Remote Control (6 page)

When a figure flew out into the stairwell, Six almost fired. But then he recognized the Deck-issue fatigues, identical to his own. Two, he thought, or Kyntak.

The figure fell towards him limply, arms hanging from slackened shoulders, knees bent at ninety degrees, gloved fingers letting an Eagle automatic slip away from them.

He’s unconscious!
Six thought. Letting go of his Owl, he leaned out into the center of the well, reaching for the arm of the falling agent.

But as the figure spun slowly in the air to face him, Six found himself looking into the still, lifeless eyes of Agent Two—and the bullet wound between them.

The body slipped through Six’s clutching hand and disappeared into the darkness below.

Six lost his balance and toppled off the door. He grabbed the handle on his way down and hung there, reality seeming to fade as the color washed out of it. He felt dizzy and light-headed.

He looked down. Two was dead.

The first thing Six felt was relief that it hadn’t been Kyntak. The second thing he felt was shame for feeling this.

The third thing was self-loathing, disgust for failing to protect Two, letting him die—a man whose last words to Six had been, “We trust you, Six. Go.”

And for witnessing the murder of a friend and feeling guilt instead of grief.

But it was Six’s first thought that brought him back to reality. Kyntak. It was too late to help Two, but Kyntak was still up there.
And if I hang on to this door handle much longer
, he thought, staring into the void,
Kyntak could die too.

If he isn’t dead already.

Like a flash, Six was on the move. He scrambled back up to the top of the door, took aim at the doorway above, and jumped.

There was a soldier standing in the corridor. His face revealed nothing behind the mask and goggles, but as he saw Six appear through the doorway, he raised his weapon.

This is the one
, Six thought.
The soldier who killed Two.

Six had no gun, but it didn’t matter. He preferred it that way. He charged silently towards the soldier just as he got his weapon up and opened fire.

Six ran up the wall on his left-hand side, keeping his head at the same altitude but his torso out of the way of the barrage of bullets. The soldier didn’t have time to readjust his aim before Six punched him in the face.

The soldier’s mask cracked and he fell to the floor, dropping his weapon—but he wasn’t too dazed to kick Six in the knee. Six spun his leg, bending with the impact so no bones were broken, then stepped forward and pinned down the soldier’s arm with his other foot as the man reached for the fallen gun.

The soldier aimed a punch at Six’s hip with his free fist. Six blocked it, caught the man’s forearm, and held it against the ground with one hand. He used the other to reach under the man’s mask and grab his throat.

He found the windpipe and squeezed.

The soldier’s legs began kicking wildly, trying to throw Six off. Six squeezed tighter. He could feel his victim’s adrenaline-powered pulse through the jugular vein, racing at 150 beats per minute.

Don’t kill him
, Six reminded himself.
You’re not a murderer.

The soldier tried to lift his arms up from the floor, in vain. His pulse climbed to 170 as he realized he was at Six’s mercy.

Six squeezed tighter.
No
, he thought.
Killing this man won’t bring Two back.
But he didn’t seem to be able to control his hands.

180.

190.

The scrabbling of the soldier’s legs was getting slower, weaker. His arms were resisting Six’s pressure with less and less force. Like a spider sprayed with pesticide, his panicked motions were subsiding. His heart rate began falling fast, slipping back to 150, then 100.

If you kill him
, Six thought,
you are worse than him. He may have shot Two in self-defense.

Eighty.

Sixty-five.

And every second you spend here
, Six told himself,
Kyntak is in more danger.

He unclenched his hand. The soldier slumped to the floor, bruised, unconscious—but alive. Six fell backward. He stared at his gloved hands for a moment, flexing the fingers to unstiffen them.
Look what I almost did
, he thought. The human body could sometimes survive as much as four minutes of strangulation, and Six was confident that he had done no permanent damage. But he was alarmed. His subconscious had taken over. He was a being of reason. He saw the futility of killing the soldier for what he had done to Two, but a deeply buried part of Six’s mind had wanted to do it anyway, a raw aggression which circumstances had activated.

Murder is like a virus
, he thought.
Infectious. The more you see it, the closer it comes to you, the more likely you are to succumb to it.

