Flight of Shadows: A Novel

by Brouwer, Sigmund

  Before he could answer, his phone vibrated. He glanced at a text on the screen. PACKAGE AT LOBBY DESK UNDER NAME U. O. MEE.

  Pierce smiled. He had called in another favor for a priority unofficial delivery of agency material that regulations demanded go through a tight official-supply chain. And now Pierce owed the guy. Big-time.

  “The less you know right now,” Pierce told Holly, “the better for you. Really.”

  He didn’t spell it out further. NI regulations were such that if an agent knew of another agent breaching regulations and didn’t report the breach, both agents were equally guilty.

  “I don’t care about me,” she snapped. “I care that you make it back safe. I can help make sure it happens.”

  “I go in alone, there’s a chance I’ll find out a lot more than I would by sending in choppers and searchlights and a SWAT team.”

  She let out a deep breath. “Get this done, Pierce. Just know that after you’re back, I’ll be putting in a request for a transfer from your little unit.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, thinking of what he’d once told Wilson about Holly. That’ll change. She doesn’t know me yet. “Like I said before, not everyone likes the lone wolf thing.”

  EIGHTY-TWO

  She is remarkable in more ways than you can imagine,” Charmaine told Dawkins and Wilson, as if Caitlyn wasn’t standing there. “As far as I can tell, her skeletal structure is human, but the bones are stronger and lighter. Only x-rays will confirm. Her muscles are stronger, pound for pound, than human muscles. And shortly I’ll be able to confirm blood content.”

  “Eggs?” Dawkins asked.

  “That’s next,” Charmaine said, pointing at a surgery table in the corner of the room. “We’ve got what we need to check. No sense wasting time.”

  It was surreal to Caitlyn. The large room was divided down the center by a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The lighting on her half was subdued, except for lamps hanging directly above some operating beds, casting a harsh, sharp light on the sheets.

  Despite the implied threat of the assorted medical apparatus, Caitlyn could not help but stare at the other side of the glass, where two large, hairy, humanlike creatures were upright on two legs, with stumps for arms. Both had the sides of their heads pressed against the glass. Behind them, a mangled body.

  “They’re curious,” Charmaine told Caitlyn, noticing her gaze. “They can’t hear, but the vibrations on the glass tell them they are not alone.”

  “They?” Caitlyn was shrinking away.

  “Your cousins,” Dawkins snapped. “Let’s get things started.”

  Charmaine snapped back at Dawkins. “It’s natural that she has questions. I promised her I’d be open with her.”

  “You don’t need that kind of emotional engagement,” Dawkins said.

  “She’s going to be stressed enough as it is. If she knows what’s happening, it will make things easier on all of us.”

  “Just get it done,” Dawkins said. “Confirm we’ve got eggs. Confirm her blood has what we need.”

  Caitlyn was still reeling inside. Those hideous creatures were her cousins?

  Her focus changed, however, when she saw Charmaine grab a syringe from a nearby table. It would have been easier to give up. What hope was there?

  But she charged forward, bringing her shackled wrists upward to strike down on the smug man who so casually ordered Charmaine. The other man, the stocky square-headed one with the short, graying red hair, stepped in front of her and swung an arm around her chest and pulled her in close.

  She tried kicking at him, but it was futile.

  His restraint was gentle.

  “I hate this,” he said softly. “But you are saving my son.”

  She tried biting his arm. Then felt the needle jab her thigh.

  “Don’t let her fall,” Charmaine said to the big man. “It’s going to hit her quick.”

  They’d crossed the expansive lawn through shadows of large oaks, the sound of their footsteps cushioned by the thick grass, the sound of cicadas in the heat of the night and, most importantly, protected by the hum of the HVAC unit at the rear of the house.

  With Billy and Theo standing nearby, Pierce knelt beside the HVAC. He had a small flashlight with an intense beam and immediately found both intake vents. The one to the left was for combustion and drew air only when the HVAC needed to pump heat. The other was for fresh air and drew outside air into the house when the interior fans or air conditioning was on. Pierce was not a heating technician; this knowledge was agency 101, as Theo and Billy were about to find out.

