War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  Those were mostly on the main street, surrounded by neighborhoods filled with glorified ranch-style shacks, sun-beaten lawns, and sparse trees that looked like stunted arms of the earth clawing at the sky for help.

  By the time the Morgans had called a halt to their reconnaissance, they had watched most of the residents head off for work in Summerfield, Umbarger, or, if they were really lucky, the Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. To both father and daughter’s pleasure, even though they were strangers in town, no one had taken a second look at the gray CR-V. To help ensure that, Dan had even installed a worn, faded license plate that didn’t scream “outsider.”

  They staked their vantage point six-tenths of a mile away on Floss Street. Dan had found an empty lot between two small residences where Alex’s CheyTac scope could make a laser line between buildings, garages, sheds, driveways, bushes, vehicles, and, in a few cases, between slats or chain links of a fence.

  Feeling they had found the most effective hideout, they waited. Their patience paid off. At seven, through the rifle’s scope, Alex saw activity stirring around the back, front, and inside the Peking Panda Palace.

  Dan slipped on a light khaki jacket to cover his Walther and Ruger, as Alex settled into the “kill nest” of the SUV. Dan had installed sniper stations on both sides and in the rear of the vehicle—allowing Alex to lie relatively comfortably on the padded floor and poke the barrel through a slot that gave her enough side-to-side movement. Atop that was a cunning one-way glass panel that gave the shooter plenty of room to spy.

  He turned to her just as he was about to exit the vehicle. “Let me know if your mom says anything more, okay?” he asked, only half-joking.

  “Don’t tempt her to speak up,” Alex replied, hardly joking at all. “But, if necessary, a point four-oh-eight round will deliver her message, all right?”

  Dan stepped out and started the long walk down Union Avenue—past Avenues D, C, B, and A—to one-forty-three North Twenty-Five Mile Avenue.

  Dan had a hard time not raising his eyebrows when he entered the place. Could it be any more generic? he wondered.

  It was a big, empty, square space, with a counter along the back wall—complete with padded swiveling stools—five basic tables dotting the floor with four makeshift chairs each. There were even a few garish paintings of ancient Peking, pandas, and Chinese palaces on the walls, looking like they’d been picked up at a local mall just yesterday.

  Jenny didn’t speak to him, but she still entered his mind. Back in the good old days, she’d made him watch a reality TV show with her where the contestants were challenged to create their own restaurant in an otherwise empty space in twenty-four hours.

  As far as Dan was concerned, this place looked like that, only in a space that had once been a diner or something. Since he or Alex hadn’t had time to check out previous occupants at the Deaf Smith County Chamber of Commerce, he saw nothing for it but to take another step in.

  At this time of the morning, the place was empty—something he couldn’t say about the fast food drive-in and sandwich places he saw down the street. Luckily for him, and maybe his daughter’s little four-oh-eight messengers, neither the salon nor the pizza place that adjoined the Peking Panda Palace were open yet.

  His entrance had an interesting effect. He saw and heard some hushed activity through the rectangular slot between the counter and the kitchen. He got the impression that the sounds were tense, but he could have been reading into that, or projecting it from his own mental state.

  A young Asian woman came walking out of the kitchen. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old. She had a wide nose, thin lips, and black hair in a ponytail that bounced between her shoulder blades. She wore a starched white shirt, blue work pants, and black Chinese-style slippers with cloth uppers and white woven bottoms. Her dark brown eyes seemed lifeless, and her expression was impenetrable. At least to Dan.

  “You want breakfast?” she asked as she approached, gesturing to all the empty seats. “Bun? Dumpling? Congee?”

  Dan shifted away from her, heading toward a table in the center of the floor. Although she sounded as if she was making up the choices as she went along, he was not about to start asking questions.

  “Dumplings sound good,” he said, choosing a chair that gave him a full view of both sidewalk and kitchen, with no door or window behind him.

  “Pork, chicken, beef, vegetables?” she asked, beginning to circle back toward the kitchen door.

