by Jon McGoran
Red asked, “Excuse me, Aram? Was that Occitex as in O-C-C-I-T-E-X?”
Aram nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
Red turned on his heel to leave, but Cooper called after him. “Reddington. A word before you leave.”
Reddington followed Cooper into his office.
“Ressler and Navabi are on their way back from Dallas,” Cooper told him. “Edward Stannis is looking like a possibility for the Ringleader.”
“Stannis?”
Cooper shared what Ressler and Navabi had learned in Dallas.
Red thought for a moment. “So Stannis liquidated his assets right before the first Dead Ring.”
“Exactly. So I know you’re concerned about Agent Keen’s safety, as are we all. Having Wall on board is a huge help, and so is possibly identifying Tindley as the local organizer, and perhaps Stannis as the Ringleader. But right now, the situation is stable. Keen is not in immediate danger, and we are in a good position to execute the plan that we have carefully designed and take this whole thing down.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m saying we can’t have you tipping our hand. If you confront Tindley, or interact with him in any way, you could be putting Agent Keen in danger. I am putting Tindley under distant surveillance. We’ll be looking into him, hard. Dorothy Stannis’s sister, as well, in case either of the Stannises come to visit her while they’re in the country. But we are doing it in a way that will not be detected. We have this under control, and you need to let us do our jobs, and let Agent Keen do hers. You need to sit tight, is that understood?”
Red flashed a smile that was tinged with acid. “Oh, I think we understand each other. And as long as you all do your job, I won’t have to do anything, will I?”
Chapter 43
Keen had spent the rest of the day trying to get access to Yancy so she could kill him or seduce him, or somehow distract him enough that she could get the transmitter out of his shirt pocket. As he walked around the campground, she could see its vague outline through the thin, grimy fabric of his uniform shirt, as if he had forgotten it was there. She’d gotten close enough to smell him on several occasions, but never close enough to retrieve the TNT. And then it was lights out.
She spent the night tossing and turning in bed, wondering how she was going to get the transmitter back before the first round started at daybreak.
Yancy’s cabin was visible from hers, and several times throughout the night she had gotten up and cracked her door to check, but there were two armed PMCs guarding it, awake and alert each time.
Best case scenario, he changed his shirt and she could sneak in and go through his laundry—a thought that made her gag—then get to the main square before anyone noticed she was missing.
As the sky began to lighten, Keen cracked her door again, a tiny fraction, and set her chair so she could sit and watch Yancy’s cabin. When the sky was almost light, his door opened and he stepped out. The two PMCs stood up straighter, then fell into step behind him. As he came closer, she saw to her disbelief that he was still wearing the same shirt. The thing was disgusting, and she wondered if he ever took it off.
She stared at it intently, and just for a moment, he twisted himself slightly and the predawn light picked up the edges of the transmitter, casting a faint but unmistakable shadow across his breast pocket.
Keen cursed and slumped back in her chair. She felt doomed. She also felt sore from the previous day’s altercations and exhausted from stressing all night about what to do about the transmitter. Now it seemed that she was going to have to survive whatever it was they had in store, competing against these raging, murderous lunatics with virtually no sleep. She turned and looked longingly at her bunk, wondering if she had time to catch a minute of sleep.
Then the bugle sounded reveille and she cursed again.
Two minutes later she was dressed and out the door, filing down the rows of cabins with the other ringers toward the square. She was so tired she felt light-headed.
Corson and Yancy were waiting at the square, standing up front, already scowling at them.
A wall of low clouds was approaching from the south. The rising sun torched their undersides with pink and orange. As the rays cut sideways across the square, the sharp outline of the transmitter in Yancy’s shirt pocket practically taunted her.
As everyone lined up, two black-painted school buses pulled up outside the gate. They had reinforced glass and Keen realized they were prisoner transports.
Yancy did a quick headcount and gave Corson a nod.
Corson said, “Get on the buses. We’ll brief you on the way.”
Keen angled toward the bus closer to where Yancy was standing. The driver was one of the private security types, with dark, reflective shades and no human expression.
She took a seat up front, hoping Yancy would get on and sit near her, and that she would somehow have a chance to get the transmitter. Maybe she could distract the driver, cause him to swerve, she could throw herself at Yancy and somehow lift the transmitter.
She let out a sigh as Boden and Dudayev got on and took the seat just behind her. They seemed like back-of-the-bus troublemakers, but so did pretty much everyone else, for that matter.
Then Okoye got on, as well. He started heading toward the back, but when he saw Boden and Dudayev sitting behind Keen, he sat across from them.
Okoye caught her eye and they exchanged a nod. He didn’t look well, but she supposed she didn’t either.
The bus quickly filled up, and Keen’s heart sank as Corson got on with two armed PMCs and the door closed behind them. Yancy was on the other bus. At least she wouldn’t have to smell him.
Corson stood over her, looking down. Staring. She couldn’t tell if it was “I’m onto you” or “I hate you” or “I’m thinking lewd thoughts,” but she just stared back at him, her best badass, psycho, what-the-hell-are-you-looking-at stare.
He continued to stare at her as they pulled through the gate.
