Swords Of Exodus Part 5

Before I realize what's happening, I'm in a small village somewhere. I've been here before, but I can't remember when. This time I'm not alone. It's dark, but there are fires, enough of them that I can see. People are running for their lives. Men, women, children alike, fleeing in terror.

There's noise, gunfire. A large armored truck, an MRAP, slowly rolls through the village. A faceless machine gunner in the turret mows down anything that moves in front of him. Men in uniforms, carrying rifles, walk along side it, shooting.

Why are they killing all these people?

I see a few more men, coming up behind the vehicle. These men are bulkier, stronger, and wear armor. One carries a FAL rifle in his hands, and shoots a terrified old man as he runs down the street.

Stop it! Why are they doing this? Who are these people?

The shooter with the FAL rifle is undeterred, unaware of my pleas. He reloads his rifle, quickly and smoothly, and fires again. A car pulls out into the street, desperately trying to get away, but it's no use. The machine gunner and the man with the FAL rifle tear into it. It rolls to a stop, crunching against a wall, its pa.s.sengers' lives having been snuffed out.

I move closer to the man with the FAL, furious now. I don't know what's going on, but I desperately want to make him hear me. I'm like a ghost, silent, invisible. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

STOP IT!.

The man with the rifle is aware of me now, somehow. He turns to face me, a cruel smile on his face. "Stop what?" he asks. His voice is familiar. It's mine. He's me.

No! I didn't do that!

"Didn't you?" he asks, still smiling. His voice sounds distant, like an echo. I look down, and now the rifle is in my hands. It's still hot to the touch. I can feel the heat of the fires, smell the exhaust of the truck, and hear the screams and gunfire clearly.

No! I protest. It wasn't me! I didn't kill all those people!

The ghastly mirror image grins at me malevolently. "You did kill a lot of people. You're a natural-born killer, remember? This is your natural environment."

The burning village is gone, and suddenly I'm in a helicopter. Dim red lights provide all the illumination I have. My .44 Magnum revolver is in my hand. Rafael Montalban is in front of me, on his knees, with a surprised look on his face. I fire, the gun bucking in my hand. Before he can scream, I kick him out of the aircraft. He falls away into the darkness and disappears.

The other one is next to me again, whispering in my ear. "It's what you do. It's all you do."

No . . . please stop. G.o.d, please, make it stop.

He laughs darkly. "G.o.d can't find you here. It's just you and me."

Leave me alone! I scream, in silence. The other is gone then, and I'm alone, floating in a void.

Is this h.e.l.l?

I don't know how long I wondered that, but I wasn't afraid. After a while, I felt nothing at all. I drifted alone in darkness for ages, wondering about my state, but only barely. I was detached, wholly separate from myself, and I didn't have it in me to care. No one else did, why should I?

Suddenly I was aware of my body again. I'd returned to my corporeal form. My arms and legs began to feel heavy. My back was against warm metal. I was lying on something. m.u.f.fled sounds pierced the blackness. Metallic sounds, then voices. Then there was light, blinding white light. With the light, my skin felt cold, and I began to shake.

I didn't know what was happening. I still couldn't see anything. But one clear voice pierced the confusion, a cold, dispa.s.sionate woman's voice.

"Log that as eighteen hours, thirty-six minutes in the tank," Dr. Silvers said.

"That's amazing," a nasally man's voice replied. "I wasn't sure we'd be able to keep the program going for that long."

"Neither was I," Dr. Silvers said. "Mr. Valentine keeps exceeding our expectations."

The last image that crosses my mind, before mercifully losing unconsciousness, is of the sky, on fire.

LORENZO.

Somewhere over Texas February 8th I looked up from the file in my hand, rubbed my eyes, and glanced out the window. Brown fields stretched for miles below. Somewhere down there was where I had been born. Somewhere to the east was where I had been taken in and raised by the Lorenzo family. Ling was sitting across from me, the folding plastic table in between us.

"So, what do you think?" she asked.

"Tough, but doable. This is pretty detailed information about the security at North Gap." We had floor plans, an incomplete list of personnel files, and even some intercepted e-mail traffic from somebody named Dr. Silvers. "How'd you get this?"

"Your brother gave it to me," she said simply. "Once he found out that we wanted to rescue Valentine, he provided everything. He has been looking into this secret organization, which he referred to as Majestic, for quite some time."

"And how exactly did you come into contact with Bob?" Ling was silent. She could tell I was fis.h.i.+ng. "Fine. Be like that. What other resources do we have?"

