Demon Accords 05.5: Executable (4 page)

“Chuck Norris is the reason Waldo is hiding,” Jonah responded.

“Ghosts sit around the campfire and tell Chuck Norris stories,” Rory responded, but his attention was now on my lunch bag.

I saw Sarah enter the room from the lunch line, holding her tray while scanning for a place to sit. 

I’ve only ever gone to Castlebury, but I’ve been told that lunch is the hardest part of starting at a new school.  Some kids even thought that swimming through a shark-filled tank might be less scary.

The junior hippies of America crowd ignored her, while the potheads eyed her like she was a narc.  The athletes and cheerleaders smirked and snickered to themselves as she walked through the tables and the nerdy suckup kids all just kept their heads down and made no eye contact. Wisely, she turned away from the fashionista girls before they could mock her clothing choices.

I waved to her.  A frown flickered across her face, but there were no other options, so she headed our way.  My three companions looked from her to me, questions written in their expressions.

“Hey, we’ve got an empty seat,” I said when she got closer.  I introduced the others as she sat down.  She nodded back at them, poker face in place, and then got down to eating.  I noticed that she had way more food than most girls.  Scratch that:
way
more food than most three girls.  Her tray was loaded.  Two sandwich wraps, a bag of chips, an apple, banana, a brownie, a chocolate cupcake with white frosting, and two cartons of milk.  She ate like it was her job—head down and machine-like.

“Where are you from, Sarah?” Jonah asked after exchanging a raised eyebrow with the rest of us.

She lifted her head, pausing her chewing to answer around a mouth full of what appeared to be chicken salad in a sundried tomato wrap.  “Colorado.  South of Denver.”

She wasn’t even slightly dainty in her manners, more… guylike.

“Parents change jobs or something?” he asked, gamely trying to create a conversation.

“Yeah,” she answered, flicking her eyes from his to mine before dropping them to her tray.

Jonah looked at her for a moment, clearly at a loss, before looking at me and mouthing
what the fuck?
  I shrugged and opened my lunch bag.  Jonah gave the girl one more glance before turning his attention to my bag.  Rory was already focused on it.

I pulled a recycled cardboard takehome box from the bag, the words
Rowan West
in raised imprint on the top of it.  Inside was today’s culinary delight.

“What ya got?” Rory asked.

“Looks to be a Black Forest ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, sliced apple, and honey mustard sandwich on oatmeal bread.  A Granny Smith apple, a Stewart’s Orange Crème soda, and some of her homemade chips.  Dammit, no cookies,” I answered.

Sarah had paused in her eating to watch my unveiling.  She looked from my lunch to my eyes, pulling her head back and tilting it to one side.

“One of the many job perks of being a restaurant dishwasher.  My aunt or whatever chef is cooking through the dinner hour packs my lunch.”

“Why can’t they pack my lunch?” Rory complained.

“Because you don’t wash thousands of dishes every week and your allowance is
still
more than I make,” I replied.  “You
could
just buy a Rowan West lunch every day.”

His parents were both professors at UVM.  His father was head of the Chemistry department and his mom taught Psychology to undergraduates.  An only child, he was the Tessings’ pride and joy.

“That’s brilliant!” he exclaimed.  “My parents worship the ground your aunt walks on, so they would love the idea I was getting a Vermont-produced, nutritious lunch!”

“Why?” Sarah suddenly asked.

“Why would they want me to eat nutritionally?” Rory asked. 

The brown-haired girl shook her head. “No. Why do they worship his aunt?” she asked, pointing her thumb in my direction.

“Because I got lost in the woods as a little kid and she found me,” Rory said.  I stopped chewing, not liking where this was headed.  As usual, Rory was oblivious.  Candace, however, glanced my way.

“How did she find you?  She a good tracker?” Sarah asked.

“No she…” Rory started, but I interrupted.

“Hey, who’s going to the Homecoming dance?”

There was an awkward moment of quiet as everyone wrestled with how to handle my blatant topic change.  Sarah looked at me with narrowed eyes but said nothing, instead continuing to chew.

“I’m going with either Elle Resner or Jess Trainor,” Jonah said into the silence. 

Rory, who had been left with his mouth hanging open, looked from me to the tall boy beside him.  “What the hell does that mean?  You’re either going with one or the other. Which is it?”

“It means he hasn’t asked either yet but is still working up to it,” Candace said, peeling the top off a container of applesauce.

“Technically, you’re correct, but I’m confident that one or the other will say yes,” Jonah answered, trying to look smug.  Of all of us, he had the most options for friends.  He could have chosen to sit with his soccer buddies at any time, but instead stayed with our little group for lunch.  He regularly got invited to parties and events that I never would.  Candace also had options for lunch, through her many club connections, but she was socially awkward and didn’t really fit in anywhere.  Rory, because of his annoying tendency to rub his intelligence in everyone’s faces and because of his steadfast loyalty to me, was the second least-popular person of our group.  I’ll give you one guess as to who holds the number one spot.

“How about you?  You going?” Candace asked me.

“I never go to dances,” I replied.

“Plus, that’s Mabon,” Rory said absently.  Because he was staring intently into his bag of Doritos, he failed to notice my wicked glare in his direction.

“What’s Mabon?” Sarah asked suddenly.  Rory looked startled, like he’d forgotten her presence, then he glanced at me, perhaps realizing that his big, fat mouth had yet again run away from him.

‘He means it’s the Fall Equinox that weekend, and I usually spend it stargazing with my aunt.  Usually some leftover Perseid meteors still visible,” I said, lamely trying to cover his lapse.  The other two would
never
bring up Mabon, but Rory’s know-it-all reflex tended to kick in at ill-opportune times.

