Snow had started to fall outside the block building, and the roofs and windshields of the black government vehicles were no longer visible. Forecasters predicted eight to ten inches with this storm and cautioned that there might be even more than that if the storm were to stall, or slow. One of the security detail reached inside the first Blazer and pulled out the cigarette lighter. After walking the perimeter of the building for half an hour, he began to feel the effects of the cold wind and snow. Usually, a briefing for a mission took place before engagement, but in this case, they hadn’t prepared. He and the other guards inside agreed to take half hour shifts. The heat that radiated from the red glow of the lighter, felt good on his face. The guard lit his cigarette, then cupped his hands around the lighter. After a minute, he plugged the lighter back into its holder on the dashboard. His cigarette tasted good to him. It had been hours since his last one, and he was feeling the stress. His blood yearned for the nicotine. He smiled, as the smoke gave him a false sense of calmness. His heart began to beat faster, as his arteries slowly contracted. He, like so many other people, was killing himself.
He knew how polluted his lungs were, and how bad it was for him, but his body overtook his mind. His body’s addiction to the nicotine, reprogrammed his mind to accept the consequences, for that one moment of satisfaction.
Inside the building, McBride smiled and winked to Richard who stood alone in the observation lounge. The man in the lab coat stood with his back turned to McBride and prepared a tape recorder, to document the conversation he and McBride were about to have.
Richard smiled back at McBride, knowing that he had something to work with. Not sure of what that was, he could do nothing but wait.
“I think we’re all set here. Now, Mr. McBride. My name is Welch. Dr. Leonard Welch,” he said as he turned around, “and I have some questions I would like to ask you.”
Richard’s eyes lit up. He knew the name Welch but also knew he was only a doctor in title. The reputation, that made its way through the grapevine, was that Welch was an interrogator. Richard remembered Welch’s slip of the tongue, a few moments earlier, when he stuck the needle into Richard’s arm.
McBride sat back in the chair, with his hands and feet bound behind him, before noticing the concern on Richard’s face. Although he could no longer get a fix on Richard’s thoughts, he could feel the excitement in his body. The adrenaline. The look Richard had also helped quite a bit. The color seemed to run out of him, after he heard Welch’s name. Something wasn’t quite right about him, but McBride had to find out what he wanted. Who Welch worked for would be the goal, but McBride would settle for anything to go on. “Shoot.”
“Hopefully, it won’t come to that.” The doctor laughed. “I would like to know why you have come to Colorado.”
“I like to ski.”
“Yes, the skiing here is quite nice.” Dr. Welch was an expert in interrogation. His art was perfected over time, and he knew that the best way to get the answers he wanted, wasn’t to jump right into punishment. You can catch more flies with honey, then you can with vinegar. “Why have you come with Dr. Walker?”
McBride thought that if Welch wanted to play, then he would oblige. “Because we are old friends, and we haven’t had a chance like this for a long time.”
Welch smiled. “Alright, Mr. McBride. I see.” He had hoped that would happen. McBride didn’t cooperate, and that made his job fun. He liked interrogating people. It was what he was good at, and he felt the more stubborn the person, the more pleasure he would get from it. “I was really hoping for your cooperation,” he lied.
“I answered your questions.”
“Yes, sir, you have, but I was hoping for the truth.”
“Then why don’t you tell me why I am here.”
“You’re here, because your friend Dr. Walker has unanswered questions about your abilities.”
McBride ran the scenario through his head in an instant. Welch was good. Very good. But the red color in his friend’s face above, told McBride that he was lying. It might be true that Dr. Walker still had questions, but that was not why McBride was there. Something or someone else put this together. “Abilities? What abilities?”
“Now, now. Let’s not be too stubborn. We’re all friends here. We just want to know how you’ve gotten along for the last twenty years. How your talents have come along.”
“My talents? What, you want to know how I’ve learned to cut the grass, or bring in the harvest? I can ride a bike too and chew gum.”
Welch loved it when they became stupid. It was so much more fun when he did bring punishment. “I see Mr. McBride, that we’re not going to get along like I had hoped. But that’s all right.” He paused as he rose and put a doctor’s bag on the only countertop in the room. “I have a reputation which I must say I’m proud of. I’m quite respected in our community.”
“Community?”
“What would you call it? A brotherhood perhaps?”
“There are so many names for it, the government, the CIA, The Company. I like to refer to it as the Department of Venereal Disease,” McBride spat out. “But if you prefer to call it a community, when in Rome…”
“Ah, yes. Rome is beautiful, isn't it?”
“Don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
“Really? That’s not what I’ve heard.”
McBride was intrigued. He had been in Rome the year before, but very few people knew.
“Then you’ve heard wrong,” he lied. Twenty years earlier, when he’d left, he had vowed he would never lie again, but once he received the first package, he’d realized that a goal like that was unrealistic. From then on, the lies flowed, but only when given a mission. He hated it, but he had no choice.
“Weren’t you there, just last year?” Welch raised his hands and made the quote-unquote signs with both his hands. “As a tourist? Isn’t that your M.O.?”
“M.O.? What are you talking about?”
Welch appeared to be happy. There, in front of him, was the fabled assassin, John McBride, known only in certain circles of the elite, yet feared by them all except Welch. He had McBride against the ropes. Yes, he was quite pleased, that he alone was able to capture such a prize. On the desk in front of him, was a file two inches thick, and he opened it.
