Gone Dark (The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Gone Dark

  P R Adams

  Promethean Tales

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

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  GONE DARK

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  Copyright © 2018 P R Adams

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  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

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  Cover by Justin Adams

  www.variastudios.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by P R Adams

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by P R Adams

  For updates on new releases and news on other series, visit my website and sign up for my mailing list at:

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  http://www.p-r-adams.com

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  Books in the On The Brink Universe

  The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy

  Into Twilight

  Gone Dark

  End State (2018)

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  The Rimes Trilogy

  Momentary Stasis

  Transition of Order

  Awakening to Judgment

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  The ERF Series

  Turning Point

  Valley of Death

  Jungle Dark

  Chariot Bright

  The Burning Sands Trilogy

  Beneath Burning Sands

  Across Burning Sands

  Beyond Burning Sands

  The Chain

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  The Chain: Shattered

  The Journey Home

  Rock of Salvation

  From the Depths

  Ever Shining

  For Josh. Thanks for the encouragement. Keep creating.

  Chapter 1

  They found me somewhere east of Denver, in the dead of a silent night. It was a freakish whiteout blizzard, the sort where the sky becomes a white mass in your headlights, and black specks are all you know of the darkness. Each time I crested a rise, there should have been a grid of sparkling towers to guide me into the city, and to the south a flickering blanket where the common folk huddled inside lesser buildings.

  In the storm, the only light was my own.

  I had swapped out Gillian’s car in Hays, Kansas. Maybe that had bought me time. The SUV I’d taken could have passed for a hunter’s stand on wheels—flat camouflage paint and matching crude-sewn upholstery and cargo webbing, winter tires, sports suspension. It was old and probably close to illegal for city driving, and I had no doubt the owner would find the swap inadequate. Life sucks like that sometimes.

  When a scoped rifle had slid out from under the front seat, I christened the vehicle Huntergasma. Under the dome light, the rifle looked like a civil war relic, older than the SUV but better maintained: polished walnut-brown wood, even more polished barrel.

  Huntergasma was more amenable to my frame—six foot, thick chest, and cybernetic limbs that felt a little long after more than a day driving Gillian’s little car. Maybe that’s why I almost didn't notice the wash of ultraviolet through the windows at first. When I did, I stuck my head out the passenger side window. Snow clung to my face, ghostly against the pale copper of my skin and black of my hair.

  Despite the hyper-masculine smells of sweat and beer that permeated the cab, Gillian’s scent clung to my clothes as tenaciously as the memories of our time together—condensed now, frantic groping and thrusting. She had reduced me to an animal, and that was all that remained now. The car managed the slushy road with a hypnotizing hum intermittently shattered by the thud of snow clumps breaking free from the wheel well and undercarriage. It was just enough to drown out the voices in my head. Voices that told me I'd gone too far, taken too big a risk, kicked the wrong hornet's nest.

  The ultraviolet beam swept through the snow again, brighter than my lights.

  I leaned out again, and sniffed, as if my prominent nose—the pride of the Mendelsohn side of my mother’s family, despite mine being crooked—might be able to pick out something in the blizzard that my cybernetic eyes couldn’t.

  The thermal outline glowed: a helicopter. A powerful one, with a fearless pilot.

  Or remote-piloted.

  Whichever one, the aircraft was at its limits, and the pilot knew it. It was gone as quickly as it appeared.

  Which meant they had people in the area already.

  On the ground.

  I accelerated. Plowing through heavy, wet snow made the SUV sluggish and sloppy, but as I accelerated, the feeling became closer to hydroplaning. There was no sense of control, only a marginal connection to the road. It was more like aiming than driving. An exit notice flashed off to the right, blurry in the whiteout. I pulled a map up on the data device I’d taken from one of my caches—a hidey-hole on the West Virginia border—and spotted what might be trees, and took my foot off the accelerator. I went from feeling a loss of control to a trapped feeling.

  I swung wide to turn onto the exit road, slipped into the oncoming lane, then tried to use the piled snow to drop some speed. About twenty feet down the exit road, I had everything under control again.

  No worries. No one else would be out in this weather.

  Just me and the Agency's assassins.

