Made Men (24 page)

A
s the remaining
soldier pulled the door closed, Osgar stepped behind him—brushing the
scarf from his mouth.

Faster
than a scorpion, he seized the soldier’s dagger from his belt, punched the
battle-worn blade through his neck,
then
arced the
edge forward, assuring the destruction of both carotid arteries and trachea.
Spinning, he strode for the cockpit, killing the pilot using the same
technique.

Osgar
kept the unwitting man’s head low to keep the instrument panel free of blood.
When the jets slowed to a trickle, he placed a device on the co-pilot’s seat.
Punching the dagger into the instrument panel, The Spear of God pried loose
what he needed. Osgar crimped a clamp into the autopilot, then rammed a suction
cup against a side window and positioned his gear. Syncing devices, shedding
the plundered coat, in moments he was at the door. He pulled on the
goggles which
would reveal his target’s thermal imprint and
dove. Wind cut through the dead man's hat. The shemagh, a battle scarf, tore
away, floating behind as the man-spear plummeted. Osgar tuned his movements to
minimize his area of intercept while Shupp attempted to maximize his.

There.

Nearing,
and he adjusted his angle of approach.

Impact.

He
worked the knife, punching through the soldier’s brainstem. Wrapping his legs
around the girl and the bearded corpse from behind, he choked the woman
unconscious, spun the load, and clung to the straps.

Low, now.

Osgar
pulled the ripcord. As the chute popped, Osgar let his legs dangle, his knees
bent to absorb the hard landing.

Grounded, he slashed
away the chute,
then
stuck the knife into Shupp's leg
to free up his hands. He stayed low, dialing to establish contact with the
autopilot, enabling gaze engagement once the goggles were off and the glasses
on.

Concealed
by brush, he assembled Shupp’s rifle, flying the plane with his eyes.

Stephan
and his matted bodyguard approached at a clip. Palming the bearded corpse’s
skull, Osgar eased the complete rifle onto the back of his hand, fingers
cupped, adjusting his aim. The remaining soldier paused to look, quizzically,
skyward, at the descending airplane.

“I
know…” the German frowned “…not the plan.” Osgar pulled the trigger. The girl’s
friend paused, stunned by the crack of the rifle. His body language broadcast
defeat.

Drawing
his breath, the man shouted something Osgar didn’t anticipate.

“I’VE
ALWAYS LOVED YOU HENNA MAXWELL!”

Stephan’s
nose in the crosshairs, Osgar squeezed the trigger.

Security details should always address
vegetative functions in pairs
.

S
oon, Rickard would land in the Netherlands to
hunt Osgar.

They should have killed him years ago,
when he was weak. The moment they had noticed his sociopathy. But who would
have been able to excise Gitte’s cancer? No one. They would have lost her too early
.

His
twin had booked flights from their most secure computer: two tickets to
Amsterdam, two to St. Petersburg, and two to Sydney. Hopeful that when Osgar
hacked them, he would assume she was headed to Amsterdam. From there she could
board a train and be invisible in hours, with access to several countries.

Not so easy in Australia or Russia
.

It
was a long shot, and Ryker knew it.

Osgar
would know that they knew he could and would hack them, and might guess
correctly that she was headed to none of the three destinations, but he had to
start somewhere.

And so did they.

 
Ryker breathed slowly, steadily plotting
his next moves.

The
Landcruiser had been driven, after an appropriate wait, to LaGuardia by the
first team of soldiers, the thinnest of whom, a serious runner, wore a woman’s
wig, and had come through the tunnel from the adjoining building, where he was
paid a quarter of a million dollars a year to remain on-call every other month
in case he had to impersonate Henna Maxwell on short notice. Surely the dummy
maneuvers by the SUV full of operators had been logged and communicated by the
drones, while Henna and Stephan were
evacuated—literally—underground by the second team, the
first-string operators.

If
the cameras were as high-definition as Ryker suspected
,
their magic act was shot. Guessing how humans thought was always difficult for
Ryker; attempts to guess Osgar’s thoughts were preposterous. If, however, Osgar
was
grounded on the same continent as Rickard, with
Henna safely underground in Russia, it would buy their toxicologist some time.

He’d
once read a fairytale about a bear that killed a whole village carved into a
mountainside. When the greatest hunter in the land returned to the decimated
hamlet (for the bear had waited for him to leave) he drove his weary hounds
back into the forest to seek vengeance straight away, though the bear had left
no trail to follow, having leapt from treetop to treetop upon making his sated
escape. When the lone survivor, an old woman who’d hid in a hayloft called
after the hero:
It’s no use! The trail is
cold. He’s killed them all!
he’d
replied to the
lead hound, not to the grandmother.
A
bear never falls on a still arrow.

