Swords of Exodus [Dead Six 02] (7 page)

One giant hand clamped onto my forearm. I looked up from the brass pile. “Hector, listen to me. You might not believe me now, but no matter what somebody has done in their past, they can be forgiven. They can make up for what they’ve done. There still needs to be justice, and that person has to pay for what they’ve done first, but anyone can be redeemed. Just remember that.”

I went back to picking up brass. “That’s insane.”

“He’s insane.”

“Obviously.” Ling’s voice. “Unfortunately we need him. We don’t have the numbers for a frontal assault.”

“They might kill Valentine as soon as we attacked anyway. No, you’re right, Ma’am. If we’re going to free him, then we need this man, even if he is unpredictable,” Antoine responded. “Did you think he was bluffing?”

“A Godless, self-absorbed narcissist like him would never willingly sacrifice his life for the sake of others, much less in a childish attempt to prove a
point
. Frankly, I’m rather surprised that the fact his brother is in danger was enough to compel him to do this,” Ling responded with some contempt. “However, he’s very good at what he does. His reputation indicates that.”

“Everything we have heard about this Lorenzo says that he’s a ghost. He can go anywhere. The fact that we happened to encounter his brother, just when we needed a man like him, is I think, providence. Please let me speak to him.”

I didn’t recognize the latest voice, and it was close. I groaned as I cracked open my eyes. The side of my head throbbed and the light streaming through the plane’s windows stabbed through my eyeballs and into my brain. The speaker was sitting across from me, a concerned look on his face. I was still in my chair.

Albert Einstein
?
I thought groggily. He was an older man, with wispy strands of white hair poking out from around his ears, and a mustache like a boot-brush. He studied me from behind his thick glasses. He was actually wearing a bow tie.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a thick German accent. “I am Dr. Bundt.” He was holding my STI 9mm casually in his bony fist, pointed toward my chest. “I’m afraid Shen hit you a little hard. I apologize for getting off on the wrong foot, but you were threatening to blow us up.” His smile seemed genuine.

“Who’re you?” The lump on my head hurt like a son of a bitch. Ling and Antoine were seated around me. Shen must have gone up front, behind the curtain. Brilliant Caribbean clouds scrolled past the windows.

“As I say, I am Dr. Bundt. I oversee the treatment and well-being of those unfortunate souls that we rescue. As you may expect, I have gained some experience in helping people.”

“Ironic,” I said, nodding toward my gun.

“Oh, this?” He turned it around and held it out to me. I glanced toward Ling and Antoine, waiting to see which one was going to shoot me first, but neither moved. “Go on, take it.” He shook it slightly. I took the gun slowly, the textured grip was familiar and comforting. I didn’t do anything stupid, figuring that they had probably unloaded it while I was out. I reholstered without looking. “No more of the threats, yes? We have a common goal. Both of us want to see your brother rescued. He is very well respected in our organization now. He was most insistent that rescuing Mr. Valentine should be our first priority.”

“My brother, the
Fed
, is friends with a bunch of terrorists?” I snorted.

“I see there is much about your brother you do not know,” he said. “I think you will be very surprised when you see him next. In any case, if I were you, I’d be careful about using the word
terrorist
, Mr. Lorenzo. Is it not true that you were the right hand of Eduard Montalban?”

I rubbed the knot on my head, not wanting to argue. Hopefully Shen at least broke a finger or something. “Will you
please
tell me what is so important about that kid?”

“Mr. Valentine is one of us, though only in an honorary sense.”

“One of you? When did that happen?”

“Mexico,” Ling injected harshly. “A few years ago. He saved many lives, including mine.”

Touched a nerve there.
Ling had a personal stake in Valentine, and always looking for an angle, I filed that potentially useful information away for later.

Dr. Bundt continued. “In any case, that fact was irrelevant to your brother. For him, young Mr. Valentine was far more important than that. Bob believes Valentine was the key to something very important, something which could have grave repercussions for all mankind.”

“And what would that be?”

