Painkiller

by Will Staeger

  Gibson took inventory of the sputtering, bleeding remainder of Admiral Li, the motionless lumps of the four mercenaries, and the prone, bent, and clearly dead Hiram splayed backward over the dolly. Two, then three seconds passed, during which time Gibson considered what he knew was about to happen next. Taking in the bodies, he did some math, and concluded that whoever was doing the shooting-not that it mattered now, but he had a pretty good guess-it would be more profitable, to the tune of an estimated two hundred million gross, were he to get the shooter to hang around for a little while longer.

  He leaned back against the transformer.

  “Alive!” he bellowed.

  The sinewy muscles of his scrawny neck flexed and stretched as he elon-gated the word and repeated the wail.

  “Alive!”

  53

  As Gibson’s echoing plea reached her ears, Lana the maid pulled her finger off the trigger of the MAC-10 assault pistol she had been about to fire. Instead, she took two long steps, covering the remaining distance between her and the trespassing figures of Cooper and Laramie, and struck Cooper in the side of the head with a roundhouse kick that sent him sailing six feet before his body hit the cavern floor. When he did land, it was with a skull-carom across the lava surface and a back-bending bash against a silo joist. Lana then spun in a short, efficient motion and rammed her left elbow into Laramie’s temple while Laramie attempted to rise from the floor of the cavern and fire back with her UR-14.

  Laramie collapsed, sputtering, at which point Lana savagely and repeatedly kicked her, rolling her across the cavern floor until Laramie’s body flopped against Cooper’s at the base of missile 34.

  Protection of Spike Gibson complete, Lana surveyed the carnage wrought upon the occupants of the cavern. Deng was nowhere to be seen; there was Gibson, alive and in perfect health; Li lay on the cavern floor, contorted, bruised, barely breathing; the four anonymous soldiers, dead and bleeding, were sprawled across the floor as though in formation; and finally there was Hiram, a six-foot-five-inch rag doll draped cold and dead across the dolly. Lana bent at the knees and touched Hiram’s face, lingering for a few long seconds.

  Then she stood upright, nearly at attention, and lowered the MAC-10 to her side.

  “Clear!” she said.

  Deng clawed his way up the side of the hole beneath missile 36 and peered over its top edge at the floor of the cavern. He could see Gibson’s maid standing by the transformer; Gibson had just stood and said something to her. Everyone else was dead, dying, or comatose. Li was mortally wounded, but Deng didn’t mind this much, since if Li died here, now, it would only serve to make things easier.

  He scrabbled his way to a foothold and rose from the hole. Gibson and Lana watched him do it.

  He thrust a finger toward the prone bodies of Cooper and Laramie.

  “Who are they?” he demanded.

  Deng didn’t like the look in Gibson’s eyes, the security director looking him over as though Gibson were the one controlling his fate.

  “They’re no one,” Gibson said.

  Deng shifted his gaze to the docking bay. He did so confidently, the threat implicit: the military might of the People’s Republic of China crouches within the skin of that vessel. I have ordered them to remain aboard, but defy me now, and pay.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said. It didn’t come out quite the way he meant to say it.

  He could see Gibson was thinking something through, but the security director’s expression hadn’t changed, and he hadn’t moved. Neither had the maid.

  Deng started walking.

  As he passed by, Deng heard the words that Gibson spoke, but he neither acknowledged them nor altered his stride as he walked from the interior of the cavern and out through the wide, arching doorway to his submarine.

  “Bon voyage, lou bahn,” Gibson said.

  Li sucked at the air, sputtering, taking in as much blood as oxygen with every gasp. The admiral knew nothing but this simple task; occasionally, he would blink hard enough to clear the blood from his vision. After one of these blinks, the oil-greased, zit-scarred face of Spike Gibson loomed into view.

  “How you doing, Admiral? You know, you aren’t a bad guy, so it’s a shame, isn’t it, that you’ll go down in history as the greatest all-time traitor to the people. Public enemies number two and one, my man. You and me. You figure this motherfucker out yet?”

