The Shadow Protocol

by Andy McDermott

  Adam took something else from the bag. “Just an umbrella.”

  The Bullpen was in chaos.

  The video wall had been switched to show views from the STS building’s internal CCTV cameras, tracking the fugitives as they made their way to the uppermost floor. The coverage was not total, so none of the observers had seen Adam planting the charge on the water tank … but it was impossible for them to miss its effects.

  “Goddamn!” Morgan exclaimed as he saw the water sweep away his men—then all the screens went black. The overhead lights flickered and died, plunging the room into darkness for several seconds.

  “My system’s down!” Levon cried as illumination returned.

  “Mine too,” added Holly Jo in dismay. The computers were linked to a backup battery system that was supposed to keep them running long enough to allow the emergency power supplies to kick in, but something had clearly gone very wrong.

  Kyle was the first to realize the cause. “The hell? I’m gettin’ rained on!”

  Everyone looked up. Water was dripping from several points on the ceiling. One of the lights buzzed furiously before going out with a crack and a small puff of smoke. Kiddrick, standing beside Morgan, flinched. “That maniac’s destroying the entire building!”

  Desktop monitors started to flick back to life as machines rebooted. “Martin!” shouted Tony in alarm as he checked one of his screens, then entered frantic commands. “The security system’s gone into fail-safe mode!” He looked at one of the doors. The green light was flashing, telling him that the lock had been deactivated. In dire emergencies, the fail-safe was intended to allow people to evacuate the building without fear of being trapped behind a security barrier. “I can’t reset it, everything’s—Shit! Qasid!” He ran for an exit. “Martin, get security to the cells!”

  Morgan had already picked up a phone from a nearby desk, stabbing at one of the keys. There was no response. “Phones are down,” he reported. “Levon, we’re deaf and blind! How long before all the systems are back up?”

  Levon gestured helplessly at his screens. “I’m still rebooting! Couple of minutes, at least.”

  “Damn it!” Morgan slammed the receiver back down and took out his cell phone, swiping through the contacts list to find a particular number. “This is Martin Morgan. I need to speak to Admiral Harper—it’s an emergency.” He waited impatiently for the call to be transferred. Finally, he got a reply. “Admiral! It’s Morgan—we have a major situation at STS.”

  “What’s going on?” Harper demanded.

  “Agent Gray has gone rogue. We don’t know the full situation, but he assaulted Dr. Kiddrick and stole a PERSONA module.”

  “Which module? Who’s on the disk?”

  “He is, sir. It’s a recording that was made when he first joined the project.”

  There was a long silence from the other end of the line. When Harper spoke again, he sounded both angry and strained. “If what Adam Gray knows—what he used to know—gets into the wrong hands, there will be major implications for national security. That disk has to be recovered, Morgan. At any cost. Do I make myself clear?”

  “You do, sir,” said Morgan, frowning. “If I may ask … when you say ‘the wrong hands,’ do they include Agent Gray’s?”

  Another pause. “That is correct. Where’s Gray now?”

  “We’re not sure. He’s knocked out our systems.”

  “What?”

  “He blew a water tank and shorted out a lot of the building’s electrics. We’re trying to bring everything back online now. We think he’s on the roof, but—”

  “Whatever it takes, Morgan, you have to recover that disk. Put Baxter and his team on it. They’re authorized to use any means necessary to take Gray down.”

  Morgan was shocked. “Take him down, sir? Are you saying—”

  He broke off, whipping around at a muffled sound from somewhere outside the room. Kyle jumped. “Was that a gun?”

  “Everyone stay calm,” Morgan ordered, as more distant retorts reached him. “Stay at your posts—we need those cameras! Get our systems online!” He brought the phone back up. “Sir, there have been shots fired. I’ll report back as soon as I know the situation.” He ran from the Bullpen, following Tony’s path through the building.

  He passed frightened workers rushing the other way. “Did you see what happened?” he asked one woman.

  She shook her head, desperate to get away. “No, sir. But I saw Mr. Carpenter run past my office—and then we heard the shots.” She pointed down the corridor.

