by S. A. Beck
Grunt nodded. He and Mubarak got out, and the Moroccan hurried him down a small alley and then down a road parallel to the one on which the house stood. They saw few people around, mostly children and a couple of old women, the adults away for a long day of working or looking for work. The streets emptied as Grunt and Mubarak maneuvered behind the building. Grunt shook his head. In this kind of neighborhood, even the kids knew when a fight was brewing.
They passed through a small yard, where a little girl took one look at them and hurried her two goats inside. They heard her door slam as they made their way over a low fence to come to an open area littered with trash. The back of the target house stood before them. Two shuttered and barred windows and a metal door looked blankly in their direction. Grunt and Mubarak crept to the building and stood to one side of the door, drawing their pistols.
After a minute of tense waiting, they heard Ahmad and Muhammad pound on the front door.
“Police! Open up!” Ahmad shouted in Arabic. Grunt’s Arabic wasn’t all that good, but he understood that phrase well enough. He’d heard it a few times before.
There was a pregnant silence then another pounding on the door.
Suddenly a gunshot cracked the air. Grunt ducked instinctively, even though his ears told him the fire came from the front of the house.
“These are very bad boys,” Mubarak commented, not seeming the least worried. “You should not reply to the police in such a manner. It is very disrespectful.”
Grunt stared at him. “Are you for real?”
He never got an answer to his question, because just then, a couple more shots rang out from inside the house. The back door burst open.
A teenaged Moroccan came running out. Grunt stuck out an arm and clotheslined him, catching him on the neck and knocking him flat on his back. His head smacked on the threshold, and he was knocked out cold.
The second teen out the door stumbled over his friend, then froze as Mubarak stuck a gun in his face. Grunt plucked a gun out of the kid’s hand.
“All clear, my friend!” Ahmad shouted from inside the house.
They entered, the conscious teen carrying his knocked-out friend while Mubarak covered him. They found Ahmad in the living room, covering two more teens who lay face down on the floor, their hands behind their heads, fingers interlocked. One of them was bleeding from a flesh wound to the leg.
“Where’s Muhammad?” Grunt asked.
“Checking the rest of the house,” Ahmad replied.
Muhammad appeared a moment later. “No one else on this floor, but there’s a cellar. Anyone down there?”
This question was directed at the teens on the floor and emphasized with a swift kick to the nearest one.
“No, there’s no one. Are you really police?” one of them asked in a trembling voice.
“You’re going to wish we were!” Ahmad laughed.
“Where’s Edward?” Grunt asked.
One of the teens looked up. He was the oldest and appeared to be the leader. “You mean the fat American?”
“That’s him, yeah.”
His eyes got shifty. “We let him go.”
Grunt picked him up by the collar and held him up. Their eyes met as the teen’s feet dangled beneath him.
“What’s your name?” Grunt demanded.
“Amir,” the teen said, eyes wide with fear.
“Ahmad here is pretty pissed about you attacking Mohammad el Aoufi’s hotel. And killing a member of the Saudi royal family? Nice work, dumbass. The Saudis will give him a big reward for your hide. Lucky for you I’m around. You see, all I want to know is where Edward is, what you did to him, and who put you up to it. If you tell me all that and tell it to me straight, I’ll let you and your buddies go.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Grunt saw Ahmad stiffen. It was obvious that Ahmad had no intention of letting these punks go.
Grunt looked Amir in the eye. “I’m your only hope.”
Amir’s gaze shifted to the fake Moroccan policeman, to his friend lying wounded on the floor, and then back to Grunt.
“They will not kill me. I am CIA,” Amir said.
Grunt thought that might actually be true; otherwise why would Isadore have picked these losers? Grunt shook him and bluffed, “Why shouldn’t they kill you? No one knows we’re here. Talk.”
He could see the calculation going on behind Amir’s eyes.
Then Amir told him everything—about Isadore and the American junkie she had with her, about the attack on the hotel, about questioning Edward. It took some more shaking to get the details of the questioning out of him. Grunt felt his stomach turn as the punk described badgering the frail recluse with noise and jabs until he had broken. Then Grunt felt fear well up in him to hear that, in the end, Edward had talked.
“He held out for a long time,” Amir said. “He was a man in the end.”
Grunt nodded. Good. There was that at least.
“And then you killed him,” Grunt said. He had already resigned himself to this fact.
“No, the junkie did. Edward died of a heart attack.”
“Where is he now?”
The sun was setting when they got to the grave outside of town. They made the three street kids dig it up while the fourth one lay nearby, his gunshot wound wrapped with an old shirt.
The grave had been covered well, and the animals hadn’t gotten to him. Edward hadn’t been in there long, and Grunt could still recognize his face. He looked down at him in silence for a time.
