The alarms blared and the red lights flashed, but there was no one around to speak those words.
The voice repeated the warning.
“Don’t touch it.”
Here’s the thing. The voice I heard sounded like my own.
Chap. 7
Granted, I make no claims about being sane. Or even in the same zip code as sane. On my best day I have three different people living inside my head. The Civilized Man — who is the innocent and optimistic part of me. The one who wasn’t destroyed during the childhood trauma that otherwise turned me into a psychological basket of hamsters. Then there’s the Killer, that rough, crude, dangerous part of my mind, always looking to take it to the bad guys in very ugly ways. And there was the Cop, the closest thing I have to a sane and sober central self.
Each of them spoke in a particular voice inside my thoughts.
This wasn’t any of those voices.
The voice I heard was the one I use in normal conversation.
My regular voice.
Clear as day.
I spun around, bringing the gun up in a two-hand grip. There was an empty hall in front of me, and an empty hall behind me. Just the sleeping scientist on the floor. Red flashing lights on the walls. Nothing else.
No one else.
That voice, though…it had been real.
There’s nothing in the playbook on how to react to that kind of situation. I didn’t feel like I’d suddenly gone crazier than I already was. There was no way on earth the North Koreans had somehow sampled my voice and rigged a playback just to screw with me. It was too improbable and there was no point. So, that wasn’t it.
The voice, though.
I had heard it.
I switched the gun to one hand and slowly knelt beside the artifact. The little green lights were pulsing now. Steady. Like a heartbeat.
I swallowed what felt like a throatful of dust.
“Fuck it,” I said, and gently scooped up the object.
It weighed almost nothing. It felt like metal, but there was no heft to it at all. Lighter than aluminum or magnesium. Lighter than Styrofoam. I had to press my fingers against its planes and angles to assure myself that it was actually there.
That alone is strange. If this was some new alloy, then someone had broken through the ceiling of superlight design. If it was durable — and given the thing’s history I had to believe it was — then that alone would be worth billions to the aeronautics industry. Durable superlight materials are the dream, the holy grail of metallurgy. If it could be studied and reproduced, it would totally revolutionize military aircraft. Maybe space travel as well.
And yet that was, as far as my team was concerned, a secondary benefit. An unknown benefit. It added another element of mystery to this thing. Science, as it’s known by the teams working with the Department of Military Sciences — including the über-geeks at DARPA — couldn’t do this. The energy discharge alone was freakish. Now this.
The artifact was warm to the touch.
Creepy warm.
Not warm like metal.
Touching it was like touching flesh. If I closed my eyes, that’s what it would have been like. Skin, at normal body temperature.
Not metal.
“Jesus,” I said, and I wished I could have dropped it right there and then. I wanted to. It was repulsive.
“Do it,” said the voice. My voice. “Drop it and get out.”
I whirled around again.
The hall was still empty.
“Fuck me,” I told the emptiness.
The clock was ticking. I needed to be at the extraction point in ten minutes.
So I clutched the package to me, and I ran.
The corridors fed one into the other. I ran up flights of stairs. I ran down. I burned seconds I could spare bypassing locks on security doors.
Twice I encountered security personnel.
Twice I put them down before they could get off a shot.
After I dropped the last one, I passed through another door that took me out of the lab complex and into what was clearly an administrative wing. There were vault-style doors on that level, and the place was entirely deserted. Not sure if it was because of the hour — local time here was three in the morning — or because of the alarms. North Korean military protocols sent workers into secure bunkers during emergencies. I’d passed several locked chambers. Any staff working this late was probably squirrelled away in there. Good. Better for everyone concerned. Besides, I was down to three rounds in the Snellig. If I met any real resistance I’d have to switch to something lethal. I’d already killed one poor dumb son of a bitch; I didn’t want to compound my crimes.
I hurried through the offices. At most of the desks, the chairs were neatly snugged into the footwells, computers were off or on screensaver, and the desk lamps were dark. A few were less tidy; those probably belonged to the workers hiding in the bunkers.
There were no security guards in this wing. That concerned me. Not that I wanted to meet any, but it seemed odd.
Everything, in fact, seemed odd.
Then I rounded a corner and found something even odder.
Three uniformed guards lay sprawled on the floor.
There was no blood. No marks of violence.
For all the world, they appeared to be…sleeping.
I think I actually said, “What the fuck?”
Beneath my arm the artifact throbbed.
Actually throbbed. It was a feeling of heat that pulsed so quickly and abated so immediately that the effect was like the device had expanded and contracted. Like something taking a breath.
I almost flung the thing away from me.
Instead I held it out at arm’s length — despite its size I could easily hold it with one hand, it was that light — and looked at it.
Metal. Green lights.
Same as before.
But not exactly the same.
That pulse or throb or whatever it was….I didn’t like it.
No, sir. Not one bit.
It felt wrong.
Like the surface temperature and texture of it was wrong. I was reacting to it as if it was not a machine at all. It felt to me like something….
The word is alive, but I can’t really use it because that’s stupid.
It’s metal. It can’t be alive.
The thing pulsed again.
The green lights went from a neutral intensity on a par with traffic “go” lights, to a glare that, for a split second, was eye-hurtingly intense. I winced and cried out and….
And, yes, I dropped the thing.
Or, maybe I flung it away.
Hard to say.
Hard to actually think about.
The artifact hit the ground and rolled bumpity-bumpity across the floor.
And stopped when someone placed the sole of his foot against it.
Someone who, I swear to God, was not there a moment ago.
Chap. 8
The man was dressed all in black.
All.
Head to toe. Black pants and pullover. Black socks and shoes. Black gloves. A black balaclava and black goggles. I couldn’t see a single square inch of his skin. He could have been white, Asian or, yeah, black.
He was big, though. About my height. Not as bulky in the arms and chest, but close enough.
And he was just there.
Standing where he shouldn’t have been standing, within arm’s reach, and I hadn’t seen or heard him approach.
So, fuck it, I shot him. Point-blank.
In the script in my head that I was writing for this scene, he should have folded up like a deck chair and that should have been that.
That wasn’t how it played out.
I fired the dart gun, and he moved out of the line of fire.