“Lorenzo said you think you’re trying to save the world.”
“The world is going to hell one way or another. I can’t do anything about that. It’s not about saving the world, it’s about picking my battles. It’s not very often that you find yourself in a position to stop something horrible, when shit like this happens, you know? My whole life, I’ve been governed by forces beyond my control. Not anymore. This time, I’m fighting on my own terms. I took ownership of this. That’s how I cope. That, and having people I can talk to on bad days.”
He brushed a few strands of his long hair out of his eyes. “I didn’t have anybody. Lorenzo was gone, Jill wasn’t the same, and I don’t have many friends. I avoided people. I thought I was going crazy. I couldn’t prove I saw anything.”
“What is it you saw there?”
Reaper didn’t say anything for a long moment, looking at me askance. “You know . . . the battle.” He wasn’t telling me everything, and then he tried to change the subject. “After everything that happened, you’d think it would leak out somehow, but nada. Some bullshit on Russian TV about separatists and militias and that’s it. It didn’t even make Sea to Shining Sea AM.”
“That’s the world we live in, man, secret battles in places the world doesn’t care about. I swear, someday I’m going to publish my memoirs.”
“Heh . . . Cool, man. I’ll buy a copy if you autograph it.” Reaper seemed a bit happier. “Thanks for talking, Val. What did you want?”
Now it was my turn to be weird and traumatized. “Have you ever heard of a program called XK Indigo?”
Reaper tilted his head to the side, giving me a puzzled look. “Whoa . . . Dude. Holy shit. Why didn’t I see it?”
“See what?”
Reaper ignored my question and turned back to his computer. A few mouse clicks pulled up a folder labeled Valentine Stuff.
“You have a file on me?”
“Of course I do. I have a file on everybody. Lorenzo asked me to put it together before we sprung you from North Gap.”
Of course. “So what do you know?”
“Lots. You’re not very good about information management.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy.”
“That book you want to write? I could probably save you a bunch of time.” he said, scrolling through his files. “You’re like the most interesting man in the world. But XK Indigo? No wonder Majestic wants you dead. That’s some weirdass voodoo tech right there.”
“So, you’ve heard of it?”
“Of course I have. Everybody tuned in has. I just didn’t think it was real. It’s supposed to be about making perfect assassins for the government. I can’t tell you what’s real because most of the hard drives Lorenzo recovered from North Gap were encrypted enough that I couldn’t do anything with them.”
“You can’t, I don’t know, hack into the encrypted drives?”
Reaper sighed. “No, I can’t hack into it.” He made finger quotes when he said the word “hack”. “It doesn’t even work like that. I wish guys like you and Lorenzo would take a computer class or something. Cracking is math, not sorcery. Without a key there isn’t a whole lot I can do. But not everything was encrypted. That Silvers lady was sloppy at times. All I’ve got is stuff like this. Here, you might find this interesting.” He opened a video and set it to playing.
The camera was focused on me, strapped into a chair. My head was shaved and I was extremely pale and thin. Numerous wires connected my body to different monitoring devices. An overlay in the margins of the screen displayed my vital info, like heart rate and other physiological conditions. They were sticking me with needles and probes.
“I don’t remember this.”
“There are dozens of videos like this. Most of them are uninteresting. This one is flagged, though. Watch.”
My vital signs started spiking and falling, fluctuating rapidly. From the convulsions, I think they were shocking me.
“Turn it up.”
“There’s no sound.”
“What the hell were they doing to me?”
“It’s labeled negative stimuli. I think they were running a current through different parts of your brain. Mostly it looks like they were trying to piss you off.”
“It worked,” I said, noting how I began to thrash around in the chair.
“Is this uncomfortable for you?”
“Yes? A little. It’s weird.”
“Okay, good. Keep watching. This is where it gets interesting.” With my thrashing and convulsing, I managed to get my hand free of the restraints. A black-clad security man moved in to resecure my arm.
