Jordan laughed. He’d been hoping for a normal day. Still, he had to be careful with what he said next, because this was a touchy subject that if handled incorrectly would leave him looking like a fool. “You’re joking right? Extraterrestrial Sentient Beings?”
Reddy’s expression said that he wasn’t joking in the slightest.
“Yes, I have.”
“Good, because what you are about to experience would drive most people mad trying to comprehend what it is they were seeing. That’s why we were given you, because of your prior ESB experience.”
Jordan nodded that he understood. An orphanage, a drug company and now ESBs; this was getting worse by the second. Weirdness was seeping back into his life again.
The doors of their armored car were opened and the men stepped outside. They moved as pairs towards the building, while the other pair provided cover, scanning rooftops and windows.
Once inside it was a world of grays and shadows.
The first warning that everything was wrong was the smell, a noxious odor Jordan couldn’t quiet describe but left him queasy.
Beyond the foyer was a large open room. The three Centaurus middle-managers slipped on face masks and surgical gloves. Shaw offered the same protection to Jordan, and he obliged. The smell however didn’t worsen with the miniscule protection.
“Got any Vicks Vapor Rub?” Jordan asked.
“What?”
“Never mind, old coroner’s trick for the smell.”
“The insurgents don’t attack this place, Talcott,” explained a smug Shaw, “because they think the devil lives here.”
“And does he?” asked Jordan.
Shaw was silent.
Stepping into the next room Jordan’s vision was filled with rows upon rows of beds with overhanging sheets covering the patients so that no one could see any other. The floors were wet with mixtures of sticky fluids that gripped like glue to his boots. Everywhere tiny mounds of fibrous wet material grew. Three Iraqi men, one wearing a lab coat, checked in on the hidden shapes in sequence, spending a couple of minutes with each. Some of those shapes flailed, others gave the impression that they had grown into large mounds of flesh. A few languished as serpent-like grows, slid in and out of the semi-human silhouettes that had birthed them.
Jordan wanted to be sick. Only his steal nerves developed through many years of standing against horrors like this stopped him from fleeing, screaming into the heart of a Baghdad war zone. It was hard to believe he felt more unsafe here than being shot at by swarms of Al Queda terrorists.
He knew why he’d been recommended for the job. To do this kind of work, one had to accept that a scene like the one before him was normalcy. That didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Mr. Talcott,” Reddy had brought forth an Iraqi wearing the lab coat. “This is Dr. Aziz. He runs our little research operation here.”
“Research, I thought this was an orphanage?”
“That would be correct, in the days previous,” said Aziz in his clipped English. “Now you find none here are, well, human.”
Including you, Jordan thought.
A child’s voice screamed from somewhere toward the back. The five men looked up, to see blood splatter across the sheet that covered him. Then the scream fell silent.
“So once upon a time these children, were, how you say, human?” Jordan made no attempt to hide his bitterness.
The four men pretended that he had said nothing.
“That is subject 674,” Aziz’s yellow tainted eyes motioned to the blood stained sheet. “Nothing to get concerned over. He does that often.”
Jordan swallowed, wondered what he’d gotten himself into. When he had first been offered this assignment it had struck him as odd that a pharmaceutical company was doing business in Baghdad. But Centaurus weren’t here to sell; they were here to test new drugs. Where those drugs had come from, Jordan feared to guess.
Reddy unlocked the briefcase handcuffed to Shaw’s arm. Inside were several syringes marked with biohazard symbols and the Centaurus company logo. Reddy withdrew an empty syringe, held it high, ready to put to use. “What are we waiting for? Show us your most promising subjects, Dr. Aziz.”
“Ah, this one you’ll like I am sure.” He led them to a bed not far from the middle and pulled back the sheet.
When they saw what the soiled linen hid, all four men shuddered. Lawrence bent over and puked, but the smell of his bile was hardly noticeable over the already putrid odor that permeated everything. None of the staff bothered to clean it either.
