Read War in Heaven for Free Online Page B

liaison between the multitudes of compartmentalised intelligence agencies that confused the American government and military. He’d made a name for himself early in his career by running very black ops for the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Department. He was described as someone not afraid to make hard decisions. Or, from the perspective of people on the ground, he was a cunt who didn’t care how many people he got killed to make himself look good.
    No war record – he was too old, well over a hundred. He had of course been implicated when we revealed the Cabal to everyone. He’d been neck deep in their nasty shit but, according to the info Mudge had gleamed from God, had disappeared very quickly after the big reveal.
    Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.
    ‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.
    ‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.
    ‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.
    ‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.
    ‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.
    ‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.
    ‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.
    ‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.
    Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.

2
New Mexico
     
    We sat on the benches of the black copter opposite the three walking bruised egos that took the form of lower-echelon spooks. They’d optimistically asked for our weapons as we’d boarded the copter. We’d politely refused, Mudge had hit one, but I’d promised they could have their guns back at the end of the trip.
    They’d also been more than a little annoyed when we’d loaded the four-wheel-drive muscle car and the dirt bike into the back of the copter. I mean cars and bikes don’t grow on trees. We’d taken the time and the effort to steal them so we wanted to hold on to them. So the gunmen had spent most of the trip staring at us resentfully.
    It was my first trip to America. Or rather my first trip over the border into the America controlled by the American government. I didn’t get much of a chance to see it. Being in the back of some kind of military transport vehicle usually meant I was on my way somewhere to do something stupid, wasteful and dangerous. The journeys to and from said stupid, wasteful and dangerous things were often my only downtime. It had taken me a long time to learn the skill, but I could sleep anywhere, even in the back of these often noisy and always uncomfortable vehicles. I drifted off quite quickly. Careless perhaps, but I knew Rannu and Mudge had my back. They’d wake me when one of them wanted some rest.
    Heaven appeared to glow a blue-white colour. It reminded me of something, something dangerous. I wasn’t sure about opening my eyes but I felt good. In fact I felt the best I had in a very, very long time, presumably because I was no longer dying but was in fact dead. On the other hand, I remembered that I’d done an awful lot of bad things in my life, from stealing money from my parents to buy cigarettes when I was ten to killing a lot of people. Some in cold blood and some after I’d tortured them – those were the ones I felt most bad about