Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Uh huh.” I didn’t want to call him on it right then, because that was more a job for our mother. I was quite content to take the long way around, because Jamal clearly had some feelings going on there, a little story in the background that had me wondering.

  “Don’t act like you know what I’m thinking,” Jamal said, looking at me hard as I came around to the driver’s side and got in.

  “Man, I didn’t even know the last time you had a girlfriend until after she’d been dead for years,” I said, slamming the door behind me a little harder than I meant to. “You’re right; I don’t know what you’re thinking. Like, a lot of the time, and not just when you’re programming or doing computer wizardry.”

  “This is touching,” Reed said, “but why don’t you drive now and have a deep, personal family conversation later?” He’d gotten in the back with Scott. The two of them had been bickering about something between themselves until Reed had leaned up and said that.

  “Why don’t you,” I said, turning around and letting him have a piece of the irritation that had been building up in me since I’d gotten dragged into a dank, concrete basement and wrapped up in inescapable plastic bonds with the threat of beheading due to his “leadership,” “get a double deluxe bottle of SuperEnema and use it to cleanse yourself of whatever bullshit you’ve got up your ass with regards to your sister.”

  That quieted the car down real fast.

  I watched Reed in the rearview, and it only took me a second to realize I’d probably stepped real, real far out of line in my anger. “Reed, I’m so—”

  “Just drive,” he said, and settled back in his seat. After a moment of silence I pushed the button to start the car, and drove off.

  We made it the whole way back to the agency in pained silence.

  38.

  Greg

  The phone rang when Greg was over Chicago, close enough to the ground that he felt comfortable taking the call without worrying that it was too high in the air to go unnoticed by anyone monitoring calls above 10,000 feet. He started to answer it without thinking, assuming it must be Morgan or else McGarry, but when he looked down, he saw that it said something quite different.

  Sam Bennett.

  Greg shifted at the controls of the SR-71. It felt like he’d been flying most of the day, which was, perhaps, not much of an exaggeration given that he’d crisscrossed the country several times in the last twenty four hours. He hesitated. What could Sam want? They hadn’t spoken in years, not since they’d dissolved their partnership.

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  “Hello, Sam,” Greg said, clipped, but trying to put his best professional spin on it.

  “Gregggggg,” Sam let his name drag in an enthusiastic, faux-friendly sort of way. Sam had a natural drawl that he seemed to turn up in moments when he was trying to be charming. It would have been a more appropriate greeting for two old acquaintances at a bar than for a phone call between two former work colleagues where a modicum of professionalism might be expected. “What did you do, little buddy?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Greg sniffed. How much ruder could he get, launching into his accusation that way?

  “You just nuked East LA,” Sam said, laughing all the while. “I mean, I’m assuming that was you given that the explosion was so small. Could have been a mouse with a grudge, I guess. Anyone else would have let a nuke go off full force, but … they’re saying someone evacuated people—physically dragged them away from the scene, as if by magic.” He laughed again. “I gotta say, I wouldn’t have bothered with that, either. I would have dropped that nuke full force and let it take care of my Sienna Nealon problem.”

  “I don’t have a Sienna Nealon problem,” Greg said. “I never had a contract on her.”

  “Oh, so it was for the big guy that was with her?”

  Greg froze. How did he know that? “Yes,” he said slowly …

  “Yeah, they both walked out of that fallout cloud, Greg,” Sam said, still laughing uncontrollably, but apparently in control of himself enough to squeeze the words out without much difficulty. “I’m afraid your little gambit failed to pay off, amigo. The only thing you killed today was that Mexican restaurant’s margarita sales. I’ll give you some credit there, though, little buddy—no one else I know would have bothered to steal a nuke, weaken it down, and then throw it at the world’s most dangerous meta—well, second most dangerous, next to me, you know. No offense.”

  Greg answered out of habitual politeness. “None taken.”

