Waxing Kriger

Jeffrey Yule

Department of English
Ohio State University
jyule@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu

 

After they waxed Kriger, he was supposed to stay dead. Kriger, that Kriger anyway, was a rare one. Wanted nothing to do with reconstitution. Reconstruction was okay, for light stuff. You lose an arm or some brain tissue, maybe even a whole lobe, of c ourse you get that fixed. He wasn’t a fundamentalist. But the part about no reconstitution was supposed to have been an actual clause in his contract. That was the word out about it, anyway. Of course you hear rumors about all sorts of things in this business and a lot of it’s crap. Still, I think that story was true. I say that because I talked to him about it once. Not much, but it was enough.

 

I’m not saying the guy took me into his confidence. He didn’t. I’m no big operator myself, but Kriger–well, that Kriger anyway–he was good, as big a deal as everybody says. He didn’t talk much to people like me, only even ran into ’em every once in a while and never for very long. We were just subcontracted labor. But I did a job for him in Belize once, and that’s where I got the impression the stories were true. Down there, they called him the man, el hombre, but the way they said it was like in capital letters–El Hombre. They wanted to call him el hombreisimo, you know, like he was the most incredible of men, but he didn’t like the way it sounded. So it was El Hombre, pronounced like with capital letters. And wit h the job he did, he earned that too. During some down time on that job, I asked him what he thought about reconstitution. I was thinking about it for myself for after I could afford it, but I was also curious about him. Even then he had quite a reputa tion.

 

What he said was, “Guys get re-sti clauses, they don’t have to worry much anymore. They get sloppy.”

 

He said it like he’d seen it happen, and I guess that’s why he didn’t go in for reconstitution. He didn’t want to get soft. Maybe because his work was his art or maybe because if he got soft, he wouldn’t pull down the same sort of money on each job. M aybe both. And maybe he was right, because he was sharp then. He was almost too good.

 

You still hear a lot of stories about Kriger, but who the hell knows for sure what happened and what didn’t? I don’t know that anyone could ever sort it all out now. But I know this for sure. On that Belize job, we had two teams setting up perimeter d iversions for him so he could go in solo somewhere else along the line, into this guy’s compound. No names, okay? But you know the type. The guy had his hands in some of this and some of that, major supply contacts with different organizations, some of them competing–Mafia, Tong, Yakuza, everybody. As a consequence of his clientele, he’s a real security freak, trying to make sure nobody’s going to pay him a visit–cut him up, kidnap him, maybe even make an example of him. Mess him up bad but keep sh owing his reconstitution company that he’s alive so they can’t replace him. He was a real paranoid operator. Too much white powder and cash will do that to people. Given the type, of course, his place is wired every which way: motion sensors, IR trip b eams, countermeasures, everything. We even ran into some cyborged guard dogs his security people were running off an AI system. Nasty things–godawful tough to kill. Plus he’s got guards all over the place with IR equipment. But it’s a very strange si tuation. There’s this self-contained, high-tech fortress, built right into the side of a mountain, right? But the people who grow the man’s plant live in huts, so all around this place things are strictly stone age, third world.

 

Apparently the target had connections with somebody in the government and he stepped on the wrong toes. So Uncle says, “Central, wax that problem.” Central takes a look and thinks, “What we need here is deniability and lots and lots of insulation becau se this is an ugly situation that’s just waiting to blow up in our faces.” So they contract it out to Kriger, and he subcontracts out for support and I get a spot on a diversion team. It was my first big job and to me it was exceedingly smooth, almost s upernatural. We did our thing and he did his. He didn’t say how and nobody asked, but we all wondered. He went in and waxed the guy rough. Napalm, I think, one of those mini-flamethrower rigs. I guess they sent the guy a vid of the way it went after his reconstitution, one of those, “Next time, there better not be a next time” kind of messages. After that job, everybody called Kriger “The Man,” with capitals. And he really absolutely was. He was the best in the business, maybe the best ever. I’v e done some other big jobs where security was tight, but I’ve never seen anything tighter. I’m telling you, that place was seamless. And those goddamned dogs. Believe me, you don’t know how hard those are to deal with unless you’ve ever tried to shake one and found out that there was no other way but to kill it. Even with the diversions, I have no idea how Kriger got past everything and to the target. That was impressive enough. But he also cooked the guy and vidded it. He didn’t just go in and ner ve gas the place or even find the guy and shoot him. He found out where he was, got to him, did his things for fifteen, twenty minutes at least, and then he left. I never saw anything like it.

