Assassination Anxiety (The McKenzie Files)

by Barry K. Nelson

  * * * * *

  The wait for the shuttle, as well as the trip to the East Oakland section to reach the First Veteran’s Hospital did not take long. They met Secret Service Agent Mike Stevers in his room on the third floor. The blue floor tiles and white walls were so bright and spotless that Colin imagined they were sterile.

  Colin tried not to stare at Stevers sitting up on the white blanket of his bed. A transparent plastic cast covered his torso and right arm. His head was covered with a transparent form-fitting mask with two eye holes and a wide mouth slit. Transparent tubes ran from both sides of the mask to the top of a black five-foot-high column-shaped machine mounted on a metal disk with four wheels. A small keypad on the side of the machine sat below four blinking green lights. The tubes delivered a steady flow of red fluid that ran throughout a thin network of arteries beneath the mask. This dermal regeneration mask would help Stevers regrow the skin that he lost from the serious burns he suffered. The casts on Stevers’ torso and arm also served the same healing function and also had tubes leading back to machine by his bed. Below the torso cast, Stevers wore a pair of gray boxer shorts. Stevers’ left leg and arm were wrapped in white adhesive gel bandages.

  After showing their CID identification badges, Colin, Diane, and Kelly stood and listened as he told his account of the events that took place during President Drennan’s rally. Colin pondered Stevers’ account of what took place. “And in both instances you saw no weapon fired?”

  “No sir. I was in front of the stage, watching the crowd. A police shuttle flew overhead. Then it just exploded. Fortunately the crowd scattered before it crashed to the ground. Then this weird light appeared. I don’t know what the hell it was, but anything that was caught in this light caught fire and burned. I listened over my earbuds, and the other agents were looking for a possible shooter. But they saw nothing. A few of them ended up being burned to death with some civilians when that light hit them. I saw those people catch fire. It’s something I’ll never forget.”

  “What happened next?” asked Colin.

  “The order was given to get the President out. I deactivated her shield on the stage, and a group of other agents moved in and escorted her to her limo. Shortly after that, the building across the street exploded, and this thing shoots out from the blast. It was like a big metallic mass. All sharp, jagged metal. It hit the ground near the stage. I and several other agents went in to see what it was. Then the thing moved.”

  Another weird detail, Colin thought to himself. “It moved?”

  “It was like the thing pulsated. Or squirmed. After that, a bolt of energy shot out from it. The first thought that came to my mind was, it’s a bomb. I yelled for everybody to clear the hell out. A second later it exploded and sent this metal shrapnel flying all over the place. I was on the ground and took some of the shrapnel in my left arm and leg. And my back. I saw another agent lying on the ground near me. He was ripped apart by those fragments. That’s when I looked toward the remains of the bombed-out building and spotted the Brelac.”

  Diane shot a quick glance at Colin and Kelly. Then looked back at Stevers. “We heard about that. Can you describe this Brelac?”

  “This is going to sound strange. And I couldn’t get a full view of it because of all the smoke and a cloud of dust. But it was about eight feet tall. Had huge arms. And it wore some kind of a cape or a robe.”

  “A cape or robe is a detail that we usually don’t hear associated with the Brelac,” Colin told Stevers. “As well as the size. Are you sure it was eight feet tall?”

  “I know what I saw,” Stevers returned with a tone of anger. “It had a long tail. Just like the thing that crashed near the stage. That might have been a Brelac too. I didn’t get a good look at it, but I know what I saw.”

  “No one is disputing what you saw,” Colin assured Stevers. “It’s just that everything you’ve described sounds a little out of the ordinary. Even by our standards.”

  “But that’s what we deal with,” Diane stated. “Cases that are out of the ordinary.”

  “How many cases like this have you dealt with?” Stevers asked Diane.

  As if embarrassed, Diane turned her gaze down to the floor. “This is our first day on the job. First case.”

