The Valley of Shadows - eARC

by John Ringo

  Tom and Kaplan followed the Sicilians out of the truck, jumping down last. Their AR carbines were legally short-barreled rifles, or SBRs, courtesy of Rune’s shopping trip earlier. The decreased overall length and pistol caliber weapons permitted the handier use of the suppressors, which kept the sounds of the first shots to a loud clapping sound, similar to a chair falling over on a hard surface.

  The use of similar weapons by the first shooters out had kept the reports down, and no obvious response to their presence had started yet.

  The Cosa Nova crew split into three teams as Tradittore directed them toward the priority targets, including the suspected upstairs lab and the bunk area. As the Jersey shooters went upstairs, Tom and Kaplan soft footed up to an exterior door. Tom twisted the door handle and found it unlocked. The second man placed his right hand on Tom’s shoulder and squeezed, indicating his readiness. Tom swiftly opened the door and followed it all the way around, ensuring that no one was standing behind it. As he cleared from the wall towards the center of the room, he saw a man in a loose business suit look up from his desk. Demonstrating excellent reflexes, the seated man darted a hand at a pistol on the desktop.

  Kaplan had already entered behind him. His suppressed weapon coughed simultaneously with Tom’s, their combined efforts dropping the now limp body across the desk as the dead man’s hand covered the gun.

  A fusillade of shots rang out upstairs, then tailed off. Tom cocked an ear for a moment, but there were no other sounds so he scanned the room more completely.

  A large stainless-steel refrigerator was set into the next room. Opened, it revealed several Styrofoam racks of the now familiar vaccine ampoules. Manufacturing dates were scribbled on the stickers decorating each rack.

  “How much is that worth?” Kaplan whispered.

  “Don’t matter,” Tom replied. “We’re gonna burn it. Hold open your ruck.”

  Kaplan knew that he was looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars but letting his carbine dangle from its friction strap he shrugged out of his pack and held it open as Smith dumped the vials in, two racks at a time. The chore was completed in less than a minute and they started up the stairs.

  Behind a door, they could hear Tradittore’s distinctive voice. Knocking on the door very loudly, Tom yelled: “It’s Smith, I’m opening the door.”

  He waited a moment, and slowly opened the door, giving the Sicilians time to see him. All were aiming towards him, but dropped their muzzles as soon as they saw Smith. Tradittore lowered his last.

  “Took your sweet time.”

  Tom glanced around the room. In the corner of the lab area, one of the Cosa Nova shooters had returned to bandaging a second. Two more Mara Salvatruchas lay on the floor, unmoving. The shorty version of a Kalashnikov protruded from under one body. Broken glassware and debris from medical devices crunched underfoot.

  “What’s the hold up?” Tom asked.

  Tradittore gestured at a wide but shut door at the other end of the room. The surface was bullet scarred but intact.

  “Third door.” He smacked it with a palm. “The hinges are internal and there are least two more inside. I think it’s a safe room. Our rounds bounced.”

  “What’s your plan?” Tom asked.

  “We blow it, then shoot what’s left.”

  “Works for me,” the banker replied. “We’ll go back down.”

  Before he could step back, the locked door began to open, prompting the assaulting team to hastily raise their weapons.

  The door finished swinging open. A pair of very young women, clearly not yet eighteen, were revealed. Behind them was a sleeping area.

  “Manos arriba!” Tradittore jerked his carbine up, and the clearly scared girls raised their hands up, revealing that their midriff-length shirts were not cut with modesty in mind.

  One of the Jersey boys whistled.

  Kaplan and Smith didn’t react as Tradittore sent the two remaining shooters into the room to clear it. Finding nothing, their shouts of “Clear left, clear right” lowered some of the tension in the room.

  One of the women stepped a little closer to Tradittore, sizing him up.

  “You aren’t going to hurt us, yes?” She had survived with one ruthless gang and seemed to understand which currency might buy her security for a time with a second. She lowered her hands, one resting on her hip and another tugging her shirt downwards, ostensibly for modesty’s sake but serving to tighten the thin fabric across her chest. “We can be friends.”

