by Jack Heath
The sound of whirling blades faded from the air. The gunfire had stopped. Soon only a cold, dead silence filled Six’s ears. It was as if Kyntak and the helicopter had never existed.
And then he saw, and felt, nothing.
THE MESSAGE
Awake.
The world swam into bright, painful focus. Eyes, Six thought. Green eyes.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Ace of Diamonds said, tucking her blond hair behind her ear as she leaned over him. “Are you in pain?”
Six stretched his limbs. They were stiff, but not sore. “No.”
“Glad to hear it,” Ace said. She walked briskly over to a bench and rummaged through her instruments. “You were injected with a heavy dose of Syncal-4, a benzodiazepine derivative. Think of it as flurazepam’s bigger, meaner cousin. It creates a deep, refreshing sleep in small doses, but I’d estimate they hit you with about 35 cc, enough sedative to put most people in a coma. Not you, though. Out for less than two hours, and now you’re as good as new.” She shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
When Kyntak had carried Six back to the Deck after his ordeal at the Lab, Ace had been the doctor on call. Six was suffering from horrific injuries—injuries that would have a killed a human. So Kyntak had reluctantly told Ace the full story. Because she knew Six was a superhuman, she had been his preferred doctor ever since. She quietly tailored her treatments to his unusual needs. Six was glad of her presence—while she wasn’t much older than Six, her skill in all fields of medical science was matched only by her passion for the Deck’s cause.
“Am I at the Deck?” he asked.
Ace nodded. “The basement of the hospital wing.”
The morgue, Six thought. Why have they put me down here?
“It’s a busy day for me,” she said, picking up Six’s chart. “Two bodies and a patient. There’s no info on how superhumans react to Syncal, so I thought I’d take you down here and do the autopsies while I monitored your condition.”
Six rolled his head to one side. Methryn Crexe was lying on a chrome table only meters away in an open black body bag. His dark, narrow eyes, which had once sparkled with avarice and suspicion, were shut forever.
There was another body on a table farther away. He presumed it was Two; he didn’t want to look. He shut his eyes.
“I dug out the dart they hit you with,” Ace was saying. She held it up. “Weirdest thing I ever saw—less like a dart than an automatic syringe. The tube has two airtight compartments, one for the Syncal, the other containing a pod filled with compressed nitrogen. The needle had a trigger hooked into it, so when it broke your skin a valve opened on the pod, letting the nitrogen expand into the container. The expanding gas put pressure on the other container, forcing Syncal into the needle.”
Six kept his eyes shut. “Why go to so much trouble?”
“Because a normal dart would just have leaked some sedative into your system. This baby actually pumped you full of it.” Six could hear her scribbling on his chart. “As I said, they put enough into you to stun a decent-size horse.”
The events of the day were slowly returning to Six. Methryn Crexe, rescued, murdered. Two, shot dead. Kyntak, missing.
It makes no sense, he thought.
He opened his eyes. “Have you done the autopsies?”
Ace nodded. “Agent Two of Hearts was shot in the head with a 9-millimeter round. Plenty of bruising to the back, left arm, and left leg, mostly postmortem. The rigor mortis shows that he’s been dead for more than two and a half hours, but I’m sure you knew that. I’m sorry.” She paused. “Crexe is a little weirder. Let me show you why.”
Six swung his legs off the table and tried to stand up. His legs felt like jelly, and he fell backward against the edge of the table.
Ace gripped his arm. “Careful. Remember, they hit you with a huge dose.”
He regained his balance and shook Ace’s hand off his arm. She turned to the table with Crexe’s body.
“Killed by a shot to the head. Another 9-millimeter, but not the same gun. The lividity shows that his body was carried somewhere immediately after death. The blood drained into his extremities before congealing in the capillaries. My guess is that he was dead before he left his cell.”
Six frowned. Why would they kill Crexe before abducting him? “There must be something they didn’t want us to know,” he said. “Something he could have told us.”
“But why take the body?” Ace asked. “Why not leave him where he fell?”
“They wanted him as bait—to lead Deck agents to the apartment building.” Six rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand.
“There’s something else.” Ace adjusted the body bag. “He has a tattoo.”
Six gasped. Imprinted across Crexe’s chest was…
“…a web address?”
“Http://cww.1500hours/23June.ps,” said Ace.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, Six translated in his head, City Wide Web, dot 3 o’clock, slash 23 June, dot Private Server.
Today was June 23. Six looked at his watch. 14:55:03.
“I can do some tests on his skin,” Ace was saying, “but beyond the type of ink and when it was inscribed, there won’t be a lot I can tell you.”
“Do them anyway,” Six said. “I need all the information I can get.”
“Gotcha,” Ace said. “In that case, head to King of Hearts’s office; he’s about to check out the website. He’ll be glad to see you’re okay. And it’s nearly three o’clock.”
Six nodded. “Stay alert. Today would not be a good day to mess up.”
“I’ll take that as concern for my well-being,” Ace said, raising an eyebrow.
Six touched King’s door handle and heard the buzzer sound inside. The door opened. King was sitting behind his desk, squinting at an LCD through red-rimmed eyes. Six couldn’t see the screen. The computer looked new; the matte-finish casing was still smooth from the factory and no dust had settled on the CPU.
