by Marcus Sakey
The public called them the faceless.
Ahead of him, Shannon dodged past the end of the strip mall, leaped a short fence, and sprinted for Archer. Cooper poured it on, hit the fence without breaking stride, and pushed himself over it. She was halfway across the street, dodging through the snarled traffic. A small green space surrounded an apartment building, and she blitzed through the middle of it. He lost sight of her as she rounded the building, leaning into the run, his breath coming fast with the sudden transition to motion.
Half a block to the north, another black Escalade was parked at the entrance to a bank. The doors were open, and he spotted three faceless in defensive positions. Bulky with armor and with blank glass for a head, they resembled predatory insects. Each man held a submachine gun with a folding stock. Shannon was racing south now, right down the middle of the street. Car horns added their screams to the roar of the crowd, closer with every step. Cooper caught up to her just as she made an abrupt turn. He followed.
And saw what was making the noise. The sidewalk and alley were jammed with people, most Chinese, all facing the other direction. They yelled and shook their fists. The group was densely packed and pushing forward without making any progress. Over their heads, Cooper saw a dozen faceless with riot shields cordoning off an alley.
The alley where Lee’s social club was located.
No.
Shannon had hit the crowd already, slipped into it like an arrow into the ocean, her gift showing holes and vectors. Cooper followed as best he could, shoving his way through. The noise was unbelievable, a fury of anger and fear in a foreign language. As he watched, a man at the front scooped up a stone and hurled it. The rock bounced harmlessly off a shield. The commando stepped forward and snapped the shield into the guy hard enough that Cooper could almost hear the crunch of the man’s nose shattering. He dropped, blood pouring, and the crowd roared louder. Cooper looked around frantically, taking in the low buildings, the fire escapes, the alley farther south, trying to find an opening he knew they couldn’t risk.
DAR Tactical Response Team Protocol 43: In the event of an extraction from a dense and hostile environment, first establish a perimeter operating zone. Limit force application unless targets possess a significant strategic advantage and a demonstrated intent to employ that advantage.
Translation: unarmed people on the ground just get hit, but if anybody climbs on a building, shoot them.
Shannon had made it halfway through the crowd before stalling out. Even her gift couldn’t find a way through the mob. The faceless held the mouth of the alley shoulder to shoulder, with Chinatown’s furious residents layered twenty deep against them. Cooper grabbed a man in front of him and yanked, tangling the guy’s foot as he went. The man staggered back into the crowd, and Cooper slid in behind Shannon.
“We need to go,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd. Right now the primary team would be searching Lee’s gambling den and the apartment above. They’d have thermal scans and dogs, and it wouldn’t take them long to realize that he and Shannon weren’t there. “They’ll search the crowd for us.”
“They’re not here for us,” Shannon said. Her cheeks had paled.
“What are you…” He followed her eyes to a prisoner transport van the size of a delivery truck parked halfway down, the back doors winged open. Riot-geared troopers guarded the rear of the truck, weapons at the ready. Another group was shoving two shackled figures down the alley, a balding man and a woman with chic hair, both of them yelling and fighting.
Lee and Lisa.
Cooper’s stomach seized. As he watched, a commando buried the butt of his gun in Lee’s belly. Lisa screamed, tried to get to her husband. Another grabbed her from behind, stuffed a black hood over her head, and pushed her into the waiting wagon. Seconds later Lee was forced in beside her. Something in Cooper’s chest raged and shrieked, railed against the cage of his ribs. He pushed forward, surging against the crowd, feeling more than hearing his yells. He gained six inches, lost them. It was like being caught in a thundering wave; he was rolled and tossed but made little progress. Shannon made even less, her gift useless here. Overhead there was the rotor of a chopper, and sirens from somewhere far away. Glass shattered, a window or a bottle. That triggered a reaction; the faceless locked shields and braced themselves. From behind them, tossed over their head in a lazy arc, came a smoking canister. The tear gas hit someone in the crowd, bounced downward; billows of white streamed up. A second and third canister followed. People began to gag and retch, the motion of the crowd reversing, sweeping Cooper and Shannon along with it.
The last he saw of the alley, before the gas and the panic consumed everything, was a soldier pulling a black hood over the head of eight-year-old Alice Chen.
Silence. It had been an hour, and the silence was still loud, and in it he could hear the echoes of the mob.
He’d gotten a pretty good huff of gas as the crowd split and surged. The frantic coughing had left his throat raw, and his eyes still stung and watered. He kept having to fight the speed of the Jaguar, his foot wanting to go heavy on the accelerator. Instead, he moved with the steady flow of traffic and saw the scene again and again. He’d been too far to make out details, but his imagination was happy to supply them: the wide-eyed trembling of the little girl, the pure panic she would have felt as men in black pulled her parents away from her. Her mother’s scream as her father was beaten. The stranger’s smooth insect mask reflecting her face as he bent over her.
And then the darkness, close and heavy, as the hood slid over her head.
He had seen it, had heard the crowd and felt the gas, and yet he still barely believed it. How could that mission have been authorized? Why take Lee and Lisa and Alice? Why take them that way?
