Chapter 68
-Route 9, Northern New Jersey — Treeline-
(December – 8:14 PM)
The Humvee hit something in the dark and Killian's teeth clicked together hard enough to taste copper.
"LEFT — LEFT —"
Donie didn't go left. Donie swung the M2 in a wide arc across the treeline and opened up, the .50 cal hammering out a rhythm that Killian felt in his back teeth and his sternum simultaneously. Shell casings bounced off the roof and skittered across the hood. The muzzle flash strobed the forest in white — trees, undergrowth, shadow, trees, shadow, nothing.
"EAT IT, YOU SONS OF BITCHES — COME ON — COME ON —"
"DONIE!" Killian grabbed the headrest and hauled himself halfway through the hatch. "CONTROLLED BURSTS. Controlled. Bursts."
"There's nothing out there," Donie screamed back, and his voice had a specific quality to it that Killian had only heard a handful of times in fifteen years of this work. The quality of a man who had decided, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, that screaming was the only rational response to his current circumstances. "There is NOTHING out there and it keeps KILLING US —"
"Then keep shooting at nothing until it fuckin drops," Killian said. "Keep it loud."
He dropped back into the cab.
Reyes was leaning half out the passenger window, her Mk18 angled back toward the tree line they'd just blown through, burning through a mag with the focused economy of someone who had not yet broken. Not yet. Her jaw was set, and her eyes were doing the work they were trained to do — scanning, tracking, filing. Finding nothing.
Across from her, wedged into the rear left seat, Volkov had his rifle out the opposite window and was doing the same. The Russian hadn't spoken since the safe house. He hadn't needed to. The look on his face when he climbed into the vehicle said everything his mouth hadn't.
Killian checked his watch. 8:14.
They'd been running for twenty-six minutes.
- ++0000++-
The job had been simple.
That was the first thing Killian had said when the brief came down, and he'd meant it as a compliment. He liked simple jobs. Simple jobs had clear parameters, clear objectives, clear exit conditions. You knew when you were done. This one had all three: escort the asset from the warehouse to Hansen's facility, hand him off, hold the perimeter until the boss arrived. One asset. One location. Four hours maximum.
The asset was a teenager.
Killian had looked at the photograph in the brief — the Parker kid, seventeen years old, dark hair, the kind of face that hadn't quite decided what it was going to be yet — and he had thought: simple. He had run harder extractions on middle-aged academics with bad knees and a tendency to hyperventilate.
He had noted, because it was his job to note things, that the kid had walked into the warehouse under his own power. No resistance at the door. No resistance at the car. He'd let them pull him out of his vehicle, let them take his phone and his earbuds, let them walk him in at gunpoint, and sat down in that chair like a person settling in for a conversation he'd already read the transcript of.
Killian had noted it. He had filed it under: kid's been trained to de-escalate, probably been in bad situations before, smart enough not to run his mouth. He had not filed it under anything that would have changed his assessment of the job.
That had been his first mistake.
- ++0000++-
They'd had the kid in the facility for exactly thirty-one minutes when the coms went down.
Not degraded. Not patchy. Down. All of it, simultaneously — radio, cellular, satellite uplink, the encrypted hardline they ran as a backup for the backup. One moment Kowalski was running a comms check on the perimeter channel and the next moment there was nothing. Not static. Silence. The specific quality of silence that happened when something had not merely interrupted a signal but had reached into the infrastructure and switched it off.
Killian had been in the north corridor when it happened. He'd had four seconds to register it before the power went.
The facility ran on a independent generator with two redundant backup systems. All three died at once. The emergency lighting kicked in for approximately seven seconds before that died too. Then there was darkness and the sound of men doing what trained men did in sudden darkness — moving to walls, calling positions, weapons up.
Then Cho stopped calling his position.
Then Reiter.
Then Fischer, whose voice cut off mid-word in a way that did not suggest he'd found a reason to stop talking.
Killian had moved toward the last known position of each man and found, each time, a body. No signs of forced entry at any point. No gunshots. No sounds of struggle that anyone could identify after the fact. Just men who had been standing and then weren't.
What he had found at each position was the same thing.
A faint red glow in the dark. Pulsing. Regular as a heartbeat.
Coming from inside the chest.
- ++0000++-
It was Reyes who figured out what was happening. Reyes who had the presence of mind, in the middle of all of it, to grab Moreau before he could bring his weapon up and put it against the back of Moreau's own skull.
