Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Bill opened the service box and pulled the lever inside. The utility closet door sprung outward, revealing a flight of stairs. Ecstatic, Grudzev led the charge down.

There were no lights in the giant subbasement, but the fluorescent ring in the stairwell was enough to reveal the door-sized ventilation grate on the far wall.

“That’s gotta be it, yeah?” Grudzev said.

Advancing for a closer look, Bill said, “The plating’s awfully thick for a vent.”

“That better be it,” said Pyotr with uncharacteristic anxiety.

A glance at the young man in his arms explained it: He’d lost color, and his breathing was barely noticeable.

Bill examined the grate. “Did the horses guy have any idea where the scanner is?”

“No, but I’m sure we’ll find it,” Grudzev said, keeping private his fear that they wouldn’t. Studying the huge, essentially featureless room left him at a loss.

“Maybe hidden inside a cinder block, yeah?” Karpenko said, tapping the wall beside the grate.

“Yeah, could be,” said Bill. “A pressure-sensitive or spring-loaded deal. But…”

The wall was a good twenty meters of cinder blocks. And who was to say the scanner wasn’t in one of the other three walls? With no better option, Grudzev began rubbing his palms along the rough, musty cinder blocks. The others followed his lead.

“Probably at eye level,” Bill suggested.

Seconds later, Karpenko pressed a cinder block about six up from the floor and the same distance from the left of the grate. The facing hissed sideways, revealing a scanning module like a telescope eyepiece. Grudzev thanked God.

Pyotr took up the American like a puppet, pulled open his right eyelid, and positioned his eye before the scanner. The machine within it whirred, glowing green, then faded back to black. The ventilation grate didn’t stir.

Grudzev said of Charlie, “I’m gonna make that cocksucker eat one of these fucking cinder-”

Locks were heard popping open within the wall.

The first shot sounded high caliber, like the rounds in battle footage. As the report resounded along the raw cement corridors of the complex, Charlie envisioned a zealous Karpenko brandishing some sort of shoulder-mounted cannon, and he felt like jumping for joy. With his hands cuffed behind him to the handles of the heavy refrigerator and freezer, he could barely move.

More weapons joined in. Among the blasts and jolts, bullets hissed, whined, and pinged off the walls and floors. Things began to pop and shatter, building to one continuous, deafening peal. To Charlie it was a symphony. Lights flickered and a fog of dust rolled into the employee lounge.

Suddenly, as if someone had thrown a switch, the shooting ceased. The complex settled, the familiar hum of the ventilators and fluorescents returned, and the air regained most of its clarity.

Charlie heard someone approaching the employee lounge. He pictured himself momentarily giving Grudzev a bear hug.

Dewart batted through a dust cloud and entered the lounge. His face was streaked with perspiration and blood. A fragment of ceiling tile clung to the back of his neck.

“Hey,” he said flatly.

Charlie was too stunned to muster even that much in response.

Dewart uncuffed him from the refrigerator, nudged him aside, and opened the door. He lunged in for a fresh bottle of Gatorade and drained most of it with his first gulp.

Charlie got out, “What happened?”

Dewart wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “We had three men to their four. They had vastly superior weapons. But one of the guards here was alerted in time for us to put a couple of rifles on tripods and wait inside the tunnel entrance. You see, criminals without qualms about nuclear devastation is a key demographic of ours, so one of their men was really one of our men.” Dewart flicked a hand at the hallway.

To Charlie’s shock, Karpenko appeared, hauling a giant assault rifle. As most PlayStation veterans would have, Charlie recognized the iconic AK-74 fitted with a big-mouthed underbarrel grenade launcher. Despite the burden, Karpenko stood more erect than usual, his jaw no longer jutting and his eyes shining with intelligence in place of the usual demonic possession.

“Fortunately, Charlie Clark, you have qualms about nuclear devastation,” Karpenko said. His accent was now no more Russian than Charlie’s. “You went to elaborate lengths to convince us you were the new town gossip, but all you really did was give Grudzev vague details. None of his surviving goons know anything of consequence. And now we’ll be able to spin it so I can get in with Bernie Solntsevskaya, who’s a much greater threat than Grudzev ever was.” The past tense slapped Charlie. “Also, the way things worked out, we were able to save Pitman.”

Charlie reflected that his rescue mission had amounted to saving the life of a traitor, almost certainly at the cost of his own life. Through a thick gloom, he said, “Super. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

The interior of the Blue Lion Pub was paneled in mismatched sheets of dark wood, all nail-gunned into place, many of them warped. The effect was more utility shed than pub. Alice had chosen the Blue Lion for its view across Broadway onto West 112th. She’d been sitting by herself in a window booth for half an hour, nursing a pint of Guinness while immersed in a copy of the free weekly she’d taken from the pile in the entryway. Or so the wizened barkeep and three solitary drinkers were meant to think.

Really she was using the neon Rolling Rock bottle in the window as camouflage of sorts while watching the Perriman Appliances building. Earlier she’d followed Cranch there from the heliport. The night vision lenses in her otherwise superfluous eyeglasses allowed her to see him admitted from the dark vestibule to the Perriman reception area by a young man who wore a powder-blue Columbia rugby shirt-but probably was no Columbia student. Although baby faced, he had that boxy build indigenous to ex-military contract agents.

Her job now was to determine the right time to send in her backup unit, augmented shortly after Cranch’s arrival by sixteen SOCOM weapons and tactical specialists, all of them in dark gray Nomex jumpsuits with body armor vests, Twaron/Kevlar helmets with protective face covering, night-vision goggles, gas masks, and combat steel-reinforced boots. They were armed with either nine-millimeter Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine guns or Remington 870 shotguns. All carried semiautomatic handguns as well. Their tactical aids included a battering ram, flash bang grenades, Stingers, tear gas grenades, and-probably most useful of all-extension poles with mirrors on the ends for looking around corners without putting the looker in the line of fire. If the Clark exfiltration went according to plan, they would need to fire only a couple of paintball guns. The paintballs were packed with oleoresin capsicum, an upmarket pepper spray.

Alice had no expectation that things would go according to plan. In her experience on such ops, Murphy’s Law was a good-case scenario. Her “go” order was to be decided by a number of variables and protocols perhaps best summed up, by her backup unit’s chief, as “whenever you feel the time’s right.”

Shortly after the tactical team arrived, she’d watched Fielding enter the vestibule, then use a key to admit himself to the Perriman offices. She itched to send a couple of troops rappelling through a plate glass window and into the rogue’s face, but the time still wasn’t right.

A few minutes later, a lanky young man who reeked of the Farm prodded in Charlie. Given what Alice had gleaned of his travails, Charlie appeared in great shape. She again refrained from issuing any orders; Drummond still might be en route or somewhere else altogether. Also, she could afford to hold off because Cranch needed time for his act.