by Andrew Post
When Brody didn’t hear the trademark click of holographic pages being turned, he looked to Thorp. “Something wrong?”
Thorp pointed to the digital page.
Brody came around the desk to see the image better. Despite the holo being bent and the text disjointed, he could make it out. His stomach turned when it all fit together and he understood.
Under the project file’s list of candidates were Thorp’s and Brody’s names.
Brody bent forward, reading the list again and again. Dozens of names. The only ones familiar were his, Thorp’s, and Alton Noel’s. “So that’s it. There it is.”
“After all this is said and done, you should probably see a doctor.”
Brody stepped away from the desk. He checked his phone. The stopwatch displayed three minutes remaining. They’d have to move with almost superhuman speed to get to the roof in time for the Darter. “Let’s go.”
“All right, just let me—shit.” Thorp sprung out of Hubert’s high-backed leather chair and crushed himself against the window.
Brody rushed over. “What is it?”
Thorp, his face illuminated by the light pitching in through the city beyond, melted of expression. Slowly, he shut off his earbud. The Gizumoshingu’s speaker took over, announcing what the Darter was picking up from the O’Hare tower.
“—or we will be forced to shoot you down. I repeat, remove yourself from Chicago airspace or we will be forced to shoot you down.”
Brody looked east to Lake Michigan. There were innumerable sets of blinking lights, all creeping across the starlit sky. But only one blossomed suddenly with a white flash, then a second. Even from the great distance, a soft thud carried in the air and rattled the glass against his palms. The glowing ball of white sharpened, shifting to a more fiery shade as it became smaller, streaking as it descended and was snuffed upon hitting the water.
31
The surveillance program hesitated before allowing Thorp to pull it up onto his ordi’s screen. That or the ordi was doing the hesitating. But after a moment, Thorp had the surveillance camera feeds—all one thousand and fifty-six of them—on his monitor, fanning out like the million-lens eye of a bug. He twisted his hand in a peculiar way and placed it on the keyboard to hit six radically spaced keys at once. In a blink, all the feeds were dead, gone to fuzz.
Thorp gathered his ordi and wedged it into his rucksack. While his arm was still submerged in the bag, he withdrew an assault rifle. He snapped in the clip and extended it toward Brody.
Tearing his gaze from the smoking wreckage burning on the glassy surface of Lake Michigan, Brody stared at the butt of the gun. A gun he had known so well. So many days spent with an identical rifle, sleeping with it in the bunks, carrying it from place to place—it was like a steadfast companion through his years in the service. He knew the weight of it, the feel of it. He could tell if it was loaded or not just by holding it in his arms. He didn’t make a motion to take it from Thorp.
“This is going to get hairy,” Thorp reminded him. “You need this thing. If we’re going to get out of here alive, you have to do this with me.”
Instead, Brody took up the Franklin-Johann Thorp had resting on Ward’s desk. He looked into Thorp’s eyes and said nothing, forcing himself to keep his fingers wrapped around the grip of the pistol.
“Fine,” Thorp said. “But you better be good with it.”
They went to the office door. Beyond, in the stark white lab, there was still no activity. The security team may not have been alerted yet. They could be in the break room, swapping stories and downing coffee just as well as they could be donning their flak jackets and stop-gel-equipped vests.
“What’s the plan? Try to make it out the front?”
“Well, we could go up to the roof and jump, but I don’t think that will get the results we’re after,” Thorp said. His cold and distant demeanor had shifted yet again. Here he was, like he’d been when Brody knew him in Egypt. A secret second personality waiting to be swapped in when needed, Jekyll and Hyde with no serum required.
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Brody said.
“You probably won’t even hurt anybody with rubber bullets,” Thorp commented. “These guys will probably be wearing some high-grade stuff. Rubber bullets are just going to bounce off them like tennis balls. I have another rifle if you change your mind. Armor-piercing rounds, a few clips with incendiary rounds—”
“No,” Brody said firmly. His still-swirling guts from the Darter ride reawakened, and he felt the urge to get sick again. No matter how he held the gun, no matter which hand it was in—it felt uncomfortable.