  Dan had to admit that the idea of Chinese dumplings sounded pretty good. Maybe this place wasn’t a trap after all…and maybe God didn’t make little green apples.

  “Chef’s choice,” he replied, then sat down as if straddling a horse.

  The woman blinked, then disappeared back into the kitchen, and the hushed voices started again. Dan couldn’t make out the words but was fairly certain they weren’t English.

  Although he wasn’t a tech fan, even he had to admit that he missed the smartphones the Zeta Protocol had insisted they trash. He was sure Linc or Alex could’ve shown him an app that not only would’ve told him what language they were speaking, but translated it as well.

  The appearance from the kitchen of what appeared to be a busboy and the chef needed no translation. The chef looked older and wore a t-shirt, pants, boots, and a full apron. The busboy had a tray of dishes and cups, and was dressed the same, except his apron only covered his waist and hips. They approached Dan’s table from either side.

  “What kind of eggs you want?” the chef wanted to know. “Scramble, sunny, over, easy, hard?”

  Dan kept his gaze between the two as the busboy angled sharply toward the table. Dan found his hand shifting toward the PPK, but then the busboy slapped down a napkin, cutlery, plate, and a plastic water glass.

  “You want tea, coffee, juice?” he asked.

  The two questions from two people, neither of whom waited for an answer, tipped Dan off, so he was ready when they pounced. He was already up, bouncing back from the table as if the chair had an ejector seat. His gun came out, but so did everything in the busboy’s tray.

  Plastic plates, bowls, and cups smashed into him, but worse, so did the pressed metal forks and knives. Dan jumped back and ducked his head, but the cutlery and the chef were on him. He felt a ladle slam into his wrist and heard rather than saw his Walther clatter across the floor. As he went for his blackjack he couldn’t help but wonder why it had been a ladle and not a cleaver.

  The two men were fast and obviously well-trained. Dan felt a lightning-like pain in his arm where the busboy gripped his elbow, and then felt a dizzying chop of the side of the chef’s hand into his throat.

  Get away from these two, his brain said. Alex will never be able to get a clear shot.

  He remembered his hand-to-hand instructor. “When in doubt,” the man had taught him, “drop.”

  Who was Dan to argue? He fell to his knees as if through a hangman’s trap door. That move elicited a double reaction. First, a bullet hole appeared in the front window and the chef’s head exploded. Second, Dan found himself looking at the busboy’s crotch.

  Needs a fist, his brain suggested, and again Dan didn’t argue. Less than a second later, Dan saw the busboy’s flushed, florid, feverish face doubling over into view, his eyes squeezed shut in agonizing pain.

  Dan found himself concentrating on the busboy’s sharp chin as his brain repeated its suggestion. Dan complied, with all his anger and annoyance, feeling satisfaction fill him as the busboy launched backwards, hovered in the air, limbs flailing, then smashed down on the table like a starfish dropped from a tsunami.

  Before Dan could fully assess the situation, he heard rapid gunshots from the direction opposite Alex. He dropped and stared at yet another strange sight. The woman was firing some sort of semi-automatic through the rectangle between counter and kitchen, seemingly indiscriminately. />
  The bullets were splattering everywhere—across the walls, floor, and ceiling. There were only two places they weren’t going: into the front window or into Dan Morgan. The latter target took advantage of that fact by grabbing his Walther, bending his knees, planting his feet against the wall, and launching himself, sliding, across the floor toward the kitchen door.

  He came up beside it and waited for only a second as the bullets kept coming from the opening. It really seemed that the woman wasn’t even trying to hit him. But better safe than sorry. Dan pumped two three-eighty rounds into the door, crouched, and rolled in. What he saw there surprised him even more. The woman was throwing her weapon away and running into the kitchen’s walk-in freezer.

  But that’s insane, he thought. Why go into the one place in the whole joint that has no exit?

  But his was not to reason why—his was to do and hope not to die. Dan noticed her gun on the floor; it was a Taiwanese XT97 automatic. Looking back from it, he positioned himself by the side of the freezer opening, stuck his gun barrel in, shot up, down, in the middle, then to both sides. He turned away, waiting for the ricochets to die down, then looked into the darkened enclosure.

