[stmercy2020]

I know, I know- everyone thought I'd vanished off the face of the writing Earth.  Didn't actually happen, but it was starting to feel like it.  ::)  It's gonna be awhile before I get anything else written up- I don't want to take so long, you understand, but I'm smack dab in the middle of my marking period, and all the work is piling up in a big way, just now.  Anyway, here's chapter seven- let me know what you think, as I'm rather pleased with this one.

Cold Fury
by: stmercy2020

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Chapter One: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5697.0/
Chapter Two: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5705.0/
Chapter Three: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5731.0/
Chapter Four: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5767.0/
Chapter Five: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5883.0/
Chapter Six: http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,5975.0/

Chapter Seven
Tris finally confronts Mr. Kim while various plot-threads finally begin to draw together.

November 2000
Li Jung-Bae regarded the tall Spaniard with reptilian frigidity.  “You have quite the nerve, Mr. Renaldo,” he said quietly in English, “to come to my offices to announce your failure.”

Renaldo smiled thinly.  “It’s just Renaldo,” he said dryly, “no honorific.  And I thought it would be only appropriate for me to deliver this information to you in person and as quickly as possible.  If you have a contingency plan, this would be the time to activate it.”

Mr. Li grunted.  “Very well.  I trust you understand that your services are no longer required.  I expect you will be refunding the good-faith advance you received?”

“I expect I won’t.  I already spent quite a bit of that money, and it wasn’t my fault that you neglected to mention Mr. Kim’s bodyguard.  The contract you signed said nonrefundable, and I meant it.”

Mr. Li narrowed his eyes.  “We had no intelligence on any bodyguards for Mr. Kim save the ones he always has close to him.  You said you could handle them.  Is this a new player?”

“She wasn’t mentioned in any of your briefings, Mr. Li.  I would have noticed.”

Mr. Li chewed his lip, then turned his laptop around to face Renaldo.  On the screen was footage from a security camera of several guards fighting someone in the hallway outside.  “You say her… Was it this woman?”

Renaldo’s eye twitched slightly, but he gave no other sign of recognition.  “I really couldn’t say, Mr. Li- that footage doesn’t ever really show her clearly.”

“I see.  Very well, Renaldo.  You may go- I have no further use for you.”

Renaldo stood soundlessly and left.

After he had closed the door, Jung-Bae touched a button on his intercom.  “Tell the beta team that they have a go.  I want Yong-Sook on a slab by lunchtime.  Get ahold of Mr. Giancarlo for me.  Something needs to be done about Renaldo’s failure.  And his disloyalty.”

*****

Special Agent Marie Cunningham walked purposefully to her car, keys in hand.  She wore her purse loosely over her left shoulder, the bag within easy reach of her hand, putting her holdout piece nearly within her grasp.  She felt she had calmed down enough to leave the building without arousing suspicions, but she still felt that itchy feeling between her shoulderblades.

“Marie?”  The voice startled her and she jumped just a little before she recognized it.

“Jesus!  God, hi Felix,” she remarked, getting control of her voice.  Felix was a middle-aged man who worked mainly in archives, these days.  Rumor had it that he had been a field agent, once, but the stress had gotten to him and he was shunted to a less demanding position.  Marie didn’t know him well- just occasionally passing him in the halls and meetings over the coffeemaker in the breakroom- but he had always seemed nice enough.

“Hi, Marie- do you have a minute?” he asked, approaching from her left side.  “I have a question about a case you’re working on.”  Marie had nearly relaxed when something about the way he was moving set her teeth on edge.  He was coming just a little too quickly, holding a file folder protectively in front of his chest.  His right hand was actually inside the folder, she realized as he got closer.  He started to pull his hand free and Marie threw herself away from her car, reaching into her purse to grab her Glock .23.  As she fell, she saw three more men stepping from the shadows and heard the sound of a large engine starting.

Felix’s first shot went high and wide, his silenced pistol making a faint popping noise before it shattered the driver’s side window of Marie’s sporty little ZR1.  Marie’s return fire was more accurate, her first shot nailing Felix high on the right side of his chest.  Her second shot missed completely as she hit the ground and jammed her shoulder, but her third shot was good, a solid hit directly in Felix’s ample gut.

