Waypoint Kangaroo (2 page)

I give Fakey a polite smile and a polite nod. His expression doesn't change. I turn back to face the road, but I feel my cheek muscles relaxing a split second too soon.

Note to self: work on timing. Practice in front of mirror or something.

Maybe Fakey didn't notice. Maybe I can still make it out of here. I lower my foot onto the accelerator, not too hard, pushing the hovercar forward faster but not fast enough to arouse further suspicion. I hope.

I get about half a kilometer down the road before I hear yelling. I don't look back. I just slam the throttle down and head for the hills.

The good news is, this is no longer a suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse, which I am demonstrably terrible at. Now it's a flat-out chase, and I should have the advantage.

Equipment gave me instructions for goosing the hovercar's main drive, and the chemical booster I poured into the fuel tank earlier will give me fifty percent more power. But there's only so much you can squeeze out of an old exotherm engine.

I check the rearview mirror and see a shiny blue atomic shield logo on the front of the vehicle chasing me. Great. They're driving a low-altitude skimmer: electrodynamic vectored thrust. I can't outrun them in this rented rustbucket. I have to disable their vehicle—without killing anyone. Nobody likes spies, but soldiers will hunt down assassins.

We're moving pretty quickly up and down winding mountain roads. Unlike me, the Kazakhs don't have any reservations about opening fire. The bullets whizzing past and ricocheting off the back of the hovercar make it difficult to concentrate, but I sprayed poly compound over the windows and chassis earlier to bulletproof them. All I have to worry about is driving.

I turn east toward my rendezvous coordinates. My pursuers follow. They know they're blowing through two national borders, but why should they care? Nobody in this part of Mongolia is going to complain about a Kazakh incursion into the Gobi Desert. The Mongolians are more worried about China. I'm not going to get any help until I reach my rendezvous, and that's three days out in the middle of sandy nowhere.

The battery light starts blinking on my dashboard. Not a problem. The booster I mixed into the fuel will cause electrical fluctuations. Equipment warned me about that.

But it does give me an idea for how to evade my pursuers.

This is a bad idea,
I think to myself, even as I'm figuring out the tactical details. This low-rent hovercar doesn't have a self-drive system, so I'll have to keep one hand on the wheel while opening the pocket. That'll be tricky. It usually takes a good push to get my arm through the barrier, but I can't lean too far over and still maintain control of the car.

I wait until I hit a relatively straight stretch of road, then think of my reference object—a blackbird—and open the pocket. The circular portal pops open and travels with me, hanging in midair above the passenger seat.

I never thought about the physics of the pocket when I was younger, but Equipment insists that I learn the higher math to describe these phenomena—frame of reference, conservation of momentum, blah blah blah. I keep telling him it doesn't really help me in the field. He doesn't listen.

I push one hand through the glowing white force field covering the portal. It's hard vacuum inside the pocket, which means it's near-absolute-zero cold. My freezing fingers fumble against the insulated bag I'm trying to retrieve from its zero-gravity vault, sending it spinning. I can't see through the barrier, so I have to proceed by touch. I feel the bag strap touch my thumb, and I grip it tight, then wriggle my hand over the frigid material until I'm holding one end of the cylindrical soft-case.

I have to pull it lengthwise through the portal—solid matter obstructs the event horizon, so I can't open the pocket wide enough inside the hovercar to just yank out the whole case willy-nilly. My steering goes wonky. The passenger-side mirror scrapes the side of the mountain and shatters, but I manage to get the case into my lap and close the pocket, then straighten out again.

That was the easy part.

I've never actually used an electromagnetic lance in the field. Still driving one-handed, I unzip the case, pop the lid off the storage tube, and pull out the launcher. It looks like a harpoon gun, but instead of firing a flesh-rending metal hook at an endangered species, an EM lance is designed to penetrate most types of modern vehicle armor and deliver a massive electromagnetic pulse to disable any electronic systems inside. In the case of the guard skimmer, that should include the main thrusters.

