CHAPTER.

FORTY-THREE.

The sergeant at the gate generally waved me through, but this time he stopped me. He came to my door, saluted, and said, "Sir, I have orders..."

"Sergeant, you better let me through or the sorry son of a bitch in the backseat is going to bleed to death," I said.

The sergeant looked behind me, and said, "Sir, my orders..."

"That man back there is dying," I said.

"There are three of them, sir, and they look pretty dead," said the sergeant.

"Not the one on the bottom," I said. In truth, I only hoped he hadn't. I wasn't sure.

The sergeant tapped his earpiece and spoke. He leaned into the window, and said, "They're sending MPs to meet you at the infirmary."

The gate opened, and I sped through. The sound of sirens filled the air. A trio of jeeps with flashing lights caught up to me and stayed snug on my ass. I didn't mind.

I sped around barracks, past a baseball field, and into the infirmary parking lot. I skidded to a stop near the door, then hopped out of the car. Three sets of MPs parked a few feet away and watched as I dumped the stiffs.

The man I had shot babbled incoherently as I hefted him off the car floor. The blood had drained out of his face, leaving his skin chalk white. The holes the flechette had left behind were not much bigger than a pinprick. They went all the way through the bastard. In the heat of the fight, I had shot him several times, including the one through the wrist; now I wondered if perhaps that had been a bit excessive.

The guy was in shock. I slung him over my shoulder and dashed into the infirmary. He hung as limp as a wet towel, still mumbling shit I could not understand.

Two medics, both clones, waited with a gurney outside the door. I flipped the bleeding, babbling victim onto his back and laid him down for them.

The medics hauled my victim away and a half dozen MPs came to join me. They did not draw their guns or make any move to arrest me. The urgency had gone out of the situation now that they had me.

Along with the base cops came a man from Intelligence, a lieutenant who looked scared to death as he approached me. He said, "General, um...sir, I noticed that there were two dead men on the ground beside the car."

"Yeah."

"Did you kill them, sir?"

Somebody had to, I thought. I said, "Affirmative."

The poor bastard had no idea what was going on. He was just the highest-ranking Intelligence officer on a far-flung base. Someone from Washington probably told him he had a three-star problem without going into details.

I walked to a row of chairs and sat down. He followed me; so did the MPs.

"What are you doing?" asked the lieutenant.

"I want to have a word with that fellow when he comes out of E.R.," I said, trying to sound civil.

He stood a few feet from me nodding and trying to figure out what to do next. Finally, he ordered the MPs to bring in the bodies.

He sat down in the chair next to mine, and asked, "Why did you shoot them?"

"They were following me," I said.

"How do you know they were following you?" he asked.

I smiled, and said, "Just a hunch."

Along with my S9, I had that strange cylinder in my pocket. I pulled it out and showed it to the lieutenant.

"What is that?"

"I took it off the guy with the holes," I said, nodding toward the emergency room. Normally, I spoke more respectfully to junior officers, but I was still coming down off a combat reflex.

I twisted the metal cylinder around and looked at it from every angle. "I think it is a weapon of some kind," I said. "Whatever it is, the bastard did everything he could to hold on to it. I had to shoot him through the wrist to get it out of his hand."

I gave the cylinder to the lieutenant and told him to get it analyzed.

"I hear you're piling up bodies again," Cutter said, when I picked up the infirmary phone.

"Maybe today is the third Day of the Martyrs," I said. "Were there other attacks?"

"Just you," said Cutter. "I've seen the video feed. It doesn't look like they actually attacked you."

"Bad camera angle," I said.

"There are twelve witnesses who claim they saw you shoot three unarmed men."

"Ridiculous," I said. "One of the men was armed with a flask."

"So I hear. We'll open it in Langley. In the meantime, what do you intend to do with your victim?"

"I've got some questions I want to ask him."

"Do you plan on arresting him?"

"That depends on what is in that flask," I said. While waiting for my victim to come out of the emergency room, I reviewed the fight in my head over and over again, looking for ways of justifying my attacking those men. I decided the term "flask" conveyed a note of scientific menace. It would need a lot of scientific menace to justify shooting two men in the back and drilling the third guy multiple times.

Cutter said, "You can't detain him, Harris. You either need to arrest the guy or let him go."

"Or I can keep him here in the hospital until I'm sure that he's healthy enough to leave," I said.

"You are creating a diplomatic nightmare."

"Look, Admiral, he's not going anywhere. He took flechettes in both knees," I said. "If I need to arrest someone to make this official, I can arrest his two pals."

