by David Horne
More of Chang’s thugs began to swarm the room, wielding assault rifles.
“Drop your guns!” Curtis boomed in Cantonese. “Drop them all! Or I’ll shoot him!”
Unsurprisingly, after seeing their boss’ limp and lifeless form, Chang’s thugs began to wonder if he was already dead and Curtis was trying to pull a fast one, and Curtis suspected that he had a few seconds at best before they decided to call his bluff. If he shot Chang, that left the three of them outnumbered and outgunned, to get shredded by gunfire. Curtis needed to make a move before they realized that.
Mustering all his strength—which, it had to be said, wasn’t much after being cramped and crouched in one position for more than half a day—Curtis reared back and threw Chang’s unconscious body like a bowling ball, right at his thugs. Most of them ducked, some of them jumped out of the way, but almost all of them immediately opened fire. The air was filled with a haze of flying bullets, but not one of them even so much as nicked either Curtis or Hartley.
As soon as he’d released, Chang, Curtis dove to the right, pulling Hartley with him by the scruff of his neck. Agent Milwaukee bundled himself sideways, using his body weight to crash through the door leading to the alleyway outback. On the floor in the doorway, both Curtis and Hartley rolled out of the line of fire as Chang’s thugs gave chase, and came up, guns at the ready. The next few seconds were marked by a cacophony of bangs and sharp cracks as the two sides let off what seemed like as many bullets as humanly possible.
Hartley lashed out with his foot, kicking the door closed, and this time it was his turn to grab Curt by the scruff of the neck, sprinting to the end of the alleyway where a matte black SUV was waiting with its hazard lights blinking.
“Get in the back!” Milwaukee growled, just as Curtis had his hand on the driver’s door.
“Eh?” Curtis asked, somewhat indignantly.
Hartley put a hand on his shoulder. “Trust him, Curt, he’s the best driver we have. It’s why I brought him.”
Hartley could see that Curtis wasn’t exactly happy about it, but he decided to let Milwaukee call the shots on this one, and they bundled into the back together.
“Seatbelts,” Milwaukee said shortly, even as Chang’s thugs burst out of the door into the alleyway. They had forty, maybe fifty feet between the car and the thugs, but an Ak-47 can easily bridge that gap.
“Milwaukee, they’re about to open fire!” Curtis exclaimed urgently.
Milwaukee snorted. “They can fire all they want; this baby is bulletproof. We could take a hit from an RPG in this and walk away from it.”
Missile-proof cars weren’t exactly new in the arena of security technology, and a high-class security intelligence such as Columbus certainly got massive funding from the federal government so that they could afford all the latest toys. Cicada was no different; Curtis had even wanted to get a special amendment that allowed them to keep the Concorde in production and rebrand it as the “Cicada Blackbird”. For the agency’s exclusive use, of course. Not surprisingly, this idea was quickly kicked to the curb.
Bullets rained against the hull of the car, but, true to Milwaukee’s word, they cracked and fractured the windows, but they did not penetrate. “Can we go?” Hartley shouted.
“Put your seatbelts on!” Milwaukee repeated.
“Are you being serious?”
“Do you want to go flying through the windshield?” Milwaukee shouted back.
Sighing with exasperation, Hartley clicked his seatbelt on, and Milwaukee floored the gas. He held the clutch in place, allowing for some gratuitous tire squeal before lifting his foot up and allowing the car to lurch from its place by the sidewalk and go screaming into traffic. It was late in the afternoon-stroke-early in the evening, and so traffic was about as thick as it would be all day. Milwaukee ignored this and meandered through the lines of cars like he was on a motorcycle.
And speaking of motorcycles, the buzz of several engines behind them told Curtis that Chang’s thugs were giving chase. He glanced out of the rear windshield and saw them curving through the traffic in like fashion, cutting off angry, honking drivers and startled-looking cyclists. Curtis imagined that, to the public, it looked a lot more like illegal street racing than a fast-paced Triad chase.
“Well,” he murmured, more to himself. “I’ve always wanted to be in a high-speed Triad chase.”
