Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset (107 page)

***

Ben sat on the edge of the bed and gripped the sides with both hands, his knuckles a pale sheet of white. The room around him was an improvement over his previous accommodations. A bed, sink, shower, and television that didn’t work were his gifts for betraying his sister, along with the agreement that for every answer he gave to the questions asked, he would receive one minute with his children.

When Ben finally saw them, he broke down, squeezing them until they wiggled away from him. He kissed his wife, who cried as hard as he did. The kids touched the bandages on his face, asking if he was okay, to which he told them he was fine. He couldn’t remember how much time he had with them, but it was over quickly. Two guards had to come in and escort him out, and that’s when his children started crying.

Today, he was told he would get to see them again. And he waited. Despite his fatigue, he hadn’t gotten an ounce of sleep the night before. He’d tossed and turned, rolling back and forth on the clean sheets, waiting for the morning to come. There was no clock in the room, and despite the bed and bathroom, he still didn’t have a window. The lack of the reference of time had caused the seconds to drag for eternity.

The door to his room cracked open, and Ben jumped to his feet. He made a few short steps forward, smiling, then stopped abruptly when he saw two stone-faced guards enter. They stood there, silently, until one of them extended a digital tablet.

“I was told I would see my children again. In person.” He stood there, defiantly clenching his fists, and he could feel his resolve shake a bit.

“Look,” the guard said.

Ben took the tablet, on which he saw a man clutching his side, an IV hooked up to his arm. From his condition, Ben couldn’t tell if they were trying to kill him or trying to save him.

“Do you know him?” the guard asked.

Ben shook his head, and the guards took an aggressive step forward. Ben retreated until his back was against the wall, his body tense.

“You’ve never seen him before?”

“No,” Ben answered.

The guard yanked the tablet out of Ben’s hands then turned to leave. “Wait. What about my kids?” The door was slammed in his face. Ben shook the doorknob, shaking the frame and the wall it was attached to. “I want to see my kids! You hear me? I want to see my children!”

Swells of rage grew within him, lapping up against the shores of his mind, eroding what control he had left. He squeezed his fists tight until his arms shook and his face reddened. He slammed his fist into the concrete wall, a dull thud sounding against the solid piece of rock. He continued to smack his fist until bits of blood left his flesh and stained the wall red.

Ben felt his hand go numb. He stomped over to the television, lifted it off its stand, and smashed it against the wall. The screen shattered into pieces, and bits of black plastic flew off the edges. When it crashed to the floor, Ben collapsed, all his energy exhausted. The rage and the burst of adrenaline that had come with it were short lived.

Ben looked at the black, blue, and bloody stump that was his fist. The pain started to set in harder now. He tried squeezing his hand but winced, pulling it closer to his body to hold it. He massaged some of the bones and could feel that at least one of his knuckles was broken.

Suddenly, he could see Matt and Ella, laughing in the front yard, chasing after each other in a giggled fit of joy and terror, full of children’s joy of moving but without the understanding of why they were doing it. It was simply motion. Happy, blissful motion.

Ben wanted that back. He didn’t want his last memories of his children to be just that—old memories. He wanted new ones, fresh in his mind, to take with him into whatever afterlife came next. And he wasn’t going to let them take him anytime soon.

The flight back to Chicago consisted of Bryce transfixed on his laptop, doing everything in his power to hasten the uplink of the satellite, which involved typing loudly, throwing his hands up in the air, talking to himself, and staring with laser-like intensity with a scowl on his face. To Sarah, it looked like the computer was winning.

Mack didn’t look up from the notepad he scribbled on the entire trip, and when she tried to sneak a peek at what he was writing, he blocked her view. She’d given up after the third attempt, and the pilot kept giving her a stern glance whenever she got out of her seat.

The plane touched down at O’Hare, and Sarah drove back to the safe house, since the two pieces of luggage that she was stuck with seemed too busy with their own work. She could feel the stiffness in her bones and cracked her neck to the side, letting out a satisfied groan from the relieving pop. “I swear, sometimes I think my back has bubble wrap in it.”

