Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  “Hup! Hup! Hup!”

  Thomas stalked up and down the line as his squad sat at their little desks like fucking preschoolers. They’d spent all day observing color, texture, pattern, and this was supposed to help something? Let her just wait until he filed his report with the colonel.

  The sound spectrum tests had been creepy. Cracking branches, cricket calls, subliminal tones that made his scalp prickle but which he couldn’t really hear. It had been hard to hear some of them over the growling of his stomach. There’d been little water and no food. And having a training round bounced off his ass after four hours of sleep certainly wasn’t improving his perceptions or his mood.

  “Eyewitnesses are unreliable,” Thomas barked at some poor sap farther down the line. Lawrence maybe. “But you have to be the perfect eyewitness. No matter how tired. No matter how distracted by physical hardship. You must be able to recognize, distill, and act instantly and reliably. Friend or foe. Civilian or lethal hazard.”

  What? Was she a fucking mind-reader now?

  Next flash.

  He rocked back in his seat. Thomas had a bloody Abrams tank inside the missile silo? Several of the others swore at the sheer size of the thing, but finally he was on his own turf. He could make up a list of a dozen items about those without even looking. He’d always loved armored cav, but had joined the wrong damned corps. Didn’t expect to wash out as a pilot, now he was just a fuckin’ Air Force MP grunt. He scribbled his list ignoring Thomas and her god-damned “Hups!” He’d show her tight ass who knew his shit.

  “Pens down.”

  He snapped his to the desk and kicked his legs out in front of him. Maybe she’d trip on them and break her goddamn neck.

  Thomas made no comment as she gathered their papers.

  She hit a button on the remote in her hand and the first light came up and stayed on this time.

  He was right, the first mannequin had big tits. No other real surprises. Jeans and a bikini top. Hard to miss. Brunette like Thomas. He preferred blonde and built like the blond senior airman. Slim and tight in all the right spots. He’d been so close to getting there, but now Thomas had screwed that up too. Big bitch and little bitch.

  Click.

  Mr. Gray Suit Business Guy. No scar. Crap. Four right. Double crap. No briefcase. Instead, an Uzi sub-machine gun, pointed right at his face. Shit. He tried to lean sideways out of the sights, but it seemed to follow him.

  He checked back with the bikini babe. Shit and hell! A Skorpion machine-pistol held hip high. Plain as day. Probably knock her on her pretty ass held that way, but not before it chewed up anyone staring at those big tits.

  Third light. Abrams, bloody big boy. Okay, just a damn big photo. Still impressive.

  Tracks blown off. He’d missed that.

  “Fuck!” He leapt out of his seat knocking the chair over backwards. Kneeling right in front of the Abrams, a mannequin that looked piss-in-the-pants real. A slender whip of a street-gang boy with a narrow face and one of those ratty goatees squatted between the treads. A long knife cocked back, ready to throw.

  The mannequin whipped the knife right at him.

  Frozen, Dave couldn’t dodge or get away. Time slowed down until he could see every flip and turn of the glittering blade.

  With blinding speed, the boy flipped six more blades, one at each person along the row, all thrown before the first hit him. A shot rang out from down the line, training round some part of his brain cataloged the sound, as the first blade struck his own chest.

  Point first.

  He was dead and hadn’t even reached for his weapon.

  He watched it plunge in up to the hilt even as he threw himself backwards.

  The hilt bounced off his chest and the spring-loaded training blade that had disappeared into the handle reemerged. It clattered hollowly to the ground even as he collapsed backward over his fallen chair and sprawled to the floor.

  His head banged the floor hard enough that the room spun and his vision tunneled for a long moment.

  Well, he knew one thing for sure.

  He was fucked.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jeff rested his forehead on the cool, stainless steel of the tabletop. It did nothing to calm his nerves no matter how much he willed it to do so. Days? Weeks? How long had he been here? He couldn’t tell. Sometimes when they woke him it felt like an hour after he’d gone to sleep. Other times, unable to sleep, he’d listened to nothing for hours before they came for him.

