Site Kilo-29
Personnel Living Quarters
Winter, 1993
Day Three-Early Evening
Status: Defensive Status
Facility Status: Alert One-Bravo
The entire interrogation took a little over four hours.
I started with basic questions. How old she was, where she was born, her parents names, how long she served in the Air Force, stuff like that. During the time I was able to tell when she was lying or not. There was probably some kind of subconscious cue that I was picking up on, something that my subconscious recognized that my conscious mind did not. I used it ruthlessly, not allowing her to get away with the smallest lie.
Her first lie I simply tied her left foot to the chair. Her second lie, her right foot. Third lie, her right hand. Her fourth lie, her left hand. When she lied for the fifth time, she was obviously expecting me to start in on the pain.
Instead, I looped the tubing around her throat and tied it off to the back of the chair. I tied it tight enough that the flesh bulged out on top and bottom of the tube, but not enough to restrict her breathing.
I'd been taught that it made it so the subject could feel their pulse in their throat, that it was a constant reminder that they were in someone else's control. The subject wouldn't get used to it, and when they swallowed it gagged them for a moment.
She almost seemed to wilt.
She told me the truth when I asked who she worked for and what section. It turned out she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence, and was part of something called Project Pilot Light.
She tried to hold back, but I kept reminding her that I was in charge. Most of it slaps with an open hand or a strike with the tubing. I didn't bother going for her nipples, my trainers had taught me that hurting a woman's nipples had three problems. First was their design, the pain would cut out quickly or stop altogether pretty quickly. The second was that it could easily become sadism. The Third was that it added a level of sexuality you wanted to avoid. By the time you had moved to nipples, the interrogation should be at the level of 'direct stimulation' already. The breasts were to be considered merely expanses of flesh, not breasts. Avoid hints of sexuality, that ran the risk of turning the power over to the female subject.
With a female subject, you want to do as little physical harm as possible. You wanted her to feel exposed, helpless, completely in your power. By stripping away social and cultural protections, by letting her know that she had no control over the situation in any way, you could accomplish much more you could with just direct stimulation. If you had to apply direct stimulation, you wanted to perform it on someone else, a third party, so that the other party was punished in her place. A loved one was best, but anyone would suffice. The fact that her actions were causing someone else torment would break a woman quicker than direct stimulation applied to her.
The problem with Agent Killain, is that she was also trained as a man would be trained. She'd gone through anti-interrogation classes, she'd been in situations where she didn't have any power over the situation and had to do what she was told, which was a pretty powerful resistance right there. Add to the fact that I didn't have a third party for leverage, and she should have been able to resist my interrogation pretty easily if I stuck to the normal methods used on women.
So I mixed the two. Rendering her powerless, rendering her vulnerable and helpless, but also applying direct stimulation to her when she lied to me. I didn't move the level of stimulation up very quickly. I didn't go to punching her, breaking bones, dunking, twisting joints, waterboarding, chair dropping, electric shock, or anything else. I stuck with the surgical tubing, leaving welts across her skin. I didn't slap her once she was in place in the chair, sticking to the tubing, unless I wanted to reinforce just how helpless she was. Toward the end I merely put a carpet tack in the surgical tubing I used to hit her, letting her know that for every lie she told me it would be worse when I finally did strike her with the tubing.
It worked.
God help me, it worked.
She told me everything.
Project Pilot Light centered around seizing control of the largest, best equipped, and most well maintained sites from the old Continuity of Government Project. Any sites that had ongoing 'projects' with them were to be examined and possibly re-purposed or have the old project restarted under a different name.
Kilo-29 fell under what was known as 'Project Bed Check', was the largest site involved in that project, and had been running since 1957 through three completed tests until the site had been lost during the Iran-Contra Affair paperwork shuffle. Now they were going to use it for the latest one that Agent Killain was supposed to assist in setting up.
This time it involved making use of the large number of homeless and mentally ill street people. They would be gathered up, exposed to chemical weaponry and radiation through contaminated food and clothing, and injected with several common diseases that were expected to make a comeback. Typhoid, TB, and a swine variant of Influenza. Those 'subjects' addicted to street drugs were divided into three categories. The first would receive not only regular injections, but a supply of drugs to be carried by the subject. The second would be given regular injections, which would stop as soon as they entered the facility. The third would be forced to go cold turkey, but would be allowed the knowledge of the first two groups.
The goal was to find out if order could be maintained without military personnel if the pool was drawn from people who had been damaged severely.
Agent Killain and her team were supposed to prepare the site, which had been listed as 'decommissioned' in CIA records. However, when they got here, they came under attack within the first 48 hours. The site had locked down, and they'd been unable to escape.
Colonel Bishop had figured out that she wasn't Air Force, that her team wasn't military, and eventually discovered what was going on.
She'd executed him outside, in the snow, after he managed to open one of the secondary egress points.
I'd changed the subject at that point, on the edge of switching from interrogating her to torturing her to punish her.
It was very tempting.
