Chimera (The Subterrene War)

by T. C. McCarthy

  “What did you do before the Army?” I asked while scanning the plaza. “Before Special Forces.”

  “The Bureau. Assurance and Investigation.”

  “Are you shitting me? BAI?”

  He laughed. We had rented a tiny flat near the edge of the plaza in a new housing unit that was tall enough to give a good view. Ji shuffled over to its kitchen and ran water over his hands to wash his face.

  “It’s true. I left the bureau two years ago to join Special Forces. I wanted to get in the field, and this is my first operation.”

  I nearly dropped the binoculars and looked at him. “You ever fired a weapon in anger? Been shot at?”

  He toweled off and shook his head.

  “Then what did you do for the bureau?”

  “Linguist. A translator and analyst for the Domestic Assurance Service, where the major city information systems link.”

  “So you were part of the central computer system. Monitoring the lives and conversations of innocent people. You got paid to be a Peeping Tom.”

  Ji’s face went red. “Our job was to protect people. We got tip-offs from the semi-awares, but the semis only pinged us if they had serious information; they screen out anything that isn’t important.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

  We stared at each other, and hatred flooded into my chest; this guy was nothing. I didn’t hate him because he was Asian, but because he had taken Wheezer’s place and had no right to, hadn’t even shown that he could hack it, but they’d given him to me and just that was enough to make me want to put my fist through his teeth. And knowing that he had been one of the nameless watchers, waiting for alerts from the central system, the voice in my kitchen that reported when we used too many resources or the fact that Bea’s voice had reached a certain decibel level…

  I picked up the field glasses and went back to watching the plaza. “You’re a piece of shit.”

  “Excuse me?” Ji’s voice trembled, and I didn’t have to look to know he was pissed.

  “A piece of shit. And to make it worse you’re a lousy sack of a Chinaman, and all you BAI guys are the same: perverts who get their rocks off by watching and listening while normal Americans climb in the sack with their girlfriends or wives or whatever. You make me freakin’ sick. You know one of the reasons I like to get in the field, why I liked Kazakhstan and all the ’Stans so much? It was because out there if I wanted to be alone, unmonitored, all I had to do was flip a few switches. But I can’t even get privacy in my own home because of stinking asswipes like you.”

  I heard him coming. As soon as he was in range, I stood and slammed the binoculars into his face, at the bridge of his nose, and the crack echoed through the room. When he started to fall, it was easy to sidestep, to move over and let him crumple to the floor with both hands clenched to his face and blood turning them red.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  I kicked him in the stomach until he doubled over, then did it again. “What’s the mission?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Look, Ji, you don’t know me, and I don’t like you at all. And I’m guessing that, like me, you’ve been stripped of any connection to the Army, which means you’re a civilian now and pretty much on your own.” As I spoke, I took off my belt and then kicked him again, reaching down to force his arms behind his back so I could tie them. “You don’t know half of what I’ve seen.”

  It was true. Wheezer would have recognized the look in my eyes and heard the tone of my voice and just known that this was my zone, a job; that although I wasn’t a collector, I knew how to dig information from satos; and that to me, Ji was no different, a piece of meat attached to a meat cog, attached to a bigger meat machine that had over time become something loathsome but necessary if I wanted a paycheck. If Jihoon had known all that, he would have just told me what I wanted to know—would have known that his life was in danger. It took a second to rip a leg off the chair I had been sitting on and a minute to rip padding off the couch and fasten it around my makeshift club, to soften it just enough and make sure the thing wouldn’t kill him right away.

  “What’s the op?” I asked again. “Give me the details.”

  His voice was muffled now and wet with blood. “Go to hell.”

  It took about five minutes. Jihoon screamed with the blows, each one placed to cause the most pain without doing permanent damage, during which time I didn’t ask for anything. When he was ready, the beating stopped.

  Ji was sobbing. “You mother…”

  “What’s the op? Tell me, and it all goes away.”

  “You’re just going to kill me.”

  I lit a cigarette and sat cross-legged on the floor next to him. “Why would I do that? I need you for the next leg of the mission and killing you would just make the Army come after me. I love the Army. Just tell me what the op is, and we can move on; think of this as an initiation to a brotherhood of psychopaths.”

  He coughed for a few minutes. When the cigarette went out, I sighed and stood, getting ready for the next phase, having to admit that the guy was tougher than I thought and that maybe he’d have to die after all.

  “OK, Ji. It just hurts more from here on out, though.”

  “Sunshine,” he said. I sat again and shifted his body so I could hear more clearly.

  “What about it? What is it?”

  “Unified Korea is starting its own genetics program in response to an outside threat, probably from the Chinese, but we don’t know for sure; all we know is that Chen is connected to it. I sold Command on the idea that we could get information from the Korean side of the equation that might link with what we know of Margaret and Dr. Chen, so we’d run my op first. My way.”

