Silent Assassin (26 page)

C
HAPTER
58

 

“C
orrect me if I’m wrong, but don’t I have certain rights in this kind of situation?” said Edmund Charles. Morgan hit him hard across the face.

They were at a designated safe house, a small isolated rural home just off the highway, with the broken hulls of cars in the yard. Edmund Charles was in a chair with his hands bound with duct tape. Morgan had commandeered a Ford Escort from a bystander, old enough not to have any kind of GPS tracking, and had gotten his prisoner out of there. Orders had come down from Bloch to take him to the safe house and keep him there until someone came. He was supposed to hold on to the man and do nothing, but Morgan was ignoring that part.

“I think you’re mistaking me for the government.” Morgan hit him across the face once more.

“I am well aware of who you work for, Mr. Morgan.”

Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Not many people who know that name have lived long enough for it to cross their lips too many times.”

“Oh, yes? And how much longer would you wager I have to live?” For a neutral face, Charles looked quite self-satisfied. “Eh, Mr. Morgan?” Each time he said the name, it was a taunt. It said that he knew, and that his family wasn’t safe.

“Not too long,” said Morgan, with satisfaction. “What’s your plan?”

“You mean what
was
the plan? You should know. You managed to stop the shipment before it was distributed.”

“Where’s Novokoff?”

“How should I know?” said Charles, with an exaggerated shrug.

“He works for you.”

“You know yourself that Novokoff has been . . . erratic, of late.”

“He was infected by the fungus you had him steal,” said Morgan.

“So I understand,” said the American. “Although, as it was told to me, that was your fault.”

Morgan backhanded him across the face. “I’m not kidding around here.
Where’s Novokoff?
”

“You know, the fungus seems to be affecting his brain quite a bit,” the man continued, oblivious to the question. “He has sunk to depths of cruelty that even I would not have imagined. I mean, what he tried to do to your poor sweet Jen—”

Morgan grabbed him by the throat and began to squeeze him hard enough that he might have rendered Charles unconscious. Then he released the hold. Charles showed no emotion.

“I’ll rip your head off if you say her name again.”

“Not an ineffective threat, I must say,” said Charles, spitting blood.

“Maybe you should be working harder to get on my good side.”

“What do you suppose is going to happen here?” asked Charles.

“You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or you will feel pain that you can’t imagine.”

The American laughed airily. “Sadly, no. Let
me
tell
you
how it will happen. You will not be allowed to keep me here. They are going to tell you that they have their own facilities, their own interrogators. They are going to take me away and you will never see me again. You may believe them when they tell you that they extracted whatever information it was possible to extract, and then disposed of me. But they will never prove it to you. They don’t care. And you will always have that twinge of doubt. What if they let me go?”

“Why the hell would they let you go?” asked Morgan.

“Because, Mr. Morgan. I have friends in places so high you cannot even see them.”

“Why don’t you tell me about them?” said Morgan.

“Oh please, you don’t actually expect me to—” Morgan punched him in the gut before he could finish. Edmund Charles retched.

“No,” said Morgan. “I mostly just wanted to distract you before I did that.”

“Very droll,” said Charles. “But I do have one more thing I have to offer you. An offer you may not want to reject.”

“What is it?” asked Morgan.

“I can tell you who you’re working for. I can tell you what Aegis is. I can see I caught your attention. You’ve been wondering about that, haven’t you, Morgan? Tell me, does it keep you up at night? I can take all that doubt away. Let me go, Morgan, and
I’ll tell you what Aegis is
.”

If anything did keep him up at night, it was this. Who was he working for? Whose interests was he serving? And here he was, someone willing to tell him. To give him all the answers.

“You don’t know anything.”

“No, Morgan.
You
don’t know anything. You play your little spy games as if you had some choice about the future, about what happened and how things turned out. Newsflash. You’re just a pawn. An expendable piece on the frontline. And behind your actions aren’t kings. They are
players
. And until you realize that, you’ll never be a player yourself. You’re going to continue to be played until someone decides that you’re a reasonable sacrifice to make to save a truly important piece.”

