Point and Shoot (26 page)

Including a dead body that looked just like him.

Cut to:

The NSA, having no fucking idea what the hell he was talking about.

No, we did not carve one of our agents to look like you, Mr. Hardie. Nor did we shoot this fictitious agent, um, into space. Who are you again?

But once a junior-level agent began digging into the case, fireworks started to go off. Apparently someone had been investigating him all this time, thanks to some obscure document they kept calling the Arbona Memorandum, which Hardie didn’t fully understand. Nor did he care to understand. Hardie had stumbled into this world by mistake and found himself caught up in it for seven years of pure misery. Now he had the chance to possibly stumble back out of it, and that would be just fine with him.

The important thing was, they knew about the Cabal, though nowhere near as much as they thought. They were looking for Doyle and Abrams, two lawyers who’d slipped off the grid some time ago. And once they recovered the crashed spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean floor, just off the coast of California, Hardie thought, they’d have evidence to destroy them all.

Hardie was content to let them. He was out of the destroying-the-evildoers game. All he wanted to do was heal his body to a reasonable degree. He didn’t want to run marathons or stop bullets with his bare hands. He just wanted to live.

The NSA had access to an excellent private hospital; Kendra and Seej were put up in housing—under heavy protection—adjacent to the facility. They were as essential to saving Hardie’s life as the surgeons who labored on his hopelessly wrecked body. But the real surprise came when they took a CAT scan of his head and found …

… a small computer chip welded to his skull.

They told a semi-conscious Hardie what they’d found. He asked what it looked like. Puzzled, the techs told him:

“A small black square of shiny plastic, mounted on four corners with some kind of gummy material.”

Hardie started to laugh, which made the anesthesiologist worry, because he wasn’t supposed to be having that kind of reaction to the gas while his head was cut open. Hardie, though, thought of the poor bastards doing a deep-sea dive to pull up a wrecked spacecraft … when all this time, he had the power to destroy the Cabal in his head.

Thank you, Glinda, Good Witch of the North.

See ya, Cabal. Your days are numbered.

However, when the NSA finally broke through the impossibly sophisticated encryption programs, they found that the chip welded to Hardie’s skull had but one message:

And nothing more.

The real bombshell dropped later.

NSA operatives found the pulpy, wood-chipped remains of a woman believed to be Abrams in the Pacific Northwest. A good old-fashioned forensic trail led them to her former partner, Doyle, who was holed up in an assisted-care facility in South Dakota. The man was clearly insane, babbling, “I wish I hadn’t walked through her. I wish I hadn’t walked through her.” No one could figure out what that meant until they analyzed the footprints at the crime scene. All of Abrams’s personal documents were in Doyle’s possession, and they led to a safety deposit box in a small savings and loan in Santa Monica, California. Inside of which investigators discovered the complete operational secrets of the Cabal, and the Industry, and the Accident People … since the very beginning. Every last move, recorded on a series of forty-two flash drives. No password protection, no encryption, no nothing. They were even helpfully indexed.

Still, Hardie’s testimony was invaluable. Especially after word of Hardie’s cooperation reached Eve Bell and her secret army working all over the world to dismantle Cabal operations. In exchange for their cooperation, Hardie and Kendra and CJ were given new identities, a new life, on a secret base somewhere within the continental United States.

At least, that’s what he’d been told. It was hard to make sense of anything these days.

Hardie’s head still hurt, even after the operation. Time was kind of disjointed and fuzzy, and not entirely
real
-feeling. Sometimes he would blink and for a moment forget who he was, what he was doing here, what he wanted. This never lasted more than a moment or two, but it was nonetheless awful to experience. Imagine walking down the street and the sidewalk dropping away from your feet, giving you an instant and terrifying sensation of free fall … before the world righted itself again. Sometimes Hardie thought he was dead and his brain just hadn’t processed the information yet.

The on-base doctor explained that this sensation was perfectly normal. After all, all three of them had been given memory shots after their transport. For a hellishly paranoid moment Hardie thought that this was it; that these NSA guys were just another front for the Accident People, the Industry, the Cabal, the Whatever … and that he’d just sentenced his family to death. But instead they’d woken up in this small but clean house. New construction. The usual appliances and furnishings. No phone, no open Internet, but still—better than death.