  “I couldn’t believe it was you, though,” Sam said. “I mean, I knew you had one of those old nukes lying around in your collection, but … man! Never figured you’d use that sucker. Kudos.”

  “I wasn’t trying to impress you by using it,” Greg snapped. Was it possible for the man to even talk without being condescending?

  “Yeah, you were looking to kill your target, but you whiffed wide on that one, pal, because they are still sucking air. Hey, who gave you that contract? Was it your man McGarry? Because if he saw that and is okay with the collateral damage—I mean, damn, he needs to talk to me and I definitely need to talk to him because we can come to a working agreement. I could get behind some mass destruction, if you know what I mean. I’ve been doing this all wrong if that sort of shit is okay!”

  Greg ground his teeth. Sam was always like this, no restraint, no preparation, no professionalism. “Sometimes things go wrong. This was obviously one of those cases.”

  “Hey, I thought preparation was the key to keeping things neat.” Now Sam was needling him with his own words and ethos. “I’m just joshing you, little buddy. I would have thought that thing would have killed anybody but a cockroach meta. Still … ballsy move. Nicely played. It’s just your bad luck it didn’t work out.” He chuckled again. “But I got to tell you, man … the things we can do … and you play it the way you do. All reserved, taking forever. I really didn’t think a nuke would fit into your stodgy old pattern there, Greg. You might just be heading for a working renaissance there, good buddy. Dropping a nuke in LA. I am so proud of you right now, you have no idea—”

  A beep cut him off, and Greg looked at the number for the incoming call that had interrupted Sam. “I have to let you go.” He glanced up; he was still six minutes or so from final approach. “I have to take another call.”

  “Catch you later, big shooter.” Sam laughed as Greg hit the button to flip to the other call.

  “Mr. McGarry,” Greg began.

  “Was that you?” McGarry did not sound like his usual self, sedate, controlled, only occasionally forceful. His voice was high. “In LA, was that you?”

  There was a pause, a brief quiet, and Greg assessed the situation; McGarry did not seem pleased. Still, it did not occur to Greg to lie in this instance. “Yes sir, that was me, if you’re talking about the … event.”

  “Are you kidding me?” McGarry’s voice went higher and tighter, and a strange noise like straining plastic made Greg wondering if he was gripping the phone tightly. “You dropped an atomic bomb in Los Angeles? To kill your target?”

  “A very small one, but yes,” Greg said. “I have, uh, heard reports that the target survived—”

  “Let me confirm it for you—yes, Percy Sledger is still alive.” McGarry voice was clipped; he was clearly restraining himself by only a razor-thin margin. “Some dumbass posted a video to YouTube of Sledger stumbling out of the cloud with Sienna Nealon. What the hell is he doing with Nealon? You didn’t tell me that the two of them were working together.”

  “I was trying to handle it internally,” Greg said. This was just professionalism, not running to your employer whenever a contract went slightly wrong. He didn’t bother to mention that McGarry had withheld a crucial fact of his own, because it wouldn’t have improved the tone of the conversation. “You gave me an explicit order to kill Sledger’s girlfriend—”

  “Sienna Nealon is not Sledger’s damned girlfriend!”

  Greg b
linked. “Yes, she’s made that completely clear.”

  McGarry seethed in silence for a moment and Greg let him gather his thoughts. When he spoke again, it was no more collected. “Have you been operating under the assumption I wanted her dead all day?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, I don’t,” McGarry said, and that raised Greg’s eyebrows. “I want the exact opposite, in fact, so let me say this explicitly—I do not want Sienna Nealon dead. If I’d known it was her, I would have told you to hit Sledger from a mile away, where she didn’t have a hope of seeing you or a prayer of stopping you.”

  “She’s doggedly defending Sledger,” Greg said. “None of my distance measures would have effectively worked if you were looking to minimize damage to nearby targets.”

  “Clearly not,” McGarry said in a dry fury. “This is the second time I’ve had to call you in a day to deal with a screwup. Greg, until now you’ve been our best but I’m beginning to think you might have met your match.”

