INCURSION: Knightmare (Knight's Bane Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  John continued excitedly pointing out technical details, but Noelle tuned him out. Instead, she walked a bit closer to Gretchen and asked her a question. "So, Gretchen. How does a government agency afford all these nifty toys and privileges? I can't imagine Congress approving this budget extravagance."

  Gretchen smiled at Noelle as they approached the stairs into the plane. She replied, "Because of our classification, we cannot really be expected to publish a budget now, can we? As part of Homeland Security, we have certain discretionary funds available, and you are all correctly identified as Special Agents of Homeland Security. But we also hold the patent on several items through dummy corporations and holding companies. Add those lucrative royalties to the appropriations, and we can fund you enough to do your job.

  "Very few agents ever retire from active service. You guys will live a rough life, so the Director believes that you should be taken care of while you are here. He looks out for everyone in Section 28, but he pampers the Incursion teams, and those of us who look out for you."

  One by one, the team members climbed the stairs and boarded the jet. Each one gazed in amazement at the plush leather seating and chrome and glass furnishings inside the plane. Each found a leather recliner and sank into its comfort. As Gretchen climbed aboard last, she leaned into the cockpit and said, "Alright Captain. We're all aboard, and the gear is stowed. Take off, please."

  As Gretchen sat in her seat and fastened her seatbelt, the noise from the engines shifted from a high-pitched whine to a roar, and the plane began to move. As it taxied to the end of the runway, the sleek jet paused momentarily as the captain received clearance from air traffic control. Given the priority code, the air controller cleared the traffic around the field and gave permission to the captain to take off. Both the captain and the co-pilot placed their hands on the throttle controls, and the captain pushed the throttle forward to its limit. Holding the brakes for a short second as the engines built thrust, the pilot released the brakes, and the jet leapt forward, clawing for the sky.

  The jet lifted off the runway. The pilot pulled the stick back toward him, and the plane climbed rapidly in a steep ascent. The co-pilot picked up his microphone and announced to their passengers that they would be landing in Pueblo, Colorado, in just under two-and-a-half hours.

  Agent Smith watched the jet until it disappeared from his sight. The senior agent turned from the bay windows in the mess hall and walked back to his office. Before he got there, his aide approached him and handed him a folder. Looking at the name on the folder, Smith looked at his assistant. "Has this been verified, Timothy? Do they really have him locked up?"

  "Yes, sir. Norfolk Police Department has him in jail awaiting trial. I don't know how we missed it, but he's been there for two months. I've had Logistics get a vehicle, and it's waiting outside. I've also arranged to have him transferred to a holding cell at the sheriff's office so you can talk to him."

  Smith smiled at Timothy. "Do you have anything stopping you from being my driver today?" Timothy shook his head, and Smith continued, "Then let's go catch a ghost."

  11

  GHOST

  NORFOLK, VIRGINIA.

  Jonas Vanhof sat in the holding cell at the Norfolk Sheriff's Office. He had been in custody for over two months and expected to spend the rest of his relatively short life in prison, at least until the Commonwealth of Virginia could execute him. It was all his fault that he had been caught. He had forgotten the first rule: don't be a hero. He should have left at the first screams, but he didn't. He had to play the hero.

  The police officers and sheriff deputies had found him with a body, freshly murdered. Jonas had been cleaning up his gear and getting ready to leave when the officers kicked in the door to the couple's house. As Jonas had run for the back yard, the sound of crashing glass announced more officers were waiting for him there. Trapped like a rat, he had fought back, using his considerable hand-to-hand combat skills. While no officers had been permanently disabled, several had to go to the hospital. It had taken three tasers to finally drop Jonas to the ground.

  Having been quickly denied bail, Jonas had waited to be assigned a public defender. His public defender had been frustrated when Jonas would not give her any answers about why he was there or give her any defense that she could use. She could not even get Jonas to plead temporary insanity as a defense. They were now just waiting for the trial.