  I nodded. “And you’d look good in the process. Maybe get an easy promotion, and if it worked as well as you expected, maybe they’d put you in charge of a whole shitload of stuff. Power is people and a budget, am I right? You’re not cut out for fieldwork, Ji; you’re a paper pusher and an academic who wanted to wear a gun so he could look tough.”

  “I went through the same training you did, asshole.”

  “Yeah, but training isn’t everything. You just got your ass kicked, and if I hadn’t been your partner, but an adversary, you’d be gurgling with a slit throat right now. Or worse. I can’t afford to have a sniveling jerk-off who goes behind my back, angling to be in charge and keeping information from me so that he can call the shots. That’s not my vision of a team. Now tell me why we’re in Spain, why here and why now.”

  Jihoon coughed again, spitting blood on the floor. “I think you broke my arm; you’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Yeah. You should see me with a beard, I look even worse. Tell me what we’re doing here.”

  And Jihoon gave me the rest of it. A Unified Korea team was on their way to meet with a black market weapons dealer, someone who had a sample of what they needed for whatever project the Koreans had going, and the first meet was to take place in the Plaza Mayor sometime this week. It was all he had.

  I sat back to smoke another cigarette while he moaned on the floor. This mission was prime; a real pile of crap. It didn’t matter that the Koreans were our allies, that next to the Thais they were the best friends we had left in east Asia since Japan had been obliterated decades ago along with the western US in another war over metals; none of that must have figured with Jihoon or the people who had green-lit the whole fiasco because the orders were to kill the whole Korean team after grabbing the data we needed. What had we become now that our allies were targets? Jihoon was a perfect example of this new world, where a BAI puke could unravel your whole life at any time, could pipe himself into your house and watch the action like we were all some kind of porno holo for government employee amusement, and in that scenario, where you didn’t trust your own people, how could the government give two shits about an ally? This was real prime. The problem was that there wasn’t any other path because I needed this mission, wanted the action injected into my br
ain and past the blood barrier so its effect would be instantaneous. Pure.

  “Fuck it,” I said, pulling a good chair to the window and picking up a suitcase from under my cot. “I’ll handle the op alone.”

  “Untie me,” said Jihoon.

  “You stay there.”

  It took me a second to find all the pieces of my gear, to assemble them and get everything ready. By the time I was finished, Jihoon asked me what I was doing, and I held up each piece to show him.

  “This is an aeroinjector with ten doses of a fast-acting paralytic, one that’ll knock anyone down within thirty seconds. You have to watch out on smaller people, though, or it will kill them because the doses are all the same. I also have an injector with a kind of truth serum and a fléchette pistol, a garrote, and this one you already know about—an encrypted satellite phone for our progress reports.”

  “You can’t do this one alone.”

  I shook my head. “Sure I can. I’ll keep you tied up and finish the mission, explaining that you got drunk one night and had an accident that left you immobilized. That won’t look good for your next promotion, though, falling down stairs like that.”

  “You’re dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said and picked up the binoculars. “Pretty much. And we only have two more days in the week, so if these Koreans don’t show, I’m taking it out on you.”

  But luckily for Jihoon, they showed later that day.

  After I picked up the targets, it was cake to trail them because these weren’t operators, and from the way they laughed and talked, it looked more like they were Korean government types—soft skins who operated under the assumption that everything would work out cool and breezy. Their escort would be a problem. He was muscle and had two friends who constantly checked the rear to make sure they weren’t followed and who moved like they were armed.

  They walked quickly. The old part of the city slid by at sunset, streetlights clicking on one by one, and it bothered me that there hadn’t been more time to sightsee, to get a look at architecture that had survived for more than a thousand years, the stones worn smooth and some chipped by what could have been ancient wars or conflicts. The dead must support the city, I thought, buried under the streets, maybe in catacombs or in forgotten graves so that in the middle of the night, when the old streets were empty, they’d relax a little, the weight of the cars and people gone for at least a few hours. There was more to Spain than I’d first given it credit for, like maybe its people had earned the right to smile, had learned something that we had yet to figure out: that peace was a good gig too.

  The group disappeared into a club, La Tumba, the entrance of which was a narrow set of stairs that dove underground, and I hesitated at the top of them for a moment, cursing their choice because it took all the strength I had to force myself downward. My hands shook when I opened the door. Inside, the club was dim, a half-lit bar and dance floor that throbbed with music but was empty except for the two strongmen who smiled at me from just inside, then reached out to yank me over the threshold. But they had been too slow; the first one fell dead with a fléchette through his head, and I pushed the second one to the floor, my pistol against his temple.

  “You speak English?” I asked, and he nodded. “Where are they?”

  He pointed toward a door behind the bar, not realizing that he’d be dead a second later. The music had been a blessing. It was so loud that anyone on the other side of the door couldn’t have heard anything, and I moved toward it, pushing aside the fear of being underground, then slammed the thing open. Beyond, in a small room, the four Koreans sat at a conference table at the head of which was a woman with short black hair, a confused smile locked on her face as she said something in Spanish. The last of her guards, the one who had met with the Koreans in the plaza, stood behind her. She must have been the black market dealer, and I didn’t have time to deal with her or the guy—who reached inside his jacket—so I put a few fléchettes through their foreheads, finishing them off with a couple more to their chests. Except for the music behind me, nobody else made a sound.

