Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14)

by Robert J. Crane

  “I will tell you whatever you want to know,” McGarry said quickly. “Within reason.”

  “Who hired you?” I asked.

  “Uhm, I don’t entirely know,” McGarry said, “but they’re a consortium based in Revelen. I’m not supposed to know that.” He swallowed heavily. “But I do. And now so you do. So … can I go?”

  “Who was your contact person?” I asked.

  “She went by the name Juno,” McGarry said.

  That trilled a little note of worry up my spine. I’d known Juno, the real Juno, who typically called herself Hera. But she was good and dead, and I’d watched it happen, which suggested to me it was probably a codename. “What else do you know about her that you shouldn’t know?”

  “Very little,” he said. “We never met, only talked on the phone. She’s in Revelen. She has deep pockets. She gave me all the money to set up the US operation, and gave me guidance on what to do with it, how to run it, some specific commands …” He swallowed visibly, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

  “What kind of specific commands?” I asked.

  “She told me to have him killed,” McGarry pointed at Friday. He swallowed more heavily. “And to make sure you didn’t get killed.” He looked right at me.

  “Interesting,” I said. “Keep going. When did you last talk to her?”

  “This morning,” McGarry said with a heavy gulp, and then he just stopped.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked, trying to prompt him along.

  McGarry looked around, like he was trying to find an escape, like he might want to jump out of the plane. “She asked me to schedule … uhm …”

  “What?” I asked. “A prostate exam? Because I’m about to have Friday perform one on you, fully submerged.” I held up mini-Friday again.

  “I am not going up there,” Friday said.

  “You might just if he doesn’t answer this question,” I said, and Friday went super pale. But not as pale as McGarry.

  “She wanted me to take out a contract with a local assassin against the people who … arrested our entire organization yesterday.” McGarry gulped hard.

  My blood went cold like the plane had dropped away and I’d been left out in the frigid air at 20,000 feet. “And did you?” I asked, ice in my voice.

  He nodded. “I contracted it to Sam Bennett.”

  “That is very bad news,” Greg said from behind me. I hadn’t even realized he’d rejoined us.

  “When is he going to do this?” I asked, feeling the chill seep through me.

  “As soon as he’s able,” McGarry said. “This … it took priority over assassinating your friend here.” He nodded at Friday. “As far as I know … he’s doing it right now.”

  62.

  Augustus

  “Hey, Kat, how you doing?” I asked, taking a respite from the stupid paperwork and cracking my knuckles. She was the last of us to arrive, everyone else already with their heads down, the occasional grumble about the annoying differences between paperwork contrived by different locales filling the air along with the infrequent swear word.

  “Ugh, I feel terrible,” Kat said, flouncing over to her cubicle and flopping into her chair. “Filming all week and those raids yesterday and now this today.” She made a show of yawning. “I feel like I should have my personal assistant doing this, but silly me, I gave her the week off, so she’s back in LA having fun and I’m soldiering on through forty degrees and a mountain of this.” She inclined her head toward the stack of paperwork on her desk.

  “Yeah, no one suffers like you, baby,” I said, and she gave me a withering yet amused look. “Except for the rest of us.”

  She grabbed a spare piece of paper, wadded it up into a ball and threw it at me.

  I blocked it with my forearm and chuckled. “That stack ain’t getting any smaller, and you still have to do it even if you toss all of it at me.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said and sighed, making a face as she disappeared behind the cubicle wall. I could sympathize. This was going to be an all-day thing.

  63.

  Greg

  “We are on course for Minneapolis,” Greg said once they were back aboard the Concorde, McGarry bound in white nets of light, a strange spectacle not akin to anything he could recall seeing at any point in his rather illustrious career.

  “How far away are we?” Sienna was plainly tense, cracking her knuckles nervously as she slipped into the co-pilot seat. Lord Wexford and Friday were in the passenger compartment with the unconscious, netted-up McGarry. The pilots had been left on his plane, one conscious and one not, with Sienna promising to unbind the conscious one as soon as they’d made good their escape.

  “We’re over upstate New York now,” Greg said. “I can try and lose us in commercial traffic, but …”

  Sienna’s mouth was a tight line until she spoke. “They’re canvassing the country with overhead satellites for objects moving at supersonic speed, so if we push it …”

  “They’re likely to notice us and respond, yes,” Greg said tightly. The feeling of a clock counting down to danger was imminent, and strangely gripping, given that he didn’t even know any of the parties involved in this particular drama save for Sam, who was the antagonist in the equation.

  “How fast can we go without getting their attention or getting big enough that they notice?” she asked, still quite pale.

  “I don’t know,” Greg said, “but I expect we’re about to find out.” He hesitated. “Shall I push it to the limit?”

  “Maybe,” she said, stroking the console on the side of her seat. “Is there any way we could get there faster, with less danger?”

  Greg pursed his lips. “Perhaps. If we switch to the SR-71, it’s possible. The aircraft’s profile is less likely to be noted by ground-based radar, but we’re still visible to overhead satellites. It can go Mach 3.3, which we won’t, because we’ll be smaller, but it beats the Concorde’s 2—”

  “Dammit,” she said, thrusting her head against the seat back. “This is …”

  “Intolerable,” Greg offered.

