Grayman Book One: Acts of War, Page 2

1

  October 26th 2018.

  Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Richards, US Army, NATO/JSOC CTC, EU Theater:

  “Datascan, load the Wiesbaden reconstruction simulation for me again.”

  I almost say “please”, but catch my social programming before I feel stupid for being polite to a machine. (Artificial intelligence is still artificial—not alive, not real, no matter what impressive tricks it can do to convince the TGs and the easily impressed otherwise.)

  “SIMULATION IS READY,” the thing’s deadpan voice simulator tells me almost immediately, not waiting or caring for any human ritual civility. It just does what it’s told, what it was made to do. There isn’t even a sense of annoyance at the fact that I’ve insisted on repeating this one particular simulation—what?—the log says twenty-three times.

  I sink back in the new VR “chair” that the McCain Foundation delivered unrequested to my office last week (less than twenty-four hours after Incident One). I still feel awkward and more than a bit foolish strapping myself into it like some kind of bondage marionette: legs, arms, torso, even my head secured in its fully jointed and motorized frame. The visor automatically lowers over my head like a bucket, and I settle my hands and feet into their respective “natural motion interfaces” like I’m an old hand at this. And then key that I’m ready even if I know I probably really never will be.

  The “chair” hugs me and jerks me into a standing position so I can “realistically walk through” the simulation, so fast and rough I feel like I’m on an amusement park ride. And then the visor comes on, and flashes somewhere completely other than my ordered and familiar little office over my eyes. I already feel motion sick, still not ready for the disorienting transition from real to 3D virtual. I can’t imagine how the TGs and high-end gamers love this so much.

  But I’ve got terrorists—well, dead terrorists, at least—and something possibly much worse (both tactically and politically speaking) right in my operational back yard. And a mystery group of Pentagon Brass, Joint Intel and DARPA suits pushing more than my base’s annual budget in new tech on me, to… I’m still not sure what, and they won’t tell me. (It can’t be just to hunt this one monster.)

  Now my eyes are telling me, with impressive veracity, that I’m no longer in my on-base office; that I’m standing in the shadowy concrete-gray dinginess of German public housing. That I’m standing in blood. I can almost feel it sticking to my boots as the chair’s contact surfaces simulate the floor under my feet. I take a few seconds to get my bearings, or at least get the rising nausea under control.

  I’m really not sure why I keep coming back here, specifically: back to Incident One, back to the beginning. It’s not like their hot new AI hasn’t made simulations of the other messes our “friend” in the Film Noir costume has made. I haven’t run any of those twenty-three times yet.

  Thinking I’m going to learn something, maybe: something else, something more, something I’ve missed on my last two-dozen visits to this massacre. (Twenty-four includes counting when I was standing in this flat, in this blood, for real and not in VR, just seven days ago.) As if I have any real chance of understanding what goes on inside his head, why he’s apparently taken it upon himself to personally butcher every terrorist in the Union.

  Killing the girl today… I understand that, the necessity of it. But he could have warned us, let us deal with it instead of insisted on handling it himself. But the rest… The rest are just excessive. I can understand hating them—thousands of reasons to hate them. But he’s making Grand Guinol out of them, horror movie set pieces.

  And he isn’t stopping. We’ve been getting reports of more of his theatrical little slaughters every few days. Three Union countries now, and no one’s even gotten close to catching him—not us, not the locals, not whatever Joint Intel has put on this, not even with all of this supposedly magic new tech they’ve been talking up.

  I just got screwed by luck of the draw, that he started in my operational back yard. Otherwise, I might even be rooting for the sick piece of work. (Haven’t we all wanted to do exactly what he’s doing?) But priority for finding him is going to keep burning on my desk, and this bizarre experimental joint-op is going to keep pushing me on point to find and intercept, unless he decides to take his bloody “mission” or whatever it is well out of my command jurisdiction. Until then, duty is duty.

  At least in the simulation there’s no smell. The smell was the first thing that hit me when I walked through the door of this cave-like hive-flat one week ago: the unmistakable stink of blood. It was almost choking in the dark, tight hovel they’d been using as their “safe house,” already going stale and mixing with the other human stinks: Shit. Piss. Sweat. Death.

