Christopher Golden Read online

  “He’s just insane,” Mystique replied. “It wasn’t a specific order, and I figure I’ve known plenty of people I’ve had more reason to kill and left alive. I’d rather leave the lunatics alive and kill the sane ones.”

  “Suit yourself, Raven,” Creed said. “I just don’t—”

  He paused, held up a hand.

  “Choppers,” he said.

  “They’re ours. Have to be,” Mystique observed. “But I specifically said no extraction team. We didn’t want an extraction team, I told them. Too conspicuous and completely unnecessary.”

  “Well, they’re here,” Creed replied, and he stared up at the running lights on the pair of approaching military helicopters.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Pirkle shouted over the noise of the rotors. Sabretooth could still hear him, though he suspected Mystique wouldn’t be able to. “You stole my place in history!” the terrorist leader screamed even louder. “You took my—”

  There was a sharp report, and blood blossomed on Pirkle’s chest and sprayed from his back. Then the choppers opened fire on Creed and Mystique.

  “Son of a—” Mystique roared. “We’ve been set up, Victor!”

  To his left, she ducked into one of the crumbling shanties., Sabretooth wanted to follow her, but three thick darts penetrated his hide with the sound of arrows finding their mark.

  His vision was already wavering as he took several more steps and then went down on his knees. Creed tasted dirt, and the darkness closed in on him.

  “With his healing factor, this stuff isn’t going to keep him out for long,” one of their attackers said.

  “We’ll have him properly restrained in another minute, and then even he won’t be able to move,” a second voice intoned.

  “Animal thought he was invincible, like some kind of serial-killer superman or something,” the first man said boastfully. “One thing’s for sure, he never expected the past to come back to haunt him.”

  “Not just him, though,” the second voice said. “His whole unit’s gonna pay for what they did. And we’re earning top dollar for it, too.”

  Harsh laughter was swept on the breeze to where a single terrorist lay unwounded, merely pretending to be dead. But it wasn’t a terrorist.

  “Where’d Darkholme get off to?” the first agent asked.

  “No idea,” the second answered. “But we’ll get her eventually. She can’t have gotten far.”

  As the choppers lifted off with Sabretooth as their prisoner, Mystique reverted to her true form and watched them go. For the moment, she could do nothing to stop them. The federal agents had talked too much. Very unprofessional, but helpful. At least she had some clues as to why they wanted Sabretooth. And before she went after him, Mystique was determined to find some answers.

  Information was ammunition.

  She was solo for the moment, though. Since the government was constantly monitoring X-Factor’s movements, Mystique’s own team would be no help in hunting down Sabretooth. She would have to find other help.

  The moment she thought of it, the answer was obvious.

  She had to get to Wolverine.

  * * *

  Angry shouts and staccato bursts of weapons fire filled the hallway behind them, but Team X didn’t slow for a moment. Their pursuers had yet to realize that fire was not being returned, that the operatives who had assassinated the so-called president of El Malojo were on the run. Those few seconds were precious.

  “Go, go!” Logan yelled, and nodded toward the wide palace stairwell.

  Once again, he scanned the hall down which they’d run. Still no sign of pursuit. A quick glance at the stairs confirmed that the other three members of his team—Creed, North, and Silver Fox—were heading for the roof of the estate. It wasn’t really a palace. He’d seen palaces. But in a tiny Central American nation whose gross national product was probably less than the average American made in a year, it was as close to a palace as even a tyrannical dictator was likely to get.

  Not that it mattered. The master of the house, El Malojo’s dictator and one of the primary figures in international drug trading, was dead. Creed had made absolutely certain of that before the guards had discovered them. Now they were headed for their dustoff point in high gear. None of them could be traced back to the Agency if captured, but they’d all prefer to avoid it if at all possible.

  Down the hall, guards cursed in Spanish and poked their heads around the corner, finally realizing their leader’s assassins were escaping. Without hesitation, they swarmed around the corner, nearly falling over one another for a chance to become a hero, to avenge the death of a man they’d all hated.