  “What happened next?” Colin asked Stevers.

  “Then I saw that weird light coming my way. I heard more screams over my earbuds. Other agents were dying – people I knew and worked with and respected. I wished that there was something I could have done, but I was helpless. I even saw some poor bastard running toward me in flames. But there was nothing I could do to help him. Then the light drew closer, and I started to burn.”

  Colin examined the casts that covered Stevers wounds. “After all that’s happened, it’s a miracle that you’re still alive.”

  “I wouldn’t be if it weren’t for that police shuttle. It flew in and opened fire at whatever it was. It drove the thing off. But not before I suffered third degree burns to my face, upper torso and right arm. The doctors say that my skin regeneration treatments are going smoothly. Of course the downside is being stuck hooked up to this machine for the next three days.”

  Colin gave thought to the last details of Stevers’ story. “And nobody still living saw who or what was behind this attack?”

  “There was no one.”

  “Are you aware there were some tracks of some sort found in the area? They were actually burned into the grass.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it. What kind of tracks?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Colin admitted. “They weren’t human.”

  Stevers shifted and sat forward, grunting in pain as he moved. “Not human? Then that proves that the Brelac were behind this.”

  Colin shook his head in disagreement. “We don’t know that for sure. The evidence is still inconclusive.”

  “Inconclusive?” Stevers spat out in anger. “How much more conclusive do you need it to be? The evidence is right there. It almost killed me. I’m standing by what I saw.”

  Okay. What next? Colin wondered. The information from Stevers did not offer any leads in the case. The investigation was still at a roadblock. Colin looked to Diane and Kelly. “Where do we go from here?”

  Diane looked back at Colin but said nothing. Kelly folded his arms against his chest and looked down at the floor. Then he turned his eyes to Colin. “Agent Stevers hasn’t told us anything that we didn’t already know. Nothing much more that we can do now except follow one or two options. Option one, we go to examine the actual scene for ourselves. Option two, we look into this apartment fire and the guy who was killed.”

  Diane heaved a sigh. “Kendridge. On the planet Tacoma Three. That’s going to be a hell of a long trip to look at a possible dead end.”

  Colin nodded in agreement. “And I doubt that the Secret Service would have missed anything. That entire part of the city would have been practically examined with a microscope and scanned down to every blade of grass. Our best option is to go the Hill District and investigate this apartment fire that Captain Carter told us about.”

  “Is it close enough to walk?” asked Diane. She frowned. “We should have our own car.”

  “Right now I’d settle for an extra chair in front of our desk,” Kelly said.

  Stevers sighed heavily. “Listen. If you find out who or what did all this, I want in when you take them down. The doctors say that I’ll be all healed up and out of here in a week. And I’m in the mood for some payback. Some of those agents that were killed were friends of mine. And for the sake of the civilians.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Colin told Stevers. It was commendable that Stevers would want to take action against the perpetrators of the attack, after all he’d been through. But given the evidence so far, the creatures that were responsible would be above the ability of any human to deal with. Colin looked to Diane and Kelly. “Let’s go to the Hill District.”

  back to top

  Chapter 5

&n
bsp; Colin felt embarrassed as he climbed out of the blue car with the broad black and white checkered stripe painted on both sides. He looked at the small white, holographic sign on the roof of the vehicle, with the word ‘Taxi,’ glowing in bright green letters. A taxi, Colin thought as he stepped onto the sidewalk, with Diane and Kelly climbing out after him. High-level government investigators, and we have to take a taxi to get around town.

  Standing before them was the Tykowski Building, a square, seven-story apartment complex composed of large red bricks. Two round stone pillars held up a large stone slab above the twin glass doors to the building. They entered the building and found themselves in the main lobby, a small area with gray floor tiles and walls. A few steps ahead of them, Colin saw the gold elevator door. He pressed the glowing white button on the gold panel at the right of the elevator. The door slid open, and the trio stepped inside to go up to the fourth floor.

