X

by J. D. Glass

  That tone, she decided, really pissed her off. Charli flicked her thumb against the match head, forcing it against the striker. Nothing happened.

  “Charli,” John said quietly, “it won’t work. And if it does, you’ll die. That would be an unfortunate waste of good genetic material.”

  “I’m just a monkey, John,” Charli answered him evenly as she flicked again, harder. This time she was rewarded when the sharp burn of sulfur stung the pad of her finger. She calculated the time, she calculated the risk. There were barely seconds left. Wanna lead? Gotta bleed—and this is really gonna hurt. She knew she had to do this.

  “Never,” Charli said grimly, her eyes fixed on his, “trust a monkey with matches and dynamite.” She tossed the matchbook into the puddle that still lay on the stone table. Once again, for the space of one full breath, four heartbeats, and just enough time for that same heart to sink, nothing happened.

  She stared, startled when the whole book suddenly caught, sending a blue flame leaping up and racing along the shiny wet contours of the frog’s last home.

  The room seemed to gather, tighten, as if it held its breath, taking it from her own lungs, and the sudden light was almost blinding, the very air seeming to ignite around her. It had been quicker than she’d expected.

  She felt two things almost simultaneously, the sharp impact just under her shoulder blade and the push against the small of her back that sent her tumbling off balance with the same give and drop of the wave when it let her go.

  Every wave hits the shore, she thought just before the flare took over with a sound that seemed to ribbon the ground beneath her even as it painfully invaded her head through her ears, quashed the air from her chest, and then every part of her squeezed before it all went blank.

  $ /hacking/cleared_stack test

  Turtles All the Way Down

  The decision had been made behind closed doors at some higher level of Olympus Elaine was not privy to. Dr. Seung had been found near Charli and was being held, but he had special status and would either be repatriated somewhere after he’d been pumped for information, or more than likely, be put to work in a government-funded lab in exchange for his “freedom.” She shouldn’t have been surprised, not really. After all, Dr. Seung was a true leader in his field and he, like others who had once worked for enemy regimes, was considered an asset—an unfriendly one, but still valuable.

  The official approach to him was, in fact, no different than it had been to many other such enemy experts including—and Elaine shook her head at the irony of it all—Erich Traub, the man who had been head of germ warfare research under the Nazi regime, reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command. After the war, he had been recruited to become what he would later be called: the father of biological research at Plum Island.

  It was funny in a way that didn’t make her laugh at all as she weighed the implications, what the interests of National Security—words that had been a touchstone for her for so long—could do to one’s sense of ethics, and how those ethics seemed so malleable when applied by the people she worked for.

  Right and wrong worked on a completely different scale, measured different values, and suddenly, she wasn’t certain that she understood, or that she wanted to. Disappointed, she realized, that’s what she was. Disappointed with herself, with what it all seemed to mean, for the nagging sense of dissatisfaction she couldn’t seem to shake.

  It had been so very simple for such a long time, her whole life, really: there were good guys, and there were bad guys. Dr. Seung, who would have definitely been in her estimation a bad guy, complete with all sorts of evidence to prove that, was to be, in essence, rewarded. Charli, who the Treas had originally thought despite evidence to the contrary was a bad guy, not only wasn’t, but had put herself on the line, ignorant perhaps of the larger ramifications of Romello’s plan but willing to try to stop him anyway. That definitely made her a good guy. Her reward, though, was to be forced… The thickness that grew in Elaine’s throat forced her to think of something else, and since her last few hours had involved a convoluted discussion of her career, she focused on that, instead.

  She had not only done her job, but done it exceptionally well, yet as compensation she was to be temporarily pulled from the job she was so damned good at while brass cleared her name with the Treas. The officers and agents she had trained with there would never trust her again, or so she’d been told. She’d sworn the same oaths, held the same loyalties, had done what any single one of them would have done, and sure, there’d be some grudging admiration for her from others among her rank set, but still…it made her skin feel like it had twisted on her frame.

  To add to the discomfiture, she, who had gotten close enough to Romello to be moments shy of actually apprehending him—oh, she’d been asked repeatedly to explain her methods, her deductive reasoning, had even tried to demonstrate on a whiteboard schematically the path she’d taken to arrive at her conclusions, but what was to her a single clear straight line, an easily read path from one point to another was, given the repeated requests for clarification, a route apparent only to her.

  “Enough, Harper,” her handler said, halting her with a firm wave as she drew her dotted line from one found fact to a deduction. He, the attending clerk, and two officers she did not know exchanged brief glances. “Please sit.”

  No one spoke again until she’d settled, and it was the officer with the heavier braid that crossed his head cover—scrambled eggs, as the gold insignia was commonly and sometimes derisively referred to—that told her their plans. “You’ve done great work, but you’re compromised in the field for now. You’re good with this technology crap—so six months in techno-wonderland. We need someone with skills like yours to figure out the chatter.”

  “This is a great position for you,” her handler leaned forward and said, cutting through the heavy silence that had settled around the table. “It’s an opportunity for you to”—he coughed delicately—“reacquaint.”