  “Get to safety,” Morgan ordered, running the way she had indicated. Toward the cells. It struck him that he could be heading straight into danger, unarmed, but he shook off his concerns. He was in charge; he had to know what had happened.

  A security door ahead, the green light flashing. He hurried through. Beyond was the holding area. The door was open—and he caught the sharp scent of gun smoke in the air. “Tony!” he called, going to the entrance. “Tony, are you okay?”

  Silence, then—

  “Martin? Yeah, I’m all right.” Tony sounded anything but.

  Morgan looked cautiously through the doorway. Tony was leaning over the guard’s desk, supporting himself with both hands and breathing heavily. The guard himself, a man named Rivers, was sprawled on the floor outside Qasid’s cell—which was open, and empty. A pool of blood slowly swelled around him. He was unmoving, eyes and mouth frozen open.

  Qasid was slumped against the wall by the door. Ragged splatters of blood were splashed across the paint, smeared downward where the terrorist had fallen. A SIG lay near him, several shell casings glinting on the floor. “What happened?” Morgan asked.

  Tony shook his head. “I wish I knew. Maybe Rivers didn’t realize that the fail-safe system had unlocked the cell and went to check the door after the lights went out, I don’t know. But Qasid must have caught him by surprise and gotten his gun.” He looked down grimly at the dead guard. “Jesus.”

  “What about you?”

  “I came in just as Qasid was going out—we ran right into each other. We started fighting for the gun. He nearly got me with it, but I managed to take it off him.”

  “So I see.” Morgan checked the Pakistani’s corpse. Three holes had been ripped through his chest and abdomen, blackened and burned by the muzzle flare from point-blank shots. “My God. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Just shaken up, that’s all. What’s the situation with Adam?”

  “Right now, you know as much as I do. But Harper wants him taken down.” Tony reacted with shock. “Come on, we’ve got to get back to the Bullpen.” They left the cells at a run.

  Bianca peered nervously over the edge of the roof. Traffic cruised along the street, a long way below. She looked back at Adam. “You must be joking!” she said as he pushed a button to snap open the very flimsy-looking umbrella.

  “Trust me, it’ll work,” he replied. “I’ve used one before. I jumped off a four-story building.”

  “Well, that’s great,” she protested. “But this has got more than four floors. And there are two of us, and we’re carrying a lot of heavy cases! There’s no way that’ll get us down to the ground in one piece.”

  “We’re not going to the ground. You see that tree?” He pointed at one of the lindens lining the sidewalk, this one somewhat younger and shorter than its neighbors. Even so, it was still a good thirty feet high.

  “What about it?”

  “That’s what we’re aiming for. It’ll break our fall.”

  “It’ll probably break a lot more than that!”

  Adam put down the open umbrella, taking the medical case from Bianca and squeezing it into his bag. “We can’t drop straight to the sidewalk,” he said, as he slung the carryall over one shoulder. “The Mary Poppins won’t slow us down enough from this height.”

  “The what? Oh, never mind, I get it. But you can’t seriously—”

  “The guys with guns will be here anytime now.” Holding th
e umbrella in one hand, he hefted the heavier of the two PERSONA cases in the other. “And they’ve been told they can shoot us. You want to wait for them?” Her expression made her opinion clear. “Then grab the other case and hang on to me as tight as you can.” He hunched down a little, gesturing for her to move in front of him.

  Bianca put both arms over his shoulders, gripping the case’s handle as hard as she could. The forced intimacy of being nose-to-nose with Adam was the least uncomfortable thing about her situation. “Are you ready?” he said.

  She licked her suddenly dry lips, trying to cover her rising fear. “It’s a bit late to back out now, isn’t it?”

  A crash of metal. The access door had been kicked open. Uniformed men, their clothing darkened by water, burst out into the open. “Over there!” one shouted, seeing the fugitives. His gun came up. “Freeze!”

  Adam looked into Bianca’s eyes, giving her unspoken reassurance—then he swept her with him over the edge.