“This I do not know. All he was able to convey to us was that there are powerful forces moving right now, and that something inside Mr. Valentine’s head may be the crux of it all.” Dr. Bundt shrugged his bony shoulders. “I do not know any more than that, I’m afraid. Once we rescue your brother you can ask him yourself. He was most adamant, though, that we need to get Mr. Valentine back alive.”

“I wouldn’t get too worked up either way.” That stupid kid getting himself captured in Virginia could have compromised everyone that he’d been involved with, including me and Jill. If I found him alive I was going to choke the shit out of him.

“So what do you say, Mr. Lorenzo? We cannot complete this mission if we are at each other’s throats.”

“Fine. But understand this, Doc. You people fuck with me and I’ll kill you all.”

Ling smiled as if she’d just thought of something funny, then stood up. “This is going well,” she said, and went forward.

VALENTINE

I’m having the strangest dream.

The images were confusing at first, but soon they formed a thread, a narrative, a story.
My
story. On some level I knew the thoughts were my own, but they felt unfamiliar and half-remembered. A memory of a memory.

I stood in a palatial bedroom, not sure of when I was there. An ornate, four-poster bed sits against one wall. Above it hangs a hideous painting of some tentacled monstrosity devouring a girl.

I’m not focused on the painting, though. A girl hangs from the ceiling by her bound hands. Her night-black hair is wet with blood. Her body has been ruined, mutilated, split open and dissected. She stares at me, judging me, damning me from empty sockets. The holes where her eyes should have been are black pits, so deep and dark that I fall right into them. I want to look away, but the darkness calls to me, invites me to give myself up to it.

I answer its call, and down I go, into the abyss.

You’re a natural-born killer, boy.
The words sound different this time, almost mocking me. Who had said that to me? What does it mean? I couldn’t remember. I was lost in the darkness and couldn’t find my way.

I found myself on a dusty trail in Afghanistan, next to a wall made of mud. The village around me is desolate and empty. I am utterly alone. My only companion is a dead body, laying in the dirt next to me, wrapped in a poncho.

I can’t see her face, but I know it’s Arlene Chambers.. We’re waiting for a helicopter that wasn’t coming. I look down at her unmoving form and place a hand on it. It’s like touching a piece of driftwood, cold and dead.

It should have been me.

Why am I still alive?

Am I?

I cover my face with my hands, and the ancient, immutable dust and rocks of Afghanistan, witness to thousands of years of bloodshed, fade away. I am back in the abyss, and again, I welcome it.

Before I realize what’s happening, I’m in a small village somewhere. I’ve been here before, but I can’t remember when. This time I’m not alone. It’s dark, but there are fires, enough of them that I can see. People are running for their lives. Men, women, children alike, fleeing in terror.

There’s noise, gunfire. A large armored truck, an MRAP, slowly rolls through the village. A faceless machine gunner in the turret mows down anything that moves in front of him. Men in uniforms, carrying rifles, walk alongside it, shooting.

Why are they killing all these people?

I see a few more men, coming up behind the vehicle. These men are bulkier, stronger, and wear armor. One carries a FAL rifle in his hands, and shoots a terrified old man as he runs down the street.

Stop it! Why are they doing this? Who are these people?

The shooter with the FAL rifle is undeterred, unaware of my pleas. He reloads his rifle, quickly and smoothly, and fires again. A car pulls out into the street, desperately trying to get away, but it’s no use. The machine gunner and the man with the FAL rifle tear into it. It rolls to a stop, crunching against a wall, its passengers’ lives having been snuffed out.

I move closer to the man with the FAL, furious now. I don’t know what’s going on, but I desperately want to make him hear me. I’m like a ghost, silent, invisible. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

STOP IT!

The man with the rifle is aware of me now, somehow. He turns to face me, a cruel smile on his face. “Stop what?” he asks. His voice is familiar. It’s mine. He’s
me.

No! I didn’t do that!

“Didn’t you?” he asks, still smiling. His voice sounds distant, like an echo. I look down, and now the rifle is in my hands. It’s still hot to the touch. I can feel the heat of the fires, smell the exhaust of the truck, and hear the screams and gunfire clearly.

No!
I protest.
It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill all those people!

