Vickie didn’t look as if she felt any easier than he did. “Saviour said she was sending you over. I said I don’t see people. She said I was seeing you.”
He held up a manila folder. “I’ve got an op; this is all of the particulars. It’s something she didn’t want sent through the usual channels, and I figured it’d be best to review it with ya in person, anyways. I’ve already read it.” He cocked his head to the side, offering her a lop-sided grin. “Mind if I come in? Unless you’re cool with the whole building knowin’ ’bout super-secret spy shit.”
She scuttled out of the way so he could come inside, then threw five of the locks. John noticed out of the corner of his eye that there were ten on the door. The apartment was—cozy was the only appropriate word for it. There was the faint smell of cinnamon and vanilla in the air, the lighting was dim, but not uncomfortably so, it was wall to wall books and music, the furniture was all…soft.
There was a cat. The biggest cat that John had ever seen, outside of zoos, but not because it was fat. A huge gray thing. It was looking him up and down as if he was being sized up for an interview. Or just possibly a meal. He hadn’t known that she had a cat.
Vickie sidled past him and saw where he was looking. “Oh. That’s Grey. He owns me. He allows me to buy him cat food and provide him with an apartment. And internet. And cable.” She said this as if the cat really was actually using the latter two. Then again, maybe it was.
“Huh. I’m more of a dog person, to be honest.” When John spoke, she seemed to shrink into herself. She was definitely a different person from the one that John had spent hours with over a radio connection; the confidence wasn’t there, in person. “So, y’wanna get started?” He held out the envelope for her.
She took it, gingerly, in gloved hands, then took a seat as far away from him as was physically possible, while still allowing them both to review the operational material. He noticed then that she was completely covered from the neck down, with almost less skin showing than a devout Muslim woman in a burka. There’s a lot more to this witch than meets the eye. He instinctively wanted to poke and pry for more information, but his gut also told him that he’d be overstepping some serious boundaries in doing so. And he couldn’t have his Overwatch operator seizing up and not trusting him, so he let it rest for the moment.
She went through the papers, quickly developing a fierce frown. “This isn’t good,” she muttered, several times. And when she finished, she looked up at him with the expression of a stone. “This is seriously FUBAR.”
He leaned against a wall, his arms crossed in front of him. “I know. And I told Nat as much, personally. But it just might be necessary, too. Got any other morons lining up that can pull it off? Better question: any that can do it without getting a lot of people killed?”
She clutched the papers, which trembled in her hands. “That sword…you know what that thing is? I mean…ok, magically speaking, most of the rest of the world is Steam Age and that’s like a Jedi Lightsaber.”
“So, are you saying I’m dead and I don’t know it yet?” She was the expert here. The number of magicians available to ECHO was still low; having one as strong and knowledgeable as Vickie was a major plus.
“No…no, the Commissar is right. Since you’re a distance kinda guy, you have the best chance against her of anyone that can get pulled in. Can’t call in any of our crew that’s in ECHO; Verd’ll find out in a heartbeat. Especially since Fei Li is an Op Three, and there aren’t a lot of those floating around. Wouldn’t surprise me if he had the OpTwos and Threes tagged and watched 24/7. So anyone we rope in to deal with her is going to show up on the radar on the instant.” She ran her hand nervously through her short hair.
“Concerning the particulars, I think it’s doable. I drew up a basic Operations Order, that I’ll need your help reviewing and tweaking. We can get to that in a minute. What’s more…do you think that this is a justifiable mission?” John had mostly reconciled the necessity of this task with himself. He needed her to be okay with this. If she wasn’t, he couldn’t do his job. Or at least not nearly as well.
Vickie licked her lips. “I hate this. Cause she hasn’t actually done anything yet. It’s like Mind Police. But…look…I’ve worked with you and…” She seemed to decide on something. “Murdock…I’m a certified paranoid. Kay? So…don’t freak on me. Gonna show you something.”
