Mosaic (Breakthrough Book 5)

by Michael C. Grumley

  “You speak English?” he asked.

  Clay motioned with his fingers. “No much.”

  “Figures. Donde te puedo ver,” the guard said, pointing two fingers to his eyes. “Where I can see you. Entender?”

  Clay and Caesare nodded again. Together, with the prompting of their guard, they followed the rest of the crowd toward a large service elevator.

  The older SEALs remained quietly behind the others, all of whom were waiting patiently for their turn at the elevator. Three workers would be joined by one guard each time before the doors closed, descending to their designated floor.

  It took over ten minutes and several turns before Clay and Caesare found themselves in front of the scraped and dented elevator doors––along with a small, older woman and her cleaning cart.

  Both men remained in character in their slouched positions while still managing to stare directly at the camera mounted overhead as they entered.

  Stepping inside, the guard turned and pressed himself into the front corner, motioning for the woman to press the button. “Seis!”

  She complied, and the heavy doors rumbled closed.

  127

  With an initial jolt, the large elevator began to descend, leaving nothing but silence and a muffled sound from the giant cable above them.

  The size of the elevator was roomy by most standards, even for maintenance cars—providing enough space to carry several more passengers and their carts. Adherence to the three-worker teams was obviously an effort to maintain tighter security.

  With nothing around them but battered and marred metal walls, all eyes moved to the overhead display after the elevator began to move. Then only seconds later, it shuddered and stopped between the second and third floors, followed by a sudden change in direction. Upward.

  “What the–”

  The guard was cut off when the car abruptly halted again, this time resuming its descent back down toward floor six.

  It was a signal from Borger. And when it happened again, Clay and Caesare were ready.

  ***

  When the elevator’s doors finally opened on the sixth floor, they revealed the small Mexican woman crouched next to Clay. She was staring at them in shock, gripping her cart with white knuckles.

  The guard was on the floor, unconscious. His weapon now lay in the hands of Steve Caesare, who withdrew and checked the weapon’s magazine. Smoothly reinserting it, he tipped the weapon and lowered it gently inside his cart’s thick fabric bag.

  The older woman’s eyes were wide with fright. She was watching as Caesare grabbed the guard by his uniform, dragging him from the elevator into the stairwell just a few feet away.

  Clay followed with both cleaning carts before he turned and stepped back into the elevator, taking the woman’s hand and guiding her out. He backed her gently into a corner of the hallway. “Quédate aquį,” he said. Stay here.

  The woman stared in stunned silence as Clay reached out and held the stairway door open for Caesare. His partner bent down, retrieving something from the guard’s belt. Then he propped the man up, tying his arms through the railings. Caesare stretched out an arm, accepted a clean towel from Clay’s hand, and tucked it carefully into the guard’s open mouth.

  Caesare stood back up and glanced briefly at the frozen woman. “Should be out of camera view. At least for now,” he remarked to Clay. “We’re now on borrowed time.”

  128

  Dr. Janice Talbot flinched when the door opened behind her and Dr. Rothman stepped in. Bullman’s pet.

  The younger man ignored Talbot, approaching the bed where James Seever was resting.

  “How you feeling?”

  Seever shrugged. “Not bad.”

  Rothman looked him over before leaning in and examining the man’s left arm. He jabbed at the appendage with his finger a few times before lifting and studying it more closely. Adjusting his glasses, Rothman examined the subtle lines in Seever’s skin. He then withdrew a small instrument from his pocket and pressed sharply. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  Rothman nodded and lowered the arm, thoughtfully.

  “This one is just the first of multiple applications. But they’re all the same, so they shouldn’t appear any different to your system. Genetically speaking.”

  “How many applications?”

  “Depends,” Rothman explained, “on how much change we see after each application. The outer layer, the epidermis, shouldn’t change much. But beneath it, your connective tissues in the dermis should slowly begin to thicken. How many applications depends on how much thickening occurs and how quickly.”

  “So how long until we can use that yellow girl’s super-DNA?”

  Rothman registered no recognition of Seever’s derogatory reference. “Not until we understand whether this edit has an impact on the regeneration rates of your skin cells.”

  “You mean how much impact. We both know it ain’t getting any better.”

  “Correct.”

  “So, then I say we cut the crap. Let’s do it before it’s too late.”

  “We need to study it first,” replied Talbot. “The bacterium from the girl is complicated. We need to be sure of the implications–”

  “The implication,” Seever growled, “is that without it, I’m a dead man. And you know it.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Rothman said. “The turnover times of your cells have slowed considerably. So before we start, we need to be absolutely sure about what it’s going to do. There’s no margin of error left. Something you should appreciate more than anyone.”

  “What I appreciate,” Seever responded, “is that once my cells stop replicating, all of this is over. And not just for me.”

  “Which is all the more reason to be careful,” Talbot replied. “You have an extraordinary system, but you’re not immortal.”