Instead I began questioning her about the site. It turned out that Kilo-29 had originally been designed to shelter thousands of people, almost four times the normal amount if they went to hot-bunking. There were pens for animals, where you could have hundreds cattle at a time in pens that didn't allow movement. Caverns dedicated to chicken farms. Hydroponics areas based off of NASA research, as well as massive caverns kept at freezing temperatures that stored prepacked food, caverns that held storage areas full of grains and other stock. I'd already seen sections where there was fertilizer and farm equipment, but Agent Killain had told me that there was enough farm equipment and supplies to scrape away the contaminated soil and then replant literally square miles of reclaimed farmland.
Event Storage was designed for any type of cataclysmic event. From meteor strike to nuclear war. Anything that wiped out 80%+ of the human race and damaged the surviving landscape. It was to enable the survivors to stay safe and hidden for up to 20 years, then allow them to exit the facility and begin to rebuild.
That part didn't surprise me.
What did surprise me was that everything I'd seen, it was a 'support site' in the Event Recovery Program, that despite hopes, it turned out that Kilo-29 was not the primary control facility. Apparently the primary Event Control facility was lost at one point, and nobody had ever recovered anything more than hints about it.
The Deep Storage lockers were pretty much the Event Recovery part, only more focused around vehicles, weapons, and building equipment. Deep Storage lockers were part of all Kilo and November Sites. Kilo-29 was one of the largest Deep Storage facilities Agent Killain or the people who briefed her had ever found any record of.
The whole site was designed in the mindset that if it was the only site that survived, those inside would be able to rebuild America faster than any enemy's, domestic or foreign, would be able to build their own societies.
Site Kilo-29 consisted of 9 primary military levels, 5 primary civilian levels, 4 Deep Storage Locker levels, 6 Even Locker levels, and 4 sub-levels. It went over 2000 feet down into the mountain.
Part of me wanted to call her a liar. That nothing could be that goddamn big.
But when she told me that there were huge sections beneath the facility that were natural caves that had not been used, had been blocked off by concrete and steel, I knew she was telling the truth.
When I was a kid, I'd toured Carlsbad Caverns, as well as several mines that were carved from solid rock by people working with no more than pickaxes. Add in modern jackhammers, explosives, and construction methods, changing the caverns beneath the mountain into a massive complex didn't seem that far-fetched.
Her team had been unable to access the NBC weaponry lockers, and as far as she knew, they were intact and secure, which was one good bit of news.
There were two pieces of information that let me know how serious things were.
The first, was this was what was labelled as a "War Fighter" facility. She didn't know what it meant, but I did. The "War Fighter" section was a part her and her team were not able to access. From what she was able to tell, it had its own dedicated computer systems that were not even hooked into the site.
The second was that this site had a "Recovery Section" important to her supervisors.
Kincaid had been right, from what little he guessed. There were CIA, FBI, NSA vaults containing un-redacted records. Additionally, there were vaults for the IRS, as well as the rest of the Big-13. Plus bank records from 1982, mortgage records, business records, all kinds of data to 'rebuild civilization' and allow the government to maintain control.
I had a mental image of some guy trying to grow crops in a nuclear blasted wasteland when some suit from Bank of America rolls up and demands he pay back his student loans from before the bombs fell.
She knew Toothpick intimately, but neither of the other two. Toothpick was a "Case Handler", which pretty much meant he was a dirty tricks asshole, by the name of Kevin Fellman (I figured it was just the name he was using or had been assigned most recently). Apparently he'd been with the Company since the mid-70's and was considered one of the guys to go to for difficult missions. She didn't know much about him, except for the fact that he'd apparently specialized in wet-work.
That explained a lot to me. He probably considered himself a badass.
Finally I pulled a chair up and sat down, facing her. She had welts across her legs, across her shoulders, and across her breasts. There was one blood one across her thighs, from where I'd pushed a half-dozen carpet tacks into the hose and smacked her once when she'd tried to lie to me.
I'd left her face unmarked.
She was sobbing, her head down and tears falling on her red-striped breasts.
Bomber was sitting on the counter, sharpening his knife. Nancy was sitting on the floor, thumbing through another medical field manual. Taggart was leaning against the wall that separated the dining room/kitchen from the dark frontroom. Heather was sitting on the floor next to me, nursing the baby. All of them were trying to look like they weren't paying attention to what I was doing, but I could tell they knew what I was doing.
They just didn't care.
Agent Killain finally looked up at me, no longer weeping.
"You'll never get away with this, Ant. The CIA won't let anyone get away with doing to one of their agents what you've done to me." She told me. She tried to sound defiant and menacing, but instead it just came across as petulant.
I just shrugged.
"I'm going to take personal pleasure in it when they use your wife and kids to teach you a lesson before they come for you." She told me.
I just shrugged again.
"This isn't something you can sweep under the rug." Her face was angry, and her voice was gaining strength. "I'll make sure that you pay for this."
"You realize, don't you, Agent Killain, that you aren't going to be in a position to make sure of anything?" I asked her, standing up. I smiled at her and she flinched. "You seem to be under the impression that I'm going to let you live."
All the fight went out of her. "Please. Please don't kill me." She whimpered.
I laughed at her, kneeling down in front of her. "So quick to beg for your life, right after telling me you're looking forward to your buddies butchering my wife and kids while they plead." I reached out and undid the tubing holding her ankles to the chair.