Anger, sadness, and guilt. He felt all of those at once. He had always hated losing someone from his team. Even though it had happened more times than he could count, he never got used to it. Vivian had once told him that he shouldn’t get used to it, that if he did, he’d become an animal like General Meade or Isadore. He supposed that was true, but he still dreaded these feelings.
“You were a good soldier,” Grunt said to the body at his feet. “As good as any I’ve fought with. Rest in peace, my friend.”
Grunt covered up the grave himself.
Once he was done, he turned to Ahmad. The arms dealer stood with his two assistants, guns aimed at the four street punks cowering on the ground.
“Amir here says they’re CIA. If that’s true, it would be a bad idea to kill them. Let them go,” Grunt said in English so the teens wouldn’t understand.
Ahmad shook his head. “The Saudis will give me a good reward. Besides, we need to make an example of them.”
“But the CIA—”
Ahmad cut him off. “The Saudis will tell the CIA to choose their operatives more wisely. Nothing will come of this.”
Grunt slumped. That was true. These young thugs were expendable. The government ground through people like them every day to achieve its ends.
“Don’t give them to the Saudis. They’ll torture them for weeks.”
Ahmad shook his head. “I have no love for the Saudis. They sit rich on a big puddle of oil and let their Arab brothers live in slums. I will not give these boys to them alive to have fun with. Their bodies will be enough to get the reward. I will kill them quickly for your sake.”
Grunt sighed. That was the best he could do. He took a last look at them. Amir looked back at him, pleading. So young.
Grunt shook his head. There was nothing he could do. This was why he had left government work. It always made him feel dirty.
And now he felt dirty again.
He turned and quickly walked away, but the distance he put between him and the gravesite did nothing to dampen the sound of the four shots that rang out one after another behind him.
Chapter 3
AUGUST 13, 2016, HEADQUARTERS OF THE POSEIDON PROJECT, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
11:45 A.M.
* * *
Things were going very well. With a lot of hard work, a few necessary casualties, and a bit of luck, he’d be dictator of the United States in a couple of years.
General Arnold Corbin sat in the laboratory of the Poseidon Project
and watched Dr. Jones put the two Atlanteans through their paces. Well, one and a half Atlanteans. Orion was a true Atlantean that his colleague General Meade had kidnapped and mentally enslaved through hypnosis. He was in tip-top condition and, with some more training, would be an efficient killing machine. Even now he was punching through bricks better than any triple black belt. General Corbin had to step back to avoid getting hit by the fragments.
General Meade himself was the other subject. The fellow had discovered too much about General Corbin’s plans and had had to be neutralized. Killing a general of the United States armed forces would lead to an investigation, something Corbin certainly didn’t need at the moment, so Corbin had come up with a better plan. His scientists had produced a serum that, theoretically, would give regular humans the powers of Atlanteans. Or, theoretically, it could kill them. Luckily for everyone involved, it had actually worked. Disposing of a dead general was not something Corbin was prepared to do. Yet.
By all appearances, General Meade was still the same person he had always been—a fit middle-aged man whose muscles and posture showed a lifetime of healthy living in the military. But now he could bench press four times his own weight and run as fast as an Olympic sprinter. His mind wasn’t the same, though. Where once there was a sharp, perceptive intellect, there was now the mind of a lazy slob, begging to be told what to do and having no initiative whatsoever.
It was ironic, General Corbin thought, that he was taking over America to get rid of such human trash, and in the process he’d had to create someone just like the people he hated.
Oh, but not for long. His hypnotist was working on General Meade to redevelop his mind. A true soldier had to take orders but also had to be able to think for himself. Besides, General Meade couldn’t stay on sick leave with a “bad case of the flu” forever. Sooner or later, he had to return to his office and discharge his duties. He’d be the perfect secret agent in the Pentagon to develop Corbin’s plans.
And those plans were nothing short of ruling the United States.
Democracy had failed. The system was only as good as the voters, and look at the voters! A bunch of weak civilians who had never been tested in war, who expected everything to be handed to them. Fat, lazy, addicted to television and the internet, these weren’t the kind of people who had made America great. They didn’t deserve the vote.
They deserved to remain the sheep they had become, led by someone strong. Not the big corporations that were wheedling their way into every corner of power in the nation. They only looked out for their own interests and were largely responsible for the dumbing down of America through a steady bombardment of mind-numbing media and advertising. No, the nation needed a strong military leader, someone who could set the country back on the right course. Someone who would get the people trained up to be the great fighters they had been fifty, a hundred years ago. Someone who could lead the nation back to supremacy over the world.
That someone was himself, of course.
General Corbin had studied the dictators of the past and knew that he needed three things to gain power—an external threat, an army loyal only to him, and chaos in the civilian government.
The external threat was easy enough. For years he’d planted stories of UFOs in the civilian press and had even faked some top-secret documents that had convinced many members of the government and military, including General Meade. Those false stories had grown ever more ominous. Anyone gullible enough to believe in aliens would think there was an invasion coming soon.