"I ca-can't stop it." Moreau stuttered, "I can feel it Reyes, ki-kill me, Kill ME!"
Then he went quiet.
"He's already gone," Reyes had said, in the flat voice of someone reporting a weather condition. "Look at his hands."
Killian had looked.
Moreau's hands were wrong. The temperature differential was visible even in the emergency red of the single functioning light at the end of the corridor — heat bleeding through the skin in patterns that didn't follow any anatomy Killian recognized. The veins. But not only the veins. Something else. Something that moved with a different logic underneath the surface, branching and crystallizing in shapes that were almost — almost — geometric.
Moreau turned to look at them.
His eyes were wrong, too.
"Out," Killian had said. "Everyone out. Now."
They'd made it to the vehicles before Moreau caught up to them. Before two others caught up to them. Before the thing that used to be Kowalski — good soldier, three tours, family man, kept a photograph of his daughters in his kit — pushed its hands through its own sternum from the inside and pulled out something crystalline and red and drove it through the engine block of the first vehicle like it was made of paper.
Moreau had a blade, a blade constructed from his own molten blood.
They'd left that vehicle. They'd left everything that wasn't the Humvee.
They'd left some of their people too. Killian didn't let himself think about that yet.
- ++0000++-
The doctor had screamed at them the whole way to the vehicle.
Maya Hansen — thirty years old, genetic biologist, the kind of brilliant that had curdled into something ruthless somewhere along the way — had been in the east lab when it started. She'd been at a workbench with her equipment and her samples and her particular, focused silence, the kind of silence that meant do not interrupt me, when Killian found her and told her they were leaving.
She'd screamed that they couldn't leave the samples. She'd screamed that the equipment was irreplaceable. She'd screamed as Killian physically removed her from the lab, that she knew exactly what was happening, that it was the kid and they were all going to die.
Killian had put her in the Humvee and told her to be quiet. It was her. It had to be. The kid was here for her.
She was quiet now. She was sitting in the rear middle seat between Killian and where Volkov was leaning out the window, and she was quiet in the way people got quiet when the screaming had used up everything they had and left nothing.
Her hands were shaking.
Killians were not. He noted this. He didn't consider it a virtue — the shaking would come later, when his nervous system caught up to what his body had been doing for the last half hour. It always came later. For now his hands were steady and his mind was running the thing it ran when everything else was on fire, the cold clinical inventory of what he knew and what he didn't.
What he knew: the target had been cooperative, passive, compliant in every observable way. The target had allowed himself to be escorted to the facility. Thirty-one minutes after arrival, every system in the facility died and something began systematically dismantling their personnel from the inside.
What he didn't know: how.
What he was beginning to suspect: the target had been cooperative because the target had wanted to be here. The target had walked in under his own power because the target had chosen to walk in under his own power. The earbuds, the phone, the compliant silence in the warehouse — none of it was a teenager being smart enough not to run his mouth.
It was a teenager waiting for them to take him exactly where he wanted to go.
The kid used himself as bait.
Killian had known it was too easy. He had known it at the warehouse and he had filed it wrong and now Cho and Reiter and Fischer and Kowalski and eleven others were either dead or something worse than dead and they were running through a New Jersey forest at eighty miles an hour with Donie hammering rounds into the dark.
He'd known. He'd known, and he'd filed it wrong.
That had been his first mistake. He was beginning to think everything after it was just the consequence playing out.
- ++0000++-
The thing hit the Humvee from the left.
Not a vehicle. Not an explosion. Something that impacted the driver's side at a speed that the Humvee's frame was not engineered to absorb, and the world rotated — once, twice, the treeline becoming the road becoming the treeline — and then Killian was not in the vehicle anymore.
He was in the air.
Then he was in a tree.
The trunk stopped him. His body registered this event across several systems simultaneously and in the half-second before the Extremis started doing what Extremis did, he had a comprehensive inventory of the damage: three ribs gone on the left side, left shoulder separated, something wrong in his left knee that would have been career-ending six months ago, concussion, probable.
Then the heat came up from his core the way it always did. Violent and exact. He could feel it moving — not healing so much as insisting, the thermal energy tracing through muscle and nerve and bone with a precision that hurt worse than the damage it was correcting. The ribs reset. The shoulder argued and then surrendered. His knee made a sound he chose not to identify.
