by Wesley Cross
“You go ahead,” Connelly said, leaning against the side of the vehicle. “I’ll stay out here. I don’t want any surprises.”
“Suit yourself.” The man climbed inside the cabin and closed the door, visibly relieved to be sheltered from the cold wind.
“On second thought,” Connelly rapped his fingers on the window, “you should come out. Someone’s coming.”
They watched the cloud of dust billowing far in the distance and then a few moments later, they could hear the rumble of multiple vehicles.
“That’s a big delegation,” Gupta said with uncertainty in his voice. “It’s usually one or two dudes.”
“Maybe they like you, after all. You didn’t even get properly frozen.” Connelly now could see a caravan of three old Jeeps and a pickup truck speeding up the road, each carrying a few men. The barrels of AK-47s were sticking out the windows and pointing toward the clear blue skies, swaying as the vehicles made their way closer.
“I don’t like it,” Gupta said, watching the cars get closer. “I wish you still had your pistol. Are we in trouble?”
“A pistol wouldn’t have made much of a difference.” Connelly shrugged. “There’s at least a dozen of them.”
The cars pulled up about a hundred yards from the GAZ-66, and a tall, broad-shouldered man stepped outside of one of them to greet them. The rest of the guerrillas stayed in their vehicles and, to Connelly’s satisfaction, kept their assault rifles pointing skyward.
“There’s been a change of plans. I’m here to transport you to the camp,” he said in perfect English with a touch of a British accent as he approached. His full beard and sun-scorched skin made him blend in with the rest of the fighters, but up close he looked decidedly European. Shave him and dress him in ordinary clothes, Connelly thought, and the man would look at home on Seville Row or Park Avenue.
“Is there something wrong?” Gupta asked. “Usually it’s a couple of guys who meet us. I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” The man shrugged. It looked like two giant boulders rolling under his loose clothing. “There have been some skirmishes, and I want to make sure you get to the place safe and sound. I don’t want Mr. Engel disappointed.”
“And you are?” Gupta insisted.
“You don’t want these guys disappointed either.” The man vaguely waved his hand in the direction of the Jeeps, ignoring the question. He turned around and started walking back to the caravan. “Let’s go.”
“C’mon, Sanjay,” Connelly said and started after the man.
“I don’t like this,” Gupta said without moving. “I’ve never seen this guy before. It’s always the same people. I’m not going until you tell me your name.”
“You can stay here,” the man said without stopping. “We’ll be back in a couple of days. We’ll take you back to the airport then.”
Connelly heard Gupta swear under his breath, but the little man jogged to catch up to them. They climbed in the back of one of the pickup trucks, and the broad-shouldered man joined them a moment later, taking a bench across from them. The engines revved, and the small column made a U-turn and started back down the road.
“Put these on your heads,” the big man said as he threw two black bags toward them.
The throw was too short, and the bags landed next to Connelly’s feet. He picked them up and handed one to Gupta and then opened the other, preparing to put it over his head.
“I’m not putting this on,” Gupta protested. “They never asked us to do that before. It’s one thing—”
The man leaned in and slapped Gupta across the face with his left hand. His movement was slow, almost lazy, but Gupta crashed off the bench and onto the floor as if hit by a shovel. Blood started gushing from his nose and from his lower lip that appeared to be split in two.
“Put this on, please,” the big man repeated. “Unless you want me to tell Engel that you fell off the car on the way here and we couldn’t find you.”
Connelly helped his companion back on the bench and after watching him trying to put the hood on with trembling hands, took it from him and pulled it over the little man’s head. Then without saying a word, he put another bag over his own head.
“Much better,” he heard their guide say. “I don’t understand why we have to go through all this trouble. You’ll be in the camp soon, and we’ll answer all your questions. Mr. Rosen is looking forward to seeing you both. Especially you, Connelly.”
31
Hong Kong
The local news station on the TV screen in front of the internet cafe was flashing a breaking news chyron. The volume was too low to hear anything, but the images were showing the early signs of panic—people running through the streets, supermarkets being looted.
“We have to go,” Mandy said with an edge to her voice.
“Give me a moment.” Helen opened a separate window on her laptop and launched a new program designed to infiltrate the internet cafe’s servers. “I don’t want to leave our fingerprints in this place.”
“C’mon,” Mandy said again. “We’ve got to go.”
“Okay.” Helen closed her laptop shut, stood up, and started toward the exit. “Remember—the Black Arrow guys are paramilitary. They’re not going to leave the building at the first sign of trouble. It might take a few minutes before they get orders.”
They went outside. A cacophony of sirens was filling the air. A young couple ran past them, pushing a supermarket cart in front of them. A frightened-looking girl was sitting inside of the cart in the middle of a pile of snacks.
“I feel horrible seeing this,” Helen said. Her phone vibrated in her back pocket, and she saw that Mandy’s phone was getting a message as well.
“Civil defense alert,” Mandy said, looking at her screen.
Helen pulled out her phone and read the message.
NUCLEAR MISSILE THREAT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
“My God,” she said, putting the phone away. “It better be worth it.”