  After two months in a jail cell, James was dragged out, put in shackles and leg irons, and transported to the sheriff's office. There he was placed in a holding cell and told to wait. None of his guards would give him any explanation, and Jonas just accepted it as his life. Sitting with his head down on his knees, Jonas heard the guard approach his cell, and then he heard the electronic lock disengage.

  At twenty-seven years old, this was not his first time in a cell. While awaiting trial, many of his fellow prisoners had thought his six-foot-four-inch lanky frame meant he was weak and vulnerable. He didn't have mass, or obvious muscle tone; Jonas looked scrawny, as an easy target should. He only had to give a severe beating to two other prisoners for the rest to leave him alone. His long blond hair was usually up in a loose ponytail, and his blue eyes told those who looked that he was far older than his years.

  "Hey, inmate. Wake up, or I'll wake you up." Jonas felt the tip of a baton touch the back of his head. He looked up into the guard's face. The guard continued, "Get up, scumbag. Someone wants to talk to you."

  As they walked out of the jail cell, the guard leaned in close and whispered, "I know the guys you hurt. They're good guys." When they approached the edge of the cell, the guard shoved Jonas face first into the edge of the doorframe. "Oops, you should be more careful there, pal."

  Jonas felt a small trickle of blood run down his forward and blinked to keep it out of his eyes. The guard at the gate blatantly ignored the cut on Jonas' forehead, and let them through. His guard led him to a room with only one door, no windows, and cameras in two of the corners. The table in the center of the room was bolted down and had a steel ring in the middle of it and a large red button on one side. The guard took him into the room and unshackled his hands long enough to run the chain through the loop in the table.

  The guard said, "Sit down. Your visitor will be with you in a moment."

  Jonas did not have to wait long. A medium-sized gentleman in an impeccably tailored gray pinstripe suit walked through the door, closing it behind him. Jonas could see that the man was carrying a file folder with the Homeland Security Seal on the jacket. As the gentleman walked in, he withdrew a small cylindrical object from his inner pocket and walked toward the camera closest to him. He pressed a button built into the base of the object and waived the cylinder within a couple feet of the camera. He then walked over to the other camera in the room and waived it near that one as well. Replacing the object in his suit pocket, he walked around to sit down across from Jonas. The man smiled, and Jonas could think of nothing other than a shark circling its prey.

  "Now we can actually talk," said the man in the suit. He opened the file in front of him and began skimming through the contents. As he worked his way through, he began speaking calmly, in a tone that suggested he was reading out of a dry history report. "Jonas Vanhof. Twenty-seven years old. You were caught in the house of a middle-aged bank manager, having recently killed the banker and his wife.

  "The evidence gathered by the police shows that you were in the process of cleaning up after yourself. They found customized knives covered in the couple's blood. The wife was found upstairs in the bedroom, naked. There were vicious bite marks on her arms, and her head was found three feet away from her body. The man was found on the first floor, in the living room, naked. While there were no bite marks on this one, the man's head was found behind a chair across the room, approximately eight feet away. And there were signs that you had struggled with both of them pretty violently.

  "Forensics also determined that it was you who kicked in the front door. Your boots ma
tched the prints around the house, as well as the large impression left on the door itself. All in all, the evidence left around the house and all over the scene point to you as some sort of sick, sadistic killer." The man looked up at Jonas over the rims of his glasses. "Are you, Jonas Vanhof, a 'sick sadistic serial killer?'"

  Jonas thought the man sounded like he was asking something as casual as what flavor of ice cream he wanted. Jonas leaned back and shook his head.

  Jonas began counting off facts awkwardly on the fingers on his manacled hands. "Your suit is way too nice for the detectives around here. You disabled the cameras. And you didn't threaten to beat me up. Are you a Fed? A spook?"

  The man smiled and responded with a question of his own. "What actually happened in that house, Mr. Vanhof?"

