The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  “Lead the way, then.”

  “Wait,” Gupta exclaimed. “You can’t leave me here. Let me go.”

  “You’re right.” Hanson waved to him. “Go ahead. Take the road until you see it split by a large tree. Then go right, and with some luck, you’ll end up in Pakistan.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” the little man said, walking past them.

  Connelly watched as Hanson moved out of the way, letting Gupta pass him. Then, in one swift motion, he grabbed Gupta’s hair and drew a short line across his throat with a blade that wasn’t in his hand a second ago. Gupta snorted, choking on his own blood, and Hanson expertly guided the man’s body away from himself and down on the floor, avoiding the blood splatter.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said, turning to Connelly after laying the man down. “They work with the fucking Taliban. This is what he signed up for. Besides, this will make sense for the cover story.”

  They walked up the stairs with Hanson leading the way. The room where Connelly had been held was not much more than a dugout with a lean-to covering the entrance. A steep, rocky wall was on one side, and the camp was now lying in front of them. It wasn’t that much of a camp, Connelly noted. More like two small houses and a wooden structure that served as a mix of a garage and a warehouse.

  “Ronin is in there,” Hanson whispered, pointing to the garage. “He likes tinkering with cars.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They should all be in there.” The spook nodded at the bigger of the two houses.

  “You take them then,” Connelly said, peeling off. “I’ll take care of this Ronin guy.”

  “Stop it,” Hanson hissed. “You can’t take him alone. He’s enhanced. Stick to the plan.”

  “You’re going to have to trust me.” He went into a combat crouch and started moving toward the garage. He heard Hanson curse under his breath, but he didn’t argue.

  The garage had a solid wall on one side, and Connelly crossed the distance to it as fast as he dared. Then he started around the house, staying low enough not to be spotted. When he was directly under the nearest window, he slowly rose on his feet and peeked through the corner. Ronin was working on one of the cars. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and as he leaned over the engine of the Jeep, Connelly could see unnatural bulges on his arm, as if the man was wearing pads under his skin.

  It didn’t matter. The line of sight was perfect, and Connelly brought the pistol to his eye level and aimed for the big man’s head. Then, between the beats of his heart, his index finger squeezed the trigger.

  He knew that he missed before the bullet left the barrel of the gun. The man fell back as the first bullet grazed the open hood of the car and with a grace of a jungle cat rolled behind the tires as Connelly unloaded the rest of his magazine. Then, without missing a beat, he was charging toward the window and catapulted himself through it.

  Connelly rolled back away from the wall as Ronin became airborne and a split second later crashed outside in a rain of glass and debris. The sounds of a firefight came from the two houses where Hanson engaged the other guerillas, but Connelly ignored them. He charged ahead, placing a quick kick, aiming for Ronin’s knee.

  The man dodged and then spun like a top, landing a roundhouse kick aimed for the chest. Connelly saw it coming, but the kick was so lightning-fast he only had a chance to pull back to avoid the brunt of the hit. Even then, the impact sent him back, cartwheeling into the dust, gasping for air.

  Ronin was on him before Connelly could regroup. Huge fists moving like pistons pummeled him with a speed of a runaway train, and Connelly’s vision started to blur as one after another massive hit found their way home.

  Then, without warning, the big man collapsed, blood spraying from a gaping hole in the side of his head.

  “So much for helping out,” Hanson said, coming up. He walked to Ronin’s body and placed two more shots into the big man’s head. “At least you distracted him long enough.”

  “Who the hell was this guy?” Connelly asked, wiping the blood off his broken lips. “I’ve never seen anyone so fast.”

  “I told you he was enhanced.” Hanson kneeled next to the body and turned Ronin’s head ever so slightly. Something metallic was gleaming on the inside of his skull. “There are implants that accelerate human reflexes.”

  “Fuck me,” Connelly muttered, looking at the tiny device. It looked like a small silver spider with its thin, shiny legs spreading in all directions. It was intricate, like a piece of expensive jewelry. Connelly felt his skin crawl.

  “He almost did.” Hanson chuckled. “And this is only the beginning. Trust me when I tell you—it’s only downhill from here.”

  “What now?”

  “Let’s go.” Hanson started walking toward the door of the garage. “Let’s grab some wheels. We still need to kill one more asshole.”

  35

  Hong Kong

  “The thing shot at us,” Mandy exclaimed as the exit disappeared in their rearview mirror.

  “I know,” Helen said. “Tillerson isn’t making it easy to get in there.”

  Mandy spotted a small clearing next to the highway, and they pulled over. The rain was easing up, no longer coming down like a solid wall of water, but the skies remained dark.

  “What are we going to do?” Mandy asked.

  “I have an idea, but it’s a long shot. Do you have a plastic bag?”

  “I don’t think so.” Mandy looked in the backseat and then checked the glove compartment. “Nope.”

  “Give me your purse then,” Helen demanded.

  “All right.” Her friend passed her a small shoulder Louis Vuitton. “What do you need it for?”

  “Give me your phone too,” she said, ignoring her friend’s question.

