Assignment- Danger A SpyCo Collection 4-6

by Craig A. Hart

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I will put a hole the size of your fist through your stomach.”

  “Then why not just do it? Scared?”

  Park laughed. “You win the prize for the dumbest remark I’ve ever heard. I would actually prefer to shoot you. But others have weaker stomachs. Now move toward that closet.”

  “Without that gun, I would break you in half,” Burke said, trying to piss her off. “I suppose that’s why they call firearms the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you’re the size of a fly, you can stand just as tall as any man.”

  Park’s eyes gleamed with hate and for a moment, a brief moment, Burke could tell she was considering taking him up on the challenge. And a moment was all he needed. Twisting as he moved forward, Burke grabbed Park around her tiny waist and flung her toward the floor, pushing the gun muzzle aside as he did so. For an even briefer moment, Burke thought he had won, but then he was being thrown backward by a force that could not possibly have come from Park. He landed squarely on his ass with his back against the closet door. He looked up, dazed, to find Park once again standing with her gun pointed.

  “What were you saying?”

  Despite the dire circumstances, Burke couldn’t help but be impressed. “What the hell was that?”

  For a moment, Park almost smiled. “If you’re female and tiny, you don’t survive long in this business without knowing a few secrets. Secrets I have neither the time nor the inclination to share with you. I’m not here to be your sensei; I’m here to kill you. Now get into the closet before I blow you away.”

  Burke opened the closet door and backed into it. He stood there, mind racing. The hell with it, he was one hundred percent likely to get a .44 Magnum slug in the bread basket, but he had to try one more time. He surged forward, but Park had already begun moving. She slammed into the closet door with all of her weight, which packed a surprisingly hefty punch. Burke pushed back, but just as his shoulder hit the door, there was a solid click as Park turned the lock. Burke pounded on the door like a cheating husband who just came home to find his clothing in the front yard, but it was well-constructed and firm and the effort was in vain.

  Reaching into his pocket, Burke pulled out his phone. No signal. Not even a single bar and he remembered from his research about the building’s magnetic shield. And then the proverbial lightbulb lit up inside his head. David...he had taken a phone call. But how? A building like this, housing delicate instruments and highly classified information, had to be designed to block all cellphone signals. David had lied about the call. He’d wanted to leave for another reason.

  Burke flashed the phone around the closet, using the screen for a light. In one corner, he saw a crumpled pair of coveralls. He reached down and picked them up...they were soaked in blood. When David had returned to the lab after his “phone call,” his coveralls had been clean. He had changed! So that was how Park had known where to find him. It also explained David’s refusal to consider an attempt on Burke’s part to smuggle a gun into the lab, and how Park had been armed. He’d been set up.

  Burke pounded on the door and shouted at the top of his voice.

  “David! You goddamn traitor! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Burke had expected his outburst of rage to be an exercise in futility, but instead, a voice answered.

  “So you figured it out, did you?” It was David.

  “You piece of shit,” Burke growled. “Let me out of here and I will rip you enough assholes to keep you busy for the rest of your life.”

  David laughed. “As tempting as that is, I think I’m good with the one I have.”

  “That was a convincing little charade you two staged for my benefit. How long did you rehearse that?”

  “Pure improv,” David said. “We were good, weren’t we?”

  “I’ll look for you on Saturday Night Live. Unless I manage to kill you and your partner first. Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be joining her in the quest to ensure the destruction of the world?”

  “Oh, I will. She had one little thing to finish up first.”

  “A bag of puppies to murder?”

  “Don’t be so bitter. You were bound to lose eventually. You’ve had a really good run. You ought to be proud of yourself.”

  “To hell with that. What is Park up to?”

  “Always on the lookout for intel, all the way to the end. If you must know, she is priming the explosives.”

  “The what?”

  “You heard me. The explosives. You don’t think we’d leave this place still standing, do you?”

  “What about the data?”

  “Data? We don’t need no stinking data! Now that we have the device, we can deliver it to the proper hands and their scientists will be able to reverse engineer the entire thing.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Simply because I have a different worldview? How close-minded of you. But no matter. I don’t have time to debate politics. My jet is waiting.”

  “David, I swear on my mother’s grave I will see you die for this.”

  “I admire the size of your balls, mate. I wish we were really on the same side. But it’s too late for you.”

  “And the lab employees?”

  “Unfortunate collateral damage.”

  “So much for your moral outrage. So much for ‘knowing them personally.’”

  “Pretty convincing, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re a monster. And I say that without the faintest hint of exaggeration.”

  “You are entitled to your own opinions. What you western chest-thumpers never bother to think about are all the starving people in North Korea, their plight caused by the ever-increasing sanctions put on them by self-righteous powers around the world. If North Korea attains equal status and is recognized as a world player, perhaps those people can finally live decent lives.”

  “And so much for not discussing politics,” Burke said.

  “And that’s all I’ll say. Enjoy your last few minutes, Burke. Soon you’ll be little more than, as Park said, chopped liver. The people in the lab will the lucky ones. They’ll likely die instantly in the explosion. But you’re in a reinforced closet, so you’ll probably be roasted to death by the ensuing flames.”

