Die Again To Save Tomorrow (Die Again to Save the World Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  Marshall laughed behind them. “Well, she sure as shit ain’t Rachel.”

  Aki took Rueben into the hallway, and Rueben dug his hands in his pockets. “So where are we really going?”

  “We’re going to wait in the kitchen and watch for Pete on the security cameras.”

  “I gotta admit, fucking sounded more fun.”

  She laughed. “We may get to that later.”

  He cocked a sheepish smile. “Really?”

  “Don’t get too excited now. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

  “Like not getting blown up or kidnapped by a psychopath.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  He followed her into the kitchen, where nearly a dozen agents in waitstaff uniforms stood around security cameras. They were bulky, and they carried tranq guns. They might stand a good chance at taking Pete down.

  Aki was the first to speak. “Where are we?”

  An agent wearing the nametag Ernie was the leader under Aki. “We haven’t seen anything. Not on the street, not on the sidewalk. I don’t know where this guy could be.”

  “Keep looking. Our intel is reliable.”

  “I’m looking, but we’re not getting anything.”

  “Are we tracking Marshall’s signal?”

  Another agent who wore the nametag Gus sat on a counter with a laptop. “I’m tracking it. It’s broadcasting, and someone’s intercepting it, but right now the intercepting signal is scrambled. We’ve lost the triangulation and have no way of knowing where it’s coming from.”

  Laura emerged from the back office. “Tell me we have something. Can we all go home soon?”

  Fake Gus answered, “Not yet. We’re still tracking the subject.”

  Laura sighed. “Can you please not sit on my food preparation space? If the health department came in right now, I could lose my license.”

  Fake Gus jumped off the counter. “Sorry.”

  “That goes for all of you. Hats or hairnets. Gloves, please.”

  The agents scrambled around trying to make their cover look more credible.

  Laura stood against the counter and watched the security feed. “Please tell me there’s a real reason you guys had to disrupt my business.”

  Aki tried to reassure her. “Ma’am, we can’t tell you everything, but we’re disrupting your business for the sake of the summit.”

  She sighed. “I sure hope that’s the truth. Your dad is eating all my cake. Are you two even a couple?”

  Rueben started to answer no, but curiously noticed that Aki avoided the question. Wait, was some of this real?

  They watched the security camera more, and nothing happened. Marshall started to look bored.

  Laura mumbled, “Archie Bunker needs more cake.” She grabbed a tray and trudged out to the table where Marshall sat. Once she was in his eyesight, though, she perked up and switched to sales mode.

  Fake Ernie nodded and watched the security footage. “Atta girl. Sell that cake.”

  Laura sat at the table with Marshall and talked to him for a while. He started to warm up on the camera, but there was still no attack. They waited. Rueben glanced up from the camera footage. It was after ten. They had been here for over an hour.

  Fake Gus pulled out a deck of cards. “Anyone up for a game of poker?”

  A couple of the agents joined in as they all waited.

  Laura came back into the kitchen. “Any news?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “So when do we call it enough?”

  “Not yet.”

  Marshall stood and straightened his belt and pants to leave. Aki and Rueben looked at each other. Aki messed up her hair, disheveled her clothes, and stumbled out onto the main floor, her face looking like she had slept with a coat hanger.

  Marshall greeted her with a curt, “I’m ready to go.”

  “Just…just give us a few more minutes.”

  He took her in and raised an eyebrow.

  She bit the side of her finger and stumbled backward. “Just a couple more minutes.”

  He smirked.

  Aki disappeared back into the kitchen, and the agents applauded and whistled.

  Fake Gus nodded approvingly. “Hey, next time can I fake-marry you?”

  Everyone laughed except Rueben. This was all getting a little too messy and real for him.

  The poker game continued, and they all watched the monitors. The fly buzzed around again, and Laura sighed. “What is the deal with this fly? We don’t have a pest control problem here.”

