by G T Almasi
“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “You need your rest.”
Before I could mount an argument, he was already halfway to his car.
“Hey,” I said to the inside of my front door.
Fine.
I hadn’t had the house to myself in a long time, but before I could stretch out and enjoy it I was suddenly seized by a stomach-crushing bout of anxiety. First my hands shook, then my vision blurred, and finally every sweat gland in my body let go at the same time.
I ran up to my room, sat on the floor of my closet with my knees against my chest, and sobbed my guts out. Chaotic scenes of violence stampeded into my mind—gaping mouths and severed limbs; my old partner Trick trapped under collapsed buildings and running down burning streets; dead children covered in blood; knives, grenades, and flames—all flashing by so quickly I couldn’t tell the difference between what I’d seen and what I’d made up.
Considering the shit I’ve been through lately, an emotional short circuit was long overdue. I knew it was a panic attack, but that didn’t keep it from scaring the hell out of me. I tried to ride it out with happy thoughts about my parents, my partner, Joe Theismann, freakin’ anything, but I just couldn’t stop crying. Eventually I fired up my Nerve Jet and gave myself some Kalmers.
When I went to bed an hour ago, I’d hoped the downers would help me sleep, but my right shoulder is too sore from my adventures earlier today. My exhausted brain threatens to plunge into another paroxysm of fear, so I cast about for something to occupy my thoughts. Being home has me in a family frame of mind, I suppose, and so I think about Falcon, my sort-of half brother.
He—like Talon and her sisters—is a product of Fredericks’s off-the-books cloning program. Falcon made it sound like they had childhoods the way ancient Romans had human rights. The kids’ nursery was an antiseptic laboratory, their physical affection came from the hard hands of trainer-technicians, and their bedtime stories were the deranged diatribes of Jakob Fredericks. It’s amazing anyone stayed sane growing up in this dysfunctionalia. F-Bird’s resilience is something I figure he inherited from his Original, my father.
For now, Falcon is at the Advanced Gifted Operative General Education facility in Maryland, being properly desocialized. When my—er, when our father came out of his coma last June, Falcon commed me every day to see how Big Bertha was doing. I commed back a diary of Dad’s recovery.
At first, these reports were filled with macabre tales of heart attacks, respiratory blockages, and critical organ failures. Then they transitioned to slightly less lethal issues like sepsis, insulin shock, and internal bleeding. Finally, we got to easier things: rashes, nausea, and the man’s legendary irritability when he’s laid up. During this grueling process, my—our—father’s bedside became the main event of the interns’ daily wards tour. Philip Nico was a one-man Reader’s Digest of every fucked-up thing that lands someone in a hospital.
Falcon also asked about the turbulent situation in Europe. I told him how the Rising has blossomed into a continent-wide revolution by the Provinces. The German Army tries to hold everything together, but the crisis they face often comes from within their own ranks. You see, the Wehrmacht can’t dispatch just any infantry unit to suppress an uprising in, say, the Province of Italy. What if one of the regiments contain a bunch of Italians? Those guys will ghost for supper at mamma’s and then go cruising for signorinas. Or, more disruptively, they’ll join the resistance to help bounce the Burgermeisters back to Bavaria.
On the surface, Germany’s victory in 1943 went a long way toward neutralizing Europe’s violent nationalism. The Fritzes established a strong system to harness her millions of new Deutschvolk, and then propaganded the piss out of it.
Ein ganz glücklicher Kontinent! One big happy Continent!
That’s bullshit, of course. In the decades since the war, separatist groups have repeatedly tried to break their Provinces away from Greater Germany. These attempts have all met the same unsuccessful, bloody result. This time may be different, however. The past year’s politiquakes have begun to crack the Reich’s monolithic façade and expose its syrupy foundations. The U.S. will have to help buttress the crumbling mess, which could be my generation’s Great Adventure.
