Hammer of Angels: A Novel of Shadowstorm (18 page)

Same evening, 6:21
P.M.
CET

Brussels, Province of Belgium, GG

Betti's use of her clearly labeled company truck to smuggle escaped slaves might seem crazy, but the way she does it is a good use of the principles of hiding in plain sight. To provide a precedent for the guards at this checkpoint, Betti maintains close relationships with some of Opekta's customers outside of Brussels. This includes making occasional deliveries even though she runs the company.

These guards have seen Betti drive this jam-and-sausage truck in and out of the city dozens of times. On a normal day, they would hardly notice her vehicle, much less search it. The problem we have right now is during an all-day curfew everybody gets searched, including the familiar Opekta truck.

If the guards were SZ troops, I'd shoot them all, trash any video security, and wave Betti through. These will be regular cops, however, and we don't want to spoil the Rising's popular support by greasing a bunch of reasonably well-liked sons of Brussels.

It's a thirty-minute drive to Betti's office in downtown Brussels. Half a mile from the city limits, we pull into a small rest area. There's a parking lot, a low cement building with two signs that read
Damen
and
Herren
, and a carpet of half-dead grass that stretches back to a thick stand of woods.

I get out of Marie's Orangemobile and mosey around behind the concrete structure.
Nothin' to see here, folks, just stretching my legs, pay no attention to the sexy vixen with the pocketful of homemade smoke bombs.
Once I'm out of sight, I break into a full run through the woods behind the rest area. After a minute I emerge near the highway's exit for Brussels.

There's a checkpoint here. I crouch down in some undergrowth and watch the guards thoroughly process each vehicle before they allow it to pass through the gate. Four men work the checkpoint. One guard examines everyone's paperwork while another inspects every car and truck. The last two guards occupy raised platforms on either side of the road, their MP-50 submachine guns ready.

“Darwin, I'm in position.”

“Roger that, Scarlet. We're leaving now. I'll tell you when we have eyes on the target.”

I reach into the big cargo pockets on my pants legs and fish out the three smoke bombs Brando made last night. Externally, these devices consist of nothing more than soda cans with a fuse sticking out of the top. Inside each can are the shredded remains of a half dozen Ping-Pong balls and a bullet's worth of gunpowder. I thought my partner was crazy when he asked Marie if she had any Ping-Pong balls around the house, but it turns out if you mince them up and burn them, they'll make a huge amount of smoke. Who knew? I take my lighter out of my shirt pocket.

“Scarlet, we're almost in sight of the target. It's showtime.”

“Roger that, Darwin.”

I stand up and light the fuse on one of Brando's smoke bombs. I wind up like Tom Seaver and whip the can at Paperwork Guard. The can hits him in his stomach and thumps to the ground. Herr Paperwork cries out in surprise and puts his hands over his midsection. Then he's swallowed up in a big cloud of white smoke.

My second fastball hits Vehicle Guard in the leg. He looks down and gets ready to kick the soda can away from him, but he starts coughing and choking from the fumes spewing out of the first smoke bomb. Moments later, he and the car he's searching are engulfed by the second cloud of smoke.

The two platform guards are above the thickest smoke and can still see what's happening. If Betti tries to run the checkpoint now, one or both of them will be able to call in a description of her Opekta truck.

I fire up Li'l Bertha and charge into the open. I pepper the areas around the two platform guards with short bursts of .12-caliber pellets while I move in close. Both dudes take cover. I spring up to the first platform and furiously pistol-whip the first guard until he stops shouting and struggling. Then I climb onto the platform's handrail and launch myself across to the second platform.

Oh, fuck me!

While I pummeled the first guard, his partner on the other platform had a chance to recover from my suppression fire. The second guard aims his rifle at me as I sail straight into his sights. I bring my pistol to bear, but I can tell he's going to shoot first.

A loud rifle shot rings out, and a shiny dent clangs into existence on the top curve of the guard's helmet, stunning him. This gives me the extra second I need to land in front of the policeman. I rear back and cold-cock the poor slob into next week.

“Darwin!” I comm. “All clear. Make your run!”

“Roger that, Scarlet. Here we come.”

Marie's bright orange car zips off the highway exit, closely tailgated by Betti in her truck. Brando rides shotgun in the Orangemobile. He holds his infrared scope up to his eye. His mouth moves while he directs Marie through the smoke screen. She hunches forward over her steering wheel as she avoids the car already in the checkpoint and the guards who are still crawling out of my big smoky Ping-Pong cloud.