Morgan backhanded Charles across the face again.

“You’ve got nothing,” Morgan said. “Nothing but bullshit.”

Morgan heard a car pulling up outside, the wheels crunching the gravel and coming to a stop.

“Oh?” said Charles expectantly. “What’s that I hear? I do believe it’s the chariot that’s going to take me out of here.”

Morgan pulled out his gun and held it against Charles’s head, his hand trembling with rage. Charles laughed.

“What are you going to do, Cobra? Kill me?”

“It would certainly put an end to all this,” said Morgan.

“Will it now? Novokoff’s still out there.”

The front door opened with a long creak and Diana Bloch and Mr. Smith walked into the room.

“What exactly are you doing, Morgan?” demanded Bloch.

“Interrogating the prisoner,” he said.

“You were
not
to do anything before we arrived,” said Bloch.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Morgan has been treating me very well,” Charles said blithely. “He’s been introducing me to the back of his hand. I can say that we’re pretty well acquainted by now.”

“Let’s get him back to Zeta,” said Bloch. “Morgan, would you escort him to the car?”

“Let me propose a deal first,” said Charles.

“Screw you,” said Morgan.

“It’s time sensitive and good for right now only!” said Charles. “I don’t doubt your . . . persuasiveness. I’m sure you’ll get me to say everything and more, eventually—ah, and that ‘and more’ is really the tricky part, isn’t it? But never mind, not here. Here, I offer you a one-time deal.”

“We’re listening,” said Bloch.

“I give you Novokoff and you let me go,” said Charles.

“He’s diseased,” said Bloch. “He’s going to die anyway.”

“I know what the fungus does,” said Charles. “It will make him more and more violent.”

“It’ll also kill him,” said Bloch.

“That it will,” said Charles. “But who knows how long the serum is going to keep him alive? And Novokoff is a man who can cause quite a bit of violence under normal circumstances. Imagine what he could do, filled with rage and knowing for a fact that he is going to die?”

Put like that, even in his own anger, it sent a chill down Morgan’s spine.

“Then there’s the matter of his disease. A bit contagious, isn’t it? Enough, probably, to kill, what, thirty, forty percent of the population of any place where it took hold?”

Bloch looked at Smith with an uncertain face. Smith offered no emotion.

“The clock’s ticking,” he said.

“You’re not actually thinking about this, are you?” Morgan asked.

“Why should we trust you?” Bloch asked Charles.

“Oh, you don’t think I actually want to cause a mass outbreak of this fungus, do you?”

“It’s what you tried before,” she said.

“That was for
profit
. And that whole plan is shot to hell now, isn’t it? There’s no use destabilizing the market if I don’t get to make money out of it. Trust me—” Morgan scoffed. “
Trust me
. I would personally much prefer if Novokoff were captured and killed. There is nothing that he could reveal that could do more harm than has already been done.”

“What do you want?” asked Smith.

“Simple,” he said. “My freedom.”

“I can guarantee your freedom if we find Novokoff,” said Smith.

“What good are guarantees? You are not the government. You have no constraints on your actions.

“What can I offer you, Mr. Charles?” asked Smith. “A helicopter? A plane?”

“There’s nothing you can offer me that you can’t arrange a trap for me,” said Charles. “Unless it happens now. I want the car you came in. I’ll give you his location as I drive away.”

“You must think we’re stupid,” said Morgan.

“I have no reason to hide his location from you. I
want
him killed. But it’s my only bargaining chip. That is my offer. And trust me, it expires very, very soon.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bloch.

“Novokoff will act soon. You know it and I know it. You need all the time you can get. Let me go, and you have your information now.”

Bloch looked at Smith, who nodded in assent.

“You can’t be serious,” Morgan said, exasperated.

“Quiet, Dan,” said Bloch. “This is not your decision to make. I think we have a deal, Mr. Charles.”

Morgan’s mind burned with anger. “He’s as responsible as Novokoff for what he did to my wife.”