  “Sure, we can be friends,” Tradittore said with an easy smile. “You two just stand there for now.”

  He gestured the two teenagers towards the wall, where they obediently shuffled while carefully not looking at the two bodies leaking on the floor.

  Letting his weapon aim back towards the floor, Tradittore turned to address his men and organize the withdrawal.

  “Sacks, get Little Mike down the stairs if he can walk. Let the other two know that you are coming so you don’t eat a bullet. Sammie, you and I’ll search these two, then the lab. You banker boys can check the bunkroom. Priority to vaccine, documents, then cash.”

  Tradittore sounded confident. He clearly thought that the op was already over.

  The Bank of America pair looked at each other and watched as the injured man stumbled downstairs. Kapman’s eyes scanned the pair of women who stood, mostly still, against the wall. The hips of one girl tilted from side to side as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again. Tom frowned a bit as he noticed his partner’s eyes lingering.

  It was neither the time nor place for eyeball liberty.

  They crossed towards the bunkroom as the Cosa Nova pair approached the women, grinning in anticipation of the “search.” Tom entered and began to yank open drawers. Kapman paused just the other side of the door, keeping an angle on the activity in the lab.

  The women smiled back at the Sicilians, sharing a knowing look between themselves. The one closer to Tradittore ran a hand up her leg, raising the hem provocatively.

  Tradittore chuckled throatily as stepped closer, blocking most of the view from the bunkroom. He ran his hands around the woman’s waist, and addressed his partner.

  “Sammie, what do you think? Any contraband?”

  Sammie had leaned in to sniff the hair of his “target” but his reply was interrupted by a needle-sharp ice-pick that the teen rammed into his right eye. He froze and made a glurk sound just as Tradittore’s searchee produced a black compact pistol from under her skirt and pressed it into her target’s side, pulling the trigger as fast as she could.

  Kapman took a single sideways step back into the room and serviced both targets, dropping each woman with a pair of rapid shots. Tradittore stumbled back, cursing, and emptied his magazine into the corpse at his feet as Sammie finished falling to the floor. His fresh corpse drummed its heels against the industrial tile floor.

  From start to finish the action had lasted under three seconds.

  Kapman added one more headshot to each body as Tom exited the room and scanned the scene. He looked at Tradittore who was pressing his hand to his ribs, but was still on his feet.

  “How bad?” he asked the Cosa Nova.

  “I don’t know,” Joey wheezed. “Motherfucker hurts. That fucking bitch—”

  “Shut it. Let me see.”

  Tom brushed the injured man’s hands away and opened the velcro on the plate carrier as Tradittore kept up a steady torrent of profanity. The shirt under the armor was unpunctured and unbloodied. Tom looked under the cloth and observed a large bruise already blooming.

  “You got lucky. The armor kept it out.”

  He looked down at the brass on the floor and picked up a case ejected from the dead teen’s pistol.

  “A twenty-five,” Tom said. “That wouldn’t even penetrate the soft-armor. Like I said, lucky.”

  “Lucky,” wheezed the mobster, drawing the word out.

  “How did you know?” Tom asked Kaplan.

  “
The girls weren’t scared enough,” Kapman said, his right hand still on his AR grip. “They had a plan. The one with the gun kept rubbing her thighs together, like she was horny. I don’t care how seductive you are, you watch your man get shot, you don’t feel sexy. She was moving her legs together to check that the pistol she grabbed while she was behind the door wasn’t about to fall out of her underwear.”

  “I thought for a second you were distracted by the jailbait,” Tom said. “Shoulda known better, Kapman.”

  “It’s all good, Boss.” Kaplan turned to hold security, facing the two doors leading out of the room. “I like a piece as much as the next guy, but no matter how good they look, somewhere, some dude learned the hard way that she was too far to the right on the crazy-hot matrix. I just read the signs.”

  The security specialist jerked his head at the dead Cosa Nova shooter, whose face was still decorated with a knurled red ice-pick grip.