A voice from the back of the bus called out, “Yo, man, where’s my ride?”
An angry murmur arose as everyone in the bus looked out the windows to the left. Sure enough, all the vehicles that had been parked outside the gate were gone.
Corson smiled. “That’s right, they’ve all been moved. Think of it as valet parking. Whoever wins will get their vehicle back. In fact, whoever wins can have their pick from all of them.”
The ringers quietly sat back down as the implications sunk in, as if seeing their vehicles gone made it suddenly more real and they realized what they were risking by entering the Dead Ring.
Corson seemed to take pleasure in their reaction. “Now then, for the first official round of the Dead Ring, you will be knocking over a meth lab run by a biker gang called the Cossacks. Inside their lab there are eighteen one-kilo packages of crystal meth. Your job is to go in, take one package, and bring it back to the rendezvous point. There’s eighteen packages, and I believe now there are twenty-eight of you.”
He grinned. “So, to the ten of you who will be dying in the next fifty minutes or so, I’d like to say, ‘Thanks for playing, better luck next time, and I’ll see you in hell.’”
Chapter 44
Aram had stayed up late with Wall, decrypting the uplink feed he had recorded earlier. It was after three A.M. when they finally got it cracked. Wall had created the encryption and had put in the back door himself, but it was still impressive watching him break into it by memory, even if it took several hours to do it. Now that he had it all in place, it would hopefully be easier next time the signal was live.
Wall explained that using the back door was not the same as a full decryption. They were restricted to one channel of data in each direction, but it was more than enough to confirm what they were looking at. The footage was boring, yet surreal—these crazed killers dressed in white jumpsuits running across rows of tires and doing dashes and broad jumps.
And then right there was Agent Keen, running and jumping r
ight along with them. He almost didn’t recognize her at first. She had Le Chat written across her front and back. Her hair was dark, but the biggest difference was her expression, her attitude. She looked hard and cold. He knew it was an act, but it was jarring to see.
He ran the video back and forth a couple of times. Somehow Director Cooper appeared at his side, watching, too.
Wall cleared his throat. “Is that your, um, colleague?”
“Yeah,” said Aram, softly. Worried. “That’s Agent Keen.”
Cooper put a hand on Aram’s shoulder. “She looks like she’s doing fine,” he said.
As the video continued to play, they saw two men in camo pants and uniform shirts telling the others what to do.
“Pause!” Cooper said sharply, leaning forward to look more closely.
Aram’s hand hit the pause button before he even had time to think about it.
“Those two look like they’re the ones in charge, don’t they?” He pointed at the two men. They had sidearms but weren’t carrying rifles.
Aram found a frame where their faces were clear, zoomed it in and enhanced it as much as he could.
Wall had turned pale. “That’s them,” he said quietly. “That’s Corson on the right. He’s in charge. Yancy, the one on the left, the filthy one. That’s like, his henchman.”
“Run them through facial recognition,” Cooper said. “See if you come up with anything.”
“Yes, sir,” Aram said. “I’ll see if I can capture the other contestants’ faces, too.”
“Good. Now I’m going to get some sleep. You should, too. Tomorrow could be a big day.”
Shortly after, Wall pushed himself away from the workstation and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He’s right. I need to crash, too,” he said quietly. He seemed like he was still shaken at the sight of Corson and Yancy, Aram thought as they said goodnight.
Aram watched him retreat toward the classrooms with the cots, then got to work isolating as many of the faces as he could from the video. He sent twenty-three through facial recognition, but only got two hits, a former Army Ranger named Flynn and a South African war criminal named Boden.
According to the distance scale across the bottom of the screen, Keen’s position was now fifty feet northwest of where it had been the previous night. In the darkness, Aram couldn’t compare it to the CIRRUS video to confirm her location, but he figured it was probably just a calibration issue.
He set up a script that would alert them if Keen’s tracking device moved more than twenty feet on the ground. Then he lay on a cot he’d set up next to his desk and tried to get some sleep.
After an hour of tossing and turning, he gave up on sleep and got up again.
Still just the two hits on the facial recognition.
He opened the file with the jigsaw fingerprints. He had become vaguely obsessed with them, wondering what surface they had been lifted from that left them so jumbled, wondering how they fit together. He had planned to work on them for only a few minutes, just to lull his mind by using a different part of his brain. But as he started tinkering around, the time got away from him.
He had already run two different configurations through the database, but they’d come back with errors. He ran two more and they came back as “no hits”—nothing usable but better than an error. He was still tinkering with them when he had to angle the screen away from the dim blue light coming in from the window.
He moved the screen three more times, yawning and thinking he really should get some sleep, before he turned and actually looked out the window. That’s when he realized it was morning. He had stayed up the entire night.
And that’s when the tracker alert sounded. Agent Keen was on the move.
Chapter 45
Thirty minutes after they left the campground, the bus turned onto a winding dirt road. Ten minutes after that, they rounded a small hill and drove slowly past two leather-clad biker types sprawled on the ground next to their bikes. They were both missing substantial portions of their heads and lying in patches of blood-soaked dust. Two gas station travel mugs were on the ground, as well, coffee staining the dirt around them as if they had bled out, too.