  “I don’t care, damn it! I need to know how much time I have left.”

  “We’ll have a better idea once we get the results back from this latest change.”

  Seever rolled his eyes and muttered loudly under his breath. “Idiots!”

  Talbot glared at him but said nothing. The man was an imbecile. He had no idea how far they had pushed his system already. No idea what could now be occurring in his body that they weren’t even aware of. The depth and complexity…and the risk, already set in motion. He didn’t understand. And he didn’t care. He just wanted what he wanted.

  What the girl had within her was not just another genetic edit. It was much more than that. A living organism that was changing her on an entirely new level. In ways that were completely unpredictable. And unprovoked. Who knew what it would alter and why?

  And what inside the human genome would that organism think was broken…and attempt to fix.

  129

  “I got ‘em.”

  Borger zoomed in and watched his men move cautiously down the empty hall. Clay led in front, pushing a large trash can. Caesare was in perfect step behind him, both hands on his cleaning cart.

  In the hallway, Clay looked up at the camera and motioned his head forward. They were approaching a second hallway, intersecting less than fifty feet in front of them.

  “Where are you, Will?” he mumbled.

  Several moments later, each of the keypads on the doors lit up and began to glow. The effect was a soft illumination that extended forward and continued past the connecting hallway before them.

  Clay exhaled quietly and lowered his head. “Good man. Okay, we’re going straight.”

  ***

  Less than three hundred feet away, Janice Talbot pushed the door to her private office open and let it close with a clang behind her. She closed her eyes and pressed two fingers over the bridge of her nose. That idiot was going to ruin everything.

  Years of work. Dozens of lives sacrificed. For what? An arrogant ass with what was arguably the most adaptable human genome she’d ever seen. And a system even more valuable to the science of genetics than the Henrietta Lacks cel
l line. It was as though Seever had been separated from the rest of mankind and touched by the hand of God himself. If she believed in that sort of thing.

  Talbot kept her eyes closed and breathed in deeply. Maybe things were beginning to get to her. The seclusion down here and limited interaction was bound to take a toll. Even for someone like her.

  It wasn’t exhaustion. It was resentment. Talbot was slowly being left out, sidelined from what was happening between Seever and Rothman––and of course, General Bullman, at the head of it all. She was the lead scientist, the woman who knew more than anyone on the project, and the person who had gotten them this far. But now they were keeping her in the dark. Both about what Rothman was now working on, and Bullman’s plans.

  She swiveled in her chair and looked around the office. Rows of books and papers littered a long table against the wall. The reams of test results and printouts contained enough genetic data on them that any geneticist in the world could–

  She shook her head angrily. They were idiots. Men who thought they could just push her out of her own work once she gave them enough.

  Who was going to take over, Rothman? Bullman’s lapdog and the same man who lacked the fundamental ability to understand just how complicated all of this really was? And now…with the bacterium. God, if they thought it was complicated before. Whatever it was those Chinese had extracted from that jungle was about to change everything. One tiny organism trapped inside the body of a teenage girl–

  Talbot stopped again in mid-thought. The girl held the key to everything. And of course, the Lawton woman…irreplaceable. She was the one who probably understood what was happening to Li Na more than anyone.

  These were two individuals she could absolutely not let go of. That the government could not afford to lose. Ever.

  Talbot looked up at the blank monitor in front of her. She leaned forward and wiggled the mouse to wake her computer. When the screen flickered to life, she reopened a window and scrolled down a short list of video feeds. She selected the one from Li Na’s room and clicked to open it.

  It took only seconds for her face to reflect a feeling of bewilderment, her eyes searching the video and inducing a sudden stab in her chest. Something was wrong. Talbot leaned in and searched the screen more carefully.

  The two women were gone!

  130

  Clay and Caesare slowed without warning when two men exited a room ahead of them, crossing the hall. The men momentarily glanced in their direction with puzzled expressions.

  Clay kept his head down and reached for the first door handle he could. To his relief, it was unlocked.

  Two researchers turned from their desks when he stepped in. Both watched him search the room for a trash can before finding it and muttering excusa under his breath.

  He emptied it into the larger can and returned the small metal basket inside. When he closed the door behind him, he found Caesare on the other side of the hall, standing in the doorway to what appeared to be an empty break room.

  He disappeared inside, leaving Clay to catch the door behind him. Pushing it wider, he found Caesare in front of a water cooler, wrapping his arms around the five-gallon jug and jerking it from the top of the stand. Water splashed over the floor as he flipped it right side up.

  “Get the others!”

  Clay didn’t hesitate. Instantly, he was inside grabbing two more unopened containers from the floor, exiting as soon as Caesare pushed the door open again.

  Clay looked up and down the hall before dropping the bottles into his large garbage can with heavy thuds.

  It took them less than thirty seconds to swipe all six bottles.

  “What are they doing?” asked M0ngol.

