by Alex Howell
“You good?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine, it’s not much.”
As Serena struggled to get all of her belongings inside the room, Clara peeked down the hall to see if she had anyone to help her, but the hall was deserted. Odd. Dad came with me from Maryland. Maybe she’s international? Like lives in Washington, but her family lives elsewhere? That would make sense.
“Had quite the hike, huh?”
Serena laughed much harder than Clara would have expected, though she noted the laughter definitely wasn’t mocking.
“What?” Clara asked, confused.
“You could say that,” Serena said, heaving a bag onto one of the beds, laughed breathlessly. “I just got here from Seattle.”
Clara expected more of an explanation but got none. She didn’t think Serena was being rude—she just figured there was something about Serena’s trip she either didn’t want to talk about or just hadn’t thought to mention. And given her cheerful mood, she didn’t think it was anything dark.
But it wasn’t like Seattle was Beijing or Chile. It was a couple of day’s drive at the most. Why was she so late?
“So… you get stuck along the way? Car broke down? I was told you were going to be a little late.”
“Nope!” she said. “I hitchhiked here.”
Uh… what?
On the one hand, such a move by Serena seemed beyond dangerous and preposterous. All it took was one crazy person to cause Serena a nightmare’s worth of trouble. But, then again, Clara had just been through so much hell the previous few months that hitchhiking about twelve hours’ worth of car rides seemed like going to the grocery store in comparison.
Still, that was Clara. This was someone else. What she had done was either an incredible start to an interesting year of roommates, or she had actually come from someplace dark and was very effectively hiding it.
“You’re kidding!”
Serena shook her head adamantly.
“No—I’m being serious.”
With a gleam of mischief in her green eyes, Serena continued in the most nonchalant manner possible. Now I can’t figure out anything about this girl.
“I couldn’t get a ride, so I just started sticking my thumb in the air!”
Clara had in her mind a vision of this girl, smart enough to go to Stanford, just walking out the front door of her family’s home in Seattle, sticking her thumb up, and getting a ride from a trucker in an 18-wheeler. She had visions of all of the people she must have ridden with—desperate men, bored men, tired men, truly good men—but never women. She just couldn’t imagine such a thing happening.
It must have made for a hell of a story. It definitely wasn’t one that Clara would have done. She got in the line of danger out of necessity, never by choice.
“You’re crazy,” Clara said with a smirk.
She’d meant it as a joke, and while she thought Serena did pick up on that jocular nature of her words, Serena did arch an eyebrow in defiance.
“Oh please—what is this? Did I just leave my nagging mother behind to find a new one!”
Oh, God, no, please don’t tell me our roommate relationship is starting off like this.
“No, no, I mean—”
“Relax,” Serena said, holding up a finger to signal for Clara to wait.
She then dug into her bag and pulled out a small bottle of vodka. Without warning, she tossed it to Clara, who only caught it because she was resting in bed. Had she been standing up, she knew she would have dropped it on their floor.
“This is college, honey—live a little! I figured we’re going to have a real adventure for the next four years, we might as well start off like it’s a true epic journey!”
Clara looked at the bottle of vodka and back at her roommate. It was most certainly a far cry from how her father had run the house—but, if not now, then when?
This is either going to be the greatest thing ever or the death of me.
Maybe even both.
Clara sniffed the bottle and checked her watch. She had over an hour to go before her next class, which was plenty of time to digest and absorb a single shot. While she had drank before, she’d definitely never done it on a mid-morning Monday afternoon, and she’d taken shots maybe twice in her life.
But she also wanted to start her relationship with her roommate off on the right foot, even if it was on a foot that she never envisioned doing.
“All right, one shot,” Clara said. “But I have to go to class in an hour, so nothing more.”
“Oh, of course,” Serena said. “I’m not saying we show up to class drunk. That’s for the last week.”
You’re already planning that out?
Seems like I have a lot to learn.
Reaching into her bag, Serena then pulled out two shot glasses and put them on her desk. Clara came over, poured out the shots, and put the cap back on. Serena held hers up, and Clara followed suit.
“Cheers,” they both said together.
It’s a brand new world, Clara thought as she took the shot and tried not to show her repulsion to the taste. I just hope that it’s a world I can handle.
5
September 5th, 2028
1:30 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Mason just wanted a nap.
Since the day before, when he had gotten the Ebola mission, as he liked to call it, he’d flown literally around the globe, escaped an exploding building, gotten taunted by a terrorist, failed on his mission, and was now in front of a very angry General Thomson and two of his allies, one of whom looked like a general and the other whom Mason was too tired to identify. He had slept perhaps an hour on the flight from Tehran back to D.C., but even that had been very restless and turbulent. It wasn’t often that Mason wanted a nap, but right now, want was coming very close to turning into a need.
