Dues of Mortality

by Jason Austin

  “Jones, what are you doing?” Xavier shouted. “You just killed two of your own men!”

  Jones just fired brazenly in the direction of the voice.

  Xavier backed off and tried to consider his options. What would happen if he returned fire? Would the law even be on his side?

  “Jones,” Xavier said. “Please, I surrender! I just want to...” Another shot hit the doorjamb, throwing a splinter into Xavier’s hand. “God damn it! Are you crazy?”

  “Help me!” Glenda shouted. “Please!”

  Xavier gazed over at Bowen's body, the rookie's words sounding off like fire alarms in his head now. Protect her. Protect her! Protect...Elana! Xavier imagined it as clear as day: Elana Hatten screaming for help as that shit-sack Derrick Moses aimed down on her.

  My fault, he thought. I wasn't there. I wasn't...

  Xavier tucked and rolled to just inside the door and inline of the room's freestanding microwave. Jones fired into the microwave and it exploded on impact. Xavier then used the millisecond distraction to take an inaccurate shot at Jones’s leg. Jones roared in pain, and then exposed part of his own torso aiming for another shot. Xavier rose to one knee and fired directly at Jones’s right side. His shot struck Jones in the upper abdomen and allowed Glenda to break away. Jones dropped his weapon and slumped against the wall behind him. His fingers raked the plaster as he slid downward. Once Jones was still and prone to the floor, Xavier rushed to Glenda's side.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  Glenda turned to him. “You,” she exclaimed, her tear-soaked face somehow managing to look more awed than ever. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Are you hurt?” Xavier repeated.

  “I don't think so,” Glenda replied, hysterical. “Am I bleeding? You know sometimes you get hurt and don’t know it until you see blood.”

  “No, you’re not bleeding that I can see.”

  Glenda looked down at Jones, ready to bolt at the first sign of life in the creep. “He was going to kill me. Why was he going to kill me?”

  “I don't know. But I think we should get out of here.”

  ****

  Miles Gabriel held the uplink's screen in his palms, looking like he was about to ram his head through it. The signal was fluctuating heavily. It wasn't keeping up with the program’s changes. It began freezing in microbursts, giving Gabriel ten different types of fits.

  “Don’t you do it, you piece of shit,” he grumbled. A patron with half a sandwich in his mouth glanced over. Gabriel should have stayed in the men's room, where privacy was assured, but he wanted to have some amount of visual scrutiny. If something drastic went wrong like...The signal froze again. Fuck!

  ****

  Glenda looked rightfully confused and said, “But the police are...”

  “...the ones who just tried to kill you!” Xavier finished.

  Glenda took up the dufflebag of clothes from her apartment and they headed for the door. Just short of it, Xavier dropped Bowen’s gun as his legs turned to matchsticks. He braced his palm against the wall to save himself from falling over.

  “Are you going to throw up again?” Glenda asked.

  “If I’m lucky,” Xavier answered, his bottom lip wobbly, as if he were about to. “Grab the gun.”

  Glenda picked up the gun and then held her rescuer by his sides.

  When she saw the movement from over his shoulder, she swiftly pulled the man aside without even thinking. Perry Jones had them lined up perfectly and his intended shot would have likely skewered them both had she not. Glenda then turned and let off a single shot from Bowen's gun in Jones's direction. She did so, entirely certain she would hit nothing, and even more certain Jones would make her regret it. Instead, her single shot ended Jones, leaving him virtually headless in the otherwise comfortable motel room.

  ****

  Gabriel trotted outside to get a clear view of the motel’s entrance. Jones should be moving by now, he thought. What's wrong? He turned and slapped his briefcase onto the hood of a gold Cadillac parked directly at his right side. He threw open the case, only to see the word “IMMOBILIZED” screaming at him in bold blue letters.

  “Motherfucker!” he spat. I knew it! I knew it! Gabriel tucked the uplink under his arm and moved around a corner, out of the motel's line of sight. Before he could begin to imagine what had happened, he spied a small blue sedan cutting a U-turn on an empty street across from the location.