  And then it was quiet again, and Burke knew he was alone.

  11

  Burke let the backlight on his phone grow dim, and then a moment later, extinguish totally. Extinguish, he thought. Going to be a lot of that going on in a few minutes. He stood in the dark, close quarters of the closet, straining to listen for any sounds from the lab, but it had grown ominously quiet. He tried to regulate his breathing, not knowing if the storage space was airtight. Then he laughed. If David wasn’t bluffing about the explosives, and Burke had no reason to believe he was, he’d be dead long before he ran out of air. He took a step back, as far as he could go before he hit the back wall, and slowly slid to the floor, his knees drawn up to allow him to sit in the phonebooth-sized room. Fortunately, aside from David’s discarded cleansuit, there wasn’t much in the closet, but it was still not an overly comfortable place to be. Place to die, he corrected himself.

  This was not the first time his end seemed inevitable, though every time he’d found himself in this circumstance in the past, he’d managed somehow to worm his way out. It wasn’t looking like that would be the outcome this time, and he found himself reflecting upon his life.

  His mind went to Lyndsey. He could almost see her face hovering in the darkness in front of his eyes. He smiled at the thought of her. They had known one another for almost ten years. That was nowhere near the time she’d known Perry Hall, with whom she’d grown up, but it was longer than any other woman had stayed in his life. Even his own mother, on whose grave he’d sworn David’s death moments before, had spent less time than that with her only child, dying of cancer when Burke was eight.

  So ten years with Archer was pretty much the watershed as far as relationships went. Not all of those years had bee
n good ones. After a whirlwind beginning, during which they’d worked closely and loved even more so, Burke had screwed things up by cheating. He’d justified it in his mind at the time by telling himself the dalliance had been instrumental to the case on which they’d been working. But as he sat in the humid darkness of the closet, he realized he’d been lying to himself even then. The resolution of the assignment had not been affected by his sleeping with the sexy Scorpion agent. He’d done it because he wanted to.

  Lyndsey knew it too, and for the next several years, she saw Burke only when absolutely necessary. Until Perry came along. After his parents had lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks, Lyndsey’s childhood friend had dropped out of law school to become a member of the NYPD, feeling that protecting others would honor his parents’ memory more than defending white collar criminals would have. It had been Archer who’d eventually revealed the true nature of her own profession and convinced Perry he could save a lot more people from the very sort of monsters who had taken his family from him.

  Once Perry started working his way up the ladder at SpyCo, Lyndsey’s attitude toward Burke had begun to warm, especially since he had been one of Perry’s early handlers, teaching him the trade and saving his ass more than once. Seeing Burke give what he could to Perry reminded Lyndsey of the good things she’d once seen in him. They’d begun to talk. They worked a few missions together. And they’d stood up for Perry and his late wife Trina.

  But when Trina was killed by the mysterious assassin known as Flick, Lyndsey had once again distanced herself from Burke, less in reaction to anything stupid he’d done and more to make sure Perry didn’t off himself during the extended period of personal anguish into which he’d fallen.

  But even that didn’t keep them apart for long, and things had really begun to improve recently as they’d taken a short vacation together in Rome, during which the physical aspect of their relationship had rekindled. Burst in roaring flames, Burke reflected, thinking back with a smile.

  It had almost gone sour again, though, when Burke received an order to execute a Code Grey on Perry, the termination code. He and Lyndsey had traveled to Istanbul to find him, discovering just in time that the order had been false, part of the master plan of Mr. Zmaj to cut off SpyCo’s head in a single stroke.

  As they’d flown back to New York upon the successful conclusion of that episode, Burke had slept, dreaming the whole flight of asking Lyndsey Archer to marry him. When he awoke upon final approach to JFK, he’d almost asked her then and there. But Moore had taken a call while they were still in the air, and upon setting down his phone, he informed Burke that he had two hours to spend in New York before boarding a Qantas jumbo to Australia. He’d never gotten the chance to ask Lyndsey anything.

  And now he never would.

  That really sucked, he decided, because now, at what certainly appeared to be the end, he realized he truly loved her. Loved her. Even when he’d been dreaming about proposing, he’d never really formed that thought before. He loved Lyndsey Archer. Why else would he have faltered when he could have pursued the lovely agent with the provocative code name Kitten?

  He sighed. So many close calls, so many narrow escapes. But it seemed as though his luck had finally run out. He couldn’t count on Dot to show up out of the blue this time, as she had at the debate hall. Her marksmanship with a long gun wouldn’t do him any good if she couldn’t even get into the building, assuming she had any inkling that she needed to. Charlie might have let him skate past based on his knowledge of footy, but she wasn’t about to let a profane, gun-toting old woman through.

  Charlie.

  Charlie?

  “Markham! Dr. Markham! Where the bloody hell are you?”

  “Charlie?” Burke shouted, realizing he was actually hearing her voice and not having some end-of-life hallucination. He stood rapidly, banging his head on an overhead shelf. He pounded on the door of the closet. “Charlie! Charlie! I’m locked in this goddamn closet!”

