One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  Fate stared at the fireball that had been his escape route. Behind the blazing helo, reflections in the stained glass of the Sky Church danced insanely, a thousand devils tearing it up merrily. Behind the glass, Gant would be counting down the seconds until his first shot.

  That single shot would ram home the implications of what was happening: they’d found him.

  That one shot would give Fate rope burns as the noose tightened around his neck.

  The best part of it was that the bastard was still blissfully ignorant of the fact that mine were the hands doing the strangling.

  The helo hung in the sky for a second longer, then scattered, showering blazing wreckage across the plaza below and plunging us into darkness.

  “They must have followed you! You stupid fuck. Didn’t you think they’d be tailing you? Fuck. Just… fuck. We need to move,” I barked, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward the access door. My panic sold my innocence. The In-and-In.

  Fate ran for the door.

  Fate was mine.

  He ducked through the door as Gant’s first bullet tore into the cement around the frame. The shot was so close it was hard to believe it wasn’t meant to kill him. Gant was either very good or very lucky. The huge steel door slammed behind us, echoing with the impact of another bullet. The stairwell was five degrees colder than the night outside. We ran down the concrete stairs two and three at a time, the handrail the only thing that stopped us from an uncontrolled descent. Fate didn’t look back once to see if I was following. Self-preservation is a fierce instinct.

  Before we were down the second flight of stairs, doubling back on ourselves, I shouted, “Your place.”

  “We can’t go back there, that’s exactly what they’ll expect,” he objected. “What about your team? Are they in place?”

  “They are, but they won’t be much help if Bleeders come storming up the stairs. We need weapons. You’ve got a fucking arsenal in there. We’re tooling up before we set foot outside. The damn place is a fortress.”

  He tried to argue, but with me chasing him down the stairwell it was a fight he wasn’t going to win.

  Mel had the service elevator waiting for us. The door opened as Fate slammed his hand against the call button. We rushed in. The steel cage messed with our communications set-up. Once the doors closed, we’d be out of earshot with Mel and the rest of the crew. Radio silence is unnerving in this game. It just is. Communication is everything. Before Fate could press the button for the lobby, I hit the one for his floor. He looked at me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if I’m putting my life on the line for you, I want pay.”

  For a second he didn’t know what to say. Then he tried, “I’ll see you right.”

  “No offense, but I don’t trust you.”

  “I don’t carry any cash, you know that.”

  “There’s a computer in your place. While I’m grabbing the guns and ammo, make a deposit into my work account. You’ve got the details. You want to hire me to protect you, then you pay for the privilege like anyone else would.”

  He nodded as if it made perfect sense. You get what you pay for is a fairly common truism in our game. “How much?”

  “You know what I cost,” I said. Everyone has got their price.

  The doors opened, and we were back online.

  I followed Fate into his place. He didn’t turn the light on as we entered. Even knowing that those huge plate glass windows that offered that incredible panorama of Old Tokyo were reinforced and absolutely bulletproof, he didn’t want any watchers to know we were in there. I went straight for the arsenal, carefully selecting my weapon of choice. I grabbed something for Fate and went back through to the lounge where he had the terminal switched on and was in the process of triggering a million dollar transaction from his offshore account to mine. Looking at the zeroes on the screen it was chump change to him. I began to realize just how much he’d skimmed off the top of our fifty gigs over the years as management fees before he’d paid the rest of us our cut. It was all about money. I also knew this wasn’t even the half of it. Fate had a desert island account. He used to joke about it being his pension. There were other assets too.

  As far as I could tell he hadn’t set foot in here since my last visit. The fugu takeaway box was still on the counter where I’d fished it out of the trash.

  In my ear, Mel said, “Okay, got everything, account number, password, the only thing I need now is for him to trigger the actual payment and we’ve got access to every cent he has.”

  “Good to go?” I asked Fate. He looked up. I watched his fingers. His pinky was resting on the return key, but he hadn’t pushed it and until he did that money was going nowhere. It was only one account though. It didn’t touch his desert island funds or any of those intangible assets I knew he’d stashed. But he’d been telling the truth, that last job had made him richer than god. Thankfully he’d left the lion's share in the job account which we were about to clean out, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it—apart from not press the return key and keep Mel locked out. He hesitated a second more, then hit return.

  “Got it,” Mel said, triumphantly.

  I moved up to stand behind Fate, looking over his shoulder. Instinctively, he shut the screen down, protective of his secrets. I put a finger to the earpiece in my right ear, as if I were getting an incoming communiqué. “They’ve breached the building, Fate. Mel’s counting three teams coming in from below and she’s got eyes on for a helo coming in fast from the East.” I picked the direction carefully. It was the only one you didn’t have a view of from the apartment windows. “You know how this is going to have to go down,” I said, doing my best to sound reasonable. “We can hole up here for a week, I can protect you, my team is almost as good as we were, but there’s no way we’re getting you out of this building alive.” I deliberately didn’t look at the takeaway carton on the counter, I wanted him to come up with that idea all by himself, I just planted the thought in his mind subliminally. The power of suggestion is one scary fucking thing. “And shit, look, let’s be brutally honest, even if we get you out of here, you can never be you again, right, you get that? Randall Fate is dead. That means all of those accounts, all of those hidden assets, the desert island account, the lot, gone. You won’t be able to touch them because the moment you do it’ll bring a world of corporate hurt down on you.”

