The room was empty. Not even a piece of trash littered the floor. The far wall and the outside wall were made of brick, while the back and side walls were made of wood. The floor was a sickly green linoleum, peeling in places.
Laws shook his head. “I’ll say it again. What the hell, Fratty?”
“I don’t know what to say. We’re at the right address. We’re in the right room. It has to be the intel.”
“Won’t be the first time intel didn’t pan,” Ruiz said.
Hoover got tired of standing in the middle of the room and began to sniff the baseboards.
Ruiz and Laws checked the brick wall.
Walker again posted near the window and scanned the buildings across the street. For a moment, he thought he saw someone looking at them, but it was just a guy in his underwear, leaning over his balcony railing smoking a cigarette. Soon, he went back inside.
Fratty and Holmes checked the wooden walls. When they got to the back wall, they began to tap lightly. Finally, Holmes called Hoover over.
Hoover suddenly became animated. She didn’t bark and she didn’t howl, but she began to breathe deeply and paw at the floor.
“Okay. We got something over here.” Holmes knelt and faced the wall. “There’s something I don’t like about it.”
Walker glanced outside and tracked back to where the man in the underwear had been standing. He was gone now.
“What is it? An itch?” Laws asked.
Holmes shook his head. “Not quite. Walker, get over here.”
Walker backed across the room to where the others were kneeling. “Sir?”
“Apply the TWR.”
Walker slung his Stoner across his back and pulled the paperback-sized through-wall radar from a cargo pocket. Looking at the wall, he was relieved it wasn’t composed of brick. The radar was still a new technology and wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate anything other than standard drywall or wood.
He switched it on, let it cycle through its start-up protocols, then pressed the ready button. He moved to the wall and held it against it. While he waited for it to read and translate the three-dimensional line drawing on the tablet-sized screen, he noticed a tingling sensation begin to course throughout his body. The tingling increased until it felt like an electrical current was running through him.
Then it all went crazy.
His vision went supernova, then suddenly cut to black, like a galaxy imploding on itself. Not merely the dark of night, but the dark of an absolute lack of light, life, and anything good. A feeling of doom slammed into him as he realized that there was something on the other side of the dark. Something that wanted him. Something that had been inside him before.
It came darkly through the gloom. At first, it was nothing more than a spot of blackness; a pinprick, really. But it was coming closer, and Walker realized that he didn’t want to see it. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t make a damn bit of difference. It came inexorably toward him. He knew it before he saw it. He’d known this shape his entire life. A monster from his childhood. In the red glowing eyes, the shock of white hair, and the cruel little mouth, Walker discovered to his horror that he’d found himself. That child he’d been at nine, not like any normal child, but one who harbored the soul of evil; a child who spent his days staring balefully at the world while an entity scratched tic-tac-toe on the inside of his skull.
Walker screamed as memories flooded through him of the black thing that had once lived inside him. It had whispered secrets and told him things that no child should ever know. It knew what evil others had done and had detailed them to nine-year-old Jack until his mind was on fire.
And now, as the vision of himself surfaced like a bloated corpse from the depths of his memory, he heard the voice of the beast in his mind once more, telling him things that no one should ever understand.
Images flashed through his mind of Holmes, Fratolilio, Laws, and Ruiz dead, bodies burst from the ravaging of maggots and red, hoary beetles. Billings naked and staked to a wall with machetes, her body already scored with the burns of cigarettes, eyes smoking holes, teeth jagged and broken. A child curled up in fetal position in the back of a closet, covered in his own feces, his cheek resting in a puddle of urine as he vibrated with the rage of the ancient thing trapped inside a mind that wanted nothing more than to build a castle in which to hide.
A jag of light fired through the images like an electric shot.
The child, now standing naked, body bruised and bitten as if animals had been gnawing on him, looked at him. Smoke seeped from the corners of his red eyes. The smoke took form and became a single hand tipped with talons. The smoke billowed and the hand came closer.
Walker wanted to back away but there was nowhere to go in his mind. He was trapped there, just as he’d been in those dark days of his nine-year-old life, when the beast took him over and turned him inside out.
He felt a blow to his face.
Another supernova evaporated his being, but on the other side of this one was light instead of darkness.
He saw the hand descending and managed to block it with his own. He was on his back on the floor. Holmes knelt over him. Fratty, Ruiz, and Laws stared at him with worry and just a little fear in their eyes.
“What…” A single flash of his own red nine-year-old eyes shot through him.
“Walker!” Holmes called to him, somewhere between a hiss and a shout. The word was amplified through the MBITR and echoed through the now empty space of his mind.
Then, suddenly, he knew.
“It’s down there,” he said, pointing toward the wall. “Something …
He started to get up. Holmes grabbed him and helped him to his feet.
“You okay, SEAL?”
“Yes, sir.” Walker wiped sweat from his face.
“Billings said this might happen. Chalk one up to her and her people.”
Walker stared at the SEAL team leader. The woman from the Senate had mentioned that this might happen? How could she have known? How could anyone have known? But there was no time to contemplate. Now that he was back on his feet, he was once again a gear in the SEAL machine. Laws ran the TWR, and though it didn’t show any evidence of a staircase down, it did show a room that was roughly five feet square and empty on the other side of the wall.
Ruiz pulled a line of detonation cord that had been salted with Semtex from his satchel. He attached it to the wall, creating the outline of a four-foot-high doorway. The rest of the SEALs stacked against the same wall, but several feet away. Ruiz attached an electrical lead, backed up to where the other SEALs were waiting, then depressed the contact button. Halfway between a zipping sound and a muted explosion, the cord went off, explosively sawing through the wall, but not completely obliterating it.
The SEALs moved quickly to the spot.
Ruiz pushed against the wall and the new doorway fell free to the floor on the other side.
Hoover was through first, followed by Fratty, Holmes, Walker, Laws, and then Ruiz.
The room was little more than a large landing for the set of descending stairs. From below, an unbelievable stench was joined by the sounds of clicking like the claws of a thousand crabs and the susurrations of Chinese voices. But all eyes were on the set of shackles bolted to the middle of the floor on the landing. Illuminated by a single dangling bulb, blood and claw marks surrounded the shackles. A broken piece of fingernail lay absurdly next to the metal bolt.
The SEALs looked at each other. In their eyes was the recognition that they’d just entered the Land of Fucked-Up.
Holmes grabbed Laws and pointed down the stairs. “You first. Translate.”
Laws moved down the stairs in a crouch. When he’d gotten halfway down, he paused and listened. After a moment, he said softly through his MBITR, “Mostly from Fujian Province from the sound of it. The noise is sewing machines, I think. Sweatshop.”
“And this is the center of the illegal tech transfer?” Fratty asked.