Jordan stared back towards the shape he had recoiled against. Once, the ‘thing’ had been an Iraqi boy of no more than ten years. Parts of the boy, like half a face, an elbow and most of a foot, still resembled the human being he had once been. Most of the poor creature was now a massive tangled knot of oversized muscles the size of truck tires, red raw flesh pulsing with blue and crimson blood veins. Those alien muscles inflated and deflated again and again without reason or cause, so that one moment a muscle looked normal if not skinless, and the next had become large enough to smoother the rest of the body.
Jordan suddenly thought of Madison, his nineteen-year-old daughter he had not known to have existed until a few months ago. He wondered how he would have felt if it were her in the bed. Would he feel even more disgusted than he did right now? He knew he felt something, just that he couldn’t yet identify what that feeling was. He had been trained to not feel anything and had lived his life that way for so long that emotions were slow to reawaken in him, but he was sure it would come to him.
“Subject 356 has accelerated muscle growth. This is very good. Perfect genetic sample for you to make new weapons with, correct?”
Reddy nodded, grinned with half his mouth. “I think we will take some of this one’s blood, yes?”
Detached and numb, Jordan watched without comment as a further four child monstrosities were examined then sampled for their genetic abnormalities. One resembled a fleshy serpent with phenomenal regenerative properties. Another had eyes growing all over his skin, which Aziz assured, could see in the dark. The last two had developed hardened flesh that closely resembled scaly armor. All carried characteristics of young children, but they weren’t children anymore.
It hadn’t escaped Jordan’s notice the selected child-monsters had characteristics that, if properly controlled, tested and perfected, would be ideal for breeding the perfect genetically engineered soldier.
“What happened to these children?” Jordan asked when the last blood sample had been locked inside the briefcase. “How did they end up this way?”
Again the four men were conspicuously silent.
“Is this one of Saddam Hussain’s old biological weapons testing programs?”
Now the four men laughed at him.
“Hussain was never this sophisticated, Talcott,” explained Reddy.
“You mean your company made these children into test subjects?”
“They’re not children, Talcott,” Reddy sneered. “They haven’t been children for a long time.”
Jordan could see he was loosing his patience with this conversation. It had been one of Jordan’s CIA handlers who had assigned him this job and that could only mean one thing; whatever Centaurus was up to here, the US government was getting some kind of kick-back, otherwise the CIA wouldn’t be involved. He couldn’t help consider that this orphanage was somehow connected with the secret Pentagon biological weapons research and development programs that he shouldn’t have known to exist, but did.
“Well, whatever they are, how did they get that way?”
Reddy grinned. “You don’t need to know that information.”
Jordan nodded. He’d accept that answer for now. He was still attempting to understand his feelings if it was Madison who had been experimented on. He wished he’d known his daughter better, or for that matter, at all. Because she had always been unknown to him he found it difficult to understanding his confused feelings towards her, eve
n though she was a part of him.
The four men returned to the vehicle leaving Aziz to his dirty work. Jordan check their GPS location on his watch, memorized the coordinates.
“I think I should drive,” he said.
“Why?” asked Reddy, suspicious.
“It’s been an hour since we arrived, Reddy. That means every fanatic in the area knows we are here. That means they’re going to try and take us out when we leave. I need to drive because I know the short cuts and how to deal with fanatics if they try to trap us.”
Lawrence looked worried. Shaw shrugged. After a moment of deliberation, Reddy threw the keys at Jordan. “Don’t mess this up.”
When they had driven two blocks, Jordan yelled out, “RPG, three o’clock!” and pointed toward the passenger’s window just before slamming on the brakes. While the three men were distracted, looking out the windows for nonexistent attackers, he drew his SOCOM from his shoulder holster with his right hand and used his left to hit the button that rolled down all the Mercedes’ widows at once.