  Li’s breathing stopped briefly. When it resumed, its pace was more frantic than before. The fogged look behind Li’s eyes indicated to Gibson that the rear admiral of the People’s Liberation Navy had just experienced something like an impulse to spit in his face.

  “Your buddy the premier never took a meeting with any of his investors, Admiral. It was always you or me. And the terrorists behind the Beidaihe bombing-they had to have somebody on the inside, don’t you think?” Gibson scratched his chin. “Deng does. He’s got pictures. Evidence. Probably even some sources who’ll squeal. What loyalist wouldn’t, when it turns out a Chinese traitor by the name of Admiral Li Zhu held secret meetings in Bern with the chief architects behind both the Beidaihe bombing and the horrible destruction wrought upon America afterward.”

  Life was beginning to evaporate from Li’s eyes. Gibson drew his Glock and examined the gun as if for the first time. Fascinated.

  “But, Admiral, you’re only number two. You realize who you’re looking at? Bin-Laden’s got nothing on me. I’m the new kid on the block-the mastermind behind not just one, but the two most brilliant and deadly terrorist strikes of all time. The chief assailant of two victimized superpowers.”

  Li coughed. It sounded more like a wheeze.

  “Your comrade premier found out I was yoking his warheads. You know that? He should have taken me down too, because I had no idea. But he didn’t. You know why? He didn’t do it because your new premier is one smart puppy.”

  He waved the Glock skyward.

  “As a loyalist, you should be pleased. When these missiles let fly, Deng will stand by America-China’s fellow victim. America’s military might will be shattered, but China’s will not; the People’s Republic will become the enforcer for the people of the world. All people-Americans too. The People’s Liberation Army will effect regime change, as it is called, in the nations it has shown to be responsible for these twin acts of terror. China, while benevolent, will nonetheless become the world’s supreme super-power. Pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.”

  Gibson racked a shell into the chamber.

  “But even the most powerful nation on earth needs an enemy. And what your ingenious comrade premier figured out, Admiral, is that if I get away-taking four thermonuclear warheads with me on my way out-then the great and benevolent Premier Deng Jiang will still have somebody left to fight.”

  Gibson grinned, grotesquely stretching the sinewy muscles of his upper neck and jaw. “A lethal, invisible force of evil,” he said, “waiting to strike at any moment.”

  He pressed the tip of the pistol against Li’s angular forehead.

  “China must be vigilant!” he screamed.

  The crack of the gunshot echoed through the cavern as the back of Admiral Li’s skull painted the coarse lava floor beneath it.

  54

  The splash of water shocked him awake.

  He knew immediately it was Caribbean water-lukewarm, with that mild, briny taste he knew all too well. He’d swallowed enough of it in the course of his free-diving escapades to fill a lake.

  Cooper opened his eyes to a strange face-gaunt, harshly feminine, skin a wrinkled mahogany-and assumed he was having one of his nightmares. In his dreams, he would occasionally see faces he didn’t recognize. He knew that he’d once known these faces, that he’d seen them before, and the dream was merely a visual playback of the memory that failed him during conscious thought. Usually, afterward, he could remember the faces from that dream permanently, so that, nightmare by nightmare, he was piecing together some of the missing portions of his life following his escape from the
dungeon cell.

  Cooper was trying to place himself in the dream, to figure out what this face meant and where it fell within the chronology of the usual three nightmares, when he realized that he recognized the face too keenly. He had seen it recently against a bright white pool, a background of bright sand and thatched-roof cabanas-

  The face leering at him was Muscle-head’s maid, and he wasn’t anywhere near the comforting familiarity of his dreams. He was on the floor of the missile cavern beneath Mango Cay.

  The maid had changed both her uniform and demeanor since their brief encounter by the pool. She was staring into his face with a sort of fanatical hatred, barrel of a MAC-10 pressed under his chin. She wore an olive green tank top that displayed naked shoulders and biceps easily bigger than his. The gun was secured with a strap slung over her right shoulder.

