by Hines
The house had exploded, he had probably sent twenty people to their deaths, and he didn’t regret it in the least.
No, he didn’t have a soul.
Several minutes later, they came out of the woods into a small clearing. They found their way to the end of a cul-de-sac with a few large homes surrounding it, bookended by a few open lots with For Sale signs pounded into the bare dirt. A new subdivision.
But it wasn’t the subdivision that stopped Lucas. It was the car, a newer black sedan sitting at the end of the cul-de-sac and idling.
No one was inside it.
Leila peered at him. “Looks like the car you brought to the house,” she said.
“Doesn’t just look like it. It is,” said Sarea.
“How do you know?” asked Lucas.
She shrugged. “I just know.” She began walking toward it, and Leila followed.
When they reached the car, they checked to make sure it was empty, then climbed in.
“You sure you didn’t plan this?” Leila asked from the backseat.
“I didn’t,” Lucas said. “But someone did.”
He looked at the clock on the car’s dash. By his calculations, he had an hour and change before the manacle on his leg exploded. He wanted to check it, but not in front of Sarea and Leila. They had enough on their plates for right now.
So did he, for that matter.
As they sat in the car, catching their breath, images jumbled in his mind.
(Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.)
“He only had one,” Sarea said.
He turned. “What?”
“Humpty Dumpty only had one great fall,” she said. “You just said, ‘Humpty Dumpty had some great falls.’ It’s ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.’ He only fell once.”
“Oh. I . . . didn’t know I said it out loud.” But now the words great falls kept sticking in his mind, and they somehow fit something deep inside where his soul should have been.
Great falls.
“So,” Leila said again. “What, pray tell, is our next step?”
Lucas started to speak, but Leila’s comment stuck in his mind. Pray tell.
He smiled. “We’re going to church.”
THIRTY-FOUR
01:02:59 REMAINING
Back on the interstate, they drove in silence for several miles. Sarea dug in her bag, brought out a pack of cigarettes. She put one in her mouth, offered one to Leila—who accepted it—then tilted the pack toward him.
“I don’t smoke,” he said.
“I know,” she answered.
He smiled, took one of the smokes, let Sarea put flame to it with her lighter.
“You wanna tell us what’s happening?” Leila finally said from the backseat.
“I’m not quite sure,” he answered.
Sarea looked at him. “Give it a try.”
He smiled. “Okay.”
For the next several minutes, he filled them in on Viktor and Saul, skipping the part about the explosive attached to his leg. No sense adding to their stress.
When he was done, Leila spoke. “What about your ankle? Is it okay?” she asked.
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. Oh yeah—he’d already told Leila about the bomb; he’d forgotten.
“You hurt your ankle?” Sarea asked, sounding concerned.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing at Leila in the back again. “Old injury, but I think it’ll hold out another hour.”
Leila dropped the subject.
He wheeled into a convenience store, parked in the front.
“What are you doing?” Sarea asked.
“I just need a coffee or something. Thought you guys might want a quick break too.”
“Good idea,” Leila said.
He caught her gaze in the mirror again.
“Okay,” Sarea said. “Let’s make it quick, though.” She opened the door.
“Only thing is,” Lucas said, “no way I can show my face in there, you know? They’re looking for me everywhere. So maybe . . . would you mind picking up the coffee for me?”
Sarea studied him for a few seconds, then relented. “Okay,” she said slowly. “I’ll get you a coffee. Anything else?”
“No, that should do it.”
Sarea put her foot on the pavement and started to get out of the car.
Lucas grabbed her arm. “And thanks,” he said. “For everything.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome. For everything.”
He let go and watched her walk toward the store.
“What about you?” he said to Leila in the backseat.
After a few moments of silence, she spoke. “I understand, Lucas. I had to blow up my past, you have to blow up yours.” She opened the door. “I’ll make sure she stays safe,” she said, and then she slid out of the car and walked toward the front door of the store.