"Fuck you, Ant." She went to kick at me but I drove my fist into her thigh. She cried out at the muscle cramp and I stood up and moved behind her.
"What are you doing?" She was trying to be brave, but I'd torn it out of her.
"Untying you." I undid the tubing on her throat and her wrists. "Stand up, get dressed."
"Why?" She asked, trying to look defiant as she stood up and crossed her arms over her breasts.
I snapped her across the ass with the tubing, slapping right at the juncture of her upper thighs and her buttocks. She screamed and I did it again.
"Get dressed, Agent Killain." I told her. She scrambled to get dressed, and I just stood there, watching her, while I rolled up the tubing and put it back in my pockets.
"What, what are you going to do?" She asked.
"Move over by the door." I told her. She moved over to the door and waited. I moved up next to her, staying slightly behind her, but far enough away to be able to react in case she tried to whirl around and go for me, or any other dirty trick I knew of.
"I'm going to take you to your little friends, and the four of us are going to figure out what to do next." I told her.
It wasn't exactly the truth.
"You think they'll let you live?" She asked me, sneering. "Agent Fellman seems to think you can't be trusted." She glared at me. "I think you sure as shit proved that."
I chuckled. "Except Agent Fellman doesn't know shit about nuclear reactors, and I do." She turned to look back at me, and I stepped back, still smiling. "My team and I fired up one of the portable reactors, but I overrode the programming and set the system to pull the cooling rods if I don't punch in the twenty-four digit code." it was a lie, my programming skills stopped at BASIC and some machine language, but all she'd know from my files is that I taught computer classes back in 2/19th and had been investigated by MI all the damn time. "I didn't set up a meltdown, Agent Killain." Her face went pale again. "I set it up to detonate. Flood the whole mountain with radiation, fire, and radioactive steam." A total lie, but it didn't matter.
"Why would you do that? What about the other soldiers?" She whispered.
"I don't like to lose." I told her. "I told the Major, and he approves."
"What have you done?" She asked.
"Exactly what I was trained to do." I smiled again. "Mutually assured destruction, remember?"
"You're mad."
"Keep that in mind before you try to do anything stupid." I warned her. I touched the hilt of my knife. "If we come back here, we're going to have a discussion with Ms. Pointy Thing, and I'll finish it up by killing you after I get done amusing myself. It won't be an interrogation, Agent Killain, it'll be revenge for that Private your friends killed, pre-emptive revenge for my family, and in revenge for Colonel Bishop."
I could see she wanted to plead with me, but instead she just hunched her shoulders.
I just knocked on the door as an answer, smiling. Shave and a haircut with three knocks at the end instead of two. After the third try to door opened up to reveal the Private that had locked me in the room.
"Let's go, Agent Killain." I said, stepping by her and out of the room. She hung back, staring at the other soldier and at me, then moved into the hallway.
"Where are you taking her, Sergeant?" The Private asked me as we walked toward the door.
"Agent Killain has cooperated, and I've agreed to allow her to mediate between myself and her fellow federal agents." I told him.
"Maybe I should tell Major Darson." The Private said.
"Private," I glanced at his nametag. "Thurston, it doesn't matter what the Major says, he left what was going to happen next to me, and Agent Killain has cooperated fully with me. As part of that, she's going to mediate between me and the other agents so that we can all get out of here."
"No I'm not." Agent Killain said, obviously not wanting to go anywhere with me alone.
"Then we will return to your room and continue our discussion." I told her. "We'll resolve our discussion as I warned you we would." She went pale again. "Would you prefer not to mediate?"
"No. We can go." She said.
The Private looked a little confused and worried about the byplay, but shrugged and walked with us to the door.
"Just the two of you?" He asked.
"I don't want a firefight breaking out." I told him, stopping in front of the door. "That's why Agent Killain will be leading the way, to prevent them from acting aggressively first." I smiled at her. "I'm sure we can come to some kind of compromise with the feds."
He looked doubtful, but opened the door anyway. I tilted my head, and Agent Killain went first. I stopped on the other side and motioned for him to lower it.
Agent Killain stood silently until the door lowered.
"Do you really think they'll trade me for your safety?" Her tone was disbelieving.
"Hey, I can be pretty convincing." I smiled. She just snarled and started walking down the corridor, hissing in pain as her uniform rubbed on her skin.
"You better hope I never get a chance to return the favor, you asshole." She told me.
"Just shut up and head for the Military Operations Center." I told her. "If they aren't there, we'll use the PA to tell them we're waiting for them there."
She opened her mouth and I backhanded her across the back of the head. "Walk, bitch."
Her shoulders slumped, and she kept walking. She wasn't doing the semi-shambling walk that people who were completely broken did. She probably thought I was buying her act, but I knew she'd bounced back from what had happened and was trying to figure out a way to get the drop on me.
She probably figured she'd throw a monkey-wrench in any plans I had, that she'd convince the agents to shoot me dead, or maybe strap me to a chair so she could get a turn.
"So what are you going to do when we meet up with Agent Fellman? Are you just going to ask him to let you and the other go?" She sneered. "I don't think he's going to be interested in listening when I tell him what you did."