He was on his feet in forty seconds.
The Humvee was on its roof in the undergrowth, one wheel still spinning, the M2 at an angle that made it useless. Steam or smoke rising from the undercarriage. The windscreen was gone. Donie was somewhere in the dark to his left making sounds that had stopped being words.
The kid was standing in the gap between the trees and the road.
Standing. Just standing, like a person who had stepped outside for some air and found the view acceptable. His jacket was still on. His hands were in his pockets. He was looking at the wreckage with an expression that Killian's brain, working through the concussion and the adrenaline and the Extremis heat still singing in his veins, could only file as: curious. The way a person looked at something that had caught their attention and hadn't yet told them whether it was interesting enough to keep.
Jericho moved first. The Canadian was already up and already shooting, double-tapping from a position behind the overturned hood, and the kid turned toward the sound and moved.
Killian had fought a lot of people. He had a working taxonomy of how people moved in violence — the trained ones, the enhanced ones, the ones who'd been doing it long enough that it stopped looking like effort. What he watched happen to Jericho did not fit any category in that taxonomy. The kid crossed the distance in something that was too fast to be a run and too deliberate to be anything else, and Jericho's shooting stopped, and Jericho's hands went to his chest, and then Jericho went down and didn't get up and the red glow that came from where his hands were pressing was the same red glow Killian had been finding in the dark corridors of the facility.
Avi didn't make it out of the vehicle. Killian heard the sound from inside the overturned Humvee — short, surprised, then nothing — before he saw the faint pulse of red through the crumpled door panel. She hadn't even cleared the frame.
Tommy had his knife out. The Frenchman was good with a knife, genuinely good, and he came in low the way the good ones did, and the kid looked at him with the same mild curiosity he'd been applying to the wreckage, and Tommy's arms stopped being attached to Tommy, and Tommy sat down in the snow and looked at where his arms had been and said something in French that Killian didn't speak but understood perfectly.
Higgins had been running his mouth since the facility. Screaming at the top of his voice — at the darkness, at the trees, at the situation, in the general direction of God — the specific continuous profanity of a man who processed fear through volume. He was still talking when the kid reached him. He was not talking after.
Killian heard Donie stop making sounds somewhere to his left.
Then it was quiet.
The snow came down. The Humvee ticked. The wheel had stopped spinning.
The kid turned.
Killian was already on his feet. He'd had the trench knife in his hand since before he finished standing, reversed grip, the way his first instructor had taught him in a basement in Minsk twenty-two years ago. The heat in his veins had leveled out into the familiar background burn that meant the Extremis was done with the immediate repairs and had settled into maintenance mode. His knee held. His shoulder held. His ribs held.
He and the kid looked at each other across the dark and the snow, and the wreckage of the last half hour.
The kid's expression didn't change. It was the same expression it had been in the warehouse — the same expression it had been looking at the Humvee, looking at Jericho, looking at Tommy's knife. That mild, patient, slightly detached quality of attention. Like a person watching something unfold that they had already run through in their head and found approximately as expected.
Killian had seen a lot of eyes in his career. He'd seen the eyes of people who liked this. He'd seen the eyes of people who were afraid of it. He'd seen the eyes of people who'd done it so many times it had become neutral.
These were not any of those.
These were the eyes of someone for whom the concept of danger, in the way Killian had spent his life understanding the concept, simply did not apply. Not because the kid was reckless. Not because he was suicidal. Because whatever the kid was working with internally, on whatever level the calculus happened, the outcome of this particular situation had been settled before the Humvee hit the fence line. The violence wasn't the point. It had never been the point.
Killian was beginning to understand — too late, in the way understanding always came too late in his line of work — that he had never been a threat to this person. None of them had. They had been a delivery mechanism. They had carried the bait to exactly where the bait needed to go, and the trap had closed, and the only question left was what the trap did with what it caught.
He tightened his grip on the knife.
"Well," Killian said.
His voice came out steady. He was glad about that.
"Come on then, you little shit."
The kid looked at him.
For the first time since the warehouse, something shifted in that expression. Not warmth, exactly. Not the practiced warmth of the Mandarin, calibrated and performed. Something smaller than that. Something that, in a different person, in a different context, might have been the beginning of a smile.
The kid pulled his hands out of his pockets.
- ++0000++-
-Chapter End-