As they crossed the lab, Thorp pulled the assault rifle to his shoulder and walked with the barrel pointed out ahead of him, peering down through the scope with one eye. As he trod softly across the polished white floor, he said, “We don’t want to get boxed in. We’ll keep using the stairs. You keep the rear, and I’ll make sure we don’t get stuck anywhere. With any luck, we can just scoot right on out before they even know we’re here.”
Brody followed, his heart a shuddering lump in his throat. He felt like he had those first few weeks on the training course. Running up staircases that led nowhere. Doing drills. Firing with only the laser target at cardboard men that’d pop up in windows of plywood façades, receptors in their chests and heads, flashing their eyes like a midway game when hit with a “kill shot.” Those kill shots, his only ones.
He couldn’t help but shake his head as he followed Thorp to the stairwell. It had all gotten so fucked up so fast. He compared now to the original Operation Ceramic Groom. Going up to the roof and lifting off carefree, jubilant and high-fiving the men in his squad for a job well done. This was the alternative it could’ve easily taken all those years ago. Stranded, having to go down, diving headfirst, unsure as to what lay ahead, praying that everything would turn out okay. But the overwhelming knowledge that it wouldn’t be all right was as present as the knot in his guts.
They made it down to the seventy-eighth floor without altercation.
They took a moment at the wide landing and listened to the infinite stairwell spiraling down to the ground floor. No noise, no commotion, no banging boots on metal stairs coming up to meet them. Nothing.
Just the sound of their own labored breaths.
Brody checked the stairwell behind them and saw no flitting shadows, heard no sounds at all.
Growing suspicious that it was all too easy, Brody reached out for the door of the seventy-first floor to make sure it was unlocked. It opened freely. The thought that they were being bottlenecked subsided. But still, it was too smooth; they had made nothing but noise since arriving. Someone should’ve come along by now, or some indication they’d been detected as a presence within a building that needed to be purged. “This seems strange, doesn’t it? There’s no one here.”
“Oh, they’re probably putting up blockades and trip wires in the lobby,” Thorp said. “They’ll start to move up this way when we don’t show in the next half hour or so.”
And with that last two-letter word having passed through Thorp’s bandanna, every light in the stairwell shaft darkened.
Thorp went to his rucksack for the flashlight. Brody retrieved his phone and was clearing the flashing stopwatch to select the flashlight when the shaft lit up again, except instead of the soft white it’d been casting before—it was a harsh red akin to that of a darkroom.
Brody looked to Thorp.
“It’s for their infrared. The red light cuts the flare and makes us easier to see.”
“So they’re onto us,” Brody said. “Great.”
“Looks like we’ll just have to do what we can to get out of this shit.” Thorp pulled the rifle stock in tighter against his shoulder. He clicked on a flashlight attached to the muzzle of his gun.
Brody had a sudden thought. “The train.”
“What about it?” Thorp said.
“It runs right past this building. I remember seeing it on the way in.�
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“Those trestles are three stories high. We’ll have to get down to at least the fifth floor.” He shifted the rifle. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I don’t see many other options. Break out a window and jump for it,” Brody said.
“All right, here we go,” Thorp said and charged ahead.
They began their descent. Being quiet was impossible, so they decided to make up for their volume with speed. Brody couldn’t resist but aim his pistol every time he caught his own wide-shouldered silhouette running up alongside him on the stairwell wall. The nerves were mounting, and his heart hadn’t slowed since they had made the leap from the Darter over fifteen minutes ago. He held his phone out in front of him, a train schedule on the screen. “The ‘L’ goes by here at one thirty.”
“What time is it now?”
“Ten to one.”
“Guess we might have to hole up somewhere and—wait, wait. Stop, stop, stop.” Thorp choked, Brody nearly running into the back of him.