They waited by the intersection as a row of cars blew through the red traffic light and, when the last one disappeared from view, started across the street. The mayhem intensified as they got farther from the slums and deeper into the city—a small crowd was gathering outside of a supermarket that was trying to lock the front doors. Somebody hurled a brick through the window, and the crowd pushed forward even before the pieces of broken glass stopped falling. A young man cried out in pain as the crowd pushed him into the shards of glass sticking out of the wall.
“C’mon,” Mandy urged her. “It’s too late to backpedal.”
They ran past the supermarket and pressed on. Mandy’s car was around the corner.
“No,” Helen heard Mandy cry out as she turned the corner ahead of her and then a second later, she understood why—the row of cars parked on the side of the street was ablaze. Mandy’s white SUV was not on fire yet, but it was only a matter of time—a black Mercedes right behind it was spewing two-foot-long flames.
“Shit,” Helen said, stopping, and then she saw Mandy dash toward her car as fast as her feet would carry her. “Mandy, stop. Are you crazy—it’s gonna blow!”
The woman ignored her and ran past the flames and dived inside her car. The engine revved, and the car lurched back, slamming into the Mercedes, and then shot out of the parking spot, clipping the right headlight on the minivan ahead of it.
The black Mercedes exploded, sending pieces of glass and debris flying in all directions and making Helen duck. Another two cars that had been parked behind it exploded in a fiery chain reaction. Helen fell back and started to crawl on all fours, trying to get out from the rain of molten plastic and jagged pieces of metal. A flaming wheel bounced off the wall of one of the buildings and rolled down the sidewalk, forcing her toward the middle of the street. She heard tires screeching, and a second later Mandy’s SUV roared past her, going the wrong way on a one-way street, and stopped a few feet away. The bumper on the SUV was def
ormed, and the back of the car was smoldered and discolored, but otherwise it seemed to have escaped the explosion unscathed.
“Let’s go,” she heard Mandy yell through the window, and Helen scrambled to her feet and ran to the vehicle.
“You’re one crazy woman,” she breathed as she climbed into the car and Mandy stepped on the gas, accelerating away from the row of burning cars. “You could’ve died.”
“But I didn’t.” Mandy flashed her a manic grin as she maneuvered the car around debris. “Besides, how were you going to get back to TLR if we lost the car? Walk? By the time we’d get there, the ruse would’ve been over and the Black Arrow boys would be crawling all over the place again. All this would be for nothing.”
Helen kept quiet as she watched her friend drive. She played this scenario in her head a million times before. She thought she was prepared for this, but seeing it play out in real life brought back the doubts. She had to keep going, she thought. At this point, turning back would be the worst decision of them all.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Helen lied. “Just taking it in, that’s all.”
“Listen. I wouldn’t have helped you if I didn’t come to the same conclusions as you.” They roared through the empty intersection and took the ramp going onto the highway. “Tillerson wants to weaponize this stuff. If it falls into the wrong hands, what we see now will seem like utopia compared to what will come. We can’t let this happen.”
“I know. I wish there was another way.”
“There’s no other way. Think about it. Tillerson, with all his brilliance, is a puppet—you said it yourself. He thinks he’s in control, but that’s only because he’s useful. The moment that changes, all this theater will end.” Mandy paused for a moment. “Imagine you could go back and somehow prevent the Manhattan Project. Wouldn’t you want to do it? Stop the nuclear bomb from being developed? You’d save hundreds of thousands. Prevent the world from sitting on the brink of a disaster for decades to come.”
“That’s what scares me the most.” Helen sighed.
“What does?”
“I don’t think you could prevent it. At best, you could’ve delayed it. But those guys weren’t the only ones working on it. Maybe it would’ve made it worse. We think we’re saving the world from Tillerson’s monster, but maybe all we’re doing is postponing the inevitable.”
They drove in silence for a few moments. The highway was almost empty. A storm was brewing ahead of them. A few dark, nearly black clouds were moving toward the city, consuming the bright sky. For a second, Helen had a vision that the road stretched forever between this world and Hell itself and they were rushing toward their own doom.
“We can’t kill it,” she finally said. “We need to preserve it.”
“We talked about this. It’s too risky.”
“MAD.”
“What? Who’s mad?”
“Not who,” Helen said. “MAD, as in mutually assured destruction. That was the term coined during the Cold War. The US didn’t attack the Soviets and the Soviets wouldn’t attack the Americans, because if one of them did, between the initial strike and the retaliation, no one would survive. Hence the concept of mutually assured destruction was born. The only reason the Cold War never turned into a hot one. Think about it. Someone, sooner or later, will recreate what Tillerson did. He might be the first, but he’s not going to be the only one. We’ll need the counterweight.”
“And you want us to be that? Us?”
“Yes,” Helen said. “It’s not something I’d like to do, but we’ll have to be.”
“Don’t you think we’re—”
“Underqualified? Of course we are. But it’s probably a good thing. Watch out now.” She pointed to the outline of the TLR building. “Slow down and let’s roll by the exit first to make sure the Black Arrow guys are gone. We can always make a U-turn and come back, but I don’t want to drive into an ambush.”