  Gravity caught them. Bianca screamed as they plunged. The umbrella’s carbon-fiber spokes creaked alarmingly, the tough nylon straining as wind resistance tried to rip it free.

  The floors of the STS building flashed past. Even with the umbrella’s air-braking effect, it wasn’t slowing them enough …

  “Close your eyes!” Adam shouted.

  An order, not fatalism—

  Bianca did as she was told—as they hit the top of the tree with a huge crackle of snapping twigs. Leaves burst around them like confetti, broken wood clawing at their clothes and skin.

  They kept falling, the topmost branches too slender to resist their weight. The fabric and spokes were ripped from the umbrella’s shaft. Bianca felt a slashing pain in her thigh as a wooden shard tore through her trouser leg. She cried out—then the breath was knocked from her as she slammed down on a more solid bough.

  She lost her grip on Adam. The case was jarred from her hands, bouncing through the foliage. She tumbled, hitting another branch side-on. It cleaved from the trunk with an earsplitting snap. More leaves lashed at her hair and face as she dropped—

  A hard impact, this time on something cool and flat and solid. She was on the ground.

  Head spinning, pain messages from different parts of her body competing for attention, she blearily opened her eyes …

  And saw a car coming straight for her.

  She screamed—

  The sound was drowned out by the screech of tires. The car juddered to a halt, the front wheel less than a foot from Bianca’s head.

  A thump nearby told her that Adam had landed. He pulled her up. The bag was still slung from his shoulder, and he had somehow kept hold of the case. Its twin lay on the sidewalk, leaves dropping around it like green snowflakes. “Get the PERSONA!”

  She limped to pick it up. Adam ran around the car, an aging Hyundai Elantra station wagon, and yanked open the door. “Out!” he roared, pulling the startled driver from her vehicle. “Bianca, come on!”

  Bianca collected the case and hobbled to the passenger door. “Sorry,” she called to the driver as she climbed in. Adam had already tossed his case onto the backseat, putting the car in drive. The Hyundai peeled away with as much power as it could muster, leaving shocked onlookers in its wake.

  “Take this,” said Adam, passing the bag to her.

  With the case in her lap, she had to perch the extra baggage on top of it—making it all but impossible for her to fasten her seat belt. She struggled to brace her legs in the foot well as Adam took a corner at speed, the station wagon’s roll making her slither sideways in her seat. “Where are we going?”

  “We need to get underground.”

  “Why?”

  “To block the tracker. If we stay in the open, they’ll box us in.”

  “But—if we go into an underground car park or whatever, they’ll still know where we are. It won’t take them long to find us.”

  “That’s why you’ll have to work fast.”

  “At what?”

  He glanced at the bag. “There’s an emergency surgical kit in there. I need you to cut me open and disable the tracker.”

  She gawped at him. “You couldn’t have told me all this before we jumped off the roof?”

  “Would it have changed your mind about helping me?”

  “It might! I’m a neurochemist, not a surgeon!”

  “I’ll tell you what to do.” He swerved the car onto the wrong side of the road to overtake some slow-moving traffic, then skidded through an intersection, eyes scanning the street ahead.

  “Everything’s back online,” Levon reported, checking a system diagnostic on one of his monitors. The video wall lit up again, showing the views from various STS security cameras.

  The images were well behind the action, however. “They did what?” Morgan barked, listening to a call on his cell phone.

  “They jumped off the roof!” reported the leader of the security team. “They used one of our trick umbrellas to land in a tree, then took some woman’s car.”

  “Did you get the license plate?”

  “We couldn’t see it from up here. Some sort of station wagon, light blue, fairly old.” He paused as someone spoke to him. “Thomson thinks it’s a Hyundai. They went south down Twentieth, then turned east.”

  “Hook us into the DC traffic cameras,” Morgan barked to Levon. “We’re looking for a light blue station wagon, heading east.” He turned to Baxter, who had just arrived and received a rapid briefing from Tony. “John, get your team and go after him. The admiral wants you to handle this personally. I’ll link you in with DC police.”

