“What have we got?”
Kelly leaned over Dunstan’s shoulder as he blinked the sleep from his eyes and began to report on the data he’d recovered.
“Not entirely sure, but I hope it’s something. The Harrells and the Van Burrens between them own a massive amount of real estate all throughout the demilitarised zone, all under aliases.”
“Alright, any idea on where to start looking?”
Dunstan pulled up a window on his laptop—an old farm house.
“I’d start here. It’s isolated, got enough space for a chemical lab, and room to house the workforce. Also, check this out — look at this date.”
“October 31, 2021,” Kelly read aloud.
“Anton purchased the property right after the blackout, not long after he disappeared.”
Kelly crossed her arms and nodded. “Alright, it’s worth a look. Call Connors and give him an update.”
The farm house was located a good couple of hours away from any major road. It was impossible to find on any map or any publicly accessible satellite imaging system. Other than the buried records that Dunstan had to dig very deep to find, the place might as well not exist.
“You’re good, Anton, I’ll give you that,” Kelly murmured, as she lifted her binoculars and searched the fields below.
She was laying on her stomach on a high ridge overlooking the farm. Dunstan sat a few meters behind her with his laptop and a few devices that were scanning for data. Kelly couldn’t imagine what those devices would discover that she couldn’t see for herself right now, but she had learned to trust that kind of technology — or if anything to respect it.
Kelly spotted around half a dozen people with just one look at the front of the house. The two guards on the second-floor balcony looked particularly threatening with their automatic rifles. People on the ground floor, and outside, were keeping busy transporting barrels onto trucks from inside. Based on the number of cars parked around the side of the house, Kelly guessed that there were maybe ten people inside. She’d wait and watch now to confirm exactly how many and how armed they were.
“Well, they’re producing something alright, and it’s not potatoes.”
Kelly put the binoculars down. She was already weighing the risk of infiltrating such a heavily defended building alone. Then she spotted something and raised the binoculars to investigate. Johnathan Harrell stepped onto the front porch of the house. He was pointing at something, issuing orders. Kelly began to sweat, laying directly in the scorching heat. It was a particularly dry day. She crawled backwards away from the ridge.
“Come on,” she told Dunstan. “We’ve seen enough. We’ll head back to HQ, gear up, and return tomorrow.”
In the exact same spot Kelly powered the night-vision scope of her MK14 EBR and trained the marksman rifle on the guards at the front of the house. She shifted slightly, looking from target to target. The sandy rocks underneath her still radiated heat even as her cheeks and nose prickled with the nightly chill. Through Dunstan’s infrared scans Kelly watched ten yellow blobs in and around the farmhouse. Spots of red shined from torches and light globes. Rocks outside glowed green, the house itself a thickly purple. They waited nearly thirty minutes for visual confirmation on Johnathan Harrell.
Kelly touched her earpiece and whispered. “I got eyes on Johnathan. Ground floor. Remember, we want him alive. All other enemy personnel are go for elimination.”
“Check,” said Dunstan.
Kelly picked up on the tremble in his voice. “You hang back, okay? You shoot on my orders.” She shifted her scope and watched a group of four, loitering around the front veranda. “You’re clear. Light her up.”
Detonating a Model 308-1 incendiary grenade in an area so rich with fuel was bound to cause a massive flame, but Kelly raised her eyebrows at how hungrily it roared to life. She pulled her sights away from the blaze and watched the personnel in the house storm into the field armed with hoses, buckets, axes and water trucks.
“I’ve got seven hostiles diverting into the field,” Kelly reported. She turned her attention back to the house. “One tango standing guard on the second floor balcony.”
She lined the target up in her sights. Deep breath. Exhale. She squeezed the trigger. Felt the jolt of the rifle. The suppressed round ripped through the side of the guard’s head, leaving a messy splatter of skull and brains on the wall behind him. As always Kelly tried not to think about it. Her fourth kill.
“Let’s go.”
Kelly slung her rifle onto her back and ordered Dunstan to start the BMW. Kelly jumped in the passenger seat and they took off down the dirt road towards the house. The hellish orange glow above the fields painted the house with a deep silhouette. The enemy were still plenty occupied fighting the flames, and would be for hours.
“Look out!”
As they neared the front of the farm house a woman bashed open the double front doors and blasted the BMW with an assault rifle. Kelly and Dunstan ducked under the dashboard as bullets either penetrated or skimmed off the hood of the car, and put a few dangerously close holes in the windscreen.
“Stop shooting my fucking car!” Dunstan shouted.
“Dunstan, shut up and get us closer.”