  He cleared his throat under the steely gaze the brass gave him and silence weighed heavy in the small conference room. Moments later, outside the door after they’d all exited, he was neither delicate nor careful as he motioned her aside.

  “Listen, Harper,” he began, “you fucked up. This could have wrapped differently—you had the opportunity to give the Treas a rock-solid alibi on Riven or you could have let her sink with it. Instead, you let whatever your personal issues are—issues you didn’t have a few months ago—interfere. Okay, fine. You didn’t want to do that, no problem. But—”

  The blatant untruth of the statement burned through her and Elaine shocked herself with her own temerity, unable to stop the words that scorched their way from her mind to her lips. “But nothing,” she interrupted vehemently. “Someone internal dropped the dime on me and you know that. That alibi wouldn’t have mattered—and face it, I got you rock-solid evidence, and I got you someone who actually might know more about what Romello’s future plans could be.” She breathed hard a moment and felt heat rise through her ears.

  “I fucked up? I did?” she asked with sarcastic incredulity as she stared into eyes the color of a winter sky and she voiced the suspicion that had settled, a dark and malignant seed, in her mind. “Whose ass are you covering for, anyway?” Right then and there she knew she’d gone too far, but she also found she didn’t care even as she watched his face set into hard lines.

  “Enough, Harper,” he snapped coldly. “Don’t think you know more than you do—you’re on need-to-know only status like everyone else. You spend the next six months the right way. Refamiliarize and reimmerse yourself in our internal protocols, or find yourself another line of work—I’m sure that would make your parents, make your father, really proud.”

  Frustration roiled silently through her as he turned on his heel and left her there in the corridor. She visualized what her future would be. Six months chained to a desk, not even working in analytics or communications but in pure cry
ptology. It wasn’t that it was hard work, not at all. It merely bored her to the point of depression.

  Elaine was startled to realize that the job change and the way it had been handled, the patently false why of it, infuriated her.

  This, she thought with a burst of insight, this is what happened to Romello, what turned him. Not one event, but many, compounded, confusing, and something in his mind had…broken, snapped, then restructured things in a way that made the world make sense for him again. The difference between him and me, though, she decided, pausing for a moment in her progress, is I’m not a total nut-burger.

  His plans were hopefully in ruins for now, though, and as for himself… Romello had seemingly disappeared, neither body nor parts found—only a final token: the watch he’d been given for his twenty-fifth year of service had been found by the cleanup crew, not far from remains of the laptop, the hands set at two minutes to midnight, and otherwise pristine aside from the fact that it had stopped there.

  She couldn’t shake the suspicion that someone on the team had helped him, and she was certain there were good reasons for thinking so—nothing quite as concrete as actual evidence, just a chain of events and circumstances leading to specific conclusions.

  It couldn’t have been too hard, Elaine thought as she walked with quick, efficient steps across the compound and reviewed what she knew.

  A successful recovery or attack was made of three distinct and essential parts: surprise, speed, and violence of action.

  The team had arrived what felt like hours later although it had only been scant moments behind her. It wasn’t hard to figure out where to go—as solid as the surrounding structure was, it wasn’t soundproof, nor was it airtight. She followed her ears and her nose, the scent of gas drawing her onward. Light flared from the small space beneath the door even as it flashed through the steel mesh reinforced window, and she saw the panel on the wall, the inset with its plexi cover, and ripped it off, then yanked on the wire hoops that secured the shut-off valves to give them each a hard and vicious twist. The petal-like knobs dug into her palms even through the flexible gloves Elaine wore, but she didn’t notice.

  An alarm went off, sending a series of lights flashing in the hall, a swirl of amber and shadow as they spun in their fixtures.

  The door was already too hot and as she spied about for a fire extinguisher, a heavy thud sounded, sending something caroming off the door from the interior. The extraction crew swept in while Elaine forced herself to not think about what might be happening in there while two operatives set up the “gate crasher”—basically a modified Alford strip. Speed.

  She had several Alford strips herself—narrow and hollow tubes filled with an explosive resin and set into a water-filled frame, directing the blast in a specific direction. The gate crasher was the same, only larger, about the size of a boogie board. It blasted out an entrance about two and a half feet wide by four feet tall—without any burning debris to contend with for the entering team. Doors, she found herself mentally repeating from a long-ago training session as she assumed a position with the team, we don’t need no stinkin’ doors.

  The fuse was quickly set and the device detonated with a strangely muffled burst, blowing through the wall. Surprise.

  Even as water and bits of the plastic rained down, she and the team members rushed through the opening and into the lab. Violence of action—very well accomplished.

  Without a true source of fuel to burn other than the gas, the only fire that remained was that on the shelves, the paint of the ceiling, and the paperwork, and even that smoldered to a fizzled mess under the antiquated sprinkler system that had automatically gone off—too late to prevent anything but the lab’s annihilation. The six separate workstations appeared almost untouched, the stone impervious to it all—the fire, the foam, the people that moved carefully between. Glassware continued to snap and pop and one member picked up a shredded piece of metal from the floor, about the size of his hand.