“I doubt they’ll start firing,” Hartley said wisely. “Too many civilians in the way. All we have to do is keep at this pace, and soon enough we’ll lose-”
Hartley was abruptly cut off by another hail of bullets plowing into the rear of the SUV with a loud bang. Curtis smirked at him. “Speak too soon?”
“I guess so,” Hartley shrugged.
Curtis looked up. “A sunroof, perfect.”
“Are you insane?” Hartley exclaimed. “Do you want to get shot?”
“Believe me, Hart, I want to do as little of that as possible,” Curtis said sincerely. “But we can’t shoot out the window, it’s bulletproof. Trust me, I’ll be fine. Milwaukee! Sunroof!”
“Copy that!” Milwaukee shouted. He thumbed a button on the dash, and the sunroof overhead slid open. Curtis stood up and snaked his arms and shoulders through the roof. This wouldn’t be the first time that he was shooting from a moving car, and fortunately, nobody here knew who he worked for, or Cicada would be getting an earful from the State of Hong Kong. Regardless, someone’s head was going to roll for this. It’d probably get pinned on MI6 or SIS, that is what they were there for at the end of the day.
Curtis couldn’t resist spinning the pistol around his finger with the trigger guard, a gratuitous, showoff trick if ever there was one, but Curtis’ first port of call on missions, besides getting the job done, was having fun. If you didn’t have fun as a secret agent, then what was the point, really?
Curtis’ first shot struck the motorcyclist that was coming up on the SUV’s port quarter. The force of the shot knocked him clean off of the bike and into the oncoming traffic. More bullets came their way, but Milwaukee wrenched the steering wheel to the right and the SUV careened across three different lanes and onto an exit ramp.
“Woohoo!” Hartley crowed, as Milwaukee’s maneuver wrong-footed at least three of their assailants, and only the last motorcyclist was able to turn in time to continue the pursuit. “Didn’t I tell you he was good?” he shouted through the sunroof.
Curtis didn’t voice his agreement, but he privately agreed. Milwaukee was driving like the American Jason Statham! Which was a pretty big statement, as any Englishman who’d seen The Transporter or Death Race knew.
Twenty minutes later, Milwaukee had opened up a sizable lead between them and their pursuer as they advanced onto the freeway.
“Where are we going?” Curtis shouted over the howling wind.
“Private airfield!” Milwaukee yelled back. “We’ve got a jet waiting there!”
Pretty soon, the airfield in question began to come into their sight. Or rather, the sleek silver jet parked on it did. It was the home stretch. No more turns, no more exit ramps to go down, just straight freeway. Curtis was forced to duck abruptly as another spray of assault rifle bullets veered toward him. These thugs were driven, he had to give that to them at least, but they left a lot to be desired in the marksmanship department. But then again, that was to be expected, at least from Curtis’ perspective, considering that he’d been painstakingly trained by the best marksmen in the UK.
He aimed his next shot not at the man atop the bike, but at the bike itself. The bullet hit the spokes of the wheel and crippled it, causing the bike to lurch and buck, like a bull, and toss the motorcyclist clean off. The SUV skidded to a stop as Milwaukee slammed his foot on the brakes, and for a moment, the abandoned freeway fell quiet.
“What are you doing?” Hartley asked. “We need to get moving! Hong Kong police will have been dispatched by now, and trust me, you do not want to have a run-in with those guys!”
“Yeah, I agree,” Curtis back
ed him up. “Let’s get to the jet.”
Chapter Two
Curtis Holmes couldn’t count how many near-death experiences he’d had before in his life. Incalculable, certainly. He still remembered his first near-death experience, in fact, and strangely, it had nothing to do with his current line of work. The jury was technically still out on whether this was a near-death experience, like, it certainly was in Curtis’ perspective, but medical experts might say something different. The long and short of it was, a rock got thrown into his head, and there were copious amounts of blood coming out.
