Crap.
“I thought so.”
“We must worry about that, Mr. Steed. As I understand, someone has tried to kill you three times today already, and it wouldn’t do for them to succeed when you are under our protection. May I call you Arthur?”
“I prefer Steed.”
“Very well then, Mr. Steed it is.”
“You can drop the mister part, just Steed is fine.”
“Well then, Steed, you are part of Special Activities Division now, and the first thing you should learn is that your targets generally shoot back at you. It’s one reason why we are so well paid. Ribaldo and I have been given the task of acclimating you to this new world, which is vastly different than the one you knew. Your training may last as long as a year.”
“A year? I’ve been a Shooter longer than anybody!”
Jürgen looked straight ahead as I considered his answer, which was a way for him to hide his true thoughts.
“The final test at the end of your training is dangerous, very, very dangerous. We are tasked with having you as ready as possible to survive it.”
“Survive it?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Assuming I believe you, although I can’t imagine what more I need to know, will I ever get a chance to get a First Class License again?”
The two brothers shared a glance, although I wished Ribaldo would just keep his eyes on the road. As the speedometer was pegged far to the right, I wasn’t confident that we wouldn’t die in a flaming wreck even if he did, but the odds seemed a lot better than if he didn’t.
“Why would you want to go back?” Ribaldo said.
“Yes, why would you?” Jürgen said.
I didn’t exactly know how to answer, since that wasn’t the response I’d expected.
“Because I’d like to get my franchise back?”
This time they answered in concert, like they’d practiced it. “Good god, why?”
“You two are confusing me with the whole duet thing. Don’t either of you ever want a First Class?”
It was Jürgen who smiled and nodded first. “Are you under the impression that a First Class License is an upgrade from a Second?”
“Isn’t it?”
“My goodness, no. It’s rather the opposite. I’ve already told you once, the world is a much more complicated place than you know, Mr. Steed—pardon me, Steed. Special Activities Division exists for purposes other than simple everyday contract killings. Our tasks tend to be more…let’s say ‘delicate.’”
“And complicated,” Ribaldo interjected.
“Multi-dimensional,” Jürgen continued. They smiled like it was an inside joke. “In SAD, you will be required to do a lot more investigating, often to determine exactly who it is you’re supposed to kill. There are often layers of protection and bodyguards that you must get through once you do identify your target. It has occasionally been compared to being a secret agent. So, far from being a demotion, holding a Second Class license is a position of great trust. The only way to get one is to have a well-placed patron inside of LEI.”
“I don’t have a patron.”
“Oh, I dare say that you do, and I would venture you must know her quite well, since she handed you back your credentials a little bit ago.”
“Cynthia? I didn’t know she worked for LEI, but she can’t be more than a flunkie.”
“No, my dear Steed, you are quite mistaken there.”
Without warning my vision went red and my hair felt like it was on fire.
“Danger!” I yelled.
A smoke trail appeared in my peripheral vision to the right. My alert sped up Ribaldo’s response by half a second, which saved us. He answered my cry by jamming on the brakes and throwing me hard against the front dashboard. The rocket missed the front of the car by inches and exploded on the opposite side. I expected Ribaldo to floor it, but instead he was out of the car with a rifle lying across the windshield frame before I knew it.
“You needn’t worry,” Jürgen said, apparently unconcerned. “It would take a freak hit to do much damage to this car.”
“That was a rocket!”
“Yes, but just an RPG.”
“Just an—”
The rifle’s report was a sharp crack in the heavy air. Seconds later Ribaldo slipped the rifle into a custom slot in the driver’s door I hadn’t noticed earlier, slid back behind the wheel, and shifted into drive.
“Just the one?” Jürgen said.
“I think so, yes.”
“He’s down then?”
“Quite.”
“We’ll have to find out how he got in.”
“After we drop off Steed.”
Maybe they were sanguine about getting shot at by a lunatic with a rocket propelled grenade, but I wasn’t, and let them know it.
“You’ll get used to that sort of thing soon enough. Do you happen to know why they’re after you?”