 

But that was a long time ago. Kriger himself got it, let’s see, about four, four and a half years ago now. Any number of people were supposed to have done it. There were a lot of rumors at the time. Some people thought Central might have been behind it because Kriger was getting too wild, taking on contracts they didn’t like. With Central you never know, especially with Uncle getting sloppy sometimes, a little old and not so much on the cutting edge anymore. Sometimes the parts just don’t do what t he head tells them when things get to that point, so that talk about Central might’ve been right. I heard some other people talking about a year later who thought a renegade state might’ve done it. Again, no names, okay? But there were sure people who he crossed in some of those governments, and some of them he’d really pissed off doing it. To me that theory makes a lot more sense than a Central-directed hit, but it’s damn near impossible to say. It could’ve been any number of people or groups that k illed him. Maybe it was a government-sanctioned job or maybe something that an intelligence clique put together. Could even have been one or another terrorist groups behind it. He’d thrown a few wrenches into the moving parts of some of their operation s over the years and taken out some of their people doing it. It might’ve been corporate or a criminal organization or maybe some independent contractor looking to make a name for himself with the right people. It could’ve been a combination of things. Shit, for all I know it could’ve been the guy he cooked with napalm on that Belìze job.

 

I’m not saying there aren’t people who know. I’m sure there are, but there you’re talking about people who move in higher circles than me. I’m strictly middle level, right? That’s something I’m not ashamed of either. Maybe I could’ve made it in those circles–the money’s certainly attractive–but there’s just too much pressure. There were people I worked with who went that way, and they were always walking around like they couldn’t afford to relax for a split second. This one guy went through two, three stomachs in something like eight years. Ulcers. You got other people who’d be burning holes through their noses with powders or needing liver transplants because of the drinking and the drugs. Sure the money’s good, but what did they do but spend it on extra security, bribes, transplants, and reconstructions. Now maybe some of those people know who waxed Kriger, but they’re the ones who have to worry about the fact that they know. Screw that. There are a few things that I can tell you, though.

 

Just after it happened, there was a rumor that it was a clean hit, a sniper, and that it went down in Dresden when he was on vacation or some sort of bullshit. That’s one story, the main one everybody heard for about a year. There was also talk that it was one of those old M-9 grenades launched into his car outside of Los Angeles. Either way, though, it was supposed to have been gentle. But it was probably rough no matter what you heard. On this security job a few years ago I had to liason with a co mputers op who had a thing for hardware and the merc scene, and he’d heard of Kriger and was all hard to talk to me about him and about the business. Said he had some good information to trade, and it was down time, so I figured, why not? He showed me t his vid clip he’d turned up which his source said was a partial copy of the Kriger hit. I’m no vid expert, but I watched the thing and it looked like the genuine article. The guy told me he got it in trade from an AI that pops up now and then on the net . Maybe or maybe not. I didn’t even bother trying to check into it. It fell into my lap so I gave it a look, sure, but I wasn’t going to go poking around in something that might end up giving somebody a reason to come and step on me. But, like I said, it looked genuine enough.

 

The clip is short, maybe a minute and a half long. The picture was a little jumpy, like the computer they used to edit the thing couldn’t smooth it out completely. Looked like it was shot by someone wearing a concealed camera and following along on bac kup while the rest of the team did the actual job. At first it’s a stable picture, though. You see this guy who looks like Kriger come into a building, a big hotel lobby or maybe something corporate, a place with marble floors, lots of metal, glass, sus pended balconies, fountains, like that. A man in uniform, the concierge or corporation toad boy, whatever, comes from behind the counter to meet Kriger, reaches out to shake his hand, and the picture jumps a little as the person with the vid equipment ge ts up. From that point on, it stays a little jumpy, but it’s still a good, clear sequence.