Dunstan swerved the BMW to the left, but being unable to see he slammed it into an old wooden shed. Kelly swung the passenger seat door open, leaned over the roof and fired her sidearm at the attacker. The weapon cracked three times, and on the fourth shot Kelly heard a scream from inside the house. She looked up. The woman scampered further inside. Kelly held her Beretta fixed on the entrance as she advanced, with Dunstan on her six.
They stepped into a hallway where drops of blood pooled onto a long cream-coloured carpet. Another burst of machinegun fire tore splinters down the length of the hallway, sporadic and inaccurate, and Kelly pressed herself against a bookshelf. She peeked at the woman who had blind-fired around the corner. Kelly signalled for Dunstan to stay outside. She considered pushing up. Another blast of gunfire, quickly replaced by the rapid clicking of an empty magazine. Kelly charged. Not a single thought ran through her head. Her limbs moved on their own. She fired a shot through the woman’s hand. The weapon clattered across the hardwood floor, coupled with a ghastly scream. Kelly raised her sidearm. A look of pale terror plastered the woman’s face, her chest rose and fell with panic as she tried to scamper away.
Kelly lowered the gun and took a deep breath. Target subdued. Not a threat.
“Dunstan, hallway clear. Take this one.” She tossed him a zip-tie.
Kelly did a sweep and cleared the rest of the house, finishing on a set of stairs leading underground.
“Basement,” she said.
“Smell that?” Dunstan replied.
“Chemical lab. Johnathan has to be here.”
Kelly crept down the stairs, expecting something from Johnathan. The basement was laden with chemical supplies but hardly looked like the dirty drug lab that Kelly was expecting. This lab was high-end. It appeared then that Hex was a high-end drug, not some street powder that anyone could cook up. There was a lot more to this.
Footsteps. Johnathan dashed out from a cluttered corner and made for the door. Kelly grabbed his right arm, twisted it behind his back and hurled him against the concrete floor. His shoulder dislocated with a gruesome pop. Kelly took a zip-tie from her belt and bound his hands. When she dragged a chair to the middle of the room the sound of metal scraping against concrete was surprisingly loud.
“Dunstan, run a scan for hostiles and make sure we’re in the clear, then go and get the car started.”
“They shot her up pretty bad, lieutenant.”
“I know. Just try.”
Dunstan left the room. Kelly didn’t want him to see this. She hoisted Johnathan up and threw him into the chair, hands bound behind his back. He was sweating and writhing in anger. But also… laughing.
Fuck, Kelly thought. She steeled herself. Found some bandages to wrap around her hands.
“You think you can torture me?” he accused. “Go on, try and beat me at my own—”
Kelly slugged him hard in the jaw. He groaned, spat out a glob of blood.
“I’m going to make this simple,” she said. “I want the names and locations of your distributors. Where are the drugs coming from?”
Johnathan remained silent—as expected. Kelly responded by collecting some rags and filling a jug with water.
“You authorised for that, miss CIA?” his voice was slurred. He swallowed hard. “You can’t…”
“Fucking try me.”
Kelly forced the rag over his face and poured the water. A combined sound like screaming and gagging emitted from Johnathan as water splashed around his violently kicking feet. Kelly tore the rag away and Johnathan choked up water and coughed, trying desperately to suck in a breath of air. Kelly would give him just enough time to recover.
“The distributors,” she yelled.
“Go to hell.”
Kelly threw the cloth back on and waterboarded him again. When she was done Johnathan had the look of a man who was in pain but was too stubborn to give in to the agony. Kelly glared at him furiously.
“You meant what you said.”
She searched around the benchtops, knocking over pans and shattering flasks, until she found something like cooking oil and poured it into a saucepan. She set it on the stove.
“Waterboarding has always been a preferred method of interrogation precisely because it doesn’t permanently damage the suspect.”
She slapped Johnathan. Behind her the oil began to bubble. She leaned real close, stared into his eyes and said, “Did you know that when a member of the Yakuza dishonours him or herself they are obliged to cut off their own finger?”
Johnathan didn’t respond.
“Where are drugs coming from?” Kelly barked.
Again, no response, other the darting of Johnathan’s eyes towards the boiling pot of oil. Kelly shoved Johnathan and he toppled over with a crash. She took the pot, holding it high over his torso, his breathing became heavy and his face turned an ugly pink. Kelly let a few drops of oil splash onto him, just at the base of his neck. He groaned and writhed but didn’t scream. The oil left a red welt on his pale flesh. Kelly slowly poured more, on his chin, closer and closer to his mouth, his eyes. It didn’t take long to get a blood curdling scream out of him.