The ghastly mirror image grins at me malevolently. “You did kill a lot of people. You’re a natural-born killer, remember? This is your natural environment.”

The burning village is gone, and suddenly I’m in a helicopter. Dim red lights provide all the illumination I have. My .44 Magnum revolver is in my hand. Rafael Montalban is in front of me, on his knees, with a surprised look on his face. I fire, the gun bucking in my hand. Before he can scream, I kick him out of the aircraft. He falls away into the darkness and disappears.

The other one is next to me again, whispering in my ear. “It’s what you do. It’s
all
you do.”

No . . . please stop. God, please, make it stop.

He laughs darkly. “God can’t find you here. It’s just you and me.”

Leave me alone!
I scream, in silence. The other is gone then, and I’m alone, floating in a void.

Is this hell?

I don’t know how long I wondered that, but I wasn’t afraid. After a while, I felt nothing at all. I drifted alone in darkness for ages, wondering about my state, but only barely. I was detached, wholly separate from myself, and I didn’t have it in me to care. No one else did, why should I?

Suddenly I was aware of my body again. I’d returned to my corporeal form. My arms and legs began to feel heavy. My back was against warm metal. I was lying on something. Muffled sounds pierced the blackness. Metallic sounds, then voices. Then there was light, blinding white light. With the light, my skin felt cold, and I began to shake.

I didn’t know what was happening. I still couldn’t see anything. But one clear voice pierced the confusion, a cold, dispassionate woman’s voice.

“Log that as eighteen hours, thirty-six minutes in the tank,” Dr. Silvers said.

“That’s amazing,” a nasally man’s voice replied. “I wasn’t sure we’d be able to keep the program going for that long.”

“Neither was I,” Dr. Silvers said. “Mr. Valentine keeps exceeding our expectations.”

The last image that crosses my mind, before mercifully losing unconsciousness, is of the sky, on fire.

LORENZO

Somewhere over Texas

February 8th

I looked up from the file in my hand, rubbed my eyes, and glanced out the window. Brown fields stretched for miles below. Somewhere down there was where I had been born. Somewhere to the east was where I had been taken in and raised by the Lorenzo family. Ling was sitting across from me, the folding plastic table in between us.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

“Tough, but doable. This is pretty detailed information about the security at North Gap.” We had floor plans, an incomplete list of personnel files, and even some intercepted e-mail traffic from somebody named Dr. Silvers. “How’d you get this?”

“Your brother gave it to me,” she said simply. “Once he found out that we wanted to rescue Valentine, he provided everything. He has been looking into this secret organization, which he referred to as Majestic, for quite some time.”

“And how exactly did you come into contact with Bob?” Ling was silent. She could tell I was fishing. “Fine. Be like that. What other resources do we have?”

“You’re looking at them.” She gestured at the others on the plane. “My sword is the only one which can be spared at this time.”

“Sword?”

“An Exodus strike team. Most of our people are occupied with other operations.” She didn’t seem inclined to elaborate further.

“Flight plan?”

“We will be landing at a small airfield in Montana, approximately two hundred miles from the target. Dr. Bundt and Elvis will stay with the plane.” Elvis was the pilot. I’d only seen him briefly, and he didn’t seem to be the talkative sort. “We will need to secure secondary transportation from there.”

“I’ve boosted a few cars in my day, won’t be a problem.”

“I imagine.”

“Have you thought about our getaway? How you’re going to get Valentine out of the country? These Majestic assholes may be illegitimate, but they have full access to all of the investigatory powers of one really big-ass government machine. If Valentine’s important enough to get locked in a secret prison, they’re going to be pissed off when they find out he’s gone.”

She shook her head. “This has all been rather . . .
hasty
. I’m still not sure how we’re going to get Valentine out without them killing him.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll come up with something. I always do.”

Chapter 3: The Princess of Montana

LORENZO

Bozeman, Montana

February 10th

“You’re serious.
This
is your plan?” Ling was incredulous.

I held up the spaghetti-strapped tank top and the denim miniskirt. “Come on. You need to look the part.”