Both vehicles whoosh through the checkpoint and into the city. Now the sisters will simply drive to Betti's office downtown. Brando and Marie will spend a night or two with Betti and leave Brussels from the other side of town once things have cooled down.

The rest of our plan calls for me to “acquire transportation” back to Calais. I'll keep an eye on Marie's house and lay low until she and my partner return.

Before I do anything else, though, I have to locate that sniper. I get the feeling it's the same shooter from early this morning at the department store. On the one hand, I appreciate the help. On the other hand, I don't dig some mystery guest crashing my mission because it means my comm signal has been compromised.

Who is it?
If it were someone from ExOps, I'd have been told they were coming. If it were an opponent, I'd be dead. I bend down and examine the unconscious guard's helmet. The dent's shape and angle indicate the shot came from the policeman's right side. I sight in that direction. The faded evening light shows me a highway entrance ramp that mirrors the exit Brando and Marie just used. Between me and the ramp is a expanse of open terrain with nowhere to hide, except …

Except for a big patch of tall brush next to the highway. It has excellent cover and a built-in highway-shaped escape route. That's got to be it.

I holster Li'l Bertha and drop off the platform. The shooter can obviously see me, so I don't bother hiding my intentions. I aim at the brush and blast off. My legs accelerate to a blur, and my feet only touch down once every ten yards. My target is a quarter mile away, and I cover it in half a minute.

A young man emerges from the brush and holds his hands out like he's trying to stop traffic. I tackle him at full speed, and we both fly into the stand of bushes. I land on top of the punk and ride him like a surfboard until we skid to a stop. On the ground next to us is a rifle resting on its case, and next to that is a small BMW motorcycle with a black helmet hooked on the back.

I seize the lapels of his jacket and demand, “Who the fuck are you, buddy?”
Wow, his face looks awfully familiar.

Instead of speaking, my seat cushion waves his hands around. After a moment I realize he's using sign language.

Turn off your commphone,
he signs.

“What?” I say. “Why?”

He has to spell out his next message one letter at a time:
F-r-e-d-e-r-i-c-k-s.

I cautiously take my hands off his coat and sign back,
What about him?

He sent me to kill you.

Now I recognize this guy's face. I've seen his face in my house. I've seen his face in my parents' wedding album. I've seen his face in my dreams every goddamned night for the last nine years.

It's my father's face.

Same evening, 6:49
P.M.
CET

Brussels, Province of Belgium, GG

“Falcon,” the young man gasps around the grip my right hand has clamped on his throat. “I'm called Falcon.”

Even his voice sounds like my dad. That's all I have to go on right now because I suddenly can't see anything. I shake my head and rub my eyes with the heel of my left hand.

Trick looms out of the blackness. “You're hysterical,” he says.

Somehow I find a snappy comeback for my late partner: “If you think this is funny, wait'll you see the dancing panda bears.”

“No, I mean you're emotionally hysterical. That's why you've lost your sight.”

I point my head up at the sky. Still nothing. “Will it come back?”

“Take a deep breath … that's it … try to relax until—”

Click! I can see again. Trick vanishes. I blink away the ghosts and get back to the business of strangling this teenage version of my dad.

I turn off my commphone, just in case, so nobody but the two of us can hear me demand, “Why do you look like my father? What the hell
are
you?”

He chokes and wheezes. He's turning blue. I relax my grip slightly. My left hand holds my pistol an inch from his mouth, so any false moves from him will result in a splattery cloud of deconstructive dentistry.

“Fredericks raised me,” he pants.

“That's impossible!” I say. “I'd know if my dad had given RUACH permission to clone him.”

His breath hisses around my choke hold. “Not RUACH. I'm from ARI.”

“You can't be. ARI got shut down—” I hesitate. “Unless …”

The young man nods his head a little but doesn't say anything.

“Jesus,” I whisper, “unless Fredericks kept it going as a—”

“Skunk project, yes.” Falcon finishes my sentence for me.

I let go of his throat but keep my gun aimed at his jabber hole. I fish around his left side and remove a pistol from his holster. His stomach and chest heave up and down under me while he gulps in a few big breaths.. He's dressed in blue jeans, short black boots, and a black leather jacket over a dark gray hooded sweatshirt.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” he says.

“How do I know you're not a German plant?”

“This morning I shot five Purity Leaguers for you.”

“So what?”

“Can I get up?”

I have
no
idea what to do with this person. Normally I'd ice him, but he
has
helped me—twice in one day. This kid had two golden opportunities to shoot me dead, and he didn't.

If he'd been speed-grown in Carbon's Gen-2, he'd look a little older and act a lot younger. So let's say he really is seventeen years old. I suppose Carbon could have acquired cell samples from my bad-ass father seventeen or more years ago and produced Falcon in Gen-1. But the Germans have plenty of their own bad-asses for that sort of thing.

