by Rick Partlow
“Kick his ass, Giorgi!” one of them encouraged, pumping his fist as if to show exactly how Giorgi Lermontov should kick said ass.
Anton pushed through them and into the room just in time to see Sgt. Giorgi Lermontov and Corporal Yusupov bringing a man beneath them to the floor, twisting his arms behind his back and holding him down with a knee between his shoulder blades. The man was big and long-limbed, well-dressed, his dark beard neatly trimmed but his face a wreck of acne scars and damage from one too many fights.
Anton turned back to the two men outside the door, waving them away down the hall.
“Go!” he urged them. “Help them finish securing the building.”
They left with curt nods, though Namestnikov stayed, taking up a position outside the door to watch for threats.
The bearded, rough-visaged man was still struggling, cursing them in eloquent Russian, English and Spanish, promising what he was going to do to them once he got free, describing it in great detail. Anton decided immediately that physical persuasion would avail him little with this man and he wished the team could have captured someone softer, less accustomed to pain.
It is what it is, as the Americans say.
He pulled the small medical kit out of his thigh pocket and withdrew the pre-loaded syringe. Yanking the safety cap off the needle, he estimated the correct dosage for the man’s weight by guess and by God, spraying the extra out into the air, the droplets catching the light of the desk reading light, still glowing even though it had been knocked to the floor in the struggle.
“Hold him still,” he instructed the two NCOs.
The bearded man cursed even louder, screaming desperately as Lermontov grabbed him by the hair and pushed his head into the carpeting. Books had spilled out of the nearby shelves and Anton scanned the titles with a casual curiosity as he plunged the needle into the big man’s neck and injected the chemical cocktail they loosely and rather inaccurately called a truth drug.
The big man clenched his teeth and then relaxed unwillingly, muscles going slack as the sedative hit his central nervous system.
Crime and Punishment, Anton read aloud in his head. 1984. The Art of War. And then… Oh, sweet Jesus, sparkling vampires?
“Tell me these were not his books,” he pled with the bearded man, grabbing him beneath the chin and tilting his head back.
“He found them here,” the man said, laughing a bit hysterically, as if he’d lost control of his impulses. Which he had. “He always said you could tell so much about someone by the books they read. He found the selection amusing, but he never explained why.”
Good. It’s working.
“What’s your name?” he asked the man, gesturing at the others to let some of their weight off of him and make it easier for him to breathe.
“Alexie.” The answer came easy, something he had no trouble talking about. That was how you started them.
“How long have you worked for Robert Franklin, Alexie?”
“I am FSB,” the bearded man insisted, face scrunching up as if he resented the question, was offended by it. “I have worked for the Russian government for twenty years now.”
“You were FSB, Alexie,” Anton corrected him. “Before Franklin coopted you, and Svetlana, and the rest of them. Now how long has it been? When did you stop working for us and start working for him?”
This one was harder for him. He fought it, shaking his head, sweat beading on his high forehead, veins popping out at his temples.
“I work for the FSB,” he said with mulish stubbornness.
“Come, Alexie, would we be here if that were true?” Anton’s voice was gentle, soothing, trying to lead the other man in directions he wanted to go. “Would our older brothers in Moscow have sent us in after you if you were still loyal sons of Russia? Be honest with me, tovarisch. It’s what your family back in Tbilisi would want. What your kindly old mother, Anna would want, is it not?”
Alexie’s eyes had been drifting all over the room as the man made an attempt to avoid thinking about the question, but at the mention of his mother, they snapped around and tried to focus on Anton, though they couldn’t quite lock it down.
“You would do this?” he asked, horrified disbelief in his voice, his face. “You would threaten my mother?”
“I will do whatever I am ordered to do, Alexie,” Anton reminded him. “Just the way you used to. Now tell me, how long have you been working for Robert Franklin?”
“Eighteen months.” The answer was sullen, reluctant, but truthful. Anton knew the truth when he heard it. “He pays better, and he swore I would never have to go back.”
Good.
“What was in the shipment, Alexie?”