  “My fault,” she said.

  Greg felt the puzzlement roll through his brain, prompting the question before he could stifle it. “How is it your fault? It seems to me your friends decided to cause this trouble of their own accord, going after McGarry and his operation.”

  “Because it’s my fault,” she said, offering no further explanation. “Maybe I should jump out, race for Minneapolis myself.”

  “If you do that,” Greg said, “you risk bringing the danger of the law against your friends, not just the danger of Sam, who is almost certainly making his way there more slowly than we are. Trust me when I tell you that he does not possess the ability to pilot a plane, and certainly does not have a supersonic aircraft. The clock you imagine ticking down to your friends’ deaths is most assuredly not moving as swiftly as you think.”

  “Nice logic,” Sienna said, rolling her head against the rest to look at him with a bleakly cynical smile. “How does that usually work when it comes in contact with irrational emotion, in your experience?”

  Greg let his mouth fall open to answer, then smiled. “A very excellent point.”

  She smiled, wanly. “You seem like a relentlessly pragmatic person.”

  “A useful attribute in someone who is tasked with dealing death,” Greg said, checking the instruments. “And thank you, I think.”

  “So …” she said, “… why do you always ask, ‘Any last words’? before you kill someone? Or try, at least? It seems sentimental. Kind of a time waster, isn’t it?”

  Greg drew a deep breath. “It is sentimental, I suppose. My mother was the meta, though she kept it quiet. She had my ability, but tended toward what most Atlases did with it—grow only, because big is good and small is … insignificant.” He blushed as he said it. “When she would remonstrate me as a child, she used to swell. I thought I imagined it, until I looked back later, once I knew about her powers.” He shook his hea
d. “But that’s neither here nor there, I suppose, because the reason I ask that question is … is my father.

  “He was a human. A government scientist.” Greg subtly eased up the throttle, pouring a little more speed and making the Concorde just slightly larger. It would shave a few minutes off their arrival. “He was assassinated during one of the brief spells during which the Cold War went slightly hotter, during which our two governments, the US and Soviet, used unaffiliated metahuman agents as cats’ paws to keep things quiet and on the level. They found him at his desk, dead, slumped over—he’d never seen what killed him coming.” Greg thought of the image soberly; he’d seen it in a government file once he’d gotten old enough to use his powers to ferret out the truth of what had happened.

  “So, I ask my … victims,” Greg said with great distaste, “if they have any last words … because I don’t think he got a chance to have any.” His mouth felt very dry. “I don’t know what he would have said if he’d had the chance, but … I like to think …” He swallowed hard. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters what I like to think, since …” He laughed weakly. “I suppose instead of following in my father’s footsteps, I’ve followed in the footsteps of whoever killed him.” He touched his forehead and found it wet. “I always thought that was ironic, with a sort of … amusement.” He swallowed, and tasted bile in the back of his throat. “Now I wonder why I thought that it was anything other than wretched.”

  “I wonder about that, too,” Sienna said, lifting her head off the rest and regarding him curiously. “You could have left with your family after we pulled the plug on McGarry. You could have tried to call Sam and dissuade him by telling him the money had dried up, then gone your separate way. Instead … you’re charging into battle with us. Doesn’t seem like your style, since you’re not being paid, either.” She leaned forward, putting her chin on her hand. “Why are you doing this, Greg?”

  He stared straight ahead, out the window, into the banks of clouds that lurked just outside. He was trying to keep them hidden from satellite observance as he pushed the throttle up, but the Concorde shuddered from the adverse conditions. He ignored it. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

  “Well, regardless of the reason,” she said, standing up, “I guess … I can pretty much forgive the crap we went through before if you can help me save my friends.” She paused at the cockpit door. “Still, though … I hope at least you know why you’re doing this, because it’s bound to be dangerous.” And then she left, wandering into the passenger compartment with an aimless shuffle to her step, plainly killing time until they got there.

  Of course you know why you’re doing this, that smooth voice said in the back of his head. It was so familiar, the name almost on the tip of Greg’s tongue. It’s because you saw yourself for who you really are—a villain—and now you want redemption, both in your eyes and that of your family.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, Greg said.

  You can lie to yourself, if you’d like, the voice said, so slick, so sure, but don’t bother to lie to me. How long have you looked in your son’s eyes and seen that fear lurking there, afraid of his own father, of what you’ve become? That horror in your wife’s eyes as she looks at you, through you, and sees your innumerable sins?

  Greg swallowed again, trying to choke back that feeling of bile welling up, revulsion raging in his blood like a poison.

  Don’t worry, the voice said. You’ll feel better once this is done. Once you’ve taken that first step. Because … let me tell you something about redemption, a lesson I’ve learned from personal experience. Redemption … is not a destination. It’s a journey to right the wrongs you’ve committed, as best you can.

  Something about the way the voice spoke brought to mind a peculiar association—an American flag. Greg shuddered, wondering where that had come from.

