Conspiracy of Angels

by Laurence MacNaughton

  The guy Clean had pinned let out a grunt, tried to wrestle his way free. Clean slid a hand up over the guy’s shoulder and grabbed the back of his head. One solid blow on the concrete and the guy went limp.

  Clean grabbed the gun and stood up, his face tight with pain.

  Lanny ran to help him, stopping to pick up Clean’s giant Desert Eagle. “Clean, man, damn. You okay?”

  “Fuck no!” Grimacing, Clean tried to peer over his shoulder at the spreading bloodstain. “Son of a bitch shot me.”

  Lanny had no idea what to do. “Don’t move around too much!”

  “Yeah, that’s helpful.”

  Lanny tried to think. He put his arm around Clean to support him, but the guy outweighed him two-to-one. “Come on. We close to Raylene’s. Get you to the hospital.”

  “Raylene? What’s she gonna do?”

  “Be a witness. Say you stopped a mugger, took a cap.” Lanny reached for his cell phone. His pocket was empty. He must have dropped it somewhere.

  “Hell with that. I ain’t talking to the cops. Call that animal doctor, the hot redhead. Let her stitch me up.” Clean took one step and let out an agonized grunt. He leaned hard on Lanny, nearly toppling him over.

  “Okay, dog, okay, just walk. One step at a time.” Lanny strained under the weight. “That’s it. Don’t die on me, man.”

  “Shit.” Clean grunted. “That’s the last thing I need.”

  *

  Mitch kicked open the door to the motel room and carried Geneva over to the bed. He got her jacket off, careful of her shoulder, and she gasped.

  “Hang on, kid. You’re gonna be okay.”

  Her eyes opened, looked around the room, and then closed.

  He grabbed a towel out of the bathroom, pressed it to her shoulder. She groaned. Tried to squirm away.

  “Hold this! Okay? Hold onto it.”

  She did.

  He ran back out to the Cougar, fumbled with the trunk key. His fingers were sticky with blood. He got the trunk open and dug through the bags, looking for the first aid kit he’d bought. He found flashlights encased in plastic. Yellow nylon rope. A folding shovel. He picked up another bag and dumped it out into the trunk, leaving bloody fingerprints on the plastic.

  There. A white plastic box with a bright red cross. He grabbed it, slammed the trunk and ran inside.

  She was sitting up, peeking underneath the towel.

  “Don’t do that. Lie down.”

  “I’m making a mess.” She nodded at the blood all over the bed.

  He fought away his panic, breathing deep and resisting the urge to yell at her: Lie the hell down!

  Don’t panic, he said to himself. Don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic.

  As gently as he could, he pushed her back down onto the bed. Tore the lid off the first aid kit. The plastic hinges snapped off, hit the wall. He dumped it out and sorted through it. Bandages. Thread. Suture needle. Blunt little safety scissors.

  He used the scissors to cut away the sleeve of her shirt. The wound was ugly, through the muscle, in one side and out the other. But it hadn’t hit a bone, and it wasn’t bleeding as badly as he’d thought. She was lucky as hell Michael used full-jacket rounds. Anything else, she would’ve already bled out.

  “Shit,” she whispered, “it hurts.”

  “Watch your language.” He remembered Bryce’s prescription for pain pills and dug into his jacket. It was still there at the bottom of his pocket, the paper bag all crumpled around the plastic bottle. He opened it up and shook out two pills. “Take these.” He handed her a bottle of water from the nightstand, open and warm from the night before.

  “Will they help?”

  “Eventually. This’ll be a lot easier if you hold still.” He tore open a sterile paper envelope and pulled out the suture needle.

  “I hate needles.”

  “Me too.”

  She swallowed the painkillers, put the bottle down and closed her eyes. “Do it.”

  “You’re a brave girl, you know that?”

  “I’ll be a lot braver if you tell me you know what you’re doing.”

  “Course I do. Now hold still.” He started to stitch the wound closed. When she hissed out a breath, and then another, he knew he had to distract her. “Hey, I ever tell you about the time I had to pull a watermelon off of Lanny’s head?”