  The HVAC’s hum told him the air-conditioning unit had kicked in and was fighting summer heat. Pierce confirmed it by turning his palm upward. He held it close to the intake and felt the sucking motion as it drew exterior air into the unit to be cooled and moved through the house. Pierce pulled open the NI pouch that had been in the U. O. MEE package at the hotel front desk. It was a big lead-lined pouch used specifically for hiding the contents from scanners. Getting it past the checkpoint had been as simple as showing his NI badge and pointing at the NI logo on the side of the pouch.

  Pierce handed out the gas masks—carbon filters that covered the nose and mouth, strapped into place with a couple of elastic bands around the back of the head.

  They’d reviewed how to handle this at the hotel. He wasn’t going to repeat it here.

  All three put the masks into place.

  “Safety off,” Pierce told Billy in a voice muffled by the carbon filters. He handed Billy a dart pistol from the bag and another for himself.

  The big kid checked the mechanism. Pierce did the same. Each pistol had twenty darts for rapid-fire action, each dart with fast-acting tranquilizers. Used when agents wanted to do more than disperse a crowd.

  “Ready for countdown?” Pierce asked Theo.

  The skinny kid’s instructions were to mentally count to sixty. Nothing as complicated as coordinating watches, which neither Billy or Theo had anyway. All Pierce and Billy needed was enough time to get into position. Billy at the rear door. Pierce at the front.

  “Ready,” Theo said, nodding in his gas mask.

  That’s when Pierce pulled the remaining item out of the NI pouch.

  A canister of fear pheromones. Large enough to completely infiltrate a four-story hotel. With all the chances Pierce was taking here, at least he could guarantee saturation of every single cubic inch of the interior of the house.

  “You’ll feel no pain,” Charmaine said, as she leaned over Caitlyn. “It will take about twenty minutes. But you won’t notice any time passing either.”

  It had taken a couple of minutes to get Caitlyn into place. She was strapped to one of the operating tables. Arms at her side. Legs apart. Gagged. Charmaine held up another syringe. “This is a hormone that will encourage your body to produce extra eggs over the next months. There will be few if any side effects. I promise.”

  She patted Caitlyn’s upper thigh, then injected.

  Under the influence of narcotics, Caitlyn felt euphoric, barely noticed the jab.

  “As for getting some eggs now,” Charmaine explained. “I’ll be using an ultrasound guide. It’s small and accurate. I use it to drain the follicles that contain your eggs. You won’t feel much. Most of the eggs will be frozen for our research, but some will be fertilized in a test tube. We’ll implant one of them into you and let the others divide.”

  The two men were still in the room. Caitlyn was dimly aware that she should have felt some kind of resistance to a procedure so intimate in their presence, but the drugs made her beyond caring.

  Out of focus, Charmaine’s face was still looming above her. Smiling, as if Caitlyn were a child in a dentist chair. Charmaine held up the tubelike instrument that she was about to use to violate Caitlyn.

  Then came blackness. The sensation of cloth on her face. They had hooded her again.

  Caitlyn heard the tube drop and clatter on the floor. In her drug haze, to Caitlyn it seemed like Char
maine’s scream was delayed, the way thunder rolls a few seconds after a lightning strike. And the scream, distorted in Caitlyn’s perception, seemed low and rumbling too, as if the sound were slowed down.

  In the blindness of her hood, Caitlyn’s mind was too altered to completely understand what was happening, and this realization terrified her, washing away whatever euphoria had helped her float along.

  She heard other screaming too. Realized it was coming from her own mouth.

  And her frenzied panic flung her body from side to side against the straps.

  Then the mercy of total unconsciousness.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  Pierce stood beside the front door, out of sight. Hiding was unnecessary though. Pheromone-induced panic attacks left the victim incapable of coherent thoughts. Pierce could have been waiting in full view, holding a large and bloody butcher knife, and it wouldn’t stop anyone inside from fleeing through the opening.

