Henchmen (13 page)

“Time’s wasting, Steven.  What are you up to?  Who’s the Amazon?”

My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, but now I’ve at least got some edge.  I pull myself to my feet and try to shake the cobwebs from my brain.

“I told you.  I want to fuck your sister.  I mean hold her down and just go to town,” I say.

The puff of air comes from the behind this time and is followed up with a blow to my kidney.  Goddamn it hurts.

“We need to know what you’re up to, Steven.  What were you doing at Radula?”

“You tell me.  You’re holding that thing like you’ve got all the answers,” I say, pointing at the laptop.

“There’s nothing here!  It fried itself when we tried to start it up,” he says.

Thank you, Jean.  Wherever you are I hope there are lots of hot guys and cold beer.

I give him my saddest face.  “Gee, that’s a crying shame.  However will you go on?”

I get punched in the side of the head for my troubles.  Some people just can’t handle sympathy. It’s like they’re losing their masculinity or something.

“What the fuck are these things?” I ask again.

“They’re patriots.  Men who gave everything to protect the freedom you’re so casually pissing away.  They volunteered for the process.”

“What process?”

“These men can walk through worlds,” he tells me.  “Now tell me, what are you up to?”

I get smacked in the back of the head.  “Jeez, I haven’t even made a smart-ass comment yet.  I catch you, asshole, I’m gonna fuck you up.”

I get smacked again, not hard enough to damage, just enough to let me know he’s still there.

Saxton is getting red in the face.  He must be under some pressure to get this done quickly.  “What are you trying to do?”

I stare him dead in the eye, my most serious poker face hiding my smirk.  “All right, fine, fine.”

Saxton relaxes a bit.  I pause and let the tension build.

I sigh and act defeated.

“I’m trying to find your sister so I can fuck her brains out,” I say.

I feel a puff of air to my left, and decide to give it the old college try.  If he follows his past actions, he’ll come in straight, no angularity at all.  Invisible or no, he’s a rank amateur. If he couldn’t “walk through worlds,” whatever the fuck that means, I would’ve beat him down earlier.  I thrust two fingers out to where I think his eye will be and pray there’s some god or goddess out there that hasn’t written me into their enemies list.  I must not have pissed off everyone, because my fingers hit something soft and squishy that feels like an eye.  From there it’s trivial to step to the left, pulling him by the eye along with me.  With my left hand, I slam my palm into his kidney and throw a back hand to the side of his head with my right to get him away.  Kenpo calls the technique ‘Darkness,’ and it’s always been one of my favorites. Because if you do it right, “darkness” is exactly what the person being hit sees and feels.

Getting poked in the eye hurts. Having it nearly pushed back into your skull is crippling.  When you’re in that much pain, it gets hard to concentrate, and apparently these guys need to concentrate to flicker in and out, because he’s lying on the cell floor clutching his eye and making weird howling noises.  I walk over to him and stomp his head until I hear his skull crack.

“Nice work, Steven,” Saxton says, clapping lightly.  “But you’re still in a cage.”

“Yeah.  But at least this asshole won’t be popping me anymore.”

“No.  It appears he won’t,” He gestures around him.  “These two, however, are just itching to meet you.”

There are a couple of flickers next to him, and I realize this could be a very long night.

I plop down on my cot and contemplate my immediate, possibly very painful future.  There are two coughing noises, and the flickers flatten out on the floor.  Saxton turns and pulls his gun and empties the clip at something down the hall, a look of pure shock and rage on his face.  The rage fades and the shock completely takes over when Eve casually walks up and slams him face first into the bars.

Jessica walks up behind her, silenced pistol in hand.

Eve looks around and then peers into my cage.  “Such lovely places you bring us to.”

“Yeah, well, I like to show a lady a good time,” I say.

Jessica shoots someone down the hall and Eve rips the door of the cell out.  “You look terrible,” Eve tells me.

“You wound me,” I tell her through a split lip.  “I’ve never looked as handsome as I look now.”

Jessica looks at me.  “You look like hammered shit,” she tells me, ever the big ball of happy.  “What is that thing on the floor?”

“They walk between worlds,” I tell her as I lean on the wall and try to act like I’m fine.  For some reason I’m extremely dizzy.  Oh, right.  Lots of lows to the head.  Brain rattled in skull.  Good thing I wasn’t terribly bright to begin with.