  There were two places. A narrow, sound-proofed cell where he ate his meals, slept on a bare cot, without pillow or blanket, and used the airline-style toilet, real right down to the sucking air and blue whatever it was. No sound, no vibration entered the cell. And then this place. A twelve-by-twelve foot cinder-block room where his interrogations took place. No mirrored walls. No obvious cameras. Just a four-by-four stainless steel table and two chairs.

  He heard the sharp smack as the handleless steel door slid sideways into the wall like a bad Star Trek episode. No fancy talking elevator out there, just another blank concrete wall. Institutional curdled lemon color exactly like all the others. He’d given up looking.

  The footsteps of yet another anonymous person in uniform that he knew he’d never seen before. Every interrogator was new. Every one asked the same questions in the same order and then departed. It was as if they couldn’t believe he was a chef and nothing more. Most of the questions had to do with his association with EMS. Any initial desire to protect Mandy had evaporated after the third session. They’d started that session with a training film on methods of torture commonly used during interrogations.

  He’d answered every question in full since then. The main point being that he didn’t know anything about them since they were a dozen idealists over a quarter of a century before.

  That had been ten or twenty sessions ago.

  His brain had long since cataloged the pattern of questions. He could answer them without thinking. Hell, he might as well get a jump on the whole process. He didn’t bother to raise his throbbing head or open his eyes.

  “Jeffrey Myron Davis, fifty-six years old. Former environmental analyst, first for the US Army and later for a private firm.” He’d never said the name, he wasn’t sure why, and they never asked. Some sort of a secret dance they’d worked out. You can pretend that we don’t already know all about you and we’ll let you.

  “Most recently the host of the number one American television live cooking show, Jeff the Chef.” The show felt far away, a piece of the past slipping through his fingers. He clenched his hands into fists hoping to hold onto it, he wasn’t ready to lose that piece of himself. Next topic, Davis. Just move along. That’s your role in this game until you find your get out of jail free card. They’d taken his wallet, he certainly didn’t have the mandatory fifty dollars.

  “I’ve known Phillip Peterson since the first day of my freshman year of college, we were assigned as roommates. No, I don’t remember the specific date. When I was twenty-two, served in a very small Army Corps specializing in . . .”

  “What are you babbling about?”

  Female. The first interrogator who was female. Deep voice, the sexy kind. He rolled his head sideways until the tabletop was cool against his ear and opened his eyes to check. Yep! Definitely female. No question about it. He still knew what one looked like.

  Late-twenties, maybe early-thirties. Shoulder length wavy dark hair, worn loose, accenting a nice face, and gray eyes. A worn khaki uniform that wasn’t tight enough to reveal the body beneath, but there was a strength in her stance that made him bet on the lean and powerful side. Heavy, blocky-looking weapon at her side. That was also a first, all the others had been unarmed as if he could steal their weapon.

  Enough stripes on her upper arms, seven or eight of the suckers, that she probably deserved a salute, even if he was a civilian. Definitely the
highest rank to come visit him in his unexplained incarceration. And way too trained to be surprised by his thirty-year past-due-date Vietnam jungle skills that he’d never used after basic training.

  Her expressionless face was the first woman’s face he’d seen since Mandy’s panic-stricken one. Odd. He hadn’t thought about that. The last moment, as the crowd dragged her toward the exit and tears had streamed down her face, it wasn’t sorrow. Her eyes had been wide, wide and staring at his captors.

  She’d recognized his captors or at least their type. The ones he’d never seen.

  Someone had asked him a question.

  Right. The woman in the fatigues.

  “Chef Julio Julio, Dave Roberts to his friends, and I go back about six years to a pastrami sandwich at Katz’s. Been meeting there ever since we—”

  “You’re still babbling about something.” The woman with all the stripes again. Still there.

  “I’m answering your questions.”

  “I didn’t ask any.”

