by Gini Koch
Only I hit eleven, and there was no sign of either one of them.
Ran on, got to number twelve. Did the shooting and kept going. If something had happened, I’d have a better chance of finding out what if I continued with the plan, such as it was. Reached number fifteen. Had to drop my clip and load in a new one. Also had to force panic away.
Kept on. Was definitely at the part of the island that Christopher and White would have gone to. No sign of them, no bullets in the clone heads. Fixed the latter, worried about the former, and kept on going.
Ran into Mossy at body number twenty-one, presumably because I was taller and therefore faster. My music changed to “Old Friend” by Rancid. Had that right. “I’m so glad to see you I’d be willing to not shoot this clone.”
Mossy shot the clone instead. “I’m glad to see you, too. How many did you shoot?”
“Twenty, not counting the first one. You?”
“With this one, eighteen. So we’ve solved that problem and found a bigger one.”
“This is how our luck goes. All the time. I mean, I shouldn’t even be surprised that half of our team has already disappeared somehow. And yet, I am.”
“Being able to be surprised is a good quality. Thoughts for how we search for them?”
“Together, potentially holding hands. I think we should go back a couple bodies and see if we can tell if they ever made it there. I didn’t stop to look.”
The area where I sort of guessed Christopher had considered his and White’s starting point was near the now extremely defunct Kharg airport, so that’s where we went. It was, like the rest of the place, a ruin.
“I wonder where the bathroom with the gate is,” I said half-jokingly. “Wait. This was an airport. There would absolutely be a gate here.”
“Wouldn’t it have been ruined in the bombings that clearly happened here?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Christopher may have used it—superbeings showed up all over, after all. Maybe they went to check for it.”
“Maybe.” Mossy didn’t sound convinced. “That seems more like what you’d do. Christopher doesn’t seem to be someone who alters plans at a whim.”
“I’m going to resent that later, Mossy, don’t think I’m not. I have no other ideas. So unless you do . . .”
“Why yes, let’s search through the rubble here as opposed to elsewhere.”
We headed into the rubble of what had once been possibly one of the smallest airports in existence. And my music changed to “All My Friends” by Counting Crows. Considered this. Came up with nothing.
Mossy put his hand on my arm. “Listen,” he said softly.
Did. Heard something, a low murmur. “Voices?” I asked in kind.
He nodded. I hunched down, gun still ready. He took point and we crept forward. Reached a still-standing wall. The murmuring was louder here. And there was a glow. Not a lot, but there was light with the voices.
Rounded the corner of the wall to find a man who looked Middle Eastern and who definitely had tattoos that indicated he was in G-Company standing there. He grabbed our guns before we could fire.
“You’re finally here. We’ve been waiting for you. Impatiently.”
CHAPTER 84
THE MAN TURNED and headed back to the others who were around a small lantern. But they weren’t G-Company troops. And Algar’s clues suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense. My music shut off of its own accord. Apparently Algar wanted me to concentrate fully or else he had nothing to add to the conversation. Put money on both.
I was looking at Christopher and White, who both looked fine. And several other people, one of whom was laughing quietly. At me, I was pretty sure.
Slid my goggles onto my forehead. “Adriana, what the hell?”
“Rahmi grabbed us,” Christopher said to me. “She dragged us here before I could tell her what we were doing.”
Looked around. “I don’t see Rahmi. Anywhere.”
The man who’d taken our guns grinned at me. “I’m flattered.”
“I called it! You imitated a G-Company thug!”
“Mostly. When they took Charles, I shifted my body to look like a man’s, but I knew that wouldn’t last the moment I took my gas mask off. I ensured I was last down the stairwell, grabbed the man ahead of me, broke his neck, removed his gas mask and shirt, copied him, and was able to get through their rather makeshift floater gate just in time.”
“I am so damn proud of you. Your mother is going to be, too.”
