The Hand of War Read online

  THE HAND OF WAR

  Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

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  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

  What matter where, if I be still the same,

  And what I should be, all but less then he

  Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least

  We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

  Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

  Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

  To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

  Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  One

  His face was deceptively flabby. You’d be forgiven for thinking he was a weak man. But there was steel in his eyes. He watched me without emotion, observing me from his large, black leather chair. Through the plate glass window behind him I could see the morning sun, molten copper on the East River, and the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. I had told him my story—my edited version of the story, minus the murder and the conspiracies—about how Marni was like a sister to me, we had lost touch over the last few years, and now I was trying to get in contact with her again.

  He raised an unruly eyebrow and heaved a big sigh.

  “Mr. Walker, I don’t really see how I can help you. I am not at liberty to release Dr. Gilbert’s contact details.”

  “I don’t expect you to, Mr. Staines. But if Marni’s address to the conference is on Friday 18th, she will be here for at least a week. What I was hoping was that you could get a message to her for me, and then perhaps she could contact me.”

  He spread his hands and made an unhappy face. “Mr. Walker, this is the United Nations, not a hotel switchboard. I have an international conference to organize…”

  I interrupted, fighting down the pellet of anger in my belly. “Mr. Staines, I hear you. You are not interested in the personal problems of the speakers at your conference. That’s fine. But it so happens that her father was killed and my father stepped in as her surrogate dad. We grew up together like brother and sister. All I am asking is, will you see her before the conference?”

  He sighed again, noisily. “Yes.”

  “Would it interfere an awful lot with your busy schedule to hand her a piece of paper with my name and telephone number on it, and say, ‘Please call him’?”

  He was good at sighing. I guess he got a lot of practice because he sighed at every opportunity. That’s how you get good at things in life. Now he sighed again and held out his hand. I put my card in it and stood up. “Thanks.”

  When I got to the door, he said, “Mr. Walker.”

  I turned.

  “I’ll tell her you were persistent and would very much like to hear from her.”

  Something like a smile moved his jowls and just for a moment he looked like a kindly St. Bernard.

  I nodded once. “Thanks again.”

  I stepped out of his office and into what looked like a vast set for a Star Trek movie. The words ‘sterile environment’ seemed to be encoded into the architecture and the décor, along with an obscure, subliminal message about the destiny of mankind. It appeared to promise a future in which everybody would smile and all behavior would be ‘appropriate’, all genders and all races would be not so much equal as the same, though displayed in an appropriate rainbow of aesthetically pleasing variations on a theme. And that theme was to be inoffensive. Inoffensive to whom was not clear—a great abstract United Nations ideal, where nobody would ever disagree because nobody ever asked difficult questions. Because difficult questions could be offensive. And therefore inappropriate.

  Especially if they were questions about the United Nations Ideal.

  I stepped out into the early May sunshine and as I walked through the ugly, iron gates onto First Avenue, I hesitated and looked both ways, as though I were not sure where I wanted to go. It gave me a chance to spot the Omega men who were waiting for me. They were in the garden at the bottom of the steps that lead up to 43rd Street. I acted like I hadn’t seen them, crossed over the road to make it easier for them to follow me, and started walking toward the parking garage on West 40th, where I’d left my car.

  I knew they’d parked up the road at a meter, where they could keep watch and follow me when I came out. So I stepped into the entrance to the garage and stood with my back against the near wall, where they wouldn’t see me, staring at the screen of my cell phone. A minute later they walked past. There were two of them. They had that unmistakable look of men who were clones of each other, who spent too many hours in the gym, having fantasies about living the 3D shooter dream, and not enough time looking into the eyes of dying men, or men who wanted to kill them.

  I moved after them and matched my stride to theirs. They were dressed in off the peg Armani, because that was the uniform, and they drove a dark blue Audi, because that was what you drove if you were a black ops bad boy. They were the living embodiment of the UN promise. As they came up to their car I called out in my most pleasant voice, “Oh, excuse me!” and ran two steps to catch up.

  They both turned. The nearest one was six-two and built like a brick shithouse. He looked at me with expressionless eyes in a pale, unfeeling face. That changed when I broke his knee with a short, sharp kick to the side of the joint. I didn’t waste time following up. I’d heard it snap and I knew he was out.