My dad is in Carbon's Gen-3 for what he can offer them mentally, not physically. If Falcon were—through an incredible fucking miracle—a Gen-3 clone of my dad, the kid wouldn't merely look and sound like my dad, he'd
be
my dad. And trust me, he's not. There's no way a personality that can remain so calm while being strangled was originally brought into existence by my ear-splittingly histrionic Greek grandparents.

I stand up and back away. I keep Li'l Bertha aimed at him, but in a less menacing way. “Okay, Falcon, what's your deal? What do you want?”

He stands up slowly. “Maybe I should tell you on the way.”

“Way where?”

“Anywhere but here. We can take my motorcycle.” He looks over to the checkpoint. A police car has arrived, and a couple of the guards are back on their feet.

Yeah, we'd better get out of here.

“Fine.” I jam Li'l Bertha back in her holster. “But you ride bitch.”

We saddle up and I steer us onto the highway. I crank the throttle over and his bike whisks us into the night. I keep our speed reasonable so I can ask Falcon again what he's up to, who he is, and where he came from. His story chills me even more than the winter air we're riding through.

Falcon is a product of the supposedly defunct Asexual Reproduction Initiative. Congress shut this program down because its methods for acquiring specimens were so unscrupulous. I already know how the Patricks' genes came from an off-limits minor. What's news to me is the cell sample that grew Falcon was stolen from ExOps's medical offices—two years after ARI was canceled.

This explains where ARI's old equipment went. All that crap was going to be transferred to the new American cloning program, Reproduction Using Asexual Cloning Heuristics, to continue cloning research. However, the moral and legal realities of cloned humans were so convoluted Congress simply gave up and limited RUACH's charter to shepherding ARI's offspring through their childhoods. The Asexual Reproduction Initiative was boxed up—lock, stock, and barrel—and stuffed in a government warehouse under the desert outside of Phoenix.

All this gear turned up missing during the probe of ExOps's notorious three moles. That was eight years ago and twelve years after ARI's demise. Plenty of time for an ambitious and corrupt government official to establish his own personal cloning program.

Fredericks, as the Front Desk of ExOps's German Section, had full access to his agents' medical profiles, including my dad's. What on earth Fredericks thought he was doing is beyond me. For now it's all I can do to wrap my head around a universe that includes this young version of my father.

I turn off the A10 and onto the A18. I accelerate up to 200 kph to see what Falcon does. His arm around my waist tightens, but he keeps his cool and doesn't say anything. The wind freezes my lips and makes my eyes water, so I slow down again. When I ask Falcon about Jakob Fredericks, he lets out a sharp breath.

“He's totally insane, but he threatens everybody in Washington with some incriminating mystery file, and nobody has the guts to bring him down.”

“What turned him into a nut job?” I ask.

“I don't know. Maybe nothing. I've known him all my life. He's always been a bastard, but he goes further off the deep end every year. He raves about you a lot.”

Great.

Talking on a motorcycle is a bit of a chore, so we stay quiet until I get close to Calais. Avoiding the checkpoints requires a series of creative shortcuts. We cut down dark alleys, zigzag across parking lots, and sneak through people's backyards. Once we even glide through the lobby of a block-long office building.

I can't figure out where to bring this kid. I still don't know if he's telling the truth or if he's playing me. It's probably best to keep him away from Marie's house. Unless, of course, he already knows about it.

“How much do you know about where I'm staying?” I ask.

“You and Darwin have been crashing at Marie Van Daan's place in Calais while you heal from wounds you suffered in London.”

Fuck, he knows everything.
The only way Falcon could know all this stuff is Fredericks knows it and has fed it to him. “Was that you watching Marie's house the other night?”

“No, but I know who you're talking about. He was an amateur. That was his own personal car. The dope left his real plates on it.” Clearly, Falcon takes surveillance seriously. He even spies on the people who spy on the people he's spying on.

I turn onto Marie's street and switch off the motorcycle's headlight. I goose the engine and then switch that off, too. We silently coast down the street and into Marie's driveway. I drag my feet to stop the motorcycle so the brake light doesn't come on. We hop off the bike. I walk it into the garage and leave the big door open since that's how Marie left it. I unclip Falcon's rifle case from the bike's front forks and tuck it under my arm. Then I lead Falcon into the unlit kitchen.

Nobody's home. Marie is still in Brussels, and her husband, who was away on business, got stuck at the Berlin airport when all the flights got canceled by the Germans' martial response to our bombings.