  “I’m not outmatched yet,” Greg said stiffly. “I just need to—”

  “If you had to deploy a nuclear weapon to get the damned job of killing one Hercules done, I think you’re out of your league,” McGarry said. Now he was calm, lethally so. “Consider the contract canceled. I’m handing it off to someone else, and I’m going to be re-evaluating your future work with our firm very carefully. I’m not so sure our relationship should continue based on the exceptionally bad judgment you’ve exhibited today. We wanted things done quietly. You’ve done the opposite.”

  “I’ve tried to simply do the job assigned—”

  “Goodbye, Greg,” McGarry said, and he hung up.

  “That prig,” Greg said, once he was sure the connection was dead. His hands were clenched again on the stick, his breath coming in furious starts, as though he were developing asthma on the spot. To lose this contract …

  McGarry had been a steady employer, keeping him busy for the last couple of years. He’d come to rely on that regular infusion of cash. It was the bedrock of his life at this point …

  He was still three minutes from his landing, and the only consolation, he supposed, was that he at least had the luxury of hiding out in the shop until he’d managed to find a way to put a positive spin on this devastating loss to Morgan.

  39.

  Sienna

  I sat on the couch in my safe house—an actual house, this time—up on the hill in Juneau, Alaska, and pumped my iron furiously as I watched the cable news cover the incident in East LA ad infinitum.

  Sienna … Harmon said as I completed my two thousandth lift. The dumbbells were about as good as I could have asked for. Clearly my minions who were responsible for setting up these safe houses were following specifications, which was good, because I needed failure in that regard right now like I needed another kick in the teeth.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, continuing to pound out my reps. There was no point in discussion, after all. East Los Angeles had just taken a nuke in the middle of a public street because of me. There wasn’t much to say after that.

  Sienna … Gavrikov said.

  “You’re the last person who should be saying anything to me right now,” I threw back at Gavrikov pointedly. “Remember a town called Glencoe, Minnesota? That used to exist before you decided to annihilate it into oblivion to prove a point to me and Old Man Winter about how badass you are?”

  Then I am the perfect person to carry this message, Gavrikov said, apparently finding his courage. You cannot control the acts of every madman to walk the earth.

  Also, Zack said cautiously, apparently more worried about pissing me off than Gavrikov was, this assassin of yours went to some pretty serious lengths to try and minimize civilian casualties. No one died, so …

  Why are you acting like the entire city went up? Eve threw in helpfully. There was a pause as my souls gave her baleful glances. What? We were all thinking it.

  I pumped my iron in the silence, driven by the anger that was rolling its way through my veins. “Because dammit, Phillips had stopped the shit. Or at least the shit had stopped. No one was chasing me anymore. I was sitting in my safe houses and I was feeling—safe.” My arms collapsed, maxed out from however many thousand reps of five hundred pounds, and I barely got them to the ground before my shoulders started quivering. I’d been treating this like a cardio workout, and I’d found my upper limit of endurance.

  The US Government doesn’t just forget about its fugitives, Harmon said.

  “Yeah, but the heat had died down,” I said, sinking back into the overstuffed couch, which was layered in a corduroy upholstery. The safe house was bare bones, not a single piece of décor on the walls, which was how I liked them. “There were websites out there where they were calling me a folk hero, uploading footage of me trying to save lives. I had my lawyers on appeals to clear my name.”

  I closed my eyes. “Now a nuclear bomb goes off in East LA, and everyone’s blaming me for it—wrongly, I might add, but what the hell else is new? I’m back to square one. I’m the evil monster that you painted me to be, Harmon, and the damned chess board I’ve been playing trying to reverse that damage just got turned over on me. Now I have to pick up the pieces again, and I just—I don’t—” I made a growling sound of frustration in the back of my throat. “The lawyers I hired through my bankers in Liechtenstein told me this could take years, trying to fight these warrants and charges. But I don’t want to live like this for years.” I put fingers in my hair and tugged at it, gently enough that no strands came out. “I’ve been on the run for six months and I’m so over this already. I just want my life back.” That last bit came out as a whine, pathetic even to my ears. “I just want my life back,” I pleaded again.