On the landing for the sixty-third floor, they stopped, listened.
Foggily, ringing hollow and distant—barely audible—rhythmic, heavy footfalls.
Brody laid his hand on the landing railing. It gave a faint tremble. “How many do you suppose there are?”
Thorp closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“They’re down there a ways,” Brody whispered. He leaned over the railing, and in the red light nothing could be seen beyond a few floors down.
The rabble of boots was increasing an octave every second—they were moving quickly.
A sudden screech sounded, a ragged breath, and then a voice overamplified to a deafening volume came across the tower’s loudspeaker system. “Please put your weapons down. We will not use deadly force if you are cooperative. When our task force comes upon you, if you are facedown with your hands behind your head and your weapons down, we will not use deadly force.”
Thorp grunted, shook his head. “Right. Sure.”
Brody nodded at the door for the sixty-third floor. “Dodge?”
Thorp yanked the door open.
They found another sea-foam green cubicle farm, a carpeted cavernous space with every inch packed with empty workstations.
They cut to the outermost wall facing south, pressing their faces against the glass to see straight down to the elevated trestle below. An eight-car train had just careened the bend out of sight, allowing them a glimpse of its chrome rear.
“That’s the one o’clock,” he said.
Beyond the hum of all the idle work space machines, they heard the security team in the stairwell drawing near.
Leaning against the warm plastic hull of a copier, Brody ducked inside a cubicle. Thorp did the same across the aisle—after noisily advancing the first round.
Regretting every cigarette he’d ever had, Brody pressed his palm against his chest to force his ragged breathing to quell—each sharp intake through the nose pulled in the smells of burned coffee and dusty electronics. He coughed, sputtering, lowering his damp face covering to spit. When he heard the approaching clamor against the stairs ringing hollowly, his breathing seemed to snuff itself.
Beyond the plain white door with the stick figure placard walking on the zigzagging serrated blade of stairs, the guards moved by.
After it had quieted, Brody slowly stood up, watching the handle of the door. “How secure was that hack you did?” he whispered.
“It was an ugly one. I’m sure it set off their firewall. But that was when we were just going to be fifteen minutes.” Thorp stood as well. “We should get a move on while they’re still heading up there.”
They crept out onto the landing and listened to any sound permeating the cherry-colored chamber. Soundless. They looked up and saw no flashlight beams, nothing at all. It was as if the guards had materialized to give chase, and once they knew they had been foiled turned back to a cloud of microscopic dust to make the return trip more expedient.
Moving as quietly as their boots would allow, Brody and Thorp subtracted another ten stories. Then another and another. They paused when Brody thought he heard something, held their breath to listen, and then continued.
The handgun’s grip became loose, slick with sweat in Brody’s hand. Sweat dripped from his chin, the tip of his nose, his elbows, darkening the collar of his shirt. Another flash of basic training came to him: running the circuit in the summer sun and collapsing at the end. He never considered the taste of water so fantastic in his life. The chants that without fail began, “I don’t know but I’ve been told …”
The fourth floor came upon them. Carefully shouldering the door aside, Thorp walked in staying low. Brody followed, scanning the cubicle farm with his pistol equipped with rubber bullets, still not having looped his finger over the trigger yet. All clear.
“We’re good,” Thorp said and let the rifle dangle by its strap across his chest.
They went to the far side of the floor and looked down. The trestle was there, but it looked like quite a fall. Not like the one they had done in the not-so-recent past but still a daunting distance. And this time, there’d be the chance of landing on an electrified rail.
“We have to time it pretty good,” Brody said. “Don’t want to jump too late and miss it.”
“Or too early and land in front of it,” Thorp added.
Thorp ducked out of his rifle’s strap and turned the gun around to ram the butt against the window. He had it wrenched back in both hands when Brody stuck out a hand.
“What time is it?”
Thorp lowered the rifle.