As the two buses pulled over side-by-side, Corson stood up and said, “Get out.”
The clouds were lower and the sky darker as they got out of the bus. It felt like the sun had decided to skip the day entirely and sink back under the horizon. A breeze picked up, cool but ominous.
A quarter of a mile back, the RV she’d seen outside the campground was pulled over onto the side of the road in front of what looked like a troop transport. A quartet of armed PMCs stood next to them.
When Corson spoke, he kept his voice low, and the ringers gathered close and kept quiet so they could hear him. Yancy was right next to him, the transmitter still visible in his pocket, just a few feet away. Keen worked her way closer to him, squeezing between Yancy and a ringer named Flynn. The smell coming off of Yancy was enough to make her eyes water.
Flynn gave her a dirty look and pushed her back, but she pressed on, working her way closer to the transmitter. She was easily within reach of it, but she didn’t have a plan and she didn’t have an opening. She could have reached into his pocket and grabbed it, but not without exposing herself and scuttling the operation.
Flynn pushed her back again, causing her shoulder to bump against Yancy’s.
It gave her an idea.
Without looking, she elbowed Flynn hard in the ribs. He shoved her back, hard, right into Yancy.
Keen raised her hands as if to break her fall, pressing each of them against Yancy’s chest. Her fingertips grazed the TNT in his pocket. She could feel it.
Yancy scowled and said, “What the—?”
His shirt was oily with grime. His breath smelled of dead animals and old cigarettes.
She moved her hand toward the top of his shirt pocket, but before she could slip her fingers inside it, a boot that felt like a battering ram thundered into her side, under her ribs.
She hit the ground hard and rolled into a ball, clutching her side. She heard a wet thunk and Flynn landed a foot away from her, a trickle of blood coming down the side of his head.
Corson stood over them, his gun in his hand. “Save it for the game,” he hissed. He looked at each of the others. “Anybody else?”
He waited several seconds, but the only sound was Flynn groaning and Keen trying to catch her breath. Corson turned to Yancy and ordered, “Get them up.”
Yancy grabbed Keen by her hair and jerked her upright.
She managed to get her feet under her, and even snatched at his shirt in an effort to grab the TNT, but he was gone, yanking Flynn to his feet as well. Then he was out of reach, scowling at them both as Corson resumed speaking.
The compound consisted of three double-wide trailers, he explained. They were in a “U”-shaped configuration, with living quarters on either side and the lab in the middle. The whole thing was surrounded on all sides by low hills, with a single winding road in and out, formerly guarded by the two dead bikers. It was up to the ringers how they went in and how they came out.
As he spoke the apparatus on the roof of the RV unfolded into a satellite uplink, like on a news van. The PMCs opened the storage compartment in the side of the vehicle and started lifting out boxes, four of them, that looked distressingly similar to the one containing the drone that had killed Borova. Keen felt a moment of mortal dread that was heightened when a drone rose out of one of the boxes and flew toward them. But as it circled them low in the air, she saw that it was armed only with a camera—no explosives.
Before she could register any relief, it occurred to her that the transmitter needed to be located within ten feet of a camera in order to work. Even if she was able to get hold of the transmitter, if the cameras were all mounted on quadcopters, that’s what she’d need to attach it to.
As Corson continued speaking, Keen massaged her bruised side and looked around at the other ringers.
; Boden and Dudayev were snickering and mumbling to each other.
Okoye’s face was contorted with effort, as if he was having a hard time concentrating. The occasional twitch in his eye seemed to have gotten worse.
Everyone else, even the craziest of them, were all hanging on Corson’s every word. They recognized what was at stake for them, and knew what would happen to them if they failed.
Keen had different priorities. She hadn’t been thinking about the game. She was just trying to survive and get the transmitter back so she could execute the plan. But now she acknowledged to herself that wasn’t going to happen. Not in time. The tac team was not going to ride in and shut things down. She had specifically told them to wait for her signal. A signal she now had no way of delivering.
She needed to survive this round, to get through the whole thing alive, just like the others. She tried to block everything else out and focus solely on Corson’s words, and understand completely what the round consisted of, what was expected of them, how to get through it and not get killed.
Then the other three drones rose up into the air. On the one that was closest, she saw a small red light come on.
The cameras were recording.
The uplink feed was live.
Chapter 46
Cooper, Ressler, and Navabi had gathered around the computer so quickly, Aram knew they must have been up already and waiting for the alert. Wall ambled in, rubbing his face, and sat next to Aram in front of a black screen with green numbers scrolling up and a blinking cursor. “Any signal yet?”
Aram shook his head. “No.”
“Where’s our visual?” Cooper asked.
A second screen showed the blinking dot of Keen’s tracking device, slowly moving to the east. The third screen was a flat field of gray.
“That’s it,” Aram replied, pointing to the gray screen. “That’s what we’re looking at. Meteorology said there’s a layer of low clouds in advance of a cold front.”
They watched the tracking dot moving more quickly across the screen. “She’s in a vehicle,” Aram reported.