He put the car in reverse, backed out of the parking spot, and wheeled out onto the street again.
Humpty Dumpty was heading for his great fall.
00:58:14 REMAINING
Lucas shut off his cell phone, knowing Sarea would try to call. He’d already had his share of trouble from a phone ringing at the wrong time today. He needed time to think, time to make his plan, and the church was the place to do it.
He drove down the interstate, took the exit, and made his way toward the church. After parking several blocks away, he checked the clock on the dash. How much time before the bomb detonated? Less than an hour, for sure. But enough time for a quick good-bye at the church, then maybe try to set up a meeting with Saul or Viktor. Maybe he could take one of them with him.
He walked toward the church, catching a glint of sun as it reflected off the nearby Quonset hut.
He stopped when Viktor stepped out of the front door. Two other men, thick and dark, followed him. One of them was Garlic Breath.
“Ain’t like no church I ever saw,” Viktor said when Lucas approached.
“What are you doing here?” Lucas asked.
Viktor paused, looked. “I got your message,” he said.
Lucas stared. He’d left no message, but he had an idea who had.
His Bad Twin. One of them.
“You look disappointed to see me,” Viktor said. “You should be eager to have that clock reset—which I’ll be happy to do after our little meeting.”
“Meeting?”
Viktor looked at him, puzzled. “You said you set up a meeting with your backers. Now I’ll find out who—” Viktor’s gaze caught something over Lucas’s shoulder, stopping him in midsentence.
Lucas turned and looked. He was unsurprised to see Saul walking toward them, a briefcase in his hand.
“Let me guess,” Lucas said as Saul approached. “You got my message.”
Saul knotted his brow, looked back at Lucas, staring above his head as usual. Blink, blink. “You said to meet you here.” He glanced at Viktor and his men at the front door, just behind Lucas. “These must be the . . . ah . . . the people you were telling me about,” he said.
“This is Viktor Abkin,” Lucas said. “Viktor, meet Saul.”
“Saul? A very Jewish name. You don’t look Jewish,” Viktor said.
“And you don’t look like you’re from Belarus. But that’s what your accent tells me.”
Viktor eyed him suspiciously. “Very good. Most just say Russian; you have an ear for regional differences.”
Saul smiled, shrugged. “Comes with the territory. Once had a major interest in Belarus.” He smiled again. “And Russia.”
Saul started to put his hand in his coat, and the two burly men behind Viktor moved for their guns.
“Whoa, whoa, there, cowboys. Just going for my smokes.”
The two relaxed a bit, watching carefully as Saul slipped his hand inside his jacket and retrieved his cigarettes. He shook one into his mouth, offered one to Viktor, who shook his head, and then offered one to Lucas.
“I told you before,” Lucas said, “I don’t smoke.”
�
��Well, no better time to start.”
Lucas smiled. “You know what? You’re right.” He took one of the cigarettes from the pack and put it between his lips, then waited as Saul lit it for him.
Saul glanced at Lucas, gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. He started to put his cigarettes back in his jacket pocket, paused, arched his eyebrows at the two men behind Viktor. The two men relaxed, and Saul let his hand disappear into his pocket.
Suddenly his hand reappeared, this time with a gun in it. He shot Viktor and his two henchmen quickly; three shots, three seconds, and it was over.
Immediately, Lucas felt Saul’s arm around him, and they were falling through the door as the world around them erupted in gunfire.
Lucas immediately pushed away, rolling to the side and coming out of the roll in a crouch. Saul had shot the other three because they were the most immediate threat, but Lucas knew he had to be next.
He came out of the roll, retrieving his own gun and pointing it toward Saul. Saul pushed himself up on his hands slowly, putting his gun on the floor next to him, making no attempt to use it.
Outside, the gunfire continued; a few stray bullets hit the wall of the church, and one splintered the jamb of the doorway they’d just rolled through.
