Kill Factor Read online

  Kill Factor

  Copyright © 2011 by Roger Vallon

  Published by 711 Press

  Send all questions and comments to us via the contact page at:

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction, therefore names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-935702-04-7

  Published in the United States of America

  One: Unwelcome Guests

  Two: Meet the Press

  Three: Old Friends

  Four: The Banker

  Five: First Report

  Six: New Friends

  Seven: Unraveling Plans

  Eight: Lost Baggage

  Nine: One Down, One Thousand to Go

  Ten: To Hell-Sinki and Back

  Eleven: Old Versus New

  Twelve: Covering Ground

  Thirteen: Rekindled

  Fourteen: Showdown

  Fifteen: Back to the Dust

  It was a good day for mowing the field. The sun was at the right angle, a mild breeze was blowing, and the other local farmers had harvested the last of the corn the day before. Hadrian maneuvered his John Deere over the leftover corn stubble at the edges of his vast field. The machine was holding up well, considering the deep furrows it had to navigate. Since he kept the mower high, the tractor traversed them with relative ease, the heavy-duty rotary cutters making a cheerful whirring sound as they mowed down the remaining stalks.

  Hadrian was thinking ahead to the spring planting, and he longed to grab his plow and turn the soil under in preparation. He looked in the direction of an old willow tree and considered resting in its shade for a spell, but work beckoned. Taking a breather would have to wait. After spitting out his chew, he took a swig of sweet tea to quench his thirst and examined the dirt under his fingernails. Life on the lam had resulted in nothing but hard work.

  Farming was physically new to him, but he’d been downloaded with specific skill sets that enabled him to blend in during his time here. Thanks to this, he had easily settled into his farmer persona over the past twelve months and could present a convincing simulation out here in the middle of nowhere. Although he was content for the time being, he had felt the first stirrings of restlessness, like a junkie having withdrawal symptoms, especially during the waiting period these past three days. The seventy-two hours had passed like decades. He knew what was about to occur, and just thinking about it made him salivate.

  When he had first settled on the farm a year ago, he wondered how long it would last, how long he’d have to stay in hiding. He had enjoyed living a tranquil rural life, but knowing that Redrum carried on while he did so grieved and angered him. But today, he was through living the life of a farmer. Because they were coming.

  Hadrian drove Betty through the furrows as he headed back to the barn. Such an odd name for a tractor, but she was a sweet old lady, always faithful and reliable. He broke from the field with the barn in sight, and he wasn’t surprised when he saw dust billowing in the distance—a black SUV was approaching on the mile-long dirt road. He could smell assassins in the air. He knew it was his time.

  He was surprised it had taken them so long to find him. His eyes adjusted to the distance like a zoom lens and pulled the image of the vehicle closer. Four men in black suits rode inside. He hadn’t always been blessed with keen eyesight. That was another of their “tweaks.” His adjustable vision made him a great shot, of course, but other enhancements were even more remarkable. He could hit a target blindfolded if need be—and on several occasions he had.

  “Hmm. Using the old government agency ploy,” Hadrian muttered to himself while staring at the vehicle bouncing along the road toward him. “How original.”

  He pulled Betty up to the front of the barn as the SUV made its way up his drive. A worn saddlebag he had fastened to Betty’s side carried a little .22—his insurance as he worked the farm. Hadrian grabbed it and tucked it at the back of his waist in preparation for battle. He’d miss Betty, that was for sure. Who knew you could love a machine or respect the dirt, sweat, and tears that came by honest work? Had they hardwired that into him as well? He didn’t know.

  “Mr. Blackburn. Mr. Blackburn,” one of them called from the SUV as Hadrian swung open the large barn door. He ignored them and hopped back on Betty. At a two-mile-an-hour crawl, he rolled her inside. He killed the engine when they called again. He looked in their direction and shot them an expression that signaled his annoyance at the intrusion. He could tell by the look in their eyes that, for a moment, they thought maybe they had the wrong guy. He decided to play into that.

  “Name’s not Blackburn, needle nose,” Hadrian said in a slow drawl as he walked out of the barn. “It’s George Kenton. What you doin’ on my land?” He spit out his second chaw of tobacco for the morning, and it landed a little too close to the agent’s shoes to be an accident.

  The agent glanced down at the ground for a moment, and then said, “We’ve been sent here to acquire your services, Mr. Blackburn. Or should I just call you ‘Black,’ which is your current designation?”

  When Hadrian made no reply, the agent looked up at him, stared him full in the face. “Or perhaps you prefer your lofty name from the Principate,” he said. “Third dynasty, correct? Hadrian the Caesar.”

  Hadrian stared back at him, said nothing.

  “Well, I’ve got news for you, Hadrian,” the agent continued. “They made us all Caesars. But you they have a thing for. They think you’re special somehow.” The agent smiled and looked behind him, and the other three chuckled as if on cue. He turned back to Hadrian, his smile gone, his face a grim mask. “We, on the other hand, consider you a relic.”