She led the way to a locked door, and unlocked it. Inside…
Inside it looked like a movie set for what movie directors fondly imagined the computer room of, say, the FBI looked like. Six, no, eight flatscreen monitors, enough equipment to make him blink because it filled virtually every inch of space.
“This is where the magic happens,” she said, sounding, not proud as he would have expected but…sad. She sat down and began typing. Windows popped up, with encrypted passwords. Lots of them. She typed too fast even for him to figure out what they were. Finally she opened a folder marked “CCCP” and there were…lots of little folders, all with names on them.
“Alright, I’m lookin’. So, what am I lookin’ at?”
“You remember when I showed you your file, right? I go that deep with everyone, even the paperboy. I’m…paranoid, John. I’m not kidding about that. I…have a lot of reasons to be. Like you saw, I can go very, very deep indeed. But when it comes to people who are magical? I can go a lot deeper.” She closed his file and clicked on Fei Li’s.
Fei Li’s was actually two. The file on the pretty little Chinese woman was actually fairly slender. But the one on General Shen Xue…
And when Saviour had said that the General was a monster…she had not been exaggerating. Collateral damage seemed to be a completely acceptable option for him; if something prevented the General from completing an objective, it was swept aside. Entire cities, tribes, even the damned livestock in an area. The General was single-minded in his pursuit of a goal; it was this tremendous drive and determination that allowed supremely heroic acts right along with some of the most deplorable crimes against humanity that John had ever heard of.
And as for the sword…it seemed to be a Major Magical Artifact, on the order of the Holy Grail or the Horn of Roland, or Excalibur. Vickie’s own note, written in a cramped text on the margin: “I’m not sure what it can’t do.”
“So. We’re in the right, then. Even if it sucks, it’s something that might have to be done if it can’t be avoided.”
Vickie sighed. “I hate it. But…I’m with Bell. Verd is almost as bad as the Thulians, and if Fei Li has just thrown her weight in on his side…I don’t think we have a choice. Oh. If you’re wondering how to find her, that’s no problem. That sword casts a big honking magical shadow. I have more trouble shielding out its influence than in trying to locate it. I don’t think she realizes I’m working with CCCP, and she knows Nat loathes magic, so the last person she would expect Nat to allow on an op against her is me. As long as she doesn’t know I’m looking for her, she’s on my radar.”
Some of the tension left John. Vickie was with him on this; now that he had that settled, the rest would be routine. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, then.”
* * *
The location that Vickie had used her hocus pocus to track Fei Li to wasn’t the only old, apparently abandoned motel in Atlanta that was surrounded by chain link fence with razor wire on top of it. Too many old motels became the home to squatters and druggies, especially now, with all the folks made homeless in the destruction corridors. This one would have made a good target for that, since it was about 95% intact.
This had been a big motel too, on old Highway 20 before the Beltway and the freeways came in. It had three big units, each four stories tall, in a U-shape around a swimming pool long since filled in to prevent the skaters from using it as a free ramp. It still looked abandoned…except just out of sight, there were a couple of vehicles that were way too armored to be civilian trucks.
John had inserted into the motel through the roof; through Vickie and Bella,
he was able to procure one of the ECHO jetpacks that their front runners sometimes used. He had picked it up from a dead drop in one of the destruction corridors, and lugged the package on foot until he was about three miles from the target area. Then it was time to play Rocketeer; Vickie had given him a crash course in its operation over the headset; there were a few abortive false starts, but he eventually was able to get it off the ground and heading in the right direction. After getting to a safe altitude, well above any visual searches or passive scans that Blacksnake might have been running, he had cut the jetpack, fallen, and then trigged his parachute. Airborne trained are cocky for a reason, suckers. As he descended, he scanned through his NVGs for any lookouts while Vickie gave him some help through the use of one of her seemingly innumerable gizmos; the coast was clear as far as the two of them could tell. He’d made a perfect landing on the roof, dragging his chute in quickly. After stuffing it under an inoperative air conditioning unit, he made his entry into the building’s roof access. Inside, what had been separate units and rooms had been made into a single, large room, at least on the top floor. On the first floor down from that, there were several rooms, and it was pretty clear that the utilities were all live. They’re confident, I’ll give them that. All of the floors leading down were abandoned as he swept through the building.
