The Shadow Protocol

by Andy McDermott

  The screen’s swirl and scroll slowed. The transfer was almost complete. She gave Harper a cursory check, then ran the final diagnostic before turning her full attention to Adam. “Did it work?” she asked as he stirred.

  He opened his eyes—and regarded her with the same cold, reptilian intensity as the admiral himself. A brief chill ran through her. “Yes,” he said. “It did.”

  “I’ll do a memory check anyway—”

  “No!” He jumped from his seat. “We’ve got to get out of here, right now!”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  He pointed across the kitchen. Beside a door leading outside was an alarm panel, a smaller version of the one by the front entrance. “There’s a secondary system. If it’s not deactivated within three minutes after the main alarm, it sends an alert to the Secret Service. They’ll already be on their way!” He tore off the skullcap, then hurriedly rummaged through Harper’s pockets to find his phone. “Come on!”

  “What about the PERSONA?” Bianca cried as he ran for the hall.

  “Leave it! There’s no time! Bianca, move!”

  She looked helplessly at the equipment on the table, then turned to follow him—before impulsively stopping to fire the dose of Mnemexal into Harper’s bloodstream. Then she tossed the injector onto the table and hurried after Adam.

  They reached the front door and rushed outside. The driveway was not yet filled with SUVs and sharpshooters, which was something, but Adam knew—Harper knew, from a false alarm when the DNI had once forgotten to deactivate the secondary system—that the Secret Service would take only a few minutes to arrive. He pictured the neighborhood in his mind as the pair ran down the driveway. There were two roads out of the exclusive little enclave; the Secret Service would be coming from the southwest.

  The obvious exit route was northeast, then. But the agents knew that too …

  They ran through the gates to the Mustang. Adam listened for approaching vehicles. Nothing yet—but they would not be coming with sirens wailing. If there was an intruder in the director’s home, the agents’ orders were to capture or kill, not scare away.

  He used the override to start the engine. “Wait, wait!” Bianca gasped as she scrambled into the passenger seat.

  Adam revved up, slamming the car into gear and making a rapid getaway—then abruptly jerked the wheel, flinging the Mustang into a 180-degree hand-brake turn. Bianca shrieked as she was thrown against the door. He straightened out and headed southwest.

  To her surprise, rather than accelerating, he slowed to the legal speed limit. “What’re you doing?” Bianca asked.

  “Making us seem less suspicious. Look relaxed.”

  “Oh, nothing could be easier!”

  Vehicles appeared ahead. A pair of black Lincoln Navigators, red and blue lights pulsing behind their radiator grilles. They rushed toward the Mustang—and whipped past, continuing to Harper’s home.

  Bianca turned to look out of the rear window. “Do you think we fooled them?”

  “Their first priority is Harper’s safety,” said Adam. “Or rather, his security. They need to make sure he hasn’t been compromised.”

  “I think they’ll work that out pretty quickly once they see what we left on his kitchen table.” She gave him a doleful look. “Adam, the disk—your disk. We left it behind! It’s still in the recorder.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s the only way to get your own memories back.”

  “Harper was more important.”

  “Is that you saying that, or him?”

  He gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s evidence against Harper. If his persona made you leave it behind …”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I’m in control. If we’d taken another ten seconds to get out of there, the Secret Service would have seen us leave. I had to do it.”

  “I hope it was worth it.”

  “So do I. But once we’re somewhere safe, we’ll find out the truth.”

  “Sir, are you all right? Admiral Harper!”

  Harper struggled back to wakefulness, painfully opening his eyes to see two men in dark suits standing over him. He squinted, making out coiled wires running from behind their ears into their collars. Secret Service agents.

  But why were they here?

  “What happened?” he grunted. More pain rolled through him as they helped him to sit up. His head was throbbing like the mother of all hangovers, but he hadn’t been drinking. He’d been …

  What had he been doing? He remembered being in the car, talking on the phone, and then … he was here, lying on his kitchen floor. The orange glow of sunset was still visible outside, so not much time had passed.

  He glanced at the panel by the door. A small red light was on, indicating that an alarm had been tripped. That explained the Secret Service’s presence—he must have not switched off the secondary system. Had he slipped and hit his head?

  “We don’t know what happened, sir,” said one of the agents. “We’re doing a sweep of the house and grounds, but haven’t found anyone else here. Although … we did find something unusual. We don’t know what it is, though.”

  “What thing?” He touched his forehead, wincing at a sharp pain.

  “On the table, sir. Can you stand?”

  “Yes, damn it, I can stand.” He shook off their helping hands and struggled upright …

  And froze, staring at the table.

  The PERSONA device told him everything he needed to know.

  “You were wearing this when we found you,” said the second agent. He held up the skullcap. “Sir, do you know what it is?”

  “Yes, I do,” Harper growled, using anger to cover his fear.

  Adam Gray had gotten what he came for.

  The Mustang was parked outside an apartment building on a tree-lined street in Washington’s northwestern quarter. It attracted no attention from passersby; indeed, there was an almost identical vehicle a few spaces away. If a search was under way for the black Ford, it had yet to reach this part of the capital.