“You said something like that a minute ago. Are you telling me that I’m the target on today’s shooting schedule? That thing at the resort, the drone, the Stinger, and that RPG…those were all meant for me, personally?”
“Has anyone else been with you all four times?”
I didn’t like where that was heading, and hesitated answering for a few seconds.
“No.”
“Well, there's your answer. And since we’re near the airfield, I’d best get on filling you in on what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
The airfield was a standard clandestine, cartel-template, concrete jungle strip like hundreds of others scattered over the Southern U.S., Mexico, and Central and South America. Once Charlton Heston became president, a smart drug kingpin could probably have made more money building landing fields for other kingpins rather than trying to smuggle drugs into the U.S. Not that the cartel bosses cared much about their human casualties, since the losses they cared most about tended to be green, but Heston’s policies shut off the money spigot.
Unlike previous presidents who talked about fighting crime but pocketed bribes from anybody who offered them, Heston also walked the walk. At his very public insistence, and against substantial opposition, Congress declared the cartels terrorist organizations and the president followed that by issuing shoot-on-sight orders to the entire alphabet soup in the federal government’s law enforcement stable as well as the U.S. Armed Forces. Legal appeals to the Supreme Court went unheard. After 9/11, the voters weren’t interested in splitting hairs between drug cartels and Islamic terror groups.
Bodies piled up fast. LEI did its part by devoting a large number of its Shooters to wiping out known drug dealers in fulfillment of government contracts. I popped more than twenty by myself, and never regretted one of them. Smuggling never stopped entirely, since choking off the product drove the prices up more than twenty-fold, and that kind of potential profit always attracts somebody willing to risk their life to get rich quick.
Then, once Heston died, the country legalized everything and taxed the hell out of it. Draconian penalties awaited any addict who committed a crime to pay for their drugs, or while under their influence, up to and including death.
The gravel road gave way to asphalt as we neared two half-collapsed metal gates connected by a chain. It looked dilapidated. But nothing LEI ever did was slipshod, so I knew the gates were nothing more than a ruse. Cleverly hidden somewhere there had to be cameras and heavy weaponry ready to repel dangerous visitors. Emphasizing my thoughts, Jürgen unshipped a sweet Walther PPQ M2 from his inside jacket pocket before getting out to unlock the chain, and, being a gun-guy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the pistol. There was something odd affixed to the top which attracted my attention. I assumed it to be a laser of some sort, although I’d never before seen one like it.
Any doubts I’d had about Jürgen being a killer evaporated as I watched him open the gate. Although clad in elegance and sporting an urbane façade, he moved with a liquid grace and situational awareness that left no doubt about his prowess. His head ne
ver turned, though his eyes darted this way and that. Once back in the car, I started to ask about the gun, but he held up his right forefinger to stop me. By the lines in his cheeks I could see that he’d tensed up. Simultaneously, my danger warning sense shot up the back of my neck like a taser.
“Something is near,” he said to Ribaldo. “Maybe a Pincara.”
“You’re certain of that?” his brother said.
“Either that, or…only one other creature smells like a Pincara.” Their eyes met.
“Don’t even think that. Steed isn’t scheduled for this yet.”
I perked up at mention of my name. “Scheduled for what?”
“I’ll ring Merkus,” Jürgen said. He withdrew a phone from his inside coat pocket and turned in the seat to face me. “I am sorry, Steed, you might want to replace the blindfold over your eyes.”
“Like hell—”
The rest of the words froze in my throat. I wasn’t paying attention to either of them anymore because a five-foot-long animal horn had just materialized fifteen off the ground, having ripped a long purple gash in an otherwise clear sky, like a knife cutting the wall of a tent. Around the rip I sensed movement on the other side of—well, whatever the other side was. It was like the first time I drank fine French absinthe, made from Thujone, not that I remember much except that I couldn’t trust my senses and knew they were unreliable, but I was trapped inside my own hallucination. Now, I pointed through the windshield, no doubt gaping.
“Is that a Pincara?”
They both turned to see. Everything that followed happened in mere seconds.