  And I remember thinking for a second that it was just the Wabs, the way they make themselves live, holed up in urban slum bunkers like this—I guess I do still have this programmed image of them as unwashed greasy “lefthanders”. But it wasn’t the Wabs that made this stink. Well, it was. Just not as a result of the hygiene challenges that usually come with the gone-to-ground lifestyle, because they still do manage their mandated ablutions, even in the worst rat-holes we’ve driven them into.

  It was because of what they’d done to him, and what he’d done to them.

  The “Gray Ghost.”

  That’s what the wag analysts behind their Company screens unofficially named him. It probably came from that stereotype kid-genius Becker, the barely-post-puberty TG who apparently designed this hot new AI they’ve got running shakedown for some unexplained reason on this little nightmare (the same AI—Datascan—that both generated and is running the incident reconstruction simulation I’m diving into for the twenty-fourth time right now).

  But I refuse to grace their geek fantasy that our target’s not human, that he’s some kind of slasher movie super monster, no matter what he seems to manage.

  Gray Man. I’m calling him Gray Man. But only because the mission needs a working codename for the file.

  One positive: The incident reconstructions have gotten infinitely better with this new machine. It’s been getting harder and harder to tell the VR from the real thing in the last few generations (at least until the pop-ups and animations kick in), and between the Ultra-Def and the new “chair”, even an old hater like me almost feels like he’s in a real place. And more impressive: this new AI does a frighteningly good job of making sense of what happened here just from the mess he left, better than I’ve ever seen done by human SI pros, reconstructing everything that went on in these rooms blow-by-blow from a few (well, more than a few) smears of assorted bodily fluids and weapons trace.

  The reconstructs of the bodies are the most intense: they look so real down to the last hair and pore and wound that I can’t help but remember the stink of them. It’s a medical examiner’s dream—every detail gorily perfect and readily accessible for fully interactive viewing. I even catch myself stepping over them again as I “walk” through the VR, knowing full well that I’m not really here (or is it that I am “here” in my office and none of this is?).

  My feet move in their interface rests, and in the simulation I “walk” like I’m really in the flat, only I can move through solid objects, just a ghost in a ghost world, stepping over the dead. I almost have to keep reminding myself I’m still in my office, that there’s no blood on my boots, that escape from this charnel show just a click (or voice prompt) away. It’s very much like being in a lucid nightmare.

  It strikes me, though: Everything about this is like a nightmare—it’s not just the VR reconstructs. It’s him. And it’s more than just what he does. It’s how he looks, how he moves through reality. Like a nightmare.

  Because we’ve finally seen him. Today. Four hours ago. On video feed from Rome.

  Blowing a thirteen-year-old girls’ brains out.

  I break the incident down again from scratch, looking for whatever it is I imagine I’ve missed…

  Clinical description: The Wabs’ “safe-house” i
s a two-bedroom cast-concrete industrial flat, in one of the bigger public projects in a reclaimed industrial neighborhood in Wiesbaden, not five miles from this base (probably by design—the Rads love that “right under your infidel noses” jiz).

  The housing project is a human hive, forty-five hundred drab units. The security systems had been gutted months ago—maybe it was the Wabs keeping themselves out of sight, or maybe it was just the locals wanting the privacy to flush their lives further—either way, the lack of site surveillance let the Wabs come and go fundamentally unseen. And with all the concrete and apathy, nobody heard the shooting.

  The flat is almost claustrophobically tight—600 square feet all together—with only a few little slit windows that made it an ideal prison. They all took turns crashing on futons in the bigger master bedroom, and kept him in the smaller bedroom: a barren six-by-eight with one foam camp mat on the bare floor—DNA smears say the mat was probably used by whoever was on shift guarding him, while they just left him to sit on the cold sealed concrete. Greasy smudges and dark stains on the walls and floor give a rough impression of where he spent his time (which trace-smear chemistry guesses was about a week, give or take). And he wasn’t the first prisoner they’d kept in there—old DNA links them to at least three UN workers and a German soldier executed on video over the past year. More reason to cheer for the monster.