No thoughts escaped this scrawny looking man, but he was very calm, and that's where McBride needed him to be, if he were to succeed. He had a plan, and though somewhat excited himself about being questioned, it would only be a few moments before he put his plan in motion. He was almost there.
Welch’s idea of a good time was a little different. His plan was to break McBride, simply because he thought he could. He had been hired to bring McBride in and get information from him, which he would do, but he wanted more from their encounter. He was sick with it. He needed to break McBride, just to stroke his own ego. Just to satisfy his own sick pleasure. “Let’s see, last year you were in Rome and left one day before a certain dignitary was admitted in the local hospital and died from a heart attack.”
“So? What does that mean?”
Welch flipped a few pages in the file. “Two months before that, you were in Hawaii, staying at the same resort as another dignitary who drowned while snorkeling.” He continued to flip pages in the manilla folder. “And again, in London four months prior to that, you boarded a plane back to the states one week after the passing of a French dignitary, who apparently died of an overdose. That one was interesting, because you stayed a whole week after.”
“I liked visiting London. Have you ever been on the Jack the Ripper tour?” McBride toyed with Welch. He didn't like that someone put a file together on him, and Welch had only flipped through last year’s targets. There were years of the same types of coincidences, and only the person or entity that sent him the packages could have put the coincidences together. He needed to know who they were, and why they made him a target. His mind raced. Hadn’t he accomplished the tasks they gave him? Hadn’t he followed the directions, having each mark perish as prescribed? Synapses shot into hyper drive. The chill he felt, when he first arrived from the frosty air outside, and the dampness in the concrete bunker, began to subside. He was heating up. He wondered why they would keep a file on him, knowing that such documentation could be their undoing, whoever they were.
Then, he was sure. There wasn’t a they. Not there anyway. There was only him. It was Welch. He acted independently. The file was his. Of course, they wouldn’t keep evidence so incriminating. They would have been out of business years ago, by all the different oversight committees. Agencies scrutinizing one another, was how checks and balances were kept.
McBride had it. The anger swelled, not in him, but in the guard outside. The cold must have worn down the shielding they were given, and he saw an image of a trophy. That’s what he was to Welch, just a conquest. As he tried to read the man in front of him, he projected at another.
He flooded the guard with feelings the second he got through. Twenty years of practice gave him the advantage he needed against whatever shield they had come up with to block him. The guard stomped out his cigarette and opened the heavy steel door giving him access to the heat inside. He had not been relieved, and his hands and face were numb. His instincts told him to go inside to warm up, and the other two guards stood just inside the door. When the door opened, they were startled.
“Which one of you was supposed to relieve me?” he shouted. They were only five minutes late for the changing of the guard, but with McBride’s help, this guard was enraged. Like a wounded animal intent on charging the hunter. “Well, which one?”
The taller of the two responded. “We haven’t even discussed that yet. Besides, it’s only been a half hour. What are you worried about?”
Still covered with snow, the cold enraged guard, reached into his jacket, pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol, and shot both of the other guards dead. That left only the guard who stood just outside the lab where McBride and Welch were.
McBride knew that Welch snapped out of his happy place, the second he heard the shots. Welch believed that no one would find them there, in that isolated place, but when the back of the fourth guards head exploded, a millisecond after the third shot rang out, fear crashed into him, like a tidal wave. McBride slid right in after Welch and took hold of his fear.
“Easy now, Dr. Welch. First things first.” The first guard was just outside the locked door, and McBride knew he only had a minute or so before he would get in. “Doctor, you should untie me, if I am to help you.”
Whimpering, like a scolded child, the doctor quietly said, “I can’t. You will hurt me.” Fear radiated through him, and tears streamed down his cheeks.
“No, I won’t hurt you. I will protect you,” replied McBride in a soft soothing tone. It was true that he couldn’t project or read thoughts through the serum they were given, but the animal instincts that humans have learned to ignore over the thousands of years still flowed through every one of us. Fear being the strongest, gave him enough of an arsenal to take down a bear.
Welch stepped behind the chair and untied him. McBride stood, and Welch reached into the doctor’s bag that still sat on the countertop. Shots rang out once again, as the remaining guard destroyed the locked doorknob. As the door swung open, the quivering Welch shoved a scalpel through the guard’s eye, and into his brain. The pain was only for an instant, and another shot rang out. Both men fell to the floor dead.
McBride stepped over their bodies, and hurried past them, before too much blood began to drain out. Richard met him by the steel door, and both stepped over the bodies of the other guards, and out into the cold.
“An interesting presentation John,” said Richard. “I guess my serum didn’t work.”
McBride didn't need to feel the fear he felt from his friend. He could hear it in his voice. “No, it works. But only to suppress thought projection. In, and Out, Dr. Walker.” Then he smiled at Richard again, still trying to prove that people can project their thoughts. Richard smiled back, but it was a forced. He was scared, and McBride knew it.
McBride was scared too and energized. The energy he felt, was like what he’d felt twenty years prior. It was powerful. It made him feel powerful, and that scared him. Because he liked it.
Formula-1215
Copyright © 2022 Formula-1215 - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.