by Alex Howell
What am I saying, I was a lot gruffer.
The man quietly obeyed, grabbing the pass key from a drawer in his desk and handing it to Mason. Mason grabbed it, never breaking eye contact, figuring at this point, he might as well go all-in on the tough guy demeanor. Sure hope this works.
Because if not…
“Good,” Raina said. “Now you and me are going to stand here and have a nice conversation until my partner gets back.”
Mason smirked, waved at the man, and moved right pass it all to Khalif Hatim’s room as Raina chatted with her captive receptionist about the weather. It would’ve been comical if not for the actual stakes of the situation.
Khalif’s door was right at the end of the hallway by the janitor’s closet, the perfect place for a renegade biologist like Khalif to hide. It wasn’t out in the open, but it wasn’t in too obvious of a hiding spot like the basement. Unfortunately for Khalif, Onyx’s intel surpassed the ability of the community center to keep its secrets under wraps.
Quietly walking up to the door, Mason saw a hanger affixed to the door handle that read, “Please Knock.” I’ll knock. I’ll knock down this door.
Mason then moved toward the shelter of the broom closet, using the shadows to operate. He snapped open his briefcase and pulled out a long-barreled silencer before loading a cartridge into the gun. Carefully slipping the card into its slot, Mason waited to hear the telltale click of the door unlocking. Grabbing the door handle with his left hand, and clutching his weapon with his right, he burst into the room, pistol aloft and ready for a one-shot neutralization.
Mason didn’t know what to expect to find upon entering this terrorist’s workshop, but his training immediately had him on autopilot, with gun and eyes trained on anything that moved. He looked for rushing bodies, for gunfire, for anything that would have given him what he needed.
But nothing did. The room was completely empty. There weren’t even any vials or containers, let alone ones with markings on them.
“Damn,” Mason grumbled. Came too late or we have the wrong intel.
Either way, Marshal and everyone else sure aren’t gonna be happy.
Khalif Hatim had indeed already left the scene, just like the receptionist had told them. Mason pretty much knew that Khalif wasn’t going to suddenly come back from a bathroom break. The vials of Ebola must have already been sold and carted off somewhere.
Nevertheless, he scoured the room to make sure, knowing it wouldn’t be the first time someone had hid something in relatively plain sight. Although he didn’t find any trace of the deadly pathogen, he did find something else.
On a table, he found a note as if it had been left specifically for him. Without touching it, Mason bent over to take a closer look. The words were enough to get Mason to nearly rip it in half.
“Dear CIA, FBI, FSB, NSA, MI6—or whoever the hell else has been watching us—while we are glad you have taken an interest, you are too late. We are long gone. You will not find what you are looking for. You will only find certain death.”
Underneath these words were a typeset graphic of what looked like a cup or chalice, filled to the brim with some kind of red liquid. Mason wasn’t always the most “by the book” agent, but he wasn’t stupid enough to touch or taste something that he both did not recognize and did not see made himself. Mason wasn’t about to touch the note either with his bare hands, lest he contaminate himself with some unknown residue.
Still, he was frustrated enough with the situation that he wanted to knock the cup over, rip the paper to shreds, and find Khalif himself for a lesson or two.
Mason opened up his briefcase to retrieve a plastic bag and pair of tweezers. Carefully gripping a corner of the terrorist’s message, he dropped it into the plastic bag and sealed it tight before stashing it away back in his briefcase. He took one look at the cup, thought better of it, and left it.
Don’t think you’re getting away though, Khalif. All you’ve done with your little note is intensified the attention we’ll have for you.
Mason turned the corner, saw Raina holding court with the man, and moved toward her.
“Did you get it?” Raina said, immediately dropping pretenses of conversation with the receptionist.
“Negative—the room was mostly empty. Just this note and a cup of… something. I wasn’t about to drink it.”
“Damn, completely empty?”
“Yeah, no vials, no labs, nothing. Old man here was telling the truth.”
“Wait—bring the cup out here.”
Mason, eyeing the receptionist carefully, as if to send him a message to not try anything funny, hurried back and grabbed the cup. Come to think of it, now that he saw it again and wasn’t taken aback by its presence, he felt like he’d seen a similar design somewhere, but… from where?
He hurried back to Raina who, by her gaze alone, apparently immediately knew what the cup was.
“There is an extreme cult—some sort of underground offshoot of the Catholic Church that we have been monitoring for a while now—and they use this exact same symbol. I didn’t think they were here in Iran, but it’s not implausible…”
Raina took it from Mason, examined it, and even held it closer to her nose than Mason would have preferred. But whatever Raina wanted to do was none of his concern.
“I thought that was wine at first glance, but… that’s not wine, Mace—that’s blood.”
The hell?
“That’s supposed to be the cup of Christ; a cup of holy blood.”
“Like in church?” Mason said, befuddled at how this would be here in a predominantly Islamic country.
“Yeah, but…”
It was puzzling to say the least. And Mason still didn’t trust the old man, who just sat there with a look of almost boredom on his face. The whole trip had felt like a giant waste of time, like a game of cat and mouse where the cat had shown up an hour after the mouse.