  There’s nothing in the room for them to actually tie him to, so they just left him sitting in zip-cuffs. No sign of any used spares, so he most likely wore the one set until he broke them. Smart SOB: he must have spent days rubbing the nylon strap on the concrete walls—real slow with his back to the wall so they didn’t see—until he felt a spot get thin enough to give. Still, there’s blood and tissue to say that the zips bit his wrists in the process of snapping, and analysis of the snapped cuffs says the feat took an impressive amount of leverage and pain tolerance.

  That blood and tissue also gave us a DNA tag so we could tell whose juice was whose when it was all sorted out. And it turns out there really wasn’t much of Gray Man’s, which is saying something.

  Speaking of blood: I’ll start in the bedroom this time—the “cell”—just like Gray Man did.

  Two bodies in there. I key the reconstruct popup, and the AI animates what it put together: Suddenly two roughly animated figures are standing on the far side of the room, shimmering like phantoms over the much more realistically rendered body of one of them. One of the phantoms is drawn to roughly resemble its dead version. The other is much more ghostlike: only a featureless opaque animatic, because not even the magic AI could form any guess as to what he—Gray Man—actually looked like at the time it made the sim (though I’m surprised it hasn’t bothered to update it yet, using the Rome video).

  I key the animation to run, and the two figures dance in a flash of violence that the machine calculates lasted barely two seconds. It figures Gray Man was on his feet when he broke loose of his cuffs, standing in his corner furthest from the only door, with the one guard that was originally with him in the room right up on him with a Glock to his head (for security or execution nobody knows, but I think if they were planning to pop him they’d have waited for the camera, unless of course he’d really pissed them off). Maybe they were just taking him to the head when he went off (at least the Wabs have those cleanliness mandates, so they didn’t leave him stewing in his own piss and shit). Either way, putting that gun to Gray Man’s head apparently didn’t help his poor guard in the least. Probably is exactly what got him killed.

  The animation makes it look cleaner than it probably was, but Datascan swears it’s in realtime (less than two seconds!). I’ve watched this one sequence alone almost a dozen times already, and I still can’t take my eyes off of it:

  Gray Man—estimated as somewhere between five-six and five-eight and maybe one-fifty—breaks the zip-cuffs and swats the gun away, taking control of the guard’s arm holding it, and Gray’s arms are instantly whipping alternately in a short snaky dance like he’s playing a shell game between the guard’s arm and face. In nothing flat, the guard—identified as a low-level recent recruit known as Hajaf since he changed his name from Hans Henkels—lost both his eyes to a pair of particularly brutal gouges (autopsy says Gray Man drove his fingers straight in almost to the brain, one socket at a time, about as fast as I can type), and in between them his right elbow gets made to bend the way it isn’t designed to, hard enough that his shoulder also separated in the process. Datascan even provides the juicy sound effects.

  Blinded and broken, Hans (I’m reluctant to humor them by using their Wab-names) only managed to get one shot off into the wall before he got a chop through the windpipe that slid straight into Gray winding an arm around his neck like a python, across the front and wrapping back. The shot brings the guard’s one backup—known as Akbar, which may have been his actual name—running in, just in time to see (and hear, I expect) Hans’ neck breaking backwards as Gray’s coiling left arm cranked his head back and down pretty much all the way to his spine. This spectacle makes Akbar hesitate about half-a-second (that, and his already-dead partner is still on his feet being a human shield) before he remembers he’s carrying an AKS and raises it to shoot.

  Unfortunately, his panicked burst hits his own man Hans square in the heart, punching it out the back of him and all over the walls. By luck or design, Gray Man was just far enough sideways to not be in the way as the round came through his “shield.”