  His own mental count put it at three minutes. Which meant that two minutes had passed since Theo would have activated the canister at the intake vent. About enough time for the system to draw that air all through the house.

  Pierce heard the screams. Prepared himself.

  The front door crashed open.

  After that, it truly was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  He waited until the man had passed him and given him a large target. Thhhttt! He fired a dart into the back of the first person who had flailed out through the doorway.

  Then a second. A third.

  All three managed to stagger almost to the bushes at the edge of the property before falling.

  Pierce stayed in position at the doorway. The tranks would keep those three down for at least five minutes.

  Pierce left his gas mask in place. Just a whiff of pheromones from the interior of the house would send him into a panic too.

  He listened for screams. Heard only silence.

  Counted to another sixty.

  Agency procedure 101.

  House was clear.

  He jogged around the side of the house and found Billy.

  “Anyone come out your way?” Pierce asked.

  “No sir,” Billy said from behind his face mask.

  “Then lets get Theo,” Pierce said. He had plastic tie handcuffs ready in his back pocket. “Three came out my side. And all of them are down.”

  Totally without any sense of reason, Caitlyn’s mind surged back to consciousness. She screamed and bucked and flailed uselessly against the straps that held her in place on the table, oblivious to pain as the edges of the straps cut through the skin of her wrists and ankles.

  She was also oblivious to the sound of great thumps as the hybrids, in equally blind unreasoning, battered against the glass barrier that held them prisoners, their panic and intense muscular power outweighing the disadvantage of their shortened limbs.

  Caitlyn continued her epilepsy of terror until the pheromones, drugs, sheer exhaustion, and stress forced her back into unconsciousness.

  She didn’t hear the sound of shattering glass.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Choppers,” Theo said.

  Pierce and Theo and Billy had just reached the bodies at the edge of the yard, slumped figures facedown beneath the trees with decorative floodlights throwing shadows behind them. Pierce had been prepared for up to a dozen people, had plenty of plastic handcuff ties in his back pocket.

  Pierce looked up.

  “He hears them,” Billy said.

  Pierce removed his gas mask. They were far enough away from the house and upwind of it. Seconds later, he heard the choppers too. Pierce followed the noise with his ears, and then that became unnecessary as searchlights opened up from the darkness of the sky. Four blocks away. East. Close enough to understand that backup had betrayed him. Far enough away, he’d be safe from the distraction. Once the SWAT team discovered there was no threat at the false address, no way would they dare incur more wrath of Influentials by sweeping the entire neighborhood.

  As Theo and Billy removed their own gas masks, Pierce yanked the darts loose from the backs of the three from the house, expertly handcuffed their hands behind them with plastic ties, rolled them over, and used his flashlight to confirm their identities. Wilson. Dawkins. Charmaine.

  No Caitlyn.

  He felt the blackness of failure. The only way this op would have been justified is if he’d found them with Caitlyn. Wilson would have been exposed for unauthorized abduction of an agency target; that would have tied it to Dawkins and Charmaine and a widening investigation that would clear Pierce’s rogue actions.

  Unless Caitlyn was dead and he could find her body in the house.

  Pierce slapped Wilson’s face. Patty-cake. Fast, light slaps, designed to deliver as much stimulus as possible.

  From his days as a field op, Pierce was familiar with the regressive stages of a fear pheromone blast. During the panic scatter and subsequent fetal ball, targets were incapable of coherent thought. This lasted roughly ten minutes, with about a five-minute lag before regaining motor skills. During that stage, casualties felt a mild euphoria of relief combined with thought process recovery. Many spoke freely, and a majority would confess intimate and inane details of their lives in rapid-fire, often to comical effect. Despite the agency’s best efforts, many of these confessions had become lore among field ops.