"We'll see when we get there. Now shut up." I slapped her across the back of the head again.
"Following the three second rule?" Bomber asked me. He was walking along next to me, dressed in BDU's without battle rattle. I looked at him and he pointed at Agent Killain and then put his finger over his lips in a shushing motion.
I nodded, and he grinned.
"I hate it when you do that shit." Nancy bitched from behind me. She was wearing Daisy-Dukes, sandals, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. I shrugged.
One of the things we were taught was that no plan survived past three seconds of contact with the enemy.
So I didn't have any plan beyond my initial encounter. I had an overall plan, what my mission objectives were, but as far as a detailed plan, I didn't bother.
I was more heavily armed than it looked. My trusty .45, five knives, and a CS grenade.
I knew better than to believe that I wouldn't need them.
"What do you think is going to happen, Ant? Do you think you'll just trade me for those worthless fucker's lives and we'll just you go?" She asked. "Maybe some of the Privates, but you, that Major, and those two idiots that were with you are all dead men."
"You know, you aren't exactly giving me a reason to keep you alive or to trust any of your word?" I told her. "Maybe I shouldn't try to bargain, maybe I should just kill you, then kill your three friends and claim you never arrived."
She stopped and turned around, staring at me in disbelief. "You.. you wouldn't..."
I backhanded her. Not hard enough to knock her off her feet, but hard enough to get her attention. "Keep walking, Agent." When I raised my hand again, she turned around and kept walking, moving faster.
The only sound were our breathing, footsteps, and somewhere the sound of sirens. The sirens were muffled, coming from a long away.
When we got the Military Operations Center the door was closed, the bar returned to the normal position. I'd been worried that the feds knew how to reset the bars, how to override them, and the site of the bar we'd left sticking straight out locked into the down position gave heavy evidence that they did.
"Throw the bar, Agent." I told her. She glared at me, but did it anyway, and we stood there till it locked into position, exposing the airlock. "After you, Agent."
When the door shut, we stood there for a long moment while she glared at me. Her body tensed, and I laughed.
"Seriously?" I just laughed at her. "You're going to try me where I'm at my best?" I raised my hand and she flinched. "I'll just bitch slap you, then take the boots to you."
The tension went out of her and she slumped. I lowered my hand.
"Throw the bar." I told her. She did so, and the door started to raise.
"I'm coming in. I have Agent Killain with me." I shouted out as soon as the door started to raise. "I just wanna talk."
"Anyone else with you, Ant?" Toothpick's voice.
"Nope, just me and Agent Killain." I said. "The Major wants me to try to negotiate a cease-fire. We're in a lot of trouble, those cannibals are swarming out of the lower levels, and we've already lost guys."
The door was almost halfway up. I could see all three agents crouched down behind work stations. I stepped to the side of Agent Killain and showed my hands.
"So he sent you?" one of the agents laughed. "What's to stop us from just killing you?"
"Don't do it." Agent Killain half-shrieked. "He's wired one of the reactors to go off."
"And you believed him?" Toothpick sneered.
"He's a hacker, and he's been trained in reactor operation." Agent Killain told them, and I just grinned.
"Trained at Charleston, South Carolina at the Navy Reactor facility learning how to run them, fire them up, and shut them down." I grinned at them. "Software was pretty basic, written in COBOL, pretty easy to mod since they taught us how to check the code after a power surge." The last part was a lie, plain and simple.
"He's got it on a timer, if he doesn't put in the code, it'll explode." Killain had bought it all the way.
Thank you, Hollywood, for making people think that anyone who knows how to turn on a computer can use it to do magic. Using a sector editor to hack copy-protection was a world of difference between trying to hack a proprietary operating system written God only knew how long ago.
That and I'd only seen one of the 'portable' reactors.
"We'll find it out." Toothpick said, standing up and waving us in. "Get in here, Ant, let's work something out."
"Keep your hands in sight." One of the others said.
The third waved his hand at Killain. "Come over here, Agent. Get away from him."
Agent Killain almost fell over herself trying to get away from me. It made me chuckle.
"Come over here and sit down." Toothpick told me, pointing at a chair. I moved over to the chair and kicked it away.
"I think I'll pass on the offer of taking a seat." I told him, putting my hands behind my back and standing at parade rest.
I could feel my .45 at the small of my back.
"So what does the Major want?" He asked me.
"He wants to make sure you aren't going to kill his men. He just wants to get his men out of here." I told him. It was close enough to the truth.
Toothpick just laughed.
"The bastard tied me to a chair and tortured me, Kevin." Agent Killain said. She lifted up her top and t-shirt, showing the fading welts across her stomach. "Look what he did to me."
Toothpick shook his head. "Tsk tsk tsk, Sergeant Ant, you know that's against the Geneva Convention. I'm disappointed in you. I guess we won't be able to be polite to each other after all, seeing how you treated Debra." His smile was cruel, and I remembered what Agent Killain had told me about him. "That's OK, I think I'm going to enjoy questioning you. We'll let Debra take a couple of turns on you while we get you ready to give me the answers I want."