  As the elevator ascended, a potent odor of smoke hung in the air. Diane sniffed. “There was definitely a fire here.”

  “I wonder how bad it was,” Colin said rhetorically.

  “Is it just me, or is anybody else getting a bad feeling about this?” asked Kelly.

  “I’ve had a bad feeling about this whole case from the start,” Colin admitted.

  The elevator let the trio off on the fourth floor, where the odor of smoke was much stronger. When they stepped off the elevator, the first sight that greeted them was a black door that stood out against the gray wall. Several feet away was a black uniformed police officer standing in front of an open doorway to an apartment. Noticing their approach, the officer turned and held up a hand. “Whoa. This area is a crime scene. Unless you live on this floor, it’s off limits.”

  Simultaneously Colin, Diane, and Kelly reached into their pockets and brought out their badges to display to the officer. “We’re Silencers, a special investigative unit working with the CID.”

  The apprehensive officer gave Colin’s badge a careful study. “Silencers? I never heard of you before.”

  “You’ve heard of the CID, haven’t you?” Diane asked him.

  The officer gave a nod. “I’ll let you speak with Lieutenant Copeland.”

  They followed the officer through the open doorway. The apartment inside was small, drab, and dirty. The living room had grungy green carpeting and smudged walls that used to be white. Other than a small vidscreen, a ripped brown recliner with a plastic white side table and a sagging blue couch seemed to be the only furniture in site. A large print of a ringed planet orbiting a red sun hung crookedly on the wall above the sofa.

  Two uniformed police officers in the apartment held small black rectangular scanners in their hands, scouring the walls, floor, and furniture for clues. The officers stopped and turned when they saw Colin and Diane and Kelly enter the premises. “Lieutenant,” the officer accompanying them called out.

  A moment later, Lieutenant Copeland walked out from another room in the apartment. Dressed neatly in black pants and shoes, and a gray shirt under his charcoal sports coat, he appeared to be in his thirties, with a head of bushy black hair. He was also carrying one of the small black scanner instruments in his hand.

  “These people are from the CID,” their officer escort announced. “They call themselves Silencers.”

  “What?” Copeland asked.

  Colin stepped forward. “We’re a special unit.” He extended his hand to Copeland. “I’m Colin McKenzie. My colleagues here are Diane Christy and Kelly Lytton.”

  “That’s Captain Diane Christy,” Diane corrected. “You might have heard about me. Ace pilot. I’ve got two hundred and thirty–”

  “Diane, save it,” Colin snapped. He was in no mood to hear Diane go through her pre-programmed ace-pilot mantra.

  Copeland gave Colin a quick handshake. “What brings you people here? This is a local crime scene.”

  “We’re investigating the recent attack on President Drennan’s rally on Tacoma Three. We have reason to believe that your crime scene here might have some connection to our case.”

  Copeland shrugged. “Could be. This case has a few weird elements to it.”

  “How so?”

  “Let me explain after I show you the body.” Copeland led them a few steps down the hallway to an open door at the right. They entered the small bathroom where the floor, walls, and ceiling were all scorched black. A strong lingering odor of burnt plastic hung in the air. The few remnants of the floor tile were reduced to shriveled bits of black cinder. The ceramic sink at the right corner was scorched black, as was the toilet next to it. The walk-in shower’s entire plastic enclosure was burned away, leaving behind the shower’s gruesome contents – a charred body standing upright against the wall. A tremendous source of heat had burned the individual down to a blackened, near skeletal form. Its incinerated head was tilted back, with the mouth gaping open. Both arms were burned off, the bits and pieces lying nearby.

  Kelly took a step back when he saw the body. Diane stood where she was, hesitating to move, while Colin proceeded forward with Copeland. “Here’s our deceased,” Copeland said. “This is Lieutenant John Mertz. Or what’s left of him. We ran a DNA scan and cross-checked it with the military identification database. The apartment is registered in his name.”

