A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  “No,” Kaem said with a laugh. “I wasn’t smart enough to study games. I just learned what the pieces do, then started playing. I…” he looked a little embarrassed, “I do seem to be able to see ahead quite a few moves.”

  “See ahead some moves?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that most players who do well at chess can see the likely moves their opponent will make in response to the move they’re planning, then figure out what they’ll do in response to those, and so on. The number of possibilities grows exponentially into the future, so it’s really hard to keep track of any but the most likely of your opponent’s moves.”

  “Oh,” Arya said, thinking, Maybe his chess skill is more related to his math abilities than his memory.

  Other than the Corso incident, Arya had a great time and it seemed all too soon that they were all getting up, putting on their jackets, saying goodbye, and heading for the door.

  ~~~

  Since he was on the side of the table that faced Seba, CIA Officer Lafflin said, “They’re leaving.”

  Brekko said, “Stay down,” as if he expected Lafflin to blow their cover by jumping up and hurrying after their target. “Follow the plan.”

  When Seba arrived at La Bolognese, Brekko had pointed out that they knew where Seba lived and that there was only one likely route from the restaurant to Seba’s apartment. He’d had the van park near that route while Lafflin was getting them a table. Brekko was about to go out the back door of La Bolognese and have the van meet him in an alley they’d chosen off a map. Lafflin would follow behind Seba, closing on him just before Brekko stepped out of the alley and confronted the young man with his pistol. Brekko would announce Seba’s arrest and the pistol would force the guy to hold still while Lafflin applied the cuffs.

  “What about the girl?” Lafflin asked, worried that since Seba arrived with her, she might complicate matters by going home with him. “I think we should arrest him in his apartment to keep her from complicating things.”

  “By the time she’s done pissing herself, we’ll be halfway to the airport,” Brekko said. He’d already expressed his opinion that dragging a cuffed Seba downstairs and across the lobby of the apartment building would be more problematic than shoving him ten feet down an alley. Apparently, he didn’t think he needed to repeat that assertion.

  It’s going to be dicey if that girl starts screaming, Lafflin thought with some dread. He was of the opinion that screaming would be more likely than her freezing up. He got up and headed out the door of the café about thirty feet behind the couple. His nerves were so jumpy he kept closing on the strolling couple and having to window shop to let them gain distance again.

  Brekko’s voice came over Lafflin’s earbud. “There’s a truck parked in the first alley. I’ve put the van in our second choice. Now that I’ve seen it, I think it’s actually better than the first spot. You remember where it is?”

  “A block farther along,” Lafflin answered. Then said unhappily, “The girl’s still with him.”

  “Trust me, she won’t be a problem,” Brekko reassured him. “Just follow my lead.”

  The closer they got to the alley Brekko had staked out, the worse the sinking feeling in Lafflin’s gut got. Whether or not they’re trained in tradecraft, we should have more men for a snatch like this. He looked around, At least the street’s nearly deserted, he thought.

  He reminded himself once again that Seba and the girl were just untrained civilians. The guy might have low-level martial arts training, but those kinds of classes warned their students to avoid taking on people who had guns. And, though he had his doubts, he hoped Brekko was right, that the girl would freeze up like a deer in headlights—after all, most people did. As long as she doesn’t scream, he thought.

  As they covered the last thirty feet, Lafflin closed the distance and reached for his handcuffs.

  Brekko stepped out of the alley, gun in hand.

  Lafflin suddenly realized he was in the line of fire if Brekko discharged the weapon. Which shouldn’t happen, but Brekko did have a reputation as a loose cannon.

  The couple slowed but didn’t stop as Brekko said, “Okay, Mr. Seba. The party’s over. Time to come home and face the music.”

  “Sorry,” Seba said, still moving forward, though slowly. “I’m an Italian citizen.” He reached for a pocket, “Would you like to see my ID or passport?”

  The girl, who’d lagged a moment, caught up with him.

  So much for freezing up or pissing herself, Lafflin thought.

  “You’re also an American citizen, wanted for theft of intellectual property,” Brekko said. “Stop where you are. My partner’s going to cuff you.”

  Seba continued toward Brekko but did glance back over his shoulder at Lafflin.

  “Stop!” Brekko shouted, looking worried about how fast the distance was closing.

  With dismay, Lafflin saw a group of people come out of the building across the street.

  One of them pointed at Brekko and shouted, “Pistola!”

  Shit! Lafflin thought with horror.

  Seba moved toward Brekko even faster.

  He’s closing the distance! Lafflin thought, thinking about how major advantage of a gun over martial arts was at a distance. Brekko shouldn’t let him get so close!

  Brekko seemed to be thinking the same thing, taking a step back and saying, “Stop Goddammit! I’ll shoot!”

  Seba suddenly lunged forward.

  Brekko’s gun went off, then Brekko went down under Seba.

  A Seba who had attacked like a great cat pouncing and swarmed Brekko under with ease.

  Too late, Lafflin realized the girl he’d hoped would freeze had instead turned toward him with fire in her eyes. A gleaming club swung toward his arm, breaking it with a sickening crunch. As he bent over it in agony, her palm shot toward his head…