That stubborn frown again. He slapped the man’s face, not hard. It wasn’t for the pain, it was for the shock.
“Use your head. Do you think we won’t find out if you don’t talk? Do you think there aren’t other ways to get the information? You’re buying your life and your mother’s with the time you’re saving us. How much is your mother’s life worth to you?” He smacked the man again, in the forehead this time, with the heel of his hand. “Think, Alexie! What was in the shipment?”
“Duplication.” The word came in an outrush of breath. “Duplication equipment. Lots of it.”
“Good,” Anton chanted soothingly, caressing the man’s beard with his palm. “Very good. Where? Where was it being shipped?”
“The White House. The old American White House in Washington. It’s where Franklin has set up his headquarters.”
Anton laughed aloud, long and low, and Giorgi stared at him as if he’d gone crazy.
“It’s Franklin,” he explained. “Whatever else, the man has style, you have to give him that.” He slapped Alexie lightly in the cheek again. “What else? Did he share the plan with you? Did he tell you the why of it all?”
“Not me,” Alexie insisted. “None of us, only Svetlana.” A hint of a scowl. “She is the only one of us he took with him.”
“That is indeed a shame.” Anton sighed and sat back, slipping the CZ he’d taken off the guard out of his belt and putting the muzzle up against the man’s temple.
“No!” Alexie yelled, trying to shake his head but coming up against Giorgi’s unyielding hand on his neck. “I told you the truth!”
“I believe you. But that means you are of no more use to us.”
“But my mother! Will you at least spare my mother?”
“Of course,” Anton assured him, sounding aggrieved. “We are not monsters, my friend.”
Alexie seemed to relax, as if this was what he had expected. Anton raised a hand to shield his face, then put a bullet through the man’s head.
“Will you?” Giorgi asked him as they let the body slump to the floor, wiping blood from their hands and forearms on the man’s shirt. “Will you spare his mother?”
Anton snorted in dark amusement.
“His mother died ten years ago of typhus. The drugs made him forget.”
“You’re a cold man, Anton.”
“I am,” Anton declared, “whatever Russia needs me to be. Gather the others. We have to move.”
4
“Roach, Mule, get back in your mechs and head back to base.”
Roach couldn’t see Nate’s face in the video recording from Patty’s mech, but she remembered it, remembered the cold harshness of his eyes. He’d had them locked on Patty, wouldn’t look at them as if he was afraid that she would see what was in his heart. The image looked flat and washed out in the old monitor, a scratch running down the middle of it. It seemed less real, and maybe that was okay. Maybe that was why she’d hooked the monitor up to her tablet instead of just watching from the smaller tablet screen.
“What?” the Ramirez on the screen blurted, and she thought she saw the current version of the man flinch at his own words beside her. “Why?”
“Because I fucking said so.”
“Nate, you don’t have to do this alone.” Roach watched herself take a
halting step toward Nate, reaching out a hand. She almost reached out toward the screen in an involuntary sympathetic reflex but stopped herself.
“Yes, I do.” Nate had raised a palm to halt her and now, in retrospect and in two dimensions, she thought she saw the hand shaking. “Get back in your Hellfire and get out of here now. That’s an order.”
On the screen, Roach of the past slid her knife back into its sheath and turned back to her mech.
“Fuck you, man.” In the recording, the words were barely audible, muffled by distance. Inside her head, they echoed like the tolling of a bell. They were the last words she’d said to Nate.
“Okay, here we go,” Ramirez said, settling in and scooting his office chair closer to the screen. She scowled at him. The only thing missing was a bag of popcorn. “We’re taking off in the Hellfires now and this is where it should show us what happened.”
“You really gonna do it, man?” Patty had asked, looking at the muzzle of Nate’s Glock. “You really going to kill me?”
Roach wanted to go back in time and slap him in the back of the head, tell him to shut up. Maybe if he hadn’t run his mouth, he’d still be alive.