  Pierce knelt beside Wilson. When Wilson’s breathing shifted from ragged to even, Pierce spoke in a friendly tone. “Hey, buddy,” Pierce said. “Wilson. You all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Wilson said. “Wow, the stuff hits you, doesn’t it? Remember our training, when each of us got blasted with it? There was that blonde, she had a lot to say about you, didn’t she, when she came out of it? Like truth serum. Would have been okay, except her friend had your name on her lips too. Those were the days, weren’t they, Pierce? Before crap like this, when all you had to worry about was how you spent your weekends.”

  “Different times,” Pierce said, knowing he had a short window to get Wilson to spill in the same way. “Makes me wonder how we got here. Never guessed you’d flip me like this. Thought we were friends.”

  “Crap, crap, crap,” Wilson said. He began to sob. “Hated doing it. Anyone else might have been okay. But not you.”

  “Give me a reason,” Pierce said. “Let me believe.”

  “Reason, reason, reason. Yeah, reason. You can kill me now, bud, but if I had to do it all over, even knowing it would end like this, I’d still do it.”

  “How’s it going to end?”

  “Already ending. Thrown away my career. Thrown away your trust. Thrown away your respect. Had to do it. Would do it over. Yup, would do it over. Hate me for it, but I can’t change it.”

  “Why?” Pierce asked.

  “Why, why, why. Guys like you and me, what we’ve seen over the years, watching someone else’s pain is like water off a duck’s back. Right? Until it’s your own kid. Pierce, I had to do it. Little Luke. Needed the blood. It’s a choice that’s no choice, between him and you. You can take care of yourself. He can’t. He’s dying. This blood, this magic blood, it’s what’s keeping him alive. I did what I could to protect you all along, but in the end, knowing if it came down to Luke or you, I had to go with Luke. Someday, if you have kids of your own, maybe you’d understand. Put me in jail; take away my career; don’t let me see Luke again; even shoot me. It’s all worth it, the price to keep him alive. Oh, hell, look at me. Bawling my eyes out.”

  “See any agency people around?” Pierce asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Wilson said. “Nope. None.”

  “Didn’t want this going down officially until I had a chance to hear you out. Decided I’d be judge and jury. Hoped there was a way I’d understand.”

  “Can’t tell you I’m sorry for what I did,” Wilson said. “I’m not. Just sorry for how it turned out.”

  “It’s what I needed to hear,” Pierce said. Maybe there was a way to rescue all of this in the next f
ew minutes.

  Good hunters prepared for the moment. Prepared thoroughly. Mason knew that and enjoyed the painstaking pursuit of details it demanded. It was what had made him legendary as a bounty hunter.

  It was a testament to this that he was here, now knowing that Caitlyn was trapped inside the house, with Billy and Theo and the uppity jerk from the agency in his sights.

  But preparation wasn’t everything. Good hunters also needed luck.

  Mason’s luck was that Pierce’s pursuit of the man he’d called Wilson had taken them to the edge of the property, almost to the landscaped bushes that hid Mason.

  Not only had it given Mason the perfect place to overhear what he needed to learn, but there was little open ground he’d have to cover to pounce.

  The big stupid one had eluded him once, so he shouldn’t underestimate him again. Same with the pesky little one.

  Still, the situation demanded that he first take out Pierce. Pierce was the most dangerous. And he owed Pierce. Pierce was the one who’d broken his arm back in Appalachia. Mason hated Pierce almost as much as he hated Caitlyn.

  Mason took a moment to visualize how he was going to do it. He had a couple of weapons to choose from, but what gave him satisfaction was his knife. Mason loved knife work, and before this one began, he knew how it was going to end.

  When he was ready, he crept a couple of steps to a small opening between the bushes. He’d be invisible, but even if he wasn’t, their attention was on the people on the ground.

  No hesitation now.

  Mason started from a squat, pushed upward and outward, and covered the distance between him and Pierce in three large, quiet steps on the soft grass.

  Pierce reached for Wilson’s wrists, intending to free his friend.

  Something in his subconscious gave him a twinge. A primordial warning of danger. Could have been a sound, could have been a vibration; it was nothing he’d be able to articulate, even given time.