“Okay!” he cried. “Okay! The distributors. I’ll tell you… I’ll talk… My father’s in league with the Shinoda crime family in Osaka. He showed them how to make it, it’s not a regular drug it… Hex… The Osaka family are shipping it to the States from Los Angeles. Dad put me in charge of distributing it to each of our compounds.”
“Why are you pushing drugs in your own territory?”
“It’s my father, he’s crazy—”
“What’s he using the drugs for?”
“For control. Hex interrupts the electrical input-output carriers in the user’s temporal lobe so that my father can manipulate their Neural Interfaces, enough to keep them reasonable, but also enough to leave them open to suggestion.”
Jesus Christ, Kelly thought as she took a slow step back, this is bigger than I could have imagined. What do I do with this?
All those people, everyone connected to a Neural Interface, was at risk of falling under the cult’s influence. Anton could make them do whatever he wanted and they wouldn’t even realise. Kelly realised she’d have to be careful from now on. Anyone could become an enemy, but not everyone would necessarily be guilty.
Fucking hackers, Kelly cursed.
“Dunstan!” she called.
He trod down the stars. “Yeah, Lieutenant?”
“Watch him.” She took out her phone. Dunstan assured her that her communications wouldn’t be monitored, but how could she be sure? Although, with what she was going to say, maybe it didn’t matter if Anton was listening. She dialled Agent Connors.
“We have Johnathan Harrell. He cracked. He gave us everything.”
“That’s good news,” said Connors, his voice was glad yet cold. “You understand that Johnathan Harrell is expendable. Confirm the intelligence then execute the target.”
“Sir, he’s an unarmed prisoner,” Kelly rejected. She had never killed an unarmed man before.
“He’s dangerous and he’s no use to us alive. You have your orders.”
Agent Connors hung up. Kelly held the phone to her ear and stared in silence at Johnathan. Dunstan immediately noticed the hesitation—the sickly conflict in Kelly’s eyes.
“What are our orders?” Dunstan asked.
Kelly unholstered her Beretta and drew back the slide.
“You can’t be serious?” said Dunstan. “He’s a psycho, believe me I have as much reason to hate him as you, but he’s an unarmed prisoner.”
Kelly stood behind Johnathan and aimed the handgun at his head. The poor man whimpered and closed his eyes. Kelly had never before seen a grown man this dangerous burst into tears. An icy feeling rushed through her torso. She bit her tongue and her hand began to tremble. That’s when she realised it was over. She raised the gun.
“Dammit!” Kelly threw the saucepan full of oil against the wall and it clattered around the lab. She grabbed a glass beaker and shattered it on the floor. “Dunstan, go and get the body from the upstairs balcony,” she barked, and Dunstan was quick to follow.
Johnathan looked around, startled, maybe rattled by the noise. Kelly attacked him, tore off his necklace as well as the ring from his finger. The dead guard’s limp feet thunked on the stairs as Dunstan dragged the body into the lab, a little pale in the face himself. Meanwhile, Kelly retrieved a jerry can from upstairs and sloshed gasoline all over the lab. The fumes burned her eyes. This set Johnathan into another burst of screams.
Dunstan didn’t ask questions — he didn’t have to. He followed Kelly’s lead and merely nodded when Kelly looked at Johnathan and said, “Take him”. Kelly lugged the corpse onto the chair and gave it Johnathan’s necklace and ring. While Dunstan man-handled Johnathan out of the house Kelly heaved two gas canisters into the kitchen. Her movements were almost not her own but she gave in to the feeling. Filling the microwave with silverware and turning the valves on the gas canisters was an act of the purest rage. It wasn’t enough for her to complete the mission anymore. She wanted to see this house fucking burn.
Despite the raging inferno that now devoured the Harrells’ crops, Kelly found the night air refreshing compared to the stuffy basement inside. Dunstan had Johnathan on his knees. He held Johnathan by the collar with a gun to his head. The three of them watched the initial explosion devastate the house. The windows blew open and the shockwave sent a fiery puff of air over Kelly’s face. Then the fire began to crawl, licking at every part of the house, slowly devouring it whole.
Johnathan tried to shove away but Dunstan held him tight. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we should get moving.”
Kelly went to the disabled BMW, leaned into the driver’s side and turned the ignition. The vehicle chugged helplessly and failed to start. Kelly looked at the flames spilling out of the house. The remaining enemy personnel would be back soon.
She looked at Dunstan. “We’re marching, come on”.
ns 172.70.127.108da2