Sleeper Agent

by M. Anthony Harris

  “Don’t say that, Arthur. If you knew half of what I know then you’d be right here by my side.” Clayton towered above us.

  He cut an impressive figure, and it was easy to see why he inspired people to follow him. His dark hair was peppered with grey, and even in his early sixties his body looked like that of someone twenty years younger, tall and well muscled. Although he wasn’t classically handsome, his angular face had an earnestness that drew people in, and he spoke every word with an appealing conviction.

  “I will give you one more chance to join us, Arthur, Sasha, Stephen.”

  I replied, “Sorry, but I already told your master that he could put his offer where the sun don’t shine, and I’ll say the same thing to you. Take your offer and shove it up your d…” A heavy backhand from one of the guards finished the sentence for me.

  “I’m sorry, old friend, but there’s nothing you could say to persuade me to join you and that monster that you’ve partnered with. No matter what you say you won’t be changing my mind. X is too dangerous. People are nothing but commodities to him, and I spent far too long living in that mindset. But it’s not too late to give yourself up,” Arthur gave a slight nod toward the sky, giving the call to action to the secondary team that was led by Helena and Safid.

  “That’s too bad. I guess I’ll have to kill you.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have the opportunity,” a loud clap emphasized Arthur’s retort, and the guard that’d had his gun to the back of Sasha’s head fell down, gurgling and clutching the hole in his throat that a sniper’s bullet had just torn.

  Before I could even think to react, Arthur capitalized on the chaos brought by the sniper and snapped the zip ties that’d restrained his hands and reached behind himself. He grabbed the stock of his shocked guard’s gun and with an impressive twist flung him on the ground and nearly crushed the man’s windpipe with a well-placed knife hand to the throat.

  Holy crap! Who in the world is this guy? I thought in shock before Arthur and Sasha’s yells spurred me into action.

  I freed my hands from the zip ties and scooped up the gun that Sasha’s guard had dropped when the bullet had pierced his throat.

  I let out a spray of cover fire and caught one of Clayton’s soldiers in the shoulder, making him lose his aim long enough for Sasha and me to scramble the rest of the way to cover. It was a small miracle that we survived the retaliatory onslaught unharmed.

  Meanwhile, Arthur was moving like a man possessed. He stepped behind the closest guard and with a movement too quick for me to see, he took the knife from the soldier’s hip and drew it across his throat. The blood sprayed. Arthur then used the dying body to intercept a volley of bullets aimed his way.

  It was like a scene straight from hell. My ears rang from all the gunfire, and I thought that I’d have a headache for a week straight if we managed to somehow survive the situation. Gunshots from the sniper team tore down all the outliers of the team, and Sasha and I were both using guns that we’d retrieved to keep the rest of the soldiers at bay and to help Arthur whenever there was a spare moment. Sasha’s marksmanship saved the old man’s life on multiple occasions as she picked off those that the snipers’ scopes hadn’t yet drawn their bead on.

  As for Arthur, he seemed at home in the chaos. He flitted about, taking lives as if it were second nature to him. He was no ordinary scientist, that was for sure. The way he dispatched his enemies with ease made me think that he had to have been in some sort of special forces team when he was younger. He was a highly proficient killer.

  “Sasha!” I yelled as soon as I noticed the soldier that had perfectly blended into the chest level grass that covered the unassuming lot that housed the federal colocation center in the middle of nowhere. His special forces ghillie suit made him nearly invisible. It’d only been the tug on my mind that X was around somewhere watching that’d brought my eyes to that patch of field. The soldier immediately knew that I had seen him and stood up, making an oddly ferocious sight, like that of a monstrous human-shaped shrubbery, one that was carrying an RPG that was aimed at the server farm.

  Sasha immediately trained her sights on the soldier and with a short burst from the semi-automatic rifle, blasted through his chest with a tight grouping mere inches apart from each other. She’d stopped the first of the small rockets, but a small volley of the grenades had been launched by the soldier’s hidden squad before anyone had the chance to even blink an eye.

  The building behind us was torn open by the thunderous explosions from the incendiaries. I felt like my ears had been ripped open like the building had. I’m sure they were bleeding, but I didn’t even think to check. The only thought in my mind was stopping the enemy from releasing any more of the explosives.

  With the help of Sasha and using the cover of the snipers who hadn’t fallen casualty to the large blasts, I rushed toward the group of grenadiers, spraying bursts of gunfire wherever I thought I saw them.

  Time is a funny thing when your adrenaline is pumping; it both slows and speeds up simultaneously. Everything seemed to move in slow motion as the gunfire rang through the night, but within the space of what seemed like heartbeats, it was all over. The small grenadier squadron had fallen, and the rest of the soldiers had been either killed or forced to surrender by Helena’s strike team.

  Clayton nearly overwhelmed Arthur as they’d engaged in hand-to-hand combat, but a well-placed shot to the calf had brought him to his knees and the last of the resistance went down with their leader.

  Somehow during the chaos we had won.

  16

  Clayton’s remaining soldiers were gathered and after a strenuous but ultimately unfruitful interrogation process, they were shipped off to to spend the rest of their days in the highest security prison in the United States.

  It was almost ironic how they’d dedicated their lives to bringing down the government only to be caught and taken to rot their days away in the symbol that stood for everything they stood against. They would be caged like fighting dogs in kennels. I almost felt sorry for them, but the torture I’d gone through and the suffering and deaths of so many of my coworkers I’d seen—many whom I’d come to call good friends— had changed something inside of me. Where there once might have been a sense of mercy for them, a cold dark vengeance had taken its place. The monsters deserved to waste away, not even given the dignity of being remembered.