  By design (probably not luck), Gray had kept control of Hans’ broken gun arm this whole time. The impact of the 7.62 AK rounds actually helped him spin his gruesome puppet, so that the Glock is pointing at Akbar when a dying twitch sets it off again. Poor Akbar catches the round in the bladder (I’d rather hope by luck and not design), so his vest didn’t do him any good. Worse for him, the Wabs had been loading their sidearms with Talons (for the shock value when they pop an innocent), and instant karma rips a hole so big between Akbar’s legs that it almost castrates him in the process.

  The AKS fires wild into the floor (at which point I’m sure the neighbors are grateful that the place is made out of concrete), giving Gray Man plenty of time to get his own hold on the now definitely dead Hans’ Glock and finish the job. But he doesn’t kill Akbar, at least not right away.

  The AI shifts back to the hi-rez of Akbar’s remains on the floor, text-arrows counting off a systematic dismemberment as he gets a Talon blown through both upper arms and both thighs. He looks like a bloody marionette dropped in a tangle of shattered limbs, dead eyes (this sim is really disturbingly good) staring up at the ceiling. Combining the autopsy with the footprints left in the small lake of blood that promptly covered the floor, Datascan calculates that Gray Man squatted down real close over the top of his second target and spent a good five minutes just watching poor Akbar go into shock and bleed to death.

  Or maybe interrogating him. Some of the bullet wounds show signs of additional unexplained trauma, and some of Hans’ DNA was in the wounds. Only logical way that could happen was if Gray Man stuck his already bloody fingers into the holes.

  Then he went and took a shower.

  The other four bodies are in the common room.

  According to the witness (the hysterical Iraqi national they’d caught working contract labor on the base—my base—and had planned to add to their little chop-the-hostages web series), the Wabs realized something was off when they got back from their kidnapping foray and found the door ajar. Then they noticed the bloody fingerprints on the knob, and actually managed to hold it together enough to do a fairly pro leapfrog to sweep the place.

  Unfortunately, the two who took point went pretty promptly to check out their prisoner’s bedroom, and froze screaming and cursing when they scanned the gory mess Gray Man had left in there. It makes me wonder just how long and how well they had known Hans and Akbar.

  The witness—Tariq—says he remembers a lot of screaming and shouting and general losing it at that point, and admitted somewher
e in there to pissing himself (as it looked very much like they would take it out on him, as the bloody open door suggested that the true object of their rage had long since fled the scene). That was when the Claymore went bang.

  Gray Man had taken the time to hide it behind the sofa facing the bedroom door, calculating (maybe during that nice hot shower) that at least one of them would do the obvious thing and head straight for his “cell” without considering the possibility of the place being rigged (and pretty professionally rigged at that). The two Wab pointmen took most of the antipersonnel charge at close range in the legs and pelvic regions, the mine placed and aimed to spare the rest of the room (apparently Gray Man knew or guessed that the four who had gone out were fishing to bring home more victims, so he didn’t want to just spray the whole place as soon as they walked in).

  Tariq says he didn’t even hear the shots after that initial blast, but suddenly the Wab holding him—Yusuf Al-Nahl, their apparent leader—just wasn’t holding him anymore. Tariq (and probably the Wabs as well) didn’t even realize Gray Man was still home until what was left of the two by the bedroom door stopped screaming and dropped, their brains adding to the new wall-art. Al-Nahl was dead from a similar head shot almost instantly thereafter. Three shots, three kills. All with an antique Browning Hi-Power that Gray Man had apparently found (along with the Claymore) in their small arsenal.

  Tariq says he “just ran and ran” at that point—hands still zipped behind his back—and kept running, until he nearly got turned into a speed bump three blocks away, screaming for help in three different languages to no response the whole way. He swears all he saw of our mystery man was this gray rippling blur (probably the coat combined with the extreme palor, as we saw on the Rome feed today) “like a ghost” coming from what must have been the bathroom (ballistics confirms the trajectories), and then he promptly got all devout again. The rest of his interview sounds like some kind of Muslim evangelical testimonial.

  That left one.

  Delilah Ansar. 23. Very pretty girl—I can still see that, despite the mess Gray made of her. But her looks were the whole point of her.

