Please log in to recommend or discuss...
The heavy gunfire and explosions continued outside on the ground five stories below. He stooped low by the blown-out window in what would have been a living area of a modest family apartment. Thick dust now covered what remained of identifiable belongings and furniture, this whole area having been caught up in the fierce and deadly fighting several weeks ago. Several weeks of bombardment, from the air, from the ground, from inside the damn building itself, judging by the lines of bullet holes he’d seen on interior walls.
Several weeks of bloodshed and a mounting death toll, of mainly civilians.
Given the barrage, it surprised him that the building remained standing at all. That any building around here still stood. That any people around here – non-combatants in particular – were still alive.
But they were.
He turned his head to look at the group of four huddled in the corner, on their haunches. Man. Woman. Girl. Boy. Their petrified faces, their messy clothing, spatters of blood – most of it not theirs – told a lot of their story.
‘For Christ’s sake, can anyone hear me!’ he shouted into the mic on his lapel. ‘I have Echo. He’s still alive. I need an extraction. Rooftop.’ He rattled off the coordinates. Again. ‘And tell those goddamn idiots to stop firing on us!’
As the words left his lips a momentary pause came in the fighting outside, an eerie hush hanging in the smoke- and debris-filled air. He locked eyes with the girl. Her fear bore into him, as though trying to tell him, to warn him, to cry out to him…
He slowly, silently lifted his body up a few inches to look over the windowsill, down below…
Thwack.
The bullet sank into his shoulder and he threw himself back and to the floor, grimacing in pain. The four in the corner shouted in panic.
‘Arghh!’ he roared, pulling himself back up. ‘Will somebody fucking—’
The explosion cut short whatever expletive-laden demand he’d been about to make to what was left of his team. He had no clue from which direction the blast had originated, or if it’d been a projectile, a bomb-drop or even just some IED in their vicinity.
What he did know: he was falling, crashing down amid concrete and broken wood and twisted metal. Thud. Fall. Thud. Fall. His body was batted around, tumbling over and over, until he came to a stop on a crumpled heap of rubble. He coughed out blood and grit. The dust and smoke around him slowly cleared as he fought to stay in the world of the living.
Shooting. Shouting. Heightened again now.
Screams too.
He tried to lift his body. Couldn’t.
He did nothing but squeeze his eyes shut pathetically as a beam of concrete thudded down onto his right foot.
He yelled in pain again. Tried once more to move. Again failed.
Shooting. Screaming.
He looked up. The building still stood around him. Kind of. The floors had given out. One. Two. Three.
He barely even reacted at another explosion nearby and his eyes and mouth and nose filled with charred debris once more. He coughed, spluttered, rubbed at his face with his one free hand, tried to battle through disorientation.
Shooting. Screaming.
Screaming. Louder than the shooting now.
He twisted his head. Not far, really. As much as he could. Couldn’t even figure if his body was pinned or numb or… just not entirely connected.
He found a pair of eyes. The girl’s. Not even two feet from him. It was her screaming that filled his head. A bed of concrete sat on top of her, only her head and left shoulder sticking out from underneath, her face streaked with black grit and blood and horrifying fear.
‘Papa!’ she screamed.
Papa. Her papa. Echo.
His gaze moved across to her right. No eyes staring back at him there. Just a mangled, lifeless body.
Screaming. Screaming.
Not just the little girl, he realized, but a woman too.
He couldn’t see her. Just hear her. Hear them both. Their calls of anguish becoming more panicked, more pained if that were even possible.
No. Not just their screams. Something else too was taking over…
Hissing.
Crackling.
Within seconds the flames were leaping around him, licking closer and closer. Initially the woman’s screams became louder still, but mere seconds later and they’d been drowned out by the roar of the flames.
He found the girl’s eyes again. No screams from her now. Just a dejected pleading, pain-filled, as the flames engulfed her tiny, trapped body.
He roared with effort as he tried to pull his leg free.
He finally managed it. But not before the fire had surrounded him too. He thought he was yelling but he really couldn’t tell anymore. He tried to breathe but only sucked in the supercharged air, feeling like his insides were burning out.
Unimaginable pain swept over his body, every inch of him alight, clothes disintegrated, skin bubbling and sizzling.
Nothing at all he could do to stop it.
Nothing at all he could do except to close his eyes and will for it to end.