  His pal was a bit taller and more athletic. He was gaping at his fallen comrade and at me. It is estimated that a person takes a full four seconds to react to an unexpected attack. It may be three in the case of a highly trained operative. If you count out three seconds, it isn’t hard to imagine how much damage you can do in that tim
e.

  I stepped in close and rammed the heel of my right hand up into his jaw. He said, “Oh…” like he’d suddenly gone dizzy, and his legs went wobbly. As he exhaled, I rammed my fist hard into his solar plexus and, as he doubled up, I took hold of his collar and the seat of his pants and rammed his head against the side of his dark blue Audi bad boy car. In all it took about as long as he would have needed to react to my breaking his friend’s leg.

  I knelt down beside that broken friend now and looked deep into his pale eyes. His skin was the color and texture of butter. He was sweating and trembling. I reached inside his jacket and pulled out his Glock. I released the magazine and put it in my pocket. I checked to see if he had any other weapons. He’d started to whimper, clutching at his knee. A couple of people passed and frowned at us, but when they saw the Glock they kept moving.

  He was clean so I pulled his cell from his jacket and handed it to him. He took hold of it but I didn’t let go. I forced him to look into my face.

  “Tell Ben to back off. The next pair of primates he sends to follow me I’ll kill. Get a job you’re qualified for, will you?”

  I left him sobbing and dialing and went up to my car.

  Ben was Omega’s mouthpiece. My father had been a big shot in the organization before he’d died; before Marni had killed him. And Ben had been his right hand man. When I’d buried my father at the family graveyard in Weston, outside Boston, Ben had tried to persuade me to join Omega, to step into my father’s shoes. But I knew by then that my father had grown to hate Omega and everything it stood for. Since that time I had been searching for Marni, not to exact revenge, but because on his deathbed, my father had made me promise to take care of her and keep her safe. She had not made it easy[1].

  Marni was important to them because her research, and most of all her father’s research, if exposed, could bring Omega down. So Omega wanted Marni either on side or dead. Ben and I had finally reached an uneasy truce at their office in the Pentagon. At least I had allowed them to think we had. I would find Marni, they would give me any help I asked for, and in exchange I would try to persuade Marni to talk to them[2].

  But Marni had stopped communicating with me. She had vanished without a trace—until a week ago, when I had seen in the New York Times that she and Professor Philip Gibbons of Green College, Oxford, would be speaking at the United Nations International Conference on Climate Change and Overpopulation. I had been in Houston at the time, but I had dropped what I was doing, climbed in my Zombie 222, and headed east. I knew that this might be my last chance to talk to her. Omega would be weighing up the situation, figuring that if they had Marni at the UN, they didn’t need me. With both of us dead, they’d be in the clear.

  So I had to get to Marni before they got to her, and before they got to me.

  The Zombie 222 is an electric car produced by a couple of crazy geniuses in Texas. It has the body of a 1968 Mustang Fastback, but its twin engines deliver eight hundred bhp, one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of torque, straight to the back wheels. She’ll go 0-60 in just over one and a half seconds, and she is totally silent.

  As I slipped out of the parking garage, I saw the Tragic Two still on the sidewalk. The guy with the broken leg seemed to have passed out. The other one was on his knees, holding his head. I didn’t feel bad for them. They were lucky to be alive.

  Among the things I had inherited from my father, apart from a manor house in Weston and a butler to go with it, there was a penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive, in Bloomingdale. That wasn’t my style, and I kept telling myself that when this was all over I would return to my small house in Wyoming, where I had briefly been happy, fixing cars.

  But that had been in another life. And besides, who said this would ever be over?

  I took First Avenue as far as 79th Street and then crossed the park to the Upper West Side. I rode the elevator to the tenth floor and let myself in. It was a family-sized apartment. My father had bought it when I was a young kid—when my brother and I had been young kids. My mother, accustomed to the high life in London, had complained that Weston was going to drive her crazy. The bohemian, arty set had suited her better, but in the end it turned out it was not Weston that was driving her crazy, it was my father. My father was driving us all crazy.

  Now that the apartment was empty, it seemed to swell to three times its size, and to be three times as empty. A family home without a family is like a body without a soul. It’s unsettling to look at. Physically it has not changed, yet it becomes pitiable, and uncomfortable to be with.

  I went to the kitchen, cracked a beer, and stepped onto the terrace. Across the canopy of trees, the Hudson lay heavy and massive, almost black in the late morning sun. It seemed to foreshadow something, like a black tide spreading imperceptibly over the city.