The loyal army was coming along nicely too. His research team was perfecting the serum so that it could be put into mass production, and with the help of an expert and entirely unscrupulous hypnotist, those new Atlanteans would obey his every word. One was being tested in the field right now.
Brett Lawson had gone to Morocco with his agent, Isadore Grant. If Brett worked out well, then Project Poseidon could start mass production. General Corbin was already thinking of ways to get a large number of subjects to supply his army. They had to be people who would not be easily missed. He could always abduct active-duty soldiers in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and put them down as missing in action. No, he mused, that would take too long, and he couldn’t abduct too many without the Pentagon noticing a rise in MIA numbers. Homeless people? No, too many of them were sick or mentally ill or substance abusers. That might affect the process. So who? It was a tough problem, but he knew he’d find a solution.
The third factor he needed to grab success, chaos in the civilian government, was developing all on its own. The two political parties had always sniped at each other, but in the past decade, that had descended into a complete lack of cooperation. It seemed like nothing could get done anymore beyond the basic functions of government and sluggish responses to the most obvious external threats. General Corbin was developing a new propaganda team alongside the one that spread his UFO misinformation. This team, codenamed Operation Bicker, would spread so much negativity about politicians in both parties that no one in the civilian government would look credible. Luckily there was plenty of real material to use if one knew where to dig, but Operation Bicker would also make things up.
It had already sent out some test stories about a few members of Congress who seemed likely presidential candidates in the next election. One story claimed a senator from Texas was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Actually his grandfather had been, but little details like that didn’t matter. It was guilt by association. Another story had a congresswoman from New Hampshire cheating on her husband with a member of the Russian Mafia. She’d studied Russian in college, so there was enough of a hint to create a line of nonsense implicating her in something she had never done.
The trick was to make things sound believable. That Texas senator had said a couple of nasty things about Black Lives Matter, and with his grandfather’s association with the KKK, enough people would believe the fake part of the story to seriously hamper his chances at running for president. A doctored photo of that congresswoman showing her in the arms of the Russian mobster was good enough to go viral. She could deny it all she wanted, but it would still be shared and reshared all across the internet. Hardly anyone checked what they saw on that network of lies.
That was the big advantage of trying to take over a lazy and ignorant nation—he could make them believe anything. He didn’t need everyone to believe it all, just enough people to make those who knew the truth waste most of their time and energy trying to stamp out the lie.
Soon he’d have hundreds of these credible lies clogging up the internet so that no one would be able to tell the difference between truth and fiction anymore. Project Bicker would make the American people turn on one another and make them too divided to stop him when he made his bid for power.
And no one outside of his inner circle knew a thing about it.
No one, that was, except the Atlantis Allegiance. Luckily they thought General Meade was still in charge. They didn’t know about him or his real plans at all, but Meade’s goals had been close enough to his own that they knew far, far too much.
They had to be eliminated.
That was proving difficult.
An assistant came up to him as he watched General Meade run 30 miles per hour on a treadmill without breaking a sweat.
“I thought I said I didn’t want to be disturbed,” General Corbin barked.
“You said only in the case of an emergency, sir,” the assistant said.
“So I did. Well, what is it?”
“Your contact in the CIA called. Those local operatives in Marrakech, the ones Mrs. Grant was working with, they didn’t check in tonight like they were supposed to.”
General Corbin rubbed his chin. All operatives had to check in on a regular basis whether they had something to report or not. Those particular local contacts, while just a gang of teenage street thugs, were proud of their role in the world’s largest intelligence agency and had always been punctual.
“I suppose the C
IA is looking into it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep me informed.”
“Yes, sir,” the assistant said and left.
General Corbin knew they wouldn’t be found. Isadore had been sloppy and had killed too many people to capture Edward. A couple of them had been important, an Italian heroin wholesaler and a minor member of the Saudi royal family on a secret pleasure holiday. While the world would be no worse off for their deaths, it was causing ripples. Someone must have killed those street kids out of revenge, not knowing they were affiliated with the CIA.
But who? And would this imperil the mission? What if the young crooks had talked?
Then he thought of another possibility.
What if Edward had gotten a message out before he was taken? Hackers were clever, and he had been a damned good one. What if someone from the Atlantis Allegiance had come back to Marrakech to check on him, found the teens, and rubbed them out?
That meant he’d have a chance to grab them while they were isolated from the rest.
He moved into an office he’d had set up in the lab, closed the door, and pressed the buzzer on his desk to speak with his assistant.
“Who do we have in Marrakech?”
“No one, sir, but the McKay twins are in Tangier, just a quick flight away.”
General Corbin shuddered. Even on the other side of the world, those two gave him the creeps.
“What are they doing there? Are they on a job?”
“No, sir, they’re on vacation.”