What’s left of the flickering man is not a pretty sight to behold. His head is smashed in, but that’s not the worst of it.  His limbs are like ropy muscle - he’s as thin as a skeleton - and his skin is blotched with oozing red sores.  I get a cumulative case of the willies thinking about that thing touching me, and suddenly feel like I need a shower.

“Nasty,” Jessica says.

“Did you find Jean?” I ask.

“Most of him,” Eve says. “His head and hands are still missing.”

I nod.  Take the head and hands, and it makes a damn sight more difficult to identify the body.  They were probably planning on just leaving his body out there and telling the Albuquerque Police Department not to worry about it.

“How’s Frank?”

“Pretty bad,” Jessica says.  “He was almost comatose for a while, but now he’s just mad as hell.”

“Did he go back to the ranch?”

“No, he’s outside,” Eve says, raising an eyebrow.

“Assume they can find us now.  Anyone goes back to the ranch and they’ll be greeted by 20 guys with balaclavas and SMGs.”  That might not affect Eve much, but the rest of us would be in trouble.  “Eve, they may not have anything to hurt you right now, but they will eventually, and they’ve got numbers.  We need to avoid that place like the plague,” I say.

People like to think of the government as a bunch of inept buffoons, and sometimes that’s true. But they’ve gotten very good at tracking down and stomping on threats.  We’ve probably been branded terrorists by now, and it’s a very good bet they’re putting on their stomping boots as we speak.  It’s time to fall off their radar.  We need a place to lay low and lick our wounds.

I manage to make it over to Saxton, lying on the floor with blood running down his face.  “Can I borrow your gun for a moment, Jess?”

She hands it over to me and I nudge Saxton trying to get him to wake up.

“Wake up, asshole,” I say.

He groans, opens his eyes and looks up at us.  I aim the gun at his face and pull the trigger.  The bullet hits him right in the skull, and the lights go out of his eyes.  He’s not the first person I’ve killed, but he is the first person I’ve killed that I knew personally.  Perhaps it was just vengeance for tonight, but it might have been vengeance for all the other shit he’s done.  I know I’m supposed to feel regret or something for taking another life, but I don’t feel a damn thing except “fuck him.”  Frankly, I’m glad he’s gone.

“We need to get out of here,” Eve says.  “Can you walk?”

“Sure,” I say.  “Why not?”

There’s not far to go to get out of the DHS dungeon.  I grab what’s left of Jean’s laptop, and start limping to the door.  Yeah, I know. I never got hit in the leg. I don’t need to limp. This is just something men do when women are around.  We like to make it seem worse than it is, and then tough-guy our way through it, even though it’s really not as bad as it looks.  There’s a corollary to this: when men refuse to admit that there’s any pain at all.  Feel free to file this in your ‘Stupid Guy Things’ folder and move on with your life. 

I head for the door at the end of the hall, past the four pounds of C4 stuck to the wall, and head up the stairs, taking care not to step on the wires.

Wait.
  Man, my head is messed up.  I’d swear I just a hunk of C4 stuck to a wall.  When I back up I see there really is a huge brick of plastic explosives stuck to a wall.  My tired brain catalogs the explosive and promises it will get to the analysis first thing in the morning.

I shrug and keep going.

“I take it you pulled the C4 out of the Radula door,” I ask.

“Eve decided it was a better use than what they had planned,” Jessica says.

At the top of the stairs, the two on-duty guards are dead, shot in the head.  The wires run out of the front door to where Jacob is busy twisting them onto a battery.  I’ve never been a fan of bombs, but I’ll be happy to see this place blown to rubble.

We walk across the street and Jacob touches the wires together, completing the circuit.  Four pounds of C4 is a pretty significant amount of explosive, but the explosion is muffled from outside.  I’m sure if the explosives were placed properly the whole building would dropped down in a nice, neat pile - as it is the center part of the building collapses in on itself while the walls stay up.

I know you’re jealous.  Everyone dreams of blowing up a building.  Just add that to the list of fun things I’ve gotten to do that you haven’t.

“You know,” I say, “if this was
Angry Birds
, there’d still be a pig alive down there.”