The other men were on top of her before she could roll to her feet or readjust her aim, though, and one of them stomped down hard on her outstretched hand, crushing the fragile bones and rendering her gun useless.  Marie tried to curl into a ball, tried to keep them from being able to get a clean shot at her vitals, but there were too many of them.  One of them- a big man, tall and thick, kicked at her head and she flinched away, bringing her free arm up to protect herself.  Another man kicked her in her exposed stomach, making her retch, and she thought she felt ribs crack.

“Quit screwing around,” one of them growled, “get her in the damn va-“

He never finished his sentence, as his face exploded in a gory mist.  The crack of the rifle came simultaneously with his sudden demise, and was followed by four more shots very rapidly.  The weight of her assailants disappeared instantly, and Marie started to roll to her feet.

“Stay down, detective,” a voice growled, surprisingly close to her.  From her prone position, she saw a large van careen out of control and smash into the parking structure’s retaining wall.  After a moment, a man approached her from where he had been hidden not fifty feet away.  He was short, but powerfully built, and he moved with the confidence and grace of a jungle predator.  His dress marked him as some sort of agent- a SWAT member on active duty, or a marine in battle dress- but seemed too expensive and carefully maintained for traditional government service.  He carried a rifle, an M14, she thought, and he held it ready, but low.

After checking for any additional hostiles, he knelt down next to Marie.  “Good evening, detective- my name’s Duncan Boyd.  I think you’d better come with me.”

*****

The rifle shot on the mountain had not gone unnoticed down in the palace below.  Jun cursed as Mr. Kim’s bodyguards closed in around him and started to escort him to the entrance.  Without a distance weapon of her own, there wasn’t much she could do except observe as a dozen large, black-suited men surrounded her target and hustled him away.

Jun hailed Tris on her radio.  It only had a short range, just under a mile in these conditions, but Tris was just inside the umbrella now, so the contact was weak and patchy, but there.

“Go ahead,” came Tris’s voice, panting and breathless.  Jun knew she’d been running nearly flat out for over an hour, now.  The fact that she had any voice left at all was impressive.

“Kim’s on the move, surrounded by security.  Advise abort.”  It was Jun’s opinion that the operation was now to risky to complete.  Her instincts said to give it up and try again another day.

Tris, apparently, didn’t agree.  “No.  We won’t get a better chance.  How many security are we talking about, here?”

Jun looked down and started to count, but then a new activity broke out on the ground as a swarm of grey-suited men started closing on Mr. Kim’s security perimeter.  Her first thought was that there had been an outer perimeter and that Tris had somehow alerted them, but they started moving in on Mr. Kim’s bodyguards and then she saw brief flashes of light and heard the sharp popping noise of small arms being discharged.

The entire courtyard dissolved into sudden, mad chaos as hundreds of civilians heard the gunshots and panicked.  “Tris- we have a serious situation.  Can’t get a good count- too many people moving around- but there’s another group in the field moving in on Kim.”

“Okay,” Tris came back, her voice still ragged, but firm, calm and certain.  “I need you to spot for me, get me pointed the right way.  I’m going to get Kim and his family out of there.”

*****

One thing about mandatory military training, Tris thought, at least the civilians have the right instincts.  Tris was fighting her way towards the front of Gyeongbokgung, but the press of flesh was making it extremely difficult; Korean men were directing their wives and children away from the sound of gunfire, keeping their bodies low.  So far, the retreat seemed remarkably well-ordered- there was some pushing, but not as much as Tris had seen even at some of the rowdier football games she’d been to.

Tris, on the other hand, was trying to slip her body up towards the fighting, and she didn’t really have time to be nice about it.  She shoved hard against one woman, elbowed a man in the face when he didn’t move out of her way quickly enough, and vaulted over him as he started to fall prone.  Less than a minute later, she broke through into the open.

Quickly scanning the area, Tris realized she was in a largely open dirt field.  Several trees were clustered just to the north, and various shrubs were planted along the southern border.  Directly to the east was the National Folk Museum and looking down from the roof was Jun.  Kim’s bodyguards appeared to be attempting to direct the man and his family into the heavily constructed building, probably in an effort to maximize their cover, but Tris could see several of the grey-suited enemies moving to block their progress.

