Joe Ledger (30 page)

Darkness was my weapon to use. Not his.

I heard the fire tower door open.

I heard his growl of anger when he found Bishop. I’d left the security light by the elevator intact for that reason. I wanted Stanky to see what was out there.

I prayed that he’d grab his boss, cut his losses, and bug out.

Nope.

He was a big shape in the gloom.

I crouched down in a cleft between a desk, a wheeled chair, and a file cabinet. He came creeping, letting his pistol lead the way.

“I know you’re in here, dickhead,” he said.

I said nothing.

“When I find you I’m going to rip your balls off. That’s not a joke. I’ve done it before.”

I believed him.

“Make you eat ’em before I—”

I gripped the chair and rammed it at him. There was a lot of desperate energy behind that shove, and I hit him as hard as I’ve ever hit anyone in my life.

He crashed down. The gun went flying into the shadows.

I piled on top of him, needing to end this fast because surprise was the only advantage I had on this brute. I still had the stapler and I smashed it down on his face.

Except he got his forearm up instead and took the hit. He cried in pain, but it wasn’t the kind of cry that said “I’m done.”

Which he proved in the next second by twisting his hips and shoulders into a wild hook punch that caught me over the ear and rang every bell in the world. I went flopping sideways into a metal trash can, sure that my skull was fractured.

With a display of rubbery agility you wouldn’t expect to find in a man of his size, he popped to his feet and came for me. In the dismal light I saw him swing again, so I whipped the trash can at him. His punch collapsed it like it was foil, but the impact deflected his aim. The punch flattened the can against the plastic chair pad under the desk.

I tried for a kick to his nuts, caught him on the thigh, and knocked him back four feet.

That gave me a half a second, so I scrambled up and snatched the first thing I could find on the desk. It was a thick three-ring binder. He swung again. There was no finesse in his punches, just a lot of speed and power.

I shoved the flat of the binder toward him and his knuckles slammed into it. The shock knocked me back against the desk, but he had to have felt it. You can’t punch through a loose-leaf binder filled with a hundred pages of paper. That is, for all intents and purposes, a block of wood. He jerked his hand back, hissing in pain. So I followed the fist back to its source and slapped him forward and back with the binder, rocking his head side to side. He stumbled back two steps, and I reversed the binder so that the covers opened to form a Vee. I rammed that into his throat.

It would have stopped him had it connected.

He got a muscular shoulder up and took the shot, then backhanded me, catching the binder and sending it flying across the room. I narrowly avoided his return shot by back-rolling over the desk. As I landed on the far side I shoved the desk at him, hit him in the thighs, and, as he abruptly bent forward, grabbed the back of his head and slammed him facedown onto the desk. He rebounded from that, and I saw a black line following him. A trail of blood that looked like ink in this light.

With a roar like the gorilla he resembled, he grabbed the edge of the desk and hurled the heavy mahogany aside like it was cheap particleboard from Ikea.

I backpedaled until I hit the desk behind it, hooked the chair with my foot and kicked it at him as he rushed me. It caught him at knee level and he almost fell. I swept the contents of the second desk toward him, hitting him with a bunch of debris that did him no harm at all.

However it gave me a chance to dive for a coatrack closer to the door. He staggered to his feet and swung another punch at me, really putting some hate into it. I swung the wooden coatrack into the arc of the punch and that’s what he hit.

That time I heard his hand bones break.

Nice.

I kicked the base of the coatrack into his groin. It doubled him, but he hugged the rack to his body as he hunched forward, tearing it from my hand. I whirled, fumbling at the desk for something useful. Found a vase and broke that over his left ear. Picked up a couple of paperbacks and slapped them together with his head in the middle, right over his ears.

His scream was ultrasonic. Pretty sure I burst one of his eardrums.

But the son of a bitch kept coming.

He staggered toward me, reaching with long punches, both of us knowing that with his level of strength he only had to hit me once to win this fight.

I pivoted, grabbed a fistful of pencils from a cup and as he came up off the floor at me I slammed my fist down, hoping to get an eye or his face.

I missed both.

Instead I hit right above his collarbone. Right below the sweeping curve of his trapezius muscle. There’s a sweet spot there. The subclavian artery.

On any other person I’d have opened the faucets and he’d have sprayed his life all over the walls.

But Bishop’s science had given him tougher skin and thicker muscle tissue. The pencils stood up like porcupine quills, but not one of them went deep enough.

With a howl of inhuman rage and pain, he tore them out of his shoulder and threw them away. He swung punches left, right, left, right, and I fell back. He was so goddamn strong that even if I blocked him I’d break an arm. I could feel the wind of each punch and the way my heart was beating way too fast.

I dove sideways, rolled, came up onto my toes, and ran for it. He bellowed and ran after. I threw chairs in his path. I ran onto and over desks. I made it all the way to the back office and slammed the door in his face. He burst through it. I don’t mean he rushed through the doorway. He actually exploded the door itself as he slammed into it. Splinters of wood and glass filled the darkened room. I couldn’t see most of them but I could feel them cut me.

I stumbled backward, out of time, out of places to run.

Out of luck.

He backed me all the way into the corner. My shoulders thumped against something I couldn’t see. Draped cloth of some kind. And a shaft of wood.

A flagpole?

In a flash of panic I grabbed the cloth and tore at it, hoping to get the pole. Maybe I could beat him with it. Instead the cloth tore free and the pole fell out of reach.

The office was nearly pitch-black, which gave me a second as he tried to sort out which piece of shadow was my face so he could punch it to goo. I had the cloth.

It was all I had.

