The Cut Out

by Jack Heath

  ‘Are you okay?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ Fero blinked and sat down. ‘The Kamauan army tried to shoot down a Besmari helicopter. Are we at war?’

  ‘Not yet. They shouldn’t have done that, but the chopper shouldn’t have been inside the Dead Zone. Since no one was killed and the rocket didn’t actually hit the chopper, neither side is forcing the issue. Yet.’

  Fero wondered if Cormanenko would get the credit for saving the pilot’s life and preventing the war – or be blamed for luring the helicopter into the Dead Zone in the first place.

  ‘I’ll need Troy Maschenov’s passport,’ the woman said.

  Fero took it out of his bag and handed it over. He wondered if he should tell her about the gimmicked mobile phone and the spring-heeled shoes. But she would probably take them away too, and he hadn’t been given his old phone back. And he was still kind of hoping to keep the shoes.

  ‘Okay,’ the woman said. ‘You understand what we’re doing here?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m telling you what happened,’ he said.

  ‘Right. So, in your own words, start from when you were dropped off at the border.’

  Fero told her about climbing over the fence, getting shot at by Kamauan soldiers, then by Besmari soldiers, then taken in by them when they saw his passport. As the woman poured tea into his mug, he told her about meeting Vartaniev, getting scanned for bugs, being quizzed about his mission, and then about how Cormanenko had broken him out of the building, led him back in and then flown off the roof with him.

  As promised, he left out everything Cormanenko had said on the train. He skipped straight to the storage locker, the tracking device, the ATFV and the desperate race across the Dead Zone.

  ‘The rest you know,’ he said. He took a sip of the tea, which was now only lukewarm.

  ‘You said Cormanenko knocked Vartaniev out and destroyed the camera before you explained your mission to her,’ the woman said. ‘Does that mean your cover is intact?’

  Fero shook his head. ‘Lots of Besmari soldiers saw me and Cormanenko together. By now the Bank must have figured out that I’m not Troy Maschenov.’

  ‘Meaning that they know Cormanenko is on her way to stop the Melzen attack?’

  ‘I assume so. Will they be able to contact the terrorists and warn them?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Dremovich,’ she said. ‘Now that your mission is complete, I can’t give you any details about that.’

  Fero frowned. ‘So I’m supposed to go home and wait? Without knowing whether Kamau is about to be destroyed?’

  ‘That’s what you’ve been doing all your life.’ The woman half-shrugged. ‘It’s just that now you know what you don’t know.’

  Someone knocked on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ the woman said.

  Noelein stepped inside. ‘Mr Dremovich,’ she said. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me if the attack is likely to go ahead?’

  ‘You might find out for yourself. Cormanenko says she won’t go into Melzen without you.’

  ‘What?’ Fero’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ Noelein said.

  ‘Did she give you a reason?’

  ‘She said it’s because in Besmar you proved yourself to be very capable. I told her that we have many, many agents whose training far exceeds yours, but she didn’t seem convinced.’

  Capable? That couldn’t be the real reason. All he had really done in Besmar was run away from things. Cormanenko barely knew him. What was she trying to do?

  ‘Well?’ Noelein said. ‘Yes, or no?’

  Fero clenched his fists. He had a choice this time. He could go home to his family. He could be a normal kid again.

  But Cormanenko had saved his life, and she said she needed him. Could he just walk away?

  ‘We can’t send a teenage boy into a such a volatile situation,’ the heavy-set woman said.

  ‘We just did,’ Noelein said. ‘He came back in one piece.’

  ‘Just barely, by the sounds of it. When you read his debrief—’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Fero said.

  ‘—you’ll see that the danger far exceeded—’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Fero said again, louder.

  Both women looked at him.

  ‘Cormanenko and I just faced off half the Besmari army,’ he said. ‘We can handle five terrorists.’

  ‘Even when one of them is Gear Eruz?’

  Fero had forgotten about Silverback, the freakishly strong soldier-turned-bomber.