As she entered the scene, Tris identified her targets.  There were actually only three gunmen among the bad guys, she realized, and their positions were somewhat carelessly clustered near to each other.  There were probably a dozen other bad guys, though, although they were hanging back to let the gunmen finish up their work.  The gunmen had two Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine guns between them, while the third was using a Magnum Desert Eagle, although not terribly proficiently.  In fact, Tris realized, none of them were acting like particularly skilled operators- not that they needed to be at the range they were firing from.  Several of Kim’s bodyguards were already down, and Tris didn’t think that all of them would be getting up again.

Dropping to one knee, Tris took aim at the shooters.  She was still far enough away that nobody had yet noticed her.  She fired quickly, working from left to right along the gunmen.  She double-tapped the first machinegunner with two shots to the head, dropping and killing him instantly.  The second machinegunner she shot before the first even had a chance to start falling, hitting him twice in the arm and a third time in the center of his neck, the heavy bullet ripping out his trachea, jugular veins, and carotid arteries in a massive spray of bright red blood.  The pistoleer was still in the process of turning to the new threat, his face covered in his partner’s arterial spray, when Tris blew him away with a pair of shots to the face and neck.

Most of the grey men hadn’t actually been watching the gunners, opting instead to keep their eyes on their targets and just waiting for the gunfire to cease.  Now that the last gunshots were echoing off the nearby buildings, they started closing on the Kim family.  Only a few men noticed that the reason the gunners had stopped shooting was that they were all dead or dying, and they turned in alarm to try and locate the new threat.  Tris charged them with a yell, drawing her other pistol and launching into the lead opponent with a perfectly timed flying kick.  His head snapped back as his jaw shattered and dislocated and his neck overtorqued and broke cleanly.  Tris landed on his body and pumped a single shot into his face, turning to engage the next two enemies even as they tried to bring their own weapons to bear.

Tris blocked one man’s clumsy knife thrust with a hard blow to his forearm and followed it up by pistol-whipping the man on her backstroke.  The other man swung a short club in a vicious arc at Tris’s head, but she had already pivoted into a new position, redirecting his stroke into a graceful throw that would’ve looked choreographed if it hadn’t ended in a bone-crushing faceplant at the end.  She shot that man twice, once in the knees, a second time in the center of his back.  Pivoting again, she realized that the man she’d pistolwhipped hadn’t finished falling yet, and she thrust the barrel of her gun hard against his subclavicle notch to drive him down hard.  As she felt his body hit the earth, she squeezed off another shot, ensuring that he’d stay there.

With her nearest opponents dealt with, Tris surveyed the area again, choosing her next targets.  Kim’s bodyguards were still fighting, but there were only a few of them left, while the grey-suited men outnumbered them perhaps three-to-one.  Tris reholstered her guns and moved towards the melee, drawing a pair of short, sharp daggers in the process.

*****

Duncan and the detective stopped at a bar in Westland, a gloriously tacky strip club by the rather unimaginative name of ‘KnockOuts,’ where the two ‘O’s had been made exceptionally large so as two resemble a pair of breasts pressed together.  Duncan took her by the elbow and guided her to a corner table.

She hadn’t said a word since Duncan had saved her life in the parking garage, but she had been watching him, and her eyes seemed to record every detail about him that could be seen.  Duncan sat down and ordered a couple of Budweisers.  “Well, detective?  You’ve had quite the eyeful- did it answer all your questions?”

She swallowed, then shook her head.  “Duncan Boyd, you said?”  Duncan nodded.  “I’m Special Agent Marie Cunningham.”

She appeared to be about to say something else, then changed her mind.  She took a breath and held it for a moment, then released it.  Finally, she said, “I want to thank you for saving my life.”

Duncan chuckled a little, grimly, “You’re welcome, Marie, although I can’t claim it was all altruism on my part.”

“I didn’t imagine it was, in that getup,” she said, referring to the now-hidden combat gear.  He was not a pretty man, she realized, with his deeply tanned skin and dark features, his black hair and neatly-trimmed moustache- his face was too careworn and craggy to be beautiful, but it was striking.  Something about the eyes seemed familiar, too.  “So what can I do for you then, Mr. Boyd?”

“Truth to tell, I’m not certain,” he admitted.  “You’re investigating someone, though, and I have in interest- Devin Andersen.”

Marie’s eyebrows shot up.  “That was quick,” she commented softly.  “Why do you want to know about him?”

Duncan’s eyes glittered in the dim light, and she saw the tension building in his shoulders.  “That man took my daughter,” he said simply.