Six peered into the fog. The floor was thick with the bodies of soldiers, all out cold. Most were lying where they had
fallen, it seemed—but all had been disarmed. This looked like Kyntak’s work.

Six could hear the thundering of helicopter blades again. He reached towards the unconscious soldier. The Eagle lay beside him. Six picked it up and checked the magazine as the Twin descended out of the fog above him.

There was a whistling noise, and then a tranquilizer dart thudded into Six’s neck. He gasped in pain, which lasted only a second before a pleasant numbness began to spread through his veins.

The gunner launched another net at him. Six tried to get out from under it, but the muscles in his legs seemed to melt away. The world tilted towards him and he staggered into the wall.

The side of his head collided with the plaster, which cracked, but Six felt no pain as stars exploded before his eyes. The net covering him wobbled, as if he were looking at it from underwater. Six fell to his knees.

The Twin descended farther, apparently looking for somewhere to set down. The gunner was fiddling with his harness and climbing through the door. Suddenly Six realized that the soldiers hadn’t come to wipe out the Deck. It was about him. The bait had been for him. They’d come to take him away.

The logical part of his brain overcame the desire to sleep, and Six tried to tear the net off. But he only fell over. His arms hit the ground, and suddenly felt as if they were made of iron. His head landed on his elbow.

“Yeaaaaaarrgh!”
Screeching like an eagle, Kyntak suddenly sprinted out of the grey air towards Six and the helicopter, not through the corridor, but along the top of one of the walls. He raced by above Six without even glancing at him, and then jumped into the air, legs together and arms outstretched…

…and flew headfirst through the hold door of the helicopter, crashing into the gunner. They both tumbled out of sight into the hold. The Twin reared back, as if it had been hit by a cannonball instead of a teenager. Then the pilot pulled it up, engines whining, and it vanished into the mist above.

The sound of whirling blades faded from the air. The gunfire had stopped. Soon only a cold, dead silence filled Six’s ears. It was as if Kyntak and the helicopter had never existed.

And then he saw, and felt, nothing.

Awake.

The world swam into bright, painful focus.
Eyes
, Six thought.
Green eyes.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Ace of Diamonds said, tucking her blond hair behind her ear as she leaned over him. “Are you in pain?”

Six stretched his limbs. They were stiff, but not sore. “No.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ace said. She walked briskly over to a bench and rummaged through her instruments. “You were injected with a heavy dose of Syncal-4, a benzodiazepine derivative. Think of it as flurazepam’s bigger, meaner cousin. It creates a deep, refreshing sleep in small doses, but I’d estimate they hit you with about 35 cc, enough sedative to put most people in a coma. Not you, though. Out for less than two hours, and now you’re as good as new.” She shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

When Kyntak had carried Six back to the Deck after his ordeal at the Lab, Ace had been the doctor on call. Six was suffering from horrific injuries—injuries that would have a killed a human. So Kyntak had reluctantly told Ace the full story. Because she knew Six was a superhuman, she had been his preferred
doctor ever since. She quietly tailored her treatments to his unusual needs. Six was glad of her presence—while she wasn’t much older than Six, her skill in all fields of medical science was matched only by her passion for the Deck’s cause.

“Am I at the Deck?” he asked.

Ace nodded. “The basement of the hospital wing.”

The morgue
, Six thought.
Why have they put me down here?

“It’s a busy day for me,” she said, picking up Six’s chart. “Two bodies and a patient. There’s no info on how superhumans react to Syncal, so I thought I’d take you down here and do the autopsies while I monitored your condition.”

Six rolled his head to one side. Methryn Crexe was lying on a chrome table only meters away in an open black body bag. His dark, narrow eyes, which had once sparkled with avarice and suspicion, were shut forever.

There was another body on a table farther away. He presumed it was Two; he didn’t want to look. He shut his eyes.

“I dug out the dart they hit you with,” Ace was saying. She held it up. “Weirdest thing I ever saw—less like a dart than an automatic syringe. The tube has two airtight compartments, one for the Syncal, the other containing a pod filled with compressed nitrogen. The needle had a trigger hooked into it, so when it broke your skin a valve opened on the pod, letting the nitrogen expand into the container. The expanding gas put pressure on the other container, forcing Syncal into the needle.”

