Authors: Jonathan Maberry

Joe Ledger (26 page)

I hurried through the offices. At most of the desks, the chairs were neatly snugged into the footwells, computers were off or on screensaver, and the desk lamps were dark. A few were less tidy; those probably belonged to the workers hiding in the bunkers.

There were no security guards in this wing. That concerned me. Not that I wanted to meet any, but it seemed odd.

Everything, in fact, seemed odd.

Then I rounded a corner and found something even odder.

Three uniformed guards lay sprawled on the floor.

There was no blood. No marks of violence.

For all the world, they appeared to be…
sleeping.

I think I actually said, “What the fuck?”

Beneath my arm the artifact throbbed.

Actually throbbed. It was a feeling of heat that pulsed so quickly and abated so immediately that the effect was like the device had expanded and contracted. Like something taking a breath.

I almost flung the thing away from me.

Instead I held it out at arm’s length—despite its size I could easily hold it with one hand, it was that light—and looked at it.

Metal. Green lights.

Same as before.

But not exactly the same.

That pulse or throb or whatever it was….I didn’t like it.

No, sir. Not one bit.

It felt wrong.

Like the surface temperature and texture of it was wrong. I was reacting to it as if it was not a machine at all. It felt to me like something….

The word is
alive
, but I can’t really use it because that’s stupid.

It’s metal. It can’t
be
alive.

The thing pulsed again.

The green lights went from a neutral intensity on a par with traffic “go” lights, to a glare that, for a split second, was eye-hurtingly intense. I winced and cried out and….

And, yes, I dropped the thing.

Or, maybe I flung it away.

Hard to say.

Hard to actually think about.

The artifact hit the ground and rolled bumpity-bumpity across the floor.

And stopped when someone placed the sole of his foot against it.

Someone who, I swear to God, was not there a moment ago.

Chap. 8

The man was dressed all in black.

All.

Head to toe. Black pants and pullover. Black socks and shoes. Black gloves. A black balaclava and black goggles. I couldn’t see a single square inch of his skin. He could have been white, Asian or, yeah, black.

He was big, though. About my height. Not as bulky in the arms and chest, but close enough.

And he was just there.

Standing where he shouldn’t have been standing, within arm’s reach, and I hadn’t seen or heard him approach.

So, fuck it, I shot him. Point-blank.

In the script in my head that I was writing for this scene, he should have folded up like a deck chair and that should have been that.

That wasn’t how it played out.

I fired the dart gun, and he moved out of the line of fire.

It was weird. He was fast but not the Flash. It wasn’t like he dodged a bullet, so to speak. He wasn’t that fast. No, it was like he had such perfect timing that as I fired he was already moving—as if knowing exactly the timing and angle of my shot.

Then he pivoted and slapped the gun out of my hand.

There’s a way to do that if you know what you’re doing. You hit the gun at one angle and the back of the wrist at another. Do it fast and simultaneously, and the gun goes flying.

My gun went flying.

I have been disarmed exactly once in my adult life.

That time.

If anyone had wanted to wager on whether someone could do that to me, I’d have bet my whole pension on that answer being “no.”

My gun went flying anyway.

I wasted no time goggling at it.

I kicked him in the knee.

Which he blocked with a raised-leg hoof kick.

I hooked a left at his short ribs, but he chop-blocked with his elbow and counterpunched me in the biceps, numbing my arm. Growling in pain and anger, I faked once, twice, and hit him with a jab in the nose.

Except that he turned his head two inches to the left so that my jab hit the point of his cheekbone.

Then he switched from defense to offense, throwing a series of punches and kicks at me that hammered me all the way across the hall and against the wall. He blocked every one of my counterpunches, parried every kick, even intruded into my attempted head-butt by head-butting me.

It was all very fast and very painful.

I won’t lie and I won’t sugarcoat it. He beat the shit out of me.

He humiliated me.

I didn’t land a single solid punch on him, and he hit me as often as he wanted to, and it was pretty clear that he really wanted to.

Winded, bleeding, bruised and dazed, I sagged against the wall.

I tried to win that fight.

I’ve never really lost a fight. Not in years. Not any fight that’s ever mattered to me. No matter how tough the other guy was, I was tougher. Or, if he was too tough then I won because I was crazier. I don’t care if I get hurt, but I will win a fight. I’ll burn down a house if that’s what it takes to win a fight.

Except that I lost this fight.

Lost it fast, and lost it completely.

This man, whoever he was, outfought me.

I am a special operator. I’m a senior martial artist. I’m a warrior and I’m a killer, and he simply took me apart.

He even used some of my own favorite moves, some of the things I tried to use on him. He used them faster and he used them better and I went down.

On my knees, blood dripping from my mashed lips, I tried to change the game on him. I snagged the rapid-release folding knife from its little spring clip inside my trouser pocket. It came into my hand and with a flick I locked the three-point-seven-five-inch blade into place and I lunged in and up and tried to castrate the fucker.

He twisted away. I heard cloth rip. I saw droplets of blood seed the air, but he moved so fast that all I did was slash him. I could tell from the resistance that the blade hadn’t gone deep enough to cut muscle or tendon. Only trousers and skin.

The blood was red.

The skin that showed through the torn fabric was white.

Not the light brown skin of an Asian. This guy was Caucasian.

He twisted and hit the side of my hand with a one-knuckle punch that turned my entire hand into a useless bag of pain. The knife clattered to the floor. He bent, scooped it up, and suddenly I was pressed back against the wall with the wicked edge pressed against the flesh of my throat. He held the knife the way an expert does when he wants you to know that you’re not going to take that blade away from him. Not in this lifetime.

I was done.

I was cooked.