I will have to file a whole stack of paperwork when I get back, since this is last-resort equipment. Setting off EMPs in populated areas tends to kill power grids and get you noticed. Spies and their bosses don't like to be noticed. But out here in the mountains, there shouldn't be too many household appliances to disrupt.

Of course, there is still the matter of a piece of high-tech weaponry that will be buried in the engine block of a foreign vehicle, which the Hungarian spy will likely have full access to examine. He won't get any forensic evidence from it, but an EM lance is clearly something from a well-funded government armory. Mercenaries don't stock many nonlethal arms, and certainly not specialized hardware-killers like this.

But there will be reasonable doubt, right? They won't know
exactly
where it came from or who I'm working for. And the most important thing right now is getting
me
out of here safely and securely.

We've already lost one agent on this op. I can still make it home with the item. Losing that, plus all the equipment in my body and the information in my head, would be even worse.

And the pocket. Can't forget the pocket, and all the stuff I have hidden in there.

The EM lance is my best option right now. A bad idea is still better than no idea, that's what I always say.

The saying has yet to catch on with any of my peers within the agency.

I wait until we descend out of the mountains—I'll say one thing for my pursuers, they are persistent—and start driving through the sand. I want to make it as difficult as possible for them to repair their vehicle. I find a flat stretch of desert and let them pull up right behind me.

Even with the heads-up display in my left eye showing me precise angles—calculated off the side mirror reflection, no less—it's very difficult to aim a projectile weapon over my shoulder while driving in a straight line across ground that disappears as soon as the hover effect touches it. It's like piloting a boat through gravel. It doesn't help that the Kazakhs are shooting at me again. How much ammunition did they bring?

I spend precious seconds testing the best place to balance the EM lance, finally settling on the crook of my left arm, which is holding the steering wheel. I put my right index finger on the trigger and tilt the lance up, watching my HUD overlay to see when the projected trajectory lines up with the guard skimmer in the mirror. This is not easy.

A spray of bullets takes out my driver's-side mirror, and now I can't see behind me.

“Fuck it,” I mutter, and whip my head around. They're not trying to kill me. They just want my car to stop moving. I hope.

My HUD blinks, red crosshairs paint the hood of the skimmer, and I pull the trigger.

The launcher kicks back against my palm. The lance flies in a parabola and hits the other vehicle with a loud crack. I don't wait to watch what happens next. I won't be able to see the EMP anyway. Or the expressions on the guards' faces, as much as I might want to.

I turn back, toss the launcher onto the floor, grab the steering wheel with both hands, and stomp the accelerator.

Something rattles behind me, and then I hear a pop, a crunch, and lots of shouting. What I don't hear anymore is the rumble of the skimmer's main thrusters.
Holy shit, that actually worked!

I brace myself for the shooting to start again, but I get all the way up the next sand dune without incident. When the hovercar thumps over the top, I can't resist sticking my head out the window to look back.

The skimmer's half buried in the sand, nose first, and four guards are kneeling on the ground around a fifth who's lying on his back. One of the kneeling guards is struggling to open a red satchel with a white cross on it.

I have enough time, before my hovercar starts sliding down the far slope of the dune, to blink my eye into telescope mode and get a better look at the injured guard. It's Whiskey-Breath, the one I bribed with cash and chocolate. What happened? I don't see any blood …

It's not important. I should just go.
GTFO, Kangaroo.

Never let it be said I'm not an equal opportunity insubordinate: I ignore my own advice just as often as I ignore anyone else's.

I turn the hovercar's steering wheel, still moving but staying on top of the dune to keep the downed skimmer in view. The guard with the medkit rips it open and yanks out a bright orange box. He lifts the lid and extends two spiraling wires leading to round white pads. I recognize the device from my first aid training. It's an automated external defibrillator, used to shock a human heart back to its normal rhythm. But why would they need—

Oh, you gotta be kidding me.