I’d parked the van on the corner of Piedmont Avenue and Ellis Street. About half a mile from the building I didn’t need to go into today. How times had changed for a mission like this.
I didn’t need to go into the building. Although I did still need to access it.
Which explained why I was sitting in the back of the van at my homemade computer rig – two machines, three screens total that I used to control and watch my little army at work. Drones. Six of them. Five were set to automated routes, traveling back and forth right underneath me. Most of the multi-mile sewer network beneath Atlanta’s downtown was inaccessible to people, the pipes being too narrow. Unlike the gargantuan brick-walled tunnels seen in movies, like the nest where the Penguin famously hid with his minions and led his destruction in Gotham City, the majority of real city sewer networks were simple pipes, put through the ground beneath buildings using boring techniques. Eight inches, twelve inches… Some of the larger connections could be up to thirty-six inches in diameter.
Definitely too small for a person, unless they literally wanted to crawl through shit, although even then the risk of drowning in the flow would be stupidly high.
Well, unless you understood the system properly.
Like the three-foot diameter pipe that led right underneath the van, heading west underneath Ellis Street. Right now, with virtually zero rainfall over the Atlanta area for the best part of five weeks, the stormwater run-off was a trickle rather than a surge. Barely three inches of water steadily moving along. Plenty of space above it to run the five drones.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Four trips, four pick-ups and drop-offs for each unit.
And soon enough that task was complete.
But not before I’d already made progress with drone number six. Errol. A little different to the other five. A little more advanced, despite his smaller size. I didn’t give all the machines a pet name, but Errol deserved his personification given his more prominent role. Stupid, perhaps, but the sad truth was these machines were more reliable, more loyal than people, and it felt like a little reward for Errol, in a strange way. An acknowledgment of his value to me.
Errol was already inside the building. He’d initially traveled through the sewers too but had then been able to move from below ground to above ground because of the opened hatch.
OK, so that opened hatch, and one opened door, and one removed grille vent had been a key part to this whole setup, and had to be performed by an actual human being.
That actual human being was Dominic Von Hausen, a disgruntled maintenance employee who’d only recently overcome a frivolous sexual assault allegation from a female office worker, and, knowing he was getting back at his employer, had happily taken $2000 from me, few
questions asked, for performing those three simple tasks.
Perhaps he’d come to regret his part, if he or anyone else connected the dots.
Or perhaps Dominic would suffer a terrible accident in the not-too-distant future…
I watched the left screen intently as I worked the joystick. Errol climbed and climbed, moving up through the air duct system.
It was true that most big city sewer systems were unlike those seen in the movies. In contrast, big office building air heating and cooling systems were often exactly like they were portrayed in movies. Intertwining networks of metals shafts ran between walls, between floors. Big enough for a human? Yeah, probably. But why the hell bother crawling around when Errol was so much more adept than me or anyone else at moving through these tight spaces?
Twenty-third floor. East side.
I brought Errol to a stop on the floor of the shaft, the camera looking out through the space where the grille had been removed and into the room beyond. Not a particularly big room. A functional room with several hefty server towers, fans whirring, lights twinkling, wires crisscrossed all over the place.
Not the only server room in this huge building. The main one sat on the lower ground level. This one, high up, had a more specific use.
I turned on Errol’s thermal camera. The screen turned almost entirely ice-blue. Cold. Just the way the servers liked it. No sign of any orange, red. No people.
I pushed the joystick up a little and Errol took off once more, into the room, along the line of servers. I hit the keyboard to engage the command to keep Errol hovering on the spot and worked the little arm under his belly. Out it came, the ‘hand’ my view on the screen. I moved it forward tentatively, carefully, toward the port on the server. It reminded me of sci-fi movies I’d seen where
spacecraft were docking against much larger space stations. Except this was all on a much more miniature scale, even if it filled the screen I was looking at.
The ports connected and I could almost feel the whir of the hard drive on my computer suddenly engage as the software spun at whirlwind speed, hacking through the security measures to gain access…
Green light.
It’d taken all of thirty seconds.
The time bar appeared on the middle screen as the data dump started, not into Errol but wirelessly into secure cloud storage. The modern way.
Five minutes to go.
