Deadly News: A Thriller (22 page)

They talked while they waited. Something Fe said made Abby remember the folder she’d taken from the detective’s desk, the one with information on Soren in it. With the constant supervision, she hadn’t gotten a chance to look at it, had forgotten about it until now. “I really would like to get my stuff from the hotel back.” She hoped no one went through the stuff; if they did, there’s no way they wouldn’t recognize the folder for what it was, and it was only a short leap from there to incrimination.

“Yeah. We can look into that in the morning.”

“How’s, uh, the detective?” She couldn’t remember his name. “The big one.” She put her hands out to the side to indicate just how big.

“You mean Detective Masterson?”

Abby nodded.

“Um, I’m not sure what you’re implying.”

“No, no.” Abby shook her head emphatically. “With the case, Soren.”

“Oh. Funny you bring that up. He complained about not having enough information.”

Abby stared and waited. Was that sweat she felt beginning to prick her forehead?

“Yeah, a single file with nothing but a picture of him, and the report of the officer who found his car. He swears there was supposed to be more.” She laughed, elbowed Abby. “I think he’s getting paranoid.”

Abby forced a chuckle. “Yeah.” Oh God.

Abby changed the subject. “You know what else is weird. Why did they need me back there?”

“What do you mean?”

“They already knew there was someone else in the park with him, and they seem to know who that is. Isn’t that enough to go on? I mean?” She let the question hang.

“I’m not sure. They could just want to be certain. With the hotel incident, everyone is working overtime, might be short-handed.”

“Really?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. I thought that was weird also. But what do I know?” She sighed. “I’m just a washed up detective.”

“Detective Chaperone. That can’t be fun. At least you don’t have to wear a uniform.”

“It’s not so bad. Hanging around with you? It’s been, interesting.”

“Thanks.”

Fe laughed, leaned against Abby. “I mean it. You’ve scared me half to death several times, but somehow that’s helped me to relax, to worry less.”

Abby put her arm around Fe.
I’m comforting a cop
, she thought. “Hey, I’m glad I could help.”

“I just,” her voice wavered. “I’ve been so worried I’d screw things up, get you”—she shook her head against Abby’s shoulder. “And then it almost happened. God, the things that happened.”

“Hey, I’m fine. I’m here, I’m alive, ten fingers ten toes, that’s all that matters, right?”

“I guess.” She looked Abby in the eyes “There’s more things to lose than just the physical.”

“But that’s the great thing,” she said, squeezing Fe’s shoulder and turning to look at her. Their faces were inches apart. “The best part. Physical things are bound by all these laws of physics and other rules of reality. The rest? Who’s to say it can’t grow back, no matter how much damage it suffers.” She looked away, at the closed door. “It can always come back.”

Abby’s staring at the fire, and the tears roll down her cheek unimpeded by wiping fingers. She doesn’t seem to notice. It’s as though her eyes are bleeding, rather than crying, for she has no expression. “I don’t—” She closes her eyes, sends a gush out. “Those fuckers,” she says quietly. She looks around the fire. “They think they got away with it. That no one will catch them.” She’s smiling now. It’s a frightening smile. She juts out her bottom jaw, shakes her head. “They’re wrong.”

You and the quiet woman exchange a look. You wonder what she means.

“Argh.” The thirteen-year-old laughs. “Don’t keep us in suspense!”

“Yeah,” Abby says. “Sure. Ecks, right? Yeah, okay, so they go to pick up this guy they think is in the frame, and the other guy, you remember? The ex-FBI? Well, it just so happens that someone sent an order for him to be picked up as well.” She looks around. “And guess what?”

The thirteen-year-old is practically squirming. “They were the same guy!”

“No, but good guess. And close enough for government work.” She smiles.

“Okay,” she continues, “so you have one team from the FBI going after this guy from the park, and then another from, what was it? I can’t remember, now. I wrote it down in—” She waves this away. “Some other agency.

