“Something like that.” I looked at the bloody remains of the Russian team.

Top said, “Any idea what the hell we just stepped into, Cap’n?”

“I’m starting to,” I said but didn’t elaborate. “It seems pretty clear that there were at least two teams down here searching for the same stuff.”

“Three teams,” said Top, “if Jigsaw’s down here somewhere.”

I didn’t comment on that. If Jigsaw was in Deep Iron and hadn’t come to investigate the gunfire, then it meant that they weren’t able to. Top read my face and didn’t pursue it. Bunny was watching us both and he cursed under his breath.

The flashlights did a good job of lighting the room. The firefight with the Russians had taken place in one corner, over by the door through which we’d come. That part of the room was a charnel house of mangled bodies. I’d seen a lot of death and I’d caused a lot of death, but there was something about this that was jabbing wires into my brain. I wanted to turn away, but I knew that would be the wrong choice. Denial is always a bear trap-you’ll forget about it and step in it later.

Top pulled the magazine from his M4, saw that he was down to three rounds, and replaced it with a full one. “Cap’n, either I’m getting too old for this shit or we nearly got our asses handed to us by just two guys. They were winning, too, until you shanked one in the mouth.”

“No joke,” said Bunny. “One of those guys knocked my rifle out of my hands-and not to blow my own horn, but that’s not so easy to do. So I laid into him, hit him four times. Two uppercuts, a hook to the ribs, and an overhand right. I might as well have been brushing lint off his lapels.” Bunny had twenty-two-inch biceps and could bench 460. When he laid a combination into a pair of boxing mitts, whoever was holding them went numb to the wrists. Bunny’s blue eyes looked deeply spooked. “Son of a bitch didn’t even grunt. It’s not doing a lot for my self-esteem.”

“He’s right, Cap’n,” Top agreed. “I put a full mag into both of those assholes and it barely even knocked them back. Sure as hell didn’t knock them down. I think we’re seeing a new kind of body armor, something that absorbs impact like nothing I ever seen. It was only when I went for a head shot that he turned tail and ducked behind the boxes. But… until then I was slowing him down, but I wasn’t hurting him.”

“Nobody’s got body armor that good,” Bunny said.

“I may have clipped one of them in the leg-the one you didn’t stab-because he was limping when he went out the door. He should have been Swiss cheese, though. And, considering how strong these guys were, maybe we’re looking at an exoskeleton. They’ve been working on that stuff for-”

Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard, Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”

“Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with all the confusion-”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had something extra, so we’re lucky we were able to turn the tables on them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”

“Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m okay with that.”

They stood on either side of me and looked at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere, but most of the floor was clear.

“Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find much, but we have to look.”

“Balls,” murmured Bunny.

“Then I want to move the remains to that section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were no boxes.

“Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked Top.

“Because we have work to do and we don’t want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”

He nodded.

I squatted down and began searching the dead Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me, none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose, and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily substances the room was getting ripe.

As expected, the search yielded nothing. No ID. Nothing.

Without saying a word we began moving the bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of thing before in Iraq-pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond the capability of the rational mind to associate this with deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from a guy like me-someone who’s killed people with guns, knives, grenades, garrotes, and bare hands-but there is a difference between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly clinical. This was… what? The two brutes we chased out of here had done this to the Russians here and to the staff upstairs. They had enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an opponent-say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head-had given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it. Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another person… and I believed that’s what I was seeing here.

As this was going through my head, Top muttered three words that said it all.

“This is evil.”

Bunny and I looked at him and then each other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put his finger on it. This was evil.

WHEN WE WERE done we washed our hands from our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover the corpses as best we could.

I turned and surveyed the rest of the room. Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all that was stored here was paper.

“Top, Bunny… the guys we chased off, did they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records? Anything?”

“Not that I saw, unless it was small enough to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going, Cap’n?”

“We’re staying for the moment. If those guys with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to guarantee a safe run back.”

“I’m good with that, Cap’n,” said Top. “Don’t know about you fellas, but I’ve never been roared at by enemy combatants. Can’t seem to get that noise out of my mind.”

Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that’s hitting ten on my freak-o-meter, too.”

“All the more reason to stay put,” I said. “We’re secure in here. Besides, if they didn’t take anything, then that means that it’s still here.” I went over to the wall so I could see the room better and assess its layout. “We still have our primary mission objective, so we need to go through these records. We have at least two players-the Russians and the other team-who think this stuff is worth killing a lot of people over. Let’s find out why.”

It was clear from the expressions on Bunny’s and Top’s faces that they didn’t like it any more than I did.

“If those guys are on their way out of here then they’re going to run into Brick,” Bunny said. “It’d be just him against them.”

Top snorted. “Him in an armored vehicle with a minigun. Body armor be damned.”

Bunny grinned, but it was mostly faked. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Either way, it’s beyond our control,” I said. “We’ll leave that up to the gods of war. In the meantime let’s get to it. We’ve been behind the curve on this thing all along. Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell’s going on.”

So we set to work… but as we worked we each listened to the big silence outside of the storage unit. Listening for the sound of elevators, for the shout of familiar official voices, for the sound of footsteps running with that precise speed that you only hear with SWAT or special ops teams. We heard nothing.