"The Geneva Convention doesn't cover interrogating some soul-less CIA whore, since she isn't listed as a combatant." I told him. "Besides, I'd already knocked those boots, and it wasn't good enough to bother trying to seduce it out of her." I said.
"Asshole." Killain snarled.
"Shut your mouth, Sergeant Ant." Toothpick added.
"Might have been different if that pussy wasn't like two miles of bad road by the time I was done with it." I continued. "Plus, I don't think I'd want the CIA's sloppy seconds." I grinned at Toothpick, making a jump based on the detailed information Agent Killain had given me. "Or yours either, shrimp dick."
Toothpick flushed, and he started to step forward. I could hear footsteps from behind me and knew what was coming, relaxing my neck muscles so I could roll with it.
Toothpick slapped the barrel of his pistol against the side of my face, and right afterwards someone punched me in the back of my head. I staggered a step to the left, the pistol having hit me on the right side of my face right after I'd started to move with it, but I stayed on my feet and made it look good. I could feel a trickle of blood running down the side of my head.
"Sorry about busting her out, dude." I told him, straightening up and turning slightly so I could face Agent Killain and Toothpick both. "If I'd known some baby dicked three stroke joke..."
He hit me again with the pistol, but I saw it coming and managed to roll with the majority of the blow. My head was starting to pound, the pistol-whipping starting to overcome the handful of painkillers I'd downed while I was interrogating Agent Killain. He raised the pistol again, but Agent Killain stepped in between us.
The other two Agents had drifted toward us, the blond one having shut the airlock door.
"Don't." She warned. "He's already got repeated brain damage, if you keep hitting him, he'll either go blind or might even die."
"He needs a lesson to teach him not to fuck with us." Toothpick said.
"He was in a coma less than two months ago from a head injury, if you keep hitting him in the head you run the risk of killing him." Agent Killain said. "We need him to do something about that reactor."
"Thick headed Army guys like him only understand force." Toothpick said, glaring at me.
"It won't do any good if he's blind or you fuck up his brain." The blond one said.
"He's a fucking punk." Toothpick said. "The only thing dumbass Army guys like him understand is an ass kicking."
They were closer.
"Trust me, Kevin, beating on him won't do it." Agent Killain said, moving up next to Toothpick. "He's one of those Army retards who likes to fight, he gets off on fighting."
"You all right, Debra?" He asked.
"I'm fine, he just used a hose on me, and not that much." She grinned. "He doesn't like hitting girls, so he didn't use it much on me. He fell for it when I lied to him."
Toothpick stared at her for a moment. "Did he break you, Debra?"
She shook her head. He looked at me and I grinned.
"Did you give him any information?" He asked, turning slightly to look at Agent Killain. She shook her head, looking at him almost defiantly.
"Everyone has their breaking point, Kevin." I said. "Don't they teach you CIA retards that when they're teaching you to rape nuns?" I glanced behind me as I was saying it. The other two agents were only a feet behind me, the blond one holstering his pistol, the other one had already put his pistol away and was reaching toward me.
Tootpick's turned his head so he was looking at me again, eyes narrowed, the pistol came up and he brought his arm back behind him, then swung his pistol at me, telegraphing it the whole way.
The three seconds were up.
I ducked under it and started moving. The pistol came out smoothly from the holster at the small of my back, the knife came out of the sheath on my side.
Agent Killain's eyes widened when I started to move, and Toothpick was off balance from his missed swing at my head.
Out of all four of them, only Agent Killain had any idea what was about to happen, and she started to scream.
I shot Agent Killain twice in the chest, shooting from the hip. The thunder of the pistol echoed and re-echoed through the egg. She went down, falling back as her body tried to save her by throwing itself backwards.
Before the echoes died away I stabbed Toothpick two times, in the back of the thigh, tearing through all the muscle and twisting it as I pulled it free, then in the side straight in. He went down screaming, his pistol falling from his hand as he grabbed his side.
The third and fourth shots went into the legs of the agent who had his hand in his jacket, the first bullet hitting him in the left knee, the second bullet hitting him in the right thigh. He went down screaming, grabbing at his legs.
Blondie was grabbing for his pistol, his eyes wide, as I lunged forward and slammed into him, both of us going down. I drove my knife through his right shoulder as we went down, ending up straddling him as I pulled the knife out and slammed it into his left shoulder. He was screaming, and managed to get a hold of the front of the pistol, his palm over the front and his fingers curling over the top of the weapon.
When I pulled the trigger two of his fingers came off, and he went from trying to grab me to grabbing his hand and screaming as I stood up.
Less than 30 seconds and it was over.
It was easy enough to pick up the three pistols and set them on the keyboard of one of the work stations. Blondie was bleeding bad, but I didn't much care. The other guy was still screaming, but I ignored it.
I'd learned to get used to screaming in 2/19th.
I walked over to where Agent Killain was laying on her back, blood pumping from the two wounds in her chest and out of her back. She was in a pool of blood, her mouth opening and closing as she stared at the ceiling. I looked down at her, and her eyes tracked to me. She was mouthing the same word over and over.
please
"You shouldn't have threatened Heather and the babies. You should have known there was only two ways this would play out." I told her, pointing the pistol at her. I didn't know if she could hear me, I didn't care, but I had to tell her. For Deb's sake if nothing else. "Goodbye, Agent Killain."