Meanwhile, it’s almost midnight and I’ve been lying here wide awake for two hours. I decide maybe a snack will help me sleep. I shuffle down to the kitchen and dump some Cocoa-Blasters in a bowl with milk. The cereal is so crunchy it makes my eyeballs vibrate in their sockets. My view of the kitchen jiggles like a TV with bad reception. I stop chewing long enough to examine a small, framed snapshot resting on the counter. It’s of me and my parents, from July 4, 1971, down on the Mall.
The three of us are tightly scrunched into the frame together. My father must have held the camera out and snapped the picture himself. My mother’s smile is very broad, and her red hair looks darker than it is now. Dad’s eyes are covered by big sunglasses and his mouth is slightly open, like he was saying something. I’m squished between my parents, grinning like the luckiest girl on earth. I was ten years old, going on eleven. Missing from this family portrait is Falcon, who at three years younger than me would have been seven. Of course, we didn’t even know he existed.
But Falcon sure as hell knew about us.
Jakob Fredericks’s persecution complex is focused on my father, and by projection onto Cleo and me as well. Fredericks’s incessant rants allowed Falcon to gradually piece together who we are. F-Bird didn’t know where we were until Fredericks sent him to kill Yours Truly. This was the kid’s chance to escape his loveless little world, and he took it.
Brando and I were in Europe, hammering through Operation ANGEL. During a mission in Calais we benefited from covering fire of incredible accuracy. The range was nearly half a mile, yet every incoming round was a kill shot.
This was super, except we had no idea who it was. Later, it happened again, and that time I caught my mysterious bodyguard. Forever burned into my mind is the moment I first saw his face. He looks exactly like my father, except much younger. In fact, he was a seventeen-year-old clone of my dad. After I recovered from my shock, I extracted an index-card version of Falcon’s situation and his intentions: He was on the run from Fredericks’s illegal cloning program. He’d been on a Malefactor’s Development Cycle, training as a covert-action sharpshooter.
Darwin and I elected to let the kid tag along, which turned out to be a smart decision; Falcon is a natural for fieldwork. The three of us were joined by former German officer Victor Eisenberg, then by fellow ExOps Levels Grey and Raj. Our group blazed a path of mayhem from Belgium to Normandy. Everything with F-Bird was fine until we were on our way back to the States.
We’d hitched a ride in a transport ship with a batch of emigrating Jewish former slaves bound for Cuba. One evening, Fredericks triggered a homicidal sleeper program he’d written into F-Bird’s Mods. Falcon resisted the program long enough for us to subdue and then drug the kermoolies out of him. We kept the kid sedated until we got home and turned him over to the Med-Techs. The Meddies pulled off a minor miracle by extracting the insidious directive without killing their subject. After Falcon’s hidden Murder Mode was removed, ExOps debriefed him.
F-Bird was a gold mine. His deposition corroborated the intel we’d squeezed out of Winter the previous year—that Jakob Fredericks had stolen the remnants of the Asexual Reproduction Initiative and adapted it to produce cloned agents. Jakob then used those agents to harvest career-ending gossip about elected officials, especially their abiding affection for D.C.’s legion of intimacy professionals.
Most people don’t know this, but the main reason the American colonies split from England was to evade the Crown’s tax for knocking up slaves. The original draft of the Declaration of Independence renounced the British levy with, “We hold it self-evident that every lady’s petit-parlour is equally ploughable.” By the time this line was edited to w
hatever it says now, the Founding Fathers had birthed America’s nonstop shagathon known as the federal government. Their degenerate legacy has so seamlessly interwoven power and sex that bedroom conquests are met with jovial handshakes while a campaign victory produces a roomful of sticky underwear.
Not to say America is unique in this regard. Politicians’ hornballishness predates the United States by eons. Even the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in The Republic, “Senators vote with the lips on their pricks.”
If Jakob’s gang couldn’t get to the politicos, they went after the lobbyists. These flesh-peddlers supply the lips and write the laws, but loyalty means nothing to them. The easily intimidated scumbags yakked everything they knew about their depraved clients.