The rest of the Onyx team seemed to feel the same way. While Mason didn’t fight back on Marshal’s order to speak to the general himself, a fight had started over the responsibilities on the team. Chris, Marshal, and Kyle had gotten into it—shocking Mason, considering Kyle had almost never stood up for himself—while he and Raina had mostly remained mum. Mason had hoped that he could have served as the model for calm, letting it spread, but it did little good.
Once they’d gotten to the plane, Marshal apologized, but it did little to assuage everyone. The bickering ended, but the feelings of frustration and disappointment had not. And my little girl is still out west, far away from me.
It was telling that the chair Mason sat in at that moment was the most comfortable thing he’d been in since leaving the mission briefing the day before. A nap was not only wanted, it was almost impossible to avoid.
Unfortunately, with the tension in the room, a nap would probably result in the death penalty. The stone silence of the room was almost unbearable, but neither Mason nor his ragtag band of operatives were willing to say a word. In this moment of scrutiny, the simple act of speaking only seemed to be the only prerequisite needed for stepping into a mine field. No one was willing to step up to the plate to explain the failure of their current mission.
So, yeah, if I won’t talk, I sure won’t nap.
“So—you guys seriously screwed up, huh?” General Thomson said. “I send you with one simple task—one damn simple task—and I come back and find out a building’s been destroyed, a terrorist has escaped, and the biological weapons of mass destruction were not only not discovered, we have no clues as to where they may have gone.”
Thomson gets right to the point, huh? No delays here.
“Brilliant, just brilliant. Need I get Luke in here to ask him what the hell you all are good for? Do I need to see if Onyx has actually done anything worth a damn?!?”
Mason had heard things like this before, and to some extent, it was just theatre. But there was no doubting how serious General Thomson actually felt in that moment, and to dismiss it as theatrics was a good way to ensure it became anything but.
“There were m
itigating circumstances, General.”
Somehow, Marshal had mustered the courage to speak. Perhaps it was his job as team leader to do so, but, in any case, it was a beyond brave move—or perhaps just a really stupid one. Mason also suspected it was his way of apologizing for his outburst in Tehran, but no one on the team was really awake or alert enough to realize it.
“Mitigating circumstances?”
Marshal might as well have said that they had chosen to go to the animal shelter instead of the compound. He stayed strong, but even a man as strong as Marshal showed nerves from time to time. And, right now, with his eye twitching, he showed it all.
“Our intelligence proved to be faulty, and the suspected terrorists were long gone.”
At which Thomson let out a slight chuckle. Not sure that was the best place to go, Marshal.
But that’s why I’m not talking, because I’d probably say something even worse.
“Not only that, but the whole place was blown to hell! I suppose our intelligence should have picked that up too, Marshal?”
Marshal’s face turned red with frustration. Suffice to say, Mason did not envy him. Mason didn’t really envy anyone in the room at that moment.
“Yes—there were mitigating circumstances.”
“It’s all right,” the man to the left of General Thomson said. “Not every mission goes well.”
“Only if these Onyx idiots are running it,” the man to his right said.
So… are we doing the good cop, bad cop routine right now? Because I’m too tired to deal with this. Just tell us what we need to do for our next step.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Marshal said.
Got to give it to the man, he stands up for us. Just wish Luke was here to calm the tension on both sides.
Remarkably, though, General Thomson did not inflame the situation. In fact, the question seemed to give the General a chance to calm himself and give proper introductions.
“My apologies. I believe introductions are in order. This is General Fanelli—he just got back from his post in Italy. And this is Colonel Waverly from West Point.”
Mason stared intently at the pair, wondering why they were here—but as he learned long ago when he first joined the military, he didn’t ask questions, he just did what he was told. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t think them.
Why was a colonel in the room? It made sense, maybe for reasons Mason and the ground force of Onyx would never know, for generals to be in the room. Although he knew little about General Fanelli—actually, he knew little about General Thomson, as well—it was in the right of a general to sit in on a meeting like this.
But a colonel?
However, what little respite they had from General Thomson’s outburst was short-lived, and the hot-tempered man picked up right where he had left off.
“I just want you to know—I’m not so angry that you failed, I’m angry because of the reason why you failed. And, right now, all I’m hearing are a bunch of pathetic excuses about why you failed. You better give me something much better. I better hear some ownership from you instead of blaming intel or some other nonsense. You wanna know why?”
Thomson shoved a piece of paper across the table as he howled. It was theatrical, and while some on the team seemed shocked by it, Mason never had much respect for the overly demonstrative types—though General Jones had eventually turned out to be a traitor, Mason had long respected his even-keeled leadership style.
It was something to be tolerated and gotten by. It was not something to try and emulate.
“Look at your own report! You said that you guys suffered from faulty intelligence—well, according to your own report you were warned that suspects might have ‘boobytrapped’ the facility before going in!”
Welp. We missed that one.
Much as Mason wanted to defend Marshal and stand up for him, there wasn’t going to be any of that right now. It was one thing for Mason to stand up to Luke Simon, the founder of Onyx, whom he had a long history and relationship with. It was a very different thing to stand up to a general who, by all accounts, was not a damn traitor to America.