  Dark shapes rose on either side of the highway: trees. I accelerated and pulled off the road, plowing through the snow until I was at the edge of the trees. It was a nice, obvious trail. I pulled the rifle out from beneath the seat, searched around until I found an empty magazine and a box of rounds. Those went into my jacket pockets as I hopped out of the SUV and headed north, staying close to the trees and minimizing my tracks. After the foul smell of the vehicle, the air was fresh and sweet. About eighty steps from the SUV, I squatted and covered myself with snow, flipping from thermographic to normal vision while watching the road.

  And waited.

  They arrived about an hour after the helicopter spotted me. Two cars, black against the snow, heat rolling off them as they crawled to a stop along the side of the road, about a hundred feet east of the SUV’s position. I counted three per car, glowing like miniature suns in my thermo-optics, trailing yellow waves of heat from the warm interior. They fanned out, two high-stepping through the snow to the north, two to the south, two heading for the SUV. Boots, a flash of jeans, and dark pants beneath long trench coats.

  No hand signals, which meant they were connected over some sort of radio. Then again, there were no high-end optics if they hadn’t spotted me, and it didn’t seem like I was
being tracked through biometric signals.

  That said two things: not high-end agency operators, and almost certainly a rushed gathering. Mercenaries.

  I stayed still other than the occasional shiver and watched for my opportunity.

  The two approaching the SUV finally pulled out weapons: compact submachine guns. When they pulled the guns, the wind puffed out their trench coats, revealing tight shirts. Covered by body armor. They screwed something over the barrels: suppressors. Long magazines were slapped into place.

  That changed things.

  I brought the rifle up slowly, got another feel for it. Remington, 30.06, semiautomatic. It was the sort of gun my Uncle Martin would’ve liked. The magazine could hold twenty, but there had only been eight in the ammo box. Not a lot of margin for error. There rarely was when the Agency hired a crew to clean up a mess, and that’s exactly what this looked to be.

  My first targets would need to be the pair moving north. They were almost parallel to my position and still hadn’t moved west much. Drop them, then the two approaching the SUV, then the two farther south.

  Easy.

  I sighted on the closest—long, pale hair floating like a halo. Smaller than the other, who seemed bulky, like a bodybuilder. Not just smaller than the bodybuilder, smallest of the six, actually. Slender, but I’d noticed a modest flare at the hips when the trench coat had whipped open.

  Female. Smaller head. Tougher shot.

  The rifle cracked, deafening in the silence.

  She crumpled, misting a bright flare of gore over the dark snow.

  Her partner dropped flat.

  I spun around, but the two approaching the SUV were low, keeping the frame between us. To the south, one of the assassins had already dropped as well. The other seemed confused, weapon raised, swiveling, scanning my area.

  Some sort of optics? Modifications? A device to triangulate sound?

  I sighted on the lower part of the head, which widened out. Lantern-jawed, perhaps. Or comms gear. The rifle crack was followed almost immediately by him tottering, then falling sideways.

  They opened fire at that point, and it was close. The guns were silenced, a whisper to the rifle’s thunder. Branches snapped, a round buried itself in the trunk of a nearby tree with a deep thump, and a bullet whistled past close enough that I could almost feel it.

  I dropped deeper into the snow, burrowing a few feet to the south, listening to the snap of branches and the occasional voice raised just enough.

  Maybe they hadn’t been warned. Or maybe I didn’t warrant a warning.

  I rolled west, toward a tree, teeth chattering despite my effort to keep them clenched.

  Danny would have rolled his eyes at my sloppy effort. He probably would have already dropped four of them.

  When I had another tree between me and the bodybuilder, I searched for him.

  He was a brilliant red against the blue of snow. Checking the woman. They must have worked together. That was always tough. Everyone knew you didn’t form relationships. Not that kind. It was bad news, a disaster waiting to happen. So you agreed to keep it to just sex. And the relationship followed, even though you didn’t want it to.

  Bodybuilder raised his torso and brought his gun up. I had him in my sights clean. Another crack of thunder, and they were at half strength.

  Once again, their bullets tore through the trees while I tried to crawl south through the snow. Something thudded into my left shoulder, and for a second, I thought I’d lost the arm. It was sluggish and weak, but I was finally able to move again.

  Then the whistle of bullets and snapping of branches stopped.

  Repositioning. They had to be.

  Unless—

  I popped my head up for a quick glance south.

  A short, squat form, half hidden by a tree about sixty feet away, wearing a ski mask, brought a submachine gun up and fired.

  Snow kicked up in front of me, and something hammered my right wrist and then my left bicep. Something burned like fire along my scalp.

