The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  Once in the car, she put the hard drive into the glove compartment, stuffed the pistol under the driver’s seat, and started the engine. The road to the campus went through dense subtropical rainforest. If she could dump the gun there, most likely it’d never be found.

  There was a siren of a fire truck in the distance, growing closer by the moment. Helen released the brakes and pulled out from the parking lot and onto the road. The lights of the TLR building glowed brightly in her rearview mirror, but as she accelerated, they grew faint and soon disappeared around the bend. She stepped on the gas pedal and took a long, calming breath.

  Hong Kong had been kind to her, but it seemed that she’d overstayed her welcome. It was time to go home.

  42

  New York

  It would be so easy to kill him right now, Connelly thought, watching Engel pace the room, a glass of whiskey in his hand. Extinguish his miserable, useless life. Weapons weren’t allowed in the office, and his boss was proficient in martial arts, but Connelly thought he could end the man’s life in less than five seconds.

  Instead, he sat on the couch, his hands resting on his knees, watching the man pace and pretending to be listening to what he had to say. Behind the impenetrable façade, he felt his insides boil. It was one failure after the next. He came close to punching his own ticket a few times, too. It hadn’t happened yet, but Connelly felt like the proverbial cat who’d already spent eight of his lives.

  It didn’t seem to even matter if he tried to stick with the long-term vision of the ISCD, or take matters into his own hands. Despite short-term setbacks, Engel’s empire continued to get stronger.

  “You know,” he heard Engel say, “there’s never trouble that doesn’t moonlight as an opportunity. I was furious when I heard about the hit on our limo service. But it’s actually for the best. We have the Red Dragon gang distributing our product already anyway. We’ll offload the rest on them as well. Our margins will not be as high, but what we lose on margins we’ll make up in volume.”

  Connelly stifled another urge to get up and start beating the man to death. If he did that, he’d need more than one life to get out of the building alive.

  “Let’s switch gears for a moment. That guy you encountered in Afghanistan—you’re sure he was enhanced?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I saw some kind of a microchip inside his skull.”

  “You should’ve taken pictures.”

  “They took away all my stuff when they picked us up—weapons, phone, everything.”

  “It’s a shame. We know it’s GA, but we need more than hearsay. I need proof.”

  “I’m sorry, boss,” Connelly said, not feeling sorry at all.

  “Here’s what I need you to do.” Engel walked back and stopped in front of him. “I’ll send you a list of GA facilities. Go through them with a fine-tooth comb. There’s gotta be something we can find. I’ll give you whatever resources you need. Find where they are working on these enhancements and do it quick. We need to set them back while we’re working on our own projects.”

  “Will do.” Connelly stood up and headed for the door to avoid a handshake. “I’ll keep you updated.”

  He walked through the office floor, ignoring the curious looks of the cubicle workers, and took the elevator down. The sun was still up, but the air was cold, and Connelly zipped his jacket all the way up as he walked past the hideous statue of the angel working a forge.

  He crossed East Fifty-Ninth Street, walked past the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and then crossed Fifth Avenue. From there, he headed west without a destination in mind, admiring the views of Central Park and letting the flow of the foot traffic carry him. In a few minutes, he reached the entrance on Seventh Avenue, and he stopped there, considering taking a stroll in the park, but then decided against it.

  He could take the R train from the Fifty-Seven Street station, he thought, down to Court Street and walk home from there. A crowded train, somehow, seemed a better place to be than the lonely cabin of a taxi.

  As he stood there waiting for the traffic light to change, he heard a commotion and turned in time to see two teachers guiding a group of school children coming from the park. They gathered on the sidewalk a few feet away from him. The teachers were shouting to make sure the kids formed a line, and for a moment he watched their happy little faces as they chatted away and laughed and mostly ignored their guides.

  “Hi,” a girl standing at the edge of the group said.

  “Hi,” he responded automatically. She wore a pressed school uniform, and her light hair was folded in neat thick braids. He was about to turn away when it hit him. “Sarah?”

  She ran toward him, and he scooped her up in a hug.

  “I’m sorry, who are you?” One of the teachers, a pudgy, short woman, appeared next to him, eyeing him suspiciously.

  “He’s my uncle,” Sarah lied as Connelly put her down.

  “Michael,” he said, extending a hand. “I was out of town; didn’t know she’d be here. Pure coincidence.”

  “Oh.” The woman’s demeanor softened. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Ms. Karen. Science teacher. We were on a school trip, but we have to go. There’s our bus.”

  “It’s all right. It’s nice to meet you as well.” They walked across the street together and stopped by a large yellow school bus. The kids started filing into the bus one by one, but Sarah stopped, looking up at him.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Yes.” She looked at him, her face serious, as if making sure she didn’t miss anything. “You look sad. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He squatted next to her. “At least I think I am. I’m glad you’re doing well.”

  “I have to go.” She looked back at the bus. “You take care of yourself.”

  “Go,” he said, standing up and smiling. “You, too.”