Saul struggled to a sitting position on the floor, just adjacent to the doorframe. He looked at Lucas, gritting his teeth. “You gonna trust me enough now to tell me where you really got those files?”
Lucas noticed a patch of red spreading beneath Saul’s leg. He let his eyes lock with Saul’s. “You mean the files that prove you’re working with the Chinese Guoanbu?”
Saul smiled. “Shoulda expected. You’re new to this game. You don’t even know.”
“Know what?”
“Know anything.” Saul spied his recently lit cigarette smoldering on the floor a few feet away, leaned over to retrieve it. He put it between his lips, took a few puffs.
Outside, the gunfire had stopped, and now only echoes rang in Lucas’s ears. “Who’s out there?” Lucas asked.
Saul smiled. “Maybe no one left, judging from all that shooting.
Guess we’ll find out in a few seconds, won’t we?”
Moments later, a figure appeared at the door, pointed the gun toward Saul, and fired point-blank. The figure wheeled and pointed his gun at Lucas, smiling.
“Did you miss me?” Donavan asked.
THIRTY-FIVE
00:47:20 REMAINING
Lucas stared in wonder. Donavan, who had been missing since . . . well, since the beginning.
“What . . .” Lucas stammered. But it was all he could get out.
“Quite the surprise, I know,” Donavan said. “But count yourself lucky. You’ve been part of the perfect operation, Humpty. Or Lucas, I should say. I’ve known that all along, I should tell you.”
Donavan moved across the floor, keeping the gun pointed at Lucas. “Worked pretty well, don’t you think? Stories will be hitting the papers, tying your friend over there to Chinese intelligence sources, and we’ll be able to wipe the whole slate clean.”
“What slate?”
“Long story. There’s just one loose end to wrap up right now.”
Lucas dropped his gun, no longer caring. He’d reached the end of everything. His nerves were too frayed, his mind too tired to care.
“You’re going to have to shoot me like this,” Lucas whispered.
“Unarmed.”
Donavan smiled. “I’m sorry, did you think you were the loose end?” he asked. Abruptly, Donavan pointed the pistol at his own head and pulled the trigger.
00:43:18 REMAINING
Lucas closed his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them again, his vision swam in tears. He was lost, hopelessly lost, in something far beyond his understanding.
“Hello, Lucas.”
A new person at the door. Someone he didn’t recognize. The man stepped through the doorway and walked across the floor toward him. Lucas thought his ears were buzzing from all the gunfire, but then he realized it was the man who was buzzing: yellow-and-black bees hovered around him in a giant cloud. As the man stopped to stand in front of him, more bees flew in through the doorway. No, they weren’t bees, Lucas noticed on closer inspection, but wasps.
Lucas scrambled for his gun on the floor, trained it on the man, who seemed unconcerned. “Who are you?” Lucas asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“Who are any of us? That’s a question we must all ask ourselves at some point—and a question I’m hoping to help you answer in a moment. Call me Swarm; it’s the only name I’ve known.”
Swarm walked toward the Blackboard at the front of the church, flicked on the switch that bathed it in light. He shook his head. “I knew, someday, it would end up like this. It had to.”
“What had to?”
“This project.”
Project—what everyone in Creep Club called their odd fixation.
“So you—” Lucas began. “You’re a member of the Creep Club.”
Swarm spun around and began walking toward Lucas. “Let’s take a ride, Lucas. I have a car waiting outside, and as you can imagine, this place will be crawling with law enforcement soon. No way to cover up several hundred rounds fired in just a few minutes. Not even I can do that.”
Swarm held out his hand, offering to help Lucas to his feet.
Lucas stared a few moments as sirens wailed in the distance.
“Hear that?” Swarm asked, still holding out his hand. “Time to go.”
Lucas let the man help him to his feet and followed him to the door. Out on the street, as promised, a black sedan waited, its back door hanging open. Without waiting, Swarm approached the car and got in, sliding to the other side to make room for Lucas. After a few seconds of hesitation, Lucas slid in behind him.
