It was weird. He was fast but not the Flash. It wasn’t like he dodged a bullet, so to speak. He wasn’t that fast. No, it was like he had such perfect timing that as I fired he was already moving — as if knowing exactly the timing and angle of my shot.
Then he pivoted and slapped the gun out of my hand.
There’s a way to do that if you know what you’re doing. You hit the gun at one angle and the back of the wrist at another. Do it fast and simultaneously, and the gun goes flying.
My gun went flying.
I have been disarmed exactly once in my adult life.
That time.
If anyone had wanted to wager on whether someone could do that to me, I’d have bet my whole pension on that answer being “no.”
My gun went flying anyway.
I wasted no time goggling at it.
I kicked him in the knee.
Which he blocked with a raised-leg hoof kick.
I hooked a left at his short ribs, but he chop-blocked with his elbow and counterpunched me in the biceps, numbing my arm. Growling in pain and anger, I faked once, twice, and hit him with a jab in the nose.
Except that he turned his head two inches to the left so that my jab hit the point of his cheekbone.
Then he switched from defense to offense, throwing a series of punches and kicks at me that hammered me all the way across the hall and against the wall. He blocked every one of my counterpunches, parried every kick, even intruded into my attempted head-butt by head-butting me.
It was all very fast and very painful.
I won’t lie and I won’t sugarcoat it. He beat the shit out of me.
He humiliated me.
I didn’t land a single solid punch on him, and he hit me as often as he wanted to, and it was pretty clear that he really wanted to.
Winded, bleeding, bruised and dazed, I sagged against the wall.
I tried to win that fight.
I’ve never really lost a fight. Not in years. Not any fight that’s ever mattered to me. No matter how tough the other guy was, I was tougher. Or, if he was too tough then I won because I was crazier. I don’t care if I get hurt, but I will win a fight. I’ll burn down a house if that’s what it takes to win a fight.
Except that I lost this fight.
Lost it fast, and lost it completely.
This man, whoever he was, outfought me.
I am a special operator. I’m a senior martial artist. I’m a warrior and I’m a killer, and he simply took me apart.
He even used some of my own favorite moves, some of the things I tried to use on him. He used them faster and he used them better and I went down.
On my knees, blood dripping from my mashed lips, I tried to change the game on him. I snagged the rapid-release folding knife from its little spring clip inside my trouser pocket. It came into my hand and with a flick I locked the three-point-seven-five-inch blade into place and I lunged in and up and tried to castrate the fucker.
He twisted away. I heard cloth rip. I saw droplets of blood seed the air, but he moved so fast that all I did was slash him. I could tell from the resistance that the blade hadn’t gone deep enough to cut muscle or tendon. Only trousers and skin.
The blood was red.
The skin that showed through the torn fabric was white.
Not the light brown skin of an Asian. This guy was Caucasian.
He twisted and hit the side of my hand with a one-knuckle punch that turned my entire hand into a useless bag of pain. The knife clattered to the floor. He bent, scooped it up, and suddenly I was pressed back against the wall with the wicked edge pressed against the flesh of my throat. He held the knife the way an expert does when he wants you to know that you’re not going to take that blade away from him. Not in this lifetime.
I was done.
I was cooked.
Beaten, bloodied, and disarmed.
With a knife to my throat and his fingers knotted in my hair to hold me still.
Then he bent close and spoke with quiet urgency into my ear.
“Believe me when I tell you that neither of us wants you dead,” he said.
I froze. I didn’t dare move a muscle.
“I need you to listen to me, and I need you to understand. You can’t ask any questions. The best and only thing you can do is to listen and tell me you understand and agree.”
He pressed the knife more firmly against my throat to emphasize his point. A drop of warm blood ran down alongside my Adam’s apple.
“You listening, sport?”
“Y-yes….”
“Good, ’cause I’m only going to say this once.” He was leaning so close that even through his mask I could feel the heat of his breath on my ear. “You don’t know what this device is. None of you do. You can’t know and, believe me, you shouldn’t. You don’t want to.”
“Pretty fucking sure we do,” I growled.
He made a sound. Might have been a laugh. “No, you really don’t.”
“Who are you?”
For a moment I thought he was going to move the knife away. Or cut my throat. His hand trembled.
“Let me ask you a question, chief,” he said. “And you give me a straight answer. No bullshit. Can you do that?”
I said nothing. Wasn’t really feeling all that chatty.
He took it as assent, regardless. “What do you think they’re going to do with the device? I’m not talking about the North Koreans. What do you think we’re going to do with it?”
I said nothing.
“Do you honestly and without reservation believe that once the U.S. government gets their hands on it that they’ll hide it away and never use it? Do you think that if they did use it, they’d only concentrate on its potential for unlimited power? Do you think they can resist the temptation to study its potential as a weapon?”
I said nothing.
“You have good intentions, Joe,” he said. I didn’t ask him how he knew my name. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know that answer. “But sometimes you’re naïve. You’re too trusting. You think everyone has the same altruism as Mr. Church. You think that you can keep this thing from ever falling into the wrong hands. Tell me that’s not true. Tell me I’m lying.”
I still said nothing. My heart was hammering in my chest.
He sighed.
“I’m going to take the device out of play,” he said. “Nobody gets it. Not our people, not theirs. Nobody.”
“Bullshit,” I said finally.
“No,” he replied, “no bullshit. I know where it came from. I know what it is. And I know what will absolutely happen if anyone—anyone—fucks with it. And they will. You know it, sport. They’ll fuck with it and fuck around with it and then it’ll all go to hell.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No,” he said, “you can’t. I can. I do.” He paused, and there was a strange quality in his voice. A kind of sadness that runs all the way down to the cellar of the soul. “I’ve seen it. That’s why I can’t let you take it.”
He took the knife away, gave me a hip-check that knocked me sideways, and stepped backward out of reach before I could recover my balance. The device lay pulsing on the floor between us. Closer to him than to me.
Slowly, carefully, he knelt and scooped it up with the hand not holding the knife.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “Who are you working for?”
He hesitated, studying me, then dropped the knife on the floor and pulled the goggles off. He dropped them onto the floor next to the knife. The he pulled the balaclava over his head and dropped that as well.
I stared at him. The hinges of the world seemed to snap and crack off and for a moment the whole room seemed to tilt.
I know that face.