Controller

by Stephen W Bennett

  The operative wasn’t willing to give in yet. “We aren’t supposed to leave you unprotected. Neither of you speaks Korean. Excuse the slur, but if the police spot either of you round eyes now with all the shit happening down there, you’ll instantly be questioned as foreigners and you can’t answer their questions.”

  Gorka said, “If either of you is armed, you’ll be as dangerous to us as a psycho cop if you’re close to that transmitter. You won’t be able to stop yourselves. If we find our man and get what we’re after, you need to be where you can extricate us.”

  “What if the man you’re after is armed?” Alice countered.

  “So are we.” Grayson opened his jacket to reveal his concealed holster. Gorka simply patted his left armpit over his gun.

  Malfoy shrugged. “I hope you don’t need to ask directions or anything.”

  “We knew this before we came,” Gorka admitted. “We need to sit this chopper down someplace where the pilot stays clear of that transmitter’s influence, but a bit closer than we are now. Gray…,” He caught himself. “Banker here will know if we’re getting too close. A park or parking lot will do or even a wide rooftop. It needs to happen fast or more people are going to die.”

  Malfoy looked ahead, picked a spot, leaned towards the pilot, and pointed, telling him where they needed to land. It was a grassy area of a highway interchange near Seoul University, and a bit more than a mile from the double Apache crashes.

  The pilot nosed the aircraft down and swooped towards the designated spot, flaring tail down as they neared the center of the interchange loop. Malfoy reached into a bag under his seat and pulled out two handheld transceivers, passing them to Gorka and Grayson.

  “There are three others in the bag, for me, Alice, and the pilot, channels are preselected, but channel 12 is ours. Keep us updated, and we can coordinate where to recover you. Be careful. You probably need to run two miles, if you follow the roads, to get close to your man.”

  Gorka grinned. “We’ll follow the roads all right. But we aren’t running.” He stepped out of the door as it slid open, followed by Grayson. They trotted towards the underpass.

  Watching their backs, Alice asked, “Are they going to hijack a car?”

  “It’s what I’d do in an emergency. I hope they don’t have to shoot some poor bastard that can’t speak English.”

  They didn’t. Remarkably, the two men didn’t even wave down the first vehicle that drove near, headed north under the overpass. A car with two men pulled over, and they opened the driver and passenger doors. Then, surprisingly, they stepped out and let the two Americans take the vehicle without protest. The Banker slipped behind the wheel and drove under the overpass and out of view.

  “I’ll be damned,” Malfoy said in amazement. “I guess they’ll find their way from here. Most of the major road signs are in Korean and English.”

  ****

  Grayson watched in awe as the car pulled to the side of the road and the two men got out and stood to the side. “Damn, Mike. I only half believed that story, that you not speaking someone’s language wasn’t important.” He sensed Mike’s commands that ordered the driver to stop for the two presumed plainclothes police officers, then telling them to step away from the car.

  Grayson drove of course, as the Immune. As soon as he cleared the obscuring overpass the faint mental commands, which he’d sensed from the air returned. “I know which way to go, but I can’t drive cross country. There’s a GPS icon on the console display. See if you can get a map of the local roads while I drive.”

  He followed the curving parkway as Gorka struggled to figure out how to change the display. It didn’t take long. “Ha! I got it. This a KIA and my mother has an Optima. I showed her how to use her GPS.”

  Grayson glanced at the map, checking their position, and compared that mentally with the direction he sensed they should go. “This isn’t directly the way we want to drive, but the commands are growing stronger. I’ll turn right at the next large intersection. I don’t any see signs that the drivers passing near us are reacting to his weak control commands.” There was other traffic, moving in both directions.

  “What’s he sending Dan?”

  “It mostly has been specific commands, intended for what I assume are the police. The instructions seem to be directing them to make turns at intersections or to look away when told. I assume those are patrol cars that get close to the man. That’s what I faintly sensed when he brought down the two Apaches. He convinced those pilots they were in a nose up stall, and in a rapid spin to their left. The pilots compensated by tilting their noses down, and a hard right turn. They were already low and spun in with their noses down. I don’t know how far away he was from us then, but his control over the pilots must have been strong to overcome their self-preservation instincts.”

  Mike nodded. “I don’t think I could Compel anyone to plunge to their death. Distract them perhaps, or confuse them, but not force them to dive to a certain death like that. He must have Stiles-like Control ability when he uses that transmitter, and with a much greater range. That transmitter makes him dangerous as Hell. Have you sensed any crowd control commands, to trigger a riot?”

  “Just brief flashes, such as a group order to send people out onto the streets from businesses and apartment buildings. He’d be able to hide better in crowds, and if cornered, he has people to send against anyone wearing insulated foil lined suits.”

  “If he’s ordering individual police units to turn away, then he must be out on the street. He could control the officers, but dash cams could see him, although I don’t know if the patrol cars here transmit images to a substation. They don’t work that way in police units where I lived in Michigan. I never asked if they can do that in Washington because it never occurred to me. If he’s from North Korea, he may be exposed to more technology than he’s accustomed to seeing and could be worried about facial recognition software, which isn’t fooled by mental commands. That’s how we traced him out of the stadium, and how the police got a better picture to put on TV.”

