Gary Gibson - Final Days

Saul ducked away from the door, and made his way to another vacant workstation nearby. He waited there, one hand up to conceal the side of his head, leaning forward as if to concentrate on some piece of scrolling information. He was watching discreetly when Donohue emerged from the executive suite a few minutes later, hurrying back towards the elevators.

Saul followed him, rigid with tension, aware that stumbling across Donohue like this was sheer luck. He kept a discreet distance, hovering around a corner while Donohue boarded an elevator. As soon as its doors closed, Saul quickly boarded the one adjoining, punching the button for the basement car park. He couldn’t be sure that was where Donohue was heading, but the chances were pretty good.

Adrenalin chased away all the aches and pains that still plagued him as the elevator dropped, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the fatigue. I need this , he thought, fumbling for the inhaler. Just one more shot to give him a little bit of killer instinct. Maybe things had gone badly that time on Kepler, but the real mistake had been taking too much, too fast.

Just enough, and no more. That was all he needed.

He pressed the device against his lips, hitting the activator and inhaling deeply. He gasped as the loup-garou exploded into his lungs, reeling back against the wall of the elevator as the drug punched its way into his bloodstream and began racing towards his brain’s chemoreceptors. His fingers twitched slightly as he pushed the inhaler back into his pocket.

After the doors slid open, Saul stepped out into an enormous, dimly lit space that normally would be filled with maintenance trucks and Agency vehicles. Instead, more than a dozen battle-scarred Dogs, surrounded by yelling repair crews, dominated most of the available space, while nearly as many sonar tanks stood waiting next to an impromptu repair station. Half a dozen engineers were crowded around the display panel of an industrial robot that whirred and vibrated while applying the bright flame of a plasma torch to the treads of one tank.

Saul stared around wildly, desperate at the thought that he’d managed to lose Donohue.

There ! Saul recognized Donohue’s ID tag bobbing along past a cluster of troopers, almost unnoticeable amongst their varicoloured UP icons. He hurried past a pair of Black Dogs carrying sonar cannons on their backs, their batteries blaring noisily as the ear-muffled operators ran test checks across the ceiling.

He noticed Donohue was making his way towards a row of cars parked along one wall and hurried after him, closing the distance while casting a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking their way.

Saul slammed into Donohue from behind, just as he was pulling the door of a car open. The man grunted under the force of the impact, which sent him flying forward across the driver’s seat. He recovered quickly, however, ramming his left elbow back into Saul’s ribs, while struggling to pull his gun from its shoulder holster.

Saul brought a knee up hard between the man’s thighs, and Donohue slumped forward, wheezing noisily. Saul leaned further inside the car and locked an arm around Donohue’s neck, while groping with his other hand until he found the holster, and pressed Donohue’s standard-issue Agnessa up against the back of the man’s head.

‘Slide over, and keep your hands visible,’ Saul commanded.

Donohue nodded wordlessly, and moved himself over to the passenger seat. His eyes widened in shock as he turned to face his assailant.

‘You son of a bitch,’ Donohue hissed. ‘If you ever had a chance of getting out of this alive, you just lost it.’

A tide of white-hot anger obscuring his thinking, Saul flicked the gun around to grasp it by the muzzle, then whipped the handle viciously across Donohue’s head.

Donohue reeled back in shock, then reached up one trembling hand to feel the blood seeping from his forehead. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he screeched.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Saul snapped, pressing the Agnessa between Donohue’s eyes. He groped at the dashboard, opaquing the windows as far as they would go, so as to hide them both from outside scrutiny.

‘Why were you following me when I arrived in Sophia?’ Saul demanded. ‘Were you intending to kill me, like you did Farad Maalouf?’

‘You have no idea what you’re involved in,’ Donohue snarled. ‘I told you to get the fuck off Earth, and you ignored me. You got yourself caught up in something you shouldn’t have had any part in.’

‘Tell me, about Mitchell Stone,’ Saul demanded through clenched teeth. ‘You told me he was dead, but that’s not what I’ve been hearing. Why bother lying to me?’

‘So it’s true what I heard,’ Donohue snapped back. ‘You did get your hands on the Tau Ceti files. We’d never have figured that out if you hadn’t sent them to your girlfriend over a public network.’

‘How the hell can you know about that?’

‘You don’t have high enough clearance even to ask me that fucking question,’ Donohue replied angrily.

‘Before you sent me after Hanover, you told me I had a chance of finding out who blew the Galileo link – and that whoever did it was linked to Hsiu-Chuan. Or was all of that just so much bullshit?’

A Black Dog clumped past them, followed by two sonar tanks, only blurrily visible through the opaqued glass. The car trembled under the impact of their passing.

Donohue pulled himself more upright, one corner of his mouth twitching up into the same sneer Saul remembered from Hong Kong. ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said, enunciating the words carefully, ‘One. Fucking. Thing.’

Saul shot him in the thigh, taking a chance that the din of surrounding machinery would drown out the sound of the gun firing. Donohue screamed and jerked back against the door, his face turning alabaster white as he grabbed at his wounded leg. He seemed to grow suddenly smaller, his breath hissing in and out in small, tight gasps between his clenched teeth.

Saul leaned in closer, his gun now angled towards Donohue’s crotch. ‘I just want you to understand exactly how I’m feeling,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting ten long, miserable fucking years just so I can find out if my wife and daughter are even alive. I want to know who did this thing – what person is responsible for putting my life on hold for all this time. So I want you , Agent Donohue, to tell me every last fucking thing you know. I’ve been arrested, held prisoner, tortured, had guns pointed at me, you name it – and if there’s one person around here who seems to have a better grasp of whatever the fuck is really going on, it’s you.’

‘Or what?’ Donohue gasped. ‘Or you’ll kill me?’

Saul shook his head. ‘No, I’m a lot more imaginative than that. First I’ll blow your right arm off.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Then the left. Then I’ll drill a hole through your balls. Then—’

‘All right,’ said Donohue. ‘All right. Jesus, I’ll tell you.’

Saul leaned back and waited, the loup-garou making him feel superhuman, invulnerable.

‘It was never really about Galileo,’ said Donohue. ‘When we sent you after Hanover, I mean. It was just about the shipment.’

‘The artefacts from the far future? What exactly were they carrying in that shipment?’

Donohue laughed weakly and rolled his eyes. ‘What the hell do you think was in that shipment? It was something that triggered the growths, left behind by whatever it was that built the Founder Network. But we got careless.’ He winced in pain and shifted slightly. ‘Turns out that shipment went to the bottom of the Pacific before it even managed to reach Taiwan.’