Phoenix RisingSix: Ace in the HoleThe building that housed the Brookhearst Chemical Research Laboratories hadn’t been designed to look grand or imposing; it was only three stories tall, set in a swath of second-growth forest, with a deliberately small footprint that had won some environmental awards. Most of it was underground, even the parking. The lab design had been pioneered by the Phoenix Foundation, in fact – they’d partnered with Brookhearst off and on for years, mostly working on safer alternatives to some of the nastier compounds used in everyday industry. Now Phoenix was positioning itself to go big-time into cleanup projects – a field that was getting to be in huge demand – and they had a lot of new work coming up for their old buddies.
That’s why Ruth had started sounding alarms when Brookhearst missed a bidding deadline for a real promising new project, and then shrugged off the prospect altogether. She wasn’t a lady who took rejection well. She started poking around – I think she must’ve been almost as nosy as I can be – and found out that half the senior administrative and operations staff had turned over in the last three years, and the new blood was pretty cool to the old partnership.MacGyver had parked his Jeep behind a service station about half a mile away from the Brookhearst building and approached on foot, a dark-clad shadow slipping through the trees. Several winding footpaths cut haphazardly through the greenbelt that buffered the lab, and he’d gotten a good feel for the area on his previous visits.
But getting back to the lab building. It was kinda nice to have the rooftop only three stories up. The external lighting was kept at a minimum – no electricity being wasted there – and what with the long association between Brookhearst and Phoenix, on top of the good look I’d had of the place on my official tour, Willis had been able to give me the kind of detailed plans of the security systems that I don’t usually get.Mac had judged the most vulnerable entry point to be on the roof, via the exhaust system; but once inside, there were no security cameras and he was free to roam the corridors at will – or he would have been, if he’d had any idea of who might be in the building and where he might run into them. That was the drawback of having all the parking tucked away underneath the building: he hadn’t been able to wait for the parking lot to empty, or pick his time based on the number of remaining cars.
Instead, he headed for the elevator bank, got into the manual controls, and overrode and opened the doors and peered down each shaft, one after another, to check the location of the cars. Two of them were at the ground floor; good enough, and MacGyver fixed the controls to make sure they’d stay there. One was almost all the way down the shaft, at what he thought was one of the lower lab levels.
Darn it. More night-owls on the research staff, I bet.The fourth was also below ground level, at what Mac thought was the parking garage, probably left there by the last employee to leave; he summoned that one all the way to the third floor and locked it in place at the top of the shaft. In that position, there was a gap between the carpeted floor of the corridor and the bottom of the elevator car; enough room to slide into the shaft, painfully ignoring the drop while he found a good tie point for the knotted rope he’d prepared.
With the climbing rope in the elevator shaft, MacGyver had free access to all the floors in the building, and far less risk of running into anyone. His first target was Arvil Baranyev’s office, located conveniently near the elevator bank on the ground floor. During his previous visit, it had been difficult enough to slip away from his minders for the few minutes he’d snatched in the office of the elder Baranyev; he’d had no chance even to look at Arvil’s office.
The sea-change at Brookhearst must’ve started when Baranyev Junior hired on, or maybe it had started when Joshua Brooke accepted a buyout at about the same time and went back to New Jersey to be closer to his horde of grandkids. Hearst had left too, some years earlier – no relation to the other Hearsts – and when Ruth tried to interrupt his cushy retirement in Europe with unwelcome questions about his successors, he always seemed to have just moved on to a different resort.
Then there was the chief accountant, who had quit six months after Brooke left, and the security manager, who had surprised everyone by retiring early and moving to Canada, and the head research project manager, who had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The head of operations had been fired, and he was so good at his job that Brookhearst’s biggest rival had snapped him up before he’d finished cleaning out his desk. The lab director had resigned without giving any reason, and was teaching at Cornell instead. And none of the folks who could still talk seemed to be interested in the subject.
Only the research staff had been untouched by that silent wave of attrition; and my guess was that they were so wrapped up in their work that as long as the lights stayed on, they weren’t about to notice anything else.Mac slipped into the outer office and closed the door firmly behind him without turning on any lights, instead finding his way across the room to the doorway of the inner office by the aid of a penlight. In contrast to the elegantly appointed office suite of Baranyev Sr., Arvil’s secretary lived in a starkly functional realm of filing cabinets, phone system and fax machine, and a simple electric typewriter. Mac had met her briefly: a middle-aged woman, stolid and unimaginative, apparently addicted to celebrity gossip magazines. He doubted that she had the energy or inclination to snoop beyond her prescribed job responsibilities.