It turns out that as Jacob and Jessica were high-tailing it out of the Radula debacle, they tried to grab Jean.  They found him dead, and no one else around - just a dead body with no head and no hands, and no witnesses.  They grabbed anything incriminating out of the car, including Jean’s other laptop, and tried to keep an eye out.

They had a clean view of the building, so they saw Eve carrying Frank out.  They watched her casually jump off the roof with Frank still on her shoulder. 

Since Jessica and Jacob noticed only two people walking out, they decided to wait and see who else came out, and got to see me dragged out and dumped in a black Suburban, which tore off into the night.  In a panic, they got ahold of Eve, who told them to follow the Suburban.  The Suburban headed toward the DHS headquarters down by the airport, where it dropped me off. 

I must not have been out for very long, because it took less than an hour for everyone to show up, kill almost everyone, and wire up the place to blow.  Figure Wilford only knocked me around for fifteen minutes or so - that leaves me with forty-five minutes unconscious. Damage assessment: a minor concussion, a couple of missing teeth, two black eyes, minor kidney damage, a sore stomach and wicked headache. 

Not bad for a stay in the tender mercies of the U.S. Government.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

Jacob leans over the front seat and says “Hotel on Central.  Jesus, you look like shit.”

Everyone’s a comic.  “A hotel on Central.  That could be good or bad.  Hotel Parq Central, good.  Crossroads Motel, bad,” I say.

“It’s the Crossroads,” Jacob says, grinning like a loon.

“Great,” I say.  “I thought only tourists are supposed to be interested in TV show landmarks, and only crack whores are supposed to be interested in the Crossroads.”

“It’s the last place anyone in their right mind would go looking,” Eve says.

“Yeah, unless they’re looking for crack or diseases.  Or both,” I say.

The Crossroads is an old hotel on Central near I25; it’s the representative Albuquerque crack hotel you see on TV from time to time. The place is actually a little bit worse in real life than TV makes it look.  It’s not the worst hotel in town - there are some a bit further down the street that double as meth labs and dens of iniquity.  The beds at the Crossroads are usually free of any meaningful infestation, and there’s a slightly less-than-average chance of catching something science still hasn’t identified.

Oh, well.  The Crossroads is cheap and it comes with free Wi-Fi.  There’s no breakfast buffet, but I don’t think I would eat anything here anyway. 

We have two adjacent rooms on the second floor with a wonderful view of the scummy pool, and the parking lot. Eve and Jessica got the room with green door. Jacob, Frank and I got the one with the blue door.  The blue door is far better.  With all the comings and goings around here, we’ll probably be invisible, and the fact that we’re not actively slinging crack rock and/or hookers should limit our police visibility.

I’m fairly sure the name Crossroads refers to the crossroads between Hell and a slightly worse hell -  maybe the Hell of Lost Dreams, and the Hell of Broken Lives.  In a certain sense, I’m right at home, but I just wish they had better beds.  The authentic Magic Fingers are great, but the beds are six kinds of lumpy, and I wouldn’t bring a black light in here for all the whisky in Ireland - the glow would probably blind me.  I heard once (and I believe this is a true story), that hotels usually don’t wash the comforters, which might explain why the bedspread in our room doesn’t actually bend.

In any hotel, you can get a feel for the usual clientele by looking at what’s been secured in the room.  In a high-class hotel, nothing is locked, which makes it easier to lose the remote.  In this place, the ball point pen is held on the desk with a chain, and the paint-by-numbers pictures on the wall are screwed into place.  One of the paintings is missing; you can tell by the slightly-less-dirty rectangle on the wall.

The place isn’t all bad. It’s mostly roach-free, and the owners used the money they got from a TV show filmed here to upgrade not only the exterior paint job, but also the hookers -  all the hookers now have most of their teeth.  Also, the TVs are new.  And bolted to the dressers. And chained to the wall.  And the remote is securely affixed to the nightstand.  Plus, you can smoke in the rooms, which is probably a violation of some damn New Mexico code or another.

Anyway, it’s home, for the time being.

I’m flopped out on one of the beds, an ice pack nearly covering my whole face when Eve walks in, Jessica in tow, with a stack of folders all clearly marked Top Secret.