That certainly fits Curtis’ personal description of a life-threatening description. Or at least it did when he was ten, which was when the incident in question actually occurred. These days, however, Curtis found that he was what one might call “made of stronger stuff” than he had been in the good old days. He had to be. It came hand-in-hand with the job, you had to be tough. Especially for when the boys at HQ inevitably pulled the cyanide pill prank, which they did on all the newbies, Curtis included. Nobody did the whole “cyanide capsule in the tooth” thing anymore; that was so 2012.
But the technical agents at Cicada HQ would definitely still try and give you one. Or at least something that looked like one. The prank was that rather than implanting your transponder unit in the palm, they’d put it into the “cyanide capsule”, so when the tooth was broken open, the transponder would activate, and there’d be a good minute or so of you crying like a big baby in whatever torture room you happened to be in, when you weren’t actually dying. Classic stuff.
There was nothing quite like a good joke, especially in the espionage business, as Curtis was fond of saying, where nobody had any earthly clue where their next laugh was coming from. Nothing like a practical joke to take the edge off and distract the mind from all the torture, organized crime, and murder. Curtis was not a personal expert, but he heard that those things can really put a damper on a good mood, especially the murder one.
Despite all the near-misses that Curtis had with death, including a time he was nearly given a Chelsea Smile during interrogation—wouldn’t have killed him, but yikes! —and the time in the school athletics where he ran through lightning, the one he had just been through was quite high up on the list if they were all measured on some kind of scale. Like a scale of how much each incident gave Curtis the heebie-jeebies on some type of Heebie-Jeebie Measuring Instrument. Patent-pending, of course.
Of course, Curtis had never truly been in any real danger, but being in a butcher shop surrounded by people who literally torture for a living was quite unnerving, and got the pulse going, that was for sure. Despite being happy to have been rescued, Curtis wasn’t at all expecting to see Hartley and even had a hilarious joke prepared for one of his own Cicada agents for when they burst down the doors.
Guess that was all over now!
“So, are you going to explain why you came to get me?” Curtis blurted.
Hartley looked up at this, a bemused and perplexed expression on his face. “I beg your pardon?”
The jet plane was about an hour out of Hong Kong and cruising gently at twenty-five-thousand feet over the Philippine Sea. Even by Curtis’ standards, the jet was nice. The exterior was silver, with a glistening sheen that seemed to light up the entire airfield, and the interior was just as grand. Cream-colored leather-covered every inch of the jet plane, and there was easily enough room for a whole bunch of people, but it’s much easier to sneak two people into a country and then three people out than it is to smuggle a whole team of special agents over a border under the radar.
“You know what I mean,” Curtis said accusingly. “Why’d you come and get me?”
Hartley tossed his newspaper down on the coffee table in front of his seat; he wasn’t really reading the LA Times, it just made him look sophisticated. He brushed his blond hair out of his face. “Well I don’t know if you noticed, but you were in a little bit of a jam right there, hoss.”
That was just about Hartley’s all-time favorite word: hoss. His mother had been from Houston, Texas, and although he hardly remembered the place himself, he was forever intoning about the sights of the city, about how he’d supposedly “grown up” in the same city as the Houston Space Center. And, of course, he liked to call anybody who would allow it “hoss”, which is pretty much the most Texan word of all time.
Curtis rolled his eyes at this. “You know what I mean,” he repeated. “I set off my distress beacon as soon as I could, but I meant why did you come and get me?”
“Is this a complaint?” Hartley asked a hint of amusement in his tone. “Because we can turn around and drop you back if you prefer? Hey Milwaukee! Turn the plane around please!”
Curtis hoped that Milwaukee, who was in the cockpit, could tell that Hartley wasn’t being serious. “Do you call him that all the time?”
“I have to,” Hartley said in a bored voice. “I don’t know his real name, do I?”
Curtis made a face. “What, really, though? You don’t know each other’s real names?”
“You know this,” Hartley said. “We wouldn’t be much of a secret service if we did know, now, would we?”