MacGyver waited until he was inside Arvil’s inner office, with the door firmly closed, before he flipped the light switch. He started towards the desk and stopped in his tracks. Like the outer office, Arvil’s domain was simple, functional, and contained only basic equipment: there was a fax machine and a telex, and bank after bank of locked filing cabinets – and no computer equipment of any kind.
Mac sat down in Arvil’s desk chair for a moment to collect his scrambled thoughts. He’d been mentally gearing himself up to hack into the Brookhearst computer via Arvil’s terminal and start piecing together the next part of the electronic puzzle he’d found in the study in their private home. The last thing he’d expected was to find an office with no computer at all.
What the heck . . . ?Still, wherever there were locks, there was probably something interesting behind them. MacGyver stood up, pulled out his knife, and started working on opening the filing cabinets.
I have got to get my other knife back from Baba. He’d forgotten all about it until he was getting ready for the night visit. He’d dug his spare out of the emergency kit in the Jeep, but it was a different model, lacking the smaller blade that he particularly liked using on this kind of lock. He hadn’t sharpened this one in a couple of months, and that was annoying too.
The first few drawers yielded no information other than the fact that Arvil was methodical and meticulous, well-organised and thorough, and that his apparent commitment to old-fashioned paper recordkeeping obviously wasn’t hurting the lab’s operations. Mac skimmed from one section of the files to another, and finally struck pay dirt at the far end of one of the freestanding lateral file cabinets.
The dryness of the documentation lent a commonplace air to the files, organised by date and then by name; it took Mac a few minutes to grasp the implications. Starting some three years back, Brookhearst had branched out into overseas consulting, which by all the signs had rapidly grown into a booming business. The travel details of each trip were neatly filed – along with the often elaborate arrangements for establishing the identities and credentials of the ‘consultants’, and the equally elaborate arrangements for them to disappear as needed, either when they reached their official destinations or, nearly as often, at some midpoint of the trip. It was a carefully developed, sophisticated system that had moved dozens of individuals, possibly hundreds, clandestinely from East to West or back again. MacGyver recognised the significance of some of the specific travel dates – he still remembered attending the funeral of one DXS agent who had died as a result of that particular ‘consultant’ showing up in Amsterdam at a critical moment.
Few of the files mentioned money, but those that did made it plain that Brookhearst had become a front for money-laundering on at least as large a scale as its laundering of human movement. Mac thought again of the computer set-up in the office at the Baranyevs’ home, with its instantaneous interconnections between some of the worst rogue states in the world and most of the biggest offshore money havens.
No wonder they didn’t want to play any more when Phoenix came calling.He couldn’t have said what it was that drew first his eyes and then his fingers to the current year’s ‘OPQ’ file. It wasn’t that it contained more files, or fewer, or that anything in them stood out. Perhaps it was just that the letter Q made his palms itch.
Mac stood up next to the lateral filing cabinet and spread the contents of the folder out across its top. The file that had caught his eye was mostly made up of telex correspondence and internal memos. His face was grim as he leafed through the pages, which dated from January back to the previous November.
Quayle.There had been some measure of hell to pay at the DXS when no trace could be found of how that man had slipped into the country – he was
persona non grata, and by the time the furor had ebbed, so were several of the DXS research staff. An attempt to hang the blame on Karen Blake had fallen apart, and not because of either MacGyver or Pete; there simply had been no information to be found.
Now it was here in front of him: the negotiations and arrangements, the pseudonyms and false credentials, the identification of the safe house, the extra demands for ‘special equipment’, the four full days Quayle had had alone there to set up his traps – everything was there, along with the notes on Quayle’s outbound itinerary after the ‘scheduled elimination of all targets’.
Targets. Mac’s face went granite-hard and cold at the thought of Pete lying on the library floor, and the memory of the sickening internal lurch he’d endured in the endless seconds it had taken to find Pete’s pulse still strong in spite of the near-electrocution.
The last section of the file involved a Bulgarian contact who hadn’t bothered with a signature; apparently the bill for services had not been paid after Quayle’s capture left the contract uncompleted. The file petered out into a collection of memos in scribbled Cyrillic clipped to the inside of the folder. MacGyver couldn’t make out a word; he slipped the memos into an inner pocket of his black leather jacket, scowling.
