by Wesley Cross
“I’m so sorry,” the man said, not letting her go. “I was not looking. My apologies.”
She fumbled with her umbrella and did her best to wipe any traces of pain off her face.
“My bad,” the man said. “I normally don’t walk into people. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. That’s okay,” she said and pulled her elbow from his grasp, maintaining a neutral expression. “Not a big deal.”
Cooper hurried past him and continued on walking in the rain, cursing under her breath. She hadn’t blundered like that in a long time. The man’s stare was burning a hole in her back as she walked and she continued her way past the fire escape and then turned the corner when she reached the intersection.
The man was military; there was no doubt. There was some grace about the way he moved that nobody could acquire in a gym or a martial arts class. He was going to remember her face and if she had any other stumbles in this assignment, that could later prove problematic. But there was nothing she could do now.
She walked around for a few minutes, randomly crossing the streets and trying to kill some time. Finally, she turned around and headed toward the target block again. She threw away the umbrella and unzipped her jacket, making herself wider. It wasn’t much of a transformation, but it would have to do. She got lucky—there were a few people walking on the opposite side of the fire escape and no one on her side. She pressed the button on the remote control, activating the EMP devices that fried the CCTV cameras and once she got near the ladder, she pressed another button.
The rear tire of the disabled truck exploded with a bang. It was loud enough to serve as a distraction, and she flung herself up the ladder and over the wall, ignoring the pain in her shoulders.
She stayed in the narrow space between the buildings, pressing her face into the wall for a few moments to make sure her position wasn’t compromised, and listened to the sounds coming from the street. She heard the SUV doors open and close as the guards stepped out of the car and went to the truck to investigate. A couple of minutes later, she heard the doors open and close again as the team returned to the car, apparently satisfied with what they saw.
Finally, she jumped up to the second fire escape ladder that zigzagged across the back wall, pulled herself up to the platform and started her ascent to the top of the building.
Cooper climbed onto the roof, took a few seconds to catch her breath, and looked around. There were no cameras as far as she could tell and no motion detectors. She walked across the roof and stopped before the edge of the building. The gap between the two roofs, she reckoned, was eight, maybe nine feet wide. It was a reasonably safe jump under different circumstances. But now, with the wet surface and unpredictable gusts of wind, it was turning out to be a dangerous proposition.
But it was too late to turn back—the only way her deal with Engel was going to work was if she delivered the goods. Cooper backed up a dozen yards, waited for the wind to die down, and broke into a hard dash. The edge of the roof rushed toward her and she planted her foot on the short barrier separating her from the unforgiving void and catapulted herself into the air.
She landed hard, slipping on the slick surface and collapsing into a mangled tumble rather than a graceful roll. When she came to a stop, Cooper turned on her back and stayed there for a few moments, feeling the raindrops on her face and letting the pain seep out of her shoulders. Finally, she picked herself up and walked around the roof, staying away from the skylights and making sure there were no recording devices or alarms of any sort. There were none.
Satisfied, Cooper made her way to the back of the building and sat next to the square box of the ventilation system. There was nothing that resembled a shelter, but the aluminum surface was warm to the touch and she leaned her back against it. She hoped it was going to make her stay on the roof a little less miserable.
It was too early to break into the apartment and Cooper was going to have to stay here, under the cold rain, for a few more hours. But the hard part was over. All she needed to do now was to wait for the right moment to set her plan in motion.
For Cooper, waiting for the right moment was never a problem.
Epilogue 1: Rovinsky
February 2008
Port of Newark, New Jersey
It was still dark when Rovinsky drove his Jeep with a trailer in tow right to the edge of the dock and parked it next to the pair of large yellow cleats. A massive Panamax-sized container ship was docked about fifty yards to his left, its enormous hull blotting out the stars and towering above the docks like a prehistoric leviathan.
Rovinsky rolled down the window, letting in cold air, and pulled out a pack of American Spirits from his jacket. He tapped the pack on the palm of his left hand a few times until one of the cigarettes jutted out far enough, then plucked it out of the pack and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.
He hadn’t smoked for almost six years and had no intention of relapsing now, but the papery taste of the cigarette filter in his mouth and the sweet smell of fresh tobacco still had a calming effect on him.