  “Shithead, up!” she spat in a Haitian Creole drawl. Cooper thought immediately of Alphonse. “On the feet!”

  She thrust a wrist beneath Cooper’s right arm, lifted him effortlessly, said, “Against the wall!” and, using the muzzle of the MAC-10, pushed him backward against a web of scaffolding that Cooper figured she must have meant by “wall.”

  Through with Cooper for the moment, Lana crouched, lifted a second bucket of seawater, and dumped its contents on Laramie’s face. Flat on her back as Cooper had been a moment before, Laramie shot immediately upright, gasping for air and clearing her eyes with both hands. She too got the muzzle of the MAC-10 against her chin.

  “Fuck you!” Laramie yelled, lashing out in a reflexive burst that brought a smile to Cooper’s face.

  Lana shifted her weight from one leg to the other and kicked Laramie in the side of her head, reached out before Laramie could fall, and threw her against the scaffolding beside Cooper. Cooper grabbed hold of Laramie’s shirt to hold her up.

  Spike Gibson came into Cooper’s field of vision and threw an olive green duffel bag at him. Cooper caught it with his free hand; it clinked as he snatched it. The bag was heavy, maybe eighty or ninety pounds.

  Gibson ignored the captives and spoke instead to Lana.

  “Deng knows. He’ll do nothing, so I’ve unlocked all the doors. All alarms are deactivated. Get in, bring me another two hundred mill, and get off the island. The U.S. Navy appears to be interested in us now-there’s a destroyer fifteen miles east of Martinique and coming around. He does anything but break Hiram’s record,” he said, pointing at Cooper, then Laramie-“shoot her in the leg, then arm, and so on. See if that motivates him.”

  Gibson jumped behind the wheel of his cart, looked at Cooper, and said, “See you around, Albert.”

  Then he drove off.

  Gun dangling from her shoulder, Lana positioned her own cart beside the nearest missile-38-and flipped the lever that summoned its silo elevator. She opened the cage door, returned to the cart, transferred a harness and rope to the elevator, and approached Cooper and Laramie.

  Cooper could see that in addition to the assault pistol she now held a black rod.

  “Get in,” she said, and poked Cooper with the cattle prod. He jumped-fucking thing hurt, stinging him with a bone-jarring jolt. He pushed Laramie into the elevator, looking for an opening as he did it, but the maid didn’t offer up any noticeable vulnerability.

  Lana yelled to them from below as they rode the elevator up the length of the missile.

  “Maintenant you open the bag! Listen and I tell you how to use!”

  When they hit the twenty-foot mark, Lana flipped a switch at the base of the silo, and the elevator jerked to a stop. Cooper listened, sort of, as she rattled off a how-to guide on the removal of your average nuclear warhead from a Trident missile. He wasn’t sure whether she was through with the instructions when the chukka-chuk-chuk and ping-ping-peow of bullets from the MAC-10 whinging past him gave Cooper a rough indication she’d completed the tutorial.

  “Vite! Allez-y!”

  Cooper attempted both to interpret and remember what he’d been told-thick accent like hers, he thought, wasn’t exactly ideally suited for giving highly technical instructions. His time spent with Alphonse helped, but he still only understood about forty-five percent of what the well-muscled maid had to say.

  Among the tools was a flashlight, which he handed to Laramie. As told, he installed a rubber plate to use as a shelf and set the other tools on it. Working quickly, he used a distant cousin of a Phillips-head screwdriver to remove the screws securing an access panel and opened the panel when he had the screws out. He grabbed two saws and a hammer and chisel and looked at Laramie.

  “Do me a favor and keep as far back as you can,” he said. “Just point the flashlight.”

  Laramie gave him a look, which he took for indecision on whether to be offended he thought he could handle the work and she couldn’t, or flattered that he refused to expose her to unshielded plutonium, or enriched uranium, or whatever it was the warhead contained.