  ~~~

  Lafflin blinked blearily. His face felt like he’d run into a brick wall. There were flashing lights everywhere. What the hell happened to me?!

  He reached his right hand up to his face. The left one jerked along with it, producing agonizing pain at the break in his mid-arm. Handcuffs?!

  Memory started to return. We were trying to arrest an American citizen in Italy and… The last thing he remembered was Brekko’s gun going off. Oh, God! Lafflin thought. Did he kill that guy? Lafflin lifted his hand away from his face and saw blood. Or did Brekko’s bullet stray to hit me in the face?

  Lafflin tried to sit up but something was around his chest.

  His movements alarmed someone who shouted at him in Italian to stay down.

  Lafflin sank back down on what he now realized was a stretcher. Some of the flashing lights were coming from ambulances parked a few feet away. His limited rise and a cervical collar around his neck had kept him from being able to see very well. He had, however, seen Seba—apparently unharmed—talking to the police and pointing to a strapped down Brekko, also on a stretcher. Holy crap! Lafflin thought, This went even more spectacularly wrong than some of Brekko’s other misadventures.

  And, I didn’t slow him down a bit.

  Someone squatted down next to Lafflin. “Hello, I’m Sergio. You’re Sean Lafflin, an officer of the CIA, right?” the man asked in impeccable English.

  Reflexively, Lafflin said, “No, I’m a diplomat.”

  The man tsked at that. “I don’t think so. But, if that’s true, you can try diplomacy when you speak to Presidente Mattioli, eh?”

  Lafflin thought, If the president of the Republic wants to talk to me, I’m in serious trouble… Well, I already knew that. Trying to deflect the conversation from his offenses to his misfortunes, he asked, “What’s happened to me?”

  “Well, on the security camera, it looks like a young woman broke your arm and knocked you out with some kind of martial arts stick. A nunchaku or something like it.” Sergio arched an eyebrow. “Don’t be too embarrassed, apparently she’s got a black belt.”

  There are cameras? Lafflin thought in disma
y. Brekko was supposed to have checked for them but… Why did I trust Brekko on something like that?! “Um, did anyone else get hurt?”

  “You worried because your partner fired his weapon?” Sergio asked with what Lafflin thought was mock concern.

  “No, um…”

  “Well,” Sergio said, “the gun didn’t hurt anyone, but that’s only because his target was wearing bulletproof armor. Mr. Brekko, on the other hand…” Sergio turned his eyes contemplatively toward the other stretcher, “…I think he’s lucky to be alive. It would seem that being shot angered the gentleman Brekko attacked, and that man…” Sergio shook his head and tsked again. “If I hadn’t seen the camera footage myself, I wouldn’t have believed anyone could… do that.” He paused, then musingly continued, “You see it and you imagine decades of daily training. Intense martial arts training of someone already gifted with astonishing athleticism.”