  Grayson nodded. “If he’s moving around outside, then we have a chance to locate him. After that, the trick is to take him down before he sees us coming. He can turn anyone around him into his defenders.”

  Taking a right turn at the next major street, Grayson noticed an immediate difference after a quarter mile. “He feels stronger and is ahead and to the left. Call it the eleven o'clock position. I’m less sure of the true distance, because the signal strength varies as we move, and perhaps he’s moving as well.”

  “Dan, look at the cars ahead of us.” That was a redundant warning because Grayson could see people getting out of their stopped vehicles, and walking diagonally across the road.

  “They’re responding to his call to walk towards him, to build a crowd of people around him. They’d get there faster by car, but that isn’t what he told them to do.”

  “Seriously?” Gorka asked. Something in his voice made Grayson glance at his partner.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because just now I thought it would be best if we got out and walked in the same direction as those drivers and passengers, towards those tall apartment buildings or hotels.”

  “You’ve received his thoughts.” Grayson had a sense of foreboding.

  “It seemed like my idea, but I’m on guard now for anything that would be out of the ordinary. I can’t sense him, but I wanted to walk towards those high-rise buildings.”

  “That’s in the general direction where I sense he is. He’s calling a mass of people to him, and we must be within less than a mile of where he is.”

  People in buildings and residences on both sides of the road were coming out and walking towards where Grayson sensed the commands originated. He was forced to slow and swerve to avoid clusters of people. They weren’t walking completely oblivious, but they weren’t watching for traffic either. When he blew his horn, they were startled, and either hurried across the road or paused to let him pass. T
hey had passive expressions and didn’t look angry, or even curious. They were simply taking a walk, largely ignoring their surroundings and not speaking to those with them, not even other passengers from their cars who they presumably knew well.

  So many cars had stopped haphazardly on both sides that they blocked the road. Grayson crossed a grassy median to reach a side street, where he drove several more blocks north, weaving around stopped cars and foot traffic walking in the center of the street. The GPS indicated they were just a few blocks from Bongcheon Station, on line 2 of the subway.

  Pedestrian traffic had slowed them to foot traffic speed anyway, so they pulled the car to a curb and got out. Suddenly hundreds of people looked up, and Grayson did as well because he sensed the same command, and faintly heard what they were trying to see.

  There was a small drone flying over at about five hundred feet. The South Korean authorities had found a solution to flying manned helicopters over the affected area. As long as the operator remained out of range of Agent-X’s control, they could look down at what the crowds of people and the now unresponsive police were doing.

  Because Grayson was looking up, he wasn’t surprised that Gorka had followed suit. However, when Agent-X sent his next command, the only one to respond near Grayson was Gorka. That was because he was the only person in the immediate area with a gun, and he intended to follow the order. He was going to try to shoot down the drone.

  “Mike, stop!” He shouted, and grabbed his arm to pull it down.

  For a moment Gorka resisted, and said, “It can see us. I need to shoot it down.”

  “Mike, listen to me. It isn’t looking for us, and it was the NK Controller that ordered anyone with a gun to shoot down drones if they saw any flying over. It was his command, and it seemed reasonable to you, so you obeyed. There are probably multiple drones flying towards this area now. The SK army and police can’t get closer without wearing insulated suits, so this will help them find the center of the mob, where Agent-X is.”

  “You have to be right, but damned if it didn’t seem logical to me that it was looking for us.” He looked embarrassed, and instead of reholstering his weapon, he turned it butt first and handed it to Grayson.

  “I should have done this before we got out of the car. It’s protocol, and you’re new and haven’t undergone our training as VIP watchdogs. I assumed you’d tell me to do it and I didn’t consider how fast we got rushed into this mission. It’s why you drove, and my surrendering my weapon to the nearest Immune is done for the same reason.

  “I can be influenced by another Compeller if I’m not on guard, and in this case, the prick is a super Controller. We’re at least two blocks away, and he might as well be standing next to me. He could as easily have ordered me to shoot the bad guy next to me. You need to keep my gun, and if things get dicey, we have to separate.”

  Sporadic gunfire erupted from the next intersection ahead, and from streets closer to where Grayson sensed the center of control originated. None of the people nearby appeared alarmed by the gunfire.

  An automatic rifle opened up somewhere close, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the drone suddenly spin wildly. When he turned to look, it was dropping, with at least one of its four rotors shot away, but the rapid-fire continued as it fell, with bullets shattering windows of the six-story building in the line of fire behind the target. The firing ceased, but probably because the magazine had emptied. Collateral damage obviously wasn’t a consideration of whoever was doing the shooting. It was fortunate that the people in the surrounding buildings were out on the streets, but had the ammunition lasted, some of them might have died if they were in the way.

