Rogue command a troy sta.., p.5
Rogue Command (A Troy Stark Thriller—Book #2), page 5
Hays shrugged. It was just as well.
He opened the three small paper packages he had on his knee. Inside each one was an even smaller, premeasured syringe of a powerful sedative. The dose was strong enough to stop a horse’s heart.
He took the syringes in hand and kneeled down near the men. One of them must have felt his presence there.
“What are you doing?” the man said, his voice raised in alarm.
“Don’t worry,” Hays said.
He popped the tiny syringe into the man’s neck, near the artery there, and depressed the plunger. The drug entered the man’s bloodstream.
Not sure if there would be some extreme reaction before death that might upset the others, Hays moved quickly to each man in turn. The entire operation was over in less than thirty seconds. Then he sat back on his bench and watched them.
There wasn’t much to see. The three men subsided with a few gasps, but hardly a peep besides that. Then Hays sat with the bodies. Maybe they were dead already. Maybe they weren’t. In another minute, they would be.
The van stopped when it reached the barn. The man in the front passenger seat got out of the van and opened the tall sliding door of the barn. Just in the moment that the van door was open, Hays could feel the surge of cold air from outside. Winter had arrived in northern Vermont.
But he already knew that. He had been here a week ago, and there had already been a few inches of crunchy snow on the ground. The van passed into the barn. Hays could hear the man closing the doors behind them.
He pushed the rear door open and climbed out. He carried his helmet and dropped it on the floor of the barn. He would leave nothing behind—no piece of gear, no article of clothing that had touched him. He would dump all of it into the upper reaches of Lake Champlain before he crossed the border. The lake would still be open water now, but not for much longer.
The driver came to the back of the van. Hays barely knew the men who sat in the front of the van. Both were young. One had a beard. The one who drove sported long hair. They looked faintly ridiculous, but young scientists often looked ridiculous these days.
Whoever they were, they had done their job with professionalism. They could be proud of that at least. It was a shame that they were the inside players, the ones who had gotten the rest of the team access to the physics facility. Young men like this, if suspicion fell upon them and they were pressed by the authorities, were very likely to confess. Then they would tell everything they knew.
“How are the guards?” the long-haired driver said.
Their final job was to drop the guards somewhere far from civilization, but not so far that they would freeze to death before they managed to walk to a town.
Hays shrugged his big shoulders. “Come and see.”
The man passed him and went to the door. As he did, Hays pulled a 9mm pistol from inside his jumpsuit. The gun had a sound suppressor already attached to the muzzle. Hays had threaded it on during the long drive here. Unlike the Airsoft rifle he had used at the particle collider, this gun was very real.
The young man looked inside the van.
“Are they okay?”
Hays stepped up behind the man and shot him in the head. His head snapped backwards at the top of his neck as the bullet passed through it, back to front. Hays saw a mist of blood spray.
The sound of the gun was like the clack of an office stapler or a single punch of a key on an old typewriter.
Now the man from the passenger seat was coming around to the back.
“What was that?”
He turned the corner, looked at Hays, and then saw his friend slumped on the ground. Hays was already pointing the gun in his face.
Clack!
The man’s head snapped back, and he dropped where he had been standing.
Hays looked down at the two dead men on the floor of the barn. He sighed. There were two cars parked in here along with the van. One was the blue Ford sedan that Hays would drive to Montréal. The other car, which Hays barely looked at, was the decoy vehicle these men had thought they would be driving. That car would sit here a while, along with five dead men.
It was cold outside and inside the barn. The barn would act as a freezer until the spring thaw, four or five months from now. The North Adams Laboratory van was a clever forgery. There was no GPS unit inside it and no way anyone could track its location. The authorities would certainly be looking for it soon, if they weren’t already.
Soon the real winter snows would fly. The barn would be half a meter deep in snow before too long. No one came out here in winter, and no one had any reason to.
The place would be a silent tomb for months. By the time these bodies were found, other, larger issues would have come to the fore, and greater, more exciting attacks would have taken place. And if a big man had been spotted on video wearing a black helmet and visor, that man would be long gone.
Hays dragged the two men to the van and dumped them in the back with the guards. Then he slammed the rear doors shut. He changed his clothes quickly, trading his black jumpsuit for jeans, work boots, a heavy wool jacket, and a knit green cap.
He started the Ford and drove it out of the barn.
Out in the night air, it was crisp and cold indeed. A light snow was falling. That was good. He felt the cold in his hands as he ran the heavy chain through the metal loops on the barn doors, pulled it very tight, and locked it up with a sturdy Master lock.
He looked out at the dark rolling hills of this farm. No one lived here. No one, except maybe vandals or hopeful thieves, had any reason to break open that lock.
Hays glanced one last time at the doors he had just cinched closed.
“Sleep well,” he told the dead men. Then he walked to his waiting car.
CHAPTER EIGHT
6:15 am Eastern Standard Time
Windemere Inn and Suites
Worcester, Massachusetts
“Nice place,” a voice said.
