Enemy Agents (35 page)

Jack looked at Meg, who was fidgeting, running her thumb along the textured grip of her handgun. She was terrified, which meant Jack couldn’t take her with him. “I’m going after Shark. I need you to stay out of sight until the coast is clear. Once I secure the control room I’ll need you to shut this thing down,” he said.

“I can come with you,” she said, “I told you, I can shoot.”

“What’s better, your technical skill or your combat experience?”

She snorted.

“Exactly. We need you alive to kill this damn thing, so hide in here,” he opened a door and found a small kitchen with a few empty tables, “and stay quiet.”

Meg rolled her eyes, and went into the kitchen. “We don’t have much time. Kill Shark and get back here.”

“I will. Keep your safety off and watch this door. Just don’t shoot me when I come back.”

Meg nodded. She walked behind the table closest to the door and knelt down, supporting her hands on the tabletop, her gun aimed at the door, exactly where Jack was standing. “I’ll be fine,” she said, looking down the sights.

Jack smiled reassuringly and pulled the door shut.

From the main door of the bunker, there were two corridors. The one Jack was in right now had a few doors and ended with a door that was labeled as a stairway. The other was the corridor that Quarrel was working through. Jack headed for the stairs.

The stairwell was just cement with fluorescent lights in the corners. He ran down the first flight of stairs in a rush, jumped a one-eighty spin, and settled on the landing with his gun raised. The gentle impact of his back against the concrete wall, which he normally wouldn’t have noticed, sent a spike of pain through his head that left him seeing double. He squinted hard, opened his eyes slowly, and let them focus again. His concussion was still overwhelming, but the mission didn’t allow him time to take a few weeks off to get better. He had a man to kill and no head injury would stop him. Once he was seeing clearly, but still feeling a headache and powerful nausea, he crept slowly and carefully down the rest of the stairs. At the bottom of the steps he slipped off his backpack and tucked it into the corner. He could come back for it when he came for Meg. First, he had to kill Shark, and weighing himself down with explosives would only make that job harder.

He worked his way down a hallway, and saw only two doors: one at the very end of the hall, and one on the left. He opened the one on the left and found a small closet full of ancient cleaning supplies. That meant the one at the end of the hall was the control room. Kicking the door open, he scanned the room beyond the doorway, his eyes and gun-sights always pointed in the same direction. Inside the door was a room lined with hulking metal consoles covered in an assortment of buttons and dials; the computers of an earlier age. Mounted at eye level were several monitors, most of which were very old, except for one modern flatscreen that displayed a satellite’s point of view of the Earth. The others were displaying security camera feeds from all over the TCPE facility. There was no sign of Scarret. Jack stepped toward the door, about to step inside, when a small black ball bounced off the door frame and exploded.

The flashbang sent a jolt of pain through Jack’s head like he’d never experienced before. Sidorov’s tortures were nothing compared to the blinding, all-encompassing pain of having that little grenade explode less than a foot from his concussion-rattled head. Before he could even comprehend where the sudden pain had come from, he felt the rifle stripped from his hands. An instant after that, something hit him hard in the jaw.

Jack slipped into unconsciousness just long enough to wake on the floor, his ears ringing and his mouth full of vomit. As he spat he felt a combat boot kick him hard in the ribs, and for a second he was choking. Strong hands grabbed his wrists, forced them above his head, and then steel cuffs squeezed around his right wrist, then his left. He coughed out the last of the vomit and forced his eyes open, but the flashbang had essentially blinded him. He saw a shape that he knew was a man, but for that moment he couldn’t even remember who the man was. He pulled against the cuffs, but he had been locked to something secure and all he did was bruise his wrists. The strong hands stole the side arm from Jack’s hip, then felt around his body until they found the remote trigger he had been keeping in a chest pocket.

“There we go,” said Shark Scarret’s voice.

Jack tried opening his eyes again and was able to see the shape of the traitor standing above him.

“Hey there, Jack, nice of ya to drop by.” Shark slipped Jack’s detonator into his own pocket. “I saw on the security camera that you guys brought Milton’s little techie with you. How about you just tell me where you stashed her?”

Jack spat thick, foul-smelling saliva toward the traitor, but it fell short and landed on Jack’s leg.

