Jade Sky (17 page)

"How soon do you need it?" She blew a bubble, punctured it with her tongue, and sucked it back into her mouth.

"Before I walked in would be nice."

She plugged the drive into an already packed external USB hub, hammered on her keyboard for a minute, then looked up. "What's this for?"

Matt shrugged. "I have a hunch." She didn't move so he took a chance. "It involves some ICAP personnel. Could be sensitive."

"Mmm-kay, so where'd you get it?"

Matt should have been prepared for the question, and wasn't. "Um, Santa. I got it from Santa."

Her eyes floated from the monitor to his, and she stopped chewing. "Well," she crossed her legs, "this bad boy's past your payroll, if you know what I mean."

Matt decided to play dumb. "Not really. You mean I can't have it?"

She shot him with her fingers. "Bingo. You're cleared for Level Four. This file is Eight. The freaking POTUS is cleared for Seven." She ejected the drive, rolled it over in her hands for a moment, and tossed it to him.

Still playing dumb, Matt pursed his lips, then nodded. "Fair enough. I'll ask Jeff." He put his hand on the doorknob and turned around. "Keep this between us, yeah?"

She smiled, gum between her teeth, then resumed chewing. "I only report what I have to."

"Thanks!"
That could mean anything.

He closed her door behind him, waved to the desk flunky shooting daggers out of her eyes at him, and stalked down the hall to Operations. Jeff's office stood in stark contrast to Janet's, with piles of paperwork that threatened avalanche at any wrong move. Jeff had his desk phone to his ear, a smart phone in his lap, and basked in the glow of his desktop monitor. He pointed to a chair when Matt walked in, so Matt moved the stack of papers to the floor and sat.

Jeff, in a gray suit indistinguishable from any other that Matt had seen, backed out of a call from “Bill,” fielded another from “Tim,” and a third from “Angela.” When he finally hung up, his phone rang. He let it go to voicemail and gave Matt an apologetic smile. "What's up?"

"Job's done," Matt said, even though Jeff already knew that. "That wacky Garza family . . . ." He ran out of funny halfway through the comment, so he let it die with a scowl. "I hope it was worth it."

Jeff's grin vanished. "It was."

Matt frowned. "Is his organization crushed? Is Jade off the streets?"

Jeff rolled his eyes. "You know it isn't. But this is huge. Pablo Escobar huge. Huger."

Matt's smirk held no humor. "So, just like Escobar, we can expect rival cartels to pick up the slack, then?"

"Don't be an asshole. There's still a lot of work to do, but we showed them that no matter how big they get, we'll nail them. Nailing the Garzas would be a good next step."

"I'm not interested in—"

"—baby steps," Jeff finished. "I know. Your job sucks. So does mine. There are a bazillion bad guys for every one of us, they don't have rules to follow, and every time you whack-a-mole one, another dozen pop up. But we can at least be happy that we whacked this mole."

Matt said nothing, then closed Jeff's door with his foot.

Jeff raised an eyebrow. When he didn't speak, Jeff did. "What's up, buddy?"

Matt chose his words carefully. "I think this might be bigger than Dawkins." He wasn't sure if Jeff realized how fake his patronizing smile came across or how much it made Matt want to punch him in the face. With a chair. "Much bigger."

Jeff steepled his fingers. "We seized fifteen billion dollars of Jade in a single operation. If there's such thing as bigger than Dawkins, it isn't much bigger. We're half a pube from nailing the entire global operation. We could price most junkies out of the market for years." Jeff smiled.

Matt didn't. "So what's next?"

"Good question," Jeff said. "It might take a while to tease out the necessary intelligence."

"Dawkins," Matt said.

Jeff held up his hands. "Yeah. Dawkins. He's not an easy nut to crack, but we'll squeeze out of him whatever there is to squeeze." With the UN strictures on enhanced interrogation techniques, Matt doubted they could squeeze his Laundromat address out of him. "When we know more, you'll know more."

Matt scoured his brain for the right thing to do and came up empty. "What if I could talk to him?"

"Not going to happen," Jeff said. When Matt opened his mouth to protest, Jeff cut him off. "Look, we talked about this. It's not my call. Your job was to bag him, my job was to help. You bagged him, I helped. The guys upstairs are happy. I'm happy. You should be happy. You'll get a new assignment sometime this week."