Once captured, Quayle had been arrogant, uncooperative, and uncommunicative; the mystery of just who he’d been working for had never been resolved, and had died with him on the footbridge in Czechoslovakia. The KGB had been almost frantically eager to get their hands on him, which was a good indication by itself that Quayle hadn’t been on their side, not that week anyway. Mac felt his head beginning to throb again over the frustrating, endlessly shifting labyrinth of the layers upon layers of shadow play – the Great Game wasn’t played out over a giant chessboard, with two tidy sides and a known set of pieces. It was a multi-level maze, and you could never tell if some seemingly solid wall was about to open up and reveal a hint of a new player that you hadn’t known was involved.
Mac started at the sound when the telex began to chatter. Between his distraction and the noise of the incoming message, he might have missed the click of the door latch if the man who entered the office hadn’t already been talking as he came in. It was a short, balding man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, with a close-cropped dark beard: Paul Samarin, the lab director who had stepped so smoothly into the shoes of his disgruntled predecessor – a man who had been unwilling to give any reason for his abrupt resignation.
“That should be the confirmation coming in now – who the hell are you?”
Mac’s Swiss Army knife was lying on top of the lateral filing cabinet next to the files he’d been studying, with the nailfile and the reamer blade still extended from when he’d jimmied the last lock. He had a sudden mental image of Gina’s cat, energetically chasing the polished stones that Mac had flicked along the length of the coffee table. A lightning movement of his hand sent the knife spinning and skittering along the top of the cabinet towards Samarin.
The man yelped and flinched away, not even certain what it was; Mac charged at him and he shied back. Mac sidestepped and slipped past him to the office doorway – and slammed to a screeching halt at the sight of Arvil Baranyev standing in his way, holding a cocked 9mm pistol with the ease of long familiarity. His pale blue eyes were narrow slits.
“So. My father was right.”
As Arvil stepped forward, Samarin glanced frantically from one to the other. “Arvil, it’s that guy who was here last week, the one from the Phoenix Foundation. What the hell is he doing here now?”
“Phoenix Foundation be damned, Pavel. This man is a DXS agent.”
“
What!”
Mac looked at Samarin with interest. “Why? Who were you expecting, the INS?”
“
Shut up.” Arvil gestured with the gun; MacGyver met his eyes and didn’t like what he saw there. “Careful! Keep your hands where I can see them. Pavel, bring me the pocketknife that is lying on the floor. I believe it belongs to our inquisitive guest.”
MacGyver set his teeth as, for the second time in as many days, he watched one of his knives disappear into someone else’s pocket. The gun in Arvil’s hand remained steady throughout, and there was no break in the Russian’s attention to give Mac an opening to try anything.
He jerked his head towards Samarin, still not looking away from MacGyver. “Don’t stand there gawking, you fool. Go get me something I can use to tie him up.”
Samarin almost jumped. “
What? Where do I find . . . ?”
“Try the mail room, you idiot. They just unpacked a new shipment of glassware for the labs – there must be something we can use. And be quick about it. This man is notoriously slippery.”
Mac raised his eyebrows at Arvil as Samarin scurried away. “‘Slippery’?”
“My father is a more important man than anyone knows. I told him that Phoenix had sent you to look us over, and he knew your name. You have quite a reputation, Mr. MacGyver.”
Mac made a face. “Not the camels again. Just tell me they didn’t mention camels.”
“Turn around and place your hands on the top of the cabinets. Farther!” Mac complied, and stiffened when he felt the cold metal of the gun barrel nudge against his skull just behind his right ear. “Do not try anything amusing. It would be a terrible shame to blow a hole in those remarkable brains.”
“Hey, I’m just standing here – ” Mac tried to keep his voice even and casual. It wasn’t easy, especially when the gun pressed harder against his head.
“I said shut up! It will also be very much more difficult to explain if I have to shoot you, but I will.”
Mac waited for a long count of fifty, letting the silence stretch out, before he spoke up again. “Slick operation you’ve been running here. I bet you’ve got more imaginary people working for you than real ones.” He was careful not to move, and as he had hoped, Arvil began to talk again.
Most folks can’t stand silence. More of them oughta get out into the woods sometimes.“Oh, they are far from imaginary – although they do not exactly work for us, not directly. Most of them work for the KGB, or KOS, or the Stasi, or DS – but we are all working for the same ultimate ends.” Mac didn’t try to turn his head, but he could hear the smirk in Arvil’s voice. “It is a display of true solidarity – can you see that? Communist unity will prevail. It is only a matter of time. You capitalists will never be able to understand that, not with your every-dog-for-himself beliefs.” Arvil’s accent had grown thicker as he slipped into dogma. “You make me sick, do you realise that?”