Rahmi beamed. Well, Rahmi looking like a G-Company dude beamed. Same thing. In that sense. Then her, well, his, face fell. “We took Charles to Cliff. But I didn’t see him and we didn’t really get inside. Another man was waiting inside the entrance and told us all to come to the gate here and go back to headquarters. I slipped off and I don’t think the others noticed, since there were over twenty of them to handle one man.”
“Wait. If they have this gate, why do they need a floater at all?”
“This gate is broken,” Rahmi said. “It can only go to G-Company headquarters. I found out by complaining a little about Cliff making us walk all this way to take this gate, and the others reminded me that it’s a one-way trip. And you can’t get here from there, either.”
“Gotcha. By the way, Francine, John, Len, and Kyle, nice to see you and thanks for checking in.”
“You don’t check in with the President when you’re doing a mission he’ll have to disavow you for if you’re caught,” Francine said. She was in jeans and a t-shirt. And she was carrying a purse that looked a lot like mine.
“Are you impersonating me for this mission?”
“Well, three of us can,” she pointed out. “But no. I only had clothes that matched yours for this trip. So I changed into this when Adriana called for backup.”
“I want the poop and scoop, desperately, but we need to roll Jeff’s part of the plan.”
“Not yet,” Christopher said. “That’s what they’re telling us.” He looked at Adriana. “Please get her caught up and then finish what you were saying.”
“Certainly. Mister White tells me that you’ve already figured out why I didn’t check in with Camilla and Malcolm.”
“Yeah. You know, Camilla’s really damn good. We all have missions that go bust.”
“At infiltration there are none better, I agree. But my mission wasn’t to infiltrate. My mission was to find where Cliff Goodman was, not become his employee in order to find out his secrets and stop his evil plans.”
“Gotcha. So, how did you get here? We only know because we sort of flipped one of the Crazy Eights.”
“Grandmother already knew who Cliff’s benefactor is.”
“Why am I not surprised? So, she told you?”
Adriana gave me a good shot of the “really?” look. “Hardly. However, she’s educated us about G-Company.”
“By ‘us’ you mean you, Len, and Kyle, don’t you?”
She smiled. “I do. Grandmother will be very proud of you. At any rate, I left the palace and remembered that G-Company had moved its base to Bahrain decades ago. Ali Baba Gadhavi is a very powerful man, and powerful men like to show off their power. He has little fear in this region. So, if I were the head of the most powerful underworld organization in this part of the world, where would I choose to ensure I had offices and one of my residences?”
“Damn, girl, you went straight to the Burj Khalifa? No stopping at go, no collecting two hundred dirhams?”
She grinned. “I did. Once there, however, I realized that I needed assistance. So, I called Francine, shared my mission with her, and asked for her help. That Mister Wruck was with her to guard her was a happy coincidence.”
“I felt it was best to help Adriana,” Wruck said. “You had plenty of protectors and, if we were successful, you wouldn’t need them.”
“No complaining comi
ng from me. But I never saw any of you at the tower.”
“We weren’t there all that long,” Adriana said. “I had Francine and Mister Wruck do a quick search for information about Mister Gadhavi as well as what he looks like.”
“I shifted to look like him,” Wruck said. “We were given immediate entry. When a person is that powerful, they can make others do things for them. So underlings took us to everyplace we needed to go within the tower.”
“We struck gold.” Francine shared. “Gadhavi keeps very good records on his key people, and he had a good folder on Cliff. Not only did we find details about what he’s assigned to and for Cliff, but we found out where Cliff was living. Residence in the Burj Khalifa, office there, too, and also a residence in Manama.”
“That seems like a lot for a guy who’d only joined the organization a couple of months ago.”
“Yeah,” Francine said, “that would be true for a regular person.”
Adriana nodded. “But for the underworld, Cliff is something of a celebrity. But more than that—he’s the heir to the Al Dejahl network.”