  “On it,” said Baxter. He took out his own phone as he hurried to an exit. “Spence! Get the guys geared up and down to the parking garage—we’re moving out!”

  “You’re sending our tac team after him?” asked Tony. Holly Jo also looked concerned.

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” said Kiddrick, face tight with anger, “he attacked me and stole classified information! Then he wrecked half the building while resisting arrest!”

  Tony ignored him. “You are going to try to capture them, right?” he said to Morgan. “Not shoot them on sight? We need to find out why Adam’s done this.”

  “That’s what I’m going to ask him, right now,” Morgan replied as he donned a headset. “Holly Jo, patch me through to Adam.”

  She entered commands. “You’re on, sir.”

  “Adam! Whatever it is you’re doing, I want you to—”

  Holly Jo shook her head. “Sorry, sir. He’s turned off the earwig.”

  “Damn it,” Morgan muttered. He went to her workstation. “Use the alert bleeper, see if that gets his attention.” She pushed the button, but there was no response.

  “Do we have the tracker?” Tony asked.

  “Yes,” Holly Jo told him. Another flurry of commands. “Putting it on the wall.”

  A block of screens switched to a map of Washington. A green square appeared on the street grid, heading across the city. It was already several blocks from the STS building.

  “I’m tied in with Metro,” Levon announced, pudgy fingers rattling across his keyboard. More markings appeared on the map. “We’ve got live LoJack trackers of all the MPD patrol cars in the city.”

  “The nearest one’s four blocks from him,” said Kyle.

  “Holly Jo, link in with the police and give them Adam’s position,” Morgan ordered. “But tell them just to corral them, not arrest them—I want our people to make the capture. Maybe we can find out what the hell’s going on.”

  Kiddrick stared at the green square as it turned north at an intersection. “Where’s he going? Is he trying to get out of the city?”

  “No, he’s trying to find cover,” said Tony. “He knows we can track him—so he’ll be looking for somewhere to block the signal so he can disable it.”

  “How can he do that?” Kiddrick demanded. “The tracker’s implanted in his body!”

  There was a brief silence as the answer came to everyone
simultaneously. “Ew, gross,” said Holly Jo, wrinkling her nose. “I hope he’s got some Band-Aids.”

  Morgan crossed to Kyle’s workstation. “Have we got a drone available?”

  “Yeah, one of the new ones,” the younger man told him.

  “Get it in the air. When Adam goes to ground, I want us to have eyes on every possible exit from his location. We can’t let him get away.”

  While Morgan was talking, Tony went to Holly Jo and leaned over her shoulder. “Do you trust Adam?” he whispered.

  “Of course I do,” she answered, surprised. “Tony … do you know what he’s doing?”

  “No—but I trust him too. Do what you can to help him. I’ll try to get Levon and Kyle on board.” He moved away, leaving her staring after him in surprise before she returned her attention to the screens … with a surreptitious glance at Morgan to see if he was watching her.

  He wasn’t, instead finishing giving instructions to Kyle. The UAV pilot hopped from his seat and headed across the Bullpen—to be intercepted by Tony. “Kyle, hold on.”

  “What is it?” Kyle asked.

  Now it was Tony’s turn to check that Morgan wasn’t eavesdropping. “You trust Adam, don’t you?” he said quietly.

  “ ’Course I do. The dude saved my life!” It took a moment for him to realize that the question had a subtext. “Whoa, hold on, brah. You asking what I think you’re asking?”

  “There’s more going on here than we think. Adam and Bianca are the only ones who know what that is. Try to help them if you can.” Another sidelong glance, and he saw that Morgan was glaring impatiently at them. “Use the computer’s auto-tracking to tag all the MPD vehicles,” he said, more loudly. “Their trackers aren’t as accurate as ours—we need to know the exact positions of everyone involved in the pursuit.”

  “Huh? Oh yeah—sure, brah,” Kyle said, finally getting it. He hurried from the room.

  Tony went back to Morgan just as the director’s phone rang. “Yes?”

  “It’s Baxter,” came the reply. “We’re just leaving STS. Where is he now?”