"The ones you killed?"

"The ones who were down when I loaded them into the car. The witnesses don't know that I killed them."

"All twelve witnesses reported them as dead," Cutter pointed out.

"What do they know?" I asked. "This is a state-of-the-art medical facility." It wasn't, but I didn't care. "We might have resuscitated them."

"One of the witnesses saw you shoot a man in the throat. He said there was blood spurting out of both sides of the man's neck," said Cutter.

I decided to change the subject. I said, "I need Intel to ID the bastards."

"Intel has already IDed them," said Cutter.

"New Olympians?" I asked, thinking they might be members of the Martian Legion looking for a little revenge.

"No," said Cutter.

"No?" I asked, beginning to think that maybe I had just killed a couple of innocents.

"Unifieds," said Cutter. "They worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. I don't suppose you can tell me what two former spies and a retired assassin were doing in Hawaii?"

I gave the first answer that came into my head, I said, "Bleeding." Then I said, "Unifieds. Admiral, if the Unifieds are involved, this is going to get ugly."

CHAPTER.

FORTY-FOUR.

When Mr. Arthur Hooper woke up, he found me and three armed MPs waiting in his room. He looked at us, sighed, and said, "Specking hell."

I said, "Hello, Art. Glad you could join us. Did you have a good rest?"

He glared at me, and said, "Get specked."

By this time I had seen Arthur's personnel files. His buddies had been the brains of the operation. One specialized in surveillance and interrogation. The other was an interrogator with a medical degree-a particularly nasty sort of parasite.

Unfortunately for Arthur and company, they'd learned their trades back in the day when the Unified Authority owned and operated all of the satellites and the security cameras. Running surveillance was easy for them back then. Now we owned the cameras. Surveillance was easy for us.

Arthur, never the subtle surveillance type, had specialized in captures and assassinations, the bastard. He'd occupied a world of murky ethics, the world of black operations.

I said, "The big wheel of Karma seems to have spun a full circle, Art. I was just reading your personnel file. You were a scary guy."

He was big and strong. Before he ran into me and my S9, he'd been tough, and he was not backing down now. Even with two holes in his right arm and a hole through each of his legs, he stood his ground...metaphorically speaking.

Our war-tested MedTechs were more than qualified to suture veins and staunch bleeding; but the only way they knew to deal with pain involved copious amounts of drugs. At the moment, Arthur Hooper's bravado was chemically enhanced. I wondered just how resolute he would remain if I shut off his pharmaceutical courage.

At least he was lucid.

I asked, "What were three former Unified Authority spooks doing outside a Marine base?"

"We went to the beach," Hooper said in a sullen voice.

"So you were sightseeing," I said. "Hoping to go for a swim, maybe take in some sun."

"Something like that, yeah," he said. "Then you came along."

Lying bastard, I thought to myself. Using satellite transmissions meant to track me, Cutter's Intelligence operatives found the house Hooper and his friends had rented.

I said, "I want to tell you an interesting story. I found a cylindrical metal flask on the ground beside your car after I saw you collapse."

Hooper only grunted.

"Thinking maybe you used it to hold medicine, I sent it to a lab in Washington to have it analyzed. You know, the laboratories in Washington, D.C.,...the ones that used to belong to the Unified Authority but now belong to the Enlisted Man's Empire.

"We had three scientists analyze the contents, two were civilians..."

Hooper shifted in his bed. He snickered, and said, "Collaborators."

"Two were civilians...natural-borns, of course. The third was from Naval Intelligence, a clone. They scanned the flask to make sure it was not explosive. Can you imagine, they thought maybe you had parked beside a landmine." I knew he had dropped it, and he knew that I knew he had dropped it; but we still played the charade.

"It turns out that it wasn't a mine after all. It was just a vial, just a hollow metal flask.

"Do you know what they found in that flask?" I asked. "They found chemicals. Maybe hollow isn't the right word. It was filled with tiny chambers."

Hooper remained silent.

"Each of those chambers had its own little lid, and all the lids were designed for a synchronous release. One opened and then the next and then the one after that. Each chamber held a gaseous substance that they released in quick succession.

"The mix included ozone and neutralized chlorine. I understand that both chemicals are highly corrosive, downright dangerous in big doses," I said.

"Here's the interesting part. There were still traces of that gas in the air when the scientists removed their breathing gear. It didn't affect the two civilian scientists; but the third one, the clone, caught a whiff of it and fainted...passed right out.