XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series)

by Brad Magnarella

  “All right,” he said, dabbing his lips with his napkin. “I do not have long. Let us get down to business.”

  “He’s taken the bait,” Kilmer said, watching on the monitor as Khoggi set his goblet down. “Alpha, are you in position?”

  “In position,” Reginald answered.

  Kilmer scanned the feed from a hidden camera in the bathroom but could not pick the shapeshifter out. Good. The trick was to capture Khoggi without his security detail aware he was missing, acquire the code, and then return the prince without him aware he had given it up. Otherwise, he would simply change it before Reginald could reach the bank in Geneva.

  Kilmer shifted his attention to the monitor beside it, showing a second, smaller conference room, its walls reinforced with soundproof material, its windows covered. Margaret paced the carpeted floor, which had been cleared save for two office chairs facing one another in the room’s center. Agents were posted beside the two doors on opposite walls.

  “Bravo?” he asked.

  “Ready and waiting,” Margaret answered with an air of impatience.

  “Stay that way,” Kilmer said. “He’ll be coming your way in about five minutes, maybe sooner.”

  “Roger that,” she said.

  Kilmer turned and gave Janis and Scott, his backups, a thumbs-up.

  “It’s looking good.”

  Friedman was in the middle of explaining the details of the proposed arms package when a sudden spasm hit Khoggi’s bladder. He looked from the report to the goblet of orange juice, empty now save for a bit of pulp at the bottom. The refreshment had passed through him quickly.

  A second spasm seized him.

  “Ah, very sorry,” he said, “but Khoggi must break to make water, urgently.”

  “You’re in luck,” Schwartz scowled. “The conference room comes equipped with a bathroom. Through that door there.”

  Khoggi stood and hurried to the indicated door, which one of his security men held open. The door led onto a short hallway with a men’s restroom on the right and a women’s on the left. His security man opened the door to the men’s room, a small, tiled affair.

  “Wait outside,” Khoggi ordered, arriving before the urinal in three hurried steps.

  He sensed his man giving the room a final glancing over before he retreated and pulled the door closed behind him. A nearly transcendent relief bathed Khoggi’s brain as the great pressure eased from his bladder. He finished, pulled the lever to flush, and zipped up.

  When he turned, something beside him moved. At what first appeared a trick of the eye took form—a human figure patterned to look like the wall of the bathroom, gold and white striped wallpaper above dark wainscoting. What was this? An ultrafine needle, barely felt, withdrew from Khoggi’s neck. He tried to shout, but his jaw locked. A paralytic.

  The figure sat him against the wall behind the door and then proceeded to transform into the exact likeness of him, down to his polarized sunglasses. Khoggi watched the man wash his hands and then dry them on a hanging towel, pausing to study his face in the mirror.

  “Stay put,” his new twin whispered, and left the bathroom.

  Beyond the door, he heard the receding footfalls of the impersonator and his security man. The door to the conference room opened. “Khoggi is back,” a jubilant voice that sounded exactly like his announced.

  Once more Khoggi tried to shout, but save for the faintest rasping deep in his throat, no sound would come. Down the short hallway, the door to the conference room closed again.

  Reginald, Khoggi thought. The cursed shapeshifter.

  Kilmer watched Reginald’s part go off seamlessly. When the conference room door was sealed, he leaned toward the small microphone. “Bravo team? You’re clear to extract.”

  He watched the two agents open the back door to the second conference room, remove a false wall that made it appear as though the bathrooms could only be accessed by the main conference room, and steal to the men’s room. They retrieved Khoggi, one agent carrying him beneath the arms, another by the legs, and returned with him to their room. They sat him in one of the two chairs. While one of the men pulled the false wall back into place, the second secured Khoggi and injected him with an anti-paralytic.

  The agents took up their former positions. Margaret rounded the chair facing Khoggi’s and sat, one knee crossed over the other. She stared at him for a moment before her head began to move.

  “Oh, great,” Kilmer said.

  “What is it?” Janis asked.