  He swallowed. ‘We’re wasting time. They could set off those explosives at any moment. Cormanenko and I have to leave, right now.’

  ‘I knew we could count on you,’ Noelein said. Fero wondered if she was telling the truth.

  He stood up and turned to the door.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘Have you caught Troy Maschenov?’

  They both stared at him, giving nothing away.

  He looked back at them. ‘It’s been eighteen hours. Is he still on the loose?’

  ‘How did you know about that?’ Noelein asked finally.

  ‘Sloth told me,’ Fero said.

  The two women looked at each other.

  ‘I suppose you had a right to know,’ Noelein said. ‘No, we haven’t caught him.’

  ‘Well, make sure the cops know who I am,’ Fero said. ‘If I’m arrested on my way to Melzen, we’ll never get there in time.’

  Noelein nodded. ‘They know. Your police escort is already waiting.’

  Fero opened the door, wondering if he was making a fatal mistake. ‘Let’s go.’

  THE MISSION

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cormanenko said. ‘You were out – and I dragged you back in.’

  Fero watched the dark streets roll past as the hatchback hurtled towards Melzen. There was no traffic. The immediate area had been cleared, supposedly as a safety precaution for a planned demolition. The president had been moved to a bunker. All over the country, secret emergency crews in hazmat suits were on standby with tinned food, bottled water and air filters.

  According to Noelein, none of it would help. If the hospital exploded, showering Melzen and Towzhik with infected debris, there would be no stopping the coronavirus. It would kill ninety per cent of Kamauans and leave the rest without a country.

  Fero was exhausted and numb. Had it really been only two days ago that he was standing in Stolkalny Square with Irla?

  Irla. He had forgotten all about her. He still didn’t know what had happened after he fled from the protest. He hoped she was okay. Maybe all the bruises and cuts and fear he’d suffered were karma for leaving her behind.

  He wished he could warn her. It was three a.m. – only four hours until the deadline. If he and Cormanenko failed, Irla and almost everyone else he knew would be dead soon.

  What about his parents? He pictured their worried faces. What did they think was going on? Were they somewhere safe?

  Failure seemed likely. Fero was armed only with a toothbrush, a mobile phone, a stick of deodorant and some spring-heeled shoes. Cormanenko had just her pistol, two pairs of pliers, some wire-cutters and a cylinder about the size of a soft-drink can. Something which looked like a keyring dangled from one end of the cylinder, and the words Concussion MK3A4 were printed on the other.

  ‘That’s a grenade,’ Cormanenko had told him. ‘Don’t touch it unless you want to be a cloud of vapour.’

  Fero had assumed that they would have backup. Hundreds of Kamauan soldiers, ready to defend them. But hundreds of soldiers couldn’t sneak in undetected. So it would be two Librarians instead. Zooming through the night, millions of lives in their hands.

  ‘Why me?’ Fero asked.

  Cormanenko slid the gearstick into fifth. ‘You haven’t figured that out?’

  ‘It isn’t because I’m “capable”, is it?’

  Cormanenko zoomed through a red light. Fero instinctively braced himself, even though there were
no other cars.

  ‘As soon as they started questioning me, I could tell,’ Cormanenko said. ‘They knew I had abandoned my mission in Besmar. They don’t trust me any more. Anyone they sent into Melzen with me would have orders to put a bullet in my head as soon as we were done.’ She glanced at him. ‘Except you.’

  Fero stared at her. ‘You think they’ll kill you?’

  ‘I know things they don’t want anyone else to know.’

  Fero nearly asked what she was talking about, and then decided he didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘You never told me how you got out of Melzen,’ he said. Cormanenko avoided his gaze.

  ‘Now would be a good time,’ Fero added. ‘I assume we’re going in the same way?’

  ‘Everyone was wearing masks,’ she said finally. Her voice was quiet. ‘Air filters – it was an airborne virus. But soldiers were taking them away at the front gate of the hospital. Everyone going in was already infected, they said, so there was no point wearing them inside. They could be sterilised and re-used elsewhere in the city.’