“Try to be nice, Jack. You don’t want your legacy to be that you died in a pool of blood and puke, now do ya?”

Jack stared at his enemy until the ugly, burn-melted face came into focus. Slowly, the fog over Jack’s brain cleared away. “This is insane, Scarret.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “You tend to go a little nutty when your own country puts a bomb in your neck.”

Shark walked over to one of the consoles and started inputting commands. Jack’s eyes focused enough to see the shape of the stolen control computer resting on the console, connected by a rope of multi-coloured wires. “I heard Quarrel’s little speech on the radio. I guess old Thorpe managed to take down Mercier, huh? Good riddance.”

The image on the screen above Shark’s head changed. The satellite was moving to a new target, but Jack’s eyes couldn’t see what it was.

“Now, if Thorpe’s still at GX, and he’s got a whole bunch of Feds with him like Quarrel said, then they probably know about me. And since Mercier’s plan was shot once Thorpe evacuated the refineries, I think I’ll just use this here giant laser gun to get rid of all those witnesses.”

“You’re pointing it at Globection’s head office?”

“You guys forced my hand. I was happy blowing up refineries in Texas, but a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.”

“You’re gonna microwave New York City,” said Jack, his voice both disgusted and defeated. “So many innocent people . . . ”

Shark finished typing on the controls and made a show of pushing one last button. The console that Jack’s hands were cuffed to started to hum, as if there was suddenly so much electricity flowing that the pipe might burst. Shark strutted over to Jack, leaned over his fallen enemy, and smiled.

“New York is nothing but a bunch of assholes living in the world’s biggest target. The only thing that protects that target is a bunch of guys like us, Jack. Guys willing to die for the country. And when that country forces you into slavery with a goddamn bomb in your vertebrae, well then that target kinda deserves to take a shot, don’t you think?”

Shark looked back at his various displays. “Looks like the reflector won’t be in position to get New York for another five minutes.” He picked up Jack’s rifle. “But I think maybe we should try a test run.”

#

Quarrel was inside a room that was intended to be an office, sticking a blob of explosive to a fusebox on a wall next to a picture of President Bush One. He was flipping a switch on a detonator when his walkie crackled.

“Quarrel, buddy. Long-time no see. How ya like my place?”

It was Shark Scarret’s voice on a frequency that only Jack and Meg’s walkies were programmed for. Quarrel hated to think what that meant.

“No response?” asked Shark. “Nothing? Now I realize it’s a fixer-upper but it does have cable TV. So wherever you are, you should switch one of the CCTVs to channel four.”

Quarrel reached for the rifle that was hanging off his shoulder, but then he thought about the detonator in his hand. If he blew up the handful of bombs he had planted, it wouldn’t be enough to bring the bunker down. He felt the weight of the brick of explosives in his bag and wondered if he put the whole brick on the floor above the control room
,
would that be enough to cave it in on Shark’s head?

The radio crackled again, and Shark’s voice returned. “Hope you’re watching. I was really worried that this wouldn’t work, even after Mercier’s engineers said it was good to go.”

Suddenly the entire building seemed to vibrate. Quarrel ran to a TV that was mounted to the wall in this office and turned it on. He was shocked to see a security camera feed showing the array of emitters. Shocked because Jack Hall was on his knees, his hands cuffed to one of the metal towers. Shark was standing about ten feet away, holding the walkie and an assault rifle.

“Any last words? Jack?” he taunted, then held the radio toward Hall.

Jack Hall shouted at the walkie, “It’s aimed at New York! Blow it up now!”

On the screen, Shark ran away from the array, disappearing from the frame. Then Quarrel heard the humming get louder and louder, higher in pitch. He dropped his pack and ran out of the office, hoping that he could make it to Jack in time. When he made it to the door, there was a glowing red light bulb above the door, which was locked by an automatic system designed to stop people from foolishly killing themselves by walking outside when the array was active. Quarrel looked out through the small window in the door and saw Jack convulsing.