Six shivered a little when he saw the burst blood vessels in King’s eyes. It looked like he’d been staring at the screen for so long he’d forgotten how to blink.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” King said, glancing at him briefly.
Six sat down. His health was irrelevant. It was Kyntak’s whereabouts that concerned him.
“Have you heard from Kyntak?” he asked.
King shook his head. “The agents are still searching. But as far as we can tell, he’s vanished off the face of the earth. Except for the unconscious ones, the rest of the soldiers who ambushed you have disappeared as well!”
“What about the satellite pictures?”
“Someone jammed the server soon after I lost contact with you. The Diamonds say it’s a dead end.”
“So what’s on the screen?” Six asked.
King spun the LCD on its stand so it faced him. Six recognized the ChaoNet web browser and saw that King had already typed in the address from Crexe’s tattoo. The web page was a simple black backdrop with large white numbers in the center. It read 00:03:19, and flicked over to 00:03:18 as Six watched. Then 00:03:17.
Hours, minutes, seconds, Six thought. A countdown.
“You’ve disabled cookies?” he asked.
“Yes. This is a new PC, taken from the most recent shipment for Diamonds. It has nothing on it besides ChaoOffice and the browser. Grysat rigged up the best firewall he could, not that it should matter, given that the PC isn’t connected to the Deck network.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “The server will still have registered us as a hit on their stats, so they know that someone’s watching. But besides sending other computers to the same site as a smoke screen, which would be a security risk, there’s nothing we can do about that.”
“What happens when the countdown is up?”
King’s eyes didn’t waver from the screen. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“We’ve got a dead agent,” Six said, “a dead fugitive, an AWOL Joker, and no answers. What can
we do in three minutes?”
“The Clubs are retrieving the unconscious soldiers from the apartment building,” King said. “We’ll learn something from them once we get them shuffled and they wake up.”
“How long will that take?”
“An hour, perhaps.”
Six looked at the screen again. 00:02:41.
“What if it’s a bomb?” he demanded. “Here? Inside the Deck?”
“Then why would they give us a countdown?” King said. “And a body with a web address on it?”
Six remembered the mystery woman’s words. It seems like a game, but it’s not. He’s trying to put you off balance because he knows that’s the easiest way to beat you. He aims to deceive.
“Forget why,” Six said. “Evacuate the building, right now.”
“I have Diamond bomb squads sweeping the building as a precaution,” King said. “All nonessential personnel have been moved to the underground shelter.”
“What about Ace of Diamonds?” Six demanded. “She’s still running tests on the bodies!”
“There’s no bomb, Six.” King looked at him properly for the first time, and Six was again frightened by the hemorrhaged veins in his eyes. “If there were, they wouldn’t have warned us.”
“If there’s even the slightest chance—” Six persisted.
“Then what? We should all evacuate, and have no one watching this screen when it hits zero?”
“As opposed to getting ourselves killed to satisfy your curiosity?”
“We met a formidable new enemy today, Six,” King said. “Not the Lab, not even ChaoSonic. Someone worse. In a matter of hours, they broke into our cells as if the walls were made of paper, wiped the floor with a team of our best Hearts, and left the toughest agent I’ve got sleeping on the floor of some prehistoric apartment building.” He glared at Six, and Six’s gut wrenched. Is King angry at me? he wondered.
“If you want to run,” King said quietly, “then that’s fine. Take Ace with you. But this website is the only lead we have, and I’m not prepared to leave the City to their mercy just yet. I’m not leaving this computer.”
00:01:03. Six’s heart was beating a little faster. “We could set up something to record it. You don’t have to wait here.”
“It’s being recorded internally—Grysat set that up. But the website could have a copyright filter that blocks the recording—and traditional DVCs are too easily monitored.” He forced a smile. “After all you’ve been through, a few numbers on a screen are making you jittery?”
Six hung his head slightly. “I’ve had a rough day,” he admitted.
00:00:30.
The numbers clicked down. Every instinct screamed at Six to run, to climb out the window and jump, or at least to brace himself in the doorway or under the desk. But King had never steered him wrong before.
00:00:20.
But if it wasn’t a bomb, Six thought, what could it be? Why else would they have been given the web address? Perhaps it was a bomb—just not here. A shiver ran up his spine.
00:00:10.
Perhaps ten seconds from now, somewhere in the City, a building was going to shatter like glass, turning the thousands of people inside to dust.
00:00:04.
00:00:03.
00:00:02.
00:00:01.
00:00:00.
Six jumped. He’d been able to picture the explosion so vividly in his head that the anticlimax was more surprising than a colossal fireball would have been.
The numbers faded from the screen. The website was now completely black.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” King asked.
Six nodded grimly. “A bomb went off somewhere else.”
“I’ll get the Diamonds to check the—”
A flash from the screen interrupted him—the grainy flicker of exposure levels adjusting themselves. A hiss was emitted from the sound membrane over the LCD. They both stared at it, and their eyes widened in alarm.