Jürgen spoke urgently into the phone. “Merkus, get us below! Emergency!”
Ribaldo tightened his grip as the Bentley spewed gravel, accelerating toward something my brain rejected as impossible: the head of a burnt-orange rhinoceros with five horns sticking through the gash in the sky. Within seconds, the Bentley passed 50, fishtailing on the hot concrete.
“You may want to close your eyes, Steed,” Jürgen yelled over the engine.
“I want to see that thing!” If I was gonna die, I wanted to know what killed me.
That moment showed the car’s true automotive craftsmanship which, combined with world-class driving skills, did things impossible for lesser machines or men. The Bentley whined even louder than the blood pounding in my ears, but even racing across cracked and sun-bleached concrete it felt like we were riding on a $5000 mattress.
It was bigger than an elephant. By the time we closed within 40 yards of the huge creature, its front legs were through the rip and on the ground. It stood eight feet at the shoulder. Swinging its huge head, the beast leveled its gaze at us. I assumed that within five seconds I’d be dead. Although pointless, I balled my fists.
“Aren’t rhinos herbivores?” I said.
“Not these.”
We were halfway to the massive beast when it bellowed, lowered its head, and charged to meet the speeding Bentley with its foremost horn aimed at the front grill. Aside from being about three times bigger than a regular rhinoceros and the color of a maple tree in autumn, the horns lined up in a neat row, starting at the tip of its nose and marched backward to the crown of its skull. The largest one exceeded four feet in length and sat atop the head, like the iron spike of an old German helmet. The next largest was headed for the Bentley, point first.
Rhinos have tiny eyes, but that thing’s were the size and color of a cast iron skillet, lit with an angry intelligence you could see at first glance. They hinged outward like the folding mirrors on the sides of a car, so instead of only monocular vision, it also had binocular, which was the sign of a predator.
With each gallop the thing ate up ten yards, meaning that within two seconds the two speeding juggernauts were gonna smash into each other head on, and I had no illusions about who would still be alive after that.
Then we sank through the tarmac.
One moment we were above ground and the next below. Now, I’m as laconic as they come, but disappearing into solid concrete wasn’t within my range of experiences. I might or might not have screamed. After a 20-foot drop we hit bottom. The chassis bounced on its shocks, but the vibrations were less than you might expect. In situations like this, quality makes itself known. Bentleys were expensive for a reason.
A black cloud of burned rubber boiled up from the tires as the Bentley gained traction on an underground road. Ribaldo jammed the brakes, killing some of our forward momentum, as a broad net swung up into place, like a crash barrier on an aircraft carrier. We hit it still moving north of 60 mph, bounced off, zoomed forward, and hit it again. On the third impact the Bentley finally came to a stop.
Our shoulder straps could only handle so much, and we were whipped around like crash test dummies. For me it was the second time that day, and cursing seemed a given. But I’d spent three years hunting down terrorists in some of the worst places in the world, and I’d learned early on to react now and think later. My brain shifted into combat mode, observing the tactical environment without judging whether or not it made sense. I unbuckled, climbed out of the car, and dropped into a fighting crouch.
“What the fuck?”
“Yes, Steed, I agree,” Ribaldo said, his quickened breathing his only sign of distress. “Quite the welcome to SAD, eh?”
“This is the wildest dream I’ve ever had.”
“We haven’t even gotten to the wild part yet,” Jürgen said.
We had dropped into some sort of underground garage about 40 feet wide, 20 feet high, and hundreds of yards long. Recessed lighting in strategic spots left few shadows anywhere. Most of the space was taken up with gadgets and machines of grotesque design and unknown purpose. The ceiling appeared to be steel-reinforced concrete, despite us having just sunk through it like mosquitoes through a chain-link fence.
But the thing above us had no intention of letting us get away that easy. Massive blows pounded the ceiling with enough force to cloud the room with dust shaken from the pipes and supports. A giant monitor on the far wall displayed a view of the runway, where the orange rhino was rearing on its hind legs and crashing down on both front hooves, once again shaking us so hard that I nearly lost my footing. Only bracing myself against the Bentley kept me from falling.