  Suddenly a figure appeared on the camera outside the door. Rueben recognized him immediately. “It’s Pete.”

  The agents dropped the card game and grabbed their tranq guns, tucking them inside their uniforms. They all inconspicuously found jobs to do on the main floor. Dusting, straightening, arranging the tables and chairs.

  Pete stepped inside the cake shop and surveyed the room from under his hood and behind his dark sunglasses. Satisfied that no one was watching him, he walked up to Marshall. “Hello, Marshall Peet.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  Pete’s mouth curled into a smile. “I’m looking for your son.”

  He drew his silenced pistol and guns cocked all over the room in Pete’s direction. “Freeze.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Sunday, May 21, 8:30 p.m.

  It was getting late, and Buzz had his mansion to himself. He’d worked most of the day on research about Pete as well as on some of his projects. He’d checked in on Rueben and Aki, and he wondered how the Marshall babysitting thing was going. That, he knew, was probably going to end badly.

  Buzz leaned back in his cream leather armchair and sipped a drink. He closed his eyes and savored the vodka as it warmed his body and calmed his nerves.

  Buzz suffered from severe anxiety. He often described living in his head as being trapped in an amusement park. Every waking minute, hundreds of ideas and thoughts and facts and theories and numbers and scientific laws bounced around, bumping into each other. He had learned that this was anything but normal.

  In fact, if there was anything Buzz knew in life, anything at all, he knew that he was not…normal. Whatever that was. He’d known that when he was four and in preschool.

  While the other kids played with blocks in Ms. Jessica’s classroom, he was bored out of his mind. He eventually wandered off, and when they finally found him, he wasn’t outside on the playground.

  No, Buzz Lugger ran away from preschool to hide in the book closet. He had stolen Ms. Jessica’s college math book and laid on the floor and read math theory.

  He found it scintillating to try to grasp the principles of college algebra. Numbers weren’t just numbers. It wasn’t just one, two, and three like Ms. Jessica tried to make the class believe.

  Numbers were so much bigger and more exciting than that. They were dynamic entities moving about on a number line on a balanced scale of equality. They were quantities, objects, even ideas. It was like math was a language, almost an art.

  Although much more controlled and predictable than the Crayon washable paints in Ms. Jessica’s classroom, math was like a painting, but with known quantities.

  The first thing he asked when they discovered him was, “So, how can changing the quantities of X and Y move the bell curve?”

  Ms. Jessica, the slender, blonde twenty-three-year-old teacher, grabbed the text from his hand and scanned the page. “You want to know the truth? I don’t know.”

  Buzz was the only kid in the history of St. Bartholomew’s Day School to get kicked out for being too smart.

  No, Buzz was far from normal. So neither was the noise inside his head. Most people did not have Ali Baba’s circus tramping about upstairs every waking minute.

  He had learned to relate to normal people by understanding that if total brain usage were a scale, most people spent their daily lives operating on a level five. When they were at the point of extreme concentration, all neurons firing, and their brain pathways lit up
like an airport runway, they were at level ten. These were the kids who were fine with painting in Ms. Jessica’s class.

  Then there was him.

  Buzz estimated that daily, he operated at about a level thirteen or fourteen. When he was at a point of extreme concentration, he ran at a level seventeen or eighteen. As such, the sensory input was more than he could take and gave him grave anxiety.

  It was exhausting being Buzz.

  When he was a kid, he had been medicated and seen dozens of therapists who put him on all sorts of experimental drugs. None of which did anything except give him a taste for reality-enhancing chemical reactions.

  As an adult, he had since found that no prescription could calm the noise in his brain quite like the buzzing warmth of alcohol.

  So Buzz sat surrounded by the plush leather, silk, and velvet, and all the fineries that money could buy and enjoyed the chemical reaction in his brain. He flipped on a David Attenborough nature documentary and let the British narrator massage his aching neural pathways.

  Now he could think.

