Drone a sci fi superhe.., p.7
Drone - A Sci-Fi Superhero Thriller (The Gift Book 2), page 7
I’m trying to think of all the ways I could bump off a guard and swap my clothes for his. I’m always watched by at least two soldiers. This isn’t one of Darida’s grimy, dingy torture stations; this is a top-secret government facility.
Nevertheless, I don’t particularly think your prospects for surviving whatever comes after escaping the Pit are good.
“How do you mean?”
Presumably we’re somewhere in the Middle East. We don’t know where, and if this really is an airbase as Thomas claimed the entire area will be locked down very tightly. Escaping the prison is the easy part. Escaping the military base would be next to impossible.
Thinking about the myriad new faces I’ve seen among the soldiers serving as guards here recently, I’m starting to understand what he’s saying.
Even if you get lucky, and only get shot a couple of times rather than taking a few bullets directly to the head, you’ll have a tricky time explaining to the CIA doctors how you didn’t die out there. Or why you’re able to change your face. It’s vital to our mutual survival that you don’t share the secrets of the nanomachine network.
“You’re ever the optimist, aren’t you?”
I’m ever the realist. It’s my duty to keep you alive, after all.
As much as I don’t want to admit it to myself, it really does feel as though the simplest path to freedom is for me to accept Baynes’ offer.
I could take the first opportunity to disappear that I find; change my face, change my name, disappear to some Caribbean island somewhere and live out a new life. Free of this place and free of the CIA’s prying eyes. I wouldn’t even have to kill anybody.
But what the hell would I do then?
Am I supposed to go back to living like some regular Joe? Take an apprenticeship learning how to fix speedboat engines; find a nice girl, propose to her, and do it properly this time; buy a nice home and plant a garden I’m proud of…?
And then get bored; develop a nice little alcohol habit; argue with my wife; lose my job, watch my garden die, and go through a bitter divorce. All of this while arguing with the electronic brain that inhabits my body.
No, I can’t go back to the regular life. Not now, not ever. And besides, the nanomachines won’t even let me get drunk, let alone get an addiction.
There’s that deafening siren again, followed by a conspicuous ear-splitting silence. I hear the lights outside begin to go out and the jail cell door slides shut.
“What do I do, Vega?”
I mumble it into the bedsheets, but even if someone heard me, I don’t think they’d care. How could a crazy man stand out in a place like this?
Perhaps you should try to learn more about what it is the CIA want you to do. There must be a reason they want you – an unknown man, and a man unaffiliated with the CIA – to do their dirty work for them besides the fact you’ve got a bit of experience. If you knew why, you’d have a tiny bit more leverage.
God, even the thought of being the CIA’s murder drone is enough to make my skin crawl off my flesh and walk right out of here.
But Vega makes a good point. A bit of knowledge can’t hurt me. If I’m to become what the world wants to me be – a merciless killer – I want to go into it with my eyes open.
CHAPTER 11
“Kris, I’m glad you decided to meet with me today.” Baynes is sat across from me again, and I’m handcuffed to the table again. This room smells like repulsive cleaning products again, and it’s driving me out of my mind again. What’s different, however, is that Baynes isn’t wearing a tie today. I wonder if I surprised him on his day off.
“You told one of the guards that you’d like to hear more about the opportunity we’re granting you. Is that true?”
Villainous Ned Flanders and the Amazing Nanotechnological Boy, reunited again to plot state-sanctioned killings worldwide.
“Sure,” I tell him, resting my chin on my one hand that isn’t handcuffed to the table. “You just want me to kill one person, right?”
“That’s right.”
His eyes are positively glowing now.
“I hope you appreciate that I can’t reveal all of the intricacies of the mission to you now. I’d need you to fully commit first.”
I hadn’t expected him to sit here and paint a picture for me, but there’s one thing I need to know more than anything.
“Why me?” I ask him, looking into those excitable eyes of his before dragging my gaze away when his enthusiasm starts to grate on me. “Like, do you not have guys you normally use for this kind of thing? Actual real, trusted CIA guys? How come you’ve gotta come to me? I was packaging sandwiches two months ago.”
“The man we need you to kill is a former CIA agent,” he says without the usual giddiness in his voice. Suddenly it all becomes clearer. “He has intimate knowledge of our methods, our agents, our strategies, and our means.”
I lean back in my chair, putting one hand behind my head in as relaxed a posture as I possibly can while being incarcerated like this.
“And furthermore, we believe we may still be compromised. This man – this former colleague of ours – may still have knowledge of plans and intentions due to some backdoor access to our servers, or people employed within the CIA still loyal to him. So, it’s imperative that this mission remains secret and ‘off the books’ so to speak.”
He says ‘off the books’ as though it’s unusual; as if he isn’t an off-the-books agent within an off-the-books location, inside an off-the-books prison.
“Who is he?”
“We can’t tell you that quite yet. I’m sure you appreciate that, given the highly sensitive nature and circumstances at play, that information would only be provided to you at the mission’s start.”
“Right,” I reply, as unsurprised as I’ll ever be. “Can you at least tell me where he is?”