  ***

  “President Willis?”

  “What?” Willis barked, angry at being interrupted during breakfast.

  “The President of Italy is calling, sir.”

  “What about?” Willis asked, surprised since he didn’t know of any current events impinging on Italy.

  “Um, we’re not sure, sir. But… it might have to do with the CIA’s attempt to arrest an American citizen in Florence last night.”

  Willis blinked, “Wait. Did we arrest this person, or did Italy? We don’t have jurisdiction there do we?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, sir, some CIA agents attempted but failed to arrest him. Would you like me to tell the Presidente that you’ll call him back once you’ve been briefed by the CIA, sir?”

  “Attempted to arrest who?! And on whose authorization? I sure as hell didn’t hear about it.”

  “Kaem Seba.”

  “Seba? The name’s familiar but…?”

  “Um, he works for Staze. He’s the one that came up with the theory stazers are based on but couldn’t make a practical device himself. The CEO and majority owner, who’s anonymous, is the one that built the stazers.”

  Willis’ eyes narrowed, “What was Seba doing in Italy?”

  “When the company was nationalized, a bunch of the top people at Staze resigned. Apparently, quite a few of them have taken up residency in Italy and become expedited dual citizens. Seba was one of those.”

  “Wait, the Senate started hearings on Staze yesterday, right? Something about that they aren’t producing medical stazers anymore?”