His skin was turning red as blisters formed all over his body. Jack’s entire body was stiff as if he was having a seizure, jerking against the cuffs that held his ankles and wrists to the tower. Quarrel couldn’t hear any sound from Jack over the throbbing hum of the field, but the open mouth betrayed that Jack Hall was screaming. And he was bleeding from everywhere. Fingernails, eyes, ears, nose, mouth. Jack’s blood was boiling in his veins, the pressure bursting blood vessels from the inside out. After thirty seconds, the noise settled back to a deep hum, and Jack slumped closer to the ground, but the cuffs held his body in a sickening imitation of kneeling. His skin was bright red, his cheeks stained pink where blood mixed with what remained of his eyeballs. The field of emitters had cooked him alive.

If that radiation had bounced off the dish and hit New York, there could be thousands of people in the same condition.

Quarrel wanted to go out there and see if there was anything he could do, but he knew that he needed to get back to his explosives and find a way to bring the building down on top of Shark. Then he heard Meg’s scream echo from the stairway down the hall.

Shark’s voice came back again. “And now we know it works. I still have one hostage. Bring me your explosives in the next sixty seconds or I put a bullet in her heart.”

40

When Quarrel got to the bottom of the stairs, the door to the control room was still open. Through the door, he could see a puddle of vomit on the ground, with drag marks passing through it.

“Come on in,” said Shark from somewhere inside the room.

Quarrel slid his rifle into the room, then he tossed the heavy object that he was holding in his right hand. The grey brick, topped with small metal objects, landed in the middle of the room with a thump.

“I just stuck every detonator I have into ten pounds of plastic explosive and I have my finger on the trigger. If you shoot me, this whole place comes down,” Quarrel called into the room. He walked through the door with his hands raised so Shark could see the remote trigger.

Inside, Shark was standing against the far wall, Meg standing a few feet in front of him, her hands on head, her face lined with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jack said to watch the door but there was another way into the room and he got behind me . . . ”

“It’s OK,” Quarrel reassured her.

The brick of grey putty had landed a few feet from both Shark and Meg. The control room wasn’t all that big, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet, and in this underground location the walls would have no give. If Quarrel blew up the plastique, the explosion would leave nothing alive in this room.

Shark took a second to look at the explosive, and Quarrel glanced at the monitor that showed what was clearly a satellite view of a city.

“It’s already revving back up to fire, you can’t stop it now.” Shark sounded almost giddy, as if it was Christmas morning.

“I can blow it up.”

“Then we all die. You ready for that?”

Meg’s tears still streamed. “Blow it up. It’ll kill thousands of people.”

Shark screamed at her. “Shut up!” and then he was calm again as he faced back to Quarrel. “You slide me your detonator, and I let her go.”

“And then what?”

“And then the two of us watch that building burn and then I kill you. But I promise lil’ Meg here can live.”

Shark waved the rifle at Quarrel, gesturing for him to walk to the corner of the room where Jack’s puke stained the floor. “You stand in that corner and I’ll let her walk to the doorway. Then you just give me the detonator and she can go. Come on, you don’t really want to watch this girl die. Her only crime was that she wanted to get out of the office and help you out.”

Quarrel walked to the corner. Meg shook her head at him to say she didn’t want this, but when Shark told her to walk to the door, she did what he wanted. She was only a step from the doorway when he told her to stop. “Now, the detonator.”

Quarrel’s handgun was tucked into the back of his pants. He had been careful to keep it hidden. He extended his left hand, holding the detonator in front of himself, and started to slowly walk toward Shark.

“I said slide it to me,” Shark snapped. Quarrel kept walking, slowly, toward Shark. “Stop moving!”

Quarrel stopped, but now he was so close, Shark could reach out and grab the detonator from his hand if he wanted. “She leaves before I take my thumb off the trigger. Then you can take it.”

Shark sneered, which was a particularly ugly expression considering that half of his face looked like Freddy Kruger. Finally, Shark decided that Quarrel’s terms were acceptable, and he turned so that the rifle pointed at Quarrel instead of at Meg. “Get out of here,” he called. Meg was gone in an instant, and then Shark clamped his hand over the detonator. For a second, Quarrel’s thumb was still on the trigger. With only the two of them in the room, they stared into each other’s eyes, and Quarrel relaxed his fingers, letting Shark take the trigger from his hand. Shark leaned over to set the detonator down next to two identical devices—Jack and Meg’s—while at the same time, Quarrel’s right hand slipped behind his back to grab the gun.