  “Nitrogen tank,” he said quietly as they approached the center of the room, and had it been possible, their faces appeared even grimmer as they realized immediately what it meant: the remnant had once been part of a steel container that had more than likely held liquid nitrogen. The heat of the fire had also raised the temperature of the steel, which in turn affected whatever it had contained. That had resulted in rapid sublimation of the contents—the almost instantaneous change from liquid to gas state—and it was the pressure of the expanding gas that had burst and shredded the container.

  “We have casualties!” the front person called and waved them forward.

  It was at that point that whatever control Elaine had possessed, the calm process that had allowed her to plan and execute step by step, shattered as fully as the glass that littered the slippery tiles they walked on.

  She recognized the charred coat, the still frame it covered, and she’d frozen for what seemed like forever—pain and fear mixed to make something cold, something that jabbed icy fingers into her ribs to grab and crush what was beneath them. Unreal, she felt unreal, a witness even as she participated. Dr. Seung, or so his lab coat labeled him, moaned as one person bent over him and someone else reached before she could to find a pulse in Charli’s neck.

  “We need to evacuate them immediately—everything we need’s on the chopper,” one said to the other.

  There was no time to be careful about anything but the most life-threatening of injuries to the two—they’re not bodies, Elaine told herself sharply as she watched them—they’d recovered, and this time the team walked out the remains of the door. Elaine followed behind them automatically.

  She smirked to herself, a half-laugh under her breath. She understood now what Charli had meant when she’d told her earlier about feeling nothing, because nothing was exactly what Elaine felt.

  Her eyes caught the remains of the laptop, the twisted pieces, only the motherboard somewhat intact under the melted frame, then caught the glint of the watch on the floor.

  This was something she could hold on to, make sense of, and she stopped. “Where’s Romello?” she asked, casting about. “We should have another casualty here.”

  Another operative took her arm. “Down the rabbit hole,” she said and pointed to the far wall. That had to have been the source of one of the sounds they’d heard—probably the concussive blast, Elaine concluded as she unthinkingly walked toward the blasted section of wall that opened into an air duct.

  “Agent,” the operative called, and once more caught her arm. “Agent Harper, someone’s already investigating, and the sweep team will be here in”—she glanced down at her wrist—“seconds. Go with the first chopper—get debriefed.”

  Elaine was about to protest—she didn’t really know why, force of habit perhaps, or simply the only thing that she could recognize. “But—”

  “I’m Agent Fowler—go with the team, go with Charli, she’s going to need you.”

  Elaine felt her internal temperature flip from cold to hot, an instant sublimation as dark eyes shone intently at hers. They know, she thought. For half a second she tried again to hold on to what she knew, what she understood, her job, her cover, who she had been. And in the next half second, she gratefully gave in to who she now was. “Thanks, Fowler,” she said quickly, then took off after the retreating team. She barely acknowledged the sweepers she passed as she raced back along her previous route, nor the escort team which she knew in the back of her mind was composed of Navy SEALS—once upon a time, not more than a year or so ago, her father would have been among them—as she went back into the cold night air.

  Elaine could barely see, though she could clearly hear the Black Hawk that had brought them about a dozen yards away, just behind the silhouette of the MH-47. Light spilled from the gaping entrance ramp, and the sparks that occasionally burst from the twin structures beneath the rear rotor made it appear like the gaping hungry mouth of an angry fish. Snow swirled and gleamed around them, a blizzard of wind and white and wet, a
white tide wipe-out on land. It echoed the vortex that spun through her chest as she caught up with the team and boarded.

  *

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on where it had all gone so damned wrong, but reality hadn’t quite sunk in yet for Ben. His shoulders hurt, and he hadn’t expected the pigs to be as efficient as they were in handling him—not that they were excessively gentle, either, he snorted as he was led to what he recognized as a modified Chinook. Both rotors spun with purpose as they approached, and no one made eye contact with him as he was led up the ramp and into the vehicle proper.

  The noise level almost hurt his head and he could hear nothing until the pig put his mouth next to his ear.

  “Right here—sit down,” the government stooge ordered, the words felt more than heard, and Ben complied. A chain was applied to the center of his cuffs and affixed to a D-ring along a track that ran between the steel of the floor and the wall behind him. So much for comfort. They wouldn’t get shit out of him, absofuckinglutely nothing, he determined. They could play all the mind games they wanted: his was better, and he knew it. He didn’t realize how cold he’d been until he began to warm and the tang of oil and electronics filled his nose.

  Disgusting. He snorted and shook his head heartily in a fruitless attempt to clear the smell. The petrochemicals were going to give him cancer, he was sure of it, as he looked around. Snow thundered past the ramp they’d entered from to his right, and the vibrations of the craft—what was it his father had said? “My first time in a helo? Felt like I’d shit all my guts out my ass.”

  Ben completely understood what his father had meant while his own eyes watered and he felt the jelly that filled them vibrate. Still, he tried to see what he could. Farther to his left and several feet away was a compartment—a med bay, he realized from the insignia on the clear window, beyond which had to be the cockpit itself. This was no regular transport, and he quickly assembled the facts. Modified Chinook, seating for almost a dozen along both walls with room, and a med bay…this was a CSAR, Combat Search and Rescue, vehicle. That meant they expected—