  He had to blink as he thought about it. No, she hadn’t. Once he’d started his routine, his exhausted mind slipped automatically into the dozens of other repeats. He’d pay good money to be allowed to sleep. Almost as much as he’d pay to learn what the hell was going on.

  “You were there at the end?” She didn’t take the opposite chair.

  “Yes.” He answered to be agreeable. End of what? Then it clicked. At the end of Phillip. “Yes,” he offered up as a silent wish for his friend’s soul, assuming it possessed a continued existence.

  There was a silence. She didn’t move, didn’t react.

  “Yes, I watched the best friend of my college days die from the poison meant for me.”

  Still the silence. It wasn’t enough.

  He sat up and looked at her again. He’d underestimated her before. Damn nice to look at. Really pretty of face and figure. He resisted his normal inclination to become completely tongue-tied in front of a beautiful woman, even one twenty years his junior. Yet another fact that would surprise his television audience. Maybe it was the over-sized gun on her hip that made him answer straight.

  “Phillip Peterson’s final words were ‘Fucking Christmas and Thursdays’.”

  She nodded and eased her hand away from the nasty-looking pistol at her hip. Apparently the proof she’d been waiting for.

  “There was one thing more.”

  She waited, gray eyes studying him with so little emotion it sent a cold chill up his spine. He resisted the shiver.

  “He swore right before he collapsed. Forgot about that until now. Said, ‘Hell,’ but slurred it so it came out, ‘Shel’.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The woman’s face changed; a sudden shift of surprise and, perhaps sadness, quickly masked.

  “So, you knew him, too. Look, I liked the guy. I liked him a lot. What the hell is going on here?”

  “I’m going to ask you to come with me.”

  “Ask?” There was a word Jeff hadn’t heard in days, maybe even weeks.

  She nodded.

  “Wow! I feel so honored, and who are you?”

  This time she shook her head not that it mattered, no one else had answered that question in however long he’d been here. Or any other question he’d asked. He was in so far over his head he couldn’t even reach the rim of the cauldron he was being boiled in.

  Grabbing the edge of the table, he levered himself to his feet. She was tall, too. Near enough looked him in the eye at five-foot ten. He gestured for her to lead.

  She pulled a bright blue, USB thumb drive from her pocket, the kind with a metal loop for a keychain. Grabbing his hand, she dragged the loop across his palm leaving a small red mark. He stared at the red mark as it disappeared, no more than the tiniest scrape.

  “Poison?” he whispered as a prickling sensation ran up his arm.

  She merely shook her head. The prickling of his imagination didn’t recede very quickly and left a distinct buzz around the tiny red mark.

  Moving to the door, she rapped sharply and it snapped open. Her weapon was out and fired before he had time to blink. There was no crashing bang. A sharp “whoosh” and a grunt from a man out of sight.

  This wasn’t how it went. Not that he knew about these things except from the movies, but that was enough. She wasn’t on the same side as the guys wearing similar uniforms on the other side of the door.

  She moved quickly out of the room, gun raised, scanning side-to-side.

  He stepped to the prostrate guard, looked out into the hall, and stopped cold. He’d always been blindfolded between the two rooms. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but this wasn’t it.

  There was no hall, nor a long corridor of closed doors. There was just enough of a wall to block all sight-lines from inside the rooms. Over the prone man’s body he could see the unfinished space of an office building. It had no carpet or walls, no partitions or ceiling. All of the ventilation ducts were exposed and the thin, white T-bars for the acoustic ceiling hung down, but there were no panels. The whole floor was unfinished except for the two concrete block rooms that had been his holding cell and interrogation room. They sat in the vast, vacant space like a pair of forgotten shipping crates.

  He looked the other way, the false corridor ended abruptly at a wall of glass. They were dozens of stories in the air looking down on a very flat city. It was also very beige in the flat light of either sunrise or sunset. Weird to not know which.