“I can give you the continent,” he replies, a wry smile on his lips again. “South America.”
“So, this guy,” I pause, before rephrasing that. “This CIA agent, ex-colleague of yours, is somewhere in South America.”
“We will fly you out there on one of our, uhm, ‘off the books’ planes.”
There’s that term again. I’m starting to wonder if the CIA even bother putting anything in those ‘books’ I’ve heard so much about.
“After that you’ll be expected to investigate the area, form relationships with the figureheads within his organization, and find out where he’s located. And then, after gaining his trust, or perhaps just access to him, you must kill him.”
“His organization?” I ask, wondering what exactly that means. “What’s your old buddy into now? Organized crime?”
The smile drains from Baynes’ face. Somehow, I feel like I hit the nail on the head.
“This man represents a grave threat to the United States, its government, and its interests around the world. It’s not inaccurate to say many US citizens could die as a result of this man’s actions.”
So he’s a bad guy. Knowing that will make this the tiniest bit easier, I guess.
“I can’t tell you it will be straightforward,” Baynes continues, “we can’t offer much if any support while you’re out there in the field. The risk that he would find out and seek to counteract you or just go into hiding somewhere else are too great.”
“That makes sense,” I reply. I hadn’t expected much help anyway. What can the CIA do for me that I can’t do for myself?
“But, if you are successful in this mission, we could make things very easy for you on the outside.”
So now he starts talking about what the CIA can do for me.
“Very easy? In what way?”
“A new identity and a new passport, as well as a plausible cover story to meet anyone from your life in the United States that you wish. Your father, friends from school, whoever you hold dear.”
I snigger to myself, thinking of the absurdity of it all.
“My father and everyone else I ever knew from back home think I’m dead.”
“We’ll tell them you left to work for the CIA overseas, or that you were performing important undercover work and had to fake your death. I don’t know, we’ll get creative.”
I laugh again, and he leans forward, clasping his hands together before him in that negotiating manner he likes so much.
“You do what you’re good at, and we’ll do what we’re good at,” he says, with that hopeful sparkle in his eyes.
What I’m good at? I could try to argue, but the corpses of the Butcher of Ben-Assi and Cantara Hafeez would say otherwise. I think again of what Vega told me: I’ve become something I never intended.
“Can I think about it?” I ask him. His eyes widen and his eyebrows rise; he’s surprised by my saying that.
“Of course,” he says after a few moments of pause. “You know where to find me.”
He stands and smiles in my direction, while I wait for the inevitable double team of soldiers to unlock my handcuff.
“Whatever you need, Kris, we can do it for you.”
He turns and walks out of the door, saluting the two waiting soldiers as he does.
Whatever I need, huh?
Back home, I have no-one. A dad who’ll see my return to life as some sort of divine sign from the holy spirit? An ex-girlfriend who hates my guts? Baynes’ attempts to tempt me with the idea that I can return home isn’t the grand bargain he thinks it is.
But I do wonder if there’s something else I can ask for. Something that would right a lot more wrongs than releasing me back into the city ever would.
CHAPTER 12
When I get back to the pit it’s dinner time. That airline trolley is back out and the meals are being dispensed. Finch looks to be the one handing them out today – I can see him breathing through his mouth as he does it.
I smile at him as I pass; he looks like he wants to murder me.
I grab a foil-covered tray and stroll back to my cell. There, I tuck into a bland meal of eggs, vegetables, and potatoes. I briefly wonder if the nanomachine network can fine tune my tastebuds to find this stuff delicious, but it’s no problem – I quickly eat everything before me.
So that’s why they want a comparative nobody to do their dirty work, Vega says when I’m finished. I look up, see the mass of inmates gathered by the cart, and put the bedsheet to my mouth, murmuring quietly.
“A rogue CIA agent who’s wise to their methods. Why not send a clueless kid from the city to take him out?”
In a crazy situation it’s the sanest choice.
I put the bedsheet down before seeing that my tray is dangling off the bed almost.
“Hey man, we were wondering where you’d been.”
I hear Jack’s voice as I move my tray to the floor; I look up to see him leaning in the doorframe of my cell, his expression welcoming and polite.
“Ahh, you know,” I say, rising to my feet and joining him outside. “The usual dead-eyed hack asking me questions I don’t know the answer to.”
We walk to a quieter side of the floor, out of direct view of Finch now standing by the door with his hands on his rifle, as per usual. Gus and Dante are there; Gus leaning against the red wall, and Dante sitting on a steel chair with his legs splayed wide open.
We stand and chat about idle nothings – sports teams I never paid any attention to; prisoner dramas that don’t involve me; the state of the world that I don’t care about anyway – until someone mentions marriage.
“My wife always said I was too risk averse,” Gus says, stoking my curiosity.
“The criminal counterfeiter was too risk averse?” Dante asks incredulously.
“Wait a minute,” I say, interrupting them both, “Did you say you were married?”
“I still am,” Gus says, with a hopeful spark in his eyes that soon disappears. “At least, I think I am. I’ve been in here for three months or thereabouts. For all she knows I vanished without trace.”
Dante snorts derisively; I can’t tell if it’s the CIA or Gus himself who draws his ire.