  Adam lowered his window and, after checking that nobody was watching, casually dropped Harper’s phone down a drain. “I hope you got everything you needed from it,” said Bianca.

  “I did.” He had memorized a select few of the phone’s hundreds of contact numbers. “Now they won’t be able to use it to track us.”

  “Is that why you got me to chuck my phone?” He had made Bianca dispose of it earlier in the day. “Great. Now I’ll have to re-download all my apps.”

  “I’m glad you’ve got your priorities straight, Dr. Childs.” There was an acerbic disapproval in his voice that immediately reminded her of Harper. “Sorry,” he added, more normally. “I meant Bianca.”

  “So, you’ve definitely got Harper’s persona in your head. What does he know? What’s he hiding?”

  “A lot.” Flashes of the director of national intelligence’s memories had already come to Adam. Harper had forty years of dark military and political secrets stored in his mind. “But I’m not going to tell you what.”

  She gave him a hurt look. “Why not?”

  “Because they’re highly classified, and even though I’m on the run, I’m still an American intelligence officer. I took an oath, and I intend to honor it.” He considered that. “The spirit of it, at least. The letter, I’ve kinda broken.”

  “Just slightly. So what can you tell me? Why did Harper push you so hard to join the Persona Project?”

  “Because he knew Kiddrick and Roger could wipe my memory.”

  “And why was that so important to him?”

  “Because …” Adam fell silent as the answers came to him, one thought calling up a memory, which in turn opened up another, and another, a domino effect of conspiracy. He slumped back in the seat. “My God.”

  “What is it?”

  “Harper …” Adam began, barely able to believe what he was discovering. “Harper was behind it all.”

  “All of
what?”

  Harper’s persona resisted, desperate to keep the secret, but he pushed the words out. “The bombing in Islamabad—the secretary of state’s assassination. He was behind it!”

  Bianca’s eyes widened in shock. “You mean—he’s working with al-Qaeda?”

  “No, not at all,” Adam replied, shaking his head. “They’re a threat to American interests—he wants them all exterminated. But he’s willing to use them to help achieve his own goals. Giving Qasid the secretary’s itinerary was supposed to be a setup so we could take out a major al-Qaeda cell. But Harper was setting me up.”

  “How?”

  “He changed the fake itinerary for the real one. He wanted them to kill Sandra Easton.”

  Bianca was confused. “Why would he do that? What would he gain from it?”

  “Two things. Firstly, she was a political opponent. The Pentagon and the State Department have always been rivals, and Easton had been doing a good job of pushing her agenda with the president. Harper detested her. And second, al-Qaeda killing such a high-profile target meant that the War on Terror would be reignited.”

  “How could anyone possibly want that?”

  “They would if it meant expanding their power base. Billions of dollars more for the US intelligence community and the Pentagon—more special-ops units, more drones, more satellites, more surveillance systems. As the director of national intelligence, Harper is effectively in charge of all of it. The secretary’s assassination showed that there’s still a major threat against America—and he’s been given the extra money and manpower to deal with it.”

  “You mean … Harper did all that just to get more power for himself?” said Bianca, incredulous.

  “It’s not like that at all,” Adam snapped. “It’s about protecting America—by reminding everyone that there are forces out there who will stop at nothing to destroy our way of life! I did what needed to be done to make that threat clear—” He stopped abruptly, realizing what he had said. “Harper did what had—what he thought had to be done.”

  “He actually believes that paranoid crap?”

  “It’s not crap,” he said sharply. “And that’s not Harper talking, that’s me. I’ve been in the heads of these people—like al-Rais. He doesn’t just want to destroy America, he wants to tear down the whole of Western civilization and replace it with an Islamic theocracy. His ultimate goal is basically the Taliban as a model for global government. Is that something you want?”

  “Of course it’s not,” she replied. “But al-Qaeda wouldn’t have been able to kill the secretary if Harper hadn’t given them the information in the first place. He was using you as an agent provocateur!”

  He shook his head again, more sadly. “And I didn’t even know it.”

  “If you didn’t know, why did he still want to wipe your memory? You couldn’t have been a threat to him.”

  “Risk minimization,” he said, following another rippling chain of memories. “I’d read the documents I gave to Qasid. Harper thought there was a chance I might put two and two together and realize they were real, not fakes. He couldn’t allow that.”

  “Not to be morbid, but if he was willing to go that far to get what he wanted, why didn’t he just have you killed?”

  A cold shiver ran down Adam’s spine. “He considered it. That’s why John Baxter was in Pakistan. If I realized the truth, he’d been ordered to kill me.”

  “Baxter?” gasped Bianca. “You mean—all the time he was working with you at STS, he was really keeping watch on you?”

  “Yes. And he was still under the same orders, even after my memory was erased. If I remembered what had happened, he’d take me out. Quietly, though—he would have made it look like an accident.” Another memory made his eyebrows rise in dismay. “That’s what happened to the CIA officer I was working with in Pakistan! He didn’t die in the bombing. He worked it out—but made the mistake of telling Harper directly. Baxter killed him.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t work it out at the time, then.”