“It feels like I kill people every day,” the Nate of several days ago had responded, his voice quiet. She strained to understand him over the distant grumble of their generator several rooms down, over the gentle patter of rain on the windows. “I just killed two men a few minutes ago. Your Russian buddies. Does that make you sad?”
“Whoever won, I was going to wind up dead. These guys don’t put up with people failing.” Patty had squeezed his eyes shut for a second, as if it was all finally catching up to him. “Can you try to make sure they don’t hurt my mom?”
“Aw, Jesus,” Ramirez murmured, crossing himself. “His poor family.”
“Fuck,” Nate had said, lowering the gun from Patty’s chest before raising it back up again. “Goddammit, Patty, why’d you have to do this? Why’d you put me in this fucking position?”
“I’m sorry, Nate.” And it seemed as if he really was. There was genuine pain on his long, country face. “They get you a little at a time and by the time you figure out what’s really going on, it’s too late and there’s no way out.”
“Shit.” Nate had closed his eyes and let the gun fall to his side. “Shit, Patty, I can’t do it. Just go, man.”
Roach frowned in confusion.
“What the hell?” Ramirez echoed her thoughts, waving at the screen. “But if he let Patty go, then why…”
“Wait,” she snapped. “Shut up.”
There was a flicker of movement just off to the side of the screen behind Nate, something she couldn’t quite see, and then he was spasming, arms rigid at his side, collapsing forward with his whole body frozen, every muscle taut. She’d seen the look before; someone had tased him.
“Whoa!” Ramirez exclaimed. “Who did…”
“I said, shut up!” she yelled at him, not looking away from the screen.
“You’ve been a bad boy, Geoffrey.”
The voice was female, Roach could tell that much even distant and muffled as it was. She had stepped over Nate’s still-spasming body and had bent down to pry the Glock from his frozen fingers. She was blond and tall and Roach remembered her face. She’d been the one they’d seen Patty talking to at the entertainment district in the ruins of downtown Norfolk, the place people called The Fry.
“You let them sniff you out,” the woman had said, stepping closer to Patty, the Glock extended in front of her. “Treachery, I would expect. You’re a traitor, after all. Incompetence is unforgivable.”
The report of the handgun was hollow and oscillatory in the tiny speakers of the tablet, the flash muted and barely visible. Roach jerked alongside Patty as the shots hit home and she fought down a sudden wave of nausea as she watched him fall. Images of his body from the next day intruded on the footage in the recording, pieces of him stripped away by coyotes or wild dogs…
“Madre de Dios,” Ramirez hissed.
“Get him up.” The voice was male, coming from just off to the right of the screen. Roach peered closer at the display, as if she could somehow see past the edge of it, but the video remained elusive. “I have been waiting a long time for this moment, Nathan. It has cost me much in lives and treasure, but I know it’s going to be worth it.”
“What the fuck?” Ramirez just would not shut up. “He knows Nate?”
A pair of muscular goons had stepped in from the side and yanked Nate to his feet, securing him by each arm even though he hadn’t seemed as if he were even capable of moving after the shock. His face had been screwed up in pain, but as he finally saw the man they couldn’t not, confusion had played out across it. The man stepped forward, just barely into view for a moment, a flash of a lined, gaunt face and grey hair pulled back into a ponytail and an expensive suit.
“Bob,” he’d said, the words a whisper Roach had to fight to hear. “But you’re dead.”
“Indeed, I am,” the older man had agreed in a cheerful tone. “And so are you, Nate. But nothing lasts forever.”
Without another word, the two goons had dragged Nate away off to the right side of the screen. The woman with the Russian accent hesitated for just a moment, staring down at Patty, before she bent down and picked the shell casings up off the pavement before following the others.
Then, there was nothing. Roach grabbed her tablet and fast-forwarded the video, tapping the control over and over, impatiently, until it became clear nothing else had been captured. Then the first of the coyotes showed up, sniffing around Patty’s body and she cursed and shut the tablet down, smacking it down on the desktop. She stalked back and forth in front of the monitor, fists clenched, the muscles in her shoulders tightening until she felt as if her chest was about to explode.