 

On the balcony out of Kriger’s field of vision, you see a guy suddenly looking very bothered. He’s probably someone on Kriger’s security team, and it looks like he’s seeing something he doesn’t like. I had the computer kid enhance the image, and what i t looked like to me was that he was trying to use a throat mike to tell Kriger or somebody else that something looked funny, but he wasn’t getting the message through. Either he was getting jammed or the people that waxed Kriger had some sort of interfer ence software on-line and they were jamming and sending all clear signals at the same time on the skip frequencies Kriger’s people were using. It’s a pain in the ass to do, but you can pull it off if you’ve got an AI with an expert system hookup that’s f ast enough to track the shifts from frequency to frequency. The thing is, though, if the people whose signal you’re substituting for find out quick enough, your operation’s probably blown because the whole target team finds out what’s going on instantly.

 

Kriger’s people apparently had some sort of countermeasure that picked up the problem or something else tipped Kriger off because he all of a sudden veers away from the concierge-type guy. In the upper right of the picture, you see the guy who was havin g trouble with his throat mike go for a gun. He gets some shots off at one or more people who aren’t in the picture. Then he just gets absolutely raked by small flechette fire–the things hit his whole left side in a wave. One second you see him and th e next you lose sight of that half of his body in a red mist. It was very messy–painful, too, I bet–but it looked like the people who planned it probably meant for him to live. The computer liason guy couldn’t give me a good enough image to be sure, b ut I don’t think the stuff they used was meant to do a lot of deep tissue damage. It was just supposed to take off the skin and mess up the muscle–that way even if you’ve got a guy pumped with endorphin analogs, he won’t be able to do anything because t he muscles are too torn up and he doesn’t have enough blood to run them anyway.

 

While this is going on, Kriger’s moving away from the concierge. This guy’s still got his hand out, and there’s the start of a surprised look on his face as Kriger turns away from him. Then this guy takes a wave of flechette fire at about a thre e quarters full angle, and this time the hit team was obviously using something that would do deep tissue damage. It looks like most of his right side just explodes. But you only see that for a second because the camera’s following Kriger, who would’ve taken that flechette wave full in the back and gone down if he hadn’t gotten out of the way. As it is, he takes some fire from the outside edge of the scatter pattern, and you see some blood on him but not much. He was probably wearing light armor fabri cs, so his clothes took a lot of the kinetic energy out of the stuffbefore it got to him. If it hadn’t just been some some scatter, though, it would’ve torn him up too, even if he was wearing a tougher fabric. That’s probably why the hit team tried to u se the heavier flechettes on Kriger. Those things pretty much sandblast anything up to a medium-grade body armor right off a target. The hotel guy wasn’t wearing anything like that, though, and he just got torn up.

 

By this time, I suppose that any security Kriger had must have been out of the picture, if there was even anybody else still standing when the guy with the throat mike realized things were going sour. That’s how it goes on rough waxes: targets have to be cut completely loose from their support. Kriger must have known he was on his own by then. While he’s running, he lays down some flare grenades and suddenly it’s like he’s inside his own little supernova, which I suppose threw a tangle into the plans of whoever was running the op because you can’t draw a bead on somebody who’s inside that sort of lightsource. But of course the tradeoff is that Kriger can’t see anything either, so if he’s firing, he’s firing blind too. You can’t tell for sure, but b efore he threw down the flares it looked like he was headed for a cluster of furniture next to a fountain. Looked like the best available cover.

 

Now even though the camera’s still going, all you see for about three, four seconds is a lot of white light, until Kriger’s flares burn out. Then the person with the camera pans around trying to find Kriger. You see some more bodies, although it’s hard to say for sure which were on the hit team and which were with Kriger. Most of them are either still armed or lying near weapons, though, so it looks like the only person hurt who wasn’t involved was the concierge, but–if he was a crooked, greedy, or c orporate–he might not have been an innocent bystander anyway. You also see four people moving in toward the furniture where Kriger was headed when the camera last had him. They’ve all got filter masks on and they’re launching cannisters in a standard s pread pattern. There’s no visible gas, though, so they were using something colorless, a mild nerve agent probably–something that would cause a lot of pain and either full voluntary muscle paralysis or at least a lot of problems with motor function and reflex.

 

Then three of these four get slammed in quick succession, all within about five centimeters dead center of their sternums, by something high caliber. Blows right through any armor they were wearing. These three are write offs–no doubt in my mind they were dead before they hit the floor. Whatever they got hit with probably tore them to pieces internally. No surprise there. A guy who doesn’t go in for reconstitution certainly wouldn’t treat the squad hitting him gently. Anyway, one of the guys who w as firing the gas cannisters gets to some cover without getting shot. From the camera angle, I couldn’t see where the shots came from that killed the three who were with him, and I’m not sure that he could either. Certainly, though, this guy’s got reaso n to be careful. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t come into the picture again.

