Retirement

The sound of a fist hitting flesh is distinctive. It carries a subsonic message to prey that a predator is nearby and working. To men like Coyote, it means something else entirely. It sharpens the world. Narrows it. The man hanging from the heavy-duty eyehook also knew violence well, but not like this. He was still in boxing gear, less than four hours removed from a lightweight championship fight at Caesars Palace. Now he hung in silence, twenty miles from the lights, bleeding into a tarp. The canyon surrounding him swallowed sound. Even the crack of a fist against flesh didn’t carry far. Just a dull, contained impact, absorbed by stone that had seen worse. Out here in the canyon, none of it mattered.

Coyote’s Agency had tasked him with finding a data chip containing sensitive information and he had been sent to Vegas a week ago to start this mission. Getting to Vegas had been simple, one of the agency’s private jets had flown him there. His current passport listed Jon Thomas from Boston, neither of which were true. He laughed at himself gently as he thought that neither of those were strictly untrue either. The loneliness of his profession had begun to wear on him, and retirement had been close before this mission pulled him back in. He had been given the bare bones of this assignment, but had no details as to what the bigger picture was. He only knew that the requests for updates had gotten more frequent and more frantic as the week passed.

His search had led him to the Russian boxer currently hanging in the center of the room, but he had only intercepted him after the fight. He had abducted the man and brought him to a safe house tucked into Eagle Canyon just outside of the city, and Vegas’s lights were visible over the canyon rim if you cared to look.

The man had been frustratingly reticent as he was questioned in the silence of the canyon, and Coyote had been forced to resort to the type of interrogation that requires safe houses and canyons with no neighbors or witnesses. As he surveyed the scene and debated next moves, he let his mind catalogue the pieces and sort through the chain of logic.

A tarp was underneath the man, blood pooled and congealed in the dry heat. He had been asked hard, and parts of him were no longer…attached. The fact that Coyote was no closer to completing his mission meant one of two things, either the man had extensive training, or he was a complete dead end. On the table in the corner lay the boxer's belongings: the gloves he'd worn in the championship fight only hours earlier, and two mouthguards, both used. The gloves had been taken apart (much as the man had been), and there was no sign of the chip in them or in the clothes the man wore. He'd examined the mouthguards, too. One had a split along its edge, probably from a particularly hard punch. He'd flexed it between his fingers, found nothing suspicious, and tossed it aside. Nothing unusual for a championship fight.

A ringing brought him out of the branches of the logic chain he had been working through, and he answered the secure line to his handler. The tone, pitch, and volume of the voices on the other end were impressive, and outside of the realm of Coyote’s experience. Normally he only had to converse with his handler, and the interactions were professional, no matter the information being conveyed. That was not the case today, and he could make out multiple voices in the background. His handler had screamed at him and then hung up after being given the disappointing information. Coyote stopped and sat, pushing away the thought of how close he had been to walking away as he worked the problem.

Handler slammed down the phone and sat back, the war council bustling around him. Screens with real-time data took up a complete wall, and a large map centered the chaos with a small blinking dot showing in the canyon. The tracking implant secretly placed inside Coyote during a routine procedure ten years earlier was still transmitting. It had never been mentioned to the agent, but Handler did not doubt the agent had at least an idea of its presence. A flash and alarm brought Handler back from the memory and the room froze. Time had expired, and the terrorist group had followed through with their threat. An EMP detonated in the heart of Vegas, not coincidentally centered at Caesars Palace, and the city simply stopped.

An EMP is a nasty piece of work. It doesn't just shut things down—it can ruin them. Across Las Vegas, electrical systems failed in a cascading wave. The grid collapsed. Traffic signals went dark. Cars stalled in intersections, while others continued through streets suddenly stripped of order. Elevators stopped between floors. Cell towers fell silent, radios dissolved into static, and emergency generators struggled to bring critical systems back online.

From above, the city that never slept had gone dark.

Out in the canyon, there was only silence.

Handler looked at his boss, knowing what came next. The Spy Master glanced at Handler and said simply “terminate, plausible deniability”. Handler glanced at his aide and relayed the order. Far beyond the reach of the EMP, the war room's communications remained intact. An encrypted command passed through the Agency's network to a shielded receiver at the Eagle Canyon safe house.

A small LED flashed beside the main gas valve.

A moment later, the explosion tore through the canyon.

The blast wave hurled Coyote and the boxer against the outer walls. Fire consumed what remained of the safe house.

A wall stud landed 400 feet away with a rubber blob embedded in it—the remains of a mouthguard melted away, the black corner of a microchip exposed. In the canyon, it went unnoticed. In the war room, the center screen now showed multiple active targets across the globe, and a much smaller screen at the bottom right showed Eagle Canyon. A single word steadily glowed…