  The cityscape was familiar but his brain was far too disoriented to make sense of any memory and his suddenly altered reality. He wasn’t in some remote, desert-sequestered terrorist interrogation center. He wasn’t in the dungeon basement of the Pentagon or the FBI. He was prisoner in the middle of a city. Jeff patted his sweatpants and plain white t-shirt, and could feel the bare concrete cold against his bare feet. He certainly wasn’t dressed for the city, whatever city this was.

  He turned back from the view he should know but didn’t, and was confronted once more by the guard prone at his feet. He didn’t appear to be breathing. People who were alive shouldn’t be able to lie like that. Even unconscious it wouldn’t be normal. There was a small dart sticking out of his neck.

  Slowly, very slowly, he knelt down, reaching for the man’s pulse. A chill shook him like a leaf of lettuce. Perhaps it was all déjà vu and the man was about to whisper ‘fucking Christmas and Thursdays’ like some unknowable secret code from the afterlife.

  Perhaps Phillip had channeled some fallen archangel or something. Jeff was so tired, any adrenalin reserves were long since spent.

  He heard another whoosh from the strange gun and a sharp cry. A man rising from a table in the middle of the space between the concrete rooms slapped his neck and collapsed out of sight with a crash.

  The woman holstered the weapon and retrieved the two darts. Jeff remained crouched halfway down to her first victim as she snapped the projectiles into a small plastic case and pocketed them.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Heckler and Koch P11. Gas-fired. Almost silent, poisoned darts. Good to ninety feet underwater, but works decently enough in the air for my purposes here.”

  He now knew as little as he had before. Didn’t know why he’d bothered asking.

  She returned to the second victim. He was collapsed backward over a folding metal chair in front of a green card table. Jeff wondered if he’d been a chef too.

  That had been his conclusion in the hours he’d been left in his cell with nothing to do but think. One chef, one jilted lover. Two chefs, two jilted lovers? Three chefs, the third one with no lovers, coincidence didn’t hold up any more. Maggie, Julio, Jeff the Chef, that wasn’t random. That was pattern. There had to be a serial killer nutjob on the loose who’d had one too many Happy Meals and not received his McToy.

  But then his interrogators had worn either bl
ack suits or military uniforms and that theory went out the window.

  A laptop rested on the card table by the second victim. The woman plugged the small USB drive into the back of the computer and tapped a quick command.

  “Are you getting me out of trouble or in deeper?”

  She cocked her head to one side, her hair sweeping across half her face like a dark-haired version of Veronica Lake. “Deeper probably.”

  “Great! Thanks a lot.” Maybe he’d just go back and sit in his little concrete room until everyone woke up. Assuming they ever woke up. He didn’t like the second guy’s position any more than he had the first one’s.

  “But since your life expectancy here is somewhat less than a week, I didn’t think you’d mind.” She turned and headed toward the unlit core of the building.

  He tried to swallow against a dry throat. He wouldn’t have believed that just, however many weeks ago it was he’d been sweating beneath the TV lights and cameras, he might have laughed. The line was far too melodramatic to play in a movie or anything but the trashiest novel. Then he looked again at the two men on the floor. Neither had moved, neither stood up to welcome him to Candid Camera. Someone, some many, were playing for incredibly high stakes and he was their pawn. He wasn’t a big fan of pawns. He’d always played a stronger knight and rook game.

  Outside the window, the sun was setting. He’d have bet it was morning though he’d had no reason to do so. The blinding ball of fire was disappearing with a vertical suddenness that spoke of a Plains state. He didn’t remember any plane ride. The disoriented part of him wondered who’d bought his ticket. One of the now-dead, non-chefs lying on the floor?

  They’d knocked him out for how long? This wasn’t any friendly misunderstanding to be straightened out with the local cops reviewing the four simultaneous studio cameras and deciding he’d been an innocent bystander. He’d stepped off the edge into another world. Into a Heckler and Koch P11, gas-fired, poison-dart world.

  How the hell was he going to get back? How could he avoid being the next boyo sprouting a dart from his neck? By following a woman more dangerous than the people who’d held him?