“Wise idea.”
It started to rain as they approached the exit. The dark clouds had taken half the sky, and the first big drops were landing on the windshield with heavy thuds. The wind picked up, battering the car from all sides. Mandy eased off the pedal as they got closer and the car slowed to a crawl.
“What in the world is that thing?”
“Where?” The rain was coming down hard, making it hard to see, and Helen strained to look through the sheet of water.
“There.” Mandy stopped the car and pointed at a strange shape by the entrance to the building.
Helen finally saw it. It looked like a small car on six wheels, but the round cabin swiveling around was too small to hold any passengers, and there was something protruding out of it on the side. The strange car stopped, and the cabin turned more, pointing the oblong object in their direction.
“Drive,” Helen yelled as she finally made out what she was looking at.
The car lurched, the engine whining in protest as too much fuel flooded into it too quickly and the tires squealed, propelling the vehicle forward. Helen caught a flash coming from the strange car and a split second later, an invisible force lifted the back of the SUV as if a giant tried to catch the SUV’s rear tires. They swerved madly across the lanes, Mandy fighting to control the vehicle and finally the exit was behind them and they were accelerating down the empty highway.
“What the hell was that?” Mandy asked, her knuckles white as she gripped the steering wheel. The rain was coming down so hard now they could hardly see past the front end of the car.
“That was a sentry,” Helen said. “The boys from Black Arrow might be gone, but now we have a killer robot to deal with. And it’s got a big gun.”
32
New York
Perry came in early the next day to spend some extra time watching security tapes, but there was no produce truck. On the one hand, it wasn’t surprising—whoever was in the truck the day before might have been only gathering information. And there was a possibility that it was the actual produce truck that came back to the location for some reason other than delivering goods to the supermarket.
It was unlikely, though, Perry decided. In all likelihood, it was the competition. He contemplated reaching out to his cousin but they hadn’t spoken since Perry had to take this job, apart from the occasional meeting at some family gatherings. Besides, he didn’t think it was some hotshot from the cartels. Sicarios may have grown sophisticated in the last few years, but somehow a produce truck didn’t seem to fit the profile. Perry wasn’t a gambling man, but if he had to make a bet this time, his money would be on a new player in town or law enforcement.
He turned off the playback, switching to the live CCTV view, and finished his lukewarm coffee in a few long gulps. Tomorrow, the shifty man was supposed to come to check on him, as he always did once a week, and he’d tell him about the truck. Then it would be off his hands.
He hated the visits. The car wash and the loading bay next door were a vital part of the operation, of course, and Perry expected to be supervised. It didn’t matter how efficiently he ran the business or how long he worked for the boss. There was too much money involved. He wouldn’t have left himself unsupervised either. But what bothered him was the air of moral superiority that seemed to be oozing from Watkins. They didn’t speak much every time he was there, but over the years they spoke enough for Perry to understand precisely why the man acted as he did.
For some reason, Watkins seemed to believe what they were doing served some kind of greater good. A classic the end justifies the means kind of thing. It was complete nonsense, of course. Perry was a lot of things, but he was pragmatic above all. They were selling drugs, for chrissakes, and whatever moral justification Watkins had concocted under the thin layer of his wispy hair was nothing more than a pile of hot steaming shit.
“Hey Perry,” he heard from the door, and he nodded to the first of the two guards who would hang out in the car wash office for the rest of the night. At this point, he would move to the loading dock to
make sure everybody was on schedule, and drivers weren’t screwing around with the product. Their system to vet drivers was extensive and yet, once in a while, they ended up with an idiot who thought they were smarter than everybody else.
He waited for the second guard to come in, poured himself another cup of coffee, and went through the door to the warehouse. The inside of the facility looked like a letter Z, with cars entering through the gate on one side, turning in to the loading area set up in the middle, and then making another turn to go outside on the other side of the street. This setup prevented any prying eyes from the outside seeing anything that was going on where a small crew of Perry’s men lined the trunks of each vehicle with illegal merchandise.
The guards were already there, armed with Glock 19s in their side holsters—two at one entrance, and two at the other. Tonight would be busy—Perry had a long list of clients who had to be taken care of. He needed to send a few cars to deliver high-grade ecstasy on a trip to Atlantic City, provide two underground brothels in Manhattan with cocaine, and supply a few night clubs in Long Island with a new version of Aliento del Diablo. His employer liked Perry’s idea, but instead of selling their clients repackaged product, now it was a high-grade product of ultra-pure cocaine that his employer’s chemists managed to die in bright ruby red.
He was walking around the loading area, checking the packages, when the lights in the warehouse went off. He cursed, crouching behind one of the crates, the instinct developed over many years in the illegal trade shouting at him that something was wrong. A few moments later, the back-up generator kicked in, and the emergency lights lit up, drowning the place in an ominous red glow.
“What’s going on, boss?” a guard shouted from the entrance. He had his Glock out and was leaning against the wall next to the gate, keeping his bulky frame hidden from the outside.