  Jerks, Logan thought, then stepped out from the shadow of the arched doorway across from the wide stairwell. In the heartbeat when the guards were too stunned by his sudden appearance to react, he hefted the iron weight in his hands and hurled a pair of Czech RG34 grenades along the hallway toward the guards.

  The El Malojan troops barely had time to cry out in alarm and scramble for cover when the double explosion brought much of the hallway down around them. Several of them were thrown through windows or along the hall.

  Even before the grenade detonated, Logan had reached the stairwell and taken the first two steps in one stride. He stumbled slightly as the concussive blast propelled him forward. Two more steps, and he tossed a British number seventy-seven white phosphorus grenade over his shoulder, filling the stairwell with fire and smoke in his wake.

  An agonized voice shouted up from below in sneering Spanish. “You are heading for the roof, you fools!” the voice roared. “Your escape is cut off, now. It is only a matter of time before you are captured. Then you will be at our mercy, and you will suffer greatly before you are allowed to die!”

  He was a soldier, true, yet Logan could not help but wince at the man’s words. There was no real pleasure in war for him. But even clandestine wars had to have their soldiers. And soldiering was good for him; it meant he could let the savagery out of his heart in controlled bursts. Even better, he could do it in the service of the free world.

  Logan—codename: Wolverine—was haunted by the beast within, a bloodthirsty creature that cried out for battle. Wolverine was a warrior in search of a war. His teammates each had their own story, their own background, much of which they hid from one another. David North, a.k.a. Maverick, had been a freedom fighter in East Germany before entering the world of espionage. Once, he had told Logan that he’d agreed to join Team X because he believed they could do some good. Logan had been meaning to ask him if he’d changed his mind.

  The other two members of the team were more enigmatic. Sabretooth—whose real name was Victor Creed, though he seemed at times to prefer the codename—was a vicious SOB who took great pleasure in killing, and would use any excuse to do so. It chilled Logan to watch him, at times, for Creed’s butchery echoed the dreadful urges in Logan’s own heart.

  “Logan, move it!” North roared from above. “Dustoff’s in less than thirty!”

  There was a clattering of bullets far below as he turned up the last flight of stairs to the roof. Reinforcements, and those who’d survived the grenades. Logan had a MAC-11 in an armpit holster, and a Walther MPL on a leather thong slung across his shoulder, but he didn’t return fire. There was no purpose. The mission was done. Escape was the only goal now.

  He vaulted the last few steps and saw the shattered window just ahead. Team X had made its own door out to the roof. They waited for him there, and he had to wonder how long it would be before the El Malojans got a chopper in the air.

  Glass crunched underfoot as he stepped through the broken window and onto the roof of the palace.

  “Aw, and here I was hopin’ we’d be able to leave the runt behind,” Sabretooth said.

  “Any time you think you’re ready, Sabretooth,” Logan said with a growl.

  Creed only smiled. The man towered over Logan, who was only five foot three. Even North, at just over six feet, was a giant by comparison.
But height was no match for skill, strength, speed, and savagery.

  Then the fourth member of the team finally spoke up. Silver Fox was the quietest of them, and in her way the most secretive. Even Logan, who had been her lover for more than a year, knew very little about her.

  “Ignore him, Logan,” she said, and he was soothed by the Native American woman’s words, and by the sight of her chocolate eyes and the breeze whipping her hair across her face.

  “You tell ‘im, squaw,” Creed barked, his tone mocking. “He don’t need to know about us just yet.”

  Logan felt his upper lip begin to curl into a snarl, and pushed the animal back down inside him.

  “Leave it be,” Silver Fox whispered.

  “One o’ these days,” Logan said grimly, shaking his head.

  Then Creed’s head shot up. “We got company.”

  Logan listened, and knew that Sabretooth was right. The guards were making plenty of noise coming up the stairs. They were terrified. Logan could smell it on them.

  “I don’t suppose anybody’s got any explosives left?” Silver Fox asked. “Maverick, what about you? Any of those thermite grenades you love so much?”