  He thought about this Pete character. Maybe he wasn’t related to Rueben somehow. He had to cover his bases, so he ran a comprehensive series of AI profile searches across all the country’s criminal databases. Nothing. He had expected as much. With the futuristic tech Rueben described Pete as having, this man was either actually from the future or some parallel world.

  While he thought on it, Buzz deleted his and his three friends’ arrest records from the corrections system. Now their arrests had never happened.

  Maybe he could get lucky and catch Pete on video feeds from NYC city cams. He could have hacked into the system, but there was no need. He picked up the phone and called Erica in D.C. She was always good for help.

  “White House Technology Advisory Department, this is Erica speaking.”

  “Hi Erica, it’s Buzz Lugger over in New York.”

  “Oh, hi, Buzz. Did you get the blueprints I sent over for the U.N. building?”

  “Yeah, I got them. I need you to do one more thing for me.”

  “Sure, what do you got?”

  “I need you to patch me into the security feed for the NYC CCTV. We need to catch this bastard.”

  “Absolutely.” There was a brief pause, and she returned. “There you go. You should be clear. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “Thanks, Erica.”

  “You bet.”

  He ended the call, and sure enough, logged right into the NYC CCTV cams. The feeds filled up his laptop so he would need bigger screens.

  He grabbed his computer and headed down to his basement.

  The basement lair in Buzz’s mansion was a massive room with vaulted ceilings and over two hundred monitors covering the walls. Long marble counters with computers of every kind filled the room’s floor. Boxes and boxes of old computer parts lined the walls. This was where he tinkered with new AI devices. So various experiments lay around in different stages of completion. One day, when Rueben stopped needing him to kill him and all, he’d go back to tinkering with robots. But this part was fun, too. Saving the world and all had its charms.

  Yeah, he could have worked for the CIA like Rueben and Aki. They’d offered. In fact, he’d been offered it before Reuben. Only after he turned it down did he recommend Rueben.

  Buzz loved what the CIA had been at its creation. It was a clandestine organization designed around the development of new technology for political purposes. Now it had become all about counter-terrorism and global initiatives. They were no longer at the cutting edge of the science and tech field. In Buzz’s mind, the CIA was irrelevant and growing more obsolete each year.

  He was glad he never took the job and instead started as a science researcher at NYU. From there, the possibilities skyrocketed and the next thing he knew, he was flying on Air Force One advising the president’s advisors. Well, that was partly because one of the president’s advisors had stolen his research to get the job and now needed his input to keep her job.

  But, he was happy with where life had taken him. And ever so grateful for the Road Not Taken at the CIA.

  Rueben, for example, spent forty-plus hours a week over there and didn’t know how to work even half of Buzz’s equipment. The future of global security scared him.

  He pulled up the CCTV footage on the screens and filled his lab with live images of the streets of New York. He had to find this guy. Based on his memory, he would have been at the Exit Bar at around 10:30 last night. He pulled up the archived footage and watched the evening. In grainy black-and-white video, he saw himself enter with Martha, Rueben, and Marshall.

  Rueben stopped to talk to a homeless man. Buzz recalled seeing him before but couldn’t quite place him. That guy was weird. But, weird piqued Buzz’s interest, and he enhanced the image. He took down a description of the homeless man. He sure seemed to like his bucket of fried chicken…

  Finally, Pete showed up in his white hoodie.

  “There you are, you bastard.”

  He wore his hood up and seemed to be fully aware of where the cameras were. He moved his face this way and that, and Buzz couldn’t get a full look at it. Even if he’d been able to, he knew what he’d find if he ran it through facial recognition: nothing.

  He forwarded through the footage and saw the foursome run out the door, then Pete chased them. They all disappeared from the footage at that point. “Damn.”

  Buzz gathered still frames of Pete on the streets and tried to analyze them for clues. Nothing so far.

  There was a knock at the door. “What is it, Rosa?”