Brody withdrew his cell. It took a second before the phone cooperated, bogged down as it was with the massive e-mail waiting in the in-box. A warning prompt informed Brody that the duplicate files copied from Hubert Ward’s ordi tipped the scales at four zettabytes, putting a major strain on the phone’s processor. It was doing all it could to keep itself from crashing. Brody okayed the warning and waited for the main screen to load, the display coming in one quadrant at a time jerkily.
“Seventeen past,” he said finally, tucking the noticeably warm phone away.
“We got thirteen long minutes.” Thorp threw the rifle strap over his head.
A deep pounding noise in the stairwell caused both men to drop to all fours behind the walls at the edge of the maze of carpeted cubicles. Blood charged into Brody’s face, a twin set of fat veins leaping up in his temples. The world fluttered before his eyes in a wave of grainy streaks—the lenses were starting to falter. He’d get the red digits in a second, he knew.
Across the aisle, Thorp positioned onto one knee, the rifle in his arms. He leaned forward and peeked out beyond the corner of the cubicle, pulling back quickly. Making a V with two fingers, he pointed them at his own eyes, then the stairwell door.
Past the rushing of blood in his ears, Brody listened. The door to the stairwell’s hydraulic made a soft moan of unlubricated metal turning on a hinge. He heard the muffled sound of the first guard stepping onto the office’s carpet with caution.
More entered. The sound dispersed. They spread out, not communicating with any means Brody could overhear. He stole a glance as one rounded the corner at the far end of the office.
A man turned automaton, featureless and high-shouldered in matte black armor covering every inch of him. Adorned with a complete face mask, a high collar that was thick, unbending, like he was wearing blinders, the man had to turn his whole body to look in any direction other than forward. Wholly packaged in titanium-weave flak of top-shelf manufacture, stuff typically reserved for generals, unpopular politicians, or religious figureheads. He held his weapon casually with both hands: a new model rifle, its muzzle busy with devices, scopes, a louvered suppressor that made the barrel nearly double in length, electronic eyes, computer-aiming assistants—a peerless instrument of lethality.
Just as Brody glanced, 1:19 became 1:20.
He looked up to see Thorp across the aisle, readying his assault rifle in react
ion to the approaching, if meandering, tread of a security guard. Brody held his breath, kept clutching the pliable rubber of his pistol grip. It took every ounce of him to force his finger through the trigger guard. The soft pad of his index finger met the steel. It was cold.
The guard stopped inches shy of their cubicle openings, spun on his heel, and walked back.
Brody sighed internally, never making a sound aloud, but relief crashed on him in a deluge—until he saw Thorp standing, rifle to shoulder. Brody watched, paralyzed, as Thorp disengaged the safety with a flick, took aim, and let three rounds shatter the silence of the office.
His ears responding by singing along with their own squeal, Brody remained low and went for the south-facing window. Thorp covered him, letting a few more shots go in the direction of the three security guards. They were well concealed, and in the commotion of the gunfire, Brody could hear a guard frantically summoning backup on his walkie-talkie.
After putting his pistol away, Brody hoisted a desk printer and threw it toward the glass. Thorp provided cover fire. The printer shattered, leaving only a scuff in the tinted surface. He took out his pistol and hammered the bottom of the grip against the glass. A sizable crack splintered from one corner of the pane to the other. He focused on it, digging out chips of laminated glass, when he heard the whistling patter of a silenced assault rifle.
He ducked, the rounds hitting the glass above him. Broken glass rained down, but when he looked, the window was still intact. On the floor, in his hair, and in the collar of his coat were tiny bits of broken glass. A sudden heady smell, sweet like caramelized sugar, enveloped him.
Brody was baffled until he noticed among the glinting chips bent hypodermic needles and pinheads of clear liquid soaking into the well-tread carpet. Anodyne. They want us alive.
Thorp gave no answer, rose from his hiding space, and fired bursts of gunfire back at the guards.