  She didn’t say anything for a second. Then she opened her eyes, blinking. “What?”

  “We were at this guy’s house, big old brick mansion, big back yard, where they’re getting this wedding ready.” He kept his voice slow and easy, trying to keep her relaxed while he sewed her up. “People were setting up a tent out back, unfolding chairs. Couple people tuning up their violins. The whole bit. Anyway, this guy takes us back into the kitchen where his buddies are waiting, and this knucklehead I never saw before tries to renegotiate on his shipment of Freon. ‘What are you talkin’ about?” I tell him. ‘The deal’s done.’ But he’s had a couple drinks, his tie’s unstrung, he starts threatening Lanny. He shoves Lanny, so I hit him, he hits Lanny, Lanny ends up facedown in this fruit salad all made up in half a watermelon shell. I hit this guy full-on, and he goes down the counter, taking out all these little sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres, champagne bottles. Big crash. Then Lanny stands up, the watermelon’s stuck on his head.”

  Geneva smiled. “You’re lying to me.”

  “Swear to God. The other guys come after us. One of them slips in the champagne, knocks the other one down. All these people come running into the kitchen, bridesmaids screaming, dogs barking. I grab Lanny and run out the back door. And the whole time I’m hearing, ‘Mm-mmh! Mmmm-mmh!’ I get him halfway down the block and I start pulling on the watermelon. The thing’s jammed so hard on his head it’s got cracks running down the sides. Then all of a sudden, Lanny just flops to the ground.”

  “Why?”

  “Couldn’t breathe. Passed out. So I pull on it, and there’s this sucking noise, like this.” Mitch made a long slurping sound. “And then I’m shaking him, ‘Lanny? Lanny? Wake up!’ And he wipes the mush out of his eyes and he says, ‘Mitch? What happened, man? I smell like fruit. ‘“

  A hint of a smile ran across Geneva’s lips. After a little while, she said, “You make that up?”

  “Sometimes I embellish.” Mitch tied off the last stitch and wiped the wound clean. He taped on a big square of gauze and sat back with a grunt. It looked good, all taken care of.

  All of a sudden, all of the energy seemed to drain out of his body. He closed his eyes. Stayed like that for a while. The edge of the mattress dug into the back of his neck.

  “Mitch?” she said softly. “You think we’ll be safe here?”

  “Yeah. For a little while. I gotta call Lanny, see if he’s got that truck.” Mitch pulled the hotel phone off the stand and onto the floor. Sagging back against the bed, he dialed Lanny’s cell phone.

  It rang three, four, five times. No answer. “Guy gets himself a restaurant, names it after himself, drives a goddamn Lincoln. You think he could answer the phone.”

  Geneva said, “Maybe he’s not there.”

  “It’s his cell phone. He’s always there.”

  The phone clicked, and Mitch held up a finger. He tried to think of something smartass to say to Lanny, but then he heard another click. And a sound that wasn’t quite silence.

  Somebody had answered the phone, but they weren’t saying anything.

  Mitch waited. “Lanny?”

  A faint rustle came from the other end, like the fabric of someone’s jacket. They were listening.

  Mitch hung up the phone. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Something was wrong. The Archangel? Why would it go after Lanny?

  No, that didn’t make any sense. Someone, a human being, had answered that phone. But not Lanny.

  He knew they ought to get out of the hotel. But where would they go? Besides, he had to do something about the bed. If somebody came in and saw all the blood, they’d have a heart attack, cal
l the cops.

  He had to cover things up. Not leave a trace. But he was tired.

  So damn tired.

  He leaned his head back against the edge of the bed. Just for a moment.

  TWENTY

  Crickets faded into silence as Michael stole through the blackness of the abandoned lot, the soft soles of his boots whispering across the cracked asphalt. He crouched low as he moved from a cluster of bushes to the rusted hulk of an abandoned car. He kept the thick barrel of his silenced MP-5 high and ready, pausing to make sure nothing moved. The goggles turned the pitch-black night into ethereal green, shimmering in his vision as he moved.