  No reply. Team X uttered a collective sigh and reached for its weapons. Logan brought the Walther MPL up on its tether, holding the nine-millimeter submachine gun by its grip, and planting the folding stock against his shoulder.

  “Where the hell is Wraith?” North grumbled behind him.

  “Speak of the devil,” an amused voice declared, “and he shall appear.”

  The speaker was a slender black man of medium height, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a cowboy hat, despite the fact that it was nearly midnight. John Wraith, their extraction man.

  “About time,” Logan said. “Why don’t you get us outta here?”

  “Your wish is—” Wraith began, and the air began to shimmer around them all. The sound of gunfire receded instantly.

  “—my command,” Wraith finished.

  Logan blinked twice, stomach lurching a moment as he reoriented himself. The wind no longer blew. The stars no longer shone above. Instead, Team X was surrounded by the four blank walls of Wraith’s debriefing room.

  “Next time, Wraith, try to be on time,” Creed whispered with menace.

  Wraith ignored him, doubled over at the front of the windowless room. He was in pain, but they’d all seen it before. It would pass. The man was a mutant—as were they all with the exception of Silver Fox. Wraith was a teleporter of unparalleled skill, but even for him, transporting five people thousands of miles was a lot to ask. Yet he did it, time and again.

  More so even than Maverick, John Wraith was a company man. He did whatever the Agency required of him.

  When Wraith stood unsteadily, North moved away from the wall where he’d been leaning.

  “Listen, I need some downtime,” he said. “Can we deal with the debrief in the morning?”

  “No,” Wraith replied curtly. “We don’t even have time for a debrief. You’re on your way to East Germany in ninety minutes.”

  Logan and Creed said nothing. They had nowhere else to go.

  “You promised us three days’ leave,” Silver Fox reminded Wraith.

  “Not this time, boys and girls,” Wraith declared.

  North grumbled, stared at Logan, who shrugged almost imperceptibly in response.

  “It better be good, John,” North snapped.

  Logan smiled thinly. Poor kid actually thinks he can do the kind of work Team X does and still have some kind of normal life. He really is a dreamer.

  “I think you’ll enjoy this one, Sergeant North,” Wraith said archly. “You get to go home.”

  North raised an eyebrow.

  “East Berlin?” Logan asked.

  “Hooray, a vacation behind the Iron Curtain,” Creed growled. “Let’s kill us some commies.”

  “What’s the mission?” Silver Fox asked.

  “Save the free world,” Wraith replied.

  “I could be sleeping right now,” North complained.

  “I’m not kidding,” Wraith protested, and the tone of his voice made Logan take notice. He really wasn’t kidding. The idea was profoundly disturbing: the fate of the world could rest on the actions of a group of borderline—or in the case of Creed, complete—psychotics like Team X.

  “A pair of KGB agents have come into possession of some very sensitive information,” Wraith explained. “They stole a data disk that contains the locations and codes of America’s entire nuclear arsenal. In the wrong hands, it could mean the nuclear devastation of the United States.”

  “Folks shouldn’t ought to leave that kind o’ thing layin’ around,” Logan grunted.

  “So we snatch the disk back,” North said, obviously trying to hurry the proceedings along.

  “And terminate the KGB agents?” Creed asked, a broad smile on his face.

  “If necessary,” Wraith replied.

  Sabretooth grinned even wider.

  * * *

  On the southern end of Manhattan Island, Greenwich Village is a neighborhood filled with contradictions. Despite the approaching twenty-first century and the homogenization that seems to be sweeping over America, the bohemian lifestyle survives in small pockets. The tourists and yuppies cannot completely erase the taste of danger, the scent of daring that exists here. In truth, there seems almost a line drawn between the neighborhood’s past and future.

  To Wolverine, the difference was most pronounced inside the White Horse Tavern, a venerable establishment that had been one of his favorite watering holes for decades. Within the White Horse, the line was drawn between bar and restaurant. For the most part, the tourists sat in the restaurant and ate hamburgers. Locals favored the bar.