Mason turned to the old man, intensifying his gaze.
“How often does Khalif come here?” Mason demanded to know.
“I…I don’t know, a few times a week?” the man said, withering under the pressure. “He just comes and goes. I don’t know!”
“You’re full of it.”
“Mason!”
Raina shifted to English so the receptionist wouldn’t understand.
“What the hell is going on? You never snap like this.”
Mason wanted to chalk it up to anything other than the real answer. His frustration with Khalif, his disappointment at not finding him, the long flight, the attitude of General Thomson…
But that would just be scraping the surface of what was actually the issue at hand.
“Clara?”
Damn. That’s why she’s our negotiator.
“I don’t want to admit to it, but…”
Which, technically, Mason supposed he didn’t, but Raina wasn’t stupid. She put a hand on his shoulder, one eye still more or less locked on the old man, and squeezed.
“Remember your training, Mason,” she said. “You’re a special ops soldier, a SEAL, a member of Onyx. You should get help when you get back. But, for right now, you know what you can do and what you should do. I know you can do it. OK?”
Mason bit his lip, shook his head as if trying to get water out of his eardrums, and chuckled.
“Guess being a father has its downsides,” he chuckled. “I’m going to clean out the rest of the area. Keep talking to the old man here about the weather, will ya?”
Raina smiled and shifted perfectly back into Farsi.
“You sweep the area and I will help my friend here.”
3
The rest of the compound, unfortunately, was just as empty as the lab—if Mason could even call it that—where Khalif was supposedly holed up. There were a few rooms for religious worship—though more Islamic than Christian or Catholic—a couple of play rooms, some offices, and some bathrooms, but there was nothing.
In fact, it almost seemed too empty. There we
re computers at all of the desks, but there were almost no announcements, no papers, no stacks of anything that would have suggested that people worked at those desks. The play rooms had their toys well out of sight, and the various workout equipment was too simply set up.
It was almost as if whoever had run this community center knew that Mason and Raina were coming.
That seemed implausibly unlikely, of course. The intel collected was airtight, and Mason knew that Luke wouldn’t have sent them on a mission like this where they’d get exposed. More likely than not, the community center just wasn’t as active as it once was—which would explain why Khalif had chosen it.
Still, something didn’t sit right in Mason’s gut. Perhaps the vials were hidden in one of the drawers, or Khalif was hiding in some secret room, or just… something that Mason didn’t have the time to figure out. He and Raina couldn’t stay there forever.
He swept the area for a good fifteen minutes, an eternity in a black operative’s world, before eventually giving up and heading back to Raina. It seemed that her conversation with the old man had run its course, because now she was just watching him, almost looking bored.
“Any luck?” she said.
Mason shook his head.
“The place seems entirely cleared out,” he said. “Like they knew we were coming. I don’t think that’s the case, but—”
“If it’s not, then why was that note there?” Raina said. “They knew we were watching him. He and whoever he’s with wrote a pretty daring note.”
“True,” Mason said.
And then, out of nowhere, Mason’s ear piece buzzed furiously. Mason moved a bit, whacking it to get clarity.
“… get out, now! They’ve… explosives!”
Damn. Mason knew Marshal’s voice wasn’t referring to a nearby restaurant.
“You hear that?” Mason said, knowing whatever was said wasn’t good.
“Yep, time to go,” Raina said, grabbing the cup.
And then, the old man, faster than his years would have suggested, dashed around the counter and headed straight for the door.
“Hey!” Raina said, but Mason couldn’t spare time for some elderly man.
“Don’t worry about him!” Mason said, realizing that the old man must have known better—either that this would happen or that he had to get the hell out. “Go! Go! Go!”
If the old man knew something, well, credit to him for keeping his cool in front of two undercover American operatives. They’d get him another day—or at least foil whatever his plot was.
More likely than not, he was just a smart guy who knew when to run.
Mason and Raina bolted for the door and ran down a side alley where Marshal and the rest of the team were parked in a white van. It stuck out like a sore thumb, but at that moment, Mason was rather grateful to have an escape that stuck out badly—the last thing he needed was to try and hunt down his way out. Marshal, behind the wheel, started the engine and released the van’s sliding door.
No sooner were Mason and Raina inside than they heard a loud “BOOM!” and felt the whole van shake from the shock waves of the blast. Mason was thrown to the far side, colliding with Kyle and Chris. Raina then slammed into him. Mason was pretty sure he didn’t suffer any broken bones, but he was also pretty sure that he wasn’t keen on having more building explosion escapes anytime soon.
“Damn!” Marshal yelled.
“Did we know anything about that?” Mason shouted. “Any idea that the place would be rigged?”
“No. You think I’d hide something like that, soldier?” Marshal shouted back. “Buckle up, we’re getting the hell out of here!”
How did we not know that?
Someone had to have tipped them off. Whoever is running this wouldn’t have rigged the whole building for months on end waiting for such a chance. They had to have known.