We leave the house lights off. I can see fine with my starlight vision, and Falcon doesn't bump into anything, so I assume he has the same vision Mods as me. I get us each a bottle of beer from the fridge while I try to figure out what to do with him.

Falcon is about to take a swig when he freezes with the bottle halfway to his mouth. He slowly puts the bottle down on Marie's kitchen table with one hand while he reaches toward his empty holster with the other. I whip out Li'l Bertha and point her at Falcon's face.

The young sniper stops moving and holds his hands out in front of his body with his fingers splayed to say,
Okay, don't shoot.
Then he very pointedly looks into the living room.

Dammit, did this punk set me up?

My system has absorbed a heavy dose of Madrenaline, so it'll be nothing to ventilate him if he tries anything.

But then, why would he tell me where they are?

I wave my pistol toward the other room.
Move it. You first.

Falcon slowly walks through the doorway and into the living room. I layer my infrared vision over my night vision and follow him. He points across the room.

A hot red blob is hiding behind the sofa. A long blue shape overlaps the red thing and clearly outlines an automatic weapon. I stay in the doorway and shout, “Hey, peek-a-boo! You've got one fucking second to drop it or I'll light you up like a goddamned Christmas tree.”

“Scarlet? Don't shoot, it's Victor.” The red person lays his blue weapon on the floor. “My gun's down. I'm coming out.” He slowly stands up, but remains behind the sofa with his arms spread. I shut off my vision Mods and flip a wall switch to turn the lights on. We all squint in the glaring brightness.

“Vic, it
is
you! Where have you been?”

“It's a long story.” Victor shuffles out from behind the sofa.

“Why didn't you comm that you were here?” I go to shake his hand, and only then do I realize I'm still holding my fucking beer.

Victor says, “The batteries in my comm set died,” as he smoothly lifts the bottle out of my grasp, winks at me, and takes a big chug. “Ah-h-h, thanks.” He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “You wouldn't believe what my last few weeks have been like.” He extends his hand toward Falcon. “Hello. I'm Victor Eisenberg.”

The kid, who clearly recognizes the infamous underground leader, recovers his wits enough to shake his hand. “Hi. Uhh, I'm Falcon.”

“Hmm,” Victor says quietly, “another American. Very interesting.” He turns to me, “You look much better, Scarlet. How are your injuries?” While I answer him, he retrieves his weapon, an MP-52-S with a very nice scope, from behind the couch.

We settle into the kitchen and catch Victor up on what's been happening around Calais. He almost dies laughing when I tell him how I knocked Kruppe out with a wine bottle. But he regains his composure long enough to make me repeat the message about the meeting at Thiepval, which Patrick already told me is a French town with a gigundous war memorial. When I tell Victor about the bombs we set off last night, he says he saw the wrecked department store on his way into town earlier today. I finish with our rescue mission to Belgium.

“So Falcon,” Victor asks, “you're new to the team?”

I say, “Falcon was there, Vic, but he isn't ExOps.”

Victor's mouth opens to ask the next obvious question, but before he can a car's headlights swing through the kitchen windows. The vehicle pulls into the driveway. I draw my sidearm, and all three of us crouch below the window.

Now what? Did Fredericks send these people, too?

I hand signal to Falcon:
You wait here.

He shakes his head and holds his fingers out like a gun.

“No way,” I hiss, then I whisper to Victor, “Cover me from here in case I need to fall back.”

Victor nods and gently cocks his weapon.

The car's engine turns off. I wait by the door to the garage. When the headlights go out, I dive through the door, roll across the floor, and take cover in front of the vehicle's hood. My pistol sights on the passenger's face as he steps out of the car. It's Brando. Marie opens her door to get out of the driver's seat. Only now do I observe that the car's hood is bright orange.

“Darwin, what are you doing here?”

Both Brando and Marie nearly jump out of their skins. Marie exclaims something in that weird language she speaks. Brando's training allows him to resist saying anything, but he still instinctively crouches behind the car door before he recognizes my voice.

“Scarlet? Cripes! You scared the crap out of me! What are
you
doing here?”

“I'm
supposed
to be here, dummy.”

“I mean, why are you lurking in the—” My partner spots Falcon in the doorway and switches in midsentence. “Who in blazes are
you
?”

Falcon taps his ear and shakes his head. I wave at Brando to get his attention and sign to him,
Turn off your commphone. Comm code cracked.

Brando's eyes open wide. Compromised comm codes mean we're in big trouble, but his more immediate concern is to find out who this new kid is.

“Okay, it's off,” Brando declares. “What the hell is going on?”