“It had to be us.” His voice thin and hollow against the weight of an hour’s accumulated silence. “They were there for us.”
Shannon didn’t respond. She sat at the edge of the passenger seat, shoulders turned away, as if trying to get as far from him as possible.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Why not?” She spoke to the side window. “This is what it looks like.”
“Not normally. Somehow they knew we’d been there. They wouldn’t come in like that otherwise.”
She turned to look at him then, pure scorn on her face. “Are you serious?”
He searched for a response, but none of the words that came to mind was right. Everything he believed made a lie by the image of a hood going down over a child’s face.
“This is how it works, Cooper. Don’t you know that? Of course you do. You’ve ordered that before.”
“No. Never.”
“You’ve never sent faceless out? Top DAR agent, and you never ordered a mission?”
“Not like that.”
“Like what, then? Did your team bring flowers and cake?”
“My teams were called in on criminals. Terrorists. Abnorms who had hurt someone, or were about to hurt someone.”
“I’m sure that’s what those men were told, too. That Lee and his family were terrorists. Same way the Gestapo believed the people they rounded up were plotting against the state.”
“Come on. You can win any argument with the Gestapo or the Nazis. The DAR is not the same.”
“It look like it’s heading in the right direction to you?”
“Okay, first, I’m not with the department anymore, remember? Second, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you guys would stop blowing up buildings and assassinating people. I hate what I just saw. It makes me physically sick. But you can’t throw a bomb and then get upset if people don’t like you very much. Those men thought they were going to catch the people responsible for an explosion that killed more than a thousand people.”
“Whatever,” she said, and turned away again.
A thought struck him. “Wait a second. I didn’t know Lee and Lisa. But you did.”
“So?”
“So how would the DAR know unless
they were tipped off?”
“By who?”
“How about Samantha? Or…” He paused, let her work it out.
“You’re suggesting John called the DAR and told them where to find us?”
“Did he know about Lee and Lisa?”
“It doesn’t matter. He would never have done that.”
“Maybe Samantha hasn’t gotten the message to him yet. Maybe it was his attempt to take you out.”
“Not a chance.”
“Shannon—”
“I mean it, Cooper. Drop it.”
He opened his mouth, wanting to fight. Wanting to burn out the anger inside of him in a battle, the two of them going for blood. He wanted to tell her about a pink stuffed animal he’d seen amidst the rubble in New York. But then he imagined the scene in Lee’s apartment, the door blowing open without warning, the faceless streaming in, his former colleagues shouting, throwing the family down, shackling them on their kitchen floor, the same kitchen he’d stood in last night and chatted with friendly strangers.
It’s on John Smith. If there wasn’t terrorism, there wouldn’t be tactical response teams. Smith’s hands were stained with the blood of thousands. Lee and Lisa and Alice were just the latest.
He found himself remembering the evening of March 12, President Walker’s speech to the nation. Cooper had caught it the next day, in a hotel outside Norfolk, already on the run. He’d watched it with an edgy stomach, afraid of what he might hear, that the president would be preaching fire and brimstone against abnorms. Instead, the man had urged tolerance. What were the words?
“It’s said that the strongest partnerships are formed in adversity. Let us face this adversity not as a divided nation, not as norm and abnorm, but as Americans.
Let us work together to build a better future for our children.
And let us never forget the pain of this day. Let us never yield to those who believe political power flows from the barrel of a gun, to the cowards who murder children to achieve their aims.
For them, there can be—will be—no mercy.”
He’d listened to that with a swell of pride, the patriotic equivalent of a hard-on. And the words still moved him. They represented the reason he was undercover now, the reason he hadn’t seen his children in six months.
He had to find John Smith. And for him, no mercy.
The words were old, a mantra he’d repeated every night. What surprised him was the small voice that followed it. The one that said, And then what? Back to the DAR? Call in more tactical response teams? Can you really return to that?
Shannon said, “What will happen to them?”
“They’ll be taken to the local field office. Questioned.”
“Questioned.”
“Yes,” he said. “Hopefully, they’ll tell the agents about us right away. That will make things go easier. They might get off with a warning.”
“Don’t lie to me, Cooper.”
He glanced at her, saw the intensity in her eyes. Turned back to the road. “They’ll be charged. The bar and apartment will be seized. One or both of them will go to prison for harboring fugitives.”
“And Alice?”
Cooper gritted his teeth.
“Oh Jesus.” Shannon buried her face in her hands. “An academy?”
“It’s…it’s possible. It depends if she tests as tier one.”
“And even if she doesn’t, she’ll be marked. They’ll track her. Now that the microchip bill passed, they’ll put a tag in her throat. Embedded up against the carotid, so even microsurgery can’t remove it. She’ll never be safe again.”
He wanted to say something comforting, something to make it better, but he couldn’t think what that would be.
“My God. This is my fault. I should never have brought you there.”
“There’s nothing we can do for them now. We just have to get to Wyoming and get this settled. Get ourselves clear. Then maybe.”
“Right.” Her laugh had no humor in it. “Goddamn it.” She stared out the window, but he doubted she saw anything. “I sure hope you’re worth it.”