Six kept his eyes shut. “Why go to so much trouble?”

“Because a normal dart would just have leaked some sedative into your system. This baby actually pumped you full of it.” Six could hear her scribbling on his chart. “As I said, they put enough into you to stun a decent-size horse.”

The events of the day were slowly returning to Six. Methryn Crexe, rescued, murdered. Two, shot dead. Kyntak, missing.

It makes no sense
, he thought.

He opened his eyes. “Have you done the autopsies?”

Ace nodded. “Agent Two of Hearts was shot in the head with a 9-millimeter round. Plenty of bruising to the back, left arm, and left leg, mostly postmortem. The rigor mortis shows that he’s been dead for more than two and a half hours, but I’m sure you knew that. I’m sorry.” She paused. “Crexe is a little weirder. Let me show you why.”

Six swung his legs off the table and tried to stand up. His legs felt like jelly, and he fell backward against the edge of the table.

Ace gripped his arm. “Careful. Remember, they hit you with a huge dose.”

He regained his balance and shook Ace’s hand off his arm. She turned to the table with Crexe’s body.

“Killed by a shot to the head. Another 9-millimeter, but not the same gun. The lividity shows that his body was carried somewhere immediately after death. The blood drained into his extremities before congealing in the capillaries. My guess is that he was dead before he left his cell.”

Six frowned. Why would they kill Crexe before abducting him? “There must be something they didn’t want us to know,” he said. “Something he could have told us.”

“But why take the body?” Ace asked. “Why not leave him where he fell?”

“They wanted him as bait—to lead Deck agents to the apartment building.” Six rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand.

“There’s something else.” Ace adjusted the body bag. “He has a tattoo.”

Six gasped. Imprinted across Crexe’s chest was…

“…a web address?”

“Http://cww.1500hours/23June.ps,” said Ace.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
, Six translated in his head,
City Wide Web, dot 3 o’clock, slash 23 June, dot Private Server.

Today was June 23. Six looked at his watch. 14:55:03.

“I can do some tests on his skin,” Ace was saying, “but beyond the type of ink and when it was inscribed, there won’t be a lot I can tell you.”

“Do them anyway,” Six said. “I need all the information I can get.”

“Gotcha,” Ace said. “In that case, head to King of Hearts’s office; he’s about to check out the website. He’ll be glad to see you’re okay. And it’s nearly three o’clock.”

Six nodded. “Stay alert. Today would not be a good day to mess up.”

“I’ll take that as concern for my well-being,” Ace said, raising an eyebrow.

Six touched King’s door handle and heard the buzzer sound inside. The door opened. King was sitting behind his desk, squinting at an LCD through red-rimmed eyes. Six couldn’t see the screen. The computer looked new; the matte-finish casing was still smooth from the factory and no dust had settled on the CPU.

Six shivered a little when he saw the burst blood vessels in King’s eyes. It looked like he’d been staring at the screen for so long he’d forgotten how to blink.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” King said, glancing at him briefly.

Six sat down. His health was irrelevant. It was Kyntak’s whereabouts that concerned him.

“Have you heard from Kyntak?” he asked.

King shook his head. “The agents are still searching. But as far as we can tell, he’s vanished off the face of the earth. Except for the unconscious ones, the rest of the soldiers who ambushed you have disappeared as well!”

“What about the satellite pictures?”

“Someone jammed the server soon after I lost contact with you. The Diamonds say it’s a dead end.”

“So what’s on the screen?” Six asked.

King spun the LCD on its stand so it faced him. Six recognized the ChaoNet web browser and saw that King had already typed in the address from Crexe’s tattoo. The web page was a simple black backdrop with large white numbers in the center. It read
00:03:19
, and flicked over to
00:03:18
as Six watched. Then
00:03:17
.

Hours, minutes, seconds
, Six thought. A countdown.

“You’ve disabled cookies?” he asked.