  “Your sister forgot to turn her earpiece back on. I can’t hear her.”

  “Want me to send her a mental message?”

  In the monitor, he watched the green of her eyes deepen. “It looks like she’s already in interrogative mode,” he said. “Let’s let her do her work.” He cursed silently. It was a small glitch, but a glitch nonetheless—one that marred what had been a perfect operation to that point.

  He watched Prince Khoggi’s own head begin to tilt and nod.

  Their kingpin was talking, anyway. Hopefully in numbers.

  Prince Khoggi felt the second prick, again in his neck. Within moments, his muscles unlocked, but he was restrained, bound to a chair. He blinked his dried-out eyes until moisture bathed them and the blurred shapes of the room took on lines. Five feet in front of him, a woman sat, facing him.

  “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  His lips broke into a smile as recognition took hold.

  “My goddess,” he declared. “Ah, it has been too long.”

  “Prince Khoggi,” she replied formally.

  Her green eyes seemed to swirl, like a pair of emerald whirlpools. As Khoggi became lost in their seductive pull, he was distantly aware of her speaking again, her voice a gentle music. But was she talking to him or to the man at his back? He blinked several more times, his vision not yet twenty-twenty.

  With a sigh, Khoggi decided he didn’t care.

  He was just happy to see Margaret again.

  28

  Kilmer’s gaze pulsed between the monitors showing the two conference rooms. In one, Reginald-as-Khoggi was still going through the motions of negotiating with Friedman and Schwartz. In the other, Margaret continued her interrogation of the real Prince Khoggi.

  Kilmer checked his watch. They had just passed the one-hour mark, which was forty minutes beyond what they had game-planned. The knot of anxiety in his stomach tightened. With Margaret’s transceiver off, he had no idea what kind of progress she was making, if any. He only had his connection to the two agents in the room to go by. He activated the microphone.

  “How’s it going in there?” he asked.

  “Fine, sir,” one of the agents responded.

  Same answer he’d gotten the last two times he’d checked.

  “Any sense of this wrapping up?” Kilmer asked.

  “Should be soon, sir,” the other agent responded.

  Again, same answer.

  Kilmer leaned back from the microphone with a sigh.

  “Did you notice that?” Scott asked, scooting up beside Kilmer.

  “Notice what?”

  Scott tapped the feed from the interrogation room. The camera was in the room’s back corner, its angle showing an up-close side view of the agent guarding the rear door, the back of Khoggi, the front of Margaret, and then, on the far side of the room, the second agent guarding the main door.

  “There was a little hiccup in the feed,” Scott said. “Everyone shifted an inch or two. It did the same thing about ten minutes ago.”

  “Yeah,” Kilmer said, having seen it himself a couple of times. “A delay on the feed catching up to real time.”

  “Mind if I check it out?” Scott asked, already closing his eyes.

  “Go ahead. Doesn’t look like we’ll be wrapping up any time soon.”

  Kilmer’s gaze shifted to the monitor of the meeting. Reginald had to be wondering how much longer he would need to keep up the effusive-prince act. He was playing the part to perfection, but th
e longer this went on, the more chances there were of something going wrong.

  “Um, we’ve got a problem,” Scott said.

  When Kilmer turned, he was alarmed by the pallor of Scott’s face. Scott nodded toward the monitor of the interrogation room.

  “That’s not a live feed,” he said. “It’s a recorded loop.”

  “Scott’s right,” Janis said, her voice tight. “I just checked. The agents are inside, but Prince Khoggi and Margaret are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Kilmer led the foot-pounding charge from the monitoring room, down the corridor, and around a corner to the interrogation room. He grasped the handle, but the door was locked. He hammered the heavy wooden door with the side of a fist.

  “Open up!” he shouted.

  “Step aside,” Janis said.

  Kilmer heard the locking mechanism click and then felt an intake of air as the door blew inward. The agent posted beside the door immediately moved into their way, one hand out, the other on his holstered firearm.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is a restricted area.”