“So what’s with Samarin? He’s got an American accent. Is he a sleeper?”
Arvil actually spat. “That dog? He is a capitalist, with expensive habits and a few dirty secrets. Such men are very easy to find and control. Men like you . . . not so easy.”
“So you came to the US on your own, then – got everything set up here while your dad arranged it all at the other end, and then he joined you here.”
“Exactly. I followed his instructions to the letter.”
“Do you always do what your dad tells you to?”
“Of course. As long as he does not try to make me screw around with his damned computers.”
The contemptuous remark hit Mac like a punch in the gut. Somehow he managed to keep his voice easy. “Yeah, I saw you don’t even have a terminal in here. Doesn’t your dad let you play with his toys?”
“Toys! Games for children and weak-minded fools. I cannot understand why he wastes so much time fiddling around with all that
chyortovo otrod'e.”
Wait a minute. Is he kidding? Baranyev’s own son doesn’t know what Dad’s up to? MacGyver didn’t know himself, but his neck prickled again at the sense of the deadly shadow player in the game, running a side of the board that no-one knew was there. With everything else that was going on, it meant that the operation at the lab must be completely independent of whatever schemes were hatching in the electronic nest in Baranyev’s study. Mac thought about the sniper above the footbridge, and the nervous twitch that had him checking his rear-view mirror so often these days.
What else is Dad keeping from Junior?The problem of the shadow player was going to have to wait. Mac heard Samarin return, and Arvil yanked Mac’s hands behind his back and tied them with a few quick movements. Mac winced. From the feel of it, it was rough jute cord, the kind used to tie packing cases; the harsh fibers chewed into his wrists.
Mac had clenched his fists when Arvil started to tie him, hoping to win some slack in the ropes later on when he relaxed. He wasn’t prepared for the double spike of pain when the Russian struck him hard on the back of each hand with the butt of the pistol. He gasped aloud and his fingers relaxed automatically in the reflexive spasm, and he felt Arvil tightening the knots.
“Not clever enough, Mr. MacGyver. Horses do that too, did you know? They take a deep breath when you saddle them up, trying to make you leave the harness loose.”
The pistol was back at MacGyver’s neck, and Arvil jerked on his arm and turned him towards the door. Mac could see Samarin standing in the doorway, dithering.
“What are you going to do with him?”
Arvil’s voice was very soft. “The only thing you need to know is that this man was never here. You met him last week when he visited us, and you have not seen him since. Do you understand?”
“I – ”
“Pavel, just say yes.”
“Okay, yes, I understand! But – ”
“But nothing! Go home. Lock up your office, get in your car, and drive home. Tomorrow, you come to work, and we do not talk about it. None of this ever happened. Next week, we all collect another fat check. Life goes on.
Understand?”
Samarin retreated, and Arvil shoved Mac ahead of him through the outer office and to the elevator, and down to the lab area. The main working lights had been dimmed for the night, and the safety lights picked out only a few gleams from the equipment, with deep pools of shadow between them.
There’s a big difference between the kind of bullies you run into when you’re growing up, and the kind you run into later. A whole lotta differences, really. But they mostly stay the same. They don’t like it when someone’s tougher than they are, but they really hate it when they think someone’s smarter than they are. Which is most of the time.Mac balked for a moment when he realised where they were headed: Arvil was steering him towards the small airtight observation chamber used for gas testing. But the unrelenting pressure from the pistol didn’t give him any choice. Arvil gave MacGyver a hard shove as they entered the tiny room, and he stumbled forward, caught his balance in spite of his tied hands, and turned to face the other man as Arvil switched on the lights. He was still smirking.
“For a snoop, you are not very inquisitive. You have not asked me what is going to happen.”
“Well, I kinda figured you’d tell me when you were ready, and not before.”
I could keep the bullies pretty much at bay myself – I could hold my own from an early age, and sometimes help out one of the younger kids who was having a bad time of it. No matter where you are, bullies like to feel they’re in control. When they’re younger, they do it with their fists.
When they get older, that isn’t enough. They have to rub it in. They have to tell you how many points they’ve scored off you. It’s real dumb, and sometimes you can learn a lot from them that way . . . if you can handle the bruises.Mac could see the next move coming a mile away, but it didn’t help much. Arvil threw a vicious punch at his stomach, and Mac fell away from it, sprawling onto the floor. He landed hard, but he managed to land most of the way into one of the corners of the room, hoping Arvil wouldn’t guess that it was deliberate. The Russian seemed too sure of himself to suspect anything; he stood over Mac’s prone form, nudging him with his foot, but made no move to drag him out towards the centre of the testing chamber, as MacGyver feared he might.