  No sign he’d been spotted. He didn’t expect any resistance this far out, but this time he was operating alone. He had zero margin for error.

  He set off again toward a stunted evergreen tree, the last cover before he reached the decaying wooden fence at the back of the lot. He wasn’t ready for this operation. He hadn’t done enough recon, hadn’t watched their movements closely enough to get a feel for the place. It was too soon. But at this point he didn’t have any choice.

  It was Gabe’s fault. Michael tried to convince himself of that. It was Gabe who had insisted on activating the tracker in Genie’s Cougar, zeroing in on them and then trying to eliminate Mitch Turner. Do that, Gabe had reasoned, and the breach was closed. They could retrieve the black box. Resume the mission. Locate the Archangel, before it came after them. Set up a trap. But what about Genie?

  Gabe hadn’t had an answer to that.

  Michael reached the evergreen tree, thick with the scent of pine needles and sap. He pulled up the goggles and mopped the sweat off his face with the black sleeve of his jacket. It wasn’t a warm night, by any measure. But despite the sweat, he felt cold through and through.

  He’d seen the impact of his bullet, the way it had wrenched Genie sideways in a cruelly unnatural way. The moment replayed over and over in his mind, torturing him.

  The pink mist of blood in the air. The shocked look on her face. How had everything come to this?

  Michael slumped back against the split bark of the tree trunk, staring up at the unforgiving depths of the night sky, blinking sweat out of his eyes. He couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t.

  He’d shot Genie.

  It was an accident. He kept telling himself that. He’d aimed through the window of the Cougar, his crosshairs centered on Mitch. Watching the man smile at Genie, hating him for slipping this easily into the middle of things and unraveling everything Michael had fought for.

  Hating him, and yet at the same time, deeper within, feeling a grudging respect for the man. A man past his prime, no formal training at all, completely ignorant of the deadly complex intrigue he had stumbled into—and yet there he was, surviving. No, not just surviving. Thriving.

  Seeing Mitch so calm, so confident, so in control, Michael had made himself pull the trigger before he was ready. And somehow, whether Genie had moved at the last second or the rifle barrel had edged upward as Michael fired, the bullet had gone astray.

  It replayed in his mind. Genie’s body jerked. Her eyes went wide.

  Michael shook the memory out of his head. This wasn’t helping things. If he couldn’t stay focused, he’d end up dead. As simple as that.

  From the tree to the fence was a distance of less than twenty meters. Distant lights shone through the cracks between the boards. Sickly yellow sodium floodlights surrounded the industrial building beyond. Michael had memorized the floor plan, the snapshots of security cameras and guards he’d taken in his surveillance.

  The Conspiracy guarded their technology very closely. It had been nearly impossible to get the black box, and now he’d lost it again. He needed an edge. He needed the weapons they kept locked in an armored vault inside this building. The only problem was getting to them.

  He’d wanted to show his plan to Genie when the time was right, bring her in on it, bridge the gap between them with trust, of a sort. But that seemed like such a long time ago. So many lost opportunities.

  Michael seated the goggles over his eyes again and crept toward the fence. The lights became bright green-white spots in his vision, leaving ghostly trails as he moved.

  He made it to the fence and peered through, checking out the wide paved lot and the sprawling building beyond. It looked like the back lot of any average warehouse operation: big rigs parked here and there, some hitched to trailers and others sitting alone. A row of numbered loading docks broke up the long back wall. On the front of the building, Michael knew, the site was blocked off from the road by a formidable fence and an electronic gate. The front entrance was watched by at least a dozen cameras, infrared sensors, and motion detectors.

  The back lot security, on the other hand, was a little lighter.

  Michael scanned the goggles across the lot slowly, picking out the contours of flatbed trailers and forklifts until he saw what he was looking for: a two-foot-high tube topped with what looked like a pie pan. To the casual eye, it didn’t mean anything. But packed inside that metal saucer was a twenty-thousand-dollar array of vibration and heat sensors, linked to a network that scanned the entire area.

  Michael pulled a fist-sized scrambler from a zippered pouch on his hip. He aimed it at the sensor and took a reading.