  Cooper got to work, thinking that this is where his decision to take possession of Roy’s body from the beach had proved a moderately bad call. Leading him here, inside a Trident missile, digging for radiation sickness at the order of a muscle-bound maid. Once he thought about this for a bit, he made the guess that somebody else had probably been doing this kind of work before him, and probably under the same exact threat. Gibson’s words had been clear enough: he does anything but break Hiram’s record…Hiram, he thought, being the supposed bartender he’d recently shot. Hiram must have had his own radiation diggers, and maybe some time back, one of them had drawn some similar radiation-exposure duty inside the nuclear power plant he and Laramie had used as a hiding place. Considering that the power plant appeared somewhat weathered and worn, he assumed it generated its energy with the less modern U-238/U-235 uranium fuel rods, and that an accident could easily have happened while the radiation digger was doing the work. Result: odd burn marks, severe pain, a hell-bent escape for daylight, and a few gunshots in the back from Gibson’s goons. Thanks, Marcel, for all your hard work.

  And there you have it. With the help of my associate, the renegade entry-level analyst from Langley, the private-eye-for-the-dead has just solved the second murder of poor, sweet Simone’s zombified fiancé.

  Hell, he thought, maybe I’ll give Marcel’s widowed fiancée a call and let her know everything’s turned out just fine. That there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Marcel’s misfortune: exhumed following an overdose of coup poudre potion, he was brought back to the living with conconbre zombi serum and sold by your town wizard to a redheaded, serial-killing albino black named Jim Beam, who, in turn, sold him to somebody named Spike-short for Spencer-Gibson. But if it’s any solace to you, Simone, Marcel probably commanded a minimum of a couple thousand bucks on the open market, at least judging from the size of the bag of money Jim had taken in exchange for the wino from East Queen Street.

  Breathing lead dust and soaking up radiation inside the access panel, Cooper gave some additional thought to Gibson. With the man out here running Deng Jiang’s missile factory, probably thinking after ten years of the assignment he could certainly get used to island life. Maybe even thinking he wouldn’t mind securing a ninety-nine-year lease of his own. Maybe Gibson does the math, he thought, figures out how to snake a few of the warheads, and determines he can get somewhere around that two hundred mill he was telling the maid about each time he pulls a nuke out of its ICBM.

  He couldn’t see the whole docking bay from his cubby inside the missile, but it had looked to him, on the way up the elevator, that Deng’s submarine was no longer parked in the underwater lagoon. Maybe the bullets from his UR-14 hadn’t struck premier pay dirt, and the big fella had headed home. Cooper reached instinctively for his SLK, and the camera, homing device, and other goodies he had in it, but no such luck. Be good to find that camera with the pictures I took, now that they’d learned what they’d learned-Cooper figured even Peter M. Gates could put the pictures he’d taken of Premier Deng and his boys to use.

&n
bsp; About an hour in, he gave the warhead-MIRV pairing one more whack with the hammer, and the twenty-fourth and final rivet fell from its anchor, pinging its way down the interior of the missile.

  As instructed, he stepped out from the hole and signaled to the maid.

  “The harness!” she screamed. “Maintenant!”

  55

  When Zeke Sampson, captain of the USS Hampton nuclear attack submarine that housed Popeye’s SEAL Hole, reported to Norfolk that his sonar man had spied a bogey in the waters near Martinique, he was ordered to track it. Sampson was also told to monitor and escort the arrival of the USS Scavenger, the navy destroyer assigned the investigation of Mango Cay. The captain’s crew had long ago marked the approaching destroyer, which had reached its drop point some fifteen minutes back and would release its reconnaissance launch momentarily.

  Sampson found it odd that it was now-only seconds before the Scavenger’s launch boat was set to splash down-that the bogey detected by his sonar man had turned up on their system. In fact, the vessel, which was clearly a foreign submarine, had made its appearance only two thousand yards from the island the Scavenger had been sent to investigate. When Sampson received confirmation that the sub they were tracking was a Chinese nuke, he made a simple call: the sub’s presence was unacceptable.

  Sampson did not view this as an exercise. For him, nothing was-he ran a tight sub, and, loose, tight, or otherwise, a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine always operated at wartime readiness.