  “Yes, sir. Um, they’re not stazing anything else either. Do you want me to tell il Presidente you’ll call him back?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Willis said with a dismissive wave. “And get the director of the CIA to come and tell me what the hell happened over there.”

  ~~~

  “Sir, you told me not to bother you with trivial issues,” CIA Director Arlo Brent said exasperatedly. “To, ‘take care of business,’ I believe were your words. That’s exactly what I was doing. This nationalization of Staze has turned into a blemish on your administration’s record. Halser, the retired admiral in charge, lost control of the IP that makes stazers work. Hell, they not only can’t build medical stazers, they can’t even get the stazers they seized to work.”

  “So, you sent some agents over to Italy to kidnap this Seba guy?”

  “Officers, sir. CIA personnel are called ‘officers,’ not agents. We asked a pair of operations officers who were already present in Italy to arrest him. After all, we have grounds to do so. He’s a U.S. citizen in possession of stolen IP.”

  Willis studied Brent, “I thought the CIA developed intelligence but didn’t arrest people? Other agencies like the U.S. Marshal’s service are supposed to bring back American criminals, aren’t they?”

  Brent sighed, “The marshals work to get our criminals extradited from other countries. They aren’t supposed to arrest Americans in other countries either. We needed this guy and we needed him in a hurry, before he spilled any more secrets. So, we tasked some operations officers to do it. No, they’re not supposed to, but sometimes, if all you’ve got is a hammer, you’re going to have to use it when you’ve got a really important screw to drive.”

  Taking a dangerous tone, Willis asked, “Do you know for a fact that Seba has the IP? I’ve been told the CEO’s the one who came up with the tech.”

  Brent grimaced, “The CEO’s anonymous. Goes by ‘Mr. X.’ We don’t know who or where the SOB is. Well, except that he must be in Italy too. They’re stazing stuff there so the IP’s obviously there.”

  “So, why were you trying to arrest Seba? Why not figure out who X is and bring back the guy we know has the IP?”

  “Sir,” Brent sighed, “we’d sure as hell like to. We haven’t been able to figure out who X is. We know Staze’s people in Italy are talking on phones, our officers have seen them doing it. But the NSA can’t track or listen to any of their calls. We’ve tried to follow the money, but X only took one massive payout from Staze and it was sent as cryptocurrency, probably to some Swiss bank. Our only connection to X is the fact that he communicates through this Seba guy. Once we have Seba, hopefully, we’ll be able to figure out where X is too.”

  Willis stared at his CIA director, “I thought the NSA was listening to everybody?”

  “That’s the rumor, but it’s not true.”

  “Okay, but they’re supposed to be able to listen to anyone, right? I thought that was why we bought them all those quantum computers.”

  Brent snorted, “Yeah, but they haven’t been able to listen to these people. I won’t pretend to understand why they can’t, but I can tell you that the people over at NSA are shittin’ bricks about it.”

  Willis closed his eyes, “So, these ‘operations officers’ you had on hand in Italy, are they kidnapping specialists?”

  “Sir, it was not a kidnapping, it was an arrest. And yes, even though our officers don’t make arrests, all of them know how to do it.”

  “In a foreign country? Why weren’t you working with the local authorities on something like this? I understand the Italians have arrested your men?”

  Brent looked like he wanted to roll his eyes, but didn’t. “Yes sir, we do work with the local authorities in allied countries. But in this case, since Italy had granted extremely expedited citizenship to our people and stood to benefit enormously from the economic bonanza that Staze represents, we were concerned they wouldn’t consider themselves our allies on this issue.”

  “So,” the president sighed, “working around the local authorities, your officers attempted but failed to make an arrest, right? What went wrong?”

  “We haven’t been able to talk to our men, so we don’t know exactly. The NSA was able to hack into the security camera system at the site of the arrests so we’ve got video of the incident.” At the president’s impatient gesture, Brent continued, “The briefing materials we provided the officers did tell them that Seba held a yellow belt in karate, but after watching the video of his attack, it looks like he must hold high-rank black belts in more than one type of martial arts. That completely blindsided us.”

  “Let me see it,” Willis said.

  “Sir, I’m not sure—”

  “I said, ‘Let me see it.’”

  “Yes, sir,” Brent said resignedly. A few moments later he’d cast the video to one of the room’s screens.

  Willis watched a young couple enter the area covered by the camera. “Is that Seba and his girlfriend?”

  Brent paused the video. “No, sir, Turns out she’s Arya Vaii. She was the CFO of Staze here in Virginia, but she’s one of the ones who left. We don’t know what her role is in Italy.”

  “Why not?!”

  “Sir, we only found out that some of Staze’s people had turned up in Italy a few days ago. We’ve barely begun to get teams in place to surveil them.”

  “Sounds like you weren’t ready to try to pick them up either.”

  “We weren’t, but we were getting pressure to get them back on American
soil ASAP. That we needed that IP and we needed it now. Believe me, if we’d thought we’d have time we’d have seen if you could pressure the Italians into turning them over while we were bringing in additional, more-experienced people to pick him up.”

  The president waved at the screen, “Let’s see what happens.”

  Brent restarted the video. As the couple approached, someone came into view behind them. Then someone popped out in front of them. The posture of the guy in front suggested he held a gun, though, since the camera was viewing him from behind, the president couldn’t be sure. The woman slowed, but the man, presumably Seba, did not.

  Seba did, however, seem to focus intently on the man in front of him.

  Seba glanced back over his shoulder at the other officer coming up from behind, then lunged ahead at the one in front of him.

  Willis saw a flash, presumably from the muzzle of the officer’s gun. The gunshot didn’t slow Seba who swarmed over the officer and took him down in a fashion that seemed somehow to be both vicious, yet elegant. “What the hell?!” Willis exclaimed, causing Brent to pause the video. “Did your guy shoot him?!”

  “Um, it looks that way sir, but if so, he seems to have missed. You’ll see that Seba appears uninjured later in the video.”

  When the video resumed, the woman was pivoting gracefully. She struck the officer behind her with what looked like some kind of silvery nightstick. It broke the man’s arm, deforming it grotesquely for a moment. Her other arm shot toward his head, knocking it back and dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

  And, just like that, the encounter was over.

  There was something, though, about the way elegant way Seba moved. Willis wasn’t sure what it was, so he asked Brent to run it again in slow motion.

  After going through it in slow-mo, then again at an even slower speed, Willis was astonished at all that’d happened in those few seconds.