“So, like before at the other warehouse, they don’t find what they expected to.”

“Jango,” the man said quietly, but loud enough for his earpiece to pick up and transmit across the street to where a van sat in shadow.

He was hunched down near a corner, outside an industrial-looking building. The sodium-vapor streetlamps cast their yellow gaze to the edge of the property, but no further, and so the building stood in near darkness. “In position.” A few second delay, then a tap on his back from someone on his team, letting him know they were ready. He gave the signal, and they made their way toward the entrance.

The building was cast in shadow by the light of the moon, and so with the camouflage they wore, the only notice that anyone was here was the quiet sound of the gravel they walked upon on their way to the building’s door.

Unknown to them, another team, very similar in makeup and procedure, was approaching the building from the other side. On that side, the building had a different address, since it faced a different street. But they were the same building.

This team’s job was stealth, they were to wait until the target returned, or they could confirm that he was inside.

But now their microphones detected sound coming from the building, and so they prepared to gain entry.

The steel door had a digital lock, which was quickly disabled. Night vision goggles were pulled over eyes, and the group entered into the darkness of the building.

Reports of what had happened once they had gotten inside were not consistent, but taking the commonalities as truth, this is what they say in sum:

Team A was inside the building when one of the team members spotted a door opening, the light of the moon spilling in. He quickly returned to the others, and informed them of this.

At the same time, Team B, with their night vision goggles, had seen this scout, and since there was only one, had made the assumption that it was their target, which could be proved or disproved only after they captured him. And so, automatic weapons drawn and aimed forward, they proceeded after this new prey.

Team A, now warned of the presence of a possible ex-FBI agent with years of experience on the job, not to mention whatever he’d gained since he left, took his presumed entrance into the building seriously, and were ready to react accordingly.

At this point, the two teams were separated by a distance of sixty feet, and a space of three walls and a slight incline in A’s favor. Team A finished getting ready, and headed for their target, intending to take him by surprise.

This they did, but they too were also surprised to find that their single FBI agent had somehow cloned himself and was now six.

Team B had almost precisely this same thought as the leads from each team nearly collided, their gun barrels crossing.

Several shots were fired—the weapons were automatic, after all—and it wasn’t until a member of Team B, calmer under stressful situations than the majority of his teammates, and jokingly called—though secretly thought to be—a psychopath, noted that their targets were wearing vests with the very large, very yellow letters of a prominent United States Federal Agency, which stood out well in the green light of the Exelis AN/PVS-15 night vision goggles he currently had over his eyes.

“Friendlies!” he shouted. Then, “FBI!”

This at least stopped the firing. In the chaos and confusion since this confrontation had begun, seven to eight seconds previous, neither team had thought to call out anything save for unintelligible sounds that couldn’t even rightly be called screams. Reprimands would be issued all around for this failure to identify, but no formal complaints would ever be filed, given the circumstances.

And so it was that identities were confirmed, checked and doubled checked—and by God someone was losing their job for not noticing two operations were scheduled to occur in the same building—and then there was much laughing and back slapping until both teams received a call from their lookouts on the outside that something strange was going on.

“What?” several members of each team asked in not-quite unison.

“Something, weird,” was Team A’s lookout’s reply.

The lookout for Team B, being a woman of few words in the best of times, simply said, “Fuck.”

He and the other man watched both squads enter the building on monitors that showed the scene in dull greens and reds.

Despite being a safe distance away due to this technology, he was still feeling anxious. He made an unnecessary adjustment on the laptop in front of him, then again glanced at his temporary partner. Damn creepy, that face. It was hard to see. That was intentional, but it didn’t make it less creepy.

He flicked his eyes back to the monitor as gunfire erupted, glad to have something else to look at other than that smear of a face.

They hadn’t been able to get cameras inside, not undetected, so he couldn’t see what was actually going on, but the soundtrack the external microphones provided for the movie playing in his mind made him smile.