Jakob amassed a treasure trove of tabloid bait, all of which he squirreled away to blackmail his way into and out of anything, should the need ever arise.
Actually, should the need ever arise again.
The man learned a painful lesson about political leverage in the aftermath of our failed rescue during 1968’s Berlin Hostage Crisis. The blood hadn’t even dried before the media-electorate began bellowing for heads to roll. Since it was Jakob’s section that fucked up, the mucky-mucks at CIA sacked him like a pile of pig guts.
Fredericks was incensed, perhaps at himself as much as anyone else, for leaving his career so exposed to the fickle whims of Washington. He called in a favor with one of his contacts in Army Intelligence and wangled himself a middle-management job at the Pentagon. Reemployed within the government’s nurturing bosom, he began training his children in earnest. This required additional weapons, medical tech, and ass-loads of cash, which the shithead acquired by extorting compromised officials at the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, the White House, and both houses of Congress.
But he needed more. Fredericks didn’t come from money, and nobody ever got rich working for Uncle Sam. To make big bucks, Fredericks gradually submerged himself deeper and deeper into a murky bog of crime and treason.
According to Falcon, Jakob fabricated operations from whole cloth so he could redirect the funds into his war chest. If someone got suspicious, he’d doctor the files in CORE to mislead the investigation, or he’d send one of his “kids” to rub out the troublemakers.
Jakob walked his invisible high wire for over a decade. Last year, though, he tumbled into a Texas-sized tower of fanny biscuits when he tried—and failed—to bump off one of his illicit associates. His intended victim, a man CIA calls Winter, was Fredericks’s most valuable overseas asset because Winter had a line into Carbon, the granddaddy of all cloning programs.
And then I stumbled in. My oblivious entrance into Fredericks’s sphere set off a haphazard chain of events, every one of which the jackass misinterpreted to mean that the authorities were closing in on him. We weren’t—until the man panicked and put Winter’s head on the chopping block. Jakob wanted to make sure he was never connected to a terrorist organization, so rather than send one of his little assassins, ol’ Shit-For-Brains orchestrated a particularly spectacular mortality vector.
Winter led a paramilitary group dedicated to expelling Greater Germany from the Middle East. Like small-time warlords everywhere in the Reich, Winter was courted by the intelligence communities of China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. He used his charm, savvy, and ruthlessness to set these governments against one another. The man earned a lot of favors and did some good for his people, but that style of gangster-diplomacy always ends with the warlord dead as donkey dookie.
The means to his end can vary widely. Mr. Warlord might die from poisoned food, radioactive pellets, or flesh-eating insects. His or her cause of death could be a car bomb, a plane crash, or a demolished building. If time is short the subject can simply be shot, stabbed, strangled, drowned, beheaded, thrown in a vat of acid, or jammed through a wood chipper.
Or, if the man behind the trigger has a ton of clout and really big balls, Mr. Warlord might be killed by a U.S. Navy thermobaric cruise missile. Former ExOps director Chanez caught wind of Fredericks’s plan in time to send me to Winter’s huge bio-research laboratory outside Riyadh. Chanez needed an eyewitness for the corruption case he was building against Fredericks. My mission was to acquire that witness: Winter.
I got ’im—barely. Moments after I spirited Winter away from the lab, Fredericks’s cruise missile crashed out of the sky and demolished the entire facility along with any hard evidence of Jakob and Winter’s affiliation.
The end, right?
Not this time, because that same missile also blew away a group of fifty German children. Diplomatically speaking, collateral damage of this magnitude drops a deuce the size of South Dakota. Herr und Frau Deutschkopf went fucking bonkers. Our relationship with Germany cooled to just above freezing. The Reichstag put forth a vote of no-confidence for Chancellor Honecker. This didn’t immediately end his administration, but it certainly put blood in the water.
Back home, CIA was livid about the unauthorized Snatch Job I pulled. Patrick told me they nearly dissolved ExOps over it. Chanez was summoned before a special Senate hearing to see if he could be tried for treason. Chanez’s lawyer argued that his client’s decision to kidnap a foreign national was “perhaps of questionable legality, but it fully demonstrates his leadership, dedication, and selfless patriotism.”