Matt set Dawkins's flash drive on top of a pile of papers. "What about this?"

Jeff raised an eyebrow. "What's that?"

"A couple of files. I think Dawkins slipped it into my pocket while we were fighting."

"No shit?" Jeff said. He stared at it for a moment, then reached behind his desk, pulled out the Ethernet cord, and disabled the WiFi. That done, he took the drive and popped it into a USB port. "Can't be too careful."

They watched the video together. Jeff grunted, then opened the spreadsheet. "Holy fucking numbers. What is this?"

"That's what I was looking at the other night." Matt showed him and explained the correlation with bonk timetables.

"You realize that Dawkins could have access to the GIP data and just made all this up to fuck with you? You know he's got an inside line somewhere."

"Yeah," Matt said. "That's why I checked with Janet LaLonde. That file is on our servers, behind confidentiality firewall."

Jeff's smirk vanished. "Janet told you that?"

Matt shook his head. "Not on purpose. I gave her some snippets of the code and asked her for the whole file. She told me it was past my pay grade. Level eight or something. So I told her I'd ask you."

"I see." Jeff sat back.

Matt exhaled. "It's not her fault. You understand that she didn't know what or why, only that I wanted it. But note that she didn't say that no such file existed. She said I couldn't have it, and by doing so admitted that it's there to have. So if Dawkins has a mole, it's a Level Eight mole. Who's got Level Eight clearance?"

"Weird," Jeff said. His smirk returned. "Tell you what, buddy, I'll look into it, see if I can get a better handle on that file. I'm Seven-cleared, so I should be able to sort this out, and if I can't I'll pass it up to Frahm." He stood, walked around the desk, and shook Matt's hand. "Thanks for bringing it to me. I can't overstate how much I appreciate the trust you've put in me. Go home, spend some time with Monica. I'll keep you posted."

"But you'll keep my name out of it."

"Of course," Jeff said. Matt didn't leave, so Jeff leaned back on his desk. "Something else?"

"Conor Flynn was my friend. Or I thought he was." Jeff nodded. "And I want to know what happened to him. Dawkins's tattoo matched Flynn's—"

Jeff cut him off with an upraised hand. "Enough, Matt. We've got good people on it, but it's not something that makes sense for you to be working on. First, you're right. Conor was your friend, so you're emotionally compromised. Second, Dawkins is probably screwing with us, and you're letting him get in your head with this bullshit. Third, you've got a bazillion dollars of Gerstner Augmentations that make you a superhuman ass-kicking machine, and this is desk work. Let the research weenies do their jobs while you go out and kick superhuman ass, and when they know, I'll know. And once I know, you'll know."

"You swear it?"

Jeff frowned. "I don't have to swear it, I'm your boss." Then he smiled. "But yeah, I swear to God there will be people looking into this, and when they get to the bottom of it, you'll know. Now go spend a nice couple of paid days off relaxing with your wife. That's an order, buddy."

"Aye, sir," Matt said, and walked out.

He grabbed the mail on the way into the house, shuffling through bills and junk mail and stopping at a large manila envelope from Herr Gottschalk in Dresden. He set the rest of the mail on the deck, leaned against the rail, and tore open the envelope.

He pulled out Gottschalk's business card and a scanned, black-and-white photograph. Nine men stood under a giant swastika circled with German words, the enameled frieze from the stairwell to the Dresden bunker. Circled in red marker, a young man in a windbreaker smiled, one hand in his pocket, the other on the shoulder of the man next to him. With his light hair and dark eyes, he had to be Brian Frahm's grandfather. They could have been twins.

Gottschalk hadn't circled the text beneath the photo. "Joint British-American archeological team, Dresden, Germany, 1958. Photo by Tom Hannes." On the back in severe block letters, Gottschalk had written, "I knew he looked familiar. Uncanny!" Matt frowned, stuffed the photo and envelope in his back pocket, and walked inside.

He stepped through the door, scooped up Ted, and sat down on the couch next to Monica. They chatted about nothings in front of
Family Guy
reruns
—
Bartell's public nuisance hearing, the new cheese counter at the grocery store, winter greens from the farmer's market. He let her presence soothe him into something that resembled but wasn't peace of mind, closed his eyes on an enthusiastic
giggity
and let sleep take him. He woke to the squeak of the deck stair, followed by a strange rumble.