  Janis shoved him aside, and the three of them entered. The chairs in the middle of the room were empty, the restraints used to bind Khoggi’s arms and legs in a pile beside the far one.

  The second agent rushed forward.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is a restricted area.”

  Janis motioned with her arm. An invisible force wrestled the agent to the ground and pinned him face-down beside the first.

  “It’s like they’ve been programmed,” Kilmer said, remembering the rote responses to his inquiries over the past hour. He looked from the agents to the empty chairs.

  “They have been,” Janis answered.

  Kilmer felt his face screwing up as he tried to piece together whatever the hell had happened here. “By Prince Khoggi?” he asked. Was the man a Special, too? That might explain some things.

  “No,” Janis said.

  When Kilmer turned to her, the full force of what she was saying landed against his chest like a truck grille. The mole wasn’t Agent Steel. It was Janis’s sister, Margaret Graystone.

  29

  Kilmer reminded himself that Prince Khoggi and Margaret couldn’t have made it far. He had agents posted throughout the build—

  He stopped and looked again at the pair of agents on the floor. “Janis,” he said, massaging his brow, “I need you to locate all of the agents and restore their wills, starting with these two. They weren’t the only ones compromised.”

  How else would Khoggi and Margaret have escaped?

  While Janis went to work, Kilmer activated the transceiver in his ear. “Alpha? We have a situation.” He waited for Reginald-as-Khoggi to cough. “The prince is missing. Wrap up your meeting in the next five, then leave as you came. We’ll have a team in place to intercept Khoggi’s men.”

  He turned to Scott. “Can you connect me to the private hangar at National?”

  Scott nodded. Deep in his transceiver, Kilmer heard several clicks and then a ring. “You’re connecting,” Scott said.

  “Yes,” Kilmer said when a man picked up, “this is Agent Johnson from ATF. There’s a Sonic II jet in bay eighteen that we believe to be shuttling contraband. Under no circumstances are you to clear it for take off. Do you understand? We have agents en route and—”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the man interrupted. “The jet has already departed.”

  “When?”

  “Thirty minutes ago.”

  With a curse, Kilmer killed the connection and turned to Scott and Janis.

  “These two are restored,” Janis said of the agents. The armored men had gained their feet and were peering around with bleary faces, as though awakening from odd dreams. “I’ve made contact with the others. They’re on their way. Two were down in Viper’s security facilities.”

  “No doubt the ones who set up the loop on that feed,” Kilmer said. His men were well-trained in surveillance equipment, versatile too. Great assets, as long as they were working for him.

  “There’s one agent I can’t reach,” Janis said.

  “The one who drove them to the airport.” Setting a hand on the back of Janis’s neck, Kilmer lowered his face to hers. Her skin had taken on a chalky tone. “Look, no one saw this coming. No one. Let’s fix what we can now and assess what happened later. Okay?”

  A trembling resolve took hold in Janis’s dark gaze and she nodded. Kilmer gave her a gentle squeeze as a half dozen agents entered the room. He briefed them quickly on the new situation.

  Reginald’s voice entered his earpiece. “Alpha here,” he whispered. “We’re starting to move.”

  “Roger that,” Kilmer answered. “Signal when you’re in position.”

  He checked to make sure the door to their room was sealed before addressing his team. “The procession will be coming this way in about a half minute. Four men. All armed.”

  “I’ve got this,” Janis said.

  “Are you sure?” Kilmer asked.

  She set her jaw as she nodded.

  When Reginald’s clearing throat sounded through his earpiece, Kilmer signaled to Janis. She closed her eyes, then opened them.

  “Done,” she said.

  Kilmer cracked the door and peeked out. In the corridor, Friedman, Schwartz, and Reginald-as-Khoggi were standing amid four downed men. Using her telekinesis, Janis dragged the bodyguards into the interrogation room. As agents went to work, removing their weapons and cuffing them, Kilmer stepped into the corridor, Janis and Scott flanking him.

  Reginald transformed from Prince Khoggi to his natural form as he strode forward. “What’s the situation?” he asked.