Meanwhile, the world thought Charlie Hardie was dead. After all, local police had found his body in the basement of his wife’s rental home, fatal gunshot to the chest, with assorted assassins and psychopaths littered around the property. Pop culture changed its tune about Charlie Hardie. He was no longer the nutcase from Philly who’d snuffed an actress in a seedy Hollywood hotel. Instead Hardie was a hero, because Jonathan Hunter had been telling the truth about the Accident People and Hardie had sacrificed his own life to save his wife and boy. Whereabouts unknown, but the world assumed they’d gone into hiding. After all, wouldn’t you? The body of Charlie Hardie was given a hero’s funeral. There was even talk of a citywide Day of Remembrance, but then the Phillies start to pick up some heat and attention spans moved elsewhere.

Narrative over.

But the real Charlie Hardie, aboveground and recovering from six lifetimes’ worth of physical abuse, was cooling his heels at a secret military base somewhere. Though it wasn’t exactly a military base; it was a
suburb
next to a military base.

Yep, after all of his adventures, Charlie Hardie couldn’t quite escape the burbs.

Hardie had been told that this place was housing for the employees of a government research facility, secret shit happening everywhere. Everybody in town had the same deal: You just lived your life the best you could and didn’t talk about what anyone did. Hardie asked for a job, to be able to do
something
, but his caseworker told him he’d done enough for his country. Hardie pressed the point, and the caseworker finally relented. “We’ll call you if we need you.”

That had been ten months ago. So far, no call.

So it was time, at long last, for a Yuengling.

Hardie’s life was far from empty. He had physical therapy six days a week and was finally walking on his own again. He had occasional debriefings from anonymous men in suits who asked a few specific questions, then asked them another way and still another way, then departed without explanation.

But most of the time Hardie spent trying to reconnect with Kendra. They had parted under the lousiest of circumstances, and their reunion wasn’t exactly roses and confetti, either. They had grown into different, older people. Still, somehow, their strange little shared spark was still there, beneath all of the years and hurt. Hardie felt it in her touch, in her kiss. If it had been extinguished completely, this new life would be unbearable.

Most importantly, the hate in her eyes was gone. Hardie took that as the best sign of all.

CJ was another matter. He was a young man, eighteen now, and full of rage and confusion. Hardie got it. You grow up thinking your old man snuffed some actress before disappearing for seven years … and then the next thing you know, you’re living on some secret base somewhere … well, yeah, you’re going to have some blame and rage issues.

Hardie twisted the top off the cold bottle of beer. He did the sommelier thing and even sniffed the top. There was no better smell than this. It only worked the first time. He put the top to his lips and tilted.

The on-base doctor had told Hardie confidentially that he probably didn’t have all the time in the world. He’d burned too fast, too hot, too hard. No, he didn’t know about any Project Viking. There was no trace of any kind of gene therapy or secret government projects. (
Then again
, Hardie thought,
this was a military doctor. Of course he’d cover it up!
) The doctor emphasized: You can’t expect your body to absorb that kind of punishment without breaking down completely. You drink a beer, the doc said, and you’re just giving yourself a good hard nudge toward the grave. The very idea gave him pause. Hardie didn’t want to pull the grass and sod over himself until he had a chance to make things right with Kendra and CJ. As right as they could be. In this weird afterlife, every minute with his family was a bonus.

Hardie swallowed long. The beer was cold and fresh and felt like it had hit a part of his soul that hadn’t been touched in ages.

Time fragmented again. Hardie blinked and found himself on the floor. His fingers closed around a bottle of Yuengling that wasn’t there anymore. Did he finish it? Geez, did one sip knock him out? The ceiling looked strange, unfamiliar. So did the carpet under his arms. He was having a difficult time moving.

Which of course is when the alarms went off.

And somewhere, in the distance, in the direction of the base … gunfire.