“Giving myself the duh on that one. Knew he’d be trying to hook in with them, but him being the obvious ‘owner’ of Al Dejahl didn’t occur to me. No wonder he got moved in and up fast. For all we know, Gadhavi and Ronald Yates were pals. For all we know, Gadhavi has known Cliff for years. And you found proof of all of this?”
“And more,” Francine said. “We searched Cliff’s office first, then his room. Nothing much in the office, but we found a list he had hidden in his room. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, and written in code.”
“And you deciphered it already?”
“Oh, no,” Adriana replied. “Chernobog and the others did that.”
“You have Chernobog and Hacker International involved? They didn’t say anything to me about this.”
“They were told not to by Grandmother, who is at your embassy along with the rest of our mission right now. Grandmother is spending time with her old enemy and now dear friend. Grandfather is being entertained by your father and all the children.”
“Gotcha. So what did they find?”
“Everything,” Wruck said. “All money trails, which are all drained now. Listings of Al Dejahl strongholds, doomsday plans, and Cliff’s plan to take over G-Company.”
“Wow. So, once we rescue Chuckie and all that, we can take care of those.”
Len shook his head. “We’ve done it already.”
“Done what?”
“All of it,” Kyle said. “Well, except for here. That’s why Adriana called us in. She realized it needed more than a three-person team. We’ve cleared out all the strongholds but this one. Weapons are in Dulce’s armory or destroyed. Data is with the hackers or in Dulce as well. Like John said, bank accounts are drained and various humanitarian organizations around the world have gotten donations from American Centaurion.”
“We destroyed all the bioweapons,” Len said. “He had every kind, too, each in a different stronghold.”
“Yeah, he had some in the Burj Khalifa, too.”
“Yeah, Christopher and Richard told us,” Kyle said, “while we were waiting for you and Mossy to finish up and come find us.”
“Mossy and I will laugh about this later. Potentially much later.”
“We had no idea he was moving poisoned gas into the tower,” Len said apologetically, “until we were already at a stronghold, and by then we knew you guys were rolling and it didn’t seem like we could help. At least not as effectively as we were already doing.”
“Can’t argue, we’re all alive.” At least, I hoped Chuckie was still alive. I was antsy to get to him, but if the rest of the team felt we needed to recap—and Algar turning the music off indicated he agreed with the recap, too—then recapping it would be. “Where were the strongholds?”
“The UAE, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, and Qatar,” Adriana said. “And here, which is part of Iran, but Cliff thinks of it as his.”
“Wait, how in the world did you all get all over the place in such a short time?”
They all stared at me. “Ah, floater gates,” Kyle said. “We use them all the time.”
“But we were lockdown worldwide and no one told me, Jeff, or Alpha Team about this.”
“Ah,” Adriana said. “Forgive me, but Missy is also part of the group. Grandmother and Chernobog spoke with her and she agreed that my mission was vital. She also agreed that not alerting you or the President was the right course of action, and since Alpha Team was with you and the President is the strongest empath known, they couldn’t know, either. Since the idea was that you two would not be involved in this.”
“Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans and all that. So, what about the doomsday plans?”
“The gasses can’t release now, since we destroyed them,” Len said. “So that’s plan number one.”
“You said you found the gasses in strongholds. But a doomsday plan means that the gasses are elsewhere, too.”
Len nodded. “They were. We found them in various major cities and neutralized them as well.” He grinned. “Kyle and I aren’t as fast as A-Cs, but with a floater gate, it doesn’t matter. And Francine has all the skills and then some.”
She blushed. “You’re a flatterer, Leonard Parker.”
He laughed. “Only when it’s warranted.”
“So, how many doomsday plans did our least favorite crazed madman have set up or in the planning stages?”
“He had four,” Kyle said. “The first was the bioweapons being released all over the world, presumably at midnight on New Year’s Eve. At least, that’s what the intelligence looked like to all of us.”
“Nice to see he’s really channeling the Joker. And Brain.”