The gunfire died quickly enough, but he hadn’t expected different. These weren’t random people off the street, it would be far too much to hope for them to continue shooting at each other without realizing they were on the same side.

Still, it was hard not to hope.

“Looks like they’re done.”

The other man didn’t respond.

He turned to look at the stranger sitting in the corner of the room. He avoided looking directly at the face. “Should we send it now?”

The man made a gesture with one hand that he interpreted as confirmation.

“Going hot in five,” he said, and clicked send on his phone’s screen. On the laptop open in front of him, several dots lit up on a green on black map, then began moving toward the building.

“Drones? Are you shitting me?” The leader of Team B looked around. The voice in his ear spoke again. “Yeah,” he replied to it. He looked to the other team leader to confirm he’d heard as well.

The other team leader nodded.

“All right, let’s find cover.”

They locked themselves in an office while they waited for help to arrive. When it did, it would simply disable the drones. In the meantime, they barricaded the door with the furniture in the office, just in case.

The first drone entered the building through a small window meant only to let light in, and which didn’t open. It calculated the thickness of the glass, the speed needed to shatter it without damaging itself in the process, if possible, determined it wasn’t, dipped its rotors forward and gave them full power.

This martyr fell to the floor, convulsing, so much as a robot can convulse. It was soon followed by others, none of which fell.

The teams couldn’t hear the glass break from their position in the office. But they did hear the noise of the drones’ blades
whomp, whomping
the air.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Okay, is there anyone not familiar with these things?”

All of Team A raised their hands.

“Wonderful. Okay, look, they might have some kind of weapon, and they can follow you. But just remember that they are not animals, and certainly not humans. Just dumb machines that can’t think.”

“So we have to outthink them.”

“No, you have to shoot them and make sure they stay down.”

“Don’t some of these things have bombs?”

What a perfect day this was, the Team B lead thought. He’d left the military to get away from this kind of crap. And now they’d be worried about bombs, instead of worrying about taking out the more immediate threat, which meant they would be hesitating before shooting. That occasionally could be a good thing, but more often it was a good thing for the other guy, and would get you killed. “I don’t think we have to worry about that.”

“No, I remember, some blow up when taken out.”

He sighed. “Well it’s either take them out or let them take us out. And even if they do have explosives, they probably aren’t going to be triggered by small arms.”

“What if they are just scouts or something?”

What kind of idiots did they have working for them? the Team B lead wondered. “That’s what—”

“Two minutes,” a voice interrupted in his ear.

They wouldn’t have to worry about taking them out after all. Thank God. “Everyone hear that?”

People nodded.

“Good, let’s just wait—”

But anything else he was saying was cut off as nearly one hundred modified Aeryon Falcon drones, weighing 1.9 kilograms each and travelling at speeds exceeding one hundred kilometers per hour, crashed into the barricaded door of the room which the two teams occupied, splintering it into so many shards of weaponized wood, glass, and metal.

A leg of the chair propped against the door handle had all it could take, and began the arduous process of breaking from the chair.

Even with this intrusion, everything was fine, until approximately 244 milliseconds later when the first agent raised his gun, at which point, given the small distances involved, the light from the act reached the drone and, two milliseconds later, it determined a hostile action was being taken against it. It processed thousands of reactions, and after much deliberation taking nearly four milliseconds, chose a course of action appropriate for the current situation. Given the number of adversaries, and that the attack was currently aimed at itself, a sacrificial offensive protocol was activated.

The last thing the drone’s sensors registered was the bullet ricocheting off its armored shell, and then the electrical detonation impulse reached the cyclotrimethylene trinitramine that lined this very same shell.

The chair leg finished its task of separation and began a course for the back wall.

Before it had the chance to reach it, the cyclotrimethylene trinitramine had proceeded sufficiently in its decomposition that mounting pressure of the expanding gasses ruptured the shell of the drone, and it exploded.