Fired.
Behind the scenes, Winter’s testimony about Jakob’s misdeeds supplied the first files in Justice’s dossier about Director Fredericks. But even after Falcon’s report joined Winter’s statements, Fredericks remained at large because the Department of Justice felt the man’s threat was mostly passive and Capitol Hill considered Fredericks’s solutions to the crisis in Europe too important to disrupt with a big scandal. Of course, none of these tax-sucking assholes were being targeted by rogue assassins. We kicked and griped, but the illegal missions former director Chanez ordered hadn’t exactly given ExOps priority status with anyone.
Plus, our case didn’t fit any of CIA’s established models. Double agents are mousy little fucks who sell intel to the enemy. They aren’t super-smart shitheads who try to kill their own agents and ruin the agency they founded. Besides, how could anyone squirrel away a major scientific program for nearly twenty years with nobody finding out?
Because you’re all a bunch of morons, that’s how.
The ExOps bosses—especially Cyrus—persisted. Loudly. For almost a year they’ve been haranguing any elected official who ran slower than them. Patrick thinks our perseverance may be what drove Shithead to attack ExOps, and Falcon might say it was Fredericks’s schizoid whim of the day, but I’d say he’s just a vindictive fuck. Though whether it was panic, vengeance, or plain insanity doesn’t really matter now, because Talon’s mad bomber act was the last straw.
An attack on a federal office instantly becomes the sole focus of every American intelligence asset in the entire world—satellite images, confidential informants, transit security footage, credit card activity, birth certificates, death certificates, crumbly old documents written by the Pilgrims, fucking everything. Nobody is that untouchable.
We got our warrant.
Later this morning we’ll begin to dismantle Jakob’s secret empire with a raid on his cloning facility. Thinking about this puts a smile on my face.
At last, I fall asleep.
—CORE: SCORPIO—
1 SEP 1981, 3:40 P.M. EDT
JAKOB FREDERICKS ARREST WARRANT
From: James Brady, United States Attorney General
To: George H. W. Bush, Executive Intelligence Chairman
Sir,
My office has evidence that your subordinate, Jakob Fredericks, was responsible for today’s bombing at the CIA subagency, Extreme Operations Division. As such, we believe Director Fredericks represents a clear and present threat to the security of the United States. A warrant issued by my off
ice alleges the following criminal and treasonous activities:
• Conspiracy to murder Federal employees.
• Conspiracy to kidnap Federal employees.
• Destruction of Federal property.
• Sabotage of U.S. intelligence initiatives.
• Theft of classified information and equipment.
• Embezzlement of Federal funds for illegal enterprises.
• Exploitation of Federal resources for personal gain.
• Collaboration and collusion with enemies of the state.
Your cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
—James Brady, AG
04
NEXT DAY, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 4:50 P.M. EDT
ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, MARYLAND, USA
Dark secrets waft across the ground like wraiths, reeking of gasoline, rotten eggs, and burned meat. Aberdeen: the U.S. Army’s defunct three-hundred-acre testing ground for a dizzying array of speculative weapons that do things like trigger insanity, induce paralysis, melt internal organs, and infect people with communicable pathogens. Most of the experiments were performed on soldiers and federal prisoners without their consent. They just lined ’em up and blasted the poor suckers.
This wasteland hosted so much nastiness you could establish a zombie-clown whorehouse and the small garrison would figure it was a psy-op. Even Tricky Dick was scared of Aberdeen. He called it the place where ethics go to die.
Naturally, this little piece of hell is where Fredericks stashed his personal cloning program. A decommissioned chemical-weapons facility serves as Fredericks’s main lab, while a weathered, rambling wooden structure acts as a sort of foster home for the lab’s human produce. That’s the building F-Bird ironically calls the Lake House, where he lived with the rest of Fredericks’s brood of clones.