“We all think your back has bubble wrap in it,” Bryce said, the scowl still etched on his face.

“How’s the link looking?” Sarah asked. “Has your geek brain figured out how to speed it up yet?”

“No.”

“Great.” Sarah parked the stolen car just a few blocks down from the safe house and, after Bryce took down the license plate number to ensure they could return the vehicle to its owner after all this was figured out, they walked the rest of the way.

Sarah fidgeted with her hands. There was a slight haze in the back of her mind. She had tried sleeping on the plane, but the engine noise combined with the fact that they hit turbulence every fifteen minutes didn’t make for the best of REM–cycling conditions.

The adrenaline over the past week was still surging through her veins, but during the moments of lulling activity, she could feel her energy slipping away, slowly being replaced by the crawling state of fatigue. She hated those moments, wading in the useless pool of stagnation, relying on hope instead of her abilities. But most of all she hated them because it made her think of her family. She could see Ben, Ella, Matt, and Becca in her mind, along with all the horrific tortures they could be going through.

It was her fault that her family was in the position they were. Her brother had been put through enough because of her job, and now it had directly impacted his wife and kids. Her sister-in-law and her niece and nephew. She caught her reflection in the mirror of one of the cars parked on the street that they passed, and she was about to punch it when Mack grabbed her arm. “What? I wasn’t actually gonna break it.”

“Shh. Look,” Mack said.

Sarah looked up and saw a car parked in the driveway of their safe house. Sarah pulled out one of her .45 pistols and kept low, dodging behind bushes and parked cars along the road for cover. She stopped at the trunk of an old minivan while Mack and Bryce caught up.

“Robbers?” Bryce asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sarah answered. “If they were, they’d have at least someone on lookout. I think someone’s waiting for us inside. And they want us to know they’re waiting.”

“Could be another agent,” Bryce said.

“Could be the mole,” Mack replied.

“What?” Bryce asked.

Sarah shushed him. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Yeah, I think that’s an important piece of information to have in the current climate,” Bryce answered.

“I’ll go around back,” Sarah said. “Mack, you good to take the front?”

“I got it.”

“Bryce, you… You just stay right here and scream if you see anyone else come in behind us, then run and hope they don’t have guns or are slower than you.”

“Yeah, I can do that.”

Sarah dashed up the side of the neighboring house and ran around the neighbor’s backyard, tripping over a minefield of golf balls that were spread throughout the grass. “What is this, one of Tiger Woods’s mistresses’ houses?” She kept low by the fence and crouched at the corner, scanning the backyard of the safe house.

All the lights were still turned off, and there weren’t any signs of forced entry that she could see. Whoever was inside knew what they were doing. She drummed her fingers against the grip of her pistol. One deep breath later, she sprinted across the backyard and stopped just short of the back window. She peeked inside the bottom right-hand corner. She couldn’t see anyone. She ducked under the windowsill and placed her hand on the door. It was open.

The farther the door opened, the better view she was able to get inside, and as it did, she saw movement at the kitchen table. Something had nudged the chair, triggering a light squeak. The moment the door had enough space for her to enter, she dashed inside, and hiding behind the kitchen table with his hands in the air was Johnny. Sarah holstered her pistols. “Christ, Johnny, I almost shot you. Hey, Mack! It’s Johnny.”

“Sorry, Sarah,” Johnny said, pushing the chair out of his way. “I thought the car would give it away.”

Mack appeared from the front and Bryce a few seconds after, and the two had a quick reunion.

“Why the hell would the car give it away?” Sarah asked.

“Well, I just thought, who would be stupid enough to park their car in front of the house?” Johnny said. “Especially this house.”

Sarah placed her hand on his shoulder and looked him dead in the eye. “Well, thank you for showing just how dumb you can be. Isn’t that the GSF motto, Mack? ‘I want YOU to be as dumb as you can be.’” She pointed her finger in her best Uncle Sam impersonation to accentuate the point.

