Gemini Cell

by Myke Cole

  She said nothing, bouncing Patrick, telling him it was okay. He cried harder, shoving his face into her shoulder. “Thirsty,” he said.

  “You got much farther to go?” the man asked.

  She sighed. “Yeah, I’m afraid I do.”

  “Well,” he said, “come on up to the house. We can give your boy a glass of milk and maybe a cup of coffee for you. Slaughter the fatted calf?” She could see his cheeks crinkle into a smile.

  She could have been a serial killer, a thief on the run for all he knew. She was continually amazed at how the sight of a woman with a child disarmed men. It was at once honoring and insulting. And right now, damned convenient.

  “That’s kind of you, but you don’t have to do that. I’m sure we can make it to a hotel.”

  “Nearest hotel’s more’n thirty miles out, and it’s a flophouse you wouldn’t want to have your boy in. Come on.” He gestured up the hill toward the house, lighted now around the doorway.

  “Who else is up there?” Sarah asked, cursed herself inwardly for the question. It showed suspicion, but the words had escaped before she’d had a chance to check them.

  “For now? Just the wife and me. But we’re expecting company tomorrow. Church group, if you feel like stickin’ around.”

  She smiled in the dark. “Not really all that religious.”

  “We don’t judge.” He shrugged and turned for the house without waiting to see if she had followed.

  She didn’t. Patrick had begun to quiet, strained to turn fully to see the old man, eyes wide with fascination.

  The man turned, noticing she hadn’t followed, saw Patrick’s interest. The smile returning, warming his creased face. “Well, hello there, young fellah,” he said. “You want a cup of juice?” He pointed out a finger, slowly and careful not to touch.

  Patrick smiled back, said nothing.

  “Cat got your tongue?” the man asked.

  Patrick only smiled and looked, before turning and plunging his face into Sarah’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she said. “He’s a bit of a flirt.” The truth was that he hadn’t done something like that in a long time, and the sight of him interacting normally made her weak with relief.

  “Come on,” the man said. “Name’s Drew. I’m not a freak or a killer or a thief. Just a nice guy with a habit of taking in strays. No harm’ll come to you.”

  Patrick turned to look at him again, and Sarah nodded. “Okay, thanks so much. That’s very kind of you.”

  “Christian thing to do,” Drew said. “Martha’s the missus. She’ll spoil your boy, I warn you.”

  “I’m sure he’ll love it,” Sarah said, walking behind him, up the wide track that led to the house, front door wide, soft light warm and inviting.

  She shifted Patrick into the crook of one arm, allowed her right hand to drop to her pocket, fingering the knife nestled there, clip arm keeping it up toward the opening, ready to pull at a moment’s notice. It was a gravity knife, technically illegal, though Sarah doubted any cop had made an arrest for it in the history of the ordinance. Jim had taught her how to use it, and she’d gotten into the habit of practicing during idle hours watching TV. Pull, flick, feel the snap and lock of the blade into place.

  After a while, it had become second nature. She’d never beaten Jim’s time, his hand a blur, knife quivering in a tree trunk before she’d even seen him release for the throw, but she could clear the blade in a respectable three seconds.

  She patted the knife, the cold metal reassuring her as she followed Drew’s bobbing shoulders.

  She knew she wouldn’t need it.

  But it was nice to know it was there.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  ROCK STAR

  Schweitzer began to flex his newfound muscles before they’d even boarded the plane home. Jawid attached himself to Eldredge’s side and kept an open channel at all times now, facilitating a steady stream of questions and answers that Schweitzer knew Eldredge was mining in a desperate effort to understand what made Schweitzer tick.

  “When we get back”—Eldredge was seated across from Schweitzer in a metal folding chair in COP Garcia’s ready room, waiting for the weather to clear so that a helo could return them to the air base for the flight home—“I’m going to need you to work with a psych doc. Get a baseline profile. It’ll be nice. Therapeutic.”

  Who was Nightshade? Why did you send me after him?

  “Are we going to go through this every time we run you now, Jim? Are you going to be my first operational prima donna?”

  You want to know what makes me work? This is part of it. You promised me the next op would point toward my family. What was with the corpses?

  Eldredge frowned, arms folded across his chest. “This is highly . . . irregular.”

  Bowels are irregular. This is singular. I’m one of a kind. I’m pretty sure my contract with the navy expired when that bullet tore up my brain. New contract now. This is a negotiation, and a full stake is my price.

  “I know you’re not going to hurt anyone. Why should I tell you anything?”

  Maybe I’ll go for a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue naked at high noon.

  “We’d torch you.”

  Maybe I’ll save you the trouble. Push Ninip all the way out and join him. Leave you to run your program with whatever second-rate goods you were working with before I came along.

  Eldredge chuckled. “Jesus. You’re like a picky rock star. You want me to make sure you have a bowl of only green M&M’s in your trailer?”

  I want you to bring me into the decision-making process. I get a say in where, when, and how I deploy. We start with Nightshade, and we start right now.

  “What if you don’t like the answer?”

  That’s a risk you have to take. Ninip’s not my only partner now. You hold the trump card in the end. You can push the button on the burn room. Start fresh.