And given that the report had things that Marshal had apparently either missed or did not consider relevant, there just wasn’t anything Mason could do to defend him.
“Sir…” Marshal said.
But he had no words he could pull out. As it was, Thomson wasn’t having it and continued down the line of inadequacies he saw in Marshal’s mission report.
“Furthermore,” the General said. “Why on Earth wouldn’t you have formed a perimeter around the facility ahead of time? To make sure the suspects didn’t find a back door out? Did you just think they would welcome us with cake and a DJ? Or do you think, hey, maybe we should look around?”
No one said a word. Mason didn’t bother to correct for the fact that the moment they arrived, they literally went straight in—anyone who was inside would have gotten noticed.
Because at this point, Thomson seemed so angry that even the truth would have just resulted in more pain for everyone.
“Do you know just how devastating those vials of Ebola would be if they were unleashed upon the public? Do you know what kind of a crisis we’d be facing if that were to ever leak out into the streets of any major city in this country? You know what, instead of me asking these questions to you goddamn morons, let me just show you.”
Thomson hit a button on the conference desk, switching on the large flat screen on the wall behind him. Just as the image of a man half eaten alive by the Ebola virus emerged on the screen, he turned and pointed to the monitor. Even as a soldier who had seen war, seen gore, and seen human bodies in conditions that Mason could never say out loud, the image on the screen was disturbing. Really not one for anything but the truly unvarnished truth.
This was not theatrical. This was all too real, and the effect it had on Mason and the rest was very obvious and clear.
“This—this is what it would look like!”
Thomson then flipped off the monitor and turned back to the Onyx team members. Mason no longer needed a nap—the fire with which General Thomson spoke had more than gotten him awake, to say nothing of the repulsive nature of the photo he had just looked at. Thomson took a few seconds to calm down before continuing, albeit still only needing a single thing to trigger him back to full rage.
“You guys screwed up royally—okay, I get it. And, frankly, I should fire you nut-bags for how poorly you handled this mission. But, because I recognize the gravity of the situation and how it would make no sense to change streams mid-swim, I’m not going to. In fact, you are in luck.”
Wait, what? Luck? What the hell could be lucky about a spot like this?
“Yes, that’s right, you’re in luck,” Thomson said, as if being able to read Mason’s mind. “All is not lost after all. I just received precious intel that our stateside operatives have picked up the trail.”
“Where?” Mason said, no longer able to contain his surprise at the positive news.
“Right here in town. Washington D.C. General Fanelli?”
The other general stood and moved to the monitor. He was a little bit more overweight and moved a little bit slower, but his voice was much calmer than the other general’s, and he seemed much more relaxed.
“Our intel has actually given us some interesting developments,” General Fanelli said. “It appears that this group has actually dispatched of Khalif Hatim; it seems he was less of a terrorist and more of a scientist. In any case, though, this is an unfortunate development, as such a person of interest would have provided us valuable intel.”
So it probably wasn’t Khalif that wrote that note then. It was someone pretending to be him so we’d keep chasing him while missing the actual people.
Very interesting.
“However, we know that members of this group have allies and have made rumblings of activity here in Washington D.C.,” Fanelli continued. “It appears that people of Iranian and Italian heritage
—go nice on me, now, my momma is Italian too.”
The attempted humor did not draw any chuckles.
“These people comprise most of the terrorists. The Iranians are the Iranians, while the Italians mostly seem a part of the church that is playing a major role in this threat. You will all need to figure out a course of action to find these guys within the city limits.”
General Fanelli then cleared his throat.
“Sorry, General Thomson, but I have a meeting to attend regarding operations in the Pacific. Do you need any further assistance in, ahem, keeping Onyx in line?”
“I’m sorry?” General Thomson said, immediately raising suspicion from Mason. How could General Thomson not realize that Fanelli had to be elsewhere? “You have another meeting. Really?”
General Fanelli apparently wasn’t into long-winded explanations however, and picked up his satchel. Mason wasn’t sure who was acting more suspicious, but given the bluster of Thomson…
Well, he wasn’t about to accuse him of being a second General Jones, and he realized the leap from “forgetting someone else’s itinerary” to “terrorist threat” was too much. I really, really, really need a goddamn nap.
“Yes—yes. I’m going to be late. I will catch up with you later. I apologize for the sudden departure, but you know how the Chinese are being. Thank you.”
And with that, Fanelli quickly exited out of the office, leaving a bewildered General Thomson in his wake. By this point, Mason had seen the act as someone who had simply agreed to make something of a cameo appearance, only to realize halfway through that he had to be somewhere else already preplanned.
“Anyways—like I was saying on what really matters,” General Thomson said, which seemed to be an unnecessarily savage attack. “Something else to keep in mind, gentlemen and madam. You all know the presidential election is just a few weeks away. The last thing this country needs is a crisis and a domestic terrorist attack right on the day when many of us should be celebrating or making new plans. You better make damn sure you get those vials back! Do I make myself clear?”