  The woman wasn’t there.

  Dan looked all around him, half-expecting an ambush from an unseen exit, but none came. His eyebrows knitted together, and he turned back toward the freezer.

  It was wider than he thought it would be, and far from full. But there were a few bags and boxes littering the shelves on either side of the opening—seemingly filled with potatoes or meat. Keeping his PPK at the ready, Dan stepped inside for a closer look.

  A “sack of potatoes” positioned on the top shelf by the door rolled off onto him. It was, of course, the woman, and she gripped him by his gun wrist and throat. But that, somehow, was not the worst of it. The worst of it was how one of her feet rested lightly on a section of his shin.

  These were not grips he recognized from judo, nor did he recognize the brain-freezing, body-numbing pain that seemed to replace his blood.

  “What…” he managed to say, “…are you doing?”

  “Trying not to get shot by your girlfriend,” she seethed into his ear, all accent gone. “Where is she?” She eased up on his leg enough for him to answer. But her grips on his wrist and neck remained the same.

  “D-don’t you know?” he stammered, trying to think straight.

  “No!” she hissed. “We only know where you are. But every time you move we need to recalibrate.”

  “W-what?” he spluttered. “What sort of tracker is that?”

  “Tracker? What tracker?” She seemed honestly perplexed.

  Dan couldn’t dwell on that. The pain was too great for anything but total honesty. “Why didn’t you kill us before?”

  “Bendan,” she spat. Idiot. “If we wanted you dead, you would be dead. We want what you have!”

  His brain reeling, his body wracked by indescribable pain, Dan asked the one true question. “What do I have?”

  Rolling her eyes, the woman opened her mouth to answer—just as a gray Honda CR-V crashed through the front window and slammed into the kitchen wall.

  Chapter 13

  The crash shook the entire building, showing just how rushed and shoddy the construction was. Inside the freezer, Dan was safe from the glass shards and splinters, but not from the shock wave as the CR-V screeched across the restaurant floor, skidded sideways, and slid into the bar—bending, cracking, and breaking the padded swivel-top stools.

  Dan didn’t even see that. But he sure heard it, and, as far as he was concerned, the best thing was that it shook the Asian woman, causing her foot to slide off his shin. The indescribable pain stopped just long enough that he didn’t care about the other, less all-encompassing pains at his shoulder and neck.

  Even before the dust had settled, he bellowed and twisted his upper torso. Akin to a tumor being ejected from his body, the woman spun like an out-of-control water skier, then flew into the freezer door.

  Dan stopped only long enough to get his breath, but by then, he was already too late to stop her. The woman all but disappeared through the crack in the freezer door. Dan blinked, then launched himself toward the door right after her. But when he thundered out into the kitchen, the woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Alex was half out the CR-V’s passenger door, holding the vehicle’s SCAR Assault Rifle at the ready in one hand, while madly waving her father forward with the other.

  “Come on, come on!” she shouted. “Got to go before the local bulls show!”

  Dan didn’t have to be told twice. He charged forward and dove like a seasoned acrobat through the slot between the kitchen and counter. He even twisted in mid-air and slid across both the counter and the snout-like hood of the Honda before landing on his feet next to the driver’s door.

  Any other time, Alex might have taken the time to applaud that impressive maneuver. But not this time. Dan threw himself behind the dashboard while Alex slammed the passenger door. Both scoured the area for anything that might stop them as he whirled the wheel and slammed the accelerator to the floor. The CR-V roared out of the ragged hole it had made, and shot up Route Three Eighty-Five like a dull gray soccer mom missile.

  “Only twenty miles to I-four-oh,” Alex shouted to him as the vehicle went from zero to sixty in three point nine seconds flat. “Local bulls got Chevy patrol wagons.”

  “We’ll be out of town before they know we were here,” Dan growled as he hunched down and glared toward the horizon.

  “Yeah, but will our little Chinese friends?” Alex wondered, lowering the SCAR, but keeping the car’s HK P30 close at hand.