“Well, these are interesting, but they don’t explain much,” Jessica tells us.  “Is there a school or something these guys go to where they learn how to write without actually saying anything, because this is some cryptic bullshit.

“Listen to this: ‘Transferring the Guest’s walking capabilities continues to be a source of frustration.’”

“They expect anyone reading the file to be intimately involved in the whole process, and they don’t like to share information with anyone who is not currently involved,” I say “Part of it is the constant reminders of security, and part of it is a desire to make sure no one can come in take credit for their work.

“Does the file say anything about those flickering bastards?” I ask.

“Flickering bastards?” Eve asks.

“Yeah, those guys that flickered in and out.  I don’t know what they’re supposed to be called, but Saxton said they can ‘walk between worlds,’ and he had three of them with him.  He kind of implied there were more of them,” I say.

“Oh, them.  They’re called ‘Phasers’, and somehow or another ‘the guest’ created them, or they created them from him,” Jessica says.  Reading directly from the folder in her hand she continues. “The Guest was observed to disappear and reappear at various points during his sleep.  The techs said it looked like he was sleepwalking.  Data gathered before the event indicated The Guest’s ‘walking’ appeared to be, at least partially, a repeatable process.  Further analysis led to a breakthrough.  The recipient can ‘walk’ to a limited extent, which may be weaponizable.  Unfortunately, the process tends to degrade the subject over time and use.  Our best model describes the recipient’s total degradation in six months to one year, depending of the recipient.  The process is irreversible.’”

“Shit,” Jacob says, “Was that even English?”

“Kind of,” Eve says.

“Oh, good Lord,” Frank groans.  “This isn’t brain surgery.”

“Yeah,” I say.  “They’ve got something and they’re trying to figure out how to make it a weapon. It’s not exactly helping them, but they’ve had some limited success transferring some capability they wanted to people.”

“And the process is killing whoever they transfer it to,” Eve says.

“Not surprising.  Do you know how many of the original Manhattan Project engineers died of cancer?  Or how many of chemical weapons engineers died horribly?  Making new and exciting weapons takes sacrifice.  No wonder Wilford called them ‘patriots,’” I say.

“Wilford?” Jacob asks.

“The nutjob who was running the DHS, uh, interrogation,” I say.

“That guy never got laid, did he?” Jessica asks.

“He got mad poontang.  He had the looks, the attitude, knew how to play women like a harp,” I say.  “He acted like Wilford Brimley, and women ate it up.”

“Yeah, well. Wilford Brimley is pretty much a badass,” Jacob says.

“He’s got the greatest moustache in the world, and he’s the final boss of the Internet,” I agree.

“He’s definitely a man,” Says Frank.

“Yes, he’s dreamy,” Eve says, rolling her eyes.  She looks over at Jessica. “Tell them the most interesting thing.”

“Well, we don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it’s happening not far from here, in one of the older buildings downtown,” Jessica says.

“Do we know anything about the building?” Frank asks.  He’s calmed down a bit, but I can still see he hurts.  He spent the first hour in here in the bathroom.  This is how men deal with things, so don’t get judgmental.  Frank’s always been a fairly private person, and, like me, he has trouble opening up.  He’s turned his pain into rage, and his rage into focus.  Someone he loved was taken from him and, in his mind the best way to feel better is to strike back at those people that hurt him.  He looks like he’s all business now, but I can see the cracks in his armor.  He’ll have a complete breakdown when he feels like he’s got the time.

“It’s the Simms building downtown,” Eve says.

“Figures,” I say.  “I always liked that place.”

Eve digs around in her notes and says, “It was put up by government contractors back in the fifties. Most of the building is rented out to various companies.  There’s a sandwich shop in the front, and a post office towards the back,” Eve says.  “Other than that, we don’t know a damned thing.”

“It’s got bluish trim,” I say helpfully.

“Did Jean find anything?” Jacob asks.

“We don’t know, his laptop is fried,” I say.

“Yeah, but remember, he said he was copying something somewhere?” Jacob says.

“Right, the cloud.  Frank, what cloud was he talking about?” I ask.

“Of course,” Frank says.  “Jean had a buddy with a server farm, and he rented out space on it.  It’s somewhere in Indonesia.”

“How did he meet a guy in Indonesia?” Jessica asks.

“He was a hacker. He had friends all over the world,” Frank says.