Shark saw him make the move.

Shark’s finger twitched on his rifle’s trigger and Quarrel ducked to the right. The three-round burst missed by inches, and then Quarrel lunged at Shark, knocking he older man off balance. Quarrel pulled his own gun, but Shark slapped at it, raking the butt of his rifle over Quarrel’s right hand. The blow to his knuckles knocked the sidearm from Quarrel’s grip, and the gun landed on the floor. Quarrel shoved past Shark, reaching for one of the detonators, but Shark grabbed him and pulled him back. They wrestled over Shark’s gun, Quarrel trying to keep it pointed away while Shark tried to line up a shot. Shark squeezed the trigger and bullets hit the cement between Quarrel's feet. Quarrel head-butted Shark in the nose and tried to wrench the gun free, but Shark countered with a hard kick to the side of Quarrel’s knee. Quarrel stumbled, and Shark got behind him, wrapping his arms around Quarrel’s throat. Quarrel tried to grab Shark’s hand, hoping to pull the gun free and get himself out of the choke hold, but it was hopeless. Shark squeezed tighter and Quarrel felt lightheaded as the blood flow to his brain was cut off. He felt weak.

“Let him go!” commanded a woman from the doorway. It was very hard to hear over the ever-increasing hum of the TCPE, but Quarrel didn’t think that voice sounded like Meg.

Shark’s grip relaxed and his arm moved away from Quarrel’s neck to grab the shoulder of Quarrel’s shirt. Shark pulled Quarrel in front of himself as a human shield, and Quarrel felt hot steel on his temple as Shark held a gun to his head. Quarrel wiped his eyes and saw the woman that had joined them in the control room.

“Erica?”

The woman once known as Fatale was dressed for war, in a Kevlar vest, combat boots, and military-style fatigues. She held an automatic rifle aimed straight at both Quarrel and Shark. Quarrel knew immediately that if she shot, the bullets would cut through him and go right into Shark, killing them both.

“What the hell are you doing here?” whined Shark.

Erica thought for a moment before she answered. “The right thing.”

“What, did Martin’s check bounce?”

Erica nodded, just a little. “Something like that.”

The room was filled with humming sounds now. All of the consoles were fired up. On one of the old TV monitors, there were arcs of electricity jumping from a few of the emitters.

“Take the shot,” Quarrel told her.

“Oh, shut up,” Shark said. It would have been easier for Shark to hold a gun to Quarrel’s head if he had a handgun. With the rifle he was forced to awkwardly hold the gun with one hand and Quarrel’s shoulder with the other.

Quarrel looked Erica in the eye. “It was Hershey, right? What Mercier promised you? But he’s not the guy you thought he was.”

She adjusted her grip on the rifle. “He’s dead.”

“You do that? Or Mercier?”

“It was self-defence. Sometimes you have to defend yourself. Like in training.”

Quarrel remembered this situation from Jack’s training program. A hostage used as a human shield. An agent who could save the day by taking the impossible shot. Quarrel hadn’t taken the shot in training, and Erica had insulted him for it. Now the situation was reversed, and she was the one who refused to shoot.

“There are two ways to win the game,” she said. “You can take out the objective, or you can kill the other team.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Shark snapped at them.

And Quarrel remembered something else. He remembered that even when unarmed, Shark still had a secret weapon. A weapon the drug lord in Venezuela hadn’t expected.

Quarrel and Erica looked each other in the eyes. They knew what had to be done. The machine outside was humming so loud the whole facility was vibrating.

Erica held her finger to the trigger. “Just like training.”

“Defenders win.”

Quarrel slapped Shark’s gun barrel forward, away from his temple, and Shark immediately put both hands on the rifle, thinking that Quarrel was trying to steal the gun. But instead, Quarrel turned, grabbed Shark’s belt buckle, and pulled. A small, razor-sharp dagger slid out of the buckle, and before Shark had a moment to recover, Quarrel buried the blade in the side of Shark’s neck. Shark made a weak yelping noise and swung the gun around to point at Quarrel. Quarrel dove away as Erica opened fire, and a dozen bullets tore into Shark Scarret before he could put his finger on the trigger. Shark hit the floor in a wet heap, dead before he hit the ground.