 

  He waited.

 

  He thumbed through the readout. It was an extensive sensor system, eighteen units linked around the building, their sweeps overlapping. Essentially impenetrable.

  Well, that was the idea, anyway.

  Michael set the scrambler to do a query-and-response diagnostic scan. The sensor would think it was being scanned for technical problems, but its transmitted response to the scrambler contained enough codes for the scrambler to fabricate a master access key. The entire process took eleven seconds.

 

  Michael locked down the sensor, preventing it from registering anything it detected. In essence, it created a blind spot in the perimeter. He hesitated a moment, then pushed the command button.

  The display began to flash.

  Michael wedged the scrambler between two fence boards. He hoisted himself up and over.

  His boots made a soft thud when he landed. He froze, waiting for any kind of reaction. Lights, sirens, anything.

  He checked the scrambler.

 

  Sometimes, technology was a wonderful thing.

  He extended the stock of the nine-millimeter MP-5 and set it to three-round burst. He set off across the paved lot at a ground-eating trot. As he got closer to the building, the yellow floodlights got strong enough to see by. He pushed the goggles up on his forehead and moved from cover to cover, his shadow stretching out behind him.

  Get in, get the Cerenkov device, get out. That was the plan.

  Spotting movement, he stopped at the tail end of a trailer, then crept over to the other side. He followed the length of it, crouched low, staying silent.

  A guard in a dark jumpsuit appeared ten meters away, near the cab of another truck, looking alert. He carried what Michael first took to be an M-16, then realized was the smaller, stubbier Commando version.

  “Hold one,” the guard said, his voice carrying through the still night air.

  Michael stepped silently up onto the truck’s fuel tank and sank into the shadow between the truck and its trailer.

  The guard walked past Michael, footsteps heavy on the pavement. He stood for a moment, looking into the distance, eyes searching toward the back fence. He raised his rifle and peered into the scope.

  Michael kept the MP-5 trained on the guard’s head. The man had a government-issue haircut, cropped close up the back of his neck. A wireless earpiece was snugged firmly into his ear.

  “Never mind.” The guard lowered the rifle. “Area four clear.” He turned and kept walking, inadvertently kicking a pebble into the shadows beneath Michael.

 
Michael waited until the guard was out of sight, then crept down and headed toward the building. His heart thudded in his chest. This was the critical moment, where he was most exposed. He strained his hearing to the utmost, watched all around him as he went. Nothing moved.

  He kept his back close to the concrete wall as he moved toward the nearest door. If his information was correct, this was the entrance closest to the vault.

  The steel door was secured with a passkey-type lock, a little black box with a red light glowing on one side. Looked like an ordinary civilian model. Sloppy.

  Michael slung his MP-5 over his shoulder by the strap. He unzipped a pocket on his sleeve and took out a calculator-sized lock decoder. He tried the most common settings first, waving it past the red light.

  On the third try, the lock beeped and turned green. Michael zipped up his decoder and reached for the door handle.

  The door swung open from the inside, and a stocky guard with a salt-and-pepper mustache stepped out. Startled, he drew his pistol.

  Michael disarmed the guard and pulled him off balance, at the same time slamming a fist up under his chin. The guard’s head snapped back, and Michael kicked his legs out from beneath him. The man hit the ground hard, his head striking the asphalt with a hollow crack.

  Michael caught the door before it closed. Grabbing the unconscious man by the ankles, he dragged him inside and let the door shut behind them.

  They were in an L-shaped hallway made of concrete blocks and unpainted drywall, a gray steel door at one end. Michael patted down the guard for his passkey card and tried the next door.

  It had the same kind of lock as the one outside. Michael waved the guard’s passkey at it. The lock beeped and turned from red to flashing yellow. He tried the handle. It didn’t budge.

  He unzipped his decoder and tried the setting that had worked outside. No change. The light still blinked yellow.

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  He jogged past the unconscious guard and peeked around the corner. The hallway ran another forty feet, lined with utility pipes on one side, and ended in another gray door, this one with a narrow window.