  Borger didn’t know, made clear from the baffled expression on his face. He merely watched with curiosity as both men continued pushing their carts down the hall as if nothing had happened.

  Borger’s eyes switched screens upon noticing movement in another feed. Janice Talbot could be seen jumping from her chair and racing to her office door, where she threw it open and quickly disappeared.

  In an adjacent feed of the same hallway, her wide figure reappeared. Then she turned and darted away from the camera, running toward Li Na’s room.

  Borger switched views just in time to see Talbot reach Li Na’s door and punch in her security code. The woman immediately grabbed the door and flung it open, staring wide-eyed into the room.

  In a panic, Talbot stepped back out, frantically searching up and down the hallway. When she spotted the small plastic cover, she rushed over and threw it upwards, yanking down hard on the red emergency handle.

  The alarm sounded immediately.

  “Crap,” Borger sighed.

  Beneath red flashing lights, Talbot sprinted back to Li Na’s room and punched her code in again, this time disappearing inside.

  “Get that alarm turned off!”

  “I am trying.” M0ngol’s fingers were moving like lightning. He entered a command and quickly read down the long list of text returned. He tried another and another, searching for the correct parameter.

  Borger’s eyes returned to the video in Li Na’s room where Talbot stood, clearly dumbfounded. But her perplexed state lasted only seconds.

  What she had not seen the first time wasn’t just the missing women, but also the absence of a bedspread. One which was virtually the same shade of white as the walls and floor. So close, in fact, that her peripheral vision did not register anything behind the door. And certainly not the bedspread hanging seemingly in midair, covering both Neely and Li Na from head to foot.

  Neely was not expecting the camouflage to last. She only needed the door to open wide enough for Li Na to grab it from the other side. And for Neely to lunge out from under the fabric with her full body weight behind her. Which knocked Talbot completely off her feet and she fell face first onto the white linoleum.

  The older woman hit the floor with an agonizing thud. Where she turned clumsily to see Neely standing over her with Li Na behind her, holding the door open.

  The look on Neely’s face could be summed up as one of deep satisfaction.

  “The alarm is off!”

  “Good!” Borger shouted. “Now lock ‘em!”

  M0ngol nodded and typed the command they had been waiting for. When entered, the command raced through the computer system and out via the building’s connected security system––resulting in a series of loud clunks echoing from every door on the sixth floor, almost simultaneously.

  131

  “We have a problem.”

  CIA Director Andrew Hayes rose from his desk chair, gripping the phone tightly in his right hand. “Now what?”

  “It’s the attack,” Matt Millican said. “From the DoD.”

  “And?”

  “It’s more than just an attack,” he replied. “There’s something else going on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a diversion.”

  “A diversion? From what?”

  “From another breach. Someone snaked into the system while we were fighting the first intrusion. They came in from another network.”

  “For what? What are they after?”

  Millican shook his head, gazing up at a giant overhead monitor. Its screen was filled with a maze of computer connections extending in all directions. One connection out of thousands was flashing in red, tunneling in from the outer edge of the display. “It’s not what they’re after, sir. It’s where.”

  “Fine. Where?”

  “They’ve tunneled into Dugway. And breached their internal systems.”

  Hayes’ eyes widened. “Dugway?!”

  One of Millican’s technicians stood up and waved both hands at him. When he looked up from his call, another pointed urgently at their screen. Millican strode forward and squinted.

  “That’s not all. We have an alarm that just sounded in one of the research installations. Sixth floor.”

  “Son of a bitch!” growled Hayes. “It’s them! The
y’re inside! Kill their connection!”

  Millican immediately motioned to his tech, making a slicing motion across his neck. The technician nodded, dropped back into his chair, and began typing. After several seconds, he frowned and studied the output on the screen.

  Again, he typed. And waited. The same error repeated itself. He turned back to Millican, nervously. “It’s not working. I can’t terminate the thread.”

  “Try upstream!”

  The technician whirled back around. Again, he got the same result. “They’ve taken control of the network!”

  Millican mouthed an expletive and brought the phone back to his mouth. “We can’t kill the connection, sir.”

  “What do you mean you can’t kill it?”

  “They have control of Dugway’s network. It’ll take time, but we can–”

  “ARE YOU KIDDING?! WE DON’T HAVE TIME!” screamed Hayes. “Cut them off! However you have to do it, just shut the damn thing down!”

  132

  They were in the worst possible location.

  Defensively, a hallway provided absolutely zero protection. No cover, no possibility of retreat, and nowhere to break to––except through a nearby doorway, if possible. But now, without warning, those doors could all be heard locking themselves on both sides. All the way down the hall. Moments after, an alarm sounded overhead and then was silenced.

  Both men looked at each other.

  “I think whatever surprise we had is over.”

  Caesare nodded. “We got farther than I thought.”

  Clay looked forward, past another intersection, to the overhead lights at the far end of the hall. They were flashing on and off in some sort of pattern. It was Morse Code.