She mouthed it again.
I pulled the trigger.
The bullet hit her in the forehead and she twitched once.
A quick glance showed me the other two were out of the fight. I turned from her and stepped over Toothpick, kicking him in the chest so he fell onto his back, then sat on him.
"Didn't quite work out how you thought it would, did it, Kevin?" I asked him.
"Fucking bastard..." he managed to get out.
"Now, now, Agent. You should be more polite." I told him.
Then drove the knife high into the right side of his chest. He screamed, loudly, and I let him.
"I thought about questioning you, asking you a few questions." I told him, reaching behind me to put the pistol away. I held the knife in front of him where he could see it.
"But then you shot and killed a kid, which basically told me that you didn't intend on any of us surviving." I told him. "Now, think of something that might save your life. I'm the only one who can save your stupid ass before your lungs collapse and you suffocate."
I stood up and moved over to where the black haired agent was still holding his legs and screaming. When I squatted down, he made a grab at me, so grabbed his knee and squeezed, feeling the blood run over my hand as I savaged the already shattered knee.
"No touchy." I told him. I waited until he stopped screaming. "Who do you work for?"
"You can't do this." Toothpick yelled out.
"Go fuck yourself." He told me. I squeezed again, grabbing what was left of the kneecap and twisting it. Something tore free of the skin, but I couldn't tell under his pants leg.
"You're a fucking dead man." He told me. I squeezed again, twisting, then let go and patted him down. I found his little flip wallet and took a look.
Louis Grandoln, National Security Agency.
"Well, Agent Grandoln, anything you want to say?" I asked him.
"Go fuck yourself." He repeated.
I dropped the wallet, made a fist, and slammed the bottom of it into his knee. When he finished screaming I smiled at him. "Anything that might save your life?"
"You wouldn't fucking dare." He told me. I just smiled. "You're fucking with National Security, you goddamn dumbass."
"You guys keep saying that." I told him. "Tell me why it's National Security." He gritted his teeth and shook his head. "Project Pilot Light? Maybe Project Bed Check?" He shook his head again. "Does it have to do with the records vaults down there?" He closed his eyes and shook his head again.
"Don't say anything, Agent." Toothpick yelled.
I punched Grandoln twice in the knee and when he went to grab his knee I grabbed his wrist, lifting his arm up, and pushed the knife in between the bones of his hand, sawing it back and forth before pulling it out.
"Define National Security, Agent Grandoln." I told him once he was done screaming and had switched to holding his hand and making sobbing noises. He looked at me and I smiled again. "Define National Security, or it'll get ugly."
"I'll... I'll tell you..." Blondie said, trying to sit up and then screaming and falling back. His arms were useless, flopping when he tried to use them. Blood was still pouring out of his hand. "Please, help me, and I'll tell you."
"Then I don't need you, Agent Grandoln." I told the NSA agent. I put one hand against his chest, holding him down, and stared at him as I put the tip of the blade against his chest and slid it in, angling it up. He spasmed once as the blade quickly slid in. He gave a long sigh and shit himself.
I pulled Grandoln's tie off, went over to Blondie, and quickly bandaged his hand. It was sloppy, and I used part of his button up shirt for the pressure dressing. I wasn't trying to be nice, or kind. So far, Blondie was about the only one who had a chance to survive.
"Stay there. Don't fuck around, or I'll kill you too." I told him, then walked back over to Toothpick while he was still nodding frantically.
Toothpick was glaring at me, hatred pouring off of him.
"Well, Kevin, now we're back to you." I squatted down, and when he grabbed at me I punched him in the side, over the stab wound. I let him scream, smiling at him the whole time. When he stopped, I flicked his nose. "Think of anything that'll keep you alive, Kevin?"
"I'm not going to tell you shit." He told me. "You better kill me, like you did Debra, otherwise I'm going to rape your wife before I kill her myself."
"That's not exactly encouraging me to let you live, Kevin. I mean, with all the shit you bragged to Agent Killain about that you did in Central America, I don't even feel bad about this." I told him. I shrugged. "Since you don't have anything worthwhile to say..."
I raised up the knife.
"Remember how you thought it was funny when that farmer begged you to let his kid live, so you cut the kid's throat in front of him?" I asked. "Remember how funny it was to have your assets rape women while you cut their children's throats?"
"How did..." I smacked him.
"How did I know? Agent Killain gave it all up. Told me all about this whole thing, told me about you." I kept smiling. "Guess it's time to see if you think it's funny when it's being done to you."
"I'm a CIA agent, you can't do this." He said quietly. Blood was coming out of his nose, but that was to be expected, I'd deliberately punctured his lung.
"Actually, I can." I told him. "See, right now, the fact you're some CIA super-star doesn't matter. It's just you, me, Blondie, and the corpses."
I leaned close to him.
"And compared to me, you're just a fucking jumped up schoolyard bully."
He spit blood in my face.
"You're used to killing farmers and women, Kevin. You're used to thinking that you're James Bond, that you're untouchable."
I drove the knife low into his abdomen and twisted the blade.
"Touch."
Nancy laughed.
It took him a minute or two after I pulled the knife out to stop screaming. I checked back, and Blondie was just curled up in the fetal position. I stood up, walked back to him, then knelt down and lifted his pants legs up.
He had a snub nosed revolver in an ankle holster.
I took it away, tossing it underhand into the egg. It clattered on the metal, was silent for a moment, then clattered again, more silence, and I heard it bouncing on rock. I pulled his head back so he was looking at me while the pistol was still clattering.
"You were almost stupid there, Blondie." I told him. "That makes me think you don't want to be friends." I let go of his hair. "You do want to be friends, don't you?"
He nodded and I stood up, moving back over to Toothpick.
"So, Kevin, anything to say?" He shook his head. "See, Agent Killain told me all about the rumors around you, all the shit you bragged about after you and her got done having sex." I smiled. "She let you put it in her ass?" He glared at me. "She loved that. She loved licking it off afterwards even more." I could tell he hated me more than anyone he'd ever met before.
"Do you know what kind of biological agent they've been exposed to?" I asked. "Or do you even care?"
"I'm not telling you..." He started.
I grabbed his wrist, pulling the arm straight. He screamed as the punctured chest muscles moved, then started coughing as blood from his lung went into his mouth.
"Everyone has a breaking point, Kevin." I told him. I put my knee against the stab wound in his side, pulling him against my knee as I put the tip of the knife against his palm. "Let's find yours, tough guy."
For someone who had taken part in Central American operations, who Agent Killain had told me was known as a hard ass that didn't mind torturing and murdering women and children, it didn't take too long for Ms. Pointy Thing to convince him to talk.
I didn't bother asking him questions, just brutalized him with the knife. Fingernails, one ear, nerve clusters in his arms and hands. A couple strikes to the previous stab wounds. Maliciously breaking his nose with a hard downward strike. A couple of broken fingers, and deliberately breaking the bones in his hands.
At one point I just let him scream, and moved over to use the surgical tubing to tie Blondie up, as well as checking on his stab wounds. He'd lost a bit of blood, but the bleeding had slowed down. It's not like I cared that much whether he lived or died. The way he flinched from me told me that the fight had gone out of him. I didn't even bother threatening him.
He could see what I was doing. He knew that it could just as easily be him.
He had CIA ID in his wallet.
"I'll talk... please, Ant, I'll talk." He whispered after I used the knife to cut into the nerve cluster in between the eyes, at the top of the bridge of the nose.
"Let's start with something easy, Kevin." I told him, wiping my knife off on his pant leg. "How long had you'd been fucking Agent Killain?"
"Just over a year." He gasped. His breathing was coming faster and faster, shallower and shallower, as his chest cavity filled up with air from his punctured lung. His breathing had the whistling indicative of how bad it was getting. "Right after she graduated."
"Very good, Kevin." I held up the bottle of Vicodin from my pocket, then shook one into my hand. "Open. It's Vicodin." He opened his mouth, and I dropped the pill in. He swallowed and I smiled.
"Where is the next set of Project Bed Check subjects?" I asked him.
"We haven't gathered them. I was supposed to report as soon as this place was ready." He coughed. I gave him another Vicodin.
"What were your orders regarding us?" I asked him.
"If you found out, we were supposed to eliminate you all." He coughed, and his breathing went faster. "Can't... can't breathe."
"Yeah, sucking chest wound does that to you." I gave him another Vicodin and then lit a cigarette. "What disease are the inhabitants infected with?"
"I'd been advised that I'd probably have to kill you." He ignored my question, continuing on with what he'd been saying. Blood sprayed from his mouth when he tried to laugh. "Christ, I didn't know... I didn't know... Christ, they didn't tell me you..." The coughing interrupted him.
"The file isn't the man. You guys always forget that." I told him, giving him another Vicodin. "The disease. What's it called?"
"I figured you were just a loser." He coughed, still ignoring the question. "Got told only reason you joined was so you didn't go to jail." More coughing. "Read you almost got killed in that joke of a war. Thought you weren't shit."
"Lotta people have thought that over the years." I admitted, feeding him another Vicodin. "Come on, Kevin, what's the name of the disease?"
"Figured, with your history with the Company, nobody would be surprised I had to kill you." Another bout of coughing, another Vicodin. "Didn't think you could move that fast."
"How long until our backup arrives?" I asked him. I gave up on the disease angle. Either he didn't know, or he'd hold that just to spite me. I didn't bother to hold up the knife. I doubted he'd feel it anyway, between what I'd done to him and the Vicodin.
He laughed, this time there was bubbles in the blood. "No backup for you." He coughed some more. "Before we came in we called it in that we'd met with the other teams, and the site was secure." The blood was thicker when he coughed that time. "Said you guys had it under control and didn't need another team." I fed him four Vicodin that time. "No backup for you."
"When does your backup get here?" I asked. He grinned with bloody teeth.
"Tomorrow." Cough cough Vicodin. "Open access. Lower levels. Be here soon to help kill you all." I waited for the coughing to end. "Families probably been notified you all died. Gonna kill all of you. Agency sweep and clear team. My old team."
Shit.
"Guess that's all I need from you." I told him. He swallowed the two sets of four I dropped in his mouth, almost coughing the second set up.