But… how?
“That place looked empty earlier,” Raina said with some nervousness. “Hopefully there wasn’t anyone else inside.”
“Not our concern,” Marshal said with perhaps too much honesty. “Our mission is to retrieve vials of toxin, not evacuate buildings being blown up by terrorists.”
Raina, not satisfied, muttered under her breath, but Mason let it go. Mason also knew he was on edge from Clara still; he hadn’t really meant his words. He was just frustrated on multiple fronts, and the idea of adding something else he had to concern himself with was awful.
“You got those vials, Mason?” Marshal said.
Oh, damn.
They don’t know.
And they’re not going to be happy.
“No,” Mason said, drawing glares. “They’re not there. They’ve already been taken elsewhere. I looked everywhere in that building before it blew; we didn’t have any luck.”
The reaction was about as expected from the rest of Onyx.
“Great—just great!” Marshal growled. “What the hell am I going to tell Thompson now?!?”
I don’t know. But I’m glad it’s not me having to face that guy.
Marshal peeled out of the alley and headed down a busy thoroughfare. Mason wished that he had anything positive to say beyond a damn note and a silly chalice of some cult, but what was he going to do, lie? Such a move would do nothing but create tension in Onyx—and after the shocks that their last team member, Duke, had produced when he betrayed the team, tension was unfortunately something that was both all too present and something that desperately needed to be avoided.
In any case, the entire team was reeling a bit, and it had as much to do with the stress on the team from the general and from personal matters as it did the failed mission. Mason could already sense that it was going to be a stressful return and that the team would probably need some sort of a break when it was all said and done.
In any case, though, Marshal answered his own question—albeit not in the way Mason had hoped.
“You know what, I’m not going to tell him—you are! You’re going to board a plane, fly to DC, and tell General Thomson yourself!”
Well, that’s going to be fun.
I guess I am going to be the one facing that guy.
4
September 4th, 2028
11:30 a.m.
Palo Alto, California
Clara was just settling into her dorm at Stanford. The first week of orientation had gone swimmingly, and she already had made several new friends. Though sometimes she felt dumb in comparison to many of the kids who already had patents or had started companies, she reminded herself that she had four years to absorb as much as she could.
The best part of today, one that she was happy to see many other students shared, was that she finally had the chance to start her classes. She had already completed an Introduction to International Relations course around 8:30 a.m.; the professor made a joke about how this was the only time his class would be so full on a Monday morning, but Clara had no intentions of skipping it in the future. She also had a class on U.S. constitutional history, a course in chemistry, and a course on writing. It was so much more focused, with fewer courses, than high school.
But she was well aware that it was going to be tough. It didn’t particularly help matters that she had some awkward guys hitting on her already, but she brushed them aside, telling herself that she was there to learn, not to date; if it happened, so be it, but she wasn’t going to waste a gift like this in her life.
One thing she couldn’t figure out, though, was why her roommate had not shown up yet. All Clara knew was that it was a girl named Serena from Washington and that their RA had said Serena wouldn’t make it early, but, other than that, nothing had been said. It was too early for Clara to feel concerned, but being around her father and her own experiences had taught her that long silences were almost never signs of something good.
At this moment, though, Clara wasn’t worrying about absent roommates or new friends. She laid on her bed, glancing over at the photo of her and her father in Washington, D.C. from two months a
go, and then one of her and her mother when her mother still looked healthy. She missed her family. She knew it would get better, but damn if it was going to be a lot more challenging than she ever expected.
Just because it had been the right choice for her to go to Palo Alto didn’t mean that it was an easy choice, or one that she would never doubt. Her father was her rock, the one thing in life that she could depend upon no matter what; he called her every night, or at least notified her if he wasn’t going to be able to talk to her. She could turn to him for anything, from the literal life-saving rescue mission to the simple task of going to get more maple syrup at the local store.
He was still that, she knew. But if she wanted to become an adult, she had to have a more mature and adult relationship with her father. That meant all those things he did for her, she had to do for herself; all those times she knew she’d be safe in the house with him, she’d have to rely on her own intuition and skills; and all those times that she went to get ice cream, she’d now have to do it with a relative stranger.
It was necessary, but that didn’t mean it was easy.
Suddenly, she heard a knock followed by some keys turning. My roommate?
“Come in?” Clara said, feeling like it might be weird to question who it was if it was someone with keys to the room.
A red-haired girl poked her head in, smiling. She had a wheeled piece of green luggage that had battered wheels, scratches, and various dents; the girl herself had a beautiful expression but also looked like she had just spent the entire morning playing ultimate frisbee. She had freckles all over her face, a t-shirt, and gym shorts on.
“Hey—I’m Serena. Your roommate.”
Not someone crazy, not someone weird, not someone with poor hygiene—just a little sweat.
I lucked out!
“Clara, welcome!”
Clara extended a hand to the girl. Serena smiled before disengaging and dragging in her luggage and her backpack. The poor girl looked overwhelmed with moving in—and small wonder, too, considering that she was now a week late and had missed all of orientation.