  “What the fuck do we do? What the fuck do we do? Jesus…” it was like a mantra, it made no sense, he just kept repeating the words over and over again as if they would suddenly crystallize into a plan.

  “I don’t know,” I said, then paused, seeming to have this off the wall idea.

  He looked at me filled with hope. “What? What is it?”

  “There’s an assassin on my team. Her broker… he knows people. He’s kept her identity hidden for years, working as a go-between. We could approach him… maybe he could hide you the same way?”

  “That’s good. Yeah. That’s good. That could work.”

  “It won’t be cheap,” I said.

  “Fuck the money. I’ve got money. What I don’t have is nine lives.”

  Even if he did, by my reckoning he’d used up all of them anyway.

  “Even so, you won’t be able to touch your funds, they’ll be monitoring your accounts, waiting for you to touch the money. The minute you do, hammer time.”

  “There’s got to be a way we can work around that?” Fate sounded desperate now, reading to jump at any lifeline I offered him. What else could I do?

  “Let me check something,” I said, then pressed my finger to the earbud again as if instigating communication. “Mel, how difficult would it be for you to create a new identity, top to bottom, nothing that could trace back to Fate or us?” I paused a beat, the identity and accounts were all in place, he just needed to think this was a mercy dash not a red-hot poker up the financial ass. “Uh huh, yeah, right, uh huh.” Lots of positive sounds. I gave Fate the thumbs up. “We don’t need all the papers yet,
obviously, but we need to set that stuff in motion, and it needs to be legit, or as close to so it stands up to scrutiny. Uh huh, yeah. If you can set it up for new prints, corneal transplant, et cetera, I’ll worry about getting him to the docs. We’re going to need somewhere to dump his assets though, and it can’t be a straight transfer, these guys aren’t stupid. We’ll need to liquidize everything, then shift it through a dozen factors rinsing it until no one has a clue where it came from. Great, look, I’ll leave that with you. We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. The enemy’s at the door.”

  This particular enemy would come dressed as Tenebrae in just a couple of minutes, so we had to work fast to push Fate over the edge.

  Fate snapped the chain that hung around his neck and handed me the small pendant that had hung on it.

  “Everything you need is on there.” He looked nervously toward the door. He was every bit as fidgety as any Beetle addict I’d ever seen. He knew what was coming up those stairs, and just how impossible it’d be for the two of us to fight them off. “Give it to your geek, she’ll be able to crack the encryption and make sense of stuff. It’s fairly straightforward. I’m trusting you, Marco.” He kept saying that, trying to reinforce the message in my brain. I understood the psychology of it. It wouldn’t work this time. “Everything I have, everything I am, is on that. Without it, I’m nothing.”

  “You can trust me,” I said as I pocketed it, then reached up to touch the earbud again, and broke into a fake conversation with Mel, reporting back, “They’ve got twelve men on the stairwells and the elevators are down. We can’t go to the roof, the helo will be in place before we are. We’re between the Devil and the deep blue sea, mate. Is there another way out of here? A bolt hole you haven’t told us about?”

  Fate shook his head.

  “Okay, I need to think. Take this,” I handed him the gun I’d picked up in the armory. “Anything comes through that door, shoot it.”

  He laughed at that. “This isn’t my first time at the rodeo, big guy.”

  “All I care about is that it isn’t your last.” That shut him up.

  I moved across the work surface in the kitchen area, my hand resting on the counter inches from the festering scraps of fugu. “The only way we’re getting you out of here is in a box,” I said. Two could play at those subliminal games.

  Someone hammered on the other side of the door, the butt of a gun resounding off the steel.

  Fate squeezed off a round, the shells ripping into the six-inch thick security door. Even hollow-points couldn’t punch clean through the steel. The impacts resonated through the glass and steel structure in a tortuous chorus.

  The hammering came again.

  “How long with the door hold?” I asked Fate.

  “Depends what they’ve brought to open it, and just how determined they are to get through.”

  “Best guess?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “We need to be clever. I’m not ready for some foolish grand last stand. There’s got to be a way of getting you out of here.”

  “You said it yourself, the only way I’m getting out of here is in a box.”

  “Like GenX,” I said, and there it was, out there. He’d left one impossible situation seemingly dead. All we had to do was replicate those circumstances.

  He looked at the takeaway carton beside me, and a light came on. “We can do that. Exactly that. Oh yes, that’s fucking brilliant. You’re a genius, Marco. You’re a cold stone genius. Do everything I say, and we might just get out of this.”

  “Okay,” I said, dubiously. “What are you thinking?”

  The hammering intensified on the door, then followed by a dull clang. C4 being attached to the frame. We didn’t have long until Tenebrae blew the door off its hinges. “Go get a blade from the armory, I’ll sort stuff out here.”