At two minutes twelve seconds I heard a siren close by outside and tensed just a little. It wasn’t really unusual to hear such activity in a big city like this, though. Not least in this part of the city where this morning, just like several mornings over the past few weeks, there was yet another ‘protest’ taking place, orchestrated by one of several far-right factions that had grown in power and significance recently.
But that protest was two blocks away, and even if the event had turned ugly, like many did, the siren shouldn’t have been passing right by here…
Except the noise was growing louder, coming closer.
I left the terminal and moved to the back of the van and opened the door ever so slowly to see a police cruiser parked right behind me, lights flashing, the officer out of his car and glaring.
‘No parking here – you’re blocking the intersection.’
I pushed the door open a little further to reveal myself, although I kept my cap pulled low over my forehead so he could see little of my face. Well, not my face, but the latex mask I was wearing.
move the van and have him decapitated the moment he steps up?’
The officer said nothing to that but kind of squinted and cocked his head a little as though trying to figure what he was looking at. He took a step forward, fingers hovering toward his sidearm.
But the guy had no point to make here. The van was legit. Kind of. I’d stolen it and I knew it hadn’t been reported yet because the two men I’d stolen it from were a little tied up right now. And I’d properly marked out the area around the van with cones and a sign.
‘We’ll be done in a few minutes,’ I said.
Except the officer didn’t look convinced. Maybe he hadn’t just stopped on the off chance.
Had someone tipped him off?
But who the hell could have done?
The officer took another step forward.
Beep… Beep… Beep…
The final countdown sounded out from behind me.
Only seconds to go.
The main reason why I was perfectly relaxed, even with the dubious-faced lawman in front of me. The officer’s head cocked even further at the sound from my van, like a confused dog, as though the tilting of his head would help him to understand the situation better.
Whether it did or it didn’t, time was up.
The explosion a half mile behind me caused the ground to shudder and rumble. The roar of the explosion got louder and louder for a few seconds before the blast wave swept over us.
‘Holy shit,’ the officer shouted out, cowering as he held his hat to his head.
Then the guy rushed back to his car and sped off, just like that.
The immediate calmness after the explosion, as people’s brains scrambled for an explanation, didn’t last long. Panic soon took over. Cars revved, people rushed about shouting and screaming. Sirens blared. Alarms too.
I closed the van doors and sat back down at the terminal. Errol was done, but I’d wanted to have him out of there before the explosion. I just had to hope the vents were intact enough to retrieve him in the… ninety-six seconds I had left before the second explosion.
‘Come on!’ I willed as Errol whizzed back through the air ducts, fighting through smoke and dust, which thickened as he descended.
Crap. A blockage. The duct had caved in. No way around it. I swung the little device out through a hole in the vent wall and into… an office. I spun Errol around and around. People were there. Some on their feet, panicking; others dazed, looking bewildered, some unmoving.
One of them, a suited man, fixed his gaze on Errol. Then cowered as Errol sped toward him. But it wasn’t the man I was aiming Errol for but the blown-out window.
Out into the open. Not the intention. But the only way now. With the homing set I left the terminal and pushed open the doors and jumped down to the chaos outside. I pulled on the manhole cover to clank it back into place. Then I grabbed the cones and the sign and slung them into the back of the van.
I was about to jump up inside when I realized a woman was standing right there on the sidewalk, staring at me.
I held her eye a moment. Noted the disturbed look on her face as she tried to figure out what she was looking at. A look I received all too
often. It didn’t bother me anymore. In some ways I relished it.
I simply shrugged at her. Because I knew what was coming. And she didn’t.
Boom.
The second explosion was bigger than the first. More devastating. I was inside the van already before the blast wave hit. I’d slid into the driver’s seat seconds later while the street sat in that same lull as before. The calm before the sheer panic.
Through the calm I heard Errol’s gentle whir. I wound down the window and looked up, and reached out and plucked my little friend from the sky.
I smiled as I put the star of the show onto the passenger seat next to me. Then I fired up the engine and glanced into the side mirror. No sign of that woman now. That police officer was long gone too. Whatever suspicions those two had held, seeing me would hardly be the first thing they remembered about this morning.
And if at some point they did…
It didn’t even matter that much.
This mission was completed. A success.
‘Sorry about your brothers,’ I said to Errol. Thanks to the little interlude with the policeman, I hadn’t sent them on their return trip. The explosions would have torn them apart. ‘They died a good death.’