The TV had died. In the pitch black Ted growled again
—
he'd never done that before
—
and Monica stretched, groggy. "Is the power out?" The black-and-white ultraviolet mingled with the green infrared background of the house's ambient warmth. The heat registers glowed a modest, fading orange.

"Looks like it," he said, and leaned in close to whisper in her ear. "Something's wrong. Get the shotgun and lock the door. But go easy."

Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, full of worry. She swallowed, then sat up. "I'm going to bed," she said with too much theater. She stretched on her way to the bedroom, hamming it all the way. Ted followed her, still growling, his tail between his legs. Matt followed her, cutting into the bathroom with feigned nonchalance. He didn't turn on the light.

He ran the sink, flushed the toilet, and used the noise to cover his movements. He pulled the .45 ACP from the holster taped under the sink and chambered a round. His late Uncle Jon's model 1911 from Vietnam, a reliable handgun that had never been fired at another human being. He grabbed both spare box magazines and stuffed them into his back pocket, then closed his eyes and listened.

Faint scratches at the deck door. Frantic barking from the bedroom. "Ted, shut up!" Monica yelled, real fear creeping into her fake annoyance.

He eased the door open and looked at their wedding photo in a gold-painted frame on the wall. It held the only place he'd seen Monica's defiant, "bring it on, world" confidence in a long while, and while circumstance had shattered her, she'd been recovering for years and he loved her more than ever. In the fuzzy IR reflection at least two figures crouched on the deck. He held his breath as they picked the lock. The door slid open, and they stepped into the kitchen.

Matt rounded the corner pistol-first and pulled the trigger. The gun roared, and Matt's vision hazed blue in the afterimage. The first shape crumpled as a double-tap took him in the chest. The second staggered backward and fell off the railing, hot blood spraying orange in the infra-red spectrum. Matt dove through the doorway, snatched the fallen man's suppressed REC7 on his way, and rolled off the deck. A suppressed assault rifle chuffed as he hit the ground, bullets tearing through the underbrush.

As he stood, the second commando gasped for breath behind a pair of night-vision goggles, hot red blood leaking through his body armor. Matt crushed his trachea with a brutal stomp, then snatched a pair of grenades from his bandoleer. With an annoyed, curious grunt he pulled the autoinjector from the man's belt and stuffed it into his pocket. He pulled the pin on one of the grenades and tossed it at the oak by the corner of the house. It bounced off of the trunk and out of sight. The explosion shattered the front windows. Someone yelled for his mom in an anguish-filled voice.

The whispers gibbered their murderous nonsense as he circled around the deck. The screaming man's left leg lay three feet from the rest of him, and steaming liquid gushed from ravaged arteries. The iron tang of blood mingled with the earthy smell of gunpowder. Matt shot him center-of-mass, then choked up the REC7 and fired another burst into the house. Bullets tore through a man that leaned around the wall, and the grenade dropped from his hands.

"Pomegranate!" someone yelled. Another burst dropped a man as he fled for the counter, and Matt shot yet another in the thigh as he turned to run. The man stumbled to his knees next to the grenade, cried out as he scrambled for it, and blew sideways in a spray of shrapnel. His weapon scattered across the floor, some kind of strange air gun.

Matt picked it up and pulled back the breach. He caught the small canister as it ejected, a light metal object with a needle on the front. The serial number engraved on the bottom sifted through Matt's mind and landed on its significance: level-six muscle enhancement. If the needle hit him, he'd bonk in minutes at most. He tossed it across the floor, tore out the magazine and stuffed it into his pocket, and kinked the barrel over his knee.

He crouched and looked for movement, taking the time to reload from a dead man's bandoleer. Six dead and not one of them augged. He unscrewed the suppressor from the REC7.
Except for the aug gun, they used standard ICAP issue, and the man who yelled "pomegranate" had to be either French or French Canadian.
Assuming standard tactical doctrine, there were four left in the squad, and at least one more squad on standby. The whispers clawed at his mind, an orgy of desperate bloodshed.