It was when he got as far as the basement…and the brand new sub-basements…that things got interesting.
There were surprisingly few traps in the motel; a couple of Claymore mines, a few tripwire flashbangs, and a single laser sensor near the basement access. John chalked this up to the large number of personnel they had patrolling; there were over ten Blacksnake troopers going through the hallways or waiting in rooms, almost always in pairs, throughout the entire building. They reported in regularly, too. With the entire working building situated almost completely underground, however, Vickie’s witchcraft came in handy. She was able to hack quickly into their systems using magic, replicate their voices and call in for multiple troopers at once, in order to answer their designated sentry calls. She’d gotten a lot better at that since the Kansas op. That, combined with the knockout drugs that John had been equipped with, made getting to the sub-basement easy.
All of the Blacksnake troopers were alive; most of them never saw John coming, before they felt the sting of a syringe in the side of their neck. He figured that, while the Commissar wouldn’t quite approve of leaving them breathing and relatively unharmed, it was within his discretion to do so, and what the Commissar didn’t know, she couldn’t excoriate him over. They were all low-level flunkies, anyways; veterans, most likely, guys just in it for the pay. They didn’t know shit, and probably figured they were the good guys.
The final door wasn’t any more of a challenge. No password, no biometrics scan, not even a guard. Sloppy. Must’ve figured that no one could get this far. Either the General was cocky, or working with Blacksnake had kept her from running a tight ship. Blacksnake was good at what it did mostly for its brutality and the precise application of it; other areas were naturally more lax on standards than professional military units. That showed up in ways that could come back and bite them in the ass. Like now.
“Big honking magical signature on the other side of that, Johnny.”
John growled low, keeping his voice down. “Roger, Vic. Any idea on the opposition?”
“Fei Li for certain, three other probables. I’m mostly reading the probables by reflection and interference from what Fei Li is putting out.”
“Alright. I’m breaching the entrance. Stand by.” John stood against the door jam, then tested the doorknob. It didn’t squeak, which he was thankful for. In one smooth motion, he opened the door and brought his M4 up, moving silently and quickly. There were stacks of crates all over the place; he took cover behind the closest to the door. John peered around the side; peering—or shooting—over the top of cover exposed more of a person’s head to enemy fire. The entire room was filled with crates, and several cages.
“—Xie xie.” Whoever was thanking someone in Chinese was female and didn’t sound all that…grateful. It was more like automatic politeness. Not that many female Chinese-speakers in this building, John figured. “I want the full sensor suites in place and capture teams knowing their areas of responsibility well enough to react in their sleep before we even begin this operation.”
“Of course, General. We’ve been given orders to that effect.” A male voice, and one that was notably agitated.
“Eye out, Johnny?”
“Hit it, Vic, and go quietly. Gimme their disposition and that of the rest of the room. I wanna know where I can move.”
There wasn’t as much as a whisper to show that Vickie’s “eye”—a magically cloaked and levitated button-cam—was moving. John only knew it because he felt it brush against his hair as it rose from its pocket on the back of his vest. This was Vickie’s techno-hoodoo; she’d stolen non-working cams from the Vault—stuff Verd had not been able to get to work—and instead of using tech to make them float and hide, she used magic. Brilliant, despite the shivers that stuff gave him. One more thing they had that Verd didn’t.
“Most of the room is clear. On your three o’clock, two guards, one manning a monitor bank, one live, two dead. Dead ahead, another that looks like he has officer pips. Crates at your 10 o’clock, he looks like he’s talking to someone on the other side of them. Lemme get a get a better angle on the speakers.” A pause. “It’s Fei Li all right…she’s…OHSHIT!”