  Jonas considered the options. Believing the man may be from the secret government agency his uncle had told him about, he decided to lay it all out. Jonas sat up and said, "You want to know what happened? I'll tell you, but you won't believe me." He began recounting the tale.

  NORFOLK, Virginia. Two months ago.

  It was a dark night. Jonas specifically chose this night because it was a new moon. The moon was nowhere in the night sky. The night was darker and the shadows were deeper and things that relied on the moon for part of their power would have just a little bit less.

  Jonas parked his car three blocks away from his target's house and walked casually until he was about three houses away. Because of his earlier recon, Jonas knew that the next couple houses would be quiet and the inhabitants asleep long before his two-o'clock-in-the-morning activity. Got to love the suburbs, Jonas thought to himself. At least everyone goes to bed at a decent hour.

  As Jonas approached the front porch, he looked around one last time to make sure that he was not being watched. Carefully moving as silently as possible, he was worried that the monster he was hunting would hear him coming. Intimately aware of the heightened hearing and sense of smell, Jonas was careful to walk only on the soft grass. To avoid alerting the monster with his scent, he was in freshly laundered and bleached clothing that had been rolled on the yard outside the target's house.

  Tonight's target was a rather surly bank manager. This manager had a reputation for being short with customers and outright hostile with his employees. Treating everyone else as if they were simply not worthy of his time, he had callously rejected a customer's loan application and made inappropriate derogatory comments comparing the customer's manhood to his credit worthiness. The desperate customer had lost control, attacking the manager viciously. Before the security guards could pull the irate customer off him, the manager had suffered severe bruising, a broken collarbone, and even some bites on his arms.

  That was a month ago. The recovering bank manager had never realized anything was wrong until that first full moon. Fortunately for his wife, the manager had been out of the house the first time that he changed. When the new werewolf had changed that first time, his instincts had pulled him to the forest to run and hunt. The following morning, a local farmer had found three of his cattle slaughtered and half-eaten in the field. The manager had woken up, naked, alone, and cover in dried, congealed blood.

  Putting two and two together to get an impossible four, the manager had figured out that, against all the odds, he was a werewolf, a mythological creature. He had hidden his new affliction from his family, but he could not hide the reports from the eyes of Jonas. When his sources had traced the wolf to the bank manager, Jonas had traveled to Virginia to kill the wolf before he could kill a human.

  Jonas stepped up on the porch, carefully avoiding the loose step his earlier reconnaissance had discovered. Approaching the door, he withdrew a lock-pick set from his inner coat pocket. He reached for the knob to unlock the door and heard a loud, terrified scream from inside the residence.

  Jonas had two options: leave now, before the neighborhood woke up, or go help whoever was shrieking. Even as the houses around him lit up, Jonas drew back his leg and kicked hard at the door, landing a solid blow right beside the lock and breaking the frame. The door swung open, and Jonas moved inside. Hearing the shrieks turn to moans, he raced up the stairs, his long overcoat trailing behind him.

  Rounding the corner on the landing, he was met by a large furry mass that crashed into him. The collision was enough to shake them both, and they tumbled over the side of the railing onto the floor below. Vicious snarls and growls sounded from the large wolf-like creature as it tried desperately to sink its teeth into Jonas' face. Jonas could see the gleaming fangs and smell the fetid breath of the creature as its jaws snapped close mere inches from his nose.

  As the creature drew back again to bite, Jonas brought his forearm up into the path of those powerful jaws. The teeth clenched shut on his limb, and Jonas cried out as his arm was crushed. The specially prepared abilities of his overcoat worked with the thick leather of the sleeves to stop the razor-sharp canine teeth from penetrating. In a small corner in the back of his mind, Jonas realized he'd be lucky if his arm was not broken from the bite.

  While the creature gnawed on Jonas' forearm, Jonas slipped his free hand down and grabbed the hilt of a knife sheathed on his side. With the creature on top, Jonas was just able to draw the knife and thrust upward toward the heart of the wolf. The honed blade sunk in to the hilt, parting the skin and slipping between ribs in its quest for the heart. The creature howled in sudden, overwhelming pain as it was forced to release his forearm and to try to scramble away from Jonas.

