by Stephen Moss
Peter was surprised when, as he went to speak, Dmitry silenced Peter, raising a finger to his lips and shaking his head gently. Another man was, it appeared, setting something up.
At a nod from that man, Dmitry smiled magnanimously and said, “A leftover from the grave of our friend Commandant Beria, or Mikhail, or whatever his name was. They will not hear us now, no matter how clever they think they are.”
Peter nodded appreciatively, but then his face set once more. “A small upside for Mr. Beria’s betrayal, I suppose, though I will not thank him for the way he used Mother Russia.”
Dmitry frowned and shook his head. “No, no, you misunderstand me, Mr. Secretariat. You will find no love for Mr. Kovalenko in this room. Quite the opposite. The time has come to put a stop to Russia being some pawn in the greater game, Peter. The time has come for Russia to reclaim its place among the world’s elite.”
Dmitry glanced at the machine that was apparently even now masking any signal Ayala might be using to listen in on them, then went on, “But while I cannot thank the traitor Beria for using us, we are not too proud, I think you will find, to make the best of the tools he may have left behind.” He paused and glanced at his colleagues then back to Peter, “Nor are we too proud to recognize when we might have been wrong about one of our own.”
Peter and Dmitry held each other’s stares as the other two ministers nodded approvingly. Peter smiled, as his eyes narrowed. It was tempting to believe Dmitry, but Peter was no fool, he could see that they were only really offering to have him be their tool, as opposed to TASC’s. But Peter was not TASC’s puppet. He was their ally. Because however much he might disagree with that organization’s ever more stringent methods, they were still, in the end, doing what must be done.
And so was he, he knew, as he engaged with these three snakes and pretended to be enticed by the apple they offered.
The apple, it turned out, was a new alliance. A temporary one, but one that would give Russia leverage. One that would dislodge the American Neal Danielson from the helm of the ever more powerful TASC and put a council there in his place, a council upon which Russia would sit. They spoke of allies, they hinted at some, and were cagey about others. And they spoke of the remnants of what they now knew as tech ten. There was not much left, they said, but they were learning how to replicate it.
Soon they would have an army, as would their allies. They would take control of TASC and be the ones to ride the warhorse into the coming fight, and they would be the ones left ruling once they had dispatched the coming alien Armada.
Such bold talk, thought Peter an hour later. They would meet again soon, they said. Discuss this with no one, they said. He would have to prove himself, they said. And as he left and his guards fell in behind him once more, he handed them a pen from his pocket, the simplest of devices, one that would have been unimpressive during the Cold War, let alone during this far hotter one. The Spezialist took the device and plugged into it, downloading every word that had been said and sending it back to District One.
The plot thickens, thought Ayala, after Saul informed her of the overheard conversation’s contents, and she added new names to an ever-growing list of traitors to the cause.
Chapter 27: Ugly Behavior
As Peter walked away from his meeting with his ardent peers, Ayala’s eyes were really on the situation in Tehran. Many others were, no doubt, watching as well, but she had reason to believe it was about to come to a head. Any moment now. The question was not if, but when. And when the shift came, where would the epicenter be? What cracks would the shockwave reveal?
Minnie noticed it first.
Minnie:
Ayala studied it. Watched for the pattern. Men on the move. Machines starting up. Previously steady flows of men suddenly moving with purpose. They were going to make an attempt.
Ayala: ‘minnie. tell hektor and his team. get them ready. i want everyone braced for action.’
Minnie:
Ayala thought.
Ayala: ‘no, not yet. but get the phase elevens ready. they may be needed shortly.’
Minnie:
Yes, she thought, they are, aren’t they.
- - -
Bohdan anchored his rebreather in the soft sediment that lined the canal’s belly. It did not take much. Anchoring the buoyancy-neutral device under an old bicycle frame to keep it in place, he unclipped himself from it, keeping only the small tubeset that linked it to the back of his neck in place as he braced his arms and legs.
What had spooked Ayala he did not know, but apparently events were coming to a head at last. It had been seventeen hours since he had slipped into this canal. Seventeen hours with only the occasional peep above water to send signal or exude a snorkel to cycle his air tanks. He was ready for action. He was itching for it.
- - -
Across town Niels was equally ready, and almost as impatient. He knew why they were there. He knew what weapon they were planning on unleashing. It was not, he was sure, a choice that had been made lightly, but neither did this fall within Niels’s definition of fair play, either.
This, as his grandfather would have said when he was truly soured with someone, was ‘ugly behavior.’ Very ugly indeed. But in their line of work you danced pretty close to the ethical line. You did what others may fear to, what they may balk at. You did it when that same ethical line was itself being threatened. And sometimes, Niels knew, you had to cross that line in order to deal with those that lived on the other side of it.
And that justification would have to do, Niels knew, as he braced himself. That would have to suffice. But he was glad he would not have to explain this to his grandfather when he was done. Would not have to face the righteous indignation, the disappointment.