  Once again, my arm seemed to just stop working. I rolled away.

  The bullets followed, and the gunman hurried toward me.

  Panic. Excitement. Something. He had no reason to leave cover, to close.

  He brought the gun around for a shot. I hurled the rifle at him, knocking his aim wide long enough for me to get to my feet and close. It was clumsy, but the snow equalized things.

  He got off another burst—loud, the suppressor failing. The shots strafed my thighs.

  And then I was on him.

  I had enough control of my right arm to put a solid strike into his solar plexus.

  He staggered.

  I drove a knee into his gut and took him to the ground, crushing his larynx with an elbow strike.

  His buddies were closing from the east, holding fire, probably unsure who was thrashing and making wet, desperate noises.

  I tore his weapon from his hands and emptied the magazine at the two closing forms.

  They fell.

  The choking man had a nice CA-Mil Urban Enforcer 10mm pistol and another magazine for the submachine-gun—also a CA-Mil, but one I hadn’t seen before. He also had an impressive computing device hanging off his hip. I tore the device from its carrier, then examined the ski mask. It was heavier than normal, with what looked like integrated optics over the eyeholes. There was a mesh of some sort over what would have been the cheeks and ears: comms. I took the mask, then surveyed the scene, finishing off the wounded, collecting magazines for the submachine gun, and reclaiming my rifle.

  The cars were rentals, sleek American hybrid electric beauties. I took the one with more of a charge and pulled back onto the highway, then reversed back to the interstate. About five minutes later, I passed a speeding sheriff’s car, lights flashing, sirens screaming. There would be frantic, confused calls, concerns about a drug deal gone wrong or something similar, and eventually calls would go out to federal agencies.

  And the Agency would know I was still alive.

  They’d sent a rookie team. Sloppy. Strange.

  In Denver, I cut north, dumping the rental on the outskirts of Cheyenne and helping myself to another SUV that had seen better days.

  When the sun came up, I was off the road, hidden in the woods, fighting off a headache. I slept fitfully through the day. My arms were having fine motor control problems. The legs looked worse—gouged and scraped beneath torn and stained pants—but the cybernetic operations seemed to be fine. It was something I just had to deal with until I could get the limbs repaired, and there was only one person I trusted to do that. The SUV had a baseball cap in it, which was good enough to hide the bloody head wound.

  That evening, I cut back through Colorado, and the next morning rested outside Albuquerque. There was barely any mention of the dead. One feed mentioned law enforcement stumbling across the bodies of six known operatives for Central American drug lords. It sounded like one of the paranoid bunker types out to sell doomsday preppers magical nutrients and miracle solutions.

  Another vehicle change, some clothes appropriated from a dry cleaner, and I was on my way into Arizona. I turned north, off the big interstate, at Flagstaff, passed through Vegas, and was in Utah in no time. I picked up the interstate again at Salt Lake City, and shortly before dawn, I reached Emmett, Idaho. Main Street unfurled ahead of me—cracked asphalt, dull dividing lines. The Payette River rolled by on my right, black in the occasional light. I’d spent many nights of my childhood riding down the same street. There were still storefronts I recalled—gray stone facades, family businesses—from too many trips to count. The police station and jail where my father had spent time, and the courthouse where he had finally discovered that, yes, even a hard man like him could pay for acts he thought were his right; the city’s only Chinese restaurant; the McDonald’s where I’d finally broken up with Margo before heading off to boot camp.

  It was all still there, untouched, as if the place were protected by a giant force field that hel
d back time.

  The truck I’d liberated in Utah nearly died as I pulled up to the rickety gate of my mother’s farm. The chain was rusted, the lock cold to the touch but silver-white, untarnished.

  I pulled the truck off to the side of the road and climbed over the gate, carrying the bundle of clothes and stash of weapons with me. With the headache blowing up like it was, straight lines were out of the question, so I meandered. The house that had been my childhood home seemed to glare at me as I passed, black windows evaluating me coldly. I paused before the front door, remembering the last time I’d slept inside, then weaved around the path to the back. To the west was the barn: shadow-filled, mostly empty except for some tools and a tractor that still wore its familiar green and yellow colors. My fishing boat was gone. Sold. A few hundred feet back from the house was a smaller place, an oversized shack. Badly in need of paint, with grimy windows and weatherworn clapboards, it was more inviting, with warmer memories.