  “We taking that with us?”

  Tom looked over at Tradittore who had his kit back together and was fumbling with a cell phone.

  “Not our problem,” Tom said, jerking the stair door back open. “Let’s go downstairs to take care of that job.”

  In the courtyard, Tom relieved his teammate of the pack full of vaccine and began shaking it into the burning trash barrel. The chore took a minute.

  “What the fuck are you doing!”

  Looking up he saw Tradittore exit the door and start to raise his weapon.

  “Little late for that, Tradittore.” Tom tilted his head sideways even as he continued to dump the last ampoules into the barrel, the merry tinkle of glass a counterpoint to the grimness of the scene. To one side Kapman had a perfect sight picture centered on the Sicilian’s face. “He saved your ass back there,” Tom added lightly. “Be a real shame if he had to ruin his hard work, don’t you think?”

  Tradittore’s man returned and immediately shouldered his weapon, training it first on Kapman, then Tom.

  “Fuck it and fuck you, pretty boy,” Tradittore said, disgusted. He let his rifle hang once more. “Do you know how much money you’re burning?”

  Tom looked back after the last good shake consigned a final ampoule to the flames.

  “You can’t spend it if you’re dead,” Tom said, meeting Tradittore’s eyes. “This is dirty vaccine of shit quality. All it’s good for is taking money from desperate people in exchange for making a considerable number of them into zombies. It burns.”

  The red flames continued to reflect in Tradittore’s eyes after Tom turned away.

  * * *

  “Ken Schweizer, OEM.” Schweizer introduced himself to the neatly dressed black-haired man across the table.

  “Ramon Gutierrez,” came the answer from behind a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. “I represent the business interests of Mr. Overture.”

  Gutierrez’s suit looked loose and comfortable. He had eschewed a traditional suit and tie in favor of a open-necked guayabera, the traditional lightweight linen shirt of Central America and the Carib. It was as much a symbol of his role as the subdued NYC OEM logo on Schweizer’s binder.

  “Thank you for making time for me despite your busy schedule,” Schweizer said, glancing around. Although Schweizer was alone, his counterpart had brought along additional trappings to highlight his place in Big Mac Overture’s enterprise in the form of two looming, dreadlocked bodyguards.

  Gutierrez tipped the neck of his beer towards Schweizer, acknowledging his statement, before taking a healthy pull.

  The hustle and bustle of the Crown Heights bodega provided enough background noise to afford them some privacy, so Schweizer proceeded.

  “We have an interest in maintaining a good relationship with all of the important city departments, Ken,” he said. “NYPD, FDNY, sanitation—so I’m glad to hear that you want to talk. OEM has an important job, but it usually takes a while for you to get around to the little people in Queens, man.”

  Queens, and to some extent Brooklyn, had become a home to successive waves of immigration from the Gulf of Mexico and places south. Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico—all had contributed to the melting pot in New York City. The intelligence that OEM had from the police and the FBI revealed that Overture had made his bones by consolidating power in his borough, much as Matricardi had done in Jersey.

  Like Matricardi, he also appeared to have leaned into the H7D3 crisis instead of running away from it.

  “I assume that you are aware that the City is contemplating a partnership with certain business elements to regularize the production of vaccine,” Schweizer said. “An important component of that is cooperation.”

  “Well, the term ‘City’ is a pretty big stretch, wouldn’t you say, Ken?” Gutierrez said, smiling. “I mean, if you’d said you were working within Manhattan, or North Jersey, or even Staten Island, I’d probably agree. But Brooklyn and Queens already belong to my boss. And he’s moving in the other boroughs too. We know that you are rolling up MS13 and the Triads. Like my boss always says, gives us something in common.”

  Schweizer sipped his water before replying.

  “We have a working relationship with banks and other…irregular business interests. As well as the NYPD,” he said. “I see some value in maintaining a channel between us, to avoid potential conflicts of interest and to share breaking information.”

  “Everything is negotiable,” Overture’s man said, drinking more beer. “So let me show you ’round. Give you a sense of what we have to offer.” He stood up.