Rickard was built to track the bear. His
twin was the arrow.

So
Ryker focused on what he could affect, sending smokescreens wherever he could,
determined to occupy
himself
while waiting for
Rickard’s call. Once Rickard was on the ground, he would activate the rockets,
and only the most suicidal pilots would fly. Satellites would fail, violently.
Those pilots working for Osgar, he knew, were conservative to a fault. Soon, it
would hail arrows from the sky
;
a storm without
precedent.

They
had to ground him—and blind him—in order to find him.

R
yker swung open the
roof access.

Moving
fluidly, staying in the shadows, he shot down the drones he could see with a
suppressed rifle. Three crashed to the broad, flat roof of the concrete
stronghold, but others hovered high above: running algorithms, collecting
security codes, draining his employer’s—his
friend’s
bank accounts. Ryker snarled at the hum of the unseen
machines then fired some blind shots at the noises, glowering.

Hissing wouldn’t help, yet couldn’t BE
helped.

He
swept up the remnants of one drone, bounded inside, and turned the heavy lever
to seal the door.

Sophisticated.

The
drone had components he didn’t recognize. He could only theorize at their
functions.

Once
back in the lab, he flicked on a computer, by habit. The monitor stayed black.

Why did he do that? He’d known they were
down.

Rickard
had shut down the entire system.

Brushing
the battered drone into a clear plastic bin, Ryker made for the tunnel. He’d
put a bullet through the thing’s camera, but felt hopeful that what looked like
the tiny, unmanned aircraft’s microphone WAS.

And still worked.

They’d
flown in a school-of-fish formation, so most likely had redundancy in recording
and on-board telemetry.

Only one had to stay functional to send
Osgar communications.

So
he carried the drone to the tunnel, and started his act, keeping an eye on the
last four monitors sending real-time video feed from the street. These were on
a separate circuit, and hardwired, not transmitted, not stored. The tunnel was
built as a doomsday bunker, but it would be his stage, today.

“Stephan,
please take this.” He paused, as if Stephan were there, and had done his
bidding. “Thank you. Is she OK?”

He’d ask questions that had answers a
person could answer without words.

Marching
about, sliding objects, he tried to sound like a group of people, though Ryker
was alone in the vault. Lowering his tone, chopping a whisper that he hoped
sounded like Stephan, he uttered some nonsense, facing away from the drone,
then turned back,
stepping
softly to one side. “Well,
it IS a Faraday cage, if the door is shut.” Ryker whispered, conspiratorially.
“But the air exchanger is down. It’s a manual pump.”

It WAS, actually.
A
Faraday cage.

All
of it was true. Including the pump, which would lend credence to the charade
that
Stephan
wanted the door closed to keep Henna safe.
The most important thing was to make Osgar believe Henna was here.

If Stephan
was
here, Henna would be here.

They
were inseparable, and Osgar would already know that. If their brother (the
killer and savior) believed the Amsterdam ruse, replete with curbside airport
delivery by the soldiers of fortune—and this turned his head for a
bit—it gave Rickard more time. If Ryker’s acting was good enough, and
Osgar lit off for New York, or Amsterdam, then the Aryan fiend wasn’t headed
for Russia. And even if he were headed to Russia, St. Petersburg wasn’t where
she would be.

W
ith an eye on the
monitors, and running out of believable hushed banter, Ryker saw a man on the
street step from a loud old car to tap at the keypad near the garage. When the
door didn’t open, he turned to step close to the hidden camera, waving.

Maddox.

The
German took the stairs. It was slower, but safe.

Osgar could strand him in the elevator,
now, using the drones. He was sure of it.

Yanking
the door open, he pulled Bonn in. A woman glided in behind Maddox, and Ryker
eyed her warily as he heaved the heavy door closed again, manually throwing the
bolts—locks—home.

“What’s
with the hat?” Bonn looked at his head. Ryker felt with a hand, tossing it on
the floor. He’d been welding earlier, when Rickard called him to the lab, and
still had the cap on.

Everything had happened fast
.

“Follow
me,” he commanded, ignoring the pending introduction and the hat explanation.
“We only have a few minutes.” Ryker knew that the human vigilante couldn’t tip
the scales in their favor. He’d activated the beacon more as a courtesy, since
the battle to come would likely tear apart not only his building,
but
his planet. Maddox was thinner than he remembered.
Adjusting his plan to accommodate the newcomers, Ryker loped at a clip the
humans could match.