  Hadrian shook his head slowly, as if he were a first-grade teacher dealing with an exceptionally dense child. “I told you, you’ve got the wrong man. Might be a Blackburn a few miles down the road. I heard someone took over the old Griffith farm. Might want to check there.” Hadrian turned away as if he were done with them and their persistent silliness and walked around to the side of the barn. He smiled when he heard them following close behind.

  The talkative agent continued his patter. “I guess I can skip the neat little speech I was supposed to give you, about the government needing your services, among other things. You and I both know you’re too smart to fall for that.”

  Agent Talkative had just made a mistake. Hadrian now knew for sure that they wanted him alive, otherwise there would have been no need for a prepared speech about needing his services. Besides, if they wanted to kill him, they would have made their move by now. When he grabbed the pitchfork that was leaning against the side of the barn, the four agents simultaneously flinched and took a step back.

  “What’s the matter, boys?” Hadrian said. “You never seen a real farm tool before?”

  The four men relaxed as Hadrian dug into a small pile of hay next to the barn and tossed forkfuls into an old rusty wheelbarrow.

  “I had a little mishap while moving some bundles last night,” he said with a half-smile. “Guess I need to quit hitting the bottle so hard.”

  “Let’s cut the act, Hadrian, or Black, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days,” the lead agent said.

  “The name’s Kenton, George Kenton,” Hadrian said without turning from his work at the hay pile. “You need to work on your memory skills, partner.”

  “You like Kenton? Very well. You know why we’re here, Kento
n. But if not, let me make it clear. Redrum isn’t mad at you. In fact, they commended you for your amazing abilities. And, luckily for you, they had backups in Geneva, so you didn’t destroy all the files. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be standing here having this lovely chat. So, let’s not make this harder than it needs to be. Get in the truck and let’s go.”

  Hadrian realized that they must know he had the chip. He stood up straight and made a quarter turn to his left. He cocked his head and said, “What did you say?” Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a potential opening and zoomed in. The vein at the side of Agent Talkative’s temple was pulsing. The man was fearful or anxious about something. That would weaken him and make him vulnerable. He would hesitate, second-guess his instincts. Good instincts were what kept you alive in the field. Lose them or ignore them, and you were doomed.

  As the agent repeated his statement, he suddenly stiffened, his face a mask of shock and surprise as he looked down at the pitchfork that was plunged into his guts nearly to the wooden handle. He had never seen Hadrian make his move.

  Before the cerebral cortexes of the three remaining Redrum agents could register what had just happened and before the dead agent’s corpse even hit the ground, Hadrian snapped the pitchfork handle over his knee and broke it in two. His movements were swift and graceful, like tai chi in fast motion, as he launched into a backspin. Another agent went down, his features gripped with fear as he clutched at the wooden stake buried in his heart.

  The other two agents crouched down and reached into their blazers for their guns. They began firing rounds in Hadrian’s direction, but he tumbled out of the way and dived into the barn while firing backward shots from his .22 to keep the agents at bay. That bought him a few seconds, enough time to slam the barn door shut. He knew the bolt wouldn’t hold for long.

  Bullets pierced the barn door, and streams of sunlight poked through. Hadrian climbed a ladder up to the loft and kicked the slanted cover off a crate he kept in the corner. Semi-automatic weapons and ammo lay inside. He grabbed a machine gun, stuck a clip in, and set it down while he loaded another.

  The barn door finally gave way. The agents stood just outside the doorway and fired blind shots in every direction but Hadrian’s. Hadrian’s vantage point gave him the upper hand. He crouched and kept an eye on the doorway, but the agents refused to enter. They were waiting for Hadrian to return fire and give away his location. It didn’t take long for the two to empty their clips. When they ducked out of sight to reload, Hadrian seized the opportunity. He flipped over the loft rail and landed on one knee, guns in hand. He moved forward and fired at the walls on either side of the barn entrance, where the agents would be reloading. Bullets ripped through wood, and the agents bolted away from the danger. When Hadrian made it outside, he saw the two agents running in separate directions, but they got off a few shots before he felled one of them by the haystack.

  Hadrian shot the second agent as he ran toward the SUV parked in the driveway. The man fell on the hood of the vehicle and slid to the ground, bleeding from several wounds.

  Hadrian dragged the four bodies into the barn and lined them up on top of a bed of hay. He shut the barn door and pulled Betty to the side with a sigh of regret, knowing he’d never see his trusted field companion again. He bent down to kiss the hood of her engine as she purred, gave her an affectionate slap with his palm. The land had made him a little sentimental, and the tractor was the closest thing to a faithful partner he’d ever had.

  His thoughts drifted for a moment as he took in the silence. The sound of crickets almost made it seem as though peace had been restored to this countryside farm. He climbed off Betty and made his way to the back of the barn, unveiling the red ’69 Ford Mustang hidden under a huge gray tarp. He climbed in, started the engine, and pulled her out of the barn. His yearlong vacation was over. It was time to put an end to Redrum Industries.

  As he cleared the curve of Cherry Lane, he reached into his glove compartment and grabbed a small black box with a blinking red switch. Hadrian flipped the switch. Two seconds later, he saw a massive explosion in his rearview mirror, and a split second after that he felt the shock wave roll over the Mustang. When the smoke cleared, his two-story countryside house and barn were leveled, the four assassins and sweet Betty along with them.

