The Trinity Conspiracy-Betrayal at Black Mesa

I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and pushed back my hair. I had a Pelican case cuffed to my left wrist. The cold metal made a crease where the joint merged with my thumb. I had my sights on a forty-ish man, tall, thinning hair, wide studious forehead, wearing a suit and tie. He was following me. It was his close-set eyes that grabbed me. His mistake was staring. You don’t stare at strangers in crowded airports.

I was playing courier, but this was the wrong warm-up assignment for me. The guy who preceded me was pro, and he was hit by a car in the unique way a car may be steered as a weapon. The guy died on the street just last week. Hit and run. That got me called up from the minors. “Can you take a Pelican case out with you, Tuesday?” So here I am, waiting for my flight at Philadelphia International Airport, the first leg on the route to Santa Fe.

I stared at the Cyclops, and he turned away, speaking with a woman next to him. I thought to make the first move, to call him out. He’d been following me around long enough. Police were everywhere, all over Philly International. The country was still on high alert. But, no, I couldn’t go to the cops, even if I claimed I saw the Cyclops wore a gun. They would simply pat him down and discover that he was a good citizen badly used.That would earn me a sneer from the men in blue, and a smile from the Cyclops.

I’d have to take him on some other way, but all the odds fell in his favor. It would be an easy trick for him to brush me off and yell for help. Police! In the confusion, he could take me down with an injectable. An auto injector like an Epipen. That would do. A pinprick followed by sleep or a pinprick followed by death. I could imagine the ghoulish people crowding around me, thinking that I’d had a heart attack, lying there sweaty, dumb,and dying on the floor.

But the dead caused complications—cops and coroners and good-bye Pelican case. But if a man like me fell ill in a busy airport there would be every advantage. No cops required. I’d be anybody’s ambulance ride. The paramedics might already be waiting outside the terminal. That’s how they would do it. How he would do it—knock me out with an injectable, and cart me off in his ambulance. 

I needed a drink.