I switch my left eye display over to playback and rewind the live mission recording back to my border crossing. I pause on my body scan of Whiskey-Breath. This time, instead of studying his hand, I look at his torso. And there it is. I thought that glowing outline in his chest was a shoulder-phone, but a phone wouldn't have wires going directly into his heart.

Whiskey-Breath has an artificial cardiac pacemaker. And I just fried it with an EMP.

Also fried? The AED his friends are trying to use now to revive him.

This is an accident. But nobody's going to care about that. The headlines won't read “Elderly Alcoholic Succumbs to Heart Disease”; they'll say “Ugly American Criminal Murders Husband and Father.” Not to mention all the blowback at home will be on me and me alone.

Goddammit. One minute. One minute, then I'm gone.

I picture a grizzly bear in a white lab coat and open the pocket again. I pull out my own emergency AED and dangle it out the window, then turn the hovercar around and steer it back down the dune, toward the skimmer.

The shooting resumes before I get within fifty meters. In hindsight, yelling at the guards to announce my approach probably wasn't the best idea, since I don't speak Kazakh and the insulated therm-pack holding my AED looks an awful lot like an ammo pouch.

I retract my arm inside the hovercar and continue driving closer until a burst of gunfire cracks my windshield. Okay, apparently that's the operational limit of this spray-on poly shield. I pull the steering wheel over hard and toss the AED out the window toward the guards. Two of them dive for cover behind the skimmer.

“It's not a bomb!” I shout over my shoulder while driving away. “Help your friend! Aide! Medico! Medicina! Dottore!” I'm pretty sure those are all real words.

Well, these guys speak the international language of firefight, and they have plenty to say, if not an extensive vocabulary. It's only another minute before I scale the sand dune again and drop out of range, but it's a very unpleasant and stressful sixty seconds.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Earth—United States—Washington, D.C.

Several hours before I would prefer to be awake

Whenever I come home, I'm afraid it's going to be for the last time.

I walk into the building wearing a new suit. It's not my usual attire, but I want to surprise Paul. He always says I should take more care with my appearance—which is ironic, considering all the disguises and aliases we use. But of course he's talking about my appearance and behavior here at home, around the office, in the building.

There are only three people in my department of the agency—on the public budget sheets, we're listed as “Administrative Assistance for Director of Operations, Non-Territorial”—and we report directly to D.Ops. For the last ten years, that title has belonged to Paul Tarkington, code name LASHER, the man who acts as my handler. He's also the closest thing to a father I've had for most of my life.

I don't remember much about my biological parents. They were media historians who died in a vehicle accident on the Nimitz Freeway when I was five years old. The only thing they left me was an extensive archive of two-hundred-year-old entertainment vids, and I watched every one of those shows over and over, hoping to learn something about my mother and father from the annotations that popped up onscreen every once in a while.

Meanwhile, I had no other living relatives, so the great state of California bounced me around orphanages and foster homes for over a decade, until Paul found me on the worst night of my life and rescued me from what I thought was the deepest trouble I could possibly get into.

Now I know better. It takes top secret security clearance to
really
make a mess of things.

The front desk guards give me a funny look as I go through the security gate. They recognize my face, but I know they're thinking, this guy never wears a suit. Is today a special occasion? Are we retaking ID holos for our access badges? Am I doing a very well dressed walk of shame?

I smile to myself after I'm out of sight. I get a kick out of tweaking people's expectations. I walk around the corner to the freight elevator, which I ride down to the basement. Then it's just a short walk to the maze.

One of the two other people in my department is Oliver Graves. His job title is “Equipment Research, Development, and Obtention Specialist,” and the maze was his idea.

I enter a dark room, lit only by fluorescent tubes overhead and crammed full of steel cabinets, cardboard boxes, and plastic crates. Inside these containers are actual paper files. The sign on the door outside says “Archival Document Storage.” It's not a lie. It just doesn't tell the whole story.