set a trap of our own,” I said, knowing that everyone else would agree.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I, but we need to do something, and I think that the only way we’ll have a chance at fighting this is if we make ourselves so irresistible to X that he sends his best to capture or kill us.”

  “Well, if you’re going, so am I,” she insisted.

  “There’s no way that I’m letting you come along!” I insisted.

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing that you have no say in the matter, isn’t it? Look at what happened the last time that I let you out of my sight. You got yourself beaten half to death and barely escaped with your life…and us with ours. And if you haven’t realized yet that I’ve been trained in counter-intelligence and military combatives, you’re an idiot. So I don’t care what you say, I’m not letting you out of my sight. You’re stuck with me, kiddo,” Sasha stared me down with such a fierce glare that all the retorts I had
been thinking of withered away.

  I thought back on that moment as the bullets shredded the thin metal of the van.

  “This is why I didn’t want you here!” I harshly whispered in her ear as another tore through the surveillance van that we’d been sitting in moments ago.

  Her glare stabbed into me. “Go to he—”

  “Enough with your bickering,” Arthur interrupted our little spat. “They’re getting closer, and it sounds like our team is being overwhelmed.”

  A series of agonized screams seemed to punctuate his point, and we fell deathly silent.

  “I know you’re here, Arthur! You and your little pet are surrounded, and all your men are either incapacitated or dead. You’ve nowhere to run to, If you surrender now, we will show you mercy!” a familiar voice pierced the night.

  “And why should I believe you?” Arthur asked.

  “There they are. Surround them. And do it quietly,” the softly spoken command barely registered in my ringing ears.

  “You know me, Arthur. You know that I’m a man of my word. You know that I always hold true to what I say I’ll do.”

  The look in Arthur’s eyes showed me that even now he believed what Clayton was saying. He really thought that he’d be true to his word, and with a nod Sasha and I let him know that despite our misgivings, we trusted him, and we’d follow his lead.

  Arthur rose to his feet and marched toward where General Clayton’s voice was last heard, and, after a second’s hesitation, Sasha and I followed suit. A team of heavily armed soldiers instantaneously surrounded us, forced us to our knees, and fastened our hands with zip ties. They were so tight that they cut into our skin, turning our hands a dark shade of purple.

  “Hello, old friend. It has truly been a long time,” Clayton’s tone was surprisingly genial with Arthur.

  “You lost the right to call me friend the second you decided to side with that monster.”