Before the bullet resistant widows had completely descended, Reddy turned to Jordan and froze when he looked straight into the barrel of man’s .45. Jordan made a simple gesture he had done thousands of times before and with a flash and a bang most of Reddy’s head dissolved in a red mist. Turning quickly, Jordan then shot Shaw and Lawrence while they were still buckled into their seatbelts in the back of the SUV. Each man got one bullet in the head.
After a few seconds of observation, Jordan put another bullet into the ruins of Lawrence’s face when he didn’t stop twitching.
Thumbing the tiny button on the door, the vehicle’s windows slowly slid up while Jordan holstered his gun and grimaced in pain. Opening the widows had saved him from permanent hearing loss, but he was sure his ears would be ringing for days.
He took their Centaurus IDs, their passports and their credit cards. He found airline tickets on an American airliner to Washington DC. When he secured the keys to the briefcase and handcuffs, he unclipped it from Shaw’s limp corpse. Then he dumped the bodies in the street and drove off fast. In the rearview mirror he already saw a small group of children running towards the corpses to strip them of what little he had left them with.
After Jordan covered another two blocks he stopped again. He adjusted the two-way radio’s frequency to one that was used by the CIA’s Baghdad office.
“This is Jordan Eight Delta. Code in as alpha, foxtrot, omega, seven, seven, nine, two, zero. Shiite strong-hold identified at these coordinates—”, he gave the GPS location of the orphanage, “—numbers estimated at sixty individuals armed with assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers. This is a Code Red. They look to be wiring up several vans with high explosives, ready to roll within the hour.”
He repeated the message several times until someone radioed back, told him his message had been received, and that a ‘package’ was on the way. At least that’s what he hoped the break in the radio’s static hiss had meant. He still couldn’t hear a thing.
Ten minutes later a US F-22 Raptor powered through the blistering Baghdad haze. Two seconds after the fighter jet vanished, the orphanage disintegrated in a fiery cloud. The child-monstrosities—if any of them still had anything left in them that could feel a human emotion—had been put to rest.
Jordan wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. Justice was a dish that was always served cold in the supernatural world he lived in, and harder still to swallow.
It wasn’t going to end here either. He had a peculiar feeling that the Australian he had seen in his apartment, a former army officer turned NSA consultant who went by the name of Harrison Peel, was connected to what he had just seen.
He accelerated down the dusty street. It was time to go dark again, and disappear for a while.
2. Maryland
Harrison Peel sat uncomfortably in a dark conference room deep inside NSA Headquarters. He’d never enjoyed being on the business end of an interrogation, even if he was supposedly here of his own free will. He looked again at the photograph that had been passed across the table for him to examine. Zoe Isles, who sat opposite Peel, had told him she was a senior CIA case officer and that she expected his full cooperation.
Her thin finger pressed itself into the grayscale image. There were no rings, which suggested she didn’t enjoy a serious relationship. This didn’t surprise Peel.
“You know this man.”
It wasn’t a question, and Peel did indeed know the man in the picture. The two had worked together on several occasions on black ops in some of the world’s worst war zones against enemies that didn’t choose any human side.
“Perhaps.”
Peel knew nothing about Zoe Isles. She’d sprung this meeting on him without warning and he’d had no time to do a background check on her, and until he did he wasn’t ready to share. More troubling perhaps was that he found her attractive, and that might cloud his judgment if feelings became involved. In her mid-thirties Ms. Isles was freckled with a perfectly symmetrical face and full lips, a shapely figure and wild strawberry red hair. She was exactly the kind of woman Peel had always found himself drawn too.
But Peel wasn’t planning on flirting. Isles was a CIA case officer and she was about to drag him into what could only be unpleasant business. She wasn’t even going to pretend to be nice about it either.
“I know you know who he is Mr. Peel, or is that Major Peel?”
Peel grinned. “Sorry, I haven’t been with the Australian Army for several years now.”
“You were with their Intelligence Corps. Did you know this man then?”