“Merkus!” Ribaldo yelled. “Where in blazes are you?”
I already felt like I was lost in a Lewis Carroll novel, when a blue orangutan loped our way on knuckles and feet. The gait looked ungainly but propelled along him faster than a sprinter. He wore a red mechanic’s coveralls with the Union Jack stitched over the left breast pocket. Tufts of fur lined his cheeks, more of a duck-egg shade than the azure hue everywhere else.
“I’m ’ere, damn your eyes!” the orangutan, who had to be Merkus, yelled back in a thick British accent.
“There’s a Ropoco up there!” Jürgen yelled, pointing at the ceiling.
“No bloody joking!” Merkus said. “Bloody” came out sounding like “blue-dee.” I hadn’t noticed the cigar in the corner of his mouth at first. It waggled when he talked, but somehow never fell out. “What the bloody fucking hell do you think I was doing, if not printing something to deal with it?”
Wham!
The Ropoco—which seemed to be the name for the rhino’s species—wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy either, and, until three minutes ago, I never would have guessed that orange rhinos and blue orangutans were even possible, much less real. At least the Ropoco had a handle on things.
Dodging between metal shelves filled with the usual detritus of a machine shop, Merkus knuckle-swung over to a corner where something oval and gray emerged from a slot in a printer, soon followed by a second, similar item, both of which were more or less the size of his torso. Without hesitation he laid one on the floor and climbed inside it, then fitted the other on top.
“Buckle me in,” Merkus said.
Jürgen wasted no time doing so.
“Why not the auto-cannon?” he said.
“You must be daft, boy. Are
ya wantin’ to send rounds downrange into the Continuum?”
Kneeling beside the furry simian, Jürgen tightened the last strap with a jerk.
“That day might come.”
“Yeah, well it’s not today; not for one Ropoco. Maybe for a herd o’ the buggers.”
Whatever that meant, it satisfied Jürgen. When Merkus stood up, I saw the 3-D printed thing for what it was: a turtle shell, with blue arms, legs and head sticking out.
“Leonardo?” I said, unable to help myself. By this time, the rational part of my brain assumed I’d been drugged, so I decided to play the whole thing out for kicks. Why not have some fun with it?
“What?” Merkus asked, obviously annoyed and looking at me with an expression like—well, probably like I’d looked at a blue orangutan. One that meant What on God’s green Earth is that?
“Never mind,” I said.
Wham!
“Take this, Steed,” Ribaldo said, handing me a strangely shaped rifle. I started to ask him what it was but stopped when a shaft of sunlight lit his face. We both noticed it at the same time and craned our necks upward to see a crack in the concrete, where the Ropoco’s nose horn had punched a hole.
“Shoot!”
Jürgen and Ribaldo both aimed their rifles and pulled the triggers. No gunshots echoed through the cavernous garage, only a faint crackling sound. Red beams of light shot upward. A red spot appeared on some concrete around the crack. It glowed, then sizzled and dripped onto the floor. Something had melted the concrete—they were firing laser rifles! The crackling was dust particles being vaporized and I could see the lasers because they reflected off the particles before destroying them. I’d heard of such weapons being operational but never had actually seen one. Once I quit gawking, I joined in. Taking aim through the elaborate scope, I pressed the firing button and held it down for at least three seconds.
The creature’s head moved side to side, doing more damage and widening the hole. The nearest frame of reference my brain conjured up was the skull of a triceratops. Chunks of concrete rained down.
Then one of us must have hit a weak spot, because it suddenly let out a bellow. Sharp teeth gleamed inside its the heavy jaws. But it wasn’t a death cry, it was an angry one. The lasers weren’t doing any more damage than a match does to human skin, they only enraged it. The creature’s nose horn tore open a second hole right beside the first one, and this time the beast dug a long trench in the ceiling, like a farmer’s plow digging a furrow in soft soil. The rent was so wide now that the Ropoco’s shoulders nearly fit through, but clearly that wasn’t good enough.
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