  She took Mandy’s phone and pulled out her own. Then she activated the Wi-Fi hot spot on both gadgets and linked them into a network. Then, she transferred a copy of the over-the-air malware to her friend’s device.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I’ve installed a malware I used to bug Tillerson’s server with to your phone,” she told her friend. “It can ping a system over the air as long as there’s a microphone or a speaker of some sort that the signal can vibrate. We’ll have to get as close as we can to that damn thing first. Then, we’ll put your phone into your purse and fling it at the bastard, and hopefully, it lands close enough so I can hack it remotely. I can modify it to shut the sentinel down. Should be easier than installing a backdoor.”

  “There’s a big if in this scenario.”

  “There are a few ifs in this scenario,” she acknowledged. “The biggest one is whether that thing has a microphone or a speaker.”

  “Plus, it’s raining, which creates some white noise,” Mandy said. “I’ve never tried those over-the-air programs, but I hear they are prone to errors.”

  “They are. A thousand things can go wrong. It can land too far. Or the sound will be too low, or—”

  “Let’s do it,” Mandy interrupted her. “We faked a nuclear threat to the city. There’s no way I can let some tin can on six wheels stop us now.”

  They made a U-turn and drove back, getting as close to the TLR exit as they dared. Then they climbed out of the SUV and continued on foot, keeping the trees as a shield between them and the sentinel. Thankfully, the rain had almost stopped, with only a light drizzle sprinkling their faces as they moved.

  “We can’t go any farther,” Helen whispered as they hid behind a large candlenut tree. From their hiding spot, they could see the robot—an oddly shaped sphere sitting on a skinny platform with six oversized tires. The stub nose of its cannon was turning in a lazy arc, covering the open space in front of the main building.

  “Wait until it looks away,” she heard Mandy whisper into her ear. “Though I’m assuming it can only see where it points that ugly stick. For all you know, it can see three-hundred-sixty.”

  “We’re about to find out.” Helen pu
t her friend’s phone into the purse and, when the barrel of the cannon turned away from them, stepped out from under the cover of the tree. She swung the purse like a sling and let go, aiming for the sentinel. The throw was good—the purse hit the turning dome and ricocheted off it, finding a resting place two feet away from the machine.

  Helen took a quick step back—just in time as the barrel swung right back, abruptly stopping its lazy rotation. It jerked back and forth as if looking for the signs of disturbance but didn’t seem to find any. A few seconds later, it resumed the slow rotation.

  “That was close.” Helen exhaled. She pulled up her phone and launched the malware app. Then, she punched in a few lines of code, modifying the app.

  “How long does it take to transmit?”

  “Twelve seconds, give or take. It should be about now. Oh, no,” she said, louder than she’d wanted. The dome turned around in a jerky motion, and the oversized wheels spun, spitting water and mud as the machine started zigzagging around.

  “It’ll crush the phone,” Mandy said as they looked at the robot erratically driving back and forth. Then the low rumble of the motor abruptly disappeared, and the machine froze in place.

  “It worked,” Helen said in a low whisper.

  “It looks that way, but it’s pointing the cannon right at us. If some of it is still working, we’re going to be so dead.”

  “Let’s get back to the car then,” Helen suggested. “We can drive to the opening again, and if it starts shooting, we’ll take off.”

  “Okay.”

  They backed out from the tree, keeping as low to the ground as they could, and then ran to the SUV. No shots came, and a few seconds later, they were climbing back into the car.

  “Go fast, but don’t step on it,” Helen said as they approached the clearing. She tensed as they drove by the exit, but the weirdly shaped machine remained immobile. She breathed a sigh of relief. “I think we’re good.”

  They made a U-turn and took the exit this time. As they approached the sentinel, Mandy slowed down and then stopped right in front of the machine and jumped out.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I want my stuff back.” Her friend grinned as she climbed back, holding the purse with the phone in it. She accelerated away, heading for the parking lot in the back. “First of all, it’s a nice purse. But it’s also—”

  “It’s also evidence,” Helen finished her thought. “You’re right. Don’t go too far.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can’t use the elevator in the testing building. I don’t know for sure, but it’s much more likely to be monitored. And I already have the key to Tillerson’s office.”

  “Okay,” Mandy said, pulling the SUV into the closest parking spot. “We have to watch out, though. If Tillerson put this mechanical freak to guard the building from the outside, there might be other surprises for us on the inside, too.”

  “Good point.”

  They climbed out of the SUV and headed toward the main entrance, throwing nervous glances at the frozen sentinel in the front yard. The glass doors automatically opened as they approached, but Helen stopped before entering the hallway and motioned to Mandy to hide behind the wall.

  “There’s a smaller copy of this thing in there,” she whispered, peeking into the building from behind the corner. “A shiny round dome, four wheels, and a nasty-looking gun.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I wish I were.” She risked another quick glance through the doors.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “It looks like it’s going back and forth. Comes to the front door, makes a turn, and then rolls all the way back to the cafeteria. Then it comes back and does it again.”

  “You still don’t want to use the other entrance?”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere near it. At least here you have some wiggle room. If there’s another tin can with a gun in there, you’ll be stuck with it in a much smaller place with nowhere to go.”