  “Probably not,” Dan scowled like a rancher with a rancid piece of chaw. “Apparently, we both got some kind of bug up our asses. Jenny can talk through yours, and anybody can find me through mine.”

  “What?” Alex exclaimed, and, as they sped out of town without incident, Dan told her what the woman had said while trying to interrogate him in the freezer. Within minutes the Morgans—and the Honda—were surrounded by plains, grains, dairies, and farms.

  “So they don’t even know you’re my daughter,” he concluded as they passed a cattle herd on their left and a silo on their right. “But apparently they can pinpoint me the minute I stop.”

  Alex was stunned. “What kind of tracker is that?”

  “That’s what I said!” Dan exclaimed. “I guess as long as we don’t stop, all they can do is blow up every place I visit!”

  Alex looked in as many directions as she could, trying to spot any police cars but, to their surprise, saw none.

  “Man,” she said, speaking generally as well as specifically. “I just don’t get it.”

  Dan did, and put dealing with these new developments on hold long enough to clue his daughter in. “Whoever these spooks are, they’re way beyond the locals,” he told her. “I think the cops aren’t coming because these moles are cleaning up after themselves, and us.” He glanced over to take in Alex’s incredulous face. “I bet your bottom dollar that when the fuzz show up at the Peking Panda Palace, they’ll find an empty space with not even a drop of blood on the floor, let alone brains and skull fragments. Nice shot, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you. In any case, on the basis of what we’ve experienced so far, I think they don’t want to risk having whatever it is they want from me fall into anybody else’s hands.”

  Alex gave out a low whistle. “That’s some bet, Pop.”

  Dan sighed. “It’s the only explanation for why we’re not reenacting scenes from Smokey and the Bandit or Cannonball Run right now.”

  Alex stared at him in confusion. “What’re those?”

  “Okay, Fast and the Furious,” Dan said, getting a look of recognition from his daughter. “Happy now?”

  “No, of course I’m not happy now,” she re
torted, gripping the HK P30 tighter as Dan sped west onto Interstate Forty. “I’d much rather have cops all over us than Anti-Zeta.”

  “Anti-Zeta, huh? Dan grumbled. “I don’t know…Something’s bothering me, but I just can’t put my finger on it…”

  “One thing is bothering you?” Alex replied incredulously. “Well, let me know when you got it figured out, and I’ll tell you the thousand things that are bothering me.”

  The two fell silent as Dan concentrated on getting away from Deaf Smith County as fast and as furiously as he could. At this point they were satisfied with any moment that wasn’t full of gunfire or attacks, but they kept hyper-vigilant as they passed Adrian, Texas, and beyond. In fact, it wasn’t until they crossed into New Mexico that Alex seemed to audibly breathe again.

  When the Interstate split off from Route 66, and they passed through the relative urbanization of San Jon to the wide open plains beyond, it was Dan’s turn to catch his breath. His intake was so sharp, in fact, that Alex looked over expecting to see a light go on over his head.

  “What?” she asked of him.

  “Alex,” he replied. “You were there. You were there for all of it. Did those guys in the Boston alley seem anything like the guys in the Mimi or the Palace?”

  Alex considered the question. “No,” she answered. “As a matter of fact, if you, or anyone else, were to ask me, I’d say that they seemed like three completely different…”

  She didn’t get the chance to finish because the woman from the Palace repaid her for driving through the restaurant by slamming into the back of the CR-V. Only the vehicle she used was not disguised in any way.

  The Morgans lurched in their seats, but Dan’s modification of their vehicle cushioned most of the blow. He wrenched the SUV back into the lane and cursed as he stared into the side-view mirror.

  “Hell, they’ve got a Sherpa!”

  Alex wrenched around, bringing up the SCAR, and saw what her father was referring to. It wasn’t a Himalayan mountaineer, it was a European four-by-four tactical armored vehicle that looked like a Humvee on steroids. She dove down to the rear sniper spot, bringing the forty-five caliber, twenty-round weapon to bear as her father tromped the accelerator and barked out advice.