  I took a pull of the cold beer and told myself that’s what happens when you start thinking; you start getting ideas. My cell rang. I forced myself to let it ring three times before I answered.

  “Yeah, Lacklan Walker.”

  The line was silent so long I was about to repeat it. Then I heard an intake of breath, and Marni’s voice. It had been a year since I’d heard it, but it was as fresh as though it had been that morning.

  “Lacklan, it’s me, Marni.”

  “Hi, you’re a hard woman to get hold of since you hang out with university professors.”

  “Lacklan, let’s not make this any harder than it is. You need to stop pursuing me…”

  “Pursuing you?”

  “Lacklan, listen to me…”

  “No. I’m not going to listen to that shit. Do you know how many times I risked my life for you in Turret? You asked me to follow you! You asked me to follow you to Tucson! You were mad at me that I didn’t follow you to Washington! And now you tell me to stop pursuing you?”

  “Lacklan, I know this is hard to understand…”

  “It’s not hard. It’s impossible!”

  “Do you want me to hang up?”

  “No!”

  “Then stop storming at me every time I open my mouth.”

  I drew a deep breath and let it out slow. “I’m sorry.”

  “This is not your fight anymore, Lacklan. You need to give it up.”

  “Can I answer without you hanging up?”

  A small sigh. “… Yes, of course.”

  “First of all, what makes you say that? And second, what makes you think you get to decide whose fight this is?”

  “Lacklan, I can’t get into this discussion with you. But you need to understand… You have to back off!”

  “Why?”

  “What you did in Arizona. It was insane. You are so violent, so destructive!”

  “Do you know what they were doing at Biosphere 3?”

  “… Not exactly, no. But…”

  “I do. Do you know who was investing money in that research?”

  “Lacklan, listen to me!”

  “Do you?”

  “No!”

  “I do! And among others it was the Sinaloa drugs cartel. And every one of the programs they were funding involved some form of mind control. Those insane, violent things I did drew media attention to them, and the programs were shut down.”

  “You were not meant to do that.”

  “Meant? Meant by who?”

  “You were supposed to follow to Washington.”

  “Supposed by who, Marni?”

  “You are not dependable. You are not reliable, Lacklan. You go off half cock and start killing people.”

  “Now you listen to me, Marni. If you’d talked to me, instead of trying to use me like a pawn, maybe I would have followed to Washington. And maybe you, and whoever is doing all this ‘meaning’ and ‘supposing’, would have seen the need to put and end to the Biosphere 3 project. But let’s be clear about one thing, anytime you try to use me as a pawn, it is not going to work, because I am nobody’s pawn, Marni!”

  She sighed loudly. “You see? This is exactly why…”


  “You think? Maybe it’s you who hasn’t understood. Because from where I am standing, this whole damned business is about not letting people become drones. Let me ask you something, Marni.”

  “What?”

  “When was the last time that you, or one of your pals who do so much ‘meaning’ and ‘supposing’…”

  “Please, stop saying that.”

  “When was the last time you shut down an Omega program?” I waited. There was no reply. “When was the last time you were inside their office in the Pentagon?”

  This time she said, “You were at their office?”

  “Yeah. From where I am standing, the one thing you have managed to do, aside from getting Professor Engels tortured and killed in Tucson, is to kill my father, the one high-ranking ally we had inside Omega.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, now you want me to talk?”

  “He killed my father, Lacklan!”

  “I know. Are you forgetting that I hated that man all my life? He lived several hours after you shot him, Marni, and he told me everything. He made me promise, before he died, that I would look after you and keep you safe.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well you’d better believe it. You and your pals may know a lot about climate and social geography, but you don’t know shit about warfare. And so far you are screwing up at every step of the way. You need me, Marni. You don’t understand your enemy. We need to talk.”

  “Lacklan, I called you to tell you to back off and desist.”

  I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “That’s not what you want.”

  “Philip doesn’t trust you.”

  “Who the hell is Philip?”

  “Professor Gibbons.”

  “What the hell would he know?”

  “Will you please stop being so aggressive!”

  I breathed and counted five, backwards. “You know me, you turned to me when you left Weston, I was there for you. I destroyed the sun beetle farm, I destroyed the Biosphere 3 Project. What more do you need, Marni?”

  “He thinks…”

  “Fuck what he thinks!”