  It couldn’t be, he thought.

  But it was. Glenda Jameson.

  Her car was zipping around the corner with a man Gabriel had never seen before, wearing a blue shirt, or maybe jacket, behind the wheel.

  “Damn it!” he said and looked in the direction of his car. It was parked on the other side of the cafe. No way he would catch them. He tapped intensely at his fliptop until he connected to the police band's transmission. Shots had been fired, and officers were down, according to dispatch. All available units were proceeding directly to 2135 Stark Avenue. Right to him.

  Chapter 21

  Washington, D.C., August 27, 8:03 p.m.

  McCutcheon’s throat felt like he'd swallowed a tennis ball.

  I should’ve pulled him out, he thought as he zoomed down the highway. That kid was too anxious to prove himself, more so than most. What was I thinking?

  That another MIT was going to happen at Case Western, that’s what. Good lord.

  For a moment, McCutcheon's worriedness distracted him from the road and a fresh cluster of opposing cars caused him to swerve out of the median at the last second. It made him snap-to and the feeling quickly subsided. He went to engage the autodriver, and then thought better of it. Driving was another constant lesson in awareness and discipline; good agents kept their senses sharp no matter what their bodies were doing. Why am I even reacting like this? he asked himself. An agent unexpectedly going off the grid was no reason to panic. Did he really have such little faith in Bruckner?

  No. Not Bruckner.

  Himself.

  It was his decision to let Bruckner proceed. A decision that would follow McCutcheon the rest of his career, that would influence the manner in which he made future decisions about agents’ lives. And he wasn't sure he'd made the right one. McCutcheon wanted Ross just as bad, if not worse than Bruckner. He didn’t want to say it to the kid's face, but once McCutcheon was told about the meeting in D.C., any disagreement they had about making that train was effectively over. McCutcheon couldn’t just replace Bruckner. A more experienced agent would’ve been too old for the part. It would have taken another six months or even longer to get as far, and who knows how many more schools would’ve been blown to bits by then. McCutcheon banged his fist against the dash. But was there another way?

  Less than five minutes off the highway, McCutcheon pulled into the lot of a shabby, fly-by-night motor inn that was being combed by agents. It was adjacent to an equally shabby roadside diner whose parking lot was virtually empty, save for a rusty hummer that was also being searched by agents and about to be loaded onto a towing bed. It had been reported abandoned by the diner's manager. A bag of clothes and personal phone equips had been found inside. This left the agents with several kilometers to cover in any direction. It also made hoping that someone had noticed something suspicious at one of the motels their best bet. Perhaps they would get lucky and even find some decent video surveillance. The problem, there, being truckers and prostitutes of all ages and sexes made up a sizable chunk of those off-ramp motels. Some of the owners wouldn’t consider it good business to keep cameras probing about. Those were the spots Ross would prefer.

  A study of the area put a total of fifteen motels within the target vicinity. Agents were descending on every one of them. At least half were owned and or operated by naturalized citizens. With the sight of all those blue suits storming their front doors, many of them panicked, thinking the Immigration and Naturalization Service was staging a raid. One Iranian woman, crying and dressed in an ankle-length frock, had fal
len to her knees before an agent pleading with him not to deport her. The agent simply helped her up and realized it was going to be a long day.

  McCutcheon’s dashboard-com suddenly beeped and he answered it, snapping out of his funk. “McCutcheon here, go ahead.”

  “Sir, this is Brisby,” the com said. “I’m at an El Dorado Motel off Highway 1, southwest corner. You better get over here, quick.”

  ****

  After another seven miles, the towering, illuminated sign for the El Dorado crested above the off-ramp against the darkening sky. It was one of the motels on the list and being several hundred yards from a semi weigh-in station, it was a frequent stop for horny truckers. Walking up to the entrance, McCutcheon gagged at the sight of a discarded condom on the sidewalk. Dusk was shifting into night and the streets were just beginning to brew with transient women and young boys who looked like they hadn’t slept in days. One of the younger women reminded McCutcheon of his daughter. He was glad he wasn’t the local law enforcement. It would break his heart to have to drag in one of these kids.