“The question is, Cobra,” interjected Charles, “do you want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands?”

Bloch pulled Morgan aside. “Look, Morgan, I’m sorry, but there’s a greater good to consider here. You need to keep your feelings in check.”

“Mr. Charles, you may have my keys,” said Smith. “Morgan, would you cut him free?”

Morgan shot Smith the stink eye. Then he took out his knife and, resisting the urge to sink it into the man’s chest, cut the tape that was holding him to the chair.

“Thank you,” said Charles. “And I’ll thank everyone to leave their guns inside. I’m looking for a clean getaway here.”

Morgan put his Walther on the counter, and Bloch added a small snub-nosed revolver. Smith had nothing to place there. They all walked outside, and Smith gave his car keys to Charles. He got into Smith’s Mitsubishi, started the motor and then lowered the window.

“He’s in New York. He’s planning something for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Something big. That’s all I know. Now, please kill him for me.” He began to accelerate. “So long, and thanks—”

Before he could get the sentence out, Morgan had drawn his backup gun from its ankle holster, an Airweight nickel-plated Smith and Wesson two-inch revolver, and shot Charles clean through the head. The car accelerated blindly and crashed into a tree. Bloch and Smith just looked at him speechlessly. Morgan put away his gun and walked back into the house.

C
HAPTER
59

 

“W
hat the hell were you thinking, Morgan?” Bloch asked.

Bloch’s office, opaque glass, being chewed out. Nothing new for Morgan.

“Do you really believe we would simply have let him go?” asked Bloch. She was sitting close to him, facing him with those cold blue eyes of hers.

“Yes,” said Morgan. “I really do.”

“We had a helicopter standing by. We would have used satellite surveillance.”

“And still he would have gotten away, like he got away before.”

“Maybe,” Bloch admitted. “But even so. Do you think he was working alone? There’s something bigger behind this. And Edmund Charles was our only link to it. He was valuable even out of our grasp. Something lost can be found. But now he’s dead, and we have no way of tracing whoever is behind him.”

“Somehow, I can’t be too sorry to have killed a mass murderer,” said Morgan. “His bosses can wait. We’ll come for them too.”

“If we ever find out who they are,” said Bloch. “You’re not off the hook for this, Morgan. But luckily for you, this isn’t over yet. We still need to find Novokoff. It seems Shepard has something he wants to show us.” She hit the button on the intercom. “Shepard. War room.”

Morgan and Bloch walked down to the war room and sat at the table. Shepard waltzed in seconds later. “You’re gonna like this one,” he said.

“What is it?” asked Bloch.

“It’s a system I devised.” He clicked something in his hand, and the screen lit up. It showed a picture of a face. “It uses existing facial recognition software, which is itself pretty amazing.” Red dots appeared on different points of the face, including the cheekbones and the corners of the eyes and lips. “It uses a multipoint system to extrapolate a 3-D model of the—”

“Shepard,” said Bloch. “Focus.”

“Okay. So. This face recognition can be completely automated, and a powerful enough computer can analyze hundreds of faces per second. But the problem is, then, what are you going to analyze? Traffic and surveillance cameras are generally still too grainy, the definition isn’t good enough for the program. But.”

“But?” prodded Bloch.

He clicked the device again, and brought up a screen capture of a page from a popular social networking site. It showed the personal picture gallery of a person Morgan didn’t know. “What we have is photographs. An unprecedented volume of photographs being uploaded and shared on the Internet, out there where everyone—or at least, I—can see. But that, of course, isn’t enough. Every picture has embedded in it a good amount of metadata, including the date and time it was taken. More importantly for us, pictures taken on GPS-enabled phones can pinpoint the exact location where the photograph was taken as well.”

“So if a picture gets taken with Novokoff in the background—”

“We will know the location and time when it was taken, and so get an estimated position on him,” Shepard concluded.

“On a day like St. Patrick’s in New York, people are going to be taking pictures left and right. This might actually work.”

“And
that
,” said Shepard, “is why it pays to have a genius on your side.”