“What are you doing here?” Mack asked.

“Vince never checked in,” Johnny answered.

“The satellite link is down,” Bryce said. “All agents in the field would have received the blackout message. He’d know to keep low until we came back online.”

Johnny shook his head. “Except I never heard from him during his mandatory check-in that happened thirty minutes before we were bum rushed.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” Bryce asked.

“With everything that was happening, I just thought he was behind, you know? I mean, Christ, it wasn’t like everything was running on schedule.”

Sarah pulled Mack aside, away from Bryce and Johnny. “You think it’s him?” Sarah asked.

“It crossed my mind when you told me about the Russians. It makes sense. He knows the area, the people, the customs,” Mack answered. “He’d be the perfect fit.”

“I don’t know. It still doesn’t feel right,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “What are we gonna do about him?” Sarah asked, gesturing to Johnny.

“Well,” Mack said, resting his hands on his hips. “We’ll need to vet him. See what he knows.”

Bryce stood in front of a cowering Johnny. “Whoa, you guys really think there’s a mole? And you think it’s Vince or Johnny?”

“Yes,” Sarah and Mack answered at the same time.

“That’s crazy! I’ve sat next to this guy for the past four years. Trust me”—Bryce leaned out of Johnny’s earshot—“he’s not that smart.”

“I heard that,” Johnny said.

“Still,” Sarah said, walking over to Johnny and putting her arm around his shoulder. “There’s no harm in performing some due diligence, right?”

Sarah flashed a smile, and Johnny whimpered. “Right.”

***

It took Sarah less than ten minutes to learn everything she needed to know about Johnny’s secrets. The Playboys he kept under his mattress in middle school, the fact that he shot out his high school principal’s car window with a BB gun when he was drunk on three wine coolers, and that one time he signed up for an online dating site and ended up making out with a woman who used to be a dude. After that little nugget of information came up, she knew she’d heard enough.

Johnny came out of the garage whimpering and collapsed onto the couch, where he curled up into a ball. When Mack looked at her, she shook her head. After Johnny had had a few moments to collect himself, Sarah pulled up a chair right by his head.

“All right, Johnny, let’s hear it,” Sarah said. “How’d you find us?”

“Every safe house has its own internal power cell, which means it can operate off grid,” Johnny answered. “Last year I was in charge of doing a power cell inspection with the review team where we checked each house. Everyone’s code names were listed on the sheet, and since I’ve worked your recon before, Sarah, I recognized yours. With Vince gone, I knew I had to find someone.”

“Why me? You knew the locations for all the other safe houses. There had to have been one closer than ours.”

“In addition to your code name, there was also Bryce’s, and another one that I didn’t recognize. I also thought it was weird how this house had three, and the others only had two. I was hoping Mack would be here. And I was right.”

Sarah looked over at Mack, who was looking somewhere else. “You put us together on purpose? Aww, Mack, I didn’t know you cared so much.” Sarah opened her eyes as large as they would go and stuck out her lower lip, clasping her hands together in an effort to make the most pitiful face that she could muster.

“Shut it, Agent Hill,” Mack answered, and Sarah dropped the pouty face. “Why was it important that you find me?” Mack asked, towering over Johnny on the couch.

“I figured that wherever you were was the best chance I had of trying to make sure Vince was okay,” Johnny answered. He sat up from his fetal position and looked up at Mack. “You don’t really think he had anything to do with this, do you?”

“We can’t rule anyone out, Johnny. Not even me,” Mack answered.

“I got it!” Bryce said. He sat at the kitchen table, barely able to contain himself to his seat, his eyes and hands glued to his laptop. “The satellite link is up.”

Mack, Sarah, and Johnny rushed over to him, all crowding around to get a look at Bryce’s finished work. Mack patted Bryce on the back in a good-natured “attaboy.”

“Find Global Power,” Sarah said, “They’ve got to be up and running somewhere now that they think we’re out of the fight.”