  “Where?” she called back. Her voice was still somewhat distant, so he pounded the door even harder, hoping she could follow the sound. A moment later, he was rewarded by the click of the lock and a flood of fluorescent light, which seemed far brighter now than when he’d been shoved into the closet.

  Burke burst from the closet. “Where is everyone?”

  “Still in the main lab, I suppose. Why?”

  “The building’s going to explode!”

  12

  Upon hearing mention of an explosion, Charlie sprang into action. She grabbed Burke’s wrist, her grip amazingly strong, and began virtually dragging him into the hallway.

  “Come on, we have to get everyone out!”

  “Can you override the lockdown?”

  “It’s already been done. David—”

  “You saw David?”

  “He ran past me with the other new scientist who started yesterday. Um, Dr. Wu, I think. I tried to stop him, but he pushed past me and said something like, ‘Stay out of my way or I’ll lock you in the same closet as Dr. Markham.’ That’s when I came to find you and heard you banging on the closet door. Why did he lock you in there?” It was then that she noticed the body of Dr. Allcock on the office floor. “Oh. That’s why,” she said with, in Burke’s opinion, impressive calm.

  Burke and Charlie burst into the main lab to find everyone had mostly recovered from the initial shock of the lockdown and were simply milling around, talking in low voices. Burke spoke up,

  “Everyone, may I please have your attention. I need you all to move in the direction of the exit.” He motioned toward Charlie, who took the cue and ran to the nearest exit to serve as both a beacon and impromptu usher. “Orderly fashion, no pushing or shoving, but move as quickly as you can.”

  “What’s going on?” a man shouted. “Are we in danger?”

  “Oh my god, it’s a fire!” a woman shrieked. “We’re all going to burn to death!”

  Immediately, the crowd’s relative calm was replaced by a cacophony of noise as they all began pulling and pushing, yelling and screaming.

  “We’re all gonna die!”

  “It’s a bomb!”

  “Someone call my mother!”

  “Help, I’m being trampled!”

  At first, Burke tried to intervene and restore order, but finally gave up and let them all fight their way to the outside. He hated them all for wasting precious time.

  At last, the final straggler stumbled out of the main lab and the sounds of the crowd’s terrified shouting faded.

  Burke ran toward Charlie. “Okay, looks like everyone is out. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They both ducked into the hallway and began running. Burke expected any moment to feel the rumble and heat of an explosion. Park would have set the bomb for a quick detonation, only delaying long enough for her and David to get well clear.

  They came into the changing area of the Hub, but Charlie didn’t pause. Burke spotted his clothes hanging on the hook, and sprinted toward them.

  “Come on, Dr. Markham. Move your ass! Leave the clothes!”

  Burke ignored her, grabbed the shirt and pants, then dropped the shirt halfway to the front door. He started to pause to retrieve it, but his instincts screamed that he was out of time.

  Charlie raced through the glass doors into the parking lot and kept running, Burke dead on her heels. When they were five rows of cars from the lab, a booming explosion tore through the air, throwing them both to the ground. Burke grabbed Charlie and rolled them behind an SUV as a second explosion, louder than the first, sent debris flying over their heads and into the vehicle’s side. The shockwave shattered the window glass, which poured down on them in a shower of diamond-like crystals.

  DAVID AND JI-WOO Park sped toward the Australian coast. Park was at the wheel while David kept a close eye on the road behind them. As he watched, a plume of dark smoke drifted high into the air. The lab. The bomb had gone off.

  “Relax,” Park said. “Don’t you see that smoke
? No one is going to be following us.”

  “I’ll relax when we’re on the sub.”

  “Which we will be very soon.” Park dug for her phone in the pocket of the lab jumpsuit she still wore. “Speaking of which, I should confirm the coordinates. All we need is to arrive at the wrong site.” Finding no phone in that pocket, she tried the other. “Shit!”

  David glanced over. “Something wrong?”

  “I can’t find my phone. I must have dropped it when that stupid ape tried to take me in Allcock’s office. Shit!”

  “What does that mean for us?”

  “Nothing. It’ll be fine. They won’t be able to find anything on the phone that will be useful. At least, not in time to do anything about it.”

  “What about our coordinates?”

  “They’re in code. I’m quite sure I remember them correctly. I just wanted to confirm. And as far as allowing anyone to follow, don’t fret. They could probably crack it, but it would take hours at the very least. By that time, we’ll be long gone.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Forget it, David. We’re home free. Soon the QNM will be in the hands of the Great Leader and the global balance of power will at last be restored.”

  David sat heavily back in his seat.

  Park glanced at him, frowning. “You seem less enthusiastic than I would expect. Not having second thoughts, are you?”

  David shook his head. “Did it sound like I was having second thoughts when I mocked Burke from outside the closet? No second thoughts.”

  “See that you don’t,” Park said, her voice taking on a menacing tone. “Because I will kill you too, if the need arises.”

  “Like I said, no second thoughts.”

  The ominous conversation was cut off as the car left pavement and hit a dirt road.

  Park nodded curtly. “Very well. I understand it must be difficult to betray your own country. But you are doing the right thing. Keep it together for a few more hours and you will be richly rewarded.”