Marie nodded.  “I don’t know if I’ll actually be any help, then,” she commented.  “I wasn’t actually investigating Andersen- his name popped up in the middle of my investigation of my partner, Mitch Brody.”

She noted the sudden twitch at his temple- he was very controlled, but the name clearly meant something to him.  “You’ve met?” she asked.

He nodded.  “Brody confirmed Andersen’s bona fides with the National Clandestine Services before they recruited Tris.”

The connection clicked in Marie’s mind.  Duncan Boyd was the father of a girl that Marie had come across during the investigation of reputed mobster Felipe Dominguez.  She had had the bad luck to stumble into the middle of an exchange between Dominguez and another man, still unidentified.  She had killed one man, crippled two more in the ensuing melee.  One of the men she had crippled had been an undercover agent named Romeo Lopez.

“This is out of my depth,” she muttered.  “Okay.  Maybe we can help each other…”

*****

Tris’s attack on the grey-suited attackers and Kim’s remaining bodyguards was swift, precise, and devastating.  Once again, surprise was to her advantage, and she grabbed the first man within range, one of the attackers, and cut deeply around his arm, slicing through the biceps, the triceps, and the brachial artery.  He dropped his weapon and clutched at his arm to try and slow the sudden gusher of blood, but Tris almost casually hammered him in the temple, dropping him in a limp pile as she pivoted to her next victim.  This man was more aware and had brought his sword- who the hell brings a sword to a fight in the real world, Tris wondered- around in front of him like a skilled kendoka.  Tris didn’t even hesitate, feinting with her left dagger and drawing his sword slightly out of line.  A flick of her wrist buried her other dagger in his groin and he fell with a scream.  Tris dropped with him, hammering his deltoid with her now-empty fist.  He released his grip and Tris grabbed his sword, feeling the heft of the blade.

One of the bodyguards, concentrating on another attacker, stepped too close and Tris smashed him in the face with the tsuba.  He staggered back, but Tris grabbed him by the lapels, supporting his weight as she brought him in close and then flipped him into one of the attackers.  She pounced on their supine forms, tossing her other dagger away, and smashed their heads together hard, rendering them both senseless for a few seconds.  Someone, she couldn’t make out if it was one of Kim’s attackers or defenders, tried to stomp on her in the back, and she rolled with it, tucking the sword at her waist so that she came to her feet standing with the sword in hand.  Without pausing, she stepped back in and cut down across the man’s body from left shoulder to right hip.  She felt the blade catch and wedge in the bone and she left it there, shoving the corpse away from her.

A weighted chain whistled through the air at her face and Tris dropped to a three-point bridge, allowing the heavy ball to reach its full extension exactly where the center of her skull had been an instant before.  With her free hand she caught the chain and tugged lightly.  The man on the other end pulled back hard and Tris allowed him to pull her upright and over into a diving tackle.  She rolled off his body, then rolled back to deliver a hard elbow to the man’s chest.  She felt the sternum crack under arm, but was pretty sure the man wasn’t finished yet.  Rolling up to her knees, she planted her fist hard against his jaw, turning him off like switching off a light.

Looking up, she saw that Kim’s two remaining bodyguards had nearly gotten his family up the stairs leading into the Folk Museum.  “Not that way,” she yelled at them in Korean, “get him to a subway!”

There were only a couple attackers left, and Tris dealt with them both with almost negligent ease, crushing one man’s larynx with a quick chop and dropping the other with a swift crescent kick to his temple.  She stomped on the second man’s knee, crippling him, and started after Kim and his family.  Walking swiftly, Tris moved to intercept the guards.  They both drew pistols and aimed them at her.

Tris put her hands in front of her, palms out, holding their attention as she advanced.  Jun stepped from the entrance to the building and placed her pistol against Kim’s temple.  Tris shrugged.  “I warned you,” she commented wryly.

The two guards started to turn, realizing something was amiss, and Tris dodged sideways, then ran at them over the intervening space of about five meters.  The man closer to her managed to squeeze off a shot, but Tris’s erratic movement threw off his aim and he missed by a fairly wide margin.  Tris was on top of him before he could get another shot off, clamping her hand down hard over the slide of the pistol.  With a jerk, she forced his gun down, then backfisted him hard enough to make his teeth rattle.  As he fell, Tris tried to grab his coat to keep his body in front of hers, but the fabric tore and he slumped bonelessly at her feet.