Minnie:
Niels: ‘understood, minnie.’
Niels’s blood started pumping now. They had reviewed what had happened to Ben Miller and his team. They had done so as an exercise in understanding their enemy, but they also had felt it deeply. Now he felt that same sensation again. It was muted perhaps by his no longer autonomic responses, but still there. His heart remained steady, his eyes did not dilate, his gastrointestinal tract did not react, indeed it had long since been slowed to a crawl by drugs, both natural and synthetic.
But his mind was not tamed, deliberately, and now the anticipation began to mix with his latent anger and not a small amount of fear. He was as conscious as one could be, as aware as possible as he watched the images being relayed from above. As he watched the two trucks pull up a hundred or so yards from him. As he watched one offload a group of soldiers who then began marching down the canal-side in his direction.
Minnie:
The image swam downward as Minnie focused in. A cart laden with small barrels.
Minnie:
Without much ado, two of the men wheeling the cart took one of the barrels and unceremoniously lobbed it into the canal. For just a brief moment it all looked quite innocuous, like they were merely getting rid of an unwanted beer keg, until all the soldiers promptly crouched and covered their ears.
Niels followed suit, curling into a ball and bracing himself.
Neal: ‘what the hell is happ …’
The explosion was huge, a great geyser springing up from where the barrel had hit. Fifty pounds of high-explosive in a jury-rigged depth charge. Above water it made cars brake, cyclists veer, and pedestrians spin on their heels.
Beneath the water’s surface it warped Niels’s world. He was thrust away and then sucked back in the surge of water, but the titanic pressure change also found any hint of a gap in his ar
mor and sprayed through. His eardrums, hitherto protected within his helmet, ruptured violently.
Minnie:
Neal: ‘¿will he survive?’
Minnie:
Neal: ‘jesus. ¿ayala, are we reacting?’
Ayala: ‘we are, neal. we are reacting now.’
And they were. The scene was changing quickly. But for Niels, his world was frantic, and events were unfolding in front of him, out of his control. The water in his suit was not a great amount, but it was everywhere. And the pain was spectacular. He did not like to think that the suit had made him soft, but nor did he try to handle the sensation on his own either.
Co-opting his nervous system, he manually quelled the throbbing in his joints and focused on his ears. He could not get at them manually, so through his link he sought to shut them down as well. There was no easy way to do it. No short way. They were hardwired into his brain; unlike touch and taste they had far more pervasive processing centers.
He needed them silenced. The shouted pain from them was overwhelming. He could tell Minnie was trying to say something to him. He knew that he needed to move. But he could not process it. Not above the roar of agony coming from the very center of his mind; his inner-ear had become an inner-scream.
If they were blown out, Niels knew, then they might as well be burned out.
Inside his mind he shrieked a kill call, sending a hot pulse into his auditory cortex, hotter even than the searing heat of pain coming from it. The kill call was final. It surged through the cortex, rupturing it now at the neuronal level, silencing it, probably for good.
The relief was immediate, if more than a little offset by his loss, but he did not need his hearing now anyway, not now, not inside the suit. It had become a nuisance, an arrowhead, and he had cut it out. With the noise gone, Minnie’s voice returned, bypassing his ears as it did, coming straight into his mind as it said …
Minnie: <…econd barrel detonation in 0.3, 0.2 …>
Fuck. He braced.
His world warped once more, a great swell, closer now, a wall crashing into him and then the greater sucking draw, pulling him back toward its center. He had become a die in a cup and he did not much care for the sensation.
Minnie was calling off options. Other events were unfolding as well. Hektor and Bohdan, though not under attack, were too far off to help. He was on his own for now.
Enough. If they wanted a fight, so be it. He was out of air anyway, his rebreather tube long since having been ripped from him.
He leapt from the water as an echo of the two geysers that had been blown from it, an answer to the drum beat of the depth charges. But as the world was revealed to him, something was wrong. As sensors went active and sought to map and reveal the world around him, they were not returning as they should.
He began transmitting even as he came to land on the soaked bank of the canal, and as Minnie saw the data she confirmed what Niels feared.
Minnie:
He knew what she meant. As bullets began hitting him, he knew that she meant he needed to give her visual confirmation of what his sensors were saying, so she could correct for whatever had happened to them.
Very well, but first he would let his attackers know he would be with them shortly. Using angles of contact from the bullets, he calculated a horizon with about twenty points on it. He blanketed it. It was not the answer that they deserved, but he noticed a substantial reduction in fire afterward, either from attrition, or just the shock at the devastation of his wild kinetic attack. Either way, as the window in their fire opened, he opened one of his own, parting his faceplate.
The surrounding world came to him as vision to the waking: blurred and bright. And wrong in its own way, too. His eyes, closed for too long, took time adjusting. He was crouched, covering his face, while his natural senses, or what was left of them, came to.