 

At about this point, the person carrying the camera must have gotten involved in the operation, because the picture you see from then on isn’t just a vid of the hit anymore. It’s an operative’s-eye view. You see everything from the perspective of some one a lot closer to the ground, like what an op sees when he’s trying to stay low enough to avoid drawing fire. The camera shows this guy taking a winding course from cover to cover toward the place where it looks like Kriger was headed. A few times you even see his rifle barrel come into the picture. Then the camera carrier must have gotten the all clear because the picture jumps, and you can tell he’s gone into an upright position. The camera moves forward smoothly after that and, after going around this huge marble-backed leather couch that’s been chewed up by fire, you see Kriger on the floor, eyes open, teeth clenched, and his muscles all knotted up. He’s twitching a little too, his nerves obviously not firing right. Looks like he’d taken some more fire, too, something high caliber in the left leg. There was a lot of blood, some of it splattered all the way to the edge of the fountain. The camera stays on Kriger for about three seconds and no one touches him during that time. Then the clip ends.

 

The guy who showed me the thing said he didn’t know if Kriger got away or, if he was killed, how it was done. He said he asked the AI who traded him the clip, and the thing either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just as we ll. Like I said before, it’s not like Kriger and I were friends, but I had a lot of respect for the man’s work. I had no reason to want to see someone mess him up on camera. This merc groupie asks me all these questions, like was it possible maybe that Kriger could’ve gotten away or something, and the answer to that is absolutely not. Before the clip ends what you see is an immobilized target. Kriger wasn’t going anywhere alive.

 

What it looked like to me is this: it was supposed to be a rough wax, and it started out well enough and should’ve gone smoothly except that Kriger was just too good at what he did. After the point where he veered away from the guy who was getting ready to shake his hand, things went badly for the hit team. Counting the downed bodies and figuring that even if only half of them were part of the hit, Kriger and his people took down something like ten or eleven of them. And that’s just counting the bodies I could see. The fact that the person with the camera started out on backup and had to move into an active role also tells me things didn’t go well. But it looks like they wanted to do as clean a job as they could. The hotel guy getting killed was probably a mistake. Based on everything else, I’d say they just wanted Kriger dead and the people on his security team out of the picture while they killed him. They got what they were after, but it took too long, they took too many losses, and it was messy.

 

After all that, it’s hard to imagine that the hit team killed Kriger quickly. Obviously, someone had reason to make sure he died rough because what you see in the vid is a very expensive job. There wouldn’t have been any sense in going to all the trouble of cutting him off from his support and immobilizing him if they were just going to pop him in the head and make extra sure afterward with a few more shots to the heart and spine. So, no, I didn’t see what happened exactly, whether it was corrosives o r inflammables or what, but I don’t doubt they picked a bad way for Kriger to die.

 

What surprised me was that he turned up again at all. This was about six or eight months after I saw the vid clip. I got a call from this guy with an accent, asking am I free to do support on an external job, something in the Baltics, but, again, no names, all right? He also tells me the pay and gives me a few general details. I say, maybe, who wants to know?

 

“The job is to do support for Kriger. Same sort of scenario as before. Take it now or not, but no more questions either way,” he said.

 

“Sounds interesting,” I tell the guy. “But last I heard, Kriger was dead.”

 

“Just a rumor. In or out?”

 

I wondered if maybe it was a set up to take me out because I’d seen that partial clip of the Kriger hit, but it didn’t figure. People don’t need to go to that kind of trouble to kill guys like me. They had my job pickup number, which is at a public loc ation. The line was secure but they wouldn’t have had any problem tracing it and just meeting me outside to blow me away if they wanted to. So the offer looked as safe as any other. And I was curious about it. So I tell the guy, “I’m in.”

 

“Fine. You’ll hear from me again this time tomorrow. Be ready to move out any time after that. You’ll get half up front and half on completion. We supply the hardware. You can bring anything else you want so long as the total weight is under thirty- five kilos. Questions?”

 

“No.”