“That’s Smoot. I remember that son of a bitch. Hey, what . . .” I trailed off as most of the visible readouts flatlined. I had stopped thrashing. My vitals all leveled off, abruptly. I recognized the Calm. As Smoot approached, I reached out, trying to grab him. He hit me with his baton, but I managed to get my one free hand on a pen in his shirt pocket. As Smoot leaned forward to push me back into the chair, I plunged it into his leg just above the kneecap. Smoot howled soundlessly, grasping his knee and falling backward. Another guard, Reilly I think, shot me with his Taser and zapped me while Smoot crawled away. Remarkably, the Taser seemed to do nothing, and I quickly freed my other hand.
With shocking speed, I went after the guards. It was obvious I was going to kill them.
But then Dr. Silvers said something. Without the sound there was no way to tell what it was. And just like that, I stopped, went back to the table, and sat down, meek as could be.
The video ended.
“I don’t . . . I don’t remember this. I remember, vaguely, stabbing Smoot with the pen, but this?” A sense of dread crept into me. Seeing a video of you doing something you don’t remember is unsettling.
“Dr. Silvers had the file flagged as a success, that the conditioning was working. Now this is conjecture, okay, most of it is probably bullshit, so take this for what it’s worth. The XK Indigo conditioning is like brainwashing. It’s supposedly meant to heighten someone’s abilities while making them easier to control. The idea is that your loyalty is ensured through a series of psychological controls and triggers.”
“My God. This is . . . it’s almost sick.”
“Yeah. Your former employers are some real, evil bastards.”
“What did they put in my head, Reaper?”
“Beats me, man. I don’t know if you were conditioned to take orders from just that one doctor, or if there was more. There’s no clue in here. I can send you everything I’ve got so you can check it out when you’ve got time.”
“I think that would be best,” someone said. Reaper and I both turned around to see Lorenzo standing in the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been watching, or if he’d seen the video of me rendered into a murderous zombie. “And you’re welcome for my rescuing your ass from that place.”
I stood up. “What did you do with Smoot, anyway?”
“I doubt they ever found his body.”
I smiled, just a little.
LORENZO
October 2nd
Jill was sitting up in bed. Even that much exertion freaked me out a little bit. The two of us had the place to ourselves. Valentine had gone back to work and Reaper had finally crashed. I’d seen him work in streaks before, not sleeping for days at a time when he got all spun up, but never like this. Since Jill had gotten shot he’d been bordering on mania, attacking the Montalbans’ networks and finances.
“Try not to move around so much.”
“Quit being a big baby,” Jill muttered as she flipped through the photo album on Reaper’s tablet.
“I just don’t want you to hurt anything.”
“Says mister I got third-degree burns all over my back, but I’m going to walk it off while I shoot down an airplane,” she responded, not looking up from the pictures.
“When you pop some of those staples out and start leaking blood all over, don’t come crying to me. I don’t know if Reaper’s war crimi
nal doctor network makes house calls.”
“I’ll be fine. Except I’m probably never going to wear a two-piece bathing suit again.”
I almost said they’re only scars but I didn’t think that was what a woman was going to want to hear. I sat next to her on the bed. My complaints to the contrary, she was looking a lot stronger, and she was motivated to get back to work, which was good. I changed the subject. “Reaper said Ling stopped by this morning.”
“Yeah.” Jill pointed at the fresh flowers on the desk. “She actually bought me a get well card.”
“Ling is the sweetest paramilitary vigilante I know.”
“She felt guilty for getting me involved and came by to give this big, formal, honor-bound apology. It was adorable. I forgave her. We talked.”
“What about?”
“You know, girl stuff. She’s the only chick over there, and I guess I’m the closes thing she has to a girlfriend. She’s pretty freaked out about . . .” Jill went back to scrolling through the surveillance photos. “Never mind.”
“Whoa. Hang on. You can’t just say something like that and leave me hanging.”
“It’s a secret, Lorenzo. OpSec, you know?”