  “English,” I said, “who speaks it?”

  The Koreans looked at one another in confusion, and I almost lost it, feeling the seconds tick by and not sure how much time I’d have to figure this one out; I couldn’t take them all back to our flat. There were two men and two women. One of the men was old, with white hair and a nice suit. I was about to pick him when I noticed that a small stack of flexi-tabs sat in front of a young woman and that they contained technical drawings and specifications for armor, maybe a juiced-up combat suit. I figured she had to be the smart one. Three fléchettes, one for each of the other Koreans, broke the sound barrier with cracks that resonated in the small space, and I pulled the satchel from my shoulder, motioning for the woman to put all the flexis into it. By the time she finished, I had stripped the corpses of everything in their pockets and then grabbed the woman by the arm, making sure she understood that we were leaving and that my pistol would be pointed at her. She nodded, and we headed outside to climb the stairs. Once at the top, I breathed more easily in the darkness and pushed her along the sidewalk, back toward our apartment where an hour later I had her tied up next to Ji.

  “Can you untie me now?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  I lit a cigarette and blew smoke into his face. “I don’t trust you. How’d you get the information?”

  He stared at me, his face an expression of rage. Blood had dried over his lip and on his nose, a kind of bizarre mustache that represented my entire career. The missions had grown just like that. They evolved over time in a hint of a pattern that anchored itself around murder, but in general they were all chaos, the unexpected and unintended rearing itself in every one and in ways that von Clausewitz never imagined but would have admired as a whacky “fog of war.” But this mission was different. My work had never underpinned a national strategy, and although Command hadn’t given an indication that this op did, the woman’s flexi-tabs suggested otherwise, and I stared at one, the diagrams of a sophisticated armor system glowing green in the otherwise unlit apartment. The girl’s eyes went wide, and her breathing shallowed with a terror that made me feel sick. She was right to be scared. I knew what would happen once we got our information. The fact that I’d just wiped seven humans had started to sink in, a sensation that I countered by reasoning that the kills had been necessary, that it was all for an operation around which you sensed the wheels of a military complex turning, getting ready for a new generation of warfare and preparing to defend itself against a threat that had never been seen before. Whatever the armor was, it was new, it was hard-core, and it hadn’t been designed for anything resembling a human.

  “Tell me how you got the information,” I repeated.

  “One of my friends who still works Assurance at the bureau. He passed it to me a few months ago without reporting through normal channels. He was listening to one of those innocent households you were so concerned about.”

  There was a certain smell to fear, and as the woman lay on the floor, Jihoon bleeding beside her, she had it—a mixture of sweat and human ozone. Its odor wafted up, as if salt and musk seeped from the woman’s pores, but Jihoon just smelled like ass. The fact that he wasn’t scared made me reconsider.

  “You going to try anything if I untie you?”

  He spat on the floor. “I might knife you in your sleep, you son of a bitch.”

  I knelt beside him and unhitched my belt, letting him go. “Don’t fuck with me. You have no idea what I can do.”

  “I’m beginning to get an idea.”

  “Look, Command was right, I do need you. You speak their language, and this is some messed-up stuff.” I showed him the first flexi-tab and waited for the reaction, but there was none. It bothered me. Jihoon was impossible to read, and it occurred to me that this guy would have been good at poker, his face so far having been unreadable except for the few times he wanted to show how much he
hated me.

  “It’s a new kind of armor,” I said.

  “I can see that.”

  “But it’s not for people or satos. Look at the design for the occupant; the dimensions are for something with meter-long legs about an inch across.”

  Jihoon nodded. “I noticed. What happened to the others?”

  “Dead, along with the black market guys. Their contact was a woman, and I grabbed wallets along with everything in their pockets.”

  Jihoon nodded again and turned on a lamp before sitting next to the woman. They spoke Korean. I had no idea what he was saying, but the volume went up and it was clear that Jihoon had started to make her edgy—even more edgy than she had been when in my custody. He turned to me.

  “Let’s start uploading all those schematics and get ready to transmit because we might not have much time once they find the bodies you left behind. And this will take some time. Was there another Korean there, a man who looked older than the rest?”

  “Yeah. There was an old guy with white hair. Why?”

  He shook his head. “You are one dumb simpleton. In Korean culture, you should assume that the oldest one is in charge; it’s not always true, but most of the time it’s a fair assumption.”

  “So?”

  “So…” Jihoon slapped the girl and she winced, a drop of blood appearing at the corner of her mouth. “You killed one of Sunshine’s lead scientists, someone who could have told us a lot. But then, all us Chinamen probably look the same.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, what about her?”

  “She’s just an aide. A goddamn secretary. Well done, Lieutenant.”