At first Hardie thought he was having the mother of all death flashbacks, that eleven years hadn’t gone by, and that he was lying in a pool of his own cooling blood in the middle of his Philadelphia living room, having just been gunned down by those crazy asshole Albanians. And everything that followed: exile, booze, Lane, Accident People, Alcatraz, Abrams, the double, the shootout in Hollywood, everything … had just been a fever dream, experienced in a matter of seconds as the neurons in his brain misfired and gave him the pulp-action show of a lifetime …

More gunfire. Rocket blasts … were those rocket blasts? Hardie thought fast. Could it be some pissed-off remnant of the Cabal, coming after him finally to settle a score? No, he decided. If they were to come at him, they’d come at him directly.
And stop thinking everything’s about you. Because it’s not
.

Whatever it was probably had to do with the top-secret shit going on all around them, because wherever you had top-secret shit, you had people doing top-secret shit to steal the other top-secret shit because, Hardie supposed, nature abhorred a vacuum. This was the way the world worked. Hardie’s world, anyway. He’d come to accept it. Bad shit went down, and for some reason fate kept nudging him into its path.

More gunfire, explosions, screams. This wasn’t sounding good.

So go on, Hardie.

Get up.

Grab your gun.

Where is—

Oh God, where’s your gun?

Hardie hadn’t just bribed his way into a six-pack of beer. Six months ago he’d managed to get his hands on a Glock—again, from that foul-mouthed brush-cut supply sarge. This was a clear violation of the rules of this secret base. But Hardie had been through too much to be without a weapon ever again. He’d kept it a secret from Kendra and CJ, naturally. Kept it in a locked table by his recliner, key on a chain around his neck, so heavy firepower would forever be within easy reach.

But now the table drawer was unlocked and open. No Glock. Damnit, did they do a security sweep of the house and confiscate it?

Not that a gun would matter if Hardie couldn’t move. He grunted. His body responded with silence. His body had stopped talking to him. Why, after months of physical therapy, were his limbs failing to respond? So many agonizing steps, so many hours of sweat and profanity and muscles worked to the point of absolute failure. Hardie slammed his eyes shut, trying to think back on those hours of therapy. Were they a dream, a ridiculously detailed and active dream? No. He did this shit. He knew he did. And his body should know better. Fuck you, body. We’re getting up. Just like we always do.

When Hardie opened his eyes, he saw his boy, Seej, on the landing. He was holding the Glock. Pointed down, classic two-hand grip. Just like he learned from those video games he was always playing. But where’s your sword, kid? Don’t you need a sword, too?

For a horrible moment there Hardie thought his son had snapped. What a horrible thing to think about your own son, isn’t it? Despite everything they’d talked about, the time they’d spent together, maybe Seej hadn’t forgiven him after all. Maybe he’d stolen the gun hours earlier and had been sitting up in his room trying to work up the courage to finally do the Oedipus thing and take out the old man for good.

But the kid surprised him by saying, “It’s okay, Dad. I’ve got this.”

Part of Charlie Hardie could have died right then.

If life is a series of buddy films, then I’d want to co-star with these fine people: John Schoenfelder. David Hale Smith. And the man this book is dedicated to: David J. Schow. I couldn’t have written this book without these tough guys.

Also, huge thanks to Richard Pine, Lauren Smythe, Danny and Heather Baror, Angela Cheng Caplan, Shauyi Tai, Jessica Tscha, and Kim Yau, as well as the whole gang at Inkwell Management.

It’s not every day you encounter buddies like those at Mulholland Books. Huge thanks to Miriam Parker, Wes Miller, Michael Pietsch, Theresa Giacopasi, Betsy Uhrig, Barbara Clark, Christine Valentine, Janet Byrne, Peggy Freudenthal, and the rest of the stellar Little, Brown team. Ruth Tross and the amazing Mulholland UK team. Kristof Kurz, Frank Dabrock, and the rest of the team at Heyne in Germany.

My space doc, and the man who keeps me from making serious medical blunders in all of my books, is the legendary Lou Boxer. He’s at once the most
noir
guy in all of Greater Philadelphia—yet, an absolute sweetheart. Explain
that
one…

Special Cabal Honor Roll: