Assassination Anxiety (The McKenzie Files) Page 3

  He reached out and clumsily felt along the thin metal stem of his lamp to find the switch, figuring he might as well get up, get dressed, and have breakfast early before he headed off to the warehouse. Before he could touch the light switch, a powerful arm wrapped firmly around his neck.

  Startled, Colin started to create a jolt of electric current to incapacitate his assailant, but felt a sharp pain in his neck. Suddenly overcome with grogginess, he barely realized his attacker’s hold around his neck had grown stronger. Dizzy and unable to concentrate enough to create an electric surge to defend himself, Colin fell limp and faded to unconsciousness.

  * * * * *

  Colin awoke to something hard and cold pressing against the right side of his face. He opened his eyes and lifted his head, but he didn’t feel so good. What the hell happened? Dazed, he slowly sat up and looked around to find he was no longer on his cot in his dark quarters but now sat in a chair at a dark round table. He moved his hands, resting in his lap, and realized he wore his typical civilian attire – blue jeans, black tee-shirt, soft cotton socks, and comfortable white sneakers.

  How did I get here? Feeling dizzy, he forced his mind back to the last thing he remembered ... being in his room, awakening suddenly, and then–

  I was drugged. Kidnapped!

  Fear charged through him as he glared straight ahead at the black wall and black metal door of what appeared to be a small rectangular room. A holding cell? Interrogation room? He looked up at the four bright circular lights shining above his head, but quickly diverted his gaze from their intensity.

  As the bright spots cleared from his vision, he looked to his left and saw that he was not alone. Kelly Lytton, another Reploid he hadn’t seen in quite a while, sat nearby at the table with him. Dressed in an oversized blue shirt and black pants, he was slumped over the table, face down – just as Colin himself had been moments ago. Standing next to Kelly was General Verne Larkin, another person he hadn’t seen in a while. In that dark blue uniform with the band of medals on his left lapel, his narrowed eyes shaded by the dark blue officer’s hat with the gold eagle emblem, Larkin gave off an imposing aura. Colin spotted a large brown envelope in Larkin’s hand and started to rise to his feet and stand at attention, but he was still feeling dizzy.

  Larkin raised his hand. “Remain seated, sergeant. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Colin raised his right hand to the side of his head, giving Larkin a salute. “What happened? How did I get here?”

  “We brought you here,” a female voice answered from behind.

  That voice sounds familiar. Colin turned to see a woman with short red hair, dressed in black knee-high boots and a gray camouflage fatigue uniform. “You...” Colin said, surprised.

  Captain Melony Carter of the CID – Central Intelligence Division – took a step forward. “I can’t exactly say that I haven’t seen you in a while, Sergeant McKenzie,” Captain Carter said. “Considering the fact that I practically see you every day.”

  “You see me every day?” Colin asked. “I suppose that means you and the CID are still keeping me under surveillance.”

  Captain Carter smiled. “Of course. And not just you. Don’t forget your two pals, Christy and Lytton. You certainly didn’t think we were going to allow the three of you to run around without any kind of a leash, did you?”

  General Larkin stepped forward and raised his hand. “That situation could change, which is the reason why the three of you were summoned here. And I apologize for covert and harsh manner in which you were brought here.” Larkin frowned as he glanced over at Captain Carter. “I would have preferred that you weren’t drugged and dragged here in the middle of the night. That does seem like overkill.”

  “We needed to keep the situation under the radar, sir,” Captain Carter replied. “We used the quickest and quietest means to secure our three subjects with little or no outside attention.”

  Securing us as quickly and quietly as possible? That doesn’t make me feel any better when you send some thug to nearly strangle me and jab me with a needle. And who dressed me? Colin quickly discarded that last thought. “Couldn’t you guys have just sent me an email? It probably would have been less trouble. Especially when you’re dealing with Diane.”

  Diane. Colin immediately heated at the thought of her and his latest dream involving her. I wonder why she’s not here.

  As if on cue, he heard a loud commotion outside the room and could make out the voices of two males and one female. The female voice sounded familiar. Diane? It has to be.

  A loud boom accompanied the heavy impact striking the metal door from the other side. The door buckled. Captain Carter moved to the door, then stepped back just in time to avoid being struck by the door as it flew from the wall with another loud boom and sailed over the table, barely missing Kelly. General Larkin dodged back in alarm, but Colin knew the black boot that kicked the door off its hinges belonged to Diane Christy. Dressed in her gray camouflage fatigue uniform, she barged into the room while dragging two men in black masks and uniforms by the back of their necks. She hoisted both men into the air and tossed them over the table to join the mangled. Their bodies bounced off the wall with a loud thud, then dropped to the floor.

  Nobody can make an entrance quite like Diane, Colin observed, grinning broadly.

  A faint moan came from Kelly as he raised his head from the table. He sat up and blinked his eyes rapidly as if trying to regain his bearings. He looked about the room, then turned to Colin. “What happened? Where am I?”

  Diane, upon seeing General Larkin, stood at rigid attention and raised her right hand in a military-precise salute. “General Larkin, sir. I didn’t see you here. I had to deal with these two clowns. One minute, I’m in my bed in my quarters. The next minute, these guys are trying to molest me.”

  “That’s not what they had in mind,” said Captain Carter.

  Diane glared. “They told me to bring them here. What’s going on?”

  Carter walked over and stood next to Larkin. The two men Diane had ‘delivered’ groaned in pain as they rose to their feet. “Their orders were to have you secured and dressed appropriately for your meeting with the general and myself, and deliver you without incident.”

  “A stupid way to ask somebody to a meeting,” Diane grumbled. Quickly she added, “No offense intended, General Larkin.”

  “But it was effective,” Captain Carter returned. “You’re all here.”

  Kelly glared at Carter in wide-eyed panic. “Why? What do you want? Are we in trouble?”

  General Larkin stepped forward. “Nobody is in trouble. And I apologize for the use of such drastic measures to bring you here. But the point is, that you’re all here, and we have some very important matters to discuss. Captain Christy, please take a seat.”

  Diane walked over and sat in the chair next to Colin. Colin smiled briefly, then turned his attention to Larkin, willing himself not to think about the details of his very embarrassing dream.

  Larkin waved his hand at the two masked men. With slow, stiff movements they both exited the room. Larkin continued. “The three of you have been brought to this room in a sub-level beneath CID headquarters here in Navarone. We wish to inform you that you’re being reactivated.”

  Colin was confused. “Reactivated?”

  “Silencers. Your group is being reactivated and put back into service.” Larkin opened the envelope that he was holding and brought out a white paper document. “Here is your copy of the executive order signed by President Drennan, officially putting Silencers back into service. The President is fully aware of your efforts to save not only her, but the entire city of Navarone on Maseklos Prime during the incident involving Doctor Fenlow. Your government is most grateful.”

  Larkin placed the document on the table in front of Colin. Diane raised her hand. “In all due respect, sir. If everyone’s so grateful for what we did, then couldn’t they have showed us sooner, rather than have us rot in thes
e lousy jobs?”

  “Regrettably, it took a while for us to sort things out,” Larkin explained. “After all, the three of you are unique.”

  “Unique is putting it mildly,” Captain Carter added. “No offense, but we found it difficult to imagine the three of you, with your unusual abilities and backgrounds, being successfully integrated among the regular troops. To be blunt, we need you and your abilities to do things that regular humans can’t. So, the question was, what to do with you? The solution to the problem came to us a few days ago.”

  Captain Carter took a small black remote out of her pocket and pressed a button. On the wall straight ahead a large, blue square appeared. Carter pressed another button on the remote, and a vid image appeared, accompanied by sound, showing the chaotic scene of a mob of screaming people running in different directions. In the background, three cars burned. The scene shifted to the right and showed a large group of people running from a bright red light. Several of the people seemed to spontaneously burst into flames as the red light approached. The sound of their agonized screams filled the room. The scene panned left and showed a building exploding. The image froze.

  Captain Carter cleared her throat to get everyone’s attention. “This vid was taken of President Drennan’s campaign rally two days ago in the city of Kendridge on the planet Tacoma Three. The rally was attacked by assailants of unknown origin and description. We’re assuming that the purpose of the attack was to assassinate the President.”

  “Unknown description?” asked Colin. “Nobody saw these assailants?”

  “From what we understand, nobody got the chance to take a good look at them. At least, nobody who lived.” Captain Carter pressed a button on the remote again. The vid returned to the scene with the red glow. “That bright red light you see appears to be an energy burst of extreme heat. Generated by what, we don’t know. But anybody or anything caught within the vicinity of this light instantly burst into flames.”

  Captain Carter engaged the remote button again. The images of charred human bodies littered the scene. Several blackened skeletal remains were almost camouflaged, lying on the black scorched ground. Captain Carter pressed the remote button again. A different scene appeared, showing three heaps of blackened ash lying in rough human form. Mingled among the ash were black fragments of bone.

  “Judging from the extreme damage to these bodies,” Carter said, “we’re assuming that these individuals were at ground zero, right in the path of whatever it was that generated this lethal power. They were literally burned to ash.”

  Colin studied the images of the human remains. “Could some sort of weapon have caused this?”

  “We’re not sure,” said Captain Carter. “Before all this happened, a police assault shuttle exploded in mid-air and crashed. We thought that some sort of thermal cannon might have been responsible. But there was no evidence of any sort of beam or projectile weapon. This was just an aura of extreme heat.”

  Diane leaned forward to look over at Kelly. “An aura of heat. That sounds like a power similar to yours, kid.”

  “Maybe,” said Kelly. “But I’ve never used my power on people. This sounds like something that’s beyond my capabilities.”

  “We do have one clue,” said Larkin. He turned to Captain Carter. “Show them.”

  Using the remote, Captain Carter switched the image from the burned remains to a grassy field with a close-up view of what appeared to be a trail of blackened three-toed footprints burned into the grass. As the footprints progressed toward the street, they faded into an expanding black area that burned away the green grass.

  “Tracks,” said Larkin. “We’re assuming that whatever made them was responsible for the burning deaths. But there’s no description of the thing that made them. As we’ve already told you, nobody was able get close enough to get a good look at it and survive. But not all the victims were burned to death. There were a few other strange deaths.”

  With that, Captain Carter pressed the remote once again. A new image appeared of a man in a black suit lying face down on a grassy surface. Several shards of metal had pierced the man’s back and legs like long, shiny swords. Captain Carter explained, “This man was Secret Service Agent Robert Smith. He died of severe lacerations caused by these metallic fragments. When we went to the scene to investigate, we found these fragments all over the place. One of the survivors, Secret Service Agent Mike Stevers, reported that these fragments were hurled by a round metallic object that flew out from an exploding building and landed near the stage where President Drennan was speaking. Four people died from the shrapnel, and ten were severely injured. These things are razor sharp, designed for killing.”

  Captain Carter pressed the remote to summon the image of a wooden stage. The left half of the stage was torn apart by the aftermath of a powerful explosion. “Now here’s where it gets really weird.” Again Carter pressed the remote. The next image was of a silvery metal table. On top of the table was a metal object. It appeared to be three feet long, one foot wide. Half of it was flat, ending in a sharp point. The other half of the object was twisted into a corkscrew shape and ended in a jagged edge. “This object was taken from the body of Agent Roberts,” Carter said. “Look.”

  Everyone watched as a man wearing a white lab coat and thick, black gloves picked up the object and turned it over. The vid view zoomed closer to the metal object. On the flattened end, a column of raised letters read ‘Black Ice,’ followed by a large letter S set within a diamond symbol.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Diane.

  “This,” Captain Carter replied. She summoned the image of three cars parked along a city street – a blue delivery vehicle, a small black sporty job, and a white utilitarian passenger carrier. The different types of vehicles all had one thing in common: they were missing long strips of metal from their hoods, sides, and roofs. The vid view moved in closer to the sports vehicle, and Carter said, “This auto model is a Sierra Black Ice. As you can see, it’s been torn apart like the other vehicles here. That metal object you saw previously had the words Black Ice embedded on its side. The same words and logo were on the sides of this car. We suspect that somehow the piece of shrapnel with the words and logo were taken from the vehicle you see here. All of these vehicles have suffered the same damage – strips of metal removed from their bodies. But the metal wasn’t torn or burned off. It was all removed cleanly, without leaving jagged edges or burn marks.”

  Kelly raised his hand. “Those shrapnel pieces that you found. Did you run any tests on them?”

  Captain Carter explained, “We ran several extensive scans to try to find traces of explosives, DNA, chemicals, energy signatures. We found nothing.”

  “Seven cars were all damaged in the same way,” Larkin added. “This happened within the security zone during the President’s speech. Three Secret Service agents who were supposed to be in that area were found dead in an alley a few streets away. And apparently even they died under strange circumstances. An autopsy revealed that they all died from respiratory failure caused by exposure to a postsynaptic neurotoxin.”

  “A neurotoxin?” Colin asked.

  Larkin nodded, and Captain Carter summoned up the image of a white male cadaver lying face down on a metal table. A close-up view of the body revealed a large puncture wound in the middle of a reddened, swollen lump on the left side of the man’s back.

  Captain Carter explained, “This man, like the other two, was injected with powerful venom, a postsynaptic neurotoxin that’s chemically similar to the venom found in the Meridan Seddrax.”

  A seddrax? Colin conjured the image of the small eight-legged insect with a large mobile tail with a stinger on the end. Native to the planet Meridan, the seddrax’s sting could be lethal.

  “Each victim had enough venom to kill at least ten people,” Carter said. “Given the size of the puncture wounds, we’re assuming they were either injected with the venom by some sort of weapon, or they were stung by something big.”


  As big as a human being? “I don’t think I’d want to run into a seddrax large enough to make a wound like that,” Colin said. “But if some sort of weird giant insect creatures were running around, didn’t anybody manage to get a look at one?”

  “No one who lived to tell about it,” Larkin replied grimly. “The total casualty figures are twenty-two civilians dead, twelve wounded. In addition to those numbers are thirteen Secret Service agents dead, six wounded. Whoever or whatever staged this attack moved fast and struck hard. And their power was described as awesome. Right now, the best witness that we have is Secret Service Agent Mike Stevers. He was stationed at Sector Zero where the President was standing. He saw everything that took place before he was wounded by several pieces of the shrapnel that we showed you. He also suffered serious burns caused by the strange light. Stevers also stated in his report that he saw a Brelac.”

  “A Brelac?” said Diane. “Were there any others spotted?”

  “No. Stevers claimed that he just saw the one, although he didn’t get a very good look at it. He could just make it out through the smoke and dust of a nearby building that exploded. He described it as a reptilian creature around eight feet tall, with a long thrashing tail and wearing what he described as a long cape or a cloak of some kind.”

  “A cape?” said Kelly. “That doesn’t make sense. The Brelac aren’t very big on fashion.”

  “And the Brelac all come in a standard size. Six feet tall,” Colin added. “Unless they’ve started to crank out versions of themselves that are bigger. But this Agent Stevers claimed that he only saw the one? Seems to me that if the Brelac were trying to kill the President, they would send a whole battalion out in the open to get the job done.”

  Larkin nodded. “I agree with your doubts, but Stevers swore quite vehemently that this is what he saw. Whether it was one Brelac or one hundred, they demonstrated a show of power that was far beyond what the President’s security force could stand up to. This entire incident is strange beyond measure. And that’s the reason why the three of you are here. President Drennan wants Silencers to become a special task force to investigate and deal with threats that are paranormal in nature and above the ability of normal forces to handle.”