A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
Conan was grooming himself nervously in front of the mirror as he listened to the Interpol aircraft landing in a straight line just ahead of them down the road. Even without seeing it, he knew that the tail of the other plane was in front of the head of his, so they were not only unable to fly away, but they also had to wait for Interpol to take off first when everything had wrapped up.
He and Lockhart stepped off their plane before the full moon, whose glare silvered the steppe and all that was therein, including the men who came out from the other plane and marched smoothly towards them.
"What can I do for you, agents?" Conan said, stepping forward.
"Move aside," spat the senior officer, showing his badge and the documentation that credited him and the others as official members of Interpol. Both Conan and Lockhart checked their authenticity.
Nobody asked for permission to surround Conan and Lockhart and perform a thorough pat-down. As they were being frisked, they saw some men climbing the stairs to their aircraft while many others remained expectant on the tarmac, guns in hands, fingers on triggers, ordered not to move a muscle or utter a single word. The two men held their ground; they knew nobody would find anything to incriminate them, and they knew they had not been stopped for an illegal items search. The question was whether all the men were in cahoots with the real reason for the stop, or just a few among them. Perhaps only one. Or maybe even nobody there was from Interpol. But if that were true, they wouldn't have been able to hold the farce.
"We aren't carrying weapons or drugs."
"That's for us to decide."
"May we ask why you made us stop in the middle of fucking nowhere?"
"We believe you could be smuggling uranium."
"And that's it? A guess?"
"We don't need much more on this side of the world."
"Do you know how much restarting a plane engine costs?"
"If you can afford a private jet, I'm sure you can afford the gas."
That brief exchange of punches convinced Conan to stop pushing. Instead, once the frisk was done, he leaned slightly to Lockhart and addressed him in whispers.
"Are you thinking the same thing I'm thinking?"
"Yeah, but you're wrong. These are real. Don't get fooled by their cockiness."
"Then someone lured them to us to get Landau?"
"If so, they won't wait for Interpol to take him. We're most likely being watched right now; they might come out of the dark at any time and kill us all. Maybe they're waiting for visual confirmation of Landau, which they won't get, but that won't stop them when the time comes to raid us. The other possibility is that one or more of those who entered our plane aren't really agents, and they're using the yellow cake thing as the perfect out to find Landau. If that's the case, the false agent will have no other option but to take over the plane with everyone inside and get out by a default escape route. But as Landau's not here, he will be forced to go back to their plane along with his partners and chalk off the mission as failed."
Conan had forgotten that whenever Lockhart got high, very occasionally, his cognitive abilities showed a level of abstraction and logical reasoning more typical of a God or a demon than a human being.
"So, 50/50, right?"
"Right."
Conan checked on the sly around him, looking for murderous eyes between the silver and the shadow of that primitive earth, even though he did not know why he was doing it; for if it was true all of them were sentenced to death that night, he didn't want to know. The hell with that "knowing to die like a man" thing. If someone was actually crouching among the weeds, watching him through a scope, waiting patiently for the final order, he expected the bullet to pierce cleanly through his skull with no space between the bang and the shot, but he would rather be taken prisoner, be tortured, and spend the rest of his life in a dungeon below the ground, if that was the only way to stay alive.
At all costs.
Genes had blessed him with fending off the world to stay alive, but consciousness had resulted in the tragedy of knowing the world would eventually get the upper hand in the shape of a tooth, a fist, or a malady. And, as a soldier with war duty in several conflicts, he had been trained to accept his death. To welcome it if needed. He still kept the coin Sergeant Bennett gave him in Vietnam with the needle of cyanide. Son of a bitch with that impish smirk. May he rot in the pit of Laos. And his companions, who took up the coin with their chests puffed out for the great honor of serving the fatherland—the hell with them, too. He wouldn't end up the same. He had to get word to the agents of the danger they were facing, even if that blew his alibi and Landau's safety.
"Don't even," Lockhart said, ahead of Conan's train of thought.
"We can't take any chances," replied Conan, gritting his teeth.
"Shut the fuck up, Seiber."
"Or what?"
"You're not gonna put him at risk."
"I won't if I don't speak."
"Exactly."
"Would you rather die than get grilled?"
"I'd rather die than get tortured."
"Time's running out, Cedric."
"Shut up."
"50/50, Cedric."
"Shut up."
"Boss," said an agent, poking his head from the threshold of the jet, "they're clean. There's nothing here."
"OK," said the leader. "Then don't waste any more time. Let's get out of here."
All the agents came out in single file from the aircraft and returned to the other plane without looking away from the first man's nape. All but one, a young Asian with a mohawk dyed blond, who fell out of line and gawked strangely at Conan. Conan decided by pure hunter instinct to engage the man's stare as a primal deterrence. It was then that the agent, against all odds, walked blatantly towards him, a moment in which Conan moved by reflex his hand to the collar of his Hawaiian shirt, where he'd hidden a retractable blade.
"I think we met at the aquarium last month," said the agent.
Conan raised an eyebrow and shook his head in confusion.
"What the hell are you talking about, brat?"
The agent did not try to hide his disappointment, as if his interlocutor had vanished into thin air.
"It's nothing, my mistake."
And the man turned around and walked away with the others, looking back one last time at Conan with the surprise of one sees the dead wink at him from the other side of the coffin.
"What the hell was that about?" asked Lockhart. "You meet him or something?"
Conan pulled his hand slowly away from his collar.
"So, I'm not the only one who saw it..."
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