Chapter 1 Prologue
“Nobody’s life here means a damned thing to you, so maybe this will get your attention instead,” Officer Eva Narro lowered the muzzle of her Glock, shifting the point of aim off the man at the opposite end of the room, and putting it on the padded case laying open just a few feet away from her. Inside, cradled in a nest of dark grey acoustic foam, was a stainless steel sphere the size of a regulation basketball. Her hands may have been shaking, but not so much that she couldn’t guarantee a hit. “Get down on the ground and strap these on,” she tossed her cuffs, placing them perfectly between his feet, “or I’m emptying the clip into your toy.”
“Please don’t,” Jack whispered, as he watched the man standing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, a sliver of his masked face painted by moonlight and the soft blue glow of the auxiliary lights, with the rest in the shadows. What little Jack could see of the man’s face wasn’t encouraging. His eyes were relaxed. His lips were closed but just barely. He looked bored. Fed up. A hair past the tipping point between irritably indifferent, and pissed off enough to finally bring an end to the buzzing in his ear.
The man in the mask took a step forward.
“Don’t you dare take another step, or I swear, man. I swear I’ll do it. You think I don’t know how these things work?” Eva scoffed, but overplayed it. “A bullet won’t set it off. But it might break it, which means you don’t get what you came here for.”
“Oh, for the love of god, please don’t,” Jack repeated, as he watched the man take another step towards them.
“It is too late to change anything,” the man said with another step. He raised his left hand, turning his wrist so that its back faced her. A timer on his smart
watch was counting down in big, bright white numerals. “In 19 minutes, this device will achieve its destiny. It will serve the purpose for which it was constructed. No bullet will stop it.”
“Put on the cuffs,” she murmured, the gun visibly shaking in her hands. “We’re leaving here together. The three of us.”
A metallic clack from out in the hallway pulled Jack’s gaze towards the open glass door. Two men with automatic rifles in their hands entered the room, the muzzles of their weapons each finding a target. The realization that he was just a mere finger’s twitch from a violent, bloody, multiple through-and-through wounded death sent Jack into a momentary out-of-body experience, as if his soul had already fled the scene and was now a million miles away, just waiting for the formalities to get addressed.
“You have made this evening interesting,” the man said calmly, as he walked past Jack and Eva and proceeded towards the hallway. Behind him, the eyes of an anthropomorphic robot came to life, and the metallic man bent down over the padded case and quickly joined the two halves back together, locking them down with a series of eight clasps around the perimeter. The artificial man lifted the oversized suitcase effortlessly and proceeded into the hallway.
Jack looked into the eyes of the man with the automatic rifle pointed at him. They were tired eyes, just like the eyes of everyone else in the room. Too tired to care. With everything that had already happened, what would another matter? Jack’s mind, usually a symphony of ideas and possibilities, blanked out as he eyed the trigger finger. The trigger pull on a typical M-4 pattern rifle was just four pounds. 64 Ounces. That was how close Jack was to eternal oblivion, or whatever it was that came after.