  ‘Were you infected?’

  ‘No. At least, I didn’t think so. But my brother was. He’d been coughing, sneezing. He was bright red and sweating, even in the snow. The soldiers said only the infected could go inside. But our parents were dead. I was sixteen; Olear was nineteen. He was all I had.’

  Fero tried to imagine being a sixteen-year-old orphan with a terminally ill brother. He couldn’t.

  ‘I kept my mask on and hid behind my brother. There were a lot of people, and the soldiers didn’t see me. When we got inside the building, I knew something was wrong. There were no doctors, no nurses, no admin staff. Just a crowd of sick people, packed shoulder to shoulder in the corridors. Someone locked the doors from outside. And then there was this hissing sound. A fog of yellow-grey smoke came out of the ceiling. I thought it was the cure, at first. That this was how they were delivering it. But then people started to . . .’

  She trailed off. Fero didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Maybe there would have been enough time to give my mask to Olear. But I hesitated too long. He died holding my hand, and knowing that I was a coward.’

  Fero felt sick. ‘But what about the cure?’

  ‘There was never any cure. They announced that there was, so they could lure all the infected to one place. And then they gassed them all. Outbreak contained.’ Her voice was devoid of inflection. ‘I found out later that the Library called it “Operation Pied Piper”.’

  This couldn’t be true. The Kamauan government wouldn’t just murder its own people. Would it?

  ‘Olear had a pistol,’ Cormanenko said. ‘Just a little thing – a .45 calibre with room for five rounds. Only three were in it at the time. I sat there staring at it for hours.’

  ‘Why?’ Fero asked.

  She avoided the question. ‘After a while I heard movement. I thought there must be other survivors. Then I realised someone had opened the front door. A guy came in – he had a flamethrower, a hazmat suit, a gasmask. Noelein sent him to make it look like there had been a fire. He found me, sitting by my brother’s body.’

  ‘He rescued you?’

  ‘He tried to kill me,’ Cormanenko said.

  There was a pause. Fero thought of the hideous burn scars on Cormanenko’s arm.

  ‘And then what?’ he asked.

  ‘And then I walked out the front door of Melzen Hospital,’ Cormanenko said, ‘wearing his hazmat suit.’

  Fero leaned forward, clutching his stomach. He couldn’t breathe.

  It all made sense now. This was why Cormanenko had fled the country. If the Library had been willing to execute so many innocent people, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill one more to cover it up. Cormanenko had lived with a target on her back since she was sixteen years old.

  How many people had died? Lied to and murdered by their own government? The government Fero now worked for?

  He swallowed the bile rising in his throat. He wound down the window and let the cold night air splash his face.

  ‘What about the coronavirus?’ he gasped.

  ‘Long dead. What Noelein told you about it surviving for years without a living host – all lies.’

  ‘Then what are we even doing? Why do we care if they blow up an abandoned hospital?’

  ‘I found something while I was looking for a way out,’ Cormanenko said. ‘A room full of gas canisters. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all identical, the chemical formula stencilled on the side. I left it all where I found it. When I looked up the formula later, I realised that I’d found their reserve supply of the poison.’

  It was just like when they jumped off the building with the glider. Fero could feel himself falling, down and down towards madness. ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘That’s the real reason Noelein is worried about this attack. If the building gets blown up, a cloud of toxic gas will wipe out Stolkalny, or Coralsk, or Towzhik – whichever way the wind blows. Millions of people, dead in seconds.’

  Cormanenko spun the wheel. The car cruised around a corner, sweeping up eddies of trash in the gutters.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t have been dragged into my world.’

  Fero took a deep breath. ‘So you don’t even know a secret way in or out? You were just lucky?’

  ‘Lucky?’ Cormanenko repeated the word as though she’d never heard it before.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Fero dragged his hands through his hair. ‘Noelein must know how you escaped.’

  ‘She knows everything. More than me, and definitely more than you. That’s her job.’