Curtis snorted. “We don’t even bother with codenames at Cicada. We just keep it real. Speaking of Cicada, I was expecting one of my own guys. We’re not even in the same agency, Agent Wisconsin,” Curtis dripped as much sarcasm as humanly possible into the last two words, utilizing inverted air quotes with his fingers as he did so. “So why don’t you tell me why you two are really here and don’t leave anything out.”
Hartley didn’t immediately answer. Instead, he smiled that smile that he did when he found something amusing. Finally, he gestured to the seat opposite him, on the other side of the coffee table. “Fine. Sit your fanny down, this is a long story.”
“I keep telling you, you can’t say the word “fanny” to an Englishman,” Curtis said. “It means something else.”
“Sit your butt down, then,” Hartley said, rolling his eyes at Curtis’ apparently newfound concern for political correctness. “This is a pretty long story.”
Curtis did as he was bid, plonking himself down in the comfy chair opposite Hartley and crossing one leg over the other in a way that he thought made him look sophisticated. “Santa Maria, what’s a guy gotta do to get a cup of tea around here?” he murmured, seemingly to himself.
This comment, however, did not go unnoticed by Hartley, who made a face. “Really? A cup of tea? That’s about the most English thing I’ve ever heard you say. Considering you’re half Yank.”
Curtis pretended to look shocked. “Are you allowed to say that word?”
“I am,” Hartley nodded. “But you can’t use that word. Only we can use that word. It’s kind of like the one that you Brits have. I forget what it is. Milwaukee! What’s that word we were talking about the other day? The British one.”
“Limey!” Milwaukee shouted back.
Hartley snapped his fingers. “Right, limey, that’s the one.”
“That’s the second time I’m hearing that word today,” Curtis muttered.
“Funny how that sometimes happens, eh?” Hartley asked.
“I feel like we’re getting sidetracked here,” Curtis said, trying to bring them back on topic. “You said this is a long story, can we get to the point?”
“Why?” Hartley shrugged. “There are eleven hours of this flight left; we have time. But anyway, as you wish, we’ll get to the point. How much do you know about the Cicada One Hundred?”
Curtis shrugged. “It’s a new project that we have in development. I was in a meeting about it, but I can’t lie, I wasn’t paying attention. Like, at all. Why, is it important?”
Hartley rolled his eyes at this. “You should really pay attention in meetings, Curtis. One day that’s going to get you into trouble.”
Curtis frowned. “An hour and a half ago I came this close to getting my nuts cut off by Chinese gangsters. I don’t even know if it’s physically possible to be
in much more trouble than that, and here I am.”
“Fair enough,” Hartley shrugged. “Anyway, as I was saying. The Cicada One Hundred is a new Joint-Ops event that your agency is proposing.”
“Proposing to who?” Curtis asked although he felt like he should already know this. Chances are, it was already covered in that meeting that he’d been in six months ago. But his superiors should know better than to put Curtis in a meeting and expect him to actually pay attention! He’d never paid attention to anything important in his life, and if they failed to read the signs, then that was on them, harsh as it sounded!
“The whole world,” Hartley said, although Curtis got a distinct impression that he was speaking metaphorically. “As I said, it’s a joint-ops event, and countless intelligence agencies and military forces are invited.”
“Invited?” Curtis echoed. “What is it, a party?”
“Better,” Hartley replied, a twinkle in his eye that Curtis noticed there whenever he got excited. “It is the world’s very first seventy-two-hour combat simulation.”
Curtis’ jaw dropped. “Shut up!”
“I know!” Hartley said excitedly. “Cicada invited Columbus, we relayed it to the US Marine Corps, and before you know it, several people were jumping on the bandwagon! FBI, CIA, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Royal Marines, SAS, MI5. You name it, we got it.”
Curtis couldn’t resist rubbing his palms together, somewhat malevolently. “I’ve been waiting on this day for a long time. But wait! Did you pull me off of my mission for this? A game?!”
Hartley shrugged. “It’s not like you were onto anything, it was just recon. If you were about to nail the Head Triad, then that would be different, of course. Plus, you were about to die anyway, your cover was blown, I think it’s safe to say that to send you back into Hong Kong under deep cover would be a suicide mission.”