Like so many of my team members had over the years.
I swung the van around and headed away.
Another beautifully sunny spring day in the Catalan capital, with not a wisp of white in the sky. The sunglasses and cap James Ryker wore helped shield him from the intense rays from his position facing south toward the monolithic Camp Nou stadium, home of FC Barcelona. The recently renovated stadium could hold 105,000 people. Right now it was packed out, the non-stop chorus of chants and cheers and boos reverberating around Ryker 200 yards away.
He checked his watch. Not that he needed to, really. He had a good read of the time.
Late. Definitely late.
‘Is this guy ever going to show?’ came Xavi’s voice through Ryker’s earpiece.
Ryker simply kept his eyes on the entrance to the eight-story apartment block across the road.
A lull in the crowd noise from the stadium… then thunderous uproar.
‘They scored again,’ Xavi said.
Ryker checked his watch once more. Nothing but habit now.
‘And there’s only a few minutes of the game left,’ he said.
‘Which means pretty soon you’ll have a hundred thousand people battling around you.’
‘At least they’ll be in a good mood,’ Ryker said.
‘Yeah, well I’m not. I hate Barcelona.’
‘The place or the team?’
‘Both, actually.’
‘Spoken like a true Madrileño,’ Ryker said, smiling, but a moment later he stiffened when he saw the man coming out of the apartment block. Not just any man: their mark, Rafael Ospina.
‘I see him,’ Ryker said. Xavi wouldn’t be able to – he was two miles away at their mark’s intended rendezvous spot.
‘Carrying anything?’
‘He’s wearing a Barça shirt.’
‘But is he carrying anything?’
‘Yeah. Backpack.’
‘OK. He must have it in there. Is he going north?’
Which would be directly toward Ryker, initially, and on to the bus stop for the route that would take him exactly where he needed to be.
If he was taking public transport, at least. If he had a vehicle, then Ryker would hop on to the moped he’d brought here earlier. Not a powerful machine by any stretch, but about the best way to travel through a congested city.
‘No,’ Ryker said. ‘He’s going south. On foot.’
Which was about the least expected route. And
it also gave Ryker a dilemma as to whether to follow on foot too.
A satisfied roar filled the air around Ryker.
‘And the game’s just finished.’
‘He planned this. And with his Barça shirt? He’s gonna be lost in a sea of blue and red.’
Which was exactly what Ryker thought too as he peeled away from his spot – no choice now but to head after Ospina on foot.
‘Did he make you?’ Xavi asked.
‘No,’ Ryker said, about as sure as he could be.
‘Then why is he heading south?’
Ryker didn’t answer. He had no answer.
‘Stay on him,’ Xavi said. ‘Do not spook him.’
Ryker said nothing to that either. As if he needed to be schooled on such things, especially by a man some fifteen years his junior. But while Ryker was in this city on this assignment, he was working with Xavi, an agent for Spain’s CNI – the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia – which handled both foreign and domestic intelligence. Ryker preferred to work alone – always – because when things went off-plan, as they very often did one way or another in his world, he needed to know the other people around him were on his wavelength.
So far he didn’t know enough about Xavi and what he’d do if their plan here turned to shit.
Perhaps he’d find out sooner, rather than later, Ryker mused.
Within a few yards the crowds were already building, the first to leave the stadium moving quickly to escape the masses and be first to wherever they were going. Not even thirty seconds later and the street around him was packed as tens of thousands of jubilant fans poured out, singing, bouncing, waving flags and
setting off flares. And all moving in different directions, which only added to the congestion as several waves butted up against one another creating bottlenecks all around.
Ryker, trying to outpace the flow moving south, pushed and shoved and did his best to keep on top of Ospina, but his mark was several inches shorter, slighter, and perhaps wearing the fan-gear really did help Ospina too, because after a few accidental shoulder barges Ryker could sense a rise in disgruntlement in the people around him, as though they knew he didn’t belong.
He bobbed up on his toes, trying to keep Ospina in sight but the guy had pulled away some, now close to fifty yards in front of Ryker as they approached a huge bottleneck where the crowd intersected a major road. The masses slowed almost to a stop. Ryker continued to push his way through, as carefully as he could.
Not carefully enough.
Someone shouted out at him, shoved him in the back. Straight into the path of the man in front who spun around, angry glare on his face. Two men, shouting and gesticulating at him.