  ‘So why did she send me to Besmar to bring you back?’

  ‘Because she needs someone who knows the hospital,’ Cormanenko said. ‘Someone who can get around inside quietly. And every other Librarian who ever set foot in there is dead.’

  ‘How are we going to get in?’

  She reached into her coat and pulled out a tangled nylon harness. Fero recognised it as the one she had taken from the storage locker, with the laser diodes mounted on the front.

  ‘With some stolen Besmari tech,’ she said.

  Melzen Hospital stared at them through dark, cobwebbed windows. The building had a haunted quality; Fero felt like it was listening to his uneven breaths. They had parked far enough away from the fence that no one inside could see them – but it was hard to shake the feeling of impending dread.

  ‘This harness is just a prototype,’ Cormanenko said. ‘The lasers and the cameras chew up a lot of power, so the battery will die after about forty-five seconds. You’ll have to stay close to me all that time. Got it?’

  ‘Got it,’ Fero said.

  ‘Once we’re inside, we’ll split up and search for the bombs. If you find one, you can disarm it by removing the detonator from the payload. You remember what it looks like?’

  She had told him twice in the car. ‘A round thing with two prongs, stuck into something that looks like a big lump of clay.’

  ‘Right,’ Cormanenko said. ‘And what do you have to do first?’

  ‘Break the alarm circuit.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The red wire,’ Fero said.

  ‘And if you see any of the terrorists?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’ He had programmed her number into the phone Sloth gave him.

  ‘Good,’ Cormanenko said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They stepped out of the car and tiptoed towards the fence. Thick creepers had wound up the posts, making it easy to stay out of sight as they approached. But between the fence and the hospital, there was no cover. The long grass quivered in the raging wind.

  It felt like wading into quicksand. Easy, until you tried to turn back.

  Cormanenko approached the fence and dug out her cutters and pliers. She looked up at the razor wire coiled along the top. ‘The steel strip in the centre is taut,’ she said. ‘It’s designed to spring outwards if you snip it.’

  She reached u
p through a gap in the coil and pinched the centre strip with one pair of pliers. ‘Hold this,’ she said.

  Fero carefully eased his hand between the barbs and held the pliers in place. ‘Now what?’

  Cormanenko used the other pair of pliers to clamp the strip a metre further along. Then she held up the cutters and snipped through the middle.

  Fero felt the wire try to spring free, but he held on.

  ‘Good,’ Cormanenko said. ‘Now ease your side away from mine.’

  Fero leaned away. The tension in the wire lessened.

  ‘Okay. Now let go.’

  Fero shut his eyes and released the pliers. There was a jingling sound, but nothing flung out at him. When he looked, the coils of razor wire had pulled away, leaving enough room for him and Cormanenko to climb over the fence. Cormanenko flicked a switch on her harness. When she turned to face Fero, the laser diodes attached to her chest swivelled automatically towards Fero’s eyes.

  ‘You ready?’ she whispered.

  Fero nodded.

  Cormanenko flicked another switch, and disappeared.

  Fero had expected to see a slight shimmering in the air. But Cormanenko was just gone.

  Most invisibility cloaks worked by shrouding the wearer in optical metamaterials, which bent light around them. According to Cormanenko they were only effective in darkness or fog.

  This device was more complex. A stereoscopic camera on her back captured her surroundings. A computer processed the image. Another camera strapped to her chest scanned the environment for anything that looked like an eyeball. Then the laser diodes below it beamed the processed image directly into the retina. To the viewer, she – and anyone standing immediately beside her – simply wasn’t there.

  Cormanenko reappeared a split second later. She had turned towards the fence so the diodes could no longer find Fero’s eyes.

  She scrambled up the vines and bars. ‘Come on,’ she whispered.

  Fero climbed over the fence after her, gripping the sticky branches, and dropped down within the grounds of Melzen Hospital.

  Even knowing that he was invisible as long as he stayed close to Cormanenko, he felt horribly exposed. Gear Eruz could be right behind those windows.