“What?”
The hesitation was tiny, a clenching in her trapezii, a flutter of the fingers. Tiny, but there. “I said I hope it’s worth it. Getting to Wyoming.”
Cooper held his own reaction back, tapping the steering wheel. Had she just misspoken? Possible. But that hesitation…she was holding something back. Hiding something.
Yeah, well, she’s on the other side, remember?
He thought about calling her on it, decided against it. The events of the last twenty-four hours—my God, is that all it’s been?—had generated a camaraderie between them. And yeah, she was attractive, in every sense of the word. But their friendship, or whatever it was, wouldn’t survive this mission. It wasn’t as if he could betray her, kill John Smith, and then see if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee sometime.
She was the enemy. Better not to forget that. Play his part, play it to the hilt, and keep an eye on her throughout.
Just get to Wyoming, get to John Smith, and end this.
For all the children.
CHAPTER 25
Three days of green and brown and the road humming beneath their tires, of billboards against endless sky, of seemingly identical gas stations and fading radio stations. I-90 west, a long gray ribbon unfurling through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, the flat-lands of Minnesota, the sun-bleached scrub of South Dakota. The cities decreased in size as they rode, from the Milwaukee skyline dotted with church towers and brewery signs to the barely there hint of Sioux Falls and the low-slung strip malls of Rapid City.
They could have made the whole thing in a mad run but needed to kill time anyway and so drove eight-hour days and had dinner at chain restaurants. The silence hadn’t lasted. By the first evening, they were back to their calculatedly casual routine. They avoided politics, kept things light. Told stories of growing up, of friends and drunken misadventures and favorite books, tales neither intimate nor distant.
Last night they’d stopped at a roadside motel in the Black Hills. Ate delivery pizza and flipped channels on the tri-d, skipping the news networks without acknowledging it. Outside the world was black, just gone, and the sky awash with stars. He’d fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing in the other bed.
This morning they’d risen early and crossed into Wyoming. He’d visited the state only once, a camping trip with Natalie in the Grand Tetons a dozen years before. It had been late summer then, the mountains carpeted in green. He remembered making love in the morning while coffee boiled on the campfire and birds sang in the trees.
Here, though, on the eastern edge of the state, the landscape was low and blasted, thorny underbrush and dry rock. It didn’t look like a place where people could live. The towns were tiny things clutching the highway.
Until they came to Gillette. It had once been a quiet place, twenty thousand people, mostly working in the energy industry. Then Erik Epstein had revealed that the massive portion of the state he’d quietly been buying would be combined into one vast new “commune,” a place he’d named New Canaan Holdfast, a home for people like him. Twist Territory, people had called it, and laughed at the idea of anyone trying to live there. Laughed, that was, until the full weight of his $300 billion came into play, and in a matter of months the world changed completely.
Gillette was the end point of a road into New Canaan. Along with two even smaller towns—Shoshoni to the west and Rawlins off I-80 to the south—it was one of the only ways to enter the Holdfast. Epstein had constructed broad highways, four lanes in each direction, that ran into the center of a wasteland, a rough-edged slash through some of the least desirable land of the United States. He’d bought the land for dollars an acre, bought it through holding companies and at auction, bought it around existing villages of twenty people, bought sprawling cattle ranches and mineral rights for ranges of oil and natural gas that lay too deep or were too sparse to have been tapped. The result was a patchwork
of stony desert, largely contiguous land that had been barely touched in all of human history.
And with that move, the previously inconsequential towns of Gillette, Shoshoni, and Rawlins became nationally recognized as the gateways into New Canaan. Massive truck stops had sprung up, and housing for the thousands of construction workers who built the initial stages of the Holdfast. Restaurants and movie theaters and shopping malls swiftly followed. Finally came tourist hotels and trinket shops and storefront museums and all the rest.
As a kid, Cooper had loved science-fiction movies, especially the ones from the seventies, all gaudy colors and neon and people in jumpsuits. There was something so kitschily appealing about them, the world transformed into a metropolis two hundred stories high. But now, as they waited in a sea of trucks twenty minutes past Gillette, it occurred to him that the future hadn’t turned out like that at all. The barren landscape and blinding sun looked more like the past. A cowboy western.
“How long does it take to clear the checkpoint?”
“From here?” Shannon was at the wheel; she craned her neck sideways to see around the eighteen-wheeler in front of them. “Probably fifteen minutes.”
“Efficient.”
“Has to be. The entrance is basically a massive delivery depot.”
“Yeah, I know.” Like any DAR agent, he’d had numerous briefings on the Holdfast. While culturally it resembled Israel shortly after the Second World War, NCH faced a unique set of circumstances. Because it was American soil, it had to abide by US law. But $300 billion made for all manner of exceptions. Epstein’s lawyers and lobbyists had cobbled together a hundred loopholes, resulting in the Holdfast’s being declared a separate county, with its own municipal code. And because the entire NCH was privately held corporate land, access could be controlled. “All the inbound trucks drop off their loads here, and then they’re distributed via an internal shipping network. Makes for a lot of jobs.”