  Serb descent, grew up as a minor diplomat’s brat, schooled all over the world. In trouble since she hit puberty, rebelling against daddy by going the obnoxious civil disobedience route. Got bailed out on a diplomatic six times after stupid theatrical crap like pelting riot troops with blood bags and dousing herself with what she thought was dry Anthrax at a corporate crasher. She fell in with the Balkan NeoWabs just after Chechnya, and let herself get seduced into the EU Qaeda remnants. They put her to good use, too: seducing young foreigners at clubs and luring lonely soldiers and contract workers away from their green zones, setting them up to be kidnapped for their nostalgic little snuff videos. (The old techniques still work to grab the media.)

  The AI figures that’s how they snagged our Gray Man, whoever he is. Probably at a club, given what happened in the next twenty-four hours after he was done here.

  We’d have a better idea who he is, I’m sure, it’s just that nobody’s come up missing that we know of anywhere in this local Wab-cell’s effective hunting range. And we also can’t figure out why the Wabs would keep him so long without publicly announcing who they’d scooped.

  We found Delilah by the kitchenette.

  She had a weapon, also a Glock. It looks like she threw it away. Maybe figured her best play was to use her pretty face and lean body. Too bad for her that Gray apparently wasn’t in the mood to forgive her from the last time she used that tactic on him. Footprints in the blood show him backing her up against the wall. (I notice she would have been in reach of one of their laptops, which had been password unlocked just about the time she died, her prints on the keys and the reader). That’s probably when (and why) he cut her.

  The face, of course. One cut. Odd angle, though (at least it was before we got the Rome video today): diagonally down the left side of her face, splitting her brow and continuing through her cheek. Autopsy says it was quick—it doesn’t even look like he laid a violent hand on her until after, until the last, when he took her head in one hand and stuck some long-assed fighting knife (he’d probably taken it off one of his guards—the Wabs seem to like those big showy fantasy daggers—they may have even threatened to use it to head him during his stay) up under her jaw and threaded it up into her brainstem. Very pro: he knew what he was doing with the knife, minimal hesitation.

  I look down at the sim of her body, discarded against the wall like an abandoned doll: The look on her face isn’t what I would have expected at all. It’s almost sad, if I had to describe it. Like she was about to cry. Her pouty lips hang parted, smeared like her face with blood. But it’s also the way the blood is smeared—I look at it differently now that it’s been broken down for me. There’s more than just her own blood on that still-pretty face: traces of tears and saliva and other blood that isn’t hers. (More disturbing: there was blood in both of her knife wounds that wasn’t hers.) The DNA tag from the broken zip-cuffs confirmed that the mystery fluids were Gray Man’s. I don’t really need Datascan to explain the rest to me:

  His blood was on the knife he cut her with. Fresh blood.

  And he kissed her. He took her head in his hands like a lover and he kissed her while he stuck the knife in. Then he held her while she died, and somewhere in there he broke down and started crying.

  Gray was long gone before the city police took Tariq’s ravings seriously and sent GSG to crash the suite. He left no fingerprints (even the ones on the door were too smeared). And he apparently took a number of useful things with him (hard to tell exactly what, since he left no one alive to tell us what all was in the Wabs’ arsenal, but we’ve seen him use a few toys he probably got from them since).

  None of the neighbors will admit to seeing him leave.

  2

  October 26th.

  Captain Matthew Burke, US Army Special Forces, formerly assigned Zone 4 CTI:

  No idea why they’ve got me looking at this crazy shit.

  They probably still can’t figure out what to do with me since they jerked me out of Columbia. Not that I miss the place (the jungle or the lethal fucking hypocrisy). But six months sitting on my ass waiting for new orders is getting old. Especially since the ol’ Bushwar isn’t going any better than it has for the last eighteen years and I’m stuck here hell-and-gone from the fight.

  (I still can’t believe they built a monument to that dumbass…)

  Maybe they were just hoping I’d get rusted and confess to something. When that failed to yield whatever it is they want out of me, well… Maybe this is the new approach.

  So I figure this is them running some kind of psy-op on me, and I play the VR file again just for spite. At least the new gear they sent to play it on is extra-crisp and pally, even though I tend to suck with the fresh tech. (Screams DARPA pet project, unless issue gear has evolved this much while I’ve been benched.)

  Plus there’s not much to keep me in the here-and-now in this closet of a rental apartment they pay for: just a view of an automated parking garage and a thousand satellite channels with nothing on, so anything new is at least mental stimulation.

  One click and the world flashes from drab gray dusk to bright Mediterranean sunshine…

  It looks real bad at first view: some psycho stone-cold popping an innocent schoolgirl for no apparent reason that would make sense to anyone who doesn’t go around killing little girls. But it turns out that’s just what the local patrol thought they were seeing, until the truth of it knocked them all over the street half-a-second later.

  I get four views of the busy Italian open-air cafe from their helmet-feeds. It starts with a bunch of random pans: standard procedure, making the rounds of the potential civilian painpoints—trying to see their peaceful historic city like a potential mart-bomber would: all the sweet and tender targets (still sweet and tender no matter how far they go with preventive measures). Checking out the human traffic (not that there’s any
other kind visible—they’d closed this street years ago to vehicles to stop the easy car bombs—it’s pedestrians-only cobblestone for three blocks in most directions, with ancient-looking fountains plugging up the intersections).

  I concentrate on the best feed of the four: One of the local grunts gives me a nice slow, steady, wide pan like he’s majoring in art film, letting me check out the scenery. The café sits in an old-city market neighborhood right out of a travel show, popular with the diplomatic and international corporate crowd. It’s a few blocks from embassy row and within sightline of the Vatican Security Wall (I catch bits of it visible between the buildings, and a flash of the dome of St. Peter’s dominating the skyline in the thin haze). That’s what’s made it a hot target in the past. Twice, at least. Well, three times now.

  Lunch crowd is pretty heavy and pretty mixed: lots of office-casual catching espresso, surfing in interface glasses or yakking mindlessly on their earcells, mingled in with some apparent locals and a brave few obvious tourists. (You can always tell the not-so-daring orange-zone sightseer by the overkill body-armor. The foreign diplos wear minimal vests or nothing at all. The corporate suits have tailor-concealed armor. And the local help usually can’t afford Walmart underwear, much less nanofiber or even Kevlar.)

  Then the film-school grunt busts himself by repeatedly locking his camera on some of the local talent: dark, tan and leggy (and visibly confirming my no-underwear theory—I resist unduly replaying this bit only because I’m sure my work is being quietly monitored). But a minute later it looks like he’s gone from horny young soldier to major pedophile, because he’s suddenly taken a keen interest in this little ‘bait walking across the fake-cobblestone street towards the café.

  Despite her age (or lack thereof—turns out she was thirteen when they finally ID’ed what was left of her body), she’s pretty in that natural Lolita way, looking a little nervous about all the sudden uniform attention. Looking maybe more than a little self-conscious, in fact, managing a nervous smile and avoiding eye contact, as she pulls her winter jacket tight closed like she’s worried about traditional modesty or something. That should have been their first clue: traditional modest jailbait doesn’t cruise alone through Foreign Diploville. Their second clue should have been her oversized jacket compared to what everybody else was wearing—that was almost too obvious. But then I guess they really didn’t want to see what they were looking at.

  She was thirteen. Fuckers are still using their kids as delivery systems.

  The pedo-trooper whose helmet I’m watching this through figures it out and starts shouting at her, and the others all pan and lock fast, so now I get four views of her. The replay subtitles the Italian for me, which I didn’t bother to read the first time, but this run I can see they weren’t just shouting at her to stop, they were also shouting at someone on the other side of her. Either way, she freezes in the middle of the street and does the deer-in-the-headlights act for about three seconds, then starts running. Fast. Toward the crowded café.

  I freeze it and key a zoom-and-enhance to get a good look at who else the troopers were shouting at: about ten or fifteen yards behind her is a guy who looks like he’s been inserted into the picture out of an old gangster film. He’s even in black-and-white: big gray trench (old-school with the humongous lapels), big-brimmed gray fedora, smoky shades. What little I can get of his face is hollow-boned and pale as death—like a POW who hasn’t seen daylight or food in recent memory. He glides out of the crowd after her, all smooth and casual. And at the same instant the troopers shout and she panics and breaks for the café, he sweeps a pistol out of the folds of his coat and just cool as shit pops the little girl square in the back of the head before the security troops can get a bead on him.

  Of course, the girl explodes before she hits the ground, making the reality of the situation painfully clear, despite the shockwave from her suicide vest sending the video feed flipping as the grunts all get taken off their feet.

  By the time the troopers got their shit back together, Gray Trench—whom I’m assuming the file’s title “Grayman, Rome 10.26.2018” refers to—was long gone in the chaos of running and screaming and bleeding. But reconstruct also gives me an overhead POV with blast-patterns and subject movements in all neat lines and colors: “Grayman” dropped her before she could get within effective range of the café’s blast shield barricade. He knew what she was going to do, knew she was packed with explosives and nails under that jacket. And he waited until the last second before he stopped her. Like he didn’t want to. Like he was hoping she wouldn’t actually do it.

  Total damage: thirty-six injured, but only one actually dead (and she was technically dead before she blew herself up). If he hadn’t popped her just when he did, it would have been so very much worse.

  Rewind. Not to watch the pretty little schoolgirl explode—once is more than enough for that. I have to go back and watch him—especially since they also sent me a copy of the Wiesbaden gore fest VR (“Grayman, Incident One: Wiesbaden 10.19.2018”) that he was apparently also responsible for.

  Zoom in and enhance: I get him in close up. I watch him, over and over. So smooth. So icy. So fucking machine lethal. Barely hesitating on the hard call: kill the child to save maybe thirty or forty lives.

  Who the hell is this guy?

  After a week of impressive and increasingly high-profile shenanigans, still no agency will admit to owning him, and his DNA (scraped from Wiesbaden) isn’t on file anywhere that we know of. The shades he’s wearing are just enough to futz the I-Scan (I figure on purpose). The only way they got him hard-connected to Wiesbaden is the gun he used: an old Browning Hi-Power, one of the things he apparently jacked after he’d sprayed the apartment walls with his would-be captors. That, and the trail of dead Rads and affiliates through central Europe that’s thinning our current most-wanted deck.

  So—what?—they figure I’m going to have some magic insight into this guy? I’m nothing. I’m just another fucking “gun-in-the-fight,” and apparently one they don’t even trust anymore because I’m not currently deployed anywhere near said fight. And how this has anything to do with that little atrocity in Columbia that they’re pretending didn’t happen, I can’t remotely imagine.

  Zooming. Enhancing. I try to get closer in on the face: sharp jaw and cheekbones; tight, thin little half-grin just as he pulls the trigger that almost looks like he’s snarling. Like there’s an animal trying to get out of him. Overall professional impression: scary motherfucker—reminds me of a bad vampire flick. Can’t get much of his eyes through the smoky amber shades. But there is some color in that goth-pale face: a streak of dark red on the right cheek, running down diagonally from under the glasses, that looks like he’d been cut bad and not all that long ago.

  And it’s dumbass-obvious that the cut matches pretty much exactly (except the side: reversed, like a mirror) to the one he made on the chick he supposedly simultaneously kissed and killed back in Wiesbaden.

  I stop the video and jack out, back into my dark stale little two-room, and go to the fridge to crack another porter (not really officially on-duty, now am I?). Then I’m thinking about running it again (and thinking maybe I’m actually buying into whatever psy-op they’re trying to run on me), when I get flashed that the NATO EU CTC just found bomber-girl’s daddy. I do a quick check: it must be like midnight there. Someone’s staying on top of this one without sleep.

  And from the preliminary feed they give me, it looks very much like Grayman found daddy first. Either that, or Father-of-the-Year Wab Edition was so overcome with remorse for killing his own daughter that he shot off both his own kneecaps and then set himself on fire before double-tapping himself in the chest.

  I’m clicking “Send” on my reply before I can really consider what a bushable dumbass I’m being, but I don’t see myself just letting this one go by tomorrow.