“Why don’t you just agree to work for them and get out of here, man?”
“Because then I’ll never be able to quit. You and I both know that once I’m counterfeiting cash for the CIA to spend on places that don’t exist – places like this – they’ll never let me stop.”
Dante looks down and sighs. He understands.
“I never even wanted to be in that business to begin with, but what can I say? I had a talent for it. My wife thought my brother and I owned a tech company, but it was fake money the whole way down. Now, if I ever want to see my wife again I have to go back to that life. I have to lie to her.”
“Better to be dishonest out there than disappear down here,” Dante says bitterly.
“I don’t even know what I’d say to my wife if I did get out,” he replies, somberly. “Maybe I’ll just stay here until I figure that out.”
“Man, stop with that,” Dante says, his face twisted into a picture of frustration. “I’d give anything to see my kid brother again.”
“Kid brother?” I ask. He looks at me with the same expression of frustration, but his features soon soften as he begins to speak. “Yeah, Deon. He was 15 when I was disappeared. He’ll be 16 now.”
No-one says anything in reply. After a few taut moments, he continues. “We didn’t have much of an upbringing. A mom who drank, a dad who vanished. I raised him from when he was nine years old.”
He rubs his eyes and then goes back to looking at me like he’s used to breaking out in tears, but after so long down here he has no more tears left to give.
“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about him. Where he’s at, what he’s doing, who he’s with. For what I did, I could do 20 years in a federal penitentiary, and it’d be easy so long as I could talk to him. But I know too much, and I’m here. I’m here, and I can’t get out.”
He rubs his eyes again and lowers his head, holding his arms out in front of him in some subconscious approximation of begging.
“You ever think about your family, Jack?” Gus asks, looking over to the unimposing figure of Jack stood with his hands stuffed in his jogging pants pockets. “You never seem to talk about them.”
“I don’t like to talk about them,” he replies, shrugging his shoulders slightly, “I know everyone struggles with it. Everyone has people they miss. People who miss them. I’m no different. I think of them every day.”
“Who?” I ask, fully aware that by now I’m making my way around the circle, having everyone lay out their deepest emotions, but I’m curious. I expected the inmates of this jail to be bullies like Andreas – stone-cold psychopaths and world-renowned killers – but instead they feel human to me.
“My father’s a philosophy professor. My mother’s a math professor. My brother is a social worker, my sister is a biomedical student. We were all part of the same pacifist tradition while growing up. Of course, I was a little bit more radical in my beliefs, so I ended up…”
He pauses, looking around at the jail and everyone in it. Finally, he speaks again.
“Yeah, in here I thought I was so smart; I thought I could do anything. I was an engineering graduate with the world at my fingertips, and everywhere I looked I saw injustice. The strong bullying the weak. The rich taking from the poor, it all made me so mad. But I’m not mad anymore. Hard to stay mad at the world when you don’t even get to see it.”
He pauses again, closing his eyes briefly before they re-open with an added fire.
“Maybe they’d still like to see me again, maybe not. I’d like to think I could at least make an appeal to them. The pacifist bomber, Jesus, what was I thinking?”
All of these people have families of some sort. People waiting for them outside. People who may be angry or bitter, but people who care for them nonetheless.
“I have nobody,” I find myself saying out loud. Dante tilts his head back up and Jack takes his hands out of his pockets. “I mean, I’ve got a dad, who I’m sure doesn’t love me as much as he loves his God. I’ve got an ex-girlfriend who I didn’t even notice for months was starving herself to near-death. But I’ve got nobody who cares about me.”
I see Jack’s hand hover in the air; he looks as if he’s deciding whether to put it on my shoulder, but he seems to decide against it.
“I’m like you,” I say to Gus, looking up at him. “I could get out of here if I just do as they say, but what’s the point? There’s not a person in the world who’d welcome me back. And the people I told myself I’d take a bullet to protect? They’re all dead.”
“You sound like you’ve been through a lot,” Dante says, stopping my maudlin monologue in its tracks. “But you’ve gotta hope that there’s still a chance to make a difference for someone, right?”
I smile at him before feeling one of my eyes begin to well up. I dab a tear away with a sleeve; I hadn’t expected to cry tonight but speaking to these people about their loved ones seems to be dredging up awful feelings.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the locket, rolling it between my fingers a bit before placing it gently back into my pocket: a habit I’ve picked up from Dina.
The three of them begin talking of more inane matters again: their differing recollections of some 80s movie I’ve never heard of. Does it end with the hero dying, or not? Somehow, all three of them have a different opinion. Before long, though, that deafening siren sounds, signifying lights out time.
We all slowly file back to our cells, and I’m so deep in thought that before I even know it, I’m back in my pad with the lights out and the door closed.
I was meaning to ask, Vega says as I stand in the dim red light. You told Baynes you needed more time to think about his offer. What are you thinking about?
I throw off my clothing and slip back under the sheets, whispering into the covers as I’ve become accustomed to.
“There are people locked away here who deserve to see the outside world way more than I do. Maybe if I agree to kill this man, I can convince Baynes to let them go.”