  Rosa came in carrying drinks. “I thought you might want your cleanse now that the others are gone.”

  He smiled at the maid and grabbed the drink off the tray. “Thank you, Rosa.” He downed the drink all in one gulp. Yeah, it tasted awful.

  “Is this the mysterious Pete?”

  He turned to the screen and washed the bitter-tasting drink down with flavored water. “Yeah. I don’t know what to make of him. He’s a Repeater.”

  “Like Mr. Rueben.”

  “I’m trying to analyze footage of him for clues, but he always seems to know where the cameras are.”

  “Hm,” Rosa said. “Play the footage for me.”

  When Rosa talked, Buzz had learned to listen. “Okay.”

  He did, and after a few moments, she gestured toward the computer. “May I?”

  “Sure, have at it. I can’t get anywhere with it.”

  Rosa leaned over and selected a photo of Pete and enhanced an image of him standing sideways. “He is wearing some kind of hi-tech body armor, yes?”

  Buzz squinted at the screen. In the still shot, he could just make out the outline of the body-conforming armor beneath the hoodie as Pete turned. Damn, Rosa was good. “Yes. Among other pieces of advanced tech.”

  She narrowed her eyes in thought. Then with a quick key sequence, she enhanced the photo even further. Rosa peered at the photo. “See that little dot, Mr. Buzz?”

  He scrutinized the pixels on the screen, and that’s when he noticed a black speck on his white hoodie. “Looks like a fly. That’s some impressive resolution blow-up.”

  “And not just in this one,” Rosa continued. She flicked through the rest of the footage, pausing and zooming in to expose a tiny black fly resting on Pete’s hoodie or buzzing about him. “It’s in every one.”

  Buzz stared at Rosa. “He has a tiny drone.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sunday, May 21, 8:30 p.m.

  Martha and Zach pulled up near the tower in the unmarked police car. She felt a little uneasy driving it to commit a crime. Still, she couldn’t think about any of that right now. The world depended on her and Zach to help stop a nuclear war.

  She vented her guilt to Zach. “Sometimes, you have to bend the rules a little.”

  He gave her a puzzled look. “Yeah, John Grisham does it all the time.”

  “Uh…something like that.”

  They
put on their hoodies and sunglasses and exited the car about a block from the tower. They walked the last stretch toward the back of the building. The tower at night was largely empty but still lit up with the cleaning crew and the workaholics burning the midnight oil.

  Her heart raced. Slasher told her it would be like this. He also said the cameras at the back of the building didn’t work, so she should try to stay on that side. She hoped the cameras still didn’t work.

  They arrived at a single-pane glass door, and Martha tried it in case it was open. It wasn’t.

  Zach pointed out the keypad. “That’s what he was talking about.”

  She nodded. Slasher had said all the building workers carried a key fob that allowed workers in after hours.

  But in the occasional instance that a key fob didn’t work or was missing, or an after-hours delivery arrived, there was an emergency backup code. The code was #8800.

  She glanced around and entered the code.

  Pop. It opened.

  She pulled open the door and glanced back at Zach in disbelief. He grinned with a full face. She whispered to him, “You’re getting off on this, aren’t you, Grisham?”

  “Oh, this is seriously the coolest thing I’ve ever done…like, ever.”

  She made a face at him, and they approached the elevator. She pushed the button, and it wouldn’t move. She noticed the keypad and fob sensor.

  She wondered, “How did we get up here earlier?”

  “Maybe it works on its own during the day.”

  She tried the #8800, but it didn’t work on that elevator.

  Zach looked confused. “What do we do now?”

  It would have been nice to do this with Rueben and Aki. When they’d all gone to Canada together to capture Pout, the two CIA agents had called the shots and knew how to get around stuff like this. Right now, they were pretending to get married to keep Marshall busy. She thought about texting them, but a rush of pride kept her from it. She could figure this out on her own.