“Yes. This is a new PC, taken from the most recent shipment for Diamonds. It has nothing on it besides ChaoOffice and the browser. Grysat rigged up the best firewall he could, not that it should matter, given that the PC isn’t connected to the Deck network.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “The server will still have registered us as a hit on their stats, so they know that someone’s watching. But besides sending other computers to the same site as a smoke screen, which would be a security risk, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

“What happens when the countdown is up?”

King’s eyes didn’t waver from the screen. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“We’ve got a dead agent,” Six said, “a dead fugitive, an AWOL Joker, and no answers. What can we do in three minutes?”

“The Clubs are retrieving the unconscious soldiers from the apartment building,” King said. “We’ll learn something from them once we get them shuffled and they wake up.”

“How long will that take?”

“An hour, perhaps.”

Six looked at the screen again.
00:02:41
.

“What if it’s a bomb?” he demanded. “Here? Inside the Deck?”

“Then why would they give us a countdown?” King said. “And a body with a web address on it?”

Six remembered the mystery woman’s words.
It seems like a game, but it’s not. He’s trying to put you off balance because he knows that’s the easiest way to beat you. He aims to
deceive.

“Forget why,” Six said. “Evacuate the building, right now.”

“I have Diamond bomb squads sweeping the building as a precaution,” King said. “All nonessential personnel have been moved to the underground shelter.”

“What about Ace of Diamonds?” Six demanded. “She’s still running tests on the bodies!”

“There’s no bomb, Six.” King looked at him properly for the first time, and Six was again frightened by the hemorrhaged veins in his eyes. “If there were, they wouldn’t have warned us.”

“If there’s even the slightest chance—” Six persisted.

“Then what? We should all evacuate, and have no one watching this screen when it hits zero?”

“As opposed to getting ourselves killed to satisfy your curiosity?”

“We met a formidable new enemy today, Six,” King said. “Not the Lab, not even ChaoSonic. Someone worse. In a matter of hours, they broke into our cells as if the walls were made of paper, wiped the floor with a team of our best Hearts, and left the
toughest agent I’ve got sleeping on the floor of some prehistoric apartment building.” He glared at Six, and Six’s gut wrenched.
Is King angry at me?
he wondered.

“If you want to run,” King said quietly, “then that’s fine. Take Ace with you. But this website is the only lead we have, and I’m not prepared to leave the City to their mercy just yet. I’m not leaving this computer.”

00:01:03
. Six’s heart was beating a little faster. “We could set up something to record it. You don’t have to wait here.”

“It’s being recorded internally—Grysat set that up. But the website could have a copyright filter that blocks the recording—and traditional DVCs are too easily monitored.” He forced a smile. “After all you’ve been through, a few numbers on a screen are making you jittery?”

Six hung his head slightly. “I’ve had a rough day,” he admitted.

00:00:30.

The numbers clicked down. Every instinct screamed at Six to run, to climb out the window and jump, or at least to brace himself in the doorway or under the desk. But King had never steered him wrong before.

00:00:20.

But if it wasn’t a bomb, Six thought, what could it be? Why else would they have been given the web address? Perhaps it was a bomb—just not here. A shiver ran up his spine.

00:00:10.

Perhaps ten seconds from now, somewhere in the City, a building was going to shatter like glass, turning the thousands of people inside to dust.

00:00:04.

00:00:03.

00:00:02.

00:00:01.

00:00:00.

Six jumped. He’d been able to picture the explosion so vividly in his head that the anticlimax was more surprising than a colossal fireball would have been.

The numbers faded from the screen. The website was now completely black.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” King asked.

Six nodded grimly. “A bomb went off somewhere else.”

“I’ll get the Diamonds to check the—”

A flash from the screen interrupted him—the grainy flicker of exposure levels adjusting themselves. A hiss was emitted from the sound membrane over the LCD. They both stared at it, and their eyes widened in alarm.

An image had appeared. A man was sitting on a chair in front of a blank brick wall. His shaved head hung forward. Someone was standing behind him. The picture was too dark to see the person’s face, but from the posture and figure Six guessed it was a female.

The woman put her hand on the man’s scalp and pulled his head backward, exposing his face to the light.

Six gasped. It was Kyntak. Eyes shut, face bruised, but unquestionably him.

“I now have in my possession,” the woman on the screen said, “Agent Six of Hearts.”