His partner had steadier aim and Tris had no cover, but he hesitated for a fraction of a second, just long enough for Tris to bounce over the fallen man in front of her and slam her shoulder into the center of his body.  They both went down in a heap with Tris on top, and she grabbed his gun arm and banged it hard against the concrete steps.  Radius and ulna snapped and he dropped his gun with a grunt, his face going white with pain.  Even so, he reached across his body with his other arm and grabbed Tris by the shoulder, rolling her over so that he landed up on top of her and inside her guard.  Tris quickly brought her legs up and caught his neck and injured arm in the bend of her knee.  Straightening her other leg, Tris quickly applied the triangle choke to good effect and the last guard lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.

Tris rolled the guards unconscious body off of her and got back to her feet, looking at Kim and his family.  The businessman had moved to place his body between Tris and his children, but had frozen when he felt Jun’s pistol behind him.  His eyes were wide and there was a light sheen of sweat glazing his forehead.  Tris felt sorry for him- he quite clearly had no idea why he was being persecuted, nor had he any idea of whether to feel relieved or not.

“Mr. Kim,” Tris began, keeping her voice gentle and her hands open and in plain sight, “I am not here for your family.  Please believe me when I tell you I mean them no harm.”  Evidently, this was the right thing to say, because much of the tension went out of his shoulders.

“What do you want with me?” he asked uncertainly.

Tris considered for a moment.  “I want to save your life,” Tris said finally.

He looked uncertain, and Tris hurried on.  “I represent people who have an interest in some work that you’ve been doing.  I’ve been sent to retrieve you.

“Now, you need to make a choice.  Either you come with me right now, quietly, or you put up a struggle and maybe you get away.  If that happens, I don’t know how long it will be before your enemy tries to have you killed again.”  Kim started to object, but Tris overrode him.

“He’s already tried twice today, whoever he is.  It was just your fortune that I was here to stop him.  Next time you might not be so lucky.”

“Next time,” Jun added quietly, “he might be less discriminating.”

That drew him up short, and he glanced at his family.  His wife looked solid enough, but his young daughter appeared very small and frightened.  “Will I ever see them again?” he asked after a moment.

“I don’t know,” Tris admitted, “but if you’re alive, the chance is always there.”

He nodded.  “Very well, then, I will go with you.”

*****

Tris lay on her bed reading her social studies homework, but her mind wasn’t really focused.  Ms. Kalen had seemed uncharacteristically pleased when Tris had stepped off the plane with Mr. Kim.  It wasn’t anything she said, in particular, but the matronly woman had given Tris the impression that she was both surprised and relieved to have Tris back in London, tired but unscathed.  She’d even given Tris a full week off from scheduled training, although Tris wasn’t sure that she wanted it.

“Stay home,” Susan had said, “relax.  Catch up on your homework.”  Tris was now doing pretty much exactly that.  She had called Bethany and learned what she was supposed to work on.  Naturally, there was a lot of reading, but Tris’s photographic memory helped her to make short work of that.

As hard as she tried, she just couldn’t set aside her adventure in Korea.  She had killed men there and she’d done so without hesitation or mercy.  It wasn’t the first time she’d ever killed someone- she knew that- but always before she had been in mortal danger and, she liked to think, the people she had killed had deserved it.  Now she wasn’t so sure, and the thought was gnawing at her sense of self.

There was a quiet rapping on her bedroom door which she immediately recognized as Bethany’s tentative knock.  She forced her mind back to the present.  “Come,” she called.

Bethany entered the room.  Her face was scrubbed clean, her blonde hair glistening and nearly white, the light freckles across her nose and cheeks made all the more prominent by the complete absence of sweat or grime on her face.  Her liquid blue eyes were slightly downcast as she walked in, but Tris could instantly see the redness that indicated hard crying.

“My god, Bethany,” she breathed, “what is it?”

Slowly, Bethany looked up at her.  The pain in her eyes was tangible, a slap in the face.  At first she thought Bethany would try to cover it, to pretend that she was okay, but then Bethany seemed to crumple.  She didn’t sob, and she didn’t cry, but Tris could see now that she had.  Perhaps she had simply run out of tears.  “He came back,” Bethany said simply.

“Who?” Tris asked, suddenly alarmed.

“Jon.  From Neils’ party.  He came back and he…

“Oh, God.”

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