  “C’mon, it’s just around the corner.”

  Schweizer paid attention to the way that Gutierrez’s eyes glinted.

  That couldn’t be good.

  * * *

  “You take the good with the bad,” Tom Smith thought aloud, feet propped up on his desk during a rare moment of reflection. Summer had nearly gone. The fireworks, the parties and the drunks all proceeded as normal, or near enough.

  How New Yorkers managed to just…keep going was a matter of wonder for the tall Australian import.

  The previously concluded city wide meeting had taken most of the two days to negotiate, but finally the City, the police, OEM, many of the banks and insurance firms and most critically, the…entrepreneurial groups had finally met. Encouraged by the success of the first efforts to consolidate the market, some actual progress had been made towards establishing the rules of the road for how the various groups would cooperate, or more properly, compete civilly.

  The cartel was in business.

  It appeared to Smith that the salubrious effect upon the leadership of the “Gangs of New York” of watching a zombie turn from inside a sealed room while most of their security was disarmed was a dramatic acceleration of their decision-making. The agitation of watching security literally bludgeon to death what had only moments previously been an attractive secretary probably added to their sense of urgency.

  Hey, whatever it took.

  Not only the bank but the entire cartel was slowly gaining on the critical vaccination curve, although BotA was still under-producing if they wanted to meet the magic thirty thousand courses of vaccine mark, covering the currently projected number of staff and dependents.

  But they were gaining. The new equipment, the shared intelligence, the updated firearms, it was all working. The city truce was holding. The rate of infection had stabilized even.

  Rune walked in and did a double take. His boss, who had been brooding for weeks, was actually smiling. Paul thought that Smith looked happier than Dita von Teese’s pasties.

  “How are you doing this fine morning, Paul?” Tom called out.

  “Um, decent?” Rune tried to echo his boss’s apparent upbeat mood. “I did some digging on our cartel partners. I have a hit on OEM that you should see. Summary on page one.”

  He slid a red folder across Tom’s desk, retaining a copy.

  “I did a routine credential check on everyone,” Paul said. “Kohn’s had an odd break in transcripts.
I went a little further and from middle school through high school, she was in what amounted to a low- to medium-security residential program for juveniles.”

  “What fo—” Tom’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead as he flipped ahead. “Well, that would do it.”

  “She was tried as a juvenile,” Rune said. “Paragraph three. But, between the murder method and her counselor’s reports, she’s not what you call fully wrapped. You don’t just spring back from ‘extreme homicidal psychosis.’”

  “Hmm…okay,” Tom said, leafing through the report. “I’ll have to parse the psychiatric diagnosis for longer than I have now. How did you get this? These records are supposed to be sealed.”

  “Head of Global Intelligence for a top five investment bank versus podunk flyover state secure digital records system,” Paul said, miming typing on a computer. “Hardly fair. But the point is, what do we do now?”

  “Do?” Smith asked, puzzled. “Why would we do anything? She’s clinically psychotic and appears to have limits different than the average civilian. In our current situation, that’s a feature, not a bug. She is entirely efficient in her job and we need her in that role.”

  “But she used a c—” Paul said.

  “Stop,” Tom said, closing the folder. “This world’s falling apart faster than any government can get ahead of the virus. The only way for any functional core of civilization to survive is to create vaccine from, I hate repeating this, human spinal cords. To do that, we need a city official who is willing to countenance and abet the murder of thousands of infected. Kohn is that person. Now we know why. Good job. That she wasn’t entirely wrapped was sort of obvious but with this we can plan more specifically. For now, tell me about the four main sites we got for Zeus.”

  Rune had to recalibrate his headspace for a moment, then proceeded.

  “It wasn’t cheap,” Rune said. “But Site Maple in Maine is nearly fully provisioned and we have a complete skeleton staff in place. Site Grape near Champlain is at sixty percent, more or less. Site Bugle is forty-plus. The bad news is that the Blue Ridge site is a problem. We have the title, a cover story and some contractors lined up but we’re way behind on most everything else.”