Immediately the car began to move; two men sat in the front seat, but all Lucas could see was the backs of their heads. Even so, he felt his terror starting to rise a few notches.
“You feel it, don’t you?” Swarm said without looking at him. “Fear.”
Lucas swallowed, trying to calm his nerves. “Yes,” he admitted, without really knowing why.
“Scientists scoffed at the existence of human pheromones until 1982,” Swarm said. “Animal pheromones they had no problem with, but they couldn’t buy into human pheromones. Well, most scientists, anyway; the ones I worked with were convinced.”
Swarm turned to him and smiled. “That’s what you’re feeling—pheromones. We have, unfortunately, the two men in the front seat to thank for that. They’re part of one of my newer projects—a little something I call Dark Fear. A bit of genetics, but mostly good, oldfashioned pheromones, pheromones engineered specifically to light up the part of your brain that controls the fight-or-flight reflex. Scent, believe it or not, is the most deeply imprinted sense in your brain; you can’t retrain it.”
He looked at Lucas again. “I think you’ve probably met these men before,” he said, gesturing at the two in the front seat.
The two men swiveled their heads to look at Lucas, and he had a good view of their features. Not for the first time.
Both of them wore his face.
“These . . .” he stammered. “They’ve been—”
“Yes, they have,” Swarm interrupted. “Believe it or not, with pheromones, with the body’s sense of smell—and to some extent, taste—you can fool the other senses. That’s why all the agents in Project Dark Fear can appear to anyone as the person who scares them most.”
“Who scares them most? But they—”
“You see yourself, I’m told. That’s an unusual one, I must admit, but perhaps not unexpected, considering everything you’ve been through. Lots of times, we get movie influences: Jason, Freddy, Hannibal Lecter, that kind of thing. Adolf Hitler. Mothers and fathers a surprising amount of the time. I, myself, see the man who conditioned me. Raven.”
Swarm went quiet for a few moments.
“The van driver said he saw Charles Manson
,” Lucas whispered.
“Manson’s in the top ten.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes as Lucas tried to process all this information—especially as his heart trip-hammered, terrified of the two in the front seat. He prayed they wouldn’t turn around again.
Lucas looked back at Swarm, tried to ignore the cloud of wasps. The insects seemed calm, almost drugged. Most of them hovered within a foot of his head, until they tired and landed on his head or shoulders. They crawled, unhurried, around his skin before flying again. In many ways, it seemed as if the man were a human hive.
“I’m sorry for the wasps, on top of it all. When I was the project, the experiment, if you will, they didn’t understand nearly as much about pheromones, genetics, anything. Mostly synthetic drugs back then. They were trying to create a Super Soldier, a drone who sacrificed himself to save his homeland. The way drone wasps do.”
Lucas closed his eyes, wishing for the first time he was in the midst of a firefight between Viktor’s mafia men and Saul’s secret agents. This was a bit too Twilight Zone for him.
“You deserve an explanation, Lucas, and that’s what I’m here to give you. Because I also created another project, one called Inside Information. Or, as you know it, the Creep Club.”
“You started the Creep Club?”
“Yes. Two dozen people, beginning with Snake. He knew more than the others—I needed someone to be a contact, a liaison with government agencies, since I don’t officially work for any agency myself. Officially, I don’t exist. Like you.”
Swarm dug in his pocket and produced something Lucas had forgotten all about: the small black cube from Saul’s briefcase. Where had he left it? How did Swarm find it? Swarm turned it in his hands, over and over, as he spoke.
“Project Inside Information began about twenty-five years ago,” Swarm continued. “It was my brainchild, a way around the age-old question of what you do with intelligence agents who get caught.
In an ideal world, of course, they don’t get caught alive. Like Donavan—perfect example. If they follow their training, as he did, they kill themselves first. But that doesn’t always happen. Add in the temptation to be a double agent . . . well, you can see some of the difficulties.”