She looked around, desperately needing to smash something and not wanting to break anything she might need in the future. Finally, she couldn’t hold it in anymore and grabbed the desk chair, swinging it over her head and throwing it across the room. It crashed into the far wall, cracking the plaster and sending two of the wheels from the swivel chair flying off in opposite directions before the bulk of the thing landed with an anticlimactic thump.
Ramirez was staring at her, shoulders hunched protectively, eyes wide.
“We should have fucking known!” she snapped, as if it were an explanation. “I should have known, Hector! I should have known he wouldn’t just run off on us! Someone took him and we’ve been sitting around on our asses, feeling sorry for ourselves! Goddammit!”
“What are we gonna do, Roach?” Ramirez asked. The kid looked like he was about to cry.
“The hell if I know!” she shouted, still furious, at herself and whoever the grey-haired man was in the video. “You said it yourself, Mule, there’s just two of us!”
“Well, we gotta…” Ramirez stumbled over his words, his mouth working faster than his brain. “We gotta get help then!”
“Thank you, General fucking Eisenhower. Who the hell would we get to help us? DoD said they’d send someone, but they aren’t even supposed to be here yet and I don’t even know if I should call them! They might just tell us to back off and let them handle it, and there’s no way I’m leaving Nate’s life in the hands of some damned paper-pushers!”
Ramirez was on his feet now, rubbing thoughtfully at the back of his neck like he was trying to massage a memory into place.
“There was a guy,” he said, nodding. “This guy at the bar that night we went out, before everything went to shit. Older dude, but he was talking real quiet with this woman about piloting mechs. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, like he was the real deal.”
Roach cocked an eyebrow toward him doubtfully.
“You want to go recruit some old fart you think might have mech experience? You really think that’s a smart idea?”
“Dude!” Ramirez protested, holding his hands palms-up in surrender. “That’s all I got! If you got a better ide
a, let’s go do it!”
Roach wanted to yell at him—for calling her “dude” if nothing else—but she realized he was right, and she had nothing better to suggest.
“All right,” she conceded. She shook her head. “God help me, but I don’t know what else to do. Let’s go find this old guy and see if he’s stupid or desperate enough to help us.”
Ramirez grabbed the whiskey bottle and poured out a shot, handing it to her. She looked at it, frowning in confusion until he offered a toast, holding the bottle like a glass.
“Here’s to desperate and stupid people.”
She chuckled and downed the shot. Yeah, cheap-assed homebrew.
“I’ll drink to that.”
Nathan Stout was doing pushups.
He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was some idea of keeping his strength up in case the opportunity came to break out, maybe it was just a way to pass the time, or maybe it was the sheer joy of not feeling lethargic and drugged anymore. He didn’t know why they’d stopped drugging him. Hell, I don’t know why they bothered in the first place. But it seemed like an opportunity not to be wasted.
Or maybe he was doing pushups because he’d watched a lot of movies, and the heroes always did pushups when they got thrown into a cell. He was in the down position when he heard the food slot slide open. He looked up, across the floor and saw a tray scraping its way into the room. Something smelled good. Hot food, not protein bars. He pushed himself to his feet, stepping slowly over to the tray, then kneeling down in front of it.
It smelled like beef stew. There was a plastic spoon beside it, the kind so bendy you couldn’t break it to use it as a weapon. He nearly laughed at the thought of rampaging through the place, taking out guards with half a plastic spoon. Instead, he used it as God and his captors had intended and began shoveling food into his mouth.
It was beef stew. From a can, likely twenty years old, but he’d take it. It was hot, and anything hot tasted a hundred times better.
He was so entranced with the food, he didn’t even notice the upper window opening until he smelled the perfume. There wasn’t much left of the stew, but he made sure to mop up the last of it before he dropped the foam bowl back to the light, plastic tray and looked to the door. There was a little more light than usual, enough to see the faint glow of long, blond hair. Feral hate surged in his chest but he tamped it down. Losing his temper wouldn’t accomplish anything, especially dealing with a spy who was trained in judging people’s reactions.