After a few minutes, a Ford pickup truck with the dock markings pulled up next to him and turned off the engine. A short, stocky man wearing a bright-yellow jacket over a puffy North Face jacket jumped out of the cabin and walked around his truck to Rovinsky’s window.
“Hey, Jim,” the man said and leaned onto the Jeep, the steam coming out of his mouth with every breath. “Is everything on schedule?”
“Frankie.” Rovinsky opened the glove compartment, pulled out a fat envelope, and handed it to the man. “I haven’t heard otherwise, so they should be here soon.”
“Good. Give me a sec then.”
The man took the envelope and walked back to his truck. A minute later, he came back with a clipboard in his hands. “Here,” he said, giving it to Rovinsky, “make sure you exit through gate six on the way out.”
“Thanks, Frankie. I owe you one.”
Rovinsky watched as the man in the yellow vest returned to his truck and drove away. Then he rolled the window all the way up, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and put it back in the pack. He checked his watch. It was almost time.
The sixty-foot trawler came twenty minutes late, its diesel engine sputtering black smoke as the ship maneuvered next to the dock. Two men appeared on the deck, their dark silhouettes almost invisible against the dark sky as they lowered a gangway from the ship to the ground. It scraped the concrete surface as the ship wobbled with the tide, making a low grinding sound that got under Rovinsky’s skin.
He opened the door, stepped out of the car and watched as the men started lowering large cubes, wrapped in heavy tarps, that were sitting on top of wooden pallets to the ground.
“Hey, boss,” one of the men said as he hopped from the gangway to the ground.
“Hey, Doug,” Rovinsky said, shaking the man’s hand. “How’d it go?”
“It’d be better if Pat wasn’t retching the entire time.” Doug nodded toward the man on top of the deck. “Ate some funny-smelling fish, which I told him not to. The whole boat reeks like his vomit.”
“I take it Pat isn’t gonna make a pirate,” Rovinsky said.
“I won’t make a pirate either,” Doug said as he maneuvered the first pallet toward the trailer. “I might be a frog, but I much prefer solid ground under my boots.”
A moment later, Patrick joined them on the ground and together they loaded the pallets into the trailer.
“C’mon, boys,” Rovinsky said, getting into the Jeep. “Let’s not overstay our welcome.”
The two men helped the crew of the trawler pull the gangway back to the ship and then joined Rovinsky in his car.
He put the Jeep into drive and pulled away from the dock, getting onto the gravel road. They drove past a few rows of eighteen-wheelers and looped around a large stack of containers, until they hit a paved path leading to gate number six.
A few minutes later, they merged onto Interstate 278, going east. Rovinsky m
oved to the right lane and accelerated to just below the speed limit.
“What’s gonna happen now, boss?” Doug asked from the back of the Jeep. “Where do we go from here?”
“Staten Island,” Rovinsky said. “There’s a storage facility that’s run by a good friend of mine. It’ll be safe there for the time being.”
“That’s not what I meant, boss,” Doug insisted. “What’s gonna happen to us?”
Rovinsky stayed silent for a few moments. The truth was, he didn’t have a good answer to this question. At least for now.
“I don’t know, Doug,” he finally said. “The program is closed for now as per the president’s instructions. It may never be reopened again. I’ve been reassigned to the DOD. Technically, I’m not even your boss anymore.”
“So, we just go back to our old lives?”
“No,” Rovinsky looked back at the two men in the rearview mirror, “we don’t just go back to our old lives. Sometimes you need to take a step back, before you can take another step forward.”
“There’s a plan?” Pat said. “That’s why we’re smuggling the money?”
“I’m working on it, boys. For now, we need to regroup and find a way to do it again. I wanted to make sure that when the time comes, we’ll have a sizable war chest to play with. And trust me when I tell you—sooner or later, our time will come.”
Epilogue 2: Helen
March 2008
New York
It was getting dark as the sun continued to sink below the horizon. A stale stink of urine and an earthy smell of marijuana permeated the gloomy room.
The maids had come earlier and changed the sheets and fluffed the pillows, but the old fabric was past the point when a laundry could give it a snow-white appearance and a crisp, wintery smell. It was clean to the touch but bore a depressingly grayish hue. The stains, randomly distributed throughout the material, could tell more than one story.