  “If you let me.”

  You said it, not me.

  “We never learned Nightshade’s name. We always knew him as Abu Naeema. You know these guys always take noms de guerre.”

  Schweitzer nodded. He did indeed. It was a pattern they’d learned back in the War on Terror, and had kept it up even when that dark period slid smoothly into an epoch of insurgent crime.

  “He was a supplier. He kept us in corpses. The program requires more bodies than we can get . . . in house.”

  You mean grave robbing your own?

  Eldredge raised his hands. “You guys are pretty hard to kill, you know. A lot of times, conventional units get ahold of the corpse before we can retrieve it. We don’t dig up graves, Jim. We got lucky with you.”

  Can’t you just . . . requisition bodies?

  “There are exactly two people who know of the Gemini Cell’s existence, Jim. It’s funded out of a classified line item. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I think Congress thinks the money is going to the CIA. There aren’t a whole lot of people we can ask for help, and anyway, you know we need specific bodies for this, or souls rather. We can’t use window washers. Hell, we can’t even use Olympic athletes. You think hard operators in the prime of their life drop dead every day? With their bodies in pristine condition? With no families demanding an open casket? It’s a rare commodity.”

  So, what did Abu Naeema give you?

  “Hell if I know. Dead operators. Russian Spetsnaz mostly. A couple of Polish GROM. Plenty of Pakistani SSG. He even scared up a Japanese SST corpse once. I have no idea how, and I didn’t ask.”

  Was he affiliated with the Body Farm?

  “Tangentially. I think he played both sides of the fence, ancillary supplier to them. We knew about it. Tolerated it because it doubled as intel we could use to intercept their shipments.”

  Shipments where? To whom?

  “Well, that’s the thing we were trying to find out. And the reason you were brought in.
”

  Because he stopped supplying you?

  Eldredge nodded. “But kept supplying the Body Farm. We offered him a chance to give up his sources, to tell us where the bodies were going. When he refused, we found them on our own.”

  And he was no use to you anymore.

  Eldredge sighed, shook his head. “Yes, but that’s not why he had to go. The negotiations fell apart recently, Jim. We decided to solve that problem before he figured it was safer and more profitable to sell out his dealings with us to the Body Farm.”

  Schweitzer’s anger was so hot and sudden that it nearly broke Ninip loose from his enclave and brought him surging back into control of their body. He sat silent while he struggled to contain the jinn. After a moment, he succeeded. Is that how my identity got leaked? Is that how I got killed? How my family got fucking killed?

  Eldredge raised his hands again, as if his palms could ward off Schweitzer if he decided to cross the distance between them. “We don’t know how that happened, Jim. You have my word. That’s what we’re trying to find out. You asked me to put you on ops that would lead to your murderers. I have done that. Abu Naeema was the first step.”

  So, question him.

  “What will he tell us? These guys are pros. They don’t give details to a third-rate supplier like Nightshade. He’s a grave robber with mud under his fingernails. These guys know how to compartment information. We have to go slowly. We have to be patient. You know that.”

  Ninip growled, and Schweitzer realized that some of the jinn’s haste had rubbed off on him. He’d lost focus.

  So the Body Farm is . . . well . . . farming bodies.

  “Yes.” Eldredge looked uncomfortable.

  I always thought it was a term for sex trafficking, child slaves, that sort of thing.

  “It was. It is. Partly.”

  Why? Why the hell are they doing this?

  “Why do narcoterrorists ply their trade, Jim? Why does al-Qa’ida farm poppies for heroin? Why does the United States sell fighter jets to Israel? Money, power, and the ability to project ideology beyond one’s own immediate circle. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they play ball and don’t threaten the security of this nation we’re both sworn to defend.”

  So, where are the corpses going if they’re not coming to the Gemini Cell?

  Eldredge tugged awkwardly at the corner of his moustache. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

  There’s another Sorcerer, isn’t there? Not an American. Or, at least one not under American control.

  Eldredge spread his hands. “Are you surprised? Jackrabbit was the first of many. This cell has been operating against rogue magic use for years now, and the cases only get thicker, more numerous, tougher. This is a tide, Jim. It’s building, and I don’t know where it stops. It makes sense that it wouldn’t be confined to this country.

  “Yes, there’s another Sorcerer, and he or she is doing something with these dead. We need to find out who and what and most importantly . . .”

  Who pulls their strings.

  “I’d almost be relieved to find out it was a state actor, even an enemy, but there’s no guarantee of that. We found Jawid by sheer luck. What if there’s a Chinese Triad or a Greek terrorist group building Operators like you? That’s some serious shit right there.”

  Depends on what they use them for. Maybe they’ll liberate oppressed villages from corrupt party bosses.

  Eldredge gave him a look. “You’ve read Homer, I assume?”

  I was a SEAL. You don’t get far in our line of work without knowing about Achilles.

  “The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.”

  Meaning?

  “If you have it, eventually you’re going to use it, just because you can. Otherwise, you eat yourself alive. And weapons are built to do one thing.”

  Schweitzer remembered Ninip’s sympathetic tones, catching him off guard, maudlin over the thought of his brother. Let the branches do as the root commands, the jinn had said. You are a warrior. Fight.