  Be strong, Harmon said.

  “I’m trying,” I said, the weariness now settling in. Friday was sleeping in one of the bedrooms behind me, probably trying to detox the radiation out of his system by meta healing. “But I have to ask … why the hell am I doing this?”

  It’s your job, Zack said.

  “Nice,” I said. “Toss my own words back in my face like a grenade with the pin pulled.”

  You’re working to beat the bad guys, Roberto Bastian said. That’s a noble effort.

  To protect the people, Gavrikov said.

  “Someone dropped a nuke while trying to kill me,” I said. “While trying to kill Friday. And if he hadn’t cleared the area himself, there would have been mass casualties. I ask again, beyond the easy answers, guys—what am I doing? Is Friday really worth this much trouble?”

  If you don’t do this for the least liked among you, Bjorn said, stirring after watching all this argument unfold, then … why bother for the greatest among you? Such inconsistency … it is a violation of principle, is it not?

  “Sonofa,” I muttered. “Did I just get lectured on my principles by Bjorn?” No one answered. Maybe they were as stunned as I was. “I mean, really, guys … you have to admit, coming on this mission may have been my worst idea ever, and that’s saying something, because it means it’d rate above walking into a bank in Florida without checking my corners, above trusting Old Man Winter, and above that time I pulled Clyde Clary’s finger when he asked me to.” I reached up and ran fingers across my sticky, sweaty forehead like a gentle caress. It was the closest I’d gotten to anyone touching me in a positive way in a long time. “Yeah, my principles … defending people, protecting the world … but at a time like this, I have to ask … what am I doing this for?”

  Because you owe a debt, Wolfe said. 254 lives. And it can never be repaid.

  My scalp tingled at his words. “This is all your fault,” I said. “Because, yeah … it always comes back to that.”

  Yes.

  “And it always will, won’t it?”

  Yes, Wolfe said. Now … as Zollers would say … get off your ass.

  I stood up. “You’re not the boss of me. I’m taking positive action because sitting on this couch isn’t going to
get me closer to any of my goals, and it’s not a positive coping strategy. Though the near infinite reps do help a little. Burn off some frustration and whatnot.”

  So … Zack said, what are you going to do?

  “I still have to figure out why Greg wants to kill Friday,” I said, “and I need to figure out what his powers are, which will hopefully tell me how to stop him. If Friday has either answer, he’s not telling me, which means I need to talk to someone who would know.”

  You’re going to talk to his old girlfriend? Zack asked. Chase?

  “Let’s not do her the insult of calling her that without checking with her first,” I said. “I mean, honestly, I could totally see Friday saying that about poor, unfortunate, innocent women that he has no relationship with at all, like some stranger off the street he thought was pretty. ‘Oh, she’s my girlfriend, and we totally banged or whatever like a million times.’ Because that’s just kind of who he is.” I paused. “Wait, why am I trying to save his life again?”

  Principle, Bjorn said quietly.

  “Dammit.” I hung my head, the weariness of not sleeping in well over a day catching up to me. “That was a nice speech, Bjorn. Where’d you pick that one up?”

  The Norseman took a minute to answer. It was something my father used to tell me when he was … displeased with what he considered my moral failings. “Principle is our anchor in times of storm,” he used to say. I … rarely listened.

  “Not a dumb guy, that Odin,” I said. “All right. I’m back in the game. We need to find Chase and talk to her.” I felt an overpowering desire to sit down again on the couch, and I did. Action could wait until tomorrow; it was nearing midnight here in Juneau, after all, which meant the rest of the US, including wherever Chase presumably was, would be sleeping right now. “Tomorrow. First thing tomorrow.”