Ling glanced around the Walmart, embarrassed. She caught the skimpy top when I tossed it to her. “This is . . .” she looked at the tag, “a size too small.”

“Changing room is right over there.” I nodded my head.

“But . . .”

“Look. I know you don’t trust me but you need to work with me here. We’re going to an oil roughneck town in the middle-of-nowhere Montana, not the French Riviera. So unless you want to put Antoine in drag, this is the best I can come up with.”

Antoine grunted.

Ling gave me a dirty look and went into the changing room.

“I hope your boss can lighten up for this,” I told Antoine, “or at least fake it. She’s a little intense.”

Antoine folded his massive arms and glared at me. Over the last few days I had discovered that he was very protective of Ling. She was clearly his superior, but he seemed almost like a father figure. Shen, on the other hand, was a cipher. He hardly ever spoke. He stood a short way away from us, and seemed to be uncomfortable shopping at Walmart at two o’ clock in the morning. Every freak, junkie, and crazy in Bozeman was wandering around the huge store, making a nuisance of themselves as the hapless employees tried to buff the floors and restock the shelves.

“You are from here?” Antoine asked me out of the blue.

“Not here, specifically. Born and raised in the US. Only been back briefly a handful of times over the last few years . . . And every time it seems a little bit worse, a little rougher.”

“Indeed.” Antoine looked around the gigantic store filled with more food and goods in one night than whatever West African village he hailed from had probably seen in its history. He chuckled, surely thinking
whatever you say, fat American. First world problems.
“Times are hard.”

I may have detached myself from the world, didn’t mean I didn’t pay attention to current events, especially those that could present job opportunities. I was retired, not dead. “The economy is shit, but this country has bigger problems.”

“I do not understand.” Antoine looked to his partner. Shen as usual had nothing to say. “Compared to most of the world, this place is a paradise.”

“Listen . . .” It was hard to explain. “I’ve lived in every shit hole on Earth, and they’re all the same. It pisses me off to see the same thing creeping in here. There are always assholes who want to hurt the regular people, and then along come the control freaks who want to capitalize on fear of the scary assholes to control the regular people. The scary assholes just don’t care, so repeat, repeat, repeat. Government’s like a ratchet, and it just keeps on cranking down. This isn’t the country I grew up in anymore. People got too scared of the assholes so now the ratchet’s getting real tight. People think they’re trading chaos for order, but they’re just trading normal human evil for the really dangerous organized kind of evil, the kind that simply does not give a shit. Only bureaucrats can give you true evil.”

“Exodus stands against any entity which would deprive man of his freedom.”

I laughed. “Good luck with that. My brother and Valentine exposed a rogue federal agency killing folks and breaking every law you can think of. It was a big deal. They called it Zubaragate. It was all over the news for a couple of weeks, but what changed since?”

“Nothing.” Antoine admitted.

“Nothing. Valentine’s in prison and Bob’s missing, and not a damn thing changed, because a majority of the people are stupid, willfully ignorant, naïve fools, who expect bureaucrats to save them and wipe their asses for them, and the ratchet just keeps on getting tighter.”

“I am surprised this offends you.”

I glanced over at him. Antoine was smarter than he looked. I had said too much. These people weren’t my friends. They didn’t deserve a look inside my head. “Yeah . . . Too much control. Too many people watching. I don’t like people watching me.” My phone vibrated in my pocket, interrupting my thoughts. It was Reaper.
Good.
This conversation was starting to piss me off. I tapped the Bluetooth headset in my ear.

“Go,” I said.

“Go where?”

I sighed. “What do you want, Reaper?”

“I got Bob’s file, and some other stuff. I’m sending it to you now.” My phone buzzed in my hand as it downloaded the data packet. At least the cell service was better than it used to be.

“How much did you get?”

“Not as much as I wanted, Chief. I went in sideways, compromised another agency’s system, gave myself the title of personnel manager, then requested some files. Tried to stay away from anything that would be classified, good thing too, ‘cause once I did the whole system came crashing down. They were on me hard. I was lucky to get what I did. Bob’s file was flagged.”

“Of course it was. Did they track you?”