I looped it over his head and jerked downward. He bowed forward, and I kneed him in the face. Missed the nose. Got the cheekbone, which hurt like hell. My leg felt cracked and numb. Couldn’t care about that. In the split second while he was still bent over I jumped onto him, shoulder rolling over his back like an acrobat and dropping to my feet so that for a moment we were back to back. The cloth was still around his beck, so I looped one end over my opposite forearm and twisted to create a tourniquet, then I jammed my knee up between his shoulder blades and threw myself backward.

It was a hard damn fall, and he had to weigh two ninety or three hundred. The impact nearly dislocated my hip. I brought my other knee up so I was on the bottom, and he was splayed backward on my shins with the flag cinched tight around his throat. The impact constricted it even tighter and I twisted with every last bit of desperate energy I had.

He had the mass and the muscle. He was genetically engineered to be a superior soldier. Faster and stronger. More durable.

Cutting-edge genetic science made him a monster.

I used one of the oldest bits of practical physics. A turnbuckle. It’s torsion and leverage. Only simpler machine is the wheel.

I turned the cloth loop until he gagged.

Until he choked.

Until there was not enough room inside that loop for a human throat to exist in any useful structure.

And then I tightened it some more.

If the bones and cartilage made any sounds as they collapsed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own screams.

Chap. 9

When I let him go, empty meat fell sideways.

I lay there. Gasping. Hurt. Flooded with adrenaline. Seeing exploding stars in the darkness.

I lay there for maybe a full minute, unable to move.

When I finally peeled myself slowly—so damn slowly—from the floor, all the lights in the building switched back on.

And Echo Team—my own goddamn team—came pouring out of the stairwell, guns up and out, shouting, yelling, staring.

I was covered in blood, naked as an egg, and I still held the coiled flag in my hands.

I looked down at it.

It would have been extremely cool if it was an American flag. Very poetic.

It was from the Rotary Club.

Less poetry. Still effective as a son of a bitch.

Chap. 10

The postscript is brief.

Bishop’s great escape plan was South America, a face job, a false identity, and a villa in Argentina. Bug picked that apart in seconds.

They carted Bishop off to the hospital, and then he headed off to Gitmo for a long, long time of soul-searching and water sports.

He should have taken the deal.

Really should have.

~The End~

NOTE: Parts of this story are set between the novels
Assassin’s Code
and
Extinction Machine
. If you haven’t yet read
Assassin’s Code
, there are some spoilers in this story.

Prologue

They say that gods cease to exist when people stop believing in them.

Others say that the gods of Olympus and Valhalla and all of the other pantheons are merely sleeping, waiting for that one person in whose breast a spark of belief is rekindled.

Secrets are like that. Particularly the kinds of secrets governments hide and people like me kill to either defend or destroy.

A secret doesn’t stop being important because it’s forgotten. Or buried.

These secrets wait like dreaming gods until one person reaches into the darkness to stir them to wakefulness.

Part One

1983

Chap. 1

Les Égouts de Paris

(The Sewers of Paris)

March, 1983

The killer descended from the glimmering lights of Paris into a black underworld of rushing water, stagnant pollution, raw sewage, savage rats, and forgotten bones.

He carried no map, but the route was imprinted onto the front of his mind. He went deeper and deeper into the underworld, carrying with him the tools of his trade. A gun, a knife, a silver garrote, and a mind far colder than the waters that rushed through the bowels of the earth.

It had been the work of four weeks to obtain legitimate permits and credentials from the correct departments within the streets management offices, then copy those documents, and return the originals. If anyone ever checked, everything would be in its proper place. The level of proficiency at which the killer worked was both a source of amusement among his peers and the reason this man had never failed in a field mission. The jokes at his expense—“My grandmother’s slower, but she’s old”—were swapped out of his earshot. Or, at least, so the jokers thought. The killer usually heard what was being said, though through means that were only ever supposed to be used on the Russians or Chinese or North Koreans. Never on the home team.

The killer did not recognize most of his peers as being on the same team as himself. He had a separate and entirely personal agenda that he chose not to share.

Even the members of his own team—none of whom were on this particular mission—knew only what he wanted them to know. Just as his superiors knew only what he wanted them to know, and that included many of the details in his personal file. Most of it was a fabrication that had taken years, much thought, and a great deal of money to construct. Everything there—photos of his childhood, his school records, his medical history, even the samples of blood and hair on file for DNA testing—belonged to other men. Dead men whose lives he had borrowed, combined, and then otherwise erased.

The killer was as certain as he could be that his real name existed in no database in any computer on earth. 

Except Pangaea.

His computer.

A computer the killer had obtained in the way he’d obtained many useful tools in his personal arsenal. He’d killed the man who built it and the men who guarded it.

And then he completely rebuilt the computer to suit his own needs.

Now Pangaea was a killer, too. Like him in many ways. It intruded where it did not belong and destroyed things that were too valuable to let stand. For Pangaea the path of destruction was through the memory banks of other computers. It sought certain information and retrieved it, often deleting the information on the target mainframes, then it deleted all traces of its own presence.

The killer spent a great deal of time erasing all records that a computer system called Pangaea ever existed.

One of Pangaea’s secret weapons was a new feature that the killer had developed and added to its operational system. A subroutine called “Kreskin,” designed to search for patterns and collate any relevant information into a set of projections as close to human intuition and guesswork as a binary computer mind could achieve. At least with the current technology.

That pattern search had located a target the killer had sought for a long time.

It was why he was down here in the sewer.

It was why he was hunting in the darkness like the predator he was.

He moved as quietly as possible, running lightly along the narrow ledges to avoid splashing through the sluggish runoff from last night’s rain. The storm drains were vast, stretching for twenty-one thousand kilometers beneath the sprawl of the city above. These tunnels held the drinking and non-drinking water mains, telecommunication cables, pneumatic cables, and traffic light management cables. Following the tunnels took planning. Getting lost was simple. Dying down here was common.