  In room seventeen of the El Dorado motel, Garrett Trineer lay dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. A low velocity MAG shot from flat against the temple. Blood and brain-matter had been dispersed about the walls in a charred gluey horror. The El Dorado's Trinidadian owner had discovered the body, by best estimates, about an hour from the time of death. The man had been nothing but a pain in the ass since then. By the time FBI had been notified, D.C. Metro was more than happy to hand things off.

  “Damn it, mon! Why da’ hell dis’ shit got to happen here?” the owner complained.

  He became downright hostile when they discovered the second body fried in the bathtub. As if somehow American murder victims had it in for foreign motel owners. As it turned out, the El Dorado's electrical system wasn't quite up to code—something Ross may have noticed beforehand, thereby choosing electrocution as his method. Brisby must have listened to the owner bitch and moan at the local cops for a good twenty minutes before McCutcheon arrived.

  “Jesus,” the ASAC groaned as he ran his eyes over Bruckner's stewed corpse. Both Bruckner and Trineer were found in their underwear. An empty 3mm MAG pistol lay just inches from Trineer's corpse. A type-written note left on the bed spoke of a suicide pact between two homosexual lovers seeking the refuge of the afterlife—Ross’s last minute gift to the homophobic Trineer.

  “It’s my fault,” McCutcheon said. He'd come to confer with Special Agent Brisby from inside the owner/manager's office. They each occupied a side of the single window that looked out over the motel's parking lot. The office was a good thirty yards from the crime scene, but still in direct line of sight. And it explained further why the owner was being such an ass. He'd probably seen or heard something within the proper timeline, but hadn't done a damn thing about it. He hadn't even inspected the room for nearly an hour after Ross had checked out and that was because he wanted to rent it to some trucker and his sixteen-year-old male prostitute.

  “How is it your fault?” Brisby asked.

  “I sent him in without proper surveillance,” McCutcheon answered.

  “Come on boss, you couldn't have given him anything Ross wouldn't have found, inside or out. He would have detected it and killed him for sure. Even the trackers were stripped of him before he got within ten miles.” Brisby felt a dozen different kinds of silly recapitulating tactics and procedure to a man with 3 times his experience, but he knew damn well if it were him in McCutcheon's shoes, he would certainly want somebody there to help keep things in perspective. “The slipdisk wasn't just the right call it was the only call.”

  “How did Ross know?” McCutcheon asked out the window. “How could he have detected the bug in the software?”

  “I hate to say it, boss, but maybe that wasn't it. The tracker was never activated, which means it was likely never downloaded. Maybe Bruckner did something that tipped him off.”

  “Or maybe Ross caught the software and stopped it before it had a chance.”

  “How? The tech boys designed it to circumvent every commercial firewall known to man.”

  McCutcheon glanced around the office as if it had ears. “D.O.J. designs its own firewalls.”

  Brisby looked stunned. “You think Ross had an inside line on how to detect it?”

  McCutcheon shrugged. “Why Washington D.C.? Why did Ross want the exchange to happen here? There aren't any biotech firms worth hitting in D.C.? He wanted those codes to hack into Case Western Reserve back in Cleveland.” He paused. “Why was he really here? Why was he the only one who got away from us a year ago?”

  “You think somebody with bureau connections tipped him off at the last second, somebody here?”

  “I don't know what to think anymore.”

  Brisby tugged on his chin. He didn't have McCutcheon's years in the bureau, but he knew the rotten apples were there. Still, he couldn't imagine Ross actually being protected by one of their own. “Sounds like either way you look at it, the only thing that would have saved Bruckner would have been if none of us did our job.”

  McCutcheon sighed at his own reflection in the window. He knew Brisby was right, but couldn’t say it out loud. When McCutcheon looked at him with his plumb posture, full head of hair and teen-idol semblance, he remembered that Brisby wasn’t yet thirty himself. He then crimped under a spasm of guilt for letting the little snot in on suspicions that not even McCutcheon was ready to acknowledge. The ASAC nodded toward the scene of uniforms and cheap sport coats bustling across the parking lot. “What does Metro think?”