There was the sound of metal hitting metal.
“Go red. She spotted the cam.”
That should’ve been goddamned impossible. John didn’t like to lose the element of surprise.
John came out from behind his cover, suppressed rifle aimed towards where Vic had told him Fei Li was. As if on cue, the General himself—herself?—strode out from behind a stack of crates, illuminated in the green glow of computer screens and harsh fluorescents. She—he—well, it was the General in command; the figure, though that of a diminutive Chinese woman, walked with a slight swagger, and like a man. Hair in fancy braids, dressed in the same “black pajamas” as the Viet Cong had favored, she pinned him with her gaze.
The two Blacksnake guards and their officer all immediately drew weapons; submachine gun PDWs of some sort; John was too focused on the General to try to figure it out.
“So. CCCP sends you, Comrade?” She sneered. “They chose to send their American? How sad. Perhaps Natalya did not want to risk my powers of persuasion with those that know me.”
“You can come in voluntarily, Comrade. We can do this easy like that, or we can do it really easy. Your choice.” John kept his rifle trained on Fei Li; even though he had three other firearms pointed at him, she was without a doubt the most dangerous person in the entire room.
“Really easy? An interesting choice of words, considering that you are outnumbered even without my presence here.” She shook her head. “Terrible tactics, comrade. Your John Wayne maneuvers are and have always been ineffective.”
“Wonder why you didn’t know I was here till just now? Because the rest of your numbers are down an’ out. Now quit stalling, an’ make yer decision.”
The General sighed. “Very well. Men, take him, without killing him if possible.”
Without preamble, John turned his rifle slightly to aim at the closest Blacksnake operative and shot him in the face three times. The other two were fast, and closed with him quickly; at this distance, they were inside the length of his rifle before he could reorient and fire again. Shrugging off his sling, John swung the rifle at the other grunt; it caught him on the edge of his chin perfectly, causing his teeth to click. He went down like a puppet with the strings cut, crumpling into a pile on the floor. The Officer was competent, and wasn’t so quick to rush in. John, frowning at the merc, threw his rifle at him; the man caught it, instinctively. Bad move, pal. John kicked him, hard, in the groin, and then dribbled him around the floor with kicks and punches until
he was rendered unconscious.
“So,” John said, “Are you ready to come in quietly? Or do I have to beat the hell out of more goons?”
“I must definitely speak to Verdigris regarding the lack of competent help he has provided me,” Shen Xue said, and launched into a flying kick at John.
He twisted in place, swatting her leg out of the way. She landed perfectly right beside him, looking perfectly serene. What happened next was a complete blur. John struck at her as hard and as fast as he could; Fei Li flawlessly countered every blow he launched. She did it effortlessly, as if she knew every move he was going to make. And she was fast, just as fast as John. With his enhancements, that was a feat that probably only a few metahumans in the entire world could claim.
Then, her assault came. It was everything John could do to keep from being hit; he felt his stealth suit literally tear when she grazed him with an open-palmed strike.
The effect was exactly like being in the middle of a martial arts movie with a combat between two evenly matched masters. In his experience, most fights were over in seconds, usually with whoever messed up first being the loser.
Her technique was impossibly precise, almost exquisite in its flow. John was good, and had spent a long time becoming that way; but he knew he couldn’t keep up with this. She spun, swinging an elbow at his temple; ducking under it, he was immediately pounded with two open-handed strikes, a sweep, and a series of jabs. He blocked and dodged most of it, but she could see that he was giving up ground.
Fei Li unsheathed her sword without any sort of flourish, and nearly bisected John. An unearthly whir filled the air where her sword cut through the air.
“DISTANCE!” Vickie yelled in his ear. “That thing is Celestial!”
John dropped to the ground, kicking at Fei Li’s knee. She jumped back out of reach, swinging her sword through where his ankle had been a moment than before.
Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Page 42