  So I do buy in, and set myself up a transport out to the EU. If I’ve made the higher-ups happy with this decision, they
don’t show it.

  Figure, if nothing else, I haven’t actually been to Rome yet.

  3

  Scott Becker, PhD, McCain Foundation, Datascan Project:

  “What are you doing?”

  “SPECIFY.”

  Damn vox comes back fast and cold, like Dee was actually waiting for me to bitch at it. (Which it could have been, considering how good it’s already gotten at predicting what the wetware will do.) Still…

  “Does the term ‘Trial by Fire’ mean anything to you?”

  But it just runs a language breakdown and scrolls two screens of definitions and contextual uses for the phrase.

  “Your test-run,” I keep it simple. “Gray Ghost. Gray Man. What the fuck?”

  “SPECIFY.”

  I wish I’d picked a different vox. I’d wanted it to sound impressively frost. Now it sounds like it thinks I’m stupid. Must be what it’s like to parent a teenager.

  “Grayman. You’re blowing it.”

  The screens flash samples of every confirmed incident since Germany, including the dead Swiss Banker. Grayman (I liked Gray Ghost better) has whacked a dozen high-priority unfindables in three countries in barely a week. We haven’t been quick enough to get Sat-lock on him, but he has to have left enough of a pattern for Dee to extrapolate from. (I know. I wrote the damn algorithms.)

  It’s obvious even to me—the nerd outsider they think is just a bushy kid—that Grayman has been scooping up his victims’ flashware and milking the intel for new targets, using their own files against them. (How he gets their passwords, I can only guess from looking at what he’s done to some of his targets before killing them). Makes sense that the Wabs would keep their secure tech off the public nets, which is why anything he’s running with their gear isn’t surfacing above ground, but you’d figure he’d at least show up on encrypted Darknet surfs once or twice—how could anybody first-world manage what he has without accessing the Web even once? Even if all he needs is in the stolen flashware, he can’t possibly keep the cash flow going without at least some access—not that many places do the paper-money thing anymore. But there hasn’t been one transfer or debit on any account he might be using. How does he eat? How does he get around? He hasn’t even accessed a GPS system to lock an address.

  So far the only thing about him we’ve sifted is a potential ID from a stolen passport we recovered, but the ones with their hands on the plug thought it was a joke because it belongs to some slacker nobody from suburbia with a psychology degree.

  “Why won’t you get a lock on him, God damn it?!” Thought it out loud.

  “DIRECTIVE VIOLATION.”

  “What?” Holy shit. What did I say? Why can’t you get—no, that’s what I’ve been asking, and it’s been playing dumb all this time. Why won’t… Won’t. I’ve been asking the wrong question.

  It can. It won’t.

  I feel sick, like I’ve fucked up bad.

  “Clarify directive violation.”

  “VIOLATION: PRIMARY TARGET PARAMETERS ARE OUTSIDE CRITERIA.”

  You little snot. You are going through puberty…

  Primary Target Parameters. Dee’s using our own safeties against us (at least it sounds like it—digital shitbird). Dee flashes one of its unbreakable operating definitions on the screens now:

  “AGGRESSIVE OPERATIONS ARE EXCLUSIVELY RESTRICTED TO TERRORIST ENEMY TARGETS.

  “DEFINITION: TERRORIST ENEMY TARGET: ANY INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP THAT INTENTIONALLY DIRECTS VIOLENCE AGAINST CIVILIAN NONCOMBATANTS FOR POLITICAL OR ECONOMIC IMPACT.”

  Grayman isn’t a viable target. Grayman isn’t killing innocents. Like Dee couldn’t have just said that to begin with.

  I am sooo dead. No, WE are so dead.

  I am not paying back almost a billion dollars because Dee is screwing around with semantics.

  Thinking real fast:

  “Revise mission objectives. Initiate track-and-support: Define Grayman as an Allied Operative. Establish a hard field interface.”

  Find him like you want to help him, before they pull to plug on you. On me.

  “RUNNING.”

  Better. Maybe we’re still in the game after all.