“Jill . . .”
She sighed. “Okay, don’t tell her I told you. She’d never forgive me. Ling just found out she’s pregnant.”
“From Valentine?”
Jill looked at me like I was stupid. “Yes, from Valentine. But he doesn’t know yet. He’s focused on the mission right now and she doesn’t want to mess him up with it. I told her that was stupid, but you know how intense the Exodus people are. Swear you won’t say a word.”
“I promise.” The idea of Valentine and Ling having babies was amusing, and kind of frightening. I hurried and changed the subject in case Jill was thinking about talking about our future. I pointed out some of the faces in the picture she was looking at. “Shen took those. He was tailing these guys based on the intel you gave Exodus. That’s in front of a bar downtown.”
“I know that one for sure,” Jill picked the middle one, an ugly, stout young man with a squished nose. “The rest, no idea. As far as I know though, he’s just one of the rank and file Montalban goons. Nothing special, usually he’s a driver. I called him Pig Face. He’s got a brother, or at least a guy who looks a lot like him. I call him Pork Chop.”
“Fitting.” All of the Montalban crew she had followed that Jill didn’t have names for, she’d just assigned nicknames. None of them were flattering, Dickhead, Big Ears, Stinky, and so on.
For the last few days Jill had been bored out of her mind, and demanding to help. That was good, because nothing helped you heal like the motivation to get on with life, but I’d told her she still needed her rest. She called me a pendejo, and told me to get her something to do or she was going to walk out of here.
Like I said, Jill was one tough chick.
“Shen tailed Pig Face to a chop shop. He thinks the Montalbans own it.”
“Stolen cars? Really? Is there any criminal enterprise Eddie wasn’t involved with? Drugs, piracy, counterfeiting, you name it,” Jill complained. “It’s like he was trying to be a comic book supervillain.”
“Eddie was a big proponent of diversifying his assets. A lot of this was, I don’t know, like a hobby for him. A game. He was living out a crime boss fantasy by being an actual crime boss, even though he was so rich he didn’t actually benefit, financially, from all the crime.” Most of his power base had been in Asia, with its heart in the Crossroads, but he’d had a little piece of everything in Europe too. While his family’s legit businesses had been out in the open, Eddie had worked in secret. Unlike Kat, he had kept his identity on the down low, and for most of the time I’d worked for him, I hadn’t even been sure Big Eddie was one person.
“It wasn’t just a game. There was a reason for it. I’ve learned a lot about how the Montalbans work. Now Rafael, he was mostly a legit businessman. He owned stock in everything and ran a bunch of companies. But on the side, he used his little brother for everything shady. Rafael’s construction company built most of the high-speed train lines and stations over the last decade. He even bankrolled that new three-hundred-mile-an-hour super train. But on the side, the freight companies still had to pay protection money to Eddie to make sure the trains run on time, and their shipments don’t get stolen. They were in everything, Rafael in the open, Eddie in the dark. That’s why Rafael indulged Eddie’s crime boss fantasy, because it was useful for him. Now, Kat? If anything she’s even more ambitious than her brothers. She wears both hats, CEO and mobster. She’s expanded a lot in just the last year.”
“Regardless, this is a score. This could be the place Kat parks her big armored convoy when she’s not using it. I’ll ask Reaper to see if he can steal some traffic camera footage or something to confirm it.”
“That’s useful. If that’s home base, do you think you could ninja in there and put a tracking device on one of her cars?”
“Maybe.” I liked the way she thought, though I’d been tending more toward a car bomb myself. I didn’t say that though, because she still might be a little sensitive about the topic, and I didn’t want to sound like a hypocrite. “Exodus couldn’t have found this place if you’d not done all that leg work.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better,” Jill said as she went back to flipping through the pictures. “It’s not working. I’m useless stuck here. And since you refuse to leave me alone, I’m making you useless.”