  “They’re buying it for now,” Brisby answered. “Just like Ross wanted them to. You know how the locals like to keep it: simple and clean.” Brisby didn't harbor any disrespect for local law enforcement, like some agents, but looking too far beyond the veil wasn’t exactly a metro strong suit.

  “Even they won’t be fooled once they get the background on Trineer,” McCutcheon said plainly. “They’ll assume it was a poorly disguised revenge hit by his old gang—payback for rolling over on them.”

  “Our guy will just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Brisby shook his head. “I'll never understand guys like Ross. Not why they kill, but how they manage to always find the right people to manipulate.”

  “Belonging, kid. It's a powerful human instinct.”

  “Does that explain guys like Thaddeus Maguire? That guy was born with a silver spoon coming out of both ends. If I were him I would have been too busy enjoying my money to sacrifice everything for 'the cause'.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn't so much 'the cause' that Maguire threw it away for.”

  Brisby raised an eyebrow. “Then why?”

  McCutcheon sighed openly. “Thaddeus Maguire had some serious issues. You know who his father is, right?”

  “Chad Maguire, MagNanomus Therapeutics. Guy makes like 30 billion dollars a year making wheelchairs, prosthetics, exoskeletons, stuff like that. I got members of my family walking around on his hardware.”

  “Maybe so, but chances are they don't have Maguire to thank for it. He was never as good at inventing exoskeletons as he was at industrial espionage.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh yeah. He spent years building a library of top secret information on his competitors: R & D., employee histories, security protocols, bank records, the whole nine. He also had a lawyer: old-school mob type named Miles Gabriel, real scum-bucket.”

  “Gabriel used to work for the father,” Brisby said lighting up. “Now, I remember.”

  “Yep, long time ago. That is until a biotech baron named Jerome Wallace blew into town. Wallace was looking for a good attorney to help draw up his contracts and shit like that, as he went about sucking up every biotech firm on the east coast like a fat kid on a milkshake. He was also looking for somebody with an inside track on any possible competition. Wallace is already worth five times what Maguire is so it's a no-brainer for Gabriel to quit his employ with Maguire so he can work for Wallac
e. Skip to many years later—we got nut after nut blowing up any business with a double-helix in its logo. Enter Ross and PHANTOM. We discover Ross has been recruiting on some of the more popular campus sites around Columbia University. That's where a student named Beth Sullivan fell under Ross's spell during her sophomore year. Pretty young thing—energetic, outgoing and exactly the type to sweep Thaddeus Maguire right off his feet.”

  “Maguire was involved with her?”

  “Maguire was in love with her. You see, old-man Chad had pulled some expensive strings to get his only son into an ivy league school. He forced Thaddeus to major in business so he'd have an heir to the fortune and so the kid wouldn't go through his entire life as a complete idiot. Unfortunately, Chad was about twenty years too late.”

  Brisby snickered.

  “Anyhow, six months into his freshman year, Thaddeus hooks up with Beth, who proceeds to edify him on the struggles of the common man and how people like his father and the biotechs rape and plunder under the banner of economic growth. She does it all with a big smile and an even bigger rack, charming Maguire right out of his Chinos. Classic brainwashing at its best.”

  “But MagNanomus Therapeutics wasn't a biotech firm.”

  “That didn't matter. Not to Beth or to Thaddeus. And Chad owned enough biotech stock to blur the lines pretty good...especially for Ross, who, once he gets wind of the relationship, convinces his protege to bring Maguire in, mostly as a source of cash. But Ross gets a bonus when he finds out that Maguire has a searing hatred for his father. That, along with his undying love for Beth Sullivan, motivates Thaddeus to go the extra mile. He tells Ross about his father's spying on his competitors, a lot of them biotech firms. At which point, Ross's deranged ass practically ejaculates with joy. With the prospect of having such inside information, knowing what the biotechs are up to and how they protect themselves? Now he can really take the fight to them. That's how Ross picks his targets: goes after the ones whose research he deems anti-human or down right crooked.”