“This is the man my father thinks is so very dangerous?” Arvil sniffed loudly. “At least I will be able to tell him his problem is solved.”
He squatted down and ran his pistol under Mac’s chin, forcing Mac’s head up to meet his eyes. “Government agent.” The contempt was heavy in the Russian’s voice. “You are used to solving problems with your fists, yes? Or a gun, or some clever gadget? Do you even understand the first thing about science? Back home, in my own country,
I was a scientist, a chemist, not some damned bureaucrat. I ran a research laboratory ten times the size of this one. We did some fine work for the State. My father was very proud.”
“I’ll bet.” Mac winced; Arvil had finally pocketed the pistol, but he had produced another length of the packing cord and was tying Mac’s ankles.
“But there was one project I was not proud of. It could have been so useful – a gas weapon for the military to use in hostage situations, or to capture enemy personnel alive during the takeover of strategic properties. We spent millions of rubles developing it and be damned if it never worked properly. Very difficult to deploy, although we could have solved that. But it had, shall we say, an unfortunate side effect in many test cases.”
“Lemme guess,” Mac said through gritted teeth. “It’s lethal.”
“Very good! My father said you were a clever man.” Arvil shook his head sadly. “Yes, there is damned little market potential for a gas that kills both hostages and terrorists alike. Even worse if it kills the hostages and leaves the terrorists alive. There was one incident – it was hushed up, of course, but it was very embarrassing.”
He threaded another length of cord between MacGyver’s wrists and his ankles, and yanked hard to bring them together. Mac set his jaw to keep from grunting at the sudden extra strain on his shoulders; he didn’t want to give Arvil the satisfaction. But he could feel his fingers starting to tingle as the tight cords began to cut off circulation.
Arvil’s voice was maddeningly reminiscent of one of Mac’s more boring chemistry professors, a man whose lectures could leach all the fascination out of one of his favourite subjects. “It is – what would you call it? A cocktail. Yes, that is the word. A chemical cocktail. Ingredients: fentanyl and pancuronium bromide, with a touch of droperidol for flavour, you might say.”
“Hey, that’s a great idea. Don’t let your victims get too worried while you knock them out and paralyse them. What did they die from, respiratory failure?”
Mac couldn’t see Arvil, but he could feel the man’s malevolence, and he knew he should have kept his mouth shut. Arvil had finished securing the hogtie, and he backhanded MacGyver savagely across the back of the head. This time there was no way to roll away from the blow; Mac’s head sang from the impact, and Arvil’s voice briefly receded as the lecture continued.
“The real difficulty is that, with so many components, it becomes very difficult to be certain how it will work on human subjects. Very difficult to test properly, you see. Will they become confused quickly enough that they do not notice the paralysis as it overtakes them? How long before they lose consciousness? Why do so many of them die so quickly? And in this country, there is no opportunity to conduct any tests at all.”
Arvil stood up and walked back to the door of the containment chamber.
“I wish I could tell you that your death will contribute to the advancement of science – but this is not a properly controlled experiment and I will not be taking detailed notes. However, it
will make your disappearance very much easier to explain. The ocean around here is very cold, did you know that? People die from the shock of just falling into it. By the time your body is found, no-one will be able to tell what killed you.”
There was only a soft sound as the sealed door to the test chamber closed, but the slide and click as the hatch was dogged seemed very loud. Louder still was the hiss as the pumps were activated.
C’mon, MacGyver, think. How are you gonna get out of this one? Mac knew it wasn’t really a gas – from Arvil’s description, it would probably be a fine mist of aerosolized microscopic droplets, almost certainly heavier than air. Holding his breath wasn’t going to help for long; the stuff would seep into his skin and his eyes. Arvil had deliberately left him tied so that his face was at floor level. He had to get loose, and fast.
Mac strained his head backwards and arched his back to see just how far above the floor he could get his mouth and nose, and saw the shape of Arvil’s head silhouetted in the observation port of the test chamber.
Aw, terrific. He’s gonna watch!A piercing, shrilling electronic howl shattered the air, so sudden and unexpected that it took MacGyver a moment before he realised it was the lab’s fire alarm system. Mac saw the outlined shape of Arvil’s head at the observation port jerk up, look away, and then disappear. The Russian must have gone to see what the problem was.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t turned off the gas.
Hey! You claimed to be good at that! Otherwise you'd have gotten selected passages instead of entire chapters to beta-read.