“Please. I’m The Reaper.” He was always
The
Reaper when he was bragging. “Get this,” he continued. “Bob was fired from the FBI. He went off the reservation, disobeyed a direct order, was working on a forbidden investigation, stuff like that.”

This just kept getting better and better. “What the hell did Bob get himself into? Did they find out about his involvement with our incident last year?”

“I don’t know. The reprimands and personal notes weren’t classified. He was looking into something they told him not to look into. He tried to gain access to compartmentalized data. He pissed somebody off, that’s for sure. It’s no wonder he left the country. These people are scary.”

Reaper was just telling me like it was, but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. So I changed the subject. “How’s Jill doing?”

“She’s a little freaked out. Worried about you, but she’s okay. By the way, did I ever tell you there are some
seriously
hot girls on your island? Dude! I’m gonna have to get a vacation place out here. You want me to go wake up Jill?”

“No. I’ll call her later.”

“Hey, one more thing. Check this out.” My phone vibrated again as Reaper sent me another file.

“What is it?”

“You wanted me to find everything I could on Valentine, right? Just look. You’re going to love this.”

What now?
I retrieved my phone from my pocket and tapped the screen. I pulled up the image Reaper sent me. It was a picture of the cover of an issue of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine from several years ago. The screen was too small to read all of the print. The cover photo was a group of men in Tiger Stripe camouflage fatigues, carrying FAL rifles.

“What is this?”

“Just what it looks like. That’s our buddy Valentine on the cover of
Soldier of Fortune
.”

The cover headline read, “Switchblade Teams: Elite Special Purpose Units from Vanguard in Action!”

So that’s why he’d been tight with Hawk . . . That tight-lipped old bastard had once been his boss. We’d worked for the same bunch, only I’d been there back before they’d gone all corporate and legitimate. “Unbelievable. Have you found anything else out?”

“Oh, tons. He’s never been careful about information management. Between that and the Dead Six files that got dumped during Zubaragate, I found everything on him, easy. It’s all there.”

“Thanks. I’ll go through it when I have time. I’ll check in later.” I dropped the phone back in my pocket as Ling came out of the dressing room. I cracked a mean grin and whistled. The outfit was just as sleazy as I hoped. And Ling certainly had the body for it.

“I look like a Bangkok whore,” she said, awkwardly trying to pull the too-short skirt down a little farther. The revealing top she was wearing had
Princess
written across it in pink bubble letters.

“Yes,
Princess
, yes you do. It’s perfect. Now if you could just try not to be so scary all the time, we might be able to pull this off.”

Shen and Antoine were stonefaced. They looked at each other, at their superior, at me, and then back at each other. Ling glared at them.

“Not a word!” she snapped, spun around, and stomped back into the changing room. “So help me
God
, Mr. Lorenzo.”

VALENTINE

North Gap, Montana

Seated in my usual spot on the floor, I stared into space and tried not to think. My head hurt. My mind was sluggish. I felt like I had just woken from a dream. Or maybe I was still dreaming. I couldn’t always tell.

They had put me in the machine they called
the tank
multiple times now. I had only the dimmest recollection of it. It seemed to me that they drugged me before putting me inside it, but they had been drugging me so much the drugs didn’t always work anymore. I remembered a mask being put over my entire face, covering my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Something else was wrapped around my waist. Other things were plugged into my body, and they’d put me in.

I wasn’t sure what the machine did but I knew that somehow Dr. Silvers was drilling into my mind. I’d have vivid dreams, frighteningly real dreams, that seemed to come from someone else. I knew things that I hadn’t known, and had forgotten other things altogether. I lowered my head and rubbed my temples. Trying to make sense of anything just made my head hurt worse. I didn’t know why they just didn’t kill me and be done with it.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. It wasn’t just combat boots on the cold concrete floor, though. I heard the click of pumps and the shuffling of sneakers. I didn’t move as they unlocked my door. I didn’t stand up. I merely looked up dispassionately, and wondered what they wanted with me now.