The machine was humming at a higher pitch, cycling up. This is what it had sounded like when Quarrel reached that red-lit door, when he had watched Jack die. “Meg, get in here now!” shouted Erica.

“No time!” Quarrel shouted back.

He picked himself up off the floor as Meg ran into the room, heading for the main control console. Quarrel ran to the remote triggers. Erica’s eyes went wide and she screamed at him.

“You’ll kill us all!”

Quarrel grabbed one of the remotes just as the machine peaked and made a massive crackling sound. Quarrel put his thumb over the button and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was massive. The ground shook for miles around. The foundations of the basement control room cracked wide enough for soil to spill in. The TCPE sprayed sparks, and a few of the upstairs rooms that Quarrel had planted bombs in exploded and caved in.

“What happened?” asked Erica.

“I blew up my brick of explosives,” Quarrel said.

“I thought that was your brick of explosives?” shouted Meg, pointing at the brick in the middle of the room, while shaking uncontrollably from the damn-near-overdose of adrenaline in her veins.

“I was bluffing. That’s Jack’s. None of those detonators are armed.”

“But you didn’t have time to plant enough bombs upstairs,” she said, still trying to understand.

“I studied the blueprints, remember? I realized I knew where they buried the main cable that powered all those emitters. When Shark said he had you, I just put the whole brick outside on top of the power line.”

Meg’s eyes went wide and for a moment she had nothing to say, and then she shuddered and a halting, hysterical laugh shook out of her. Erica joined in, her whole body shaking as the laugh escaped.

Finally, Meg found some composure again, leaning on the console to support herself. “Remind me never to play poker with you.”

They found a key for the handcuffs in one of Shark’s many pockets and cut Jack down form the emitter. He was a hero, and Quarrel wanted him treated like one. They loaded Jack’s body into the back of the stolen pickup truck that Erica had used to get here from Whitehorse.

“How did you find us?” Quarrel asked her as they closed the hatch.

“GPS in Shark’s neck. Mercier always knew where his favourite pet was.”

Meg climbed into the truck’s passenger seat. She called out to them. “I’m not flying in my condition. Let’s just drive somewhere that’s not here. Someone else can come back for the chopper.”

Quarrel looked to Erica. “I just have one thing to do.”

He headed back into the building, picking up Jack’s brick of explosives off the control room floor. He flipped one of the detonators to the on position and set it down on the control computer, a few feet from Shark’s body. He went back outside to the truck, where the two women were waiting with the truck running. He climbed into the back seat. “Jack swore to destroy that stolen computer, and now he has.”

Erica was in the driver’s seat, and as soon as Quarrel was in the back, she pulled out onto the road. Quarrel found the remote trigger in his pocket, and squeezed. As they drove, the sound of the second explosion erupted behind them. A few seconds later, the whole bunker caved in on itself. Meg looked back to see the roof disappear behind the outer wall.

“In your professional opinion as a weapons expert,” said Quarrel. “Is that thing done?”

She nodded. “I’d say it’s scrap. Still, if your air force ever wants a target to test some drones on . . . ”

#

They drove for hours, finally reaching a hotel in Whitehorse. They stumbled in, exhausted and hungry, and found a table at the bar. They ordered food and drinks and soon enough the three of them were drunk, full and happy.

Quarrel excused himself to the bathroom, and while he was in there he took out his cellphone and called the authorities. He explained the situation and requested that the Canadian Army be sent to dismantle what was left of the TCPE. He didn’t bother calling the CIA or CIB. Finally, he dialed William Thorpe.

“I haven’t heard about anyone getting fired today,” Thorpe said when he answered. “And that means kudos, young man.”

“One man did,” Quarrel said, looking into his own bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror. “Jack.”

“Damn shame. He deserved better.”

“Are you OK?” Quarrel asked.

“Fine, fine. I’ll be alright.” Thorpe was talking over a lot of background noise.

“Where are you?” Quarrel asked.

“Over the Atlantic. I’ve someone waiting for me in England.”