  The anger returned as Schweitzer realized what the sympathy had masked. He turned inward, to where the jinn cowered. You little fucker. You thought you could trick me into being a fucking animal like you? Was that it?

  I was giving you strength. It is what battle brothers do, Ninip whined.

  We’re not battle bro . . . We’re not anything. Right now, you’re a fucking battery. You clever little shit.

  “Jim?” Eldredge’s brow furrowed with concern.

  Sorry. Just having a chat with my partner here. He gave me the same line of shit.

  “What line . . .”

  About being a weapon. I was never a tool. I was an artist. I was also a husband and a father. I was a friend. That fancy carbine you gave me? Doesn’t do a whole lot without someone behind the trigger. That’s a weapon, Eldredge. I’m a man.

  “I’d say that’s debatable now, but you don’t need me to show you a mirror. You’re something new, Jim. What exactly, we’re still trying to determine. Anyway, do you have your answers? Will you play ball?”

  This leads to the people who killed me, who killed my family.

  “It does. Eventually. It’s what we have for now. That’s got to be enough.”

  Fine. I’m in. But first, I want to see their graves.

  “Their . . . Your family.”

  That’s right.

  “Jesus, Jim. I can’t just put a hat and an overcoat on you and send you . . .”

  You’re forgetting this is a partnership. You can sit here and bluster, or you can meet my baseline demands. You either show me my family’s graves, or we have nothing to talk about.

  “It’ll take time, Jim. I’ll have to clear it with some people. I’ll also have to figure out where they’re buried.”

  She has a sister, Peg. Lives out in the Shenandoah Valley. She’ll know.

  “Okay. Give me some time.”

  Light a fire under it, Eldredge.

  “I thought we were partners, Jim. This isn’t how you treat a partner.”

  It is when you’re sick of their shit.

  Eldredge put his head in his hands. “I’m not so certain that this newest development in our program is altogether positive.”

  In all the other cases, what happened? The jinn won out?

  Eldredge sighed, nodded. “That’s right. Either the original soul bound to the corpse was destroyed or completely overwhelmed by the bound jinn. Either way, we lost contact with them.”

  You mean they wouldn’t talk to Jawid anymore.

  “That’s right.”

  They were forced out.

  Eldredge’s face lighted, he looked up, the exasperation vanishing. “You’re sure?”

  It’s a constant sumo match in here. Or, it was. I was forced out earlier. I found my way back.

  “How?” Eldredge had produced a small notepad and was scribbling on it frantically.

  Sarah.

  Eldredge froze. “What do you mean?”

  I followed her in. It’s like there’s a . . . a link, a path. I keep having this crazy notion that she’s alive, like a phantom limb. You know it’s cut off, but you can still feel it.

  Jawid’s translation faltered here, as he attempted to cobble the words together using his more limited command of English.

  “And this is why you want to see their graves? Because you think your family is alive?”

  I know they’re not. I want to see their graves . . . because I want to see their graves. They’re my family. I should be able to kneel there and cry.

  Ninip’s contempt was tiny, insignificant, but Schweitzer felt it nonetheless.

  “You can’t cry, Jim. You have no moisture in your body. You have no eyes. No tear ducts.”

  I can mourn. I haven’t had a chance to do that yet.

>   He felt the urge to touch the engraved dog tags, but stopped himself with an effort. There was no need to play his whole hand just yet. Eldredge already suspected that good deeds made the difference between him and the other Operators in the Cell, though Schweitzer thought it had more to do with simply asserting his own personality. Maybe he was a good man. Maybe the deep sable of Ninip’s shadow merely made him seem good by comparison.

  Schweitzer remembered a night with Sarah, before Patrick was born, finishing an op down south and flying back to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. He took leave there, Sarah flew down to meet him and they lay in the darkness on the post beach, feet tangled together in the sand, her head on his chest as he gazed up at the wheeling stars.

  “Why do you call them bad guys?” she’d asked.

  “Because they’re bad.” He hadn’t been paying attention; otherwise, he’d have recognized the tone of her voice that meant it was a serious question.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Sure. Sometimes. No. It doesn’t matter. We have to think that.”

  “Why?” He felt her head shift, knew she was looking at him now.

  “Because you can’t do the job if you’re thinking about their mothers, or their kids. You’ll choke up. You’ll get yourself killed. You’ll get your teammates killed.”

  “I don’t believe in bad guys.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t think there’s such a thing as evil. Some people are crazy. Others are terrified. Others are stupid or too proud to reverse what they know is a bad course. Nobody’s evil. Not in the moustache-twirling way.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.”

  “No, sweetheart. It doesn’t. The scalpel isn’t the hand that moves it. You can’t be both the hand and the blade, Sarah. That’s how you get juntas. I don’t worry about the nature of evil. There are no good guys or bad guys. There’s only alive or dead. Mission objectives accomplished or failed.”

  But he couldn’t be the scalpel anymore. That shining instrument had been sucked from his side, spinning away into the maelstrom of the screaming lost, the price of his return. Now he had to know, now he had to think.