  But see … the wrongs you’ve done, they never go away completely. The scales … they don’t balance, exactly. The pain you’ve caused doesn’t just vanish. The human wreckage you leave in your wake doesn’t just disappear once you start doing the right things. The people you’ve harmed …

  The voice trailed off for a moment, and then began again, a little weaker, a little … choked. … Once you see inside the lives of those you’ve harmed, those you’ve tried to destroy … it changes your perspective, doesn’t it?

  “Yes,” Greg whispered, looking over his shoulder. Sienna was standing there, talking to Friday … and Greg felt a strange swell of guilt for what he’d done to them. To her, specifically, her exile impending, thanks to him.

  Redemption is a journey, the voice said again. Atonement, amends … they don’t come immediately. You’ll be working on this for quite some time, Gregory. Maybe the rest of your life. But the good news is … maybe soon, even … you’ll be able to look in your wife’s eyes and that worry will be absent. Your son will be able to look at you without being deathly afraid. If you actually change.

  “I want to,” Greg whispered, a single tear trickling down his cheek. He should have been embarrassed at his weakness. Should have rushed to mop it from his cheek. But he didn’t; he left it there like an external reminder of all the reasons he had to be ashamed.

  I know, the voice said, smooth, sincere. I can see it in your mind. In your heart.

  “Who are you?” Greg said, adjusting the speed upward again.

  Just the voice of experience, he said, growing quieter and quieter. And of a fate you had best hope you never meet.

  Somehow, Greg knew that now the speaker had left him alone, in the cockpit, with his thoughts. Greg stared through the windshield at the clouds ahead, and pondered the future, that prick of tingling fear at the words the voice had said, about redemption, about his family, about atonement. And he kept nudging the speed up a little at a time, until he could move it up no more.

  64.

  Sienna

  “We’re over Minneapolis,” Greg announced as I slid back into the cockpit with him. Friday and Wexford remained behind because there was only so much room up front. “Five minutes ’til we’re in a pattern over the office complex you flagged.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s our plan?”

  “I’ll bring us down to a hundred feet over the building, shrink the plane and put it in a holding pattern on autopilot,” Greg said, fingers dancing over the console in front of him, doing who knew what. “We’ll drop as we did before, and warn your friends—”

  “They can’t see me,” I said, though saying it out loud was like a dagger through my heart. “The FBI will have the office under surveillance. If they catch a glimpse of me there …”

  “All right,” Greg said, frowning as he adjusted his planning. “That complicates things.”

  “What about Sam?” I asked. “How’s he going to play this contract?”

  That caused Greg’s frown to deepen. “He lacks my … subtlety at times. If this were a single-person assassination, he would likely shrink to enter their body while wearing scuba gear, follow their blood flow to the brain, and grow, simulating a massive aneurysm—”

  “He would ride their blood flow?” Every part of that statement gave me the heebie jeebies.

  Greg was back in straight professor mode. “It’s a very simple way to assassinate, and because it looks like a natural cause of death, typically is one of the cleanest methods we could employ—” He must have caught me looking at him in horror, because he pulled back pretty hard. “And is quite disgusting, obviously.”

  “But he won’t do that here?” I asked.

  Greg shook his head. “Too many targets. It won’t look like an accident if ten people die of an aneurysm. For this … he won’t bother with subtlety, because you can’t make this many deaths look like an accident, at least not easily. Even a gas leak explosion might not kill the targets, given that so many of them are metahumans. He’ll need to be thoroughly destructive, especially lethal, and most accidental means simply don’t possess the effectiveness of intentional,
targeted means—guns, bombs, etc. He’ll opt for the latter, counting on his abilities to screen him from any implication in the murders, and allow the undoubtedly countless people with an axe to grind against your friends to shoulder the blame during the investigation.”

  It took me a few seconds to unpack everything Greg said there. “So you’re saying … he’s going to go big on the kill method, and he’s basically counting on his powers to shrink and the fact my homies have lots of enemies to keep him from ever getting caught for this?”

  “Exactly.”

  I swore under my breath. “So … how’s he going to do it? The killing?”

  Greg shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. When someone hires us, it’s almost exclusively for covert kills, the sort for which you don’t want blame to come back on you, and that—preferably—don’t look like a kill at all. I can’t recall ever working a mass hit like this with Sam. I don’t know what he’ll do, except to say that he’s not a particularly shy or subtle fellow.”

  “Great,” I said, lapsing into thought. Sam was like an invisible spirit of death, reaching out his hand for my friends, and I had to go try and defend them, all without being seen.

  “We’re over the drop zone,” Greg said a few moments later, and I looked up to see that we had definitely shrunk again, buildings in the distance looking like mountains, even though I knew from photos they were small office park buildings, no larger than a few hundred feet in length. They looked like worlds unto themselves, which, I supposed, at this size … they sort of were. “Shall we?” Greg asked, stepping out of his seat and letting the plane fly onward. I suspected that at this size, it could fly for about a hundred years without hitting anything.

  “If you don’t mind,” Wexford said, “I’d like to get out now. I need to catch a flight back the UK, after all, and, ah … just in case things go wrong for you …” He looked at Greg. “Well … I’d rather not spend the rest of my days as a microbe. I hope you understand.”