Water was everywhere. The ground was slick with the canal’s lifeblood, the city bleeding out of one of its veins as it sought to kill an invading entity. He was the virus they sought, and now the bullets came once more, redoubled, and he started running. What he lacked in peripheral vision was made up for by Minnie, who was transposing her view from above into his mind.
Minnie:
He would when he could. But not yet. Not with a hail of lead still erupting around him. The water covering every inch of space around his pounding feet spewed and spat in tiny mockeries of the charged geysers that had crippled him. He was the epicenter of an angry circle of fire.
He led the circle off. He was not crouched now so much as running on all limbs. He had seen the Phase Elevens do it. It was actually pretty cool, a small part of him thought.
He found dryer ground, shelter. A small skip that had shaded this patch of concrete from the great fonts that had just bathed this entire area. He slid and skidded behind it and let his face come up, feeling the sun on it for the first time in what felt like an age. His view skipped and swapped as Minnie brought his sensors back online, the two images coming together now, merging as his synthetic sight returned, pervasive and reliable. It filled him with a sense of power and independence he never wanted to be without again.
As they came back online, his systems began scrolling with attacker locations. The air was thick with the whir and buzz of heavy machine-gun fire, and his mind began factoring it and tracing it.
He was so close. So close to being ready. Even as he began closing his faceplate so he could engage, at last he saw it. A ping from one of his systems that was matched by an instinctual pull. A window. Far off but not too far off. Ajar. A glint from within. A hint of the sniper that had been waiting. One of several, no doubt. Waiting for an opportunity.
They had been waiting. Waiting for him to show himself. Waiting so very patiently.
The bullet hit him square in the face. Unprotected as he was, it ruined him utterly. Niels was dead before the thought had fully formed in his mind.
- - -
More forces were on the move now, and Hektor saw the city as a map filled with liquid parts. Like oil on water, the colors of it swirled and moved, almost defying patterning, but there was a pattern, a beauty. Then a spot of green, one of very few true green patches in the diorama, blinked out, and the pattern changed.
The update on Niels came to him as a file, a fact that supplemented his understanding of his operational parameters.
His friend.
One of too many lost.
No time to mourn.
Ayala: ‘there is major movement at the Niavaran Palace. two groups. two exits. cannot say which is decoy, if it isn’t both.’
Hektor saw them. They had not been sure whether this would be necessary. Whether Hektor and his comrades would have to go weapons hot. That was all over now. Indecision past.
Now action.
He lifted from the pool with a thrust from his legs, not upward, but outward, propelled with massive force into the air, leaving two fat craters in the canal’s side, the cost of purchased momentum. He hit the ground and grabbed at it, moving off at speed. He did not want stealth. He wanted them to know his presence. Not for revenge, though he dearly longed for that, but for reaction.
Now that they had kicked things off, he wanted to see what they did. He wanted to make them run. He was met, at first, with only shouts and stares as the part of the city where he had lain in wait reacted to his appearance. The first bullets did not come for at least a minute, during which he covered huge ground.
He was driving not after one of the motorcades starting to scroll away from the palace, but after both of them. He ran right for the mid
dle to see what they did.
Minnie and Ayala watched as Hektor ran, the occasional bullet starting to ring off his sides as he closed on the two convoys.
Ayala: ‘there. that one. see how the other is staying closer to you than it is.’
Minnie:
Ayala: ‘yes it is. go, hektor.’
Hektor: ‘on my way.’
He veered significantly and obviously. He wanted them to know. I am coming for you, he wanted to say.
And they reacted as Ayala had hoped. Changing courses, speeds. One accelerating, the other faltering. Faltering as the real motorcade never would have.
Phalanxes of troops converged on the line of cars now, closing to defend it, pulling from all quarters. They came at Hektor and in turn he came down upon them with relish, a thunderclap of militant intent. He wanted this. He wanted it more than he was willing to admit. He wanted to hurt them.
As they closed it got ugly.
Chapter 28: On the Run
Jim sat facing an otherwise placid group. Placid until a sudden shift in mood started spreading out from a far corner of the room. Whoever it was that was standing there, whoever it was that had stepped forward and whispered lightly in another’s ear, they were the source of some information. Information that Jim clearly did not have.
He remained outwardly calm, even as he queried Minnie and Neal.
Jim: ‘¿what’s going on, guys? something has happened. the assembly representatives are getting an update on something.’
The three had turned, as one, to another man, giving a quiet report.
Neal: ‘yes, jim. something is happening. we are not sure how, but the iranian forces found one of our spezialists. they found him and they killed him.’
Jim’s eyes widened. He couldn’t help it. The lead representative saw it and his eyes narrowed in turn. As Neal continued to speak into Jim’s head, the representative of the Assembly of Experts raised his hands, silencing his colleagues, and began to lean forward.