An image had appeared. A man was sitting on a chair in front of a blank brick wall. His shaved head hung forward. Someone was standing behind him. The picture was too dark to see the person’s face, but from the posture and figure Six guessed it was a female.
The woman put her hand on the man’s scalp and pulled his head backward, exposing his face to the light.
Six gasped. It was Kyntak. Eyes shut, face bruised, but unquestionably him.
“I now have in my possession,” the woman on the screen said, “Agent Six of Hearts.”
ULTIMATUM
“By the end of today, I will be a hundred million credits richer,” the woman continued. “I could sell Six to ChaoSonic, who I’m sure would be thrilled to have him returned, or I could perform my own tests upon him until I have collected a hundred million credits worth of data.”
Six was searching Kyntak’s face for signs of life. He found none.
“But there is a third alternative. If you deposit that same amount into a nominated account before six o’clock this evening, then Six will be returned to you unharmed.”
Six remembered the net cutting his skin. A ransom, he thought. That’s what this is all about.
“Once the deposit has been verified, Six will be at the corner of 452nd Street and the Seawall at seven o’clock. If the money is not deposited, Six disappears forever.”
She leaned forward. “You’ve seen what I can do. Don’t test me.”
The screen cut to a string of letters and numbers—a bank account, Six realized.
There was a long silence. Then King exploded into a stream of curses, many of which Six had never heard before. He slammed his fist down on the desk, his teeth grinding together and veins popping out on his forehead.
“That doesn’t help us,” Six said.
“It helps me,” King said, breathing heavily. He wiped some sweat off his brow.
“Why do they think Kyntak is me?” Six asked.
“You’re identical twins,” King said. “You’re the same age, you have the same DNA, and the same superhuman abilities. The only reason the rest of us can tell you apart is that he’s always smiling and you’re always in a black coat.”
“How did they get a sample of our DNA?” Six demanded. “Kyntak and I wiped the Lab computers!”
“I don’t know. But they have one. Even so, they could tell he’s superhuman just by analyzing a blood sample.”
“It wasn’t about Crexe at all,” Six realized. “They knew he was the one thing they could take from us that would make me come running.”
“They just didn’t know you had a brother who’d go with you,” King said. “I assume he did some stunt that proved he was superhuman?”
Six remembered Kyntak jumping off the wall into the hold of the helicopter. “Yeah, he did.”
“Okay.” King rubbed his eyes. “I’ll call Queen, get her to dig into the reserves and scrape together a hundred million credits.”
“What?” Six stared at King. “You’re going to pay up?”
“We may have to. Otherwise—”
“No.” Six sprang up and started pacing around the room. “We can examine the video, search through the usual suspects, and see what leads we can dig up. They obviously planned this a long time in advance, so there’ll be a reason they picked 452nd Street as the drop-off point. If I go there, I’m bound to work out something. They may already have stakeouts, and I could grab them.” He stopped walking and glared at King. “They’re not going to get away with this.”
King was silent for a few seconds. “What’s more important to you, Six? Bringing them to justice or getting Kyntak back?”
“Getting Kyntak back,” Six said without hesitation. “But even if we pay, there’s no guarantee that—”
King cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I know. The money is there because we may need to give it to them and take it back later. But we won’t let them keep it.” He hit print and the bank account details scrolled out of the printer. “I just wanted to check you w
ere still on my side.”
“Always,” Six said.
“Good. Call Ace of Diamonds. Let’s see what we can get off this video.”
By 15:30, they didn’t know much more. They’d watched the recording dozens of times. Seeing Kyntak’s bruised face again and again made Six feel cold in his stomach.
The brick wall behind the woman was moderately weathered clay, held together with quicklime mortar. There were millions like it in the City. That was probably why it had been chosen.
Ace said the chair Kyntak was sitting in looked like pure lead, and it had been soldered together rather than screwed. He was chained to it despite the fact that he was clearly unconscious when he was filmed. A bad sign, Six thought. They’re being over-cautious; therefore, they know what we’re capable of.
Kyntak’s Deck fatigues had been removed—he was wearing a bright orange undershirt and shorts. That seemed unusual, but it didn’t get them anywhere.
But they had learned one thing. When they zoomed right in, they saw that Kyntak’s jugular vein pulsed with a steady rhythm. He was alive.
Six ground his teeth together. “We have three and a half hours,” he said. “And we know nothing.”
“The soldiers from the apartment building should be back any minute now,” King said. “We’ll learn plenty from them.”
That was their best shot, Six knew. But his subconscious screamed out for action. He was wasting precious seconds waiting. There must be something he could do, instead of just standing still in front of a screen…
“Cut to the end,” he said suddenly. “Where she leans forward.”
Ace clicked, and the picture shifted. The woman was leaning over Kyntak, hands on his shoulders. Her face was closer to the light, but still too dark to identify.
“Now take a snapshot,” Six said. He didn’t need to elaborate. Ace was already fiddling with the brightness/contrast and hue/saturation settings. She clicked process.
And suddenly the woman’s face was clear, staring at them out of the screen. Narrow lips, a nose that had once been broken, and fishlike crimson eyes. Black hair framed a narrow face.