‘Lo siento. Lo siento,’ Ryker said to each of them in turn.
‘Bet you wish you had the Barca shirt now,’ Xavi said joyfully.
Ryker only grunted in response before he took another heavy shoulder from a man to his right. A shouted expletive followed and Ryker was about to turn to offer another apology before he realized he’d lost sight of Ospina beyond a row of parked police vans.
He bobbed on his feet again as though the added height would give him a better view. It barely did.
‘I’ve lost him. I think he took the left onto Avenida de Madrid.’
A much wider street, with several lanes of traffic which hadn’t been taken over by the herd of pedestrians, even if the traffic was pretty
much backed up.
‘Another bus route?’ Xavi said.
‘Possibly.’
Ryker reached the corner, headed left. Past the bottleneck, the crowd became thinner, and Ryker picked up his pace as he scanned.
‘Bus stop,’ Ryker said. ‘I see him. Shit. And the bus is there.’
Ryker wanted to break into a jog, but doing so would only alert Ospina. The guy was on edge, searching. Only when he’d boarded the bus did Ryker start to run.
‘It’s heading to Montjuïc,’ he said.
‘Montjuïc? But that’s not the—’
‘It’s not where we thought he was going. But it’s where he’s going now.’
The last of the waiting passengers stepped on board. The driver looked out to the road. Ryker waved at him. The driver seemed to be caught in two minds as to whether he could be bothered to wait or not, but Ryker stepped into the road to make the decision a little more straightforward.
‘Gracias,’ he said as he stepped on board, placing his card against the reader. He kept his gaze down, not wanting to make eye contact with Ospina. ‘I’m on,’ he whispered into the mic.
‘I don’t know about this, Ryker. Should I stay here? Or head to Montjuïc?’
‘Stay there. Just in case.’
Xavi grumbled. Ryker said nothing more.
The journey didn’t take long. Ospina was at the door as the bus came to a stop at the base of Montjuïc, a prominent hill in the center of the otherwise pretty damn flat city. Up top lay gardens, a castle, a palace, and the Olympic stadium, among other monuments. It was an area favored by tourists but was also sprawling and far less crammed than the tightly packed grid-like streets of the city below it.
driver as he darted through the already closing doors. ‘He’s heading up.’
And Ryker really didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.
He held back a little as Ospina started up the twisting stone steps.
‘OK,’ Xavi said. ‘I’m not waiting here. It’s already more than an hour past the rendezvous. We got the wrong time, the wrong place.’
‘Maybe,’ Ryker said. ‘But it is happening. I’m sure of it.’
Xavi grumbled again and a moment later Ryker heard the noise of Xavi’s dirt bike revving up. And Xavi wasn’t that far away, really – he’d likely be able to get to Montjuïc in ten or fifteen minutes. Ryker understood his frustration though. The intel they had came directly from Ospina himself – off of a dark web messaging site where they’d hacked Ospina’s account to gain access. They didn’t know exactly what stolen intel Ospina was delivering today, and they didn’t know to whom. They’d not been able to hack the account of the person he’d been in contact with – the username a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers – and they had no clue as to the person’s real identity. They knew only that Rafael Ospina, an asset with ties both to the CNI and the UK’s SIS, was delivering intelligence he shouldn’t be delivering. They had a time and a place for the meet. Except both time and place were, apparently, wrong.
Which meant Ospina and his contact had made alternative arrangements through a different channel.
Which perhaps meant one or both of the parties knew they were under surveillance.
And yet it looked like the meet was happening still…
‘Where are you?’ Xavi said a few minutes later as the Olympic stadium came into view, its distinctive columned facade making it look like a Roman amphitheater.
‘The stadium.’
‘OK. I’m nearly there.’
Ryker continued past the stadium toward Plaça d’Europa, a huge open-plan square with the Torre Calatrava needle-like tower in one corner.
‘We’re at the square,’ Ryker said. ‘He’s stopping here.’ At one of the many obelisks that ran through the square.
Tourists were dotted here and there, posing for photos and sitting on benches to enjoy the sunshine and the views. Ryker tried his best to fit in, initially moving beyond Ospina, around his back to a secluded spot by the road, between two thickets.
He heard the whine of a dirt bike approaching. Spotted Xavi coming to the top of the hill off to his left, ...