 

“Fine. Tomorrow then.”

 

And so I was in.

 

Except that I was hired help for a diversion team, it wasn’t much like the Belize job. I never knew what the operation was about exactly, and it didn’t matter. I saw Kriger and I wanted to talk to him, see if he remembered me, but the opportunity never came up. He briefed us and made sure everything was clear. He looked like I remembered. Sounded the same. There were no differences I could see, so I started to wonder if maybe the vid clip I saw was fake–still, you’re not supposed to be able to tel l the re-sti copy from the original. So I wasn’t sure. But something happened that convinced me that this wasn’t the same Kriger I worked with in Belize.

 

Like I said, I didn’t know what the objective was on this job. I just knew what my team was supposed to do: make a lot of noise and draw as much attention as possible so Kriger could get in there and do his thing. There was another diversion team too, which means he had as much backup there as in Belize. So the time comes and we do our jobs. But the thing I notice right away is that this isn’t a tight target area. There’s security, sure–some armed guards, some motion sensors. But it’s just a little more than enough to keep the amateurs off the grounds–radio shack hardware and rent a cops. Nowhere near what Kriger went up against in Belize. I think there was just one guard with IR equipment, and he was an easy take down, probably didn’t even hav e any special training. There was nothing remotely as much a problem as those cyborged dogs were, either. The site wasn’t even self-contained. They had people coming and going on a daily basis. The place was a little sloppy, really. I remember thinking at the time that whoever paid for the job must have had paranoid fits. Any competent solo operator could have handled it without diversions, probably without a support team either if it came down to that.

 

But I get paid to do my job whether they need me there or not, so I did what I was supposed to do: set off some charges, got a fix on the guard with the IR equipment and made sure they dropped him. We even managed to draw a guard squad completely outside their perimeter. Plain amateurs. No security team worth anything gets drawn out like that. It looked to me like having two diversion teams along was serious overkill. But we wrapped up the job and got to the rendezvous for airlift out. And that’s w here I saw the difference between this Kriger and the man I saw in the vid, twitching on a floor waiting to get waxed. Because this Kriger showed up at the rendezvous shot, and he looked like he’d barely made it out. He gave me that feeling you hate to get. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. You have to experience it yourself, maybe. It’s the feeling you get off people whose op went bad. It’s like a smell almost, or a kind of metal taste in your mouth. You work enough jobs and you can pick i t up off even some of the very best people. And we all picked it up off Kriger. He even looked a little rattled, scared or pissed off maybe. Maybe something else. And then it occurred to me.

 

Whoever brought him back must have edited his psychic makeup, mellowed him on reconstitution–probably so they could get him to go in for more frequent brain tapings. That way he wouldn’t lose so much memory if he got killed again. See, somebody who’s at most willing to have a lobe replaced isn’t going bother going in for recordings as often as a reconstitution company’s clients would. And, like I said, Kriger wasn’t a reconstitution client, so whoever brought him back must have done it on their own initiative. They were treating him as a long-term investment. He was a kept operator at that point, probably. If they’d tinkered with him enough to change his mind about reconstitution, they might’ve done more. Made him a career corporate boy or Central op, any number of things. That’s some nasty black bag medical, but there are people out there bent enough to do most anything for a price, so it happens sometimes.

 

But the people who did it didn’t get what they were after. Serves them right, too, the fucks. An op has a clause in his agent’s contract, it ought to be honored. But those helix robbers not only ignored the clause, they tinkered with the man’s psych profile and memory. The thing is, though, that when you take away from an operator like Kriger the thing that gives him his edge, what you end up with isn’t an operator like Kriger. You get something a lot less than that, a guy who maybe looks the same and acts the same and seems the same but who isn’t the same. The Kriger I knew got inside a place and did a job that I wouldn’t have believed was possible if I hadn’t been there myself. He got waxed later, sure, but that’s reality. Nobody’s invulnerable . And even though the hit they put on him was first quality, he still took a lot of their people with him. Kriger, that Kriger, was the genuine article. That guy on the Baltics job, he was just a cheap copy, a meat puppet. You wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for him. The original Kriger, I bet he’d rather be dead than going around like that. But the copy, he probably doesn’t even know. Probably just feels like something’s wrong and can’t figure out what. It’s a shame, really. Poor son of a bitch.