Smoot entered first, followed by Davis. They were dressed in black fatigues and black combat boots. Smoot drew a taser from a brown plastic thigh holster and leveled it at me. A red laser dot appeared on my chest. He fanned out to the side, keeping the laser on me, as Davis went the other way, armed with a baton. There was another guard waiting in the hall as backup.

Dr. Silvers entered the room next, rolling her eyes and shaking her head slightly at the overt display of force. It was plain to see that she held her security force in some contempt. As usual, she was dressed in slacks, a turtleneck sweater, and low pumps. A wrinkled white lab coat completed her look, as if she were beating us all over the head with the fact that she was a doctor of some sort.

Behind her was Neville, her assistant and toady. A thin, wiry man with unkempt hair, Neville had a nasal voice and seemed extremely awkward in all of his interactions with other people, especially the guards. When she didn’t have him doing other things, he followed Dr. Silvers around like a beaten dog, espousing platitudes about her brilliance. I couldn’t tell if she enjoyed his sycophancy or merely tolerated it.

She stood over me for a moment without saying anything. This whole thing was very unusual. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d talked to her when I wasn’t doped up or restrained.

“I’m not going to get up, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

She didn’t respond. She just exchanged a glance with Neville, then crouched down so she could be face to face with me. “How are you feeling today, Michael?”

I blinked rapidly. “How am I feeling?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I feel like I went on a bender, ate a bunch of mushrooms, then got roofied. What the hell have you been doing to me?”

Dr. Silvers did something unusual then. She kicked her shoes off, then sat cross-legged on the floor, facing me, like she was addressing a frightened child. The two guards looked at each other with stupid expressions on their faces.

“When you first arrived,” Dr. Silvers began, “my organization was in a state of panic. My superiors didn’t know what to do with you. Project Heartbreaker had utterly failed. Then the worst breach of information security in our organization’s history occurred. It quickly became apparent that your Dead Six superior, Curtis Hunter, was the man who compiled all of that damaging information. From that information, though, we learned that Gordon Willis had betrayed us and was secretly in league with Eduard Montalban. The team sent to bring in Willis found him dead by your hand. Tell me, Michael, what were we to think?”

I didn’t say anything.

Dr. Silvers didn’t let my lack of participation in the conversation faze her. “As I said, they were in a state of panic. Gordon Willis had proceeded on Project Blue without any authorization from our superiors.”

“I don’t know what Project Blue is,” I managed weakly. I’d told them that a hundred times.

“I know you don’t, Michael. Unfortunately, you killed Gordon Willis, the last man we could locate that knew anything about Project Blue. My superiors were convinced you were in on his plot with the Montalbans.”

“I’m not
in
on anything,” I said. “I killed Gordon because he fucking deserved it.”

Dr. Silvers put an icy hand on my forearm in an attempt to be comforting. I almost flinched at her touch. “I know that now. We’ve learned everything you know and it isn’t anything more than we already know. The only other people alive who might know, like your friend Bob Lorenzo, have gone to ground.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. I didn’t remember ever telling her about Bob. I had been sure that despite everything they’d done to me, I hadn’t given him up. I was wrong. I’d betrayed him. Who else had I given up? Hawk? Ling? Lorenzo? Well, screw Lorenzo, but Jill? I felt sick, and lowered my eyes. Dr. Silvers regarded me silently for a few moments, until I was able to speak.

“I don’t understand,” I managed. “Why am I still here? I told you I didn’t know what you wanted to know. What do you want from me?”

“To be honest, we established that you’d been telling us the truth some time ago. We so desperately hoped you could tell us who Colonel Hunter’s Evangeline was. Once it became apparent that you were of no value in that regard, my superiors wanted you liquidated. Just one more loose end tied up.”

“Then why haven’t you killed me yet?”

Dr. Silvers leaned in closer. She stared me in the eyes. “Because you have such potential, Michael. You are an exceptional individual, and you’ve already done great things for our organization. Your record from Project Heartbreaker is phenomenal. The fact that you survived Gordon Willis’ attempt to sanitize the operation speaks volumes about your abilities, to say nothing of the fact that you managed to track him down and kill him all on your own. All of that natural talent, that drive, needn’t go to waste.”