C
olor drained from
Bonn’s face as he fell in step behind Ryker.

He’d been wrong to dismiss the beacon.
Something big was definitely happening.

Vai
sprinted along behind.

The
tunnel that led to the adjoining building was clogged with electronics. The
corrugated metal walls of the tunnel were deep underground, with blast doors on
each end. The doors themselves were concrete-filled steel. Catching him up on
the run, the reptilian German briefed Maddox as if he’d been gone only minutes,
though it had been months. He had to finish before they reached the drone’s
microphone.

“In
eight minutes, Rickard is due to land in Western Europe, and I will press a
button launching rockets.” (That the rockets were already in orbit was a
superfluous tidbit.) “Some will strike targets in low earth orbit. I project a
forty percent strike rate probability.”

“Ok.”
Bonn nodded. “Why?”

“I’ll
get there. Each impact will create thousands of fast-moving projectiles, which
will strike additional objects, continuing the cycle. Over the course of the
next thirty hours each functional manmade satellite in Earth’s orbit will
likely be destroyed. The heavier, more durable objects, those that don’t burn
up or come apart upon re-entry will cause significant loss of life—”

“The
Kessler effect,” Bonn interrupted. “Why?”

Ryker
spoke faster the closer they came to the tunnel. “Kessler, yes. Donald J.
Henna’s in
trouble,
so listen: airplanes will be
grounded for months—” They closed in on the blast door, and he grabbed
Bonn by the arm, strong as an angry 140lb lobster. “She’s not here. Play along.
You will understand.” Bonn nodded, confused. The German squeezed harder, and
Bonn felt his hand go numb.

“Play.
Along. Henna needs us,” Ryker hissed.

And
they stepped through the door.

“W
e are in a huge
Faraday cage.” Ryker pointed to his own ears with vaudevillian drama, knelt to
point at the damaged drone, and then pointed at the sky.

Shit.

“Government?”
Bonn whispered, leaning as close as he’d been to the German since Ryker had
sewn him back together in the garage, nearly a year ago, just a vigilante whelp
freshly chopped up in Brownsville.

Ryker
dragged a thumb across his own lips and looked as though he might bite him.
Bonn backpedaled.

Play along. I get it.

By
way of making peace, Ryker pulled out a pen and a tiny yellow notepad before
continuing his speech for the drone’s audience. “I anticipate staying
underground for two days before venturing out.” The note read:

Two minutes

“If
the contractor after Henna gets in …”

A hit was out on Henna. Where was Henna?

As
Ryker continued, it seemed he could read Bonn’s mind. “The blast door will
prove an effective delay. I’d rather not move her if we don’t have to. This is
a dangerous man, but at least here she’s protected by twelve feet of concrete
and forty feet of earth above that.”

He didn’t understand.

Ryker
was watching his cellphone, as though it would ring any moment. He flipped open
a nearby laptop plugged into a huge metal object in the wall that Bonn couldn’t
identify. He’d deferred to the Germans’ judgment when the tunnel had been
constructed. Hurried, the German scribbled something with the precision of a
laser.

Henna at Stronghold.

Lake Baikal.

Ask
“who is after Henna” NOW.

Bonn
had barely registered the message when Ryker peeled off the sticky note, and
chewed it up.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Bonn
cleared his throat. “Who is after Henna?” Ryker made a rolling motion with his
arm, indicating that Bonn should improvise. He’d already written something
else. Maddox read it verbatim, his voice sounding wooden, even to himself. “Why
the extreme measures? Let’s go kill the bastard.”

Nodding,
chewing the second note, Ryker answered as he flicked his inner lids open and
shut like a coked-up stockbroker clicking a pen, glaring at his telephone.

“Can’t
just kill him.” He swallowed the paper. “He’s my brother. I’m not certain he
can be killed, unless he chooses to be.” Glancing up, he saw that Maddox was
speechless, so he continued. “At least here, unless he takes out a water main
and drowns us all, she is safe. He might, actually … take out a water main.”
Ryker looked skyward, a much better actor, his
pupils
dime-sized black diamonds.

“Your
BROTHER?” Bonn was about to forget the rules. He’d certainly forgotten the
drone.

Ryker
scribbled madly. Vai held the note up for Bonn. Anyone else holding the notepad
would have been invisible. She pinched his sore arm, and he read.