“Says here that Mabon is a pagan holiday, also known sometimes as the Harvest Home festival,” Sarah said, looking up from her smart phone.

“Hey, is that a Samsung Galaxy?” Rory asked, leaning forward to get a better look at her phone.

“I saw a lot of stuff in the gift shop of your restaurant.  You know, like crystals and Tarot cards and stuff.  You and your aunt into all that New Age stuff?” she asked me, ignoring Rory’s ploy. There was a studied casualness to her question that made me a little nervous.

“We’re into
selling
New Age and Spiritualism merchandise.  Pretty good market for it around these parts, plus we do Internet orders.  So between helping my aunt and meteor watching, I’ll be too busy to do anything else.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the hippies that come out of the woodwork around here,” Jonah said.  Sarah flicked her eyes in his direction before glancing back at me.  She looked thoughtful then went back to eating like a professional.

“Did you know Chuck Norris has already been to Mars?” Rory asked us.  “That’s why there’s no sign of life.”

“When the Boogeyman goes to bed, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris,” Jonah replied.

I took another bite of my sandwich and chewed slowly, watching the new girl.  She paid no attention to the two clowns, concentrating on eating her lunch and taking the occasional glance around at the room.  Her eyes flicked in my direction at least once.  Somehow, I knew that all our misdirection had done nothing more than hone her curiosity.  Great.  She would likely ask around and in short order, our table would be once again down to four.  Probably better for her anyway.

A little over two hundred miles to the southeast of Castlebury, a fit young man with black hair and black skin stood on a roof.  Three stories above the ground, he was watching another man through expensive binoculars while holding a parabolic mike in his spare hand.  His target—who was in his early twenties and was very fit, with sandy hair and hazel eyes—was sipping a latte at an outdoor table in front of a Boston coffee shop. Playing a hunch, the watcher had been tailing his quarry for three days.  Another hunch told him his patience was about to pay off, as Mr. Latte reached into a pocket to grab his phone.

“Chete
,” the latte guy answered.  The sound was crisp and clear even ninety-seven yards away as the hunter listened through top-end headphones.

“Agent Machete, you are activated.  Details follow by text.  You’ll proceed to Castlebury, Vermont and investigate a Sarah Williams, recently registered at Castlebury High School. This is only a sneak and peek.  Copy?”

“Copy Central,” he replied, ending the call.

Agent Machete turned and headed for his vehicle, a visible sense of excitement about him.  In his eagerness
, he never noticed the man on the roof
.

The watcher knew
a great deal about Machete, like the fact that he had been recruited right off the battlefields of Afghanistan, an advanced graduate of the U.S. Army’s school of killing and mayhem.  He had been a squad leader in a light infantry unit that had drawn more than its share of dangerous building clearing assignments.  The
last
mission had sent his unit in support of a group of special operators whose only uniform emblems had been crossed black swords over the letters A.I.R.

The building was thought to contain a high
-ranking Taliban officer.  It did—along with three times as many fighters as intelligence had counted on.  Machete, whose birth name was Kevin, had demonstrated a ferocious appetite for combat in the fight that followed.  The same fight killed off his entire squad.

After the battle, wounded in both body and mind, he had been approached by a man in a black suit, representing an elite organization focused on protecting the U.S.A.  He fit their profile
: a young, skilled soldier who lacked much in the way of family or friends back in the States.  Would he want to truly be of service to his country?  Hell, yeah!

He died that day, at least on paper.  His birth name was gone, engraved on a headstone in Arlington Cemetery.  The funeral was apparently very impressive; not that he would know, as
he had been whisked into a covert training program that drew its roots from the CIA’s famous Farm facility.

The watcher, also a young man, knew all t
his because Machete was a special project of his.  

Oddly enough, he had much in common with Machete.  He
, too, had been a soldier in Afghanistan; a Ranger, assigned to a mixed force unit that spent months deep in the rugged mountains tracking the Taliban.  He, too, had been recruited by a man in a black suit while he lay in the hospital.  But unlike Machete, Michael West got to keep his own name and identity.  His recruiter, who had identified himself as Nathan Stewart, had asked him two hours’ worth of questions about his uncanny ability to find the quarry his unit had hunted.  Time and again, Mike had been ridiculously successful at picking the right direction, village, cave, or hidey hole to find his man.  He was so crazy good at it that the team’s handle for him was Witch Hunter.

Director Stewart had explained that Michael’s talent wasn’t luck or even intuition, but another gift that most of the human race didn’t have.  Mike had been skeptical, right up until one of Stewart’s assistants had somehow moved an entire tray of food off the table in front of him and over to her own place setting…
without touching it.  Several more demonstrations followed, one of which left him hovering six inches off the ground before he was willing to listen, although he pointed out that his missing left foot made him less than a whole man.  Director Stewart had waved that off as inconsequential.  There were ex-soldiers missing
both
feet who were competing in international and Olympic races.  It was what Mike had in his head and heart that would qualify or disqualify him.

So he
, too, had undergone additional training.  But while much of it was spycraft, weapons, unarmed combat and surveillance technique, there had also been intensive work done to hone and develop his innate gift for finding quarry.  All of Stewart’s people had some gift or other, gifts that belonged in fairy tales or movies but existed here in the real world.

When he was done, he was turned loose with a few leads on the mysterious and incredibly dangerous organization known as
agents in rebus,
whose symbol was crossed swords over the word AIR
.

Th
ose leads, developed further by Michael’s uncanny gift, had led him to Machete.  And now, Machete was leading him to something that his gut told him was of huge significance to AIR.  Whatever—or, in this case,
whoever
—that was, Mike West vowed to himself as he adjusted his prosthetic foot, AIR wouldn’t get it first.