Beaten, bloodied, and disarmed.

With a knife to my throat and his fingers knotted in my hair to hold me still.

Then he bent close and spoke with quiet urgency into my ear.

“Believe me when I tell you that neither of us wants you dead,” he said.

I froze. I didn’t dare move a muscle.

“I need you to listen to me, and I need you to understand. You can’t ask any questions. The best and
only
thing you can do is to listen and tell me you understand and agree.”

He pressed the knife more firmly against my throat to emphasize his point. A drop of warm blood ran down alongside my Adam’s apple.

“You listening, sport?”

“Y-yes….”

“Good, ’cause I’m only going to say this once.” He was leaning so close that even through his mask I could feel the heat of his breath on my ear. “You don’t know what this device is. None of you do. You can’t know and, believe me, you shouldn’t. You don’t want to.”

“Pretty fucking sure we
do
,” I growled.

He made a sound. Might have been a laugh. “No, you really don’t.”

“Who are you?”

For a moment I thought he was going to move the knife away. Or cut my throat. His hand trembled.

“Let me ask you a question, chief,” he said. “And you give me a straight answer. No bullshit. Can you do that?”

I said nothing. Wasn’t really feeling all that chatty.

He took it as assent, regardless. “What do you think they’re going to do with the device? I’m not talking about the North Koreans. What do you think
we’re
going to do with it?”

I said nothing.

“Do you honestly and without reservation believe that once the U.S. government gets their hands on it that they’ll hide it away and never use it? Do you think that if they
did
use it, they’d only concentrate on its potential for unlimited power? Do you think they can resist the temptation to study its potential as a weapon?”

I said nothing.

“You have good intentions, Joe,” he said. I didn’t ask him how he knew my name. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know that answer. “But sometimes you’re naïve. You’re too trusting. You think everyone has the same altruism as Mr. Church. You think that you can keep this thing from ever falling into the wrong hands. Tell me that’s not true. Tell me I’m lying.”

I still said nothing. My heart was hammering in my chest.

He sighed.

“I’m going to take the device out of play,” he said. “Nobody gets it. Not our people, not theirs. Nobody.”

“Bullshit,” I said finally.

“No,” he replied, “no bullshit. I know where it came from. I know what it is. And I know what will absolutely happen if anyone—
anyone—
fucks with it. And they will. You know it, sport. They’ll fuck with it and fuck around with it and then it’ll all go to hell.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” he said, “
you
can’t. I can. I do.” He paused, and there was a strange quality in his voice. A kind of sadness that runs all the way down to the cellar of the soul. “I’ve seen it. That’s why I can’t let you take it.”

He took the knife away, gave me a hip-check that knocked me sideways, and stepped backward out of reach before I could recover my balance. The device lay pulsing on the floor between us. Closer to him than to me.

Slowly, carefully, he knelt and scooped it up with the hand not holding the knife.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Who are you working for?”

He hesitated, studying me, then dropped the knife on the floor and pulled the goggles off. He dropped them onto the floor next to the knife. The he pulled the balaclava over his head and dropped that as well.

I stared at him. The hinges of the world seemed to snap and crack off and for a moment the whole room seemed to tilt.

I know that face.

I knew those blue eyes and the scuffle of blond hair. I knew that crooked nose and the scars. Some of the scars. There were more of them than when I’d seen that face last.

More than there had been when I looked into the shaving mirror that morning.

I said, “I don’t….”

It was all that would come out.

The face was older than mine. Harder, sadder, with deeper lines and more evidence of damage.

But it was my face.

He looked down at me with my own eyes.

There was such a look of deep hurt and enduring pain in those eyes.

“I’m taking it with me,” he said. “Once I’m gone you’ll have six minutes to get out. You’ll need four and a half.”

He smiled then.

There was no joy in it.

Not for him.

Not for me.

He turned and walked away. Within a few steps he was running. He rounded a corner and was gone.

I knew, with absolute certainty but with no understanding of why I knew it, that if I ran to that corner and looked around it, he wouldn’t be there.

There was a brief squelch in my ear and then Bug’s voice. “…To Cowboy, do you copy?”

I tapped my earbud but I had to suck some spit into my mouth and swallow it before I could trust myself to talk.

“Cowboy here.”

“Thank God! We were having kittens and—”

“Shut up, Bug. How do I get out?”

“Do you have the package?”

I hesitated, trying to construct a reply that would make sense. “Mission accomplished,” I said. Or something like that, I don’t really remember.

He gave me the route.

I ran it.

I got out.

Chap. 9

They grilled me for days about it.

Days.

No sleep. No easing up.

My boss, Mr. Church. Dr. Rudy Sanchez. Aunt Sallie. Others.

They asked me hundreds of questions. Or, maybe it was the same few questions hundreds of times. It blurred together after a while.

They hooked me to a polygraph.

Someone—it might have been Dr. Hu—slipped me a Pentothal cocktail and grilled me through the haze.

They kept asking the same questions.

And I gave them the same story every single fucking time.

After a while they stopped asking.

They let me sleep.

Eventually they even let me go home.

Tomorrow the interviews or interrogations may start up again. I’m not sure. All I know for certain is that the artifact is gone. No one has seen it. I suspect no one ever will.

Where has it gone?

I have no idea.

I really don’t.

What happened in the lab remains the biggest mystery of my life, and that is saying a whole lot.

I know what I saw. I know what I heard.

It’s just that I am absolutely certain, without any margin for error, that I will never understand it.

Not, at least, until I’m older.

As
he
had been.

Older.

Sadder.

Stranger.

I don’t believe in time travel, and I’m not sure I buy any bullshit about parallel dimensions. But, how else do I explain it? What else makes sense?