“There’s nothing for me to do,” I lied. There was no shortage of people I could be murdering. “Underhill’s superiors have to know about the nuke by now, so they’ll have no choice but get off their asses and take her out. Gentleman’s agreement be damned, they can’t be that stupid. If that doesn’t work, Romefeller told Valentine they’ve arranged a big secret meeting with all the families, scheduled soon. Once he tells them about Kat having a nuke, they’ll lose their minds, and put out a hit on her.”
“You actually expect the Illuminati or Majestic to come through for us?”
“Sure,” I said, while simultaneously thinking not really. But Jill was recuperating and I wanted to keep her spirits up. “They’ll be motivated.”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass, Lorenzo. You read what Bob thought of those people. If they accomplish something good it’s by accident. All they care about is themselves.”
“Well, having a nuclear bomb go off in Europe has to be bad for business. Majestic has been exposed. Getting blamed for it could destroy them permanently.”
“I like you better when you’re honestly seeing the worst in everyone,” she stated, completely aware that I was full of it. Jill went back to flipping through the pics the Exodus operatives had taken, but she was distracted. “You know, when I was young and naïve I used to dream about taking a romantic trip to Paris someday.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the kind of thing teenage girls think about. It’s the city of love. The Eifel Tower, and the museums, and the cafes, and . . . I don’t know . . . Mimes. But not me. Oh no. When I get here for real, I spend my time skulking around seedy bars and drug dens spying on terrorists, and then get shot stealing a truck. I’m just lucky I guess.”
“Fire your travel agent.”
Jill sighed. “On the bright side, Paris will always be where I found out you were still alive. That’s what matters.”
“Our fancy boat dinner date was nice.”
“Yes, you did good with the boat ride.” She grinned. “As for the rest? Sometimes a woman just needs to vent.”
That was the regular old Jill I knew and loved, even with bullet holes in her side she was in a better mood than I was. I couldn’t even make a crack about this being a honeymoon. It was kind of hard to describe a relationship when you didn’t legally exist. Our fake identities in the Bahamas had been legally married, so I guess you could say our status was complicated. “Once this is over, I’ll take you on a real romantic getaway.”
“Don’t laugh. I’ve looted a diamond exchange. You should see the size rock I could get you for a ring.”
“Why, Lorenzo, is that an official proposal?”
I shrugged.
“Man, that’s some emotionally stunted bullshit. You suck at this. Next time you . . . hang on.” Jill looked like she’d seen a ghost. She showed me the picture. “Where’d Shen take this one?”
It was a man walking along a sidewalk, wearing a gray suit and black shirt. He was tall, athletic, mid-forties, prematurely white hair, and a scar that split his chin. He was in the process of taking a fat envelope from Pig Face or Pork Chop.
“Outside Le Bon Marche.” I remembered that because it was across the street from the best gourmet grocery store in Paris. “Shen said the white-haired guy was smooth. Good field craft. No words. The exchange was a drop pass, and they both kept walking. Since Shen didn’t know who he was, he peeled off and tailed him for a while, but lost him when he got to his car. Exodus couldn’t ID him.”
“I can. I’ll never forget that face.” Jill had gotten a lot more serious. There was no flippant nickname here. I could tell Jill was shaken.
“What’s special about him?”
Jill was staring at the photo so hard it was like she was trying to burn a hole through the screen with her eyes. “This is the man Katarina was meeting in London.”
“The one that had you beaten?”
She nodded slowly.
My anger was building. Even if he wasn’t working with the Montalbans, I’d kill this particular fucker on principle. “What do you know about him?”
Chapter 13: The Limey
LORENZO
Paris
October 3rd
“The target’s name is Aaron Stokes, mercenary, British national, and all around scumbag.” I told the Exodus operatives as they passed around the photo Shen had taken. There were seven of us in the smoky little back room of the underground gambling establishment. It was the kind of place where shifty people could gather and count on not being noticed. We’d reserved the room for a private game. Private game, planning a hostage rescue, it was all good. “I want to hit his place ASAP.”
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 30