Peel shook his head. “I was undercover in Africa for most of my time, before that in Somalia during the UN intervention. These days however, I’m an intelligence consultant to the NSA, the Puzzle Palace, and have been for years. Mr. Peel will do fine, or Harrison if you prefer.” He immediately regretted offering her the use of his first name. To his own ears he already sounded like he was flirting when he had promised himself that he would not.
“Are you going to tell me who this man is?”
“You already know who he is.”
She sighed, frustrated. “Very well, Harrison. I know you know, so let’s cut the bullshit. This is a CIA contract player who goes most often by the code name Jordan, but you knew that too. Perhaps you didn’t know he was Green Beret and Navy SEAL trained? No? How about this, he’s spent time with the British SAS and Germany’s GSG9 if I believe everything his file tells me. Speaks Spanish, Russian and Arabic fluently, and a half dozen other languages badly.”
Peel shrugged. “Sounds like the perfect agent for you.”
“Not anymore.” Isles clenched her teeth, lent into her chair. “You’ve worked with Jordan before, Peel. You first met in the Venezuelan jungles where the two of you caused quiet a lot of trouble.”
“Maybe. Even if this is true, what makes you think I could even talk about it?”
She stood, paced. “Enough of this, I’ve seen the Venezuelan files. I have clearance. You suffered a stomach wound if I remember correctly. And you were operating against a Code-89 threat, an ESB.”
“Ah,” Peel shuddered. Code-89 was an US interagency term to designate a threat that was extra-terrestrial in nature that ranged from unnatural alien mutation in the local flora, to massive dimensional tears in the fabric of space-time that released a gigantic tentacled-horror hell-bent on consuming the Earth. He witnessed enough of both ends of the spectrum so that the term could never be lost on him, and so had Jordan. Separately, they had both seen enough to drive most men and women to desperation and suicide. Zoe Isles knew what a Code-89 threat implied and what the acronym ESB meant, which did mean she must have experienced at least one encounter first hand. He had respect for her now. Talking to her was going to be so much easier.
“A sentient alien removed my stomach then replaced it with one of its own design. It still works okay, or I should say it hasn’t given me any problems yet.”
It was Isles’ turn to shudder. “Yes, well, I didn’t realize your injury was that severe?”
“It wasn’t really an injury, in the purest sense of the word, more like…a modification.”
She gave a quizzical stare. “Why did the aliens give you a new stomach?”
“Long story, Ms. Isles. You want to talk about my past operations, or would you like to know more about Jordan?”
She sat, lent towards him, perhaps sensing that they were getting somewhere. “So you’re ready to talk?”
“You keep asking the questions. I’ll tell you if I can answer them.”
“I’ll accept that for now. Do you have any idea why Jordan went rouge one month ago?”
Peel raised an eyebrow. “Why are you telling me this? You think because Jordan and I worked together a couple of times I can help reign in your rotten apple?”
“He seems to respect you.”
Peel laughed, wondering how she had drawn that conclusion. “If he does you’ll have to ask him.”
“I think he does.”
“Well I can tell you this for free, he doesn’t trust anyone, me included.”
“I think you might be able to tell me his current whereabouts.” She was getting louder, and so was he.
“I haven’t talked to him in over six months, Ms. Isles. Jordan’s not the kind of guy you ask round to the family barbeque, or even have a beer with after work. He’s the kind of guy who phones you in the middle of the night and tells you to bring him some file to some sleazy bar in Beirut or Osaka. You give it to him, he thanks you, says that he owes you one, and then he vanishes again.”
“Harrison, you’ve never been to Beirut or Osaka.”
“No,” said Peel, realizing that Isles had done her homework. He had to assume she knew as much about him as it was possible to know.
“So Jordan does have a means of contacting you?”
She had trapped him. He’d as good as admitted to what she had just suggested. If he didn’t give her a lead, as soon as this meeting ended she would have him under surveillance, waiting and watching until Jordan contacted him again. Considering the nature of this meeting, she probably would anyway.
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