Troy opened his eyes. His head felt like a woodpecker had been hammering on his skull all night. It seemed like his veins were pulsating behind his eyes, and that he could see them there, like red neon signs, but the words were a scribble he couldn’t read.
His mouth was dry, and his tongue had grown a coat of hair.
Welts on his face, from the punches he had taken, were throbbing a bit. They weren’t bad, he had certainly sustained worse, but he could feel them there. If he had to guess, at the very least, he was going to have a shiner under his right eye, and maybe a little something on the left side near his cheekbone.
Across the dreary motel room from him, a man sat near the open sliding door to the terrace. He was smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke outside. That was against the motel rules, of course. Did this man care? No.
The man was Alex.
The last time Troy had seen Alex, he was crashing a stolen helicopter onto the Brooklyn Bridge, then getting taken away by a swarm of cops.
In the first weak light of dawn, Troy could see past him. They were high on a hillside, and the narrow terrace gave a panoramic view of the city of Worcester, complete with the Holy Cross football stadium. Troy could also feel the cold air seeping in through the open slider. It was late autumn in New England and getting chilly.
“My brother picked it,” Troy said. “He said the pictures looked okay.”
Alex shrugged, as if he didn’t care one way or the other.
“In a few minutes, your phone is going to ring. We should probably talk first.”
Troy ignored that statement. He got the sense that Alex liked to feel like he was ahead on everything. He liked to turn up while you were still asleep. He liked it when he knew things that you didn’t know. Troy wasn’t in the mood for it this morning.
“How did you get in here?”
Alex took a hit from the smoke. “The door wasn’t locked.”
Naturally. Troy vaguely remembered being inside the room and out on the terrace smoking cigars with his brothers, the bride’s brothers, and their cousins and friends. All was forgiven, and the whole group was having a grand old time.
They were all brothers forever now, the marriage a medieval bond between two clans. The coming child was claimed by everyone. There could never be a divorce. The young newlyweds were trapped. This was no longer about their relationship. It was bigger than a marriage. But Troy didn’t remember anyone leaving, and he didn’t remember going to sleep after that.
He stared down at himself. He was wearing dress slacks, a white dress shirt, and his nice black wingtip shoes—while lying in bed.
He looked at Alex. “Still smoking, I see.”
Alex shrugged again. He was dressed in a hunting jacket, wool pants, and green LL Bean boots. Except for the cigarette, he could be in a fall fashion catalog. Troy thought back to when he first met Alex. The man was dressed like a Sikh, and he said he was from Kansas.
“How was the wedding?” Alex said now.
Troy shrugged. “Eh…The bride was eight months pregnant. We got in a fight with her brothers and cousins. There was a big wedding cake and we knocked it over, you know, during the fight. But it ended up on its side, so they managed to save half of it. The half that didn’t touch the floor.”
There was a long pause.
“Other than that…”
Alex nodded. “Yeah. Typical wedding. How was the cake?”
Troy shook his head. “I didn’t have any.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Gotta stay in fighting trim.”
Troy sat up by the side of the bed and sighed. His head spun for a moment, then stopped. On the bedside table was a can of Rock Star Zero, a couple of blue pills, and a banana.
“Why are you here?” Troy said.
“Missing Persons sent me,” Alex said, using the old military nickname for the one-eyed Special Operations colonel, Stuart Persons. Persons was in classified intelligence now. Apparently, so was Alex. Troy wasn’t sure what his own relationship to them was.
He had, however, received his first payment from the United States Foreign Medical Aid Program. Eight hundred dollars for consulting services rendered deposited into his checking account. He supposed that meant he was still in.
“You mean Stu?” he said.
Alex nodded. “Yeah.”
“Last time I talked to him, he disavowed any knowledge of your existence.”
Alex didn’t touch that. “He’s concerned.”
“What did I do?” Troy said.
“You didn’t do anything. You did hear about the attack last night?”
Troy shook his head. “I was at a wedding.”
“Ah. Well, you could practically have heard it from here. That’s what the phone call is going to be about.”
“Stu is going to call me?”
Alex shook his head. It was a brief shake, a fragment of a shake, one suggesting it was common sense that of course Missing Persons wasn’t going to call.
“Your boss. In Europe. It’s early afternoon there. His people want him in on this.”
“How would you know that?” Troy said.
He almost asked the question more of himself than Alex. Alex knew a great many things. So did Missing Persons. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the ultimate string puller was Persons, and that he somehow gave assignments to intelligence agencies in Europe. If that was true, it was something he would never divulge to Troy. But Alex would know.
“It was a bombing. It took place about a hundred miles west of here, in the Berkshire mountains. There’s an advanced physics laboratory out there. Or there was, until last night. I mean, it’s still sort of there, in a sense. The atom smasher they had was blown up and burned, and the central facility, including the control room, was completely obliterated. The place is a dead loss.”
Tentatively, Troy reached out, took the Rock Star, and opened it.
“Mostly, the facility was underground. It runs for about six miles along the length of the collider under a ridgeline of the mountains. There are still fires burning down there that no one has been able to reach. There are chemicals on site, various dangerous substances, that make it unfeasible to send firefighters down. Could be a couple of days to a couple of weeks before the fires burn themselves out. That’s what I hear.”