"You're looking at them." She gestured at the others on the plane. "My sword is the only one which can be spared at this time."

"Sword?"

"An Exodus strike team. Most of our people are occupied with other operations." She didn't seem inclined to elaborate further.

"Flight plan?"

"We will be landing at a small airfield in Montana, approximately two hundred miles from the target. Dr. Bundt and Elvis will stay with the plane." Elvis was the pilot. I'd only seen him briefly, and he didn't seem to be the talkative sort. "We will need to secure secondary transportation from there."

"I've boosted a few cars in my day, won't be a problem."

"I imagine."

"Have you thought about our getaway? How you're going to get Valentine out of the country? These Majestic a.s.sholes may be illegitimate, but they have full access to all of the investigatory powers of one really big a.s.s government machine. If Valentine's important enough to get locked in a secret prison, they're going to be p.i.s.sed off when they find out he's gone."

She shook her head. "This has all been rather . . . hasty. I'm still not sure how we're going to get Valentine out without them killing him."

"Don't worry. I'll come up with something. I always do."

Chapter 3: The Princess of Montana.

LORENZO.

Bozeman, Montana February 10th "You're serious. This is your plan?" Ling was incredulous.

I held up the spaghetti-strapped tank top and the denim miniskirt. "Come on. You need to look the part."

Ling glanced around the Walmart, embarra.s.sed. She caught the skimpy top when I tossed it to her. "This is . . ." she looked at the tag, "a size too small."

"Changing room is right over there." I nodded my head.

"But . . ."

"Look. I know you don't trust me but you need to work with me here. We're going to an oil roughneck town in the middle-of-nowhere Montana, not the French Riviera. So unless you want to put Antoine in drag, this is the best I can come up with."

Antoine grunted.

Ling gave me a dirty look and went into the changing room.

"I hope your boss can lighten up for this," I told Antoine, "or at least fake it. She's a little intense."

Antoine folded his ma.s.sive arms and glared at me. Over the last few days I had discovered that he was very protective of Ling. She was clearly his superior, but he seemed almost like a father figure. Shen, on the other hand, was a cipher. He hardly ever spoke. He stood a short way away from us, and seemed to be uncomfortable shopping at Walmart at two o' clock in the morning. Every freak, junkie, and crazy in Bozeman was wandering around the huge store, making a nuisance of themselves as the hapless employees tried to buff the floors and restock the shelves.

"You are from here?" Antoine asked me out of the blue.

"Not here, specifically. Born and raised in the US. Only been back briefly a handful of times over the last few years . . . And every time it seems a little bit worse, a little rougher."

"Indeed." Antoine looked around the gigantic store filled with more food and goods in one night than whatever West African village he hailed from had probably seen in its history. He chuckled, surely thinking whatever you say, fat American. First world problems. "Times are hard."

I may have detached myself from the world, didn't mean I didn't pay attention to current events, especially those that could present job opportunities. I was retired, not dead. "The economy is s.h.i.+t, but this country has bigger problems."

"I do not understand." Antoine looked to his partner. Shen as usual had nothing to say. "Compared to most of the world, this place is a paradise."

"Listen . . ." It was hard to explain. "I've lived in every s.h.i.+t hole on Earth, and they're all the same. It p.i.s.ses me off to see the same thing creeping in here. There are always a.s.sholes who want to hurt the regular people, and then along come the control freaks who want to capitalize on fear of the scary a.s.sholes to control the regular people. The scary a.s.sholes just don't care, so repeat, repeat, repeat. Government's like a ratchet, and it just keeps on cranking down. This isn't the country I grew up in anymore. People got too scared of the a.s.sholes so now the ratchet's getting real tight. People think they're trading chaos for order, but they're just trading normal human evil for the really dangerous organized kind of evil, the kind that simply does not give a s.h.i.+t. Only bureaucrats can give you true evil."

"Exodus stands against any ent.i.ty which would deprive man of his freedom."

I laughed. "Good luck with that. My brother and Valentine exposed a rogue federal agency killing folks and breaking every law you can think of. It was a big deal. They called it Zubaragate. It was all over the news for a couple of weeks, but what changed since?"

"Nothing." Antoine admitted.

"Nothing. Valentine's in prison and Bob's missing, and not a d.a.m.n thing changed, because a majority of the people are stupid, willfully ignorant, naive fools, who expect bureaucrats to save them and wipe their a.s.ses for them, and the ratchet just keeps on getting tighter."