  “Our team was compromised,” Kilmer said, not wanting to name Margaret in front of Janis. “Prince Khoggi and his asset made it to the airport and took off more than thirty minutes ago.”

  “Can they be intercepted?” Reginald asked.

  “In a Sonic II and with that kind of lead?” Kilmer shook his head.

  A large portable phone on Schwartz’s belt began to ring. He turned away from their small gathering to answer it. After a brusque exchange, he returned the phone to its holster.

  “I was against this whole damned idea from the beginning,” he grumbled before addressing them. “We have another problem. Those disbursements we were holding off on? They’ve gone through. And not just from us. From all the defense companies.”

  A moan sounded, and Kilmer turned to find Scott digging his hands into his hair.

  “The disk,” he said. “I put the new codes on there—to keep them off our computer—but I left the disk out. I mean, it was in the server room at the command and control center, but…” His eyes moved uneasily toward Janis. “…but anyone could have picked it up.”

  And Margaret had, Kilmer thought. Meaning the Soviets would be getting their money. The installation of the cloaking technology would follow. And then a large-scale nuclear strike.

  “Christ!” an agent exclaimed. Kilmer wheeled to where he and the other agents were backing from Khoggi’s men, one of the agents wiping a spray of blood from his face shield.

  “Micro detonators in their brains,” he said. “They just blew.”

  And with them any information on Prince Khoggi’s whereabouts, Kilmer thought with a grim sigh.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s regroup.”

  30

  “I think it started in Saudi Arabia, with that date,” Janis said, staring at her ceiling. Her parents were still meeting with Director Kilmer to discuss the implications of their missing daughter. Scott had come over, and now the two of them were lying side by side on her bed. The popcorn ceiling seemed to tilt and rotate with the unreality of the last twelve hours.

  Her sister had been compromised.

  “All Margaret wanted him to talk about was how he had amassed his wealth,” Janis continued. “Prince Khoggi would have keyed in on her ambition, her drive to succeed. He’d have felt her power, too. A
fter all, she used it on him.” She wrung a down pillow over her stomach. “There’s another damn clue I missed. When I went into Khoggi’s head earlier in the night, I saw his lips near Margaret’s ear. I thought I’d tapped into a fantasy center, but he wasn’t kissing her. He was whispering to her. Sometime after that night, he got to her.”

  “Do you think she knew she’d be working against us?” Scott asked.

  Janis considered her sister’s personality. “Maybe not at first. But eventually, yeah. She probably bought into the balance of powers argument, committed to the Scale’s cause.”

  “Make a fortune while saving the world,” Scott muttered. “Makes a nice brochure.”

  “Much faster than the business-school track she was on,” Janis agreed. “Emphasis on was.” An inquiry revealed that Margaret hadn’t actually attended a course since the fall term, six months earlier. She had been using the university as a cover for whatever else she’d been up to.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Scott said.

  Janis rolled her head toward him. “But it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Why Margaret was so insistent on knowing what you and I were up to back when Kilmer was letting us leave the neighborhood. Why she didn’t respond to the alert when Jesse returned with that implant in his head.”

  “She claimed her watch malfunctioned,” Scott remembered.

  “How the Scale knew the coordinates of our landing site—I’d given them to her that morning, dammit. I felt guilty for leaving her out of the loop, and I revealed the whole plan. It also explains why Agent Steel’s team never recovered Reginald’s sniper rifle. The markings on the bullet that killed Creed wouldn’t have matched his weapon. Margaret probably had an agent remove the rifle so Reginald would remain under suspicion.”

  “But Reginald said Margaret was on his kill list—when the Witch conditioned his medicine on taking out a Champion.”

  “The Scale gave him options,” Janis pointed out. “They knew he wouldn’t target a girl, so Margaret was safe either way. But by putting her on the list, the Scale removed her from future suspicion. Smart. Do you remember how opposed she was to us escaping the emergency bunker when Steel had us on lockdown? Yet another move to aid the Scale, who wanted us out of action.”