Troy sipped the Rock Star. It tasted like citrus. There was no sugar in it, just some dangerous chemicals. It was loaded with caffeine and B vitamins. It was fizzy, and he liked the flavor. He swore by these things.
“Or twenty years,” Troy said. “Or never. Anybody get killed?”
“Unknown,” Alex said. “There are three guards missing, and there were four technical personnel who were deep inside the facility, working overnight on a faulty high-tech gizmo of some kind. It’s not official yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they’re dead. There were multiple explosions, combined with an accelerant which sent a firestorm straight along the length of the tunnel. Whoever devised the charges knew exactly what they were doing. Anyone out in the tunnel, working on the collider in that narrow space, should have been incinerated.”
Troy said nothing.
“In any event, as of twenty minutes ago, no one had heard from them.”
Troy peeled the banana.
“Who owns the place?”
“You know how these things go,” Alex said. “It’s a joint project of certain research universities, the Department of Energy, and maybe a couple of entities that prefer to remain silent partners. It was a medium-security facility. That’s how the bad guys got in so easily. Its stated purpose was to create the conditions for an elusive sub-atomic particle to appear, one that research suggests should be everywhere in the universe but isn’t.”
“That’s it? Why would someone want to blow it up?”
What he didn’t say was, Why would anyone care about such a particle? He would say it, but he was too tired. He didn’t care enough. Alex probably wouldn’t care either.
“In your experience, is anything ever what it appears to be?” Alex said.
Troy shook his head. “No. I guess not.”
On the night table next to the bed, Troy’s cell phone started to buzz. He must have put it on vibrate. It made that annoying sound where the vibrations made it rub against the surface of the table.
He picked it up. Miquel Castro-Ruiz.
Troy pressed the green button. He glanced at Alex, but Alex was looking away, out the door at the fall morning in Worcester.
“Hola,” Troy said into the phone. He was beginning to learn Spanish. He figured he should learn some European language, and they were based in Madrid at the moment, so that was a starting place. Everyone there seemed to speak five languages.
“Buenos días, Señor Stark,” Castro said. “Did I wake you?”
“No,” Troy said truthfully. Alex woke him five minutes ago. “I’ve been awake for a little while.”
“I imagine you have heard about the terrorist attack?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“How far are you from there right now?”
“About a hundred miles.”
There was a pause over the line while Castro calculated miles into centimeters or milliliters or some damn thing.
“Are you free to go there?” Castro said. “I would like to know the lay of the land, as you would say.”
Troy would never say that, but okay.
“Yeah. I can do that.”
“No need to get involved or search deeper. It’s just that they’re holding the intelligence very tightly. Jan cannot get us any information, images, or films at this time. Nothing that isn’t already in the news. I would like to know the site from your eyes. Even if they bar you from entry.”
“I’ll go,” Troy said. “I imagine I’ll find a way into the site.”
“I imagine you will too,” Castro said. “That’s why I hired you.”
“Are we worried about it?”
“Not worried. But of course, we have our own similar facilities here.”
“Of course.”
They exchanged a few more pleasantries, not much, and then Troy hung up. He liked that about Miquel Castro. The man didn’t dilly-dally with a lot of unnecessary chatter.
Troy looked across at Alex again.
Alex stood and pitched his smoke out the open door. “Ready to take a ride? Apparently, you have this motel room until tomorrow. I’ll have you back before your family gathers for mid-afternoon brunch.”
Troy wasn’t ready to take a ride, not really. He was ready to go back to sleep. He was hung over and the last thing he wanted to face was the remains of a terrorist attack.
“Is this part of the charity consulting gig?” he said.
Alex nodded. “I didn’t stop by here to reminisce about the old days, as enjoyable as that might be. I was sent here to pick you up.”
Troy shrugged and stood up. He was still dressed for the wedding, more or less.
“Remember the time we stole that helicopter?” he said. “And you crashed it onto the bridge, with the rotors shredded off and flying everywhere?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “That was fun. Also the time you left me that dead Albanian gangster in the woods. He had half a pack of Turkish cigarettes on him. It got me smoking again. But I don’t blame you for that.”
Troy nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. Those were good times. Let me just change my clothes.”
* * *
Smoke was rising near a low range of mountains on the horizon.
Troy hadn’t spoken much on the two-hour ride out here. Instead, he just stared from the big blue Jeep Alex was driving at the barren trees of the forests lining the road. It made him think of a time after a nuclear war.
Everything lifeless, as far as the eye could see.
“There’s also a no-fly zone for ten miles in any direction,” Alex said. “They’ve been chasing news helicopters out of here all morning and jamming drone signals. If we were kids, I’d suggest that we take a walk through the woods and salvage some of the nifty high-tech hardware that’s crashed back in there.”
Troy glanced up through the t-top roof of the Jeep. A line of helicopters were circling behind them, like insects: off to the east, headed north, and then in the distance, turning to the west. They were so far away, you couldn’t even hear them.