  It’d brought me deep pleasure when I’d heard that the attack was being blamed on a lone wolf hacker that’d targeted the server farm’s cooling system and had caused the explosions. Anyone who knew computers or was able to investigate the sight would know that the story was bogus, but I was amazed at how quickly the multiple agencies—many of which I hadn’t even known existed—had coordinated to seal off the area and edit the footage of the explosion that they subsequently released to the public.

  At one time I know I would've been bothered by the government’s cover up of such a devastating attack, and I think that some small part of me still was, but knowing that the monsters hadn’t only failed, but also wouldn’t even have the notoriety that would drive others to join X and his cause was worth whatever the cost may have been. Clayton and his men had done much damage, but we’d won and even had the final parting shot.

  “What’s X’s objective? This was only the first step in his plan, that much I know for sure,” Arthur pleaded with his old comrade.

  Clayton just stared forward in a stony silence. They had tried everything that they could think of to get the military man to talk, but despite the incentives or threats offered, he remained silent. His steel grey eyes looked forward, unblinking. It was almost as if he would put himself into some meditative trance every time he was brought out for questioning. Even long sessions of waterboarding did nothing to loosen his tongue. His water-soaked features never changed. He would die to protect X’s plans that he’d helped to enact.

  I tried on multiple occasions to track down X, to somehow find him as he rebuilt, doubtless
using his abilities during the process. I’d initially thought that he would somehow connect to Clayton again and use him as a vessel, but that proved not to be true. At first I wondered why he’d so completely abandoned his general, but I when I remembered how he’d so callously let me kill his soldiers just so I could lead him to us, it sunk in that he’d truly abandoned the former general. Clayton would keep his silence, believing he’d somehow served the greater good by his actions, and the man who’d warped his mind would just abandon him and move on, like some sort of parasite that ate away at the mind of its host and warped it into a twisted form of its former self.

  I tried to pry into Clayton’s world, but he seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense my presence whenever I dream walked into his mind. Occasionally he would voice a silent “hello” when I entered his mind. I tried everything I could to loosen his tongue as he carried my dream-self like a vessel in his mind, but his long years spent as a surrogate body for the imprisoned psychopath X seemed to have given him some sort of strange resistance to my mental intrusions. In the two weeks I was confined to the hospital bed I spent every sleeping moment trying to dig information about X from the General’s mind, but he only ever once spoke to me.

  I hounded him from the moment I closed my eyes, constantly pounding against his mental defenses. I think that I’d gotten to nearly two thousand bottles of beer on the wall before he spoke his first and last words aside from the occasional greeting to me: “Quit trying to get me to talk. Nothing you can do will make be betray X. I’ll never betray them.”

  Epilogue

  The months that passed after the last battle healed the wounds but did little to heal the trust that’d been broken between Arthur and the team. His double life made it difficult for most of the team to trust him. They’d all used me and had lived in their own deceptions, but it was too much to discover that one of their own, the one who’d seemed to be the moral center of the team, not only had conducted the initial inhumane experiments that laid the foundation of their program, but had also basically helped to create the villain who’d killed many of their friends.

  After an initial barrage of questions, some of which he’d been hesitant to answer, Arthur had retreated into a strong silence that refused to be broken. Helena now spoke much less around him, and although Sasha said that she’d forgiven him for the deception, I noticed that she was much more reserved around him as well.

  I think that Safid and I were the only ones who’d taken the information in stride and strived to learn as much as we could about the man. In doing so we forged a deeper friendship, one that helped me to unload all the pain and anger that’d built up in me. He profusely apologized for his part in what’d taken place and was there for me whenever I needed him, always lending a listening ear. When I experienced a flashback that I just couldn’t bear to tell Sasha of, he would be there to listen and encourage me to open up to her. In those short months, Safid also became like a brother to me.

  With the help of Safid to bring me to terms with my anger and resentment at what’d happened at the hands of him, Helena, and the rest of the team, Sasha and I also grew much closer. It wasn’t an easy process and there were many tears, but every one proved to be worth it as I got to know her more and more every day.

  It was almost enough to make me forget what’d happened and what may have been yet to come.

  When it became clear that we wouldn’t receive any more information from Clayton than that one verbal slip he’d had during the first few days of our interrogation process, he was eventually put into a sensory deprivation tank to ensure there wouldn’t be even the remotest of possibilities that X would somehow watch. He was remanded to a highly classified government black site where, to the outside world, he disappeared and was forgotten.

  Finding X came to consume nearly all my time, and when I wasn’t taking short naps and dream walking through any possible connection I could think of to him, I would be giving detailed reports of my findings or researching any possible leads that would bring us to him. Because of our search I soon abandoned college. Who would want to stay there when the only other person in the world who shared the same uncanny ability with you was intent on tearing down the world as you knew it?

  Through some magic, though, Sasha talked Helena into using her numerous connections to get me the electrical engineering master’s degree that I’d been so close to finishing.

  “I just wanted to thank you again,” I said for the millionth time as I walked hand in hand with Sasha during one of our rare breaks from the surveillance detail that seemed to now consume our lives.

  “I’ve told you thousands of times, stop thanking me! You were super close to getting it anyway before we decided to interfere with your life and nearly get you killed. In fact, I should be the one to thank you for staying.”

  “Well, I probably wouldn’t have if the company wasn’t so pleasant,” I smiled down at her.

  “Yeah, I am pretty great, aren’t I?” Sasha’s beaming smile was infectious.

  “Yes, you are,” I grinned as I bent down and kissed her. In that moment everything fell away and I remembered the present.

  My future was in the moment. Every moment was a choice I made that changed me into who I would become. The world might never be safe, and, despite how I tried, I might never be able to save it, but I could cherish what I had in the present and make every day a choice to fight to protect those with whom I picked to shape my future.

  * * *

  The End