  “Here you go, Logan,” said Erika, an attractive waitress he’d come to know and appreciate over the years she’d been working at the White Horse. Far fewer, to be sure, than the years he’d been going there. She slipped his dinner onto the bar: Delmonico steak with portobello mushrooms and mashed potatoes with gravy.

  “Thanks, darlin’,” Wolverine replied and offered a haggard smile.

  “You should smile more often, handsome,” Erika said, and his smile broke into a grin. Wolverine wasn’t a handsome man. He knew that. But he’d never had to complain about his love life. Some women just took to him. An animal attraction, his old friend Yukio had once said.

  “Flirt,” he grunted, and looked down to his steak as Erika gave a sexy, husky laugh and moved back toward the restaurant.

  The steak was delicious, prepared just the way he liked it. They weren’t supposed to cook it that rare anymore, but any establishment that wants to stay in business knows how to treat its regulars. The one thing they couldn’t let him do was smoke one of his favorite cheroots. Not in Manhattan. Still, Wolverine couldn’t complain much. After all, his healing factor would take care of any damage the smoke might do him, but he couldn’t stop whatever harm secondhand smoke might do to others around him. That’s why he stopped smoking around Cannonball, the newest, youngest member of the X-Men. Bad example, and bad for him.

  Buddy Guy sang scratchy blues on the tavern’s jukebox, his sweet guitar a counterpoint to his voice. But anything would have been better than listening to the audio on the national newscast unfolding on the television over the bar. The nation’s fear and hatred of mutants had multiplied a thousandfold since the assassination of Graydon Creed. Creed had been a presidential candidate, considered a shoo-in for the job until someone stopped him dead. He became a martyr to his cause. In this case, the cause was rabid antimutant hysteria.

  With Creed dead, the furor only increased. There was an ongoing struggle to fill the spotlighted void left behind. The current frontrunner for picking up Creed’s cause and, consequently, his supporters, was a senator named Peter Zenak. Zenak’s views had even gotten him appointed to some hotshot watchdog oversight committee after another senator, Terence Hill, died in a plane crash.

  Pretty morbid, but th
e man was making a career out of capitalizing on the misfortune of others. Then again, Wolverine had always thought that was what politics was primarily about.

  “Hey, Ronnie, change the channel, will ya?” a burly black man called from a stool down the bar. “I’m sick of hearing from this bigot.”

  There was some whispering, some exchanged glances, but Ronnie did change the channel. Wolverine was surprised the man’s comments hadn’t elicited an argument from anyone. Surely a lot of them agreed with Zenak’s views. But nobody spoke up. Maybe nobody wanted to be called a bigot. It had been Wolverine’s experience that ignorance usually thrived only in its own company.

  “Here you go, Logan,” Ronnie the bartender said amiably as he sat a sweating pint glass down next to the nearly empty one Wolverine had been working on.

  “You tryin’ to take advantage o’ me, Ronnie?” Wolverine asked. “What’s your hurry?”

  “Not me, buddy,” Ronnie replied. “It’s from your secret admirer over there.”

  Wolverine turned to look where Ronnie was pointing. Across the room, at a small table by the window, a stunning redhead sat with her legs elegantly crossed and smiled seductively at him. Logan smiled back, nodded slightly in appreciation of the glass, and took a sip, regarding her over the rim of the glass.

  The redhead raised her own glass, and an eyebrow, as if in salute, and took a sip. Erika the waitress was passing by, and the redhead beckoned her to the small table. She said something so softly that, even concentrating and with his acute hearing, Wolverine could not pick it up. Erika glanced up at him as the woman was talking, and then moved swiftly across the room toward Wolverine. All business.

  “You know the lady, Logan?” Erika asked.

  “Jealous?” he asked, then shook his head. “Nope, never seen her before.”

  “She knows you,” Erika answered, and the two of them looked over at the redheaded woman together this time. The woman caught Wolverine’s eye again, and her smile turned wistful.

  “Some kind of message for me?” Wolverine prodded, and lifted the pint glass to his lips once more.