“But he’d never met them?” Jacob asks.

“Sure he did.  On the Internet,” Jessica says.

“How can you be friends with someone you’ve never met?” Jacob asks.

“They’ve met, just not in the real world,” Frank tells Jacob.  “Look, man, just don’t worry about it.  He lived in a different world.”

Jacob shrugs.  He’s never been on the Internet, except to ogle naked women.  I keep telling him the web has other uses - like communicating with friends, playing games or stealing music and movies - but he’s an analog man in a digital world, and he likes to touch the things he steals.

“Did you guys grab the spare laptop from Jean’s car?” Frank asks.

“Yeah.  We were going to check it out,” Jessica says.

“Absolutely do not turn that machine on,” Frank says, deadly serious.  “If you don’t turn it on correctly, we’ll have two toasted laptops on our hands.”

“What do you mean, turn it on correctly?” Jessica asks him.

Frank sighs.  Everyone’s getting a peckish and grumpy.  It’s been a long day.

“Jean was a hacker. He liked to tinker with things, and he liked to keep his secrets.  If you boot it up with the battery and the SD card in, it will scramble the drive during boot, zap the RAM and CPU, and use the power it has left start a fire,” Frank tells her.

“OK, I’ll let you start it up,” Jessica says, quickly handing it to him.

It’s an older Asus laptop, orange and black with a glowing icon on the front.  Frank plugs in the monstrous power adapter into the outlet in the lamp, pulls the battery and the SD card, and presses the power button.  It boots up with the usual ROG graphics, and goes into a Linux logon prompt.  Frank logs it in with Jean’s credentials (user name: BadAss, password 4t3hL0Lzerz!) and we’re rewarded with a picture of a guy in a suit with a Guy Fawkes mask on. 

The desktop is spotless except for a widget in the upper right corner showing the CPU load, network load and so on.

Jean wrote most of his own tools, like most real hackers tend to do.  He also hid them, like most real hackers tend to do.  If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.  You can search a hard drive all day, but if you don’t know your way around it’s all just a jumble of link libraries, shared resources and cryptically named files.

Frank digs around until he finds what he’s looking for buried in one of the many /bin directories, and launches a program Jean wrote to get his files in the cloud. He types in another username and password, and we’re rewarded with a “Welcome back to Isher, B@d@$$!” screen, and a list of directories.  Frank scrolls down until he finds a directory named
nunya
and opens it.

“Nunya?” Jessica asks him.

“Nunya business,” Frank replies as the list populates.  “Damn.  That’s a ton of data.  Now we just need to find what we need in this crap.”

There are a dozen directories, each with between a dozen and a couple hundred files in it.  “There,” I say, pointing at the screen. “Guesst.  Look in that one.”

“It’s just a guest directory.” Frank says, dismissively.

“Stuck in with a bunch of classified documents?” I ask him.  “Ever see a guest directory in a classified location, let alone one with a capital G, let alone spelled with two s’s?”

“Point well taken,” he says, and opens the Guesst directory.  “Bingo.”

Inside is a single PowerPoint presentation labeled ‘Intro to Guestt.’ “I would have expected more files,” Jessica says.

“Radula probably did a search of the drive trying to delete anything named Guest and missed these two because they couldn’t spell correctly.  It happens.” I say.  “Crack it open, let’s see what’s in there.”

PowerPoint presentations always look like PowerPoint presentations, and anything put together by government contractors is guaranteed to look exactly like what you’d expect a government contractor to generate for a government contract: slick and soulless.  They’re like sets from game shows.  Government PowerPoint slide shows give the appearance of excitement and intrigue, but only deliver mediocrity.  At least they’re succinct. 

The downside is, they’re cryptic, unless you have the full speech to go along with them.  We didn’t have the speech that originally accompanied the slides, but we were able to learn some interesting things from the PowerPoint.

Like that “the Guest” was sleeping but shows signs of waking up.

That most of its capabilities cannot be replicated.

That there are dimensions and worlds that touch ours.

And that when the Guest wakes up it will be hungry. 

I would imagine burgers won’t satiate anything that can travel dimensions, no matter how good the burgers are.

“’It may be hungry when it wakes up,’” Eve comments, “but I’m hungry now.  What’s good and close?”