  Under normal circumstances, Rexford wouldn’t bother with personal protection for a routine press conference, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Parents, teachers, religious leaders, and various do-gooder rabble rousers had gathered in opposition to Redrum Games’ official announcement of the release of Waging War VII: The Sudanese Curtain, the latest installment in the hottest-selling virtual gaming series ever. The Sudanese Curtain was set for release in one week, and Redrum was not about to postpone it, much less shelve it, regardless of the growing protest outside the building, which already numbered in the thousands. So they had sent the Barracuda to deal with it. Despite Rexford’s small size, high-pitched voice, and a slight twitch that was often mistaken for a nervous tic, the man was a master of argument and persuasion, always cool, always calm, always confident.

  Peering out through a window of the Redrum building’s conference room as he waited for the reporters to begin filtering in, Rexford smiled at the giant Waging War VII ads plastered on the sides of nearby buildings. He couldn’t walk two blocks without seeing a Sudanese Curtain billboard looming over him. Yet preorders had languished and were well below average compared with the previous six releases. The top execs at Redrum weren’t overly concerned about ratings in the gaming division—the company possessed scores of other profit centers and cash cows—but they were furious over the recent string of rumors, which included more than a few grains of truth. Rexford was the man to put a lid on them. Dealing with the media was his forte. Rexford was focused, ready to eat any reporter alive. “Showtime,” he said to his bodyguard, Commodus, as the first of the reporters began shuffling into the conference room.

  Helsinki, Finland

  20 meters below the Helsinki City Library

  Letekro stared in disbelief at the suddenly blank screen. His stomach seemed to do a back flip as his brain sought to make sense of the vacant display. But nothing else seemed to be amiss—there were no accidentally pulled plugs, no flashing readouts indicating some technical problem with the system. He swallowed hard and stared at the main monitoring system of the hidden tracking facility, but the screen remained frustratingly empty. He stabbed the button on the intercom wall mount and spoke into it as soon as he got a response. “Dahl, get down here right away. We’ve got a problem.”

  Dahl showed up less than two minutes later, and Letekro immediately pointed at the still-blank screen, which should have displayed four green blips.

  “Pull up satellite surveillance and get a lock on their last location,” Dahl ordered.

  Letekro tapped quickly on a keyboard, zooming in on an old farmstead that was rumored to have kept rogue agent Hadrian Black hidden away for the last few seasons. As the zooming stopped and the view came into focus, he had his explanation for the blank monitor screen: the farm, and most likely the agents who five minutes ago had been represented by four glowing blips, had been reduced to rubble and smoldering ashes. He knew this could be the work of only one man.

  Dahl pushed Letekro aside and grabbed the mouse. He slowly panned and then stopped and zoomed in closer—the black SUV that the agents had been assigned was flipped onto its back and burning. Dahl panned south of the truck, spotted fresh tire tracks leading from the farm. “He’s still alive.”

  Rexford took the podium in front of the murmuring crowd of reporters, and they gradually settled down and became quiet. He began to speak, but feedback from the microphone stifled his thoughts momentarily until someone adjusted the volume. He nodded and gazed out at the assembled journalists. “I’ve called this press conference to announce that Waging War VII will launch next week, regardless of the protests or any rumors you might have heard. I will now take questions, but know tha
t my time is limited, so ask wisely.”

  The first questioner was James Johannsen, a journalist for The New York Herald. “Mr. Rexford, it’s rumored that Waging War III and IV were based on real-life black-ops missions. Is there any truth to these rumors?”

  And so it begins, Rexford thought. “We pride ourselves on our series being loosely based on real-life scenarios. But I’ll state this only once. The plots of our games are culled from research only. We use strategists to discuss what could happen, not what has happened. It should be obvious that if we had any ties to secret worldwide operations, the government would never allow us to continue. This is just a game, plain and simple.”

  A reporter in the back of the room stood up to ask a question. “With all due respect, sir, your ‘plain and simple’ game promotes brutality and violence. The angry protesters standing outside these walls certainly would agree with that. Waging War VI even featured a violent rape. How do you justify that?”

  Rexford was already annoyed, but he’d never let it show. He put on a sober expression and said, “That was a glitch. The person responsible for the code was fired immediately. The game was recalled and we corrected the problem. We’d never knowingly promote that type of violence. Our games focus strictly on war strategy action. These types of games have been around for thirty years now. Gamers love action, and action sometimes involves violence. I see worse violence in movies and on television. I don’t remember any protests against the Rambo films or the Call of Duty games years ago. So why now? We’ve taken online gaming to the next level with the cortex simulation suit. In fact, the Redrum games division has played at least a small part in getting your kids off their butts. That’s why they’re healthier. You should be thanking us, not trying to crucify us.”

  “Mr. Rexford, if that claim is true, then why doesn’t Redrum focus more on the sports side of virtual gaming to further help our kids?” Johannsen asked before another reporter could get her question out.