"Proud to die for my country." He said.
"It ain't proud of you." I told him, standing up.
"Not going to leave me like this." He managed to cough.
"It's better than you deserve." I told him. "Goodbye, Kevin."
I ignored Toothpick's cursing and coughing, and instead I moved over to Blondie and sat down next to him. He was still awake and looked terrified.
"How long have you been with the CIA?" I asked him, tapping his ID fold with the point of my knife.
"Eight years." He said. "I'm with the Office of Scientific Intelligence."
I nodded. "Did Agent Killain's team deploy any biological hazard?"
He closed his mouth, his jaw clenching. I sighed and shook my head, holding up the knife. "Do you really think I can't just cut it out of you like I did Kevin? Do you really want to stop being friends?"
He shook his head. "Not yet. Subjects are going to be infected while their being prepped." He moaned. "God, it hurts."
"Open." I said, putting out my cigarette. I pulled out the bottle and rattled it. "Vicodin, heavy duty ones." He opened and I shook two into his mouth. "It won't take long to start working." Behind us, Toothpick was mumbling to himself and coughing.
"Did you guys manage to gain access to the computer system?" He shook his head. "Which one of you was watching us through the cameras?"
"Nobody. I swear." He told me. I raised an eyebrow and he repeated his answer.
"Do you know how many of those things are in here with us?" That was one of the fifty-dollar questions.
"No." he said.
"How many are in the team coming in?" I asked.
"Ten." He told me. He sighed and relaxed. "It's working. Thank you." There was no way it really was, but his brain thought it was, so the pain was receding. "I'm really cold."
"Yeah. The floor's cold." I told him. "Nothing I can do about that." He was dying from blood loss.
Not like I cared.
"Were you involved in putting Project Bed-Check together this time?" I needed to know. His answer would affect what would happen to him.
"Yes. I was handled the project, and told to reactivate it and head it." He told me. "They gave me a project group, Agent Killain and her team to set the site up, Agent Fellman and Agent Grandoln were to make sure the military teams I'd requested did their jobs and were eliminated on schedule, and my other project groups are tasked with gathering up the subjects and transporting them here, as well as oversight on the project." He groaned and I fed him two more. "I planned on supervising the whole thing this time, unlike the other failed projects. I estimated that direct oversight could give us more data and keep the project from collapsing."
Fucking monster.
"Have they already rounded up the subjects?"
"Yes. They started two weeks ago, and I was notified they had everyone two days before we got here." He sighed. "I'm feeling a lot better." I nodded, and fed him two more. "They won't be infected until they get their medical checks when they arrive here."
"Will they be waiting for a signal to bring the people up?"
"Yes. They'll wait for us to contact them." He shook his head. "I was going to contact them after Agent Fellman killed you and the others." He groaned in pain. "He said you'd be no problem."
"What happens if you don't contact them?" I asked.
"They'll either abort the project and release them or use the secondary site." He told me.
"If they abort it, will those people be killed?" I asked. He shook his head. "What did the NSA have to do with it?"
"He was here because of the vaults." He told me. "He was a wet-work specialist, Agent Fellman and him were friends, he was here as backup."
"Did his supervisors know he was here?" I fed him two more. He shook his head. "Why not?"
"He's been on loan to the CIA for as long as I've known Agent Fellman." His eyes were glazing, pain and the drugs. "They're pretty tight." He was slurring his words, and I fed him three more. "Fellman was in charge of the overseas ops usually, Grandoln handled stuff here in America."
I couldn't really think of anything else I wanted to know, but I wanted to keep him talking. Fellman had quit breathing, either blood loss or the Vicodin doing their work.
I fed him three more. "What kind of stuff were they usually involved in?"
He told me, rambling, about how before the two agents had gotten involved in Project Bed-Check they had been cleaning up old Cold War refuse. Not Warsaw Pact assets, but American assets. He remembered a couple of names, since apparently the two agents liked to get drunk and laugh over the stuff they'd done, bragging about stuff to the agent bleeding out on the floor.
I recognized two of the names. One of them had been arranged to look like a suicide. The other had been arranged to look like a drunken car wreck on the way back from a bar. Both of them had been in 2/19th with me, one of them in my platoon, both had left when the unit was deactivated. One male. The other a resident of Titty Territory.
He finally dozed off, mumbling about how Fellman and Grandoln had laughed about raping a girl I'd known before pushing her in her car into the river.
I stood up, walked over to the desk, and picked up Agent's Fellman's pistol. 9mm Beretta, standard government issue. I checked the load, then walked up to Fellman, staring down at him for a long moment.
I wondered what the two people I'd known that he'd killed had done to get the attention of the CIA. Was it just cleanup, nothing personal? Had they planned on going to the press with information about what 2/19th had been all about? Had they been planning on selling information they'd learned later or in 2/19th to China?
It didn't matter.
I put one in each of the men's heads, then dropped the pistols into my BDU top pockets. It felt weird, it was the first time I'd carried something in them in years. Half the time I even forgot they were even there.
I left the dead behind, left the airlock open, and went into the site alone.
I knew I'd stared into the abyss too long.