  She turned and ran toward the open door, climbed the stairs, and disappeared inside the bus. The doors hissed as they closed and a moment later, the bus pulled away from the curb as it merged into the traffic going down Seventh Avenue.

  Connelly scanned the windows, hoping to catch a last glimpse of the girl, but the windows were dark, making it hard to see, and a few moments later the bus was too far as it sped down the road.

  He stood there until the bus completely disappeared from view and then walked over to the subway station.

  It was dark by the time he made it to his building. He walked up the stairs to his floor and stopped in the hallway in front of McAllister’s door. The yellow police tape was gone, but the door was still stamped with a seal. He stood there for a few moments and then headed to his apartment.

  He kicked off his shoes and locked the door without turning the lights on. Then he grabbed a glass of water and the laptop and sat on the couch facing the window and waited for his handler from the ISCD to log in.

  “Any updates?” A line of text appeared in the draft of the email when he refreshed the screen.

  “Yes,” he typed. “I need to go dark for a few months.”

  “Unacceptable,” came the immediate reply. “The flow of information is crucial to our progress.”

  “There’s been no progress for a long time,” Connelly wrote. “Zero. I’m starting to think you might’ve worked for Engel all this time and used me for stalling.”

  The screen remained blank for much longer than usual, and after refreshing the page a few times, Connelly clicked on the Wi-Fi icon to make sure his laptop was still connected.

  “I know you’ve lost some friends,” finally came a reply. “I am sorry. I know what it’s like.”

  He stared at his laptop, unsure how to respond. They’d been communicating for years and not once had Contact showed an emotion. It was always just business.

  “It’s not about that,” Connelly wrote. “I don’t see this going anywhere at this pace. Engel is getting stronger, and unless we change tactics, we might as well give up.”

  “You’re to stay the course. This is an orde
r.”

  “I guess playing nice isn’t your forte,” Connelly said out loud. He thought for a moment and then started typing again. “This is not a request. I’m going dark for a few months. Keep checking emails and if I have something urgent to report, I’ll get it out to you. I suggest you start looking for ways to accelerate our schedule. Because if in six months we’re still in the same place, then I’m out. Partnering up with my old teammate was a mistake. Not because we did it, but because it was only two of us. There’s got to be a way to resurrect the Unit. I can’t save the world single-handedly. If it’s going to burn, it can burn without me.”

  He closed the laptop, not waiting for a reply, and put it on the couch next to him.

  A sound coming from outside caught his attention. Cutting through the street cacophony of traffic noises, bird chirping, and garbled pieces of conversations, there was a rhythmic clip-clopping of horse’s hoofs. Connelly stood up and went to the window. Down below, coming from the dark of the night into the pool of light thrown by the bodega on the first floor, was a cop on top of a white horse.

  A smile touched Connelly’s lips as he watched the animal stride through the lighted area, but it faded as another horse came into view. It was brown, but in the flickering artificial light, its skin seemed darker, almost red. One more cop followed on a black horse and then, bookending the procession, came another mounted police officer on top of a huge gray stallion. Even from the sixth floor, Connelly could see the muscles rolling under the glossy skin of the beast. It paused and neighed, craning its neck as if trying to meet Connelly’s eyes, and then continued down the street. As it moved away from the light, the last of the four horsemen seemed to melt into the night.

  Connelly looked up at the skyline of Manhattan that shone brightly in the distance. He stood there for a few moments, watching the lights blink in and out as twelve million souls went about their lives, most of them oblivious to the grand conspiracy consuming the world. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, but the storm was coming. It was a matter of time.

  43

  Hong Kong

  Something was wrong. Helen could see two flight attendants talking to each other in hushed tones by the curtain separating the first-class seats from the rest of the plane. One of them leaned around the curtain and exchanged a few words with another person in first class, out of Helen’s sight. Her imagination drew a pair of heavily armed mercenaries from Black Arrow.

  The woman pulled the curtain back in place and threw a quick glance in Helen’s direction. As they made eye contact, the flight attendant smiled and looked away. Helen felt a trickle of sweat running down her spine. It couldn’t be happening. She was so close.

  The flight had been delayed by more than an hour now, and she was praying to every god she knew it wasn’t because of her. The announcement made it sound like they were waiting for another plane to land before they were allowed to take off, but Helen kept on looking out the window, half expecting to see a row of police cars with flashing lights coming to arrest her. The back of her head, where the butt of Tillerson’s pistol hit her, was pulsating with searing pain.

  The last few hours had been a blur. When she fled the TLR building, she ditched the pistol in the jungle on her way back to the campus. Mandy was right—the city officials initially tried to suppress the news about the hack. But as one after another major network broke the story, they caved in and issued the warning, sending the city into panic mode and forcing Black Arrow to pull back their mercenaries.

  After the authorities paid the ransom to a numbered account, it triggered the automatic chain of events that culminated with the release of the Russian cruise missiles’ control back to the warship. The Russians notified the US strike group and they, in turn, advised the city government.