  There was considerably more gunfire heard from greater distances, both pistol, and rifle fire. Mike’s words echoed Grayson’s hope. “If they use up their ammunition on the drones, there’s less to use on pedestrians, and on us. All we have are the two guns you have. I only brought one more clip.” He fished that out of his coat pocket and handed it to Grayson.

  “Thanks. I have three spares of my own, but we didn’t come prepared for a shootout. In fact, we aren’t well prepared at all. Let’s keep moving.”

  Their early worry that their western features might draw undue attention from police proved unfounded, since the police were now in the thrall of the NK Controller. At the corner of two small cross streets, the uniformed officer that had brought down the drone was standing by his patrol car, its trunk open, where he’d obtained his long rifle. He had just reloaded.

  Grayson had an inspiration. “Mike, if you’re close enough to someone, do you think you can overpower the command of Agent-X and his transmitter?”

  He smiled. “I won’t know until I try. How about you tell me when Agent-X isn’t sending?”

  “He’s not right now. Get that officer to hand you his rifle and pistol, and you hand them to me.”

  Gorka walked close to the officer, who smiled, saluted, and walked over to Grayson and handed over his rifle and his semiautomatic from his holster. Stood at attention, saluted again, and returned to sit inside his patrol car.

  Mike explained. “I didn’t even want to risk holding the guns that long.”

  “Who did he think you were?”

  “The adjutant to the Seoul Chief of Police, if it translated in his mind the same as I sent to him. I don’t know if his chief has an adjutant, but that’s the word I sent him. You’re his chief by the way. Whatever it translated into in Korean, it worked.”

  They moved out onto the wider boulevard, six lanes wide, with a narrow median and service lanes at the sides, with parking for cars and motor scooters in front of a solid line of businesses. They walked among the milling people along the service lane, but people were walking in the street as well, where no cars were moving. People occasionally glanced up, apparently looking for more drones, but none appeared. Every police officer they saw held their pistol or a long rifle, and there were at least a dozen men in plain clothes with pistols in their hands, all of them looking at the sky almost continuously. The men in suits could be police or other government security personnel. They showed no interest in the two Americans.

  “Dan, I’m not sensing any thoughts to do anything special. What’s he sending?”

  “Nothing most of the time. The NK agent has sent what I’d say were pre-commands, or preconditioning to anyone with a gun to shoot down drones, or aircraft. Since you no longer have a gun, the commands don't apply to you, which is why I think you don’t react. He last ordered all the people to stay in this general area, so they’re doing that, and when you move with me, that’s behaving similarly to what he ordered.

  “When he isn’t sending, I can’t get a distance fix on him. The location hasn’t changed much, however, so he’s in the direction I’m walking. He’s on this side of the street, but without a new command from him, I don’t have a new range for him. It felt like he was a block away before we turned the corner.

  “I don't want us to look too purposeful in our movements if he’s watching for that Mike. Nobody else is doing more than mill about, without any apparent purpose. They’re staying out of the buildings, I notice. I haven’t a clue what he intends to do. I can sense his commands when issued, but not what he wants to accomplish. I don’t see signs that he’s trying to escape.”

  “I wonder why he came out of hiding at all?”

  “It could be with his picture plastered on every TV channel it helped the authorities to locate where he was hiding if he had an apartment, and he got flushed out. I said before that he probably isn’t welcome back to North Korea. Kim Jong-un doesn’t want a competing dictator. The guy may have his family held hostage for his proper behavior. This mission was possibly a test of the effectiveness of the technology to trigger mass behavior here in the South.”

  “It doesn’t seem like he had much of a plan for after the stadium attack,” Mike remarked.

  “Perhaps whoever sent him may not have wanted or expected him to get out of the stadium alive. If his t
ransmitter cable hadn’t broken, I think he’d have continued the riot there, and he’d have eventually died in the process, thus saving his family. He may be making this up as he goes now.”

  Grayson shrugged as he continued along the wide street. “Shit, I don’t know, Mike. I’ve only known I was an Immune for a week and about Compellers and Controllers for a day longer.”

  Just then, there was a command sent to draw everyone in the direction the Americans were walking. The people didn’t run, but their aimless random small walks took on a specific direction.

  “He’s gathering people around him, I think for protection as human shields. He sent an image of a glass room on the side of the street, with a pair of stairs leading down. What the Hell would that be? He’s only a half block ahead.”

  “Dan, the GPS showed a green line along this side of the street before we abandoned the car. Seoul has subway lines, as does Washington. Louisville doesn’t have a subway system so you might not recognize an entrance. That sounds like a station entrance.”

  “Makes sense. The agent would have a below ground escape route. But I wonder how I can get close enough to shoot without him seeing me when plexiglass surrounds him? He’ll send all the civilians and perhaps armed police at me if he knows I’m a threat.”

  He glanced at the trees along the side of the service lane, thinking of trying to climb higher to see what was ahead on the same block. “I want to see how I can get closer before the crowd closes around him.”

  Gorka, seeing where he looked, said, “Use a car to stand on.”