  I heard him rattle around in the cutlery drawer, and then scrape around the contents of the takeaway carton, scratching up whatever poison remained. When I returned, he’d got enough Tetrodotoxin to down an elephant. “Give me the blade.” I handed it over. Fate smeared poison across the surface of the blade. “When they come in, I need you to stab me.”

  I shook my head. “Kinda defeats the point, doesn’t it?”

  “Avoid the vital organs and major arteries. Just get it in somewhere nice and soft, and the toxins on the blade will do the rest. Don’t do any damage that can’t be fixed. Make like you’re using me as a human shield. Make sure they see the knife go in. Give it five seconds or so, and the toxins will slow my heart to the point the beat is negligible, nearly two minutes between each. I’ll register dead on every monitor they hook me up to. Then you just walk out of there. Either they leave me behind, and you come back to get me, or they take me out of there in a box, and you bust me out and revive me when it’s safe.”

  “You think this is going to work?”

  “They want me dead. Let’s give them what they want.”

  With pleasure, I thought.

  I moved to stand behind Fate, wrapping my left arm around his neck and resting the fugu-poisoned arc-blade against his ribs.

  We waited for the door to open and Tenebrae to stride through.

  I counted down the seconds. The timer the assassin had affixed to the explosives joined in the countdown with ten seconds to go before the explosion tore the door from its hinges and warped the frame, leaving behind a ragged hole where the six-inch thick steel had stood between us. She stepped through the ruined doorway, a cold smile on her face. Dirt and dust smeared her ebony skin. “You’re a hard man to kill, Randall Fate,” she said. “But then I should have known you would be,” she tapped her temple knowingly.

  I tightened my grip on his throat. “Stay where you are,” I said.

  “I’m not interested in you,” she cocked her head to one side, as if trying to remember where she’d seen me before. Her smile parted slightly. “Marco. You can walk away from this. I’m only interested in Fate. Don’t make this your problem.”

  “How much will you give me for him?” I asked.

  “No bargains. No bartering. No deals. I’m here to kill him.”

  “I can do that for you,” I said, and with a single swift slice, opened Fate’s side. Blood spilled over my fingers as it stained his shirt. Fate howled in pain, clutching at his side as if to try and stem the flow of blood even as it thickened to the point the material could no longer soak it up and leaked through his fingers.

  “I don’t care how he dies,” the assassin says, I get paid if it’s your blade or mine that does the killing.”

  “In that case, would you mind terribly if I gut the fucker? He killed two of my best friends.”

  “Ah, yes,” the assassin said, seemingly dredging Fate’s memory up. “Swann and Martagan. Yes. Did he tell you why he betrayed them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Greed,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “Is that true, Fate? It was all about the money?”

  I felt him nod, his hair brushing against my cheek.

  “I hope you rot in hell you bastard,” and whispered in his ear, and rammed the knife home, twisting it so that it hurt.

  He collapsed in my arms, heart beating erratically. I counted to five in my head, then checked his neck for a pulse. I looked up at the assassin. “He’s gone. Time to get him out of here. Mel, can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, boss.”

  “I’ve got some sort of pendant, looks like it’s hardcoded with all of his secrets. I’ll need you to crack that before we wake him up.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Gant, you out there?”

  The big man came into the room carrying a metal coffin.

  Time to have some fun.

  We didn’t wake him for a week.

  We had to get our ducks in a row first.

  Most importantly, we needed to move his body back to Africa.

  Imsen made arrangements for the transport. I admit part of me would have been happy to just
put him in the ground and let him wake up and linger for a couple of days before the air ran out. But that really wouldn’t have been a fate worse than death. I wanted to do what I’d promised from the start, so I contacted Research and Development at Akachi and put the wheels in motion.

  At first, I wasn’t sure they could do what I wanted, and then I wasn’t sure they would do it.

  Some people have a strong sense of morality. I needed a scientist who was more driven by curiosity than bounded by ethics. I found one, finally. I knew I would. It was only ever going to be a matter of time. The pendant helped. He’d been telling the truth when he said that pendent contained everything he was. It was all on there. His entire life of fighting and bleeding was written there, just waiting to be extrapolated from a history of violence that curdled the blood.

  He was a bad man. A very bad man.

  The stone contained a silica-based Micro-drive, capable of storing vast quantities of data even if it looked no more exciting than a little geode on a gold chain.

  It took her a couple of days, but Mel Kamahi unearthed every single one of his secrets. We’re talking way beyond just money and ferreted away assets here. We’re talking enemy lists. Everyone who wanted him dead, every grudge he’d racked up, every man he’d ever crossed, we’re talking gold dust. People, in other words, with an interest in making Randall Fate hurt. Including a man who was only too happy to help us break Fate. Mel explained the concept to him in as simple terms as possible: “It’s a bit like flatlining. You leave him inside the machine, but there’s no way back to his body.” The concept delighted our doc.

  “A prison of the mind?”

  “Exactly.”

  It’s amazing quite how much information you can store on a machine.

  But that’s technology, isn’t it? A perpetual quest to make the world simultaneously smaller on the outside while vastly bigger on the inside.

  We delivered the body by hand, Mel helping in the procedure every step of the way.

  We could have walked away at that point, there was nothing else we needed to do. It was job done. But I wanted to be there when he woke up.