A few quick keystrokes, and Bryce’s laptop made a loud beeping noise, followed by pop-up screens with error messages. “What is that?” Sarah asked, pointing at the screen. “Why is it doing that?” Sarah pushed Bryce out of the chair and yelled at the computer. “Where are they, you stupid machine?”

Bryce wiggled his way back onto the seat, and Sarah acquiesced, her eyes still glued to the computer. “Easy, Sarah,” Johnny said. “Why don’t we remember to use our inside voice? Okay?”

“Johnny kissed a man once,” Sarah blurted out.

Bryce stopped typing and slowly turned his head. Mack raised his left eyebrow. Johnny turned a purplish shade of red, and his arms jolted in random spasms until his voice finally found the words he was looking for. “I didn’t know she used to be a man!”

“They changed their algorithm,” Bryce said, returning the attention to the situation at hand. “The one I used to track them down before, it’s gone.”

“How long until you find them?” Sarah asked.

“A day. A week,” Bryce answered, then turned to Mack. “We need to get every support agent on this immediately.”

“We can’t,” Mack answered. “We don’t want to give any of this information to the mole. We have to remain in the dark.”

“What about Vince?” Johnny asked. “Can you track him down?”

Multiple screens were up and running on the small laptop, and Bryce maneuvered some of them around with the click of a mouse. The tracker program that was installed in the satellite managed to pick up the tracker in Vince that all field agents were required to have.

Sarah gave Mack a look then simply made her way to the armory. “Bryce, I’m gonna need a transport to Moscow. I don’t care if it drives, swims, or flies, so long as it’s fast.” Johnny exclaimed that it wasn’t what it looked like, that there was no way Vince was the mole. But the evidence didn’t look good. With GSF’s global scope, they had a variety of details on all major nations’ security features, and with Russia’s recent ambition against the United States, Vince would have possessed knowledge that would have been favorable for a Russian attack.

After loading her duffel bag with gear, she made her way back out into the living room, where Johnny was still offering his defiant defense against Vince’s collaboration with anything that had happened over the past week. “Why would he keep his tracker in? Hmm? If he was a mole, wouldn’t he take it out?”

“They wouldn’t want him to,” Sarah answered. “They’d want him to stay as close to us as possible. That’s what makes a mole so dangerous. His trust with the people around him. And he’d need to keep that to remain valuable to the organization he traded us for.”

Johnny shook his head. “No, Sarah, you’re wrong. I’m telling you, he wouldn’t do this. He wouldn’t do any of this. I’ve worked with him for three years. He’s a solid agent. Just as good as you, Sarah, on any given day.”

“Okay, first of all, no one is as good as me, even on my worst day. Second of all,”—Sarah took a few steps closer to him and rested her hand on his shoulder, and her voice softened—“I know you trust him. We all did, and I’m not going to do anything to him until I’m sure. But until we know for one hundred percent that it’s not him, we can’t rule it out. So if you want to help him, then help Bryce find out everything he can about what he’s been doing.”

Sarah walked over to Bryce, who had managed to pull up and navigate through even more screens than he had before. “How the hell do you see all this crap?”

“The Force is strong with me,” Bryce answered, his face glued to the screen in front of him. “All right, we have a supply shipment headed into Berlin, and from there you’ll have to find a ride into Moscow, but it’s a start.”

Sarah had Johnny give her the keys to the car parked out front, and before she made it out the door, Mack stopped her and handed her an envelope. “Do not open it unless I tell you to,” he said.

“You are aware of my impulsive behavior, right?”

“I gave one to Bryce as well. It’s a handwritten copy, so anyone will be able to verify that it’s mine.”

“Is this what you were writing on the plane?”

Mack leaned in close and lowered his voice. His tone was neither threatening nor intimidating, and for the first time in six years, Sarah heard him say something that he’d never uttered before. “Please, Sarah.”

“All right, Mack.” Sarah tucked the envelope into her bag and tossed it into the passenger side of the car. She climbed in, started the engine, and headed down the road. Her eyes darted from the debris-littered street to the bag once in a while, fighting every urge to tear into the envelope inside.