brutes we chased out of here had done this to the Russians here and to the staff upstairs. They had enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an opponent-say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head-had given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it. Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another person… and I believed that’s what I was seeing here.
As this was going through my head, Top muttered three words that said it all.
“This is evil.”
Bunny and I looked at him and then each other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put his finger on it. This
WHEN WE WERE done we washed our hands from our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover the corpses as best we could.
I turned and surveyed the rest of the room. Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all that was stored here was paper.
“Top, Bunny… the guys we chased off, did they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records? Anything?”
“Not that I saw, unless it was small enough to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going, Cap’n?”
“We’re staying for the moment. If those guys with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to guarantee a safe run back.”
“I’m good with that, Cap’n,” said Top. “Don’t know about you fellas, but I’ve never been roared at by enemy combatants. Can’t seem to get that noise out of my mind.”
Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that’s hitting ten on my freak-o-meter, too.”
“All the more reason to stay put,” I said. “We’re secure in here. Besides, if they didn’t take anything, then that means that it’s still here.” I went over to the wall so I could see the room better and assess its layout. “We still have our primary mission objective, so we need to go through these records. We have at least two players-the Russians and the other team-who think this stuff is worth killing a lot of people over. Let’s find out why.”
It was clear from the expressions on Bunny’s and Top’s faces that they didn’t like it any more than I did.
“If those guys are on their way out of here then they’re going to run into Brick,” Bunny said. “It’d be just him against them.”
Top snorted. “Him in an armored vehicle with a minigun. Body armor be damned.”
Bunny grinned, but it was mostly faked. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Either way, it’s beyond our control,” I said. “We’ll leave that up to the gods of war. In the meantime let’s get to it. We’ve been behind the curve on this thing all along. Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell’s going on.”
So we set to work… but as we worked we each listened to the big silence outside of the storage unit. Listening for the sound of elevators, for the shout of familiar official voices, for the sound of footsteps running with that precise speed that you only hear with SWAT or special ops teams. We heard nothing.
We were alone down here, and as long as the NSA was still chasing the DMS, there was no chance of the cavalry coming.
We tried not to think about that; we tried to focus on the task at hand.
We tried.
Chapter Forty
Bulawayo, Republic of Zimbabwe
Five Days Ago
Gabriel Mugabe sipped tea as he watched the forklift drivers move back and forth to shift pallet after pallet of bottled water from the train depot to the warehouse. He was pleased with the quantity. An American had given him a very tidy kickback to make sure that customs cleared the delivery quickly.
“Why so quickly?” he’d asked.
“We’ve invested a lot of money in advertising,” said the American. “Our advertisements go live on September 1, and we want the product available right to the moment.”
“But you said you’re
“Impulse buying is one of the few things that still survives in this economy. Give a little and they’ll buy more.”
Mugabe thought that the American was being stupid. Giving away sixty tons of bottled water was like flushing good money down the toilet. But the American insisted that worldwide one-day buzz was worth many millions at the launch of a product. Mugabe neither knew nor cared if that was true. All that mattered to Mugabe was the fat envelope of money the American discreetly gave him. Mixed currencies-American dollars and South African rand- none of the Zimbabwean dollars that were worth less than toilet paper. Very nice.
They’d shaken hands on the deal. Mugabe wasted very little of the money on bribes to the custom officials. Mugabe’s name was enough to inspire cooperation. What little he spent was to grease the wheels in the port of Beira in Mozambique. The cargo ship unloaded there and the water was sent by train to the depot in Bulawayo and from the train yard to warehouses owned by men who feared the Mugabe family.
Gabriel Mugabe was the nephew of the President of Zimbabwe, who had been accused by organizations around the world, from Amnesty International to the African Union, for human rights violations. Gabriel privately agreed, but in his view the issue of human rights was an attempt by the weak to undermine the strong. He believed that strength came with rights that superseded anything the weak had to say. History, he felt, supported this view, and Mugabe could cite historical precedent going back to the Old Testament and up to the hypocritical U.S. so-called War on Terror.
Though Gabriel Mugabe was not the flesh-eating lion that his uncle was, he was rightly feared here in Bulawayo. The water arrived safely and most of the cash the American had given him was still in his personal safe at home.
He sipped his tea, which had been fresh brewed with water from the pallet Mugabe had appropriated for his personal use.
“Free water,” he said with a sneer. “Fucking Americans.”
Chapter Forty-One
The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos
The Morning of Friday, August 27
The boy’s name was Eighty-two. Or SAM. It depended on who was speaking to him. Otto always called him by the number; when Alpha was in a good mood he sometimes called the boy SAM. The boy seldom thought of himself as anything other than “me.” He didn’t believe the number or the name was truly his. He suspected he had a real name, but if he was right it was one he would never be allowed to use-and would never want to use.
He crouched on the sloping terra-cotta roof in the shadows cast by the fronds of a pair of towering palms. Eighty-two was small and well practiced in the art of being invisible. Most people here at the Hive were not allowed to talk to him, and those who were mostly ignored him. The people who paid attention to him terrified him, and so the boy avoided them. He lived among them, seeing scores of people every day, but he sometimes went a week without so much as a meaningless exchange of commentary on the weather. In the span from November 10 of last year until March 2 of this year he did not have a single conversation. Even the doctors who tested him seldom spoke to him. They grabbed him, poked him, pierced him with needles, took samples, made him lie down under scanners- all without directly addressing him. They knew he knew what was expected of him and mostly they pointed to where they wanted him to sit, stand, or lie down.
It hurt him for a long time, being alone, but recently he’d come to prefer it. It was better than engaging in conversation about what was going on here at the Hive. And it was better than when Otto’s men dragged him along