  “Can’t we hack him too?”

  “Let’s try it.”

  Helen grabbed Mandy’s phone and, when the bot was halfway to the cafeteria, ran into the hallway and placed it by one of the walls. Then she rushed outside and hid behind the wall again. After a few seconds, she heard a soft buzzing sound indicating the bot’s return.

  “Here you go, my friend,” she said, executing the malware again.

  The buzzing got louder as the bot approached the front door and then started to grow faint as it made a full turn and drove off.

  “It didn’t work,” she heard Mandy whisper behind her back.

  “It’s too small. The sucker probably doesn’t have any mics or speakers.”

  “Great. What do we do now?”

  “We follow it.”

  “Are you crazy? It’ll light us up.”

  “Look at it. It’s slow, and it doesn’t have mics and speakers, right?”

  “Oh.” Mandy drew a short breath. “I see what you’re saying. It can’t hear us. It relies on visual data only.”

  “We can walk right behind it and sing Christmas carols without any problems as long as it doesn’t see us. At least in theory.”

  “At least in theory.”

  “All right,” Helen said as the buzzing sound grew louder again. “Let’s see if that works in practice.”

  36

  Rockland County, New York State

  The convoy of four armored SUVs killed the lights and drove off the main road. They crossed the grassy clearing heading toward the woods and stopped a few yards away from the trees. The sky was cloudy—a thick cover hid most of the stars, and the moon was nothing more than a ghostly outline barely visible through the sick, murky gray. Here, with their lights out and engines off, the vehicles looked like black cardboard cutouts, almost invisible against the backdrop of the thick trunks of maple trees. The drivers were ordered to remain with the vehicles until the assault team’s return.

  “Listen up,” Connelly said, checking his gear. “We stick to the plan. Pete Costa and his team take the lab, and we’ll take the main building. There are four guards at the entrance of each facility—two at the front, and two patrolling the perimeter. There are four more guards inside—probably two in each building, but their exact locations are unknown so we’ll have to play it by ear.”

  He threw a quick glance at Costa. The burly man had been working for Engel for over two decades and was fiercely loyal to him. By putting him in charge of the second team, Connelly hoped he could kill two birds with one stone. He wanted to stroke the man’s ego, which in the long run would help Connelly solidify his position within Engel’s organization. But more importantly, he needed to separate Costa from the part of the mission Connelly had no intention of completing.

  “What about the two eggheads?” Costa said. “We need to whack them or what?”

  “We’ll eliminate the targets if we encounter them. Our main mission is to destroy the facilities. Both of them should be working the night shift in the main building, so I’ll take care of them personally. Any other personnel who are not offering armed resistance should be stripped of their cell phones and any other means of communication and escorted out of the building. I want minimal casualties. Any questions?”

  “Yes.” Costa stepped forward. “In case we come across those two—”

  “You’re clear to engage.” Connelly pulled the balaclava on, turned away, and signaled his team to follow. Whether he liked it or not, there were some things that were going to be out of his control, he had to admit to himself. If Jorge Rodriguez and Valentina Semyonova, the two people on Engel’s kill list, happened to work in the wrong building tonight, there was nothing he could do to save them.

  The General Armaments R&D facility sat at the end of a short, paved road that zigzagged through the woods to eventually merge into the scenic Palisades Interstate Parkway that cut the county into two roughly equal parts.

  The facility was split bet
ween two buildings sitting on the opposite sides of a large parking lot—a two-story squat main building and a long L-shaped one-story laboratory. The parking lot, despite the hour, had quite a few cars, but that was to be expected.

  Compartmentalization was not unusual in the industry—some of the more sensitive and promising projects were guarded with great care—and research teams were routinely separated based on their level of access and often worked under cover of darkness.

  The two teams had split up on their march to the facility, maintaining a radio link. The channel was open, but at the moment no information passed back and forth to keep the noise to a minimum.

  “Team One is in position, over,” Connelly radioed when his teammates acquired their respective targets. “Team Two, what’s your sitrep?”

  “Team Two is in position,” Costa’s voice boomed in Connelly’s earpiece. “Ready when you are.”

  “On my mark.” Connelly aligned the sights of the MP5 with the target’s head. “Go.”

  A short staccato of suppressed automatic fire rippled through the silence of the night and then it was all over. Connelly swung the barrel of his submachine gun in a short, frugal arc, double-checking his team’s targets. All the guards were down.

  “Team Two is good,” came over the earpiece. “We’re ready to proceed.”

  “Roger,” Connelly whispered into the mic. “Remember—minimum casualties.”

  He moved the MP5 to his back, pulled out the hefty MK23 pistol and motioned to his team. “Let’s go.”

  He ran toward the front door, checking the windows for movement. There were lights in a few of them, but the building was quiet—nobody seemed to be aware of the assault yet.

  He stopped by the edge of the large glass door and risked a peek—the hallway was brightly lit, but the place was empty. He pulled the door—it was unlocked, and the team filed into the building.

  The place was deserted. They went room by room, but while most had the lights on, nobody was inside.