  Colin made a quick study of the body. “What the hell happened here?”

  “You tell me,” Copeland returned. “A fire, obviously. My guess would be that it was some kind of a heat weapon. And considering the damage to the entire room, I’d say that it had to be pretty powerful. Whoever did this intended to not only deal with our friend here, but destroy the entire apartment to cover their tracks.”

  Kelly stepped closer to the shower and peered at the body. “This is just like it was at the President’s rally.”

  “The only difference here is that we’re seeing the aftermath first-hand,” Colin said.

  Copeland eyed them, then continued. “My guess is that all this damage was caused by some kind of thermal grenade or bomb instead of a heat ray weapon. A heat ray would leave some kind of pattern damage across the walls, if you wanted to torch the whole place. Just look at this place. It looks as if the entire room went up in one huge burst of heat.”

  Colin agreed with Copeland’s assessment. “When did this happen?”

  “Last night, 11:43. The building’s security maintenance computer registered a fire in the apartment and called for the local fire and paramedic units to respond. At the same time, it activated the fire suppression units in the apartment and released Korvium gas from the floor and ceiling vents. When the fire and paramedic units arrived, they found the blaze was already contained to the bathroom. That’s when they discovered the body. Just look at it. I never saw a burning victim who dies standing up. He’s practically one big cinder fused to the wall. The guys from the coroner’s department will have to scrape him off in chunks.”

  Colin approached the shower to make a closer look at the body. Diane and Kelly also moved in closer. As Colin looked into the empty eye sockets of the victim’s charred skull, he imagined the horror that this person experienced. What could have done this? What did you see before you died?

  “Extreme heat used as a weapon,” Kelly commented. “There’s definitely a connection between what happened here and the attack on the President’s rally.”

  Diane looked to Kelly. “How would you rate this? Is this similar to what you can do?”

  Kelly shrugged his shoulders. “Hell, I don’t know. I already told you. Whatever did this could be on the same level or stronger than me.”

  “What?” asked Copeland.

  Colin smiled. “Just an inside joke between us. I see that you guys are running scans on the apartment. Did you come up with anything?”

  “We scanned the whole place for fingerprints, chemical and biological agents, and DNA. That’s when we found a strange signature. Our scanners showed that it was a hybrid of human and insect. At first I thought that our scanners were off. So, just to
be sure, I had them recalibrated and tested. Then we ran our scans again twice and came up with the same thing.”

  Human/insect DNA? Colin thought back to their earlier meeting with Captain Carter and General Larkin, recalling the idea of encountering a seddrax as big as a human. Now it appeared that such a notion was unfolding into a reality.

  “Let me show you something,” Copeland said.

  Colin, Diane, and Kelly followed him out of the bathroom and to an open door at the end of the hallway. They walked past the door into a small bedroom with the same grubby carpeting and walls as the living room. A disheveled queen-size bed dominated the space, dwarfing the cheap black nightstand and wooden dresser.

  Copeland pointed to the single window in the room, covered with faded brown drapes. “The front door was locked from the inside. This window was the only open entrance to the apartment. We found traces of that strange DNA around the window. Inside and out. There’s also a trail of it leading to the bathroom.”

  “Does the building have any security cameras?” Colin asked.

  “There’s a security camera set up at the main entrance. We’ve already looked over the footage from the past twenty-four hours and saw only authorized residents entering and leaving the building. The building has two emergency doors at the rear of the first floor. But the computer’s logs show that they remained closed. So it appears that any intruder who entered the building to torch Mertz didn’t enter through the door. But possibly through this window.”

  Colin agreed with Copeland’s theory. “Your suspect could have easily climbed up here with a little help from the proper tools. Or could have flown.”

  “The computer’s sensors didn’t pick up any low-flying craft,” Copeland objected.

  Another layer added to this mystery. “You said that Mertz was a lieutenant?”