Boone nodded. “If Hobbs was compromised, I didn’t know who to trust. I didn’t know if he was rogue or if he’d been a plant inside the company the entire time.”
“So you