  Wrapping his legs around the creature, Jonas heaved and flipped over, putting the wolf on its back on the ground. Jonas continued to drive the knife inwards, working the blade back and forth to wreak havoc on the creature. His other arm was now free of the wolf's mouth, and, with that one, he reached behind his back to withdraw the large machete from its sheath.

  Raising the machete in a high swing, he abruptly brought it down on the neck of the creature. On the first swing, he made it most of the way through the neck, but stopped against the spine itself. The wolf suddenly went rigid and began reaching for its throat. With paws that were changing into human hands as he watched, the wolf creature tried to stem the flow of its lifeblood from its severed arteries.

  The second swing of the machete cleaved through the spinal column and severed the head from the body. As it rolled away, the shape changed and the facial features became human. Jonas reached down and pulled his knife from the now-human torso it was buried in. Standing, he glanced up the stairs and heard small movements.

  Covered in the creature's blood, Jonas climbed the stairs. Walking into the bedroom, Jonas saw the wife of the banker in bed. She was nude and lying on the bed with her hands covering her face. The massive bite marks on her shoulder were no longer bleeding, and she appeared to have fainted.

  Knowing that it was too late for her, Jonas grimly walked to the side of the bed and raised the machete. When he moved her arms away from her face and neck, the woman stirred. Incoherent, she saw a man with a large machete in his hand standing over her bed where her husband had just attacked her. She began sobbing and repeating the words, "No, please, no," as she begged for her life.

  Jonas looked down at her and raised the machete to deliver a blow. "I'm sorry," he whispered as he brought the machete down.

  "THE POLICE SHOWED up as I was cleaning up trace from the house. When they busted in, I tried to go out the back. There were four of them out there, and I guess I put a couple of them in the hospital. Sometimes I forget to pull my punches with mere humans. And for the past two months, I've been dealing with a public defender that is clueless and wants me to take a plea bargain, a jail crew that wants to make me suffer for beating up those cops, and fellow inmates that finally have learned not to pick on me, or else they suffer a beating." Jonas finished his story and looked at the man in front of him.

  The man consulted the file he held and looked at Jonas over his glasses. "As strange as it may seem, Mr. Vanhof, I believe your story. That is why I'm her
e.

  "You are originally from the Pacific Northwest, and you believe that you are the last in your family's bloodline. You were trained to hunt monsters since you were little. And you've been on your own since your uncle was killed. You are good at what you do. Unfortunately you got caught this time."

  Jonas smiled wearily. "So which secret government organization are you from? CIA? NSA? Ghostbusters?"

  The man chuckled. "Mr. Vanhof, my name is Agent Smith, and I work for the Department of Homeland Security. I have a team that could use your particular... expertise. This is a one-time offer. If you come to work for me, this little problem goes away.

  "As you know, Virginia is a death penalty state, and I hear that the prosecutor is going to try to make you dance the chemical dance. Your prosecutor has political aspirations, and he's been waiting for a juicy case like yours to come along. If you choose to work for me, the prosecutor will have to find another case to hang his political hat on. So what do you say? Do you want to take my 'Get out of jail free' card?"

  Jonas started laughing at the absurdity of Smith's offer. Tears flowed down his face as the stress and fear of the last couple months fed the near-hysteria. After he had composed himself, he was wiping away the tears when he spoke again. "So let me get this straight. I can either come with you, and get paid to do what I was doing before, or I can rot and wait to die. I think that's a pretty easy choice to make for me. Where do I sign?"

  "We'll get you signed up as soon as we get out of here," Agent Smith said as he smiled and shook the proffered hand. As Agent Smith stood and walked to the door he said, "The paperwork is waiting for my signature. You will be out in less than an hour." Agent Smith knocked on the door to let the guard know that he was done. "By the way, it's good to have a member of your family on one of my teams again."