Len snorted. “I don’t want to know who he thinks Pinky is.”
“Len remains my favorite.”
Kyle chuckled. “The second plan was a computer virus set to take down financial institutions worldwide. That one was ready to go, big time. Chernobog and her team got that one neutralized, though.”
“The third one you just foiled,” Wruck said. “He really felt he had a winner with the whole idea of killing all the world leaders.”
“How is that a doomsday plan? The summits literally just happened last-minute.”
Wruck sighed. “He had a plan in place for this kind of world event. And options for whatever country would end up hosting, too. He adapted the doomsday plan to fit the current situation.”
“Wow. He really is the Leader of the Lunatic Pack, isn’t he? So, what’s plan number four?” This question earned silence. “Gang?”
“We don’t know,” Adriana admitted. “He just calls it The Close Encounter.”
“Fantastic. So, you just gated all the stuff back and forth to Dulce?”
Len nodded. “We treated everything like we’ve heard you all describe handling superbeings. We treated intelligence and weapons as you would people—took them to safety—and we treated the strongholds themselves and any bioweapons or similar as you would a superbeing—we destroyed them.”
“Kitty, the copy of a copy Francine found, we found it everywhere,” Kyle said. “In every stronghold and in his residence in Bahrain, too.”
“We sent them back to the Embassy,” Adriana said. “Grandmother says they are all the same, no differences, and Chernobog and her team agree.”
“So, other than this last stronghold and The Spielberg Doomsday Plan, Cliff’s got nothing?”
“Correct.” Adriana smiled at me. “And we hear that you’ve taken care of half of his loyal team, as well.”
“Yeah, as to that, didn’t the dead clone bodies seem odd to you?”
“We didn’t go around the perimeter like you did,” Len said.
“I did,” Rahmi said. “But at hyperspeed so as not to be spotted. They wer
en’t down when I got here, so I had to avoid them spotting me. I saw all of them fall at the same time a little while ago. But I didn’t want to risk being exposed as still being here. I haven’t shifted out of this form in case we’re spotted. I can then ‘capture’ all of you for Cliff.”
“Rahmi found us when we exited our gate,” Francine said.
“How did you know they were coming?”
Rahmi shrugged. “Being where they would exit was calculated luck—I was on the highest ground here, which is not that high, so I could see everything, and that’s where Adriana’s team landed. But I was waiting for you. Cliff took Charles. I knew you’d be coming for him. So I was keeping a lookout. I tried to contact Serene using the device she gave me, but it didn’t work.”
“Oh, yeah, we thought Cliff had control of our airwaves, so we destroyed from both ends.”
She nodded. “Wise. And it gave me time to search for another entrance. I found what appears to be a secret path.”
“Where does it lead?” White asked. Clearly this was where Mossy and I had come in.
“Directly to Cliff.”
CHAPTER 85
“KITTY, I think we can do this without risking Jeff and the others,” Christopher said. “If we can get in without them knowing, then we can get Chuck and destroy this last stronghold.”
“Which leaves that last Doomsday plan flapping in the breeze.” There was something about the name—I knew I could make the connection for what Cliff’s plan was, I just had to focus. But I didn’t feel up to focusing. I felt up to saving Chuckie and killing Cliff and the others, but not focusing.
“It might be like his world leaders plan,” Len said. “Something that requires a major event to happen, and then he’d have to do something. If he’s dead, he can’t do anything.”
“John, you were in with these people for a long time. Did Cliff ever talk about any of this?”
“He talked about taking over the world all the time. Specifics, however, not as much. Those plans were limited to LaRue. And I was never close enough to LaRue to kill her, let alone to stop her. And once the clones of her and Reid were a part of the team, it was worse.” He sighed. “If we’re going to discuss those whose missions did not work, I’m the least effective of anyone here. I might have gotten closer to Cliff after the fiasco that was Operation Epidemic, but I chose to stay with you.”