"I am surprised this offends you."

I glanced over at him. Antoine was smarter than he looked. I had said too much. These people weren't my friends. They didn't deserve a look inside my head. "Yeah . . . Too much control. Too many people watching. I don't like people watching me." My phone vibrated in my pocket, interrupting my thoughts. It was Reaper. Good. This conversation was starting to p.i.s.s me off. I tapped the Bluetooth headset in my ear.

"Go," I said.

"Go where?"

I sighed. "What do you want, Reaper?"

"I got Bob's file, and some other stuff. I'm sending it to you now." My phone buzzed in my hand as it downloaded the data packet. At least the cell service was better than it used to be.

"How much did you get?"

"Not as much as I wanted, Chief. I went in sideways, compromised another agency's system, gave myself the t.i.tle of personnel manager, then requested some files. Tried to stay away from anything that would be cla.s.sified, good thing too, 'cause once I did the whole system came cras.h.i.+ng down. They were on me hard. I was lucky to get what I did. Bob's file was flagged."

"Of course it was. Did they track you?"

"Please. I'm The Reaper." He was always The Reaper when he was bragging. "Get this," he continued. "Bob was fired from the FBI. He went off the reservation, disobeyed a direct order, was working on a forbidden investigation, stuff like that."

This just kept getting better and better. "What the h.e.l.l did Bob get himself into? Did they find out about his involvement with our incident last year?"

"I don't know. The reprimands and personal notes weren't cla.s.sified. He was looking into something they told him not to look into. He tried to gain access to compartmentalized data. He p.i.s.sed somebody off, that's for sure. It's no wonder he left the country. These people are scary."

Reaper was just telling me like it was, but it wasn't what I wanted to hear. So I changed the subject. "How's Jill doing?"

"She's a little freaked out. Worried about you, but she's okay. By the way, did I ever tell you there are some seriously hot girls on your island? Dude! I'm gonna have to get a vacation place out here. You want me to go wake up Jill?"

"No. I'll call her later."

"Hey, one more thing. Check this out." My phone vibrated again as Reaper sent me another file.

"What is it?"

"You wanted me to find everything I could on Valentine, right? Just look. You're going to love this."

What now? I retrieved my phone from my pocket and tapped the screen. I pulled up the image Reaper sent me. It was a picture of the cover of an issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine from several years ago. The screen was too small to read all of the print. The cover photo was a group of men in Tiger Stripe camouflage fatigues, carrying FAL rifles.

"What is this?"

"Just what it looks like. That's our buddy Valentine on the cover of Soldier of Fortune."

The cover headline read, "Switchblade Teams: Elite Special Purpose Units from Vanguard in Action!"

So that's why he'd been tight with Hawk . . . That tight-lipped old b.a.s.t.a.r.d had once been his boss. We'd worked for the same bunch, only I'd been there back before they'd gone all corporate and legitimate. "Unbelievable. Have you found anything else out?"

"Oh, tons. He's never been careful about information management. Between that and the Dead Six files that got dumped during Zubaragate, I found everything on him, easy. It's all there."

"Thanks. I'll go through it when I have time. I'll check in later." I dropped the phone back in my pocket as Ling came out of the dressing room. I cracked a mean grin and whistled. The outfit was just as sleazy as I hoped. And Ling certainly had the body for it.

"I look like a Bangkok wh.o.r.e," she said, awkwardly trying to pull the too-short skirt down a little farther. The revealing top she was wearing had Princess written across it in pink bubble letters.

"Yes, Princess, yes you do. It's perfect. Now if you could just try not to be so scary all the time, we might be able to pull this off."

Shen and Antoine were stonefaced. They looked at each other, at their superior, at me, and then back at each other. Ling glared at them.

"Not a word!" she snapped, spun around, and stomped back into the changing room. "So help me G.o.d, Mr. Lorenzo."

VALENTINE.

North Gap, Montana Seated in my usual spot on the floor, I stared into s.p.a.ce and tried not to think. My head hurt. My mind was sluggish. I felt like I had just woken from a dream. Or maybe I was still dreaming. I couldn't always tell.

They had put me in the machine they called the tank multiple times now. I had only the dimmest recollection of it. It seemed to me that they drugged me before putting me inside it, but they had been drugging me so much the drugs didn't always work anymore. I remembered a mask being put over my entire face, covering my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Something else was wrapped around my waist. Other things were plugged into my body, and they'd put me in.