  The threat was deemed to be over, but the roads remained mostly empty, and Helen made it back to her place in no time. There she threw some essentials into a suitcase, grabbed her passport and a wad of cash, and drove back to the city. The storage disk containing Callisto rested in a side pocket of her laptop.

  By the time she made it to New Kowloon, the streets were bustling with life once again, and Helen ditched her car and, paying triple price in cash, hired a taxi to take her to the Chek Lap Kok island that housed Hong Kong International Airport.

  Some flights were delayed after the initial rush of panicking crowds, but by the time she walked through the main doors of the terminal, service was mostly back to normal. She bought a last-minute ticket to New York, and after a few tense minutes waiting in line, she went through the metal detector and headed toward her gate. No one bothered to ask her about the laptop or the memory disk.

  Maybe she was paranoid, she thought. Perhaps the woman wasn’t even looking at her. The two attendants seemed to have come to a decision, and one retreated behind the curtain as the other started walking in Helen’s direction.

  Please let it be someone else, she thought, closing her eyes.

  “Ms. Wu?” The flight attendant’s voice was soft and soothing, and yet it made Helen jump in her seat.

  It was happening. It was the end of the line. They’d remove her from the plane and then she’d spend the rest of her life in jail. Or worse.

  “Ma’am?” the flight attendant said again, snapping her to attention.

  “Yes?” Helen opened her eyes, wiped her brow with the back of her hand, and forced a smile.

  “I have some good news.” The attendant smiled back. Then her smile faded as she seemed to have noticed beads of perspiration covering Helen’s forehead. “I’m sorry, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she lied. “Just a little hot.”

  “Sorry about that,” the woman said. “But maybe this will make your day better—one of the first-class passengers was a no-show, so we’ve upgraded your seat.”

  “Oh, okay.” It should’ve been excellent news for anyone about to take a seventeen-hour-long flight. Instead, it made her even more nervous. Were they moving her all the way to the front on purpose? In that case, the police, or whoever came to get her, wouldn’t have to march through the entire airplane, scaring the rest of the passengers.

  She glanced out the window, but as far as she could see there were no police cruisers or Black Arrow SUVs near the plane.

  “Could you show me which one is your carry-on bag? I’ll help you move.”

  “Of course.” She stood up on shaky legs and opened the overhead bin. Strange calmness came over her as she passed the bag to the flight attendant—she had zero control over whatever was about to happen next and, in some ways, it was comforting.

  She followed the woman as they walked through the aisle, catching jealous glances from fellow passengers until they reached the front of the plane.

  “There you go.” The attendant pointed to a chair next to a young man. “That’ll be yours for the rest of the flight.”

  “Thank you,” she managed and collapsed into the soft leather of the seat. She still wasn’t sure it wasn’t a trap, but her headache seemed to start to subside.

  The PA speakers came to life, and the captain informed the passengers that the wait was over and they would be taking off in the next few minutes. The engines whined, and as the steel bird started moving toward the takeoff strip, Helen felt her muscles relax. Whatever came next, she was still free.

  She looked out the window as the plane taxied and the momentary joy of realization that nobody was trying to stop her disappeared in a flash. She might have been free, but she had started something in Hong Kong that she couldn’t walk away from. She needed to see it through.

  Her enemies were playing the long game, and she needed to think bigger too. Until now, she’d been reactive. When she fled to Hong Kong from the US, she was hunted, scared, with no money and no plan to speak of.

  Her position was still precarious, but as the plane ran up the concrete path and jumped into the sky, Helen drew a long breath—she might have been dealt some terrible cards at the beginning of the game, but by
now she’d managed to add a couple of aces to her pile.

  One was hidden away in a gray, innocuous-looking data storage device. And, of course, somewhere across different jurisdictions, there was a set of numbered accounts, whose combined value was now in the nine digits. She might not have weakened her enemies yet, but at least now she had the tools to fight back.

  There was also something else. Suddenly she realized she owed a debt so substantial, she might never be able to pay it back. To Hiroko, who took her side, not for personal gain, but because it was the right thing to do. To Eugene, who gave her shelter without asking anything in return and paid the ultimate price for it. To Mandy. To Audrey Hunt. To many others, whose names she didn’t know, but who fought and died against the faceless corporate machine trying to take over the world.

  She might have fled here to lie low and start a new life, but she couldn’t do it again. To not even try to strike back against the people who would stop at nothing until the world became their little sandbox to play in was not an option.

  She wasn’t fooling herself—even now, with all that money and Callisto on the disk, the odds were stacked against her.

  It didn’t matter. She would find allies.

  The plane leveled after the climb and settled into a cruise. She glanced through the window—dark heavy clouds were rolling far below the silver wings. At least for a moment, she was above the storm. It wasn’t going to last—sooner or later, she’d have to dive right back into it—but for now she was content on taking a break. She knew, when the time came, she’d be ready.

  “Upgraded?”

  She turned to the young man sitting next to her, seeing him properly for the first time. He was sipping on a glass of champagne, and his thin face with a pair of bright-blue eyes wore the most mischievous smile she’d ever seen.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too.” He winked and offered her a hand. “The name’s Max Schlager.”