  “I should have. I had all the information, but … I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “I suppose not.” He stared morosely through the windshield. “You know what’s funny? In a twisted way, I mean. Harper actually thought that my not figuring it out made me the perfect candidate to replace Tony. One of Kiddrick’s theories about why Tony had his breakdown was that he was too strong-willed, that he was subconsciously resisting the persona imprints. But I was a good soldier who followed orders and didn’t ask questions … and I was broken. I wanted to forget who I was.”

  An image from Harper’s mind came to him, as disconcerting as the similar one from Qasid’s memories: himself, as seen through the eyes of another. But the quiet confidence of the agent on a mission was gone. This Adam Gray was a shattered wreck, crippled by loss and guilt. The only thing keeping him from a complete breakdown was his sense of duty.

  And Harper had taken advantage, filled with contempt for the younger man’s emotional weakness even as he saw the potential to make use of it. Persona … That puffed-up little prick Kiddrick claimed he could wipe a man’s mind, and condition him not to think about it. Two birds with one stone—reactivate a promising project, and make sure that Gray never puts the pieces together. I could assign Baxter to keep an eye on him …

  So events had been set in motion. Harper had “persuaded” Adam to join STS, and Kiddrick and Albion had erased his memories—without ever being told the complete story, just enough to convince them that his mental injuries had been sustained on a mission of the highest secrecy, and that he should never be allowed to remember it. For his own emotional protection.

  The procedure had worked. More effectively than either doctor expected. As they had explained to Harper, the trauma they were trying to delete was intimately linked to countless other memories … and the process had wiped them all away. Albion was uneasy about it, but Kiddrick had been positively crowing. Their new agent was an empty vessel, perfectly primed to take on the other personas that would allow him to complete his missions.

  And I was safe … except that idiot Kiddrick had made a recording of Gray’s original persona without telling me!

  “Adam?” He blinked as Bianca gently touched his arm, emerging from the admiral’s thoughts back into the real world.

  “Yeah, I’m here, I’m fine. I was just … just seeing things from Harper’s side.”

  She bit her lip. “He’s not trying to take control, is he?”

  He knew she was worried about what had happened in the Cube, when his despair had almost allowed Qasid’s persona to overcome him. “No. Absolutely not. I won’t let him. That bastard used me. He took literally everything from me and tried to turn me into some kind of—clockwork soldier.” Bitterness and anger colored his words. “Wind me up and watch me go.”

  “Well, nobody’s telling you what to do now. Except yourself. So what are you going to do?”

  His response was immediate. “I’m going to bring that son of a bitch down. Tell people what he did—and make him pay for it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.” A cold smile. “But he does.”

  The answer was already in his mind. All he had to do to find it was think. What is Gordon Harper’s worst fear? How can he be exposed?

  Harper knew. And now, despite his persona’s attempts to deny him, Adam did too.

  He sat in silence for a long moment, absorbing the flood of information and images and feelings. A name and face jumped out: Alan Sternberg, the national security adviser. A rival—and a threat. The nightmare scenario for Harper was Sternberg discovering the truth about the events in Pakistan. There would be no bargaining, no deals, no quiet cover-ups. Sternberg would destroy him without hesitation if he ever had the opportunity.

  Was there a way to give him that opportunity?

  Yes.

  Adam felt Harper rage in protest inside him, but
he pushed the DNI’s fury down and started the car. “Where are we going?” Bianca asked.

  He smiled. “A hardware store.”

  She was surprised. “Why?”

  The smile widened. “To solve Levon’s puzzle.”

  “Sir,” said one of the Secret Service agents, listening to a message through his earpiece. “A Mr. Baxter just arrived. He says you asked to see him.”

  “Let him in,” Harper ordered. He irritably waved away another agent still fussing about him. The cut on his forehead had been bandaged and he had been given some painkillers, but refused to take them, wanting to keep his mind sharp.

  Gray knew everything he did. That meant Gray also knew how to expose him. Even though he had done what he did solely to protect America’s interests, he knew that the sniveling left-wing parasites infesting Washington would not accept that as justification. If they learned about it, they would twist it in the media to bring him down in a howling witch hunt of a kind not seen since the trial of Oliver North. He would be accused of treason; every past decision second-guessed, every black operation under his watch dragged into the light. A disaster for American intelligence—no, a disaster for America.

  As a patriot, he would do whatever it took to stop that from happening.

  At the back of his mind for the past ten months had been the concern that something might emerge that could destroy him. The risk was minimal—he had taken every possible precaution, from the deletion of incriminating files at the small end of the scale all the way up to Gray’s mind-wipe and the elimination of his CIA contact in Islamabad. But there were some things that even the director of national intelligence could not simply erase from the record.

  One of those was foremost in his thoughts right now—which meant, he was sure, that it was also foremost in Gray’s. It would not be easy for the rogue agent to obtain. He had seen the facility for himself; security through obscurity was backed up by security through physical barriers—and beyond them, physical force. But if anyone could do it …