Chen sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her suitcase. It was a simple, small, rectangular box on wheels with an extendable handle. She’d bought it at a flea market in the morning. It had seen better days, its once black fabric exterior faded and frayed in the corners, but it was still sturdy enough to serve on one more flight.
An airplane ticket, a brand-new passport, and a pile of cash sat next to her on the bed. Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Just under the limit where she would have to declare it during the customs check.
She picked up the passport, opened the page with her photograph and studied it. It was a surreal experience—seeing an official document with her picture on it, but with a strange name next to it printed in big bold letters.
Helen Wu.
The best lies are always those that have the right mix of truth and fiction. It was too easy to stumble if everything in your story was a lie. Keeping her real first name also gave her a sense that at least some part of her identity hadn’t been taken away. Her name was still Helen.
The last few months had been trying. She had been hunted by organized crime and also wanted by the police for questioning concerning the murders of Hiroko and Eugene. She didn’t know for sure how the cops found out that she was staying at the house in the sleepy Kings Highway neighborhood, but she could make an educated guess—Victor Ye was trying to flush her out.
She went back to look at the house once, unable to help herself, and stood there for a few minutes looking at the place that had once sheltered her and her friends that was now a pile of ash, debris, and burned-out beams. Amazingly, there was the full-size Captain America’s shield sticking out of the rubble, its colors darker, scorched by the fire, but otherwise untouched, as if made from real vibranium.
Eugene had some family in Upstate New York who gave him a proper funeral, his closed casket now resting somewhere in a small cemetery up in Syracuse.
Hiroko, on the other hand, had no one and the city of New York took care of her remains. That hurt the most. Chen had purchased a column in a local newspaper for an obituary, but even that felt like an empty exercise—she didn’t have a single picture of the woman to put in the paper along with the article. The only photograph she had—a selfie they’d taken with Eugene in his dining room—was on a camera that had perished along with the house.
Her room phone rang, startling her.
“Hello.”
“Miss Wu? Your car service is here.”
“Thanks. I’ll be right out.”
She hung up the phone and looked around the room. There was nothing else here to do. She stuffed the cash, the ticket, and the passport into the inside jacket pocket, and wheeled the suitcase out the door.
“Good evening, ma’am,” the driver said, opening the car door for her and taking her luggage.
“Hello.”
“Going to JFK, right?”
“Yes,” she said, settling in the backseat. “Terminal 4, Hong Kong Airlines.”
“No problem.” The man started the car and pulled out from the parking spot. “So, going to Hong Kong, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Nice,” the driver continued. “Never been to that part of the world. Very interesting culture. But every time me and the missus go somewhere, we end up going south—Miami, or Puerto Rico. She likes the warm weather, you know? What about you? Going on a vacation? Or business?”
The rhythmic sound of tires was relaxing, almost hypnotic, and Chen started drifting into a sleep.
“Neither,” she said. She rested her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes. “New life.”
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Thank you for reading VERTIGO, the second book in THE UPGRADE series. I hope you enjoyed it. The universe of the series continues to expand with four more books coming out in the next two years.
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Also by Wesley Cross
THE UPGRADE SERIES
BOOK 1. THE BLUEPRINT
BOOK 2. VERTIGO
BOOK 3. THE LOOP (Winter 2019/2020)
BOOK 4. SPARE PARTS
BOOK 5. FATA MORGANA
BOOK 6. GOD IN THE MACHINE
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to Oleg V and Alex B for the in-depth tutorial on hacking lingo. To Andrew Ackerman, for input and some fantastic stories about the life of a special forces soldier. To Wesly Farris, for giving me some crazy ideas and always willing to help with research. To Faith Williams, for doing a fantastic editing job. To the talented Jeroen Ten Berge, for the wonderful series design. To Dave L. for continuous inspiration; wherever you are, I hope it’s a place with magnificent ships and warm, sunny skies. To my wife, who always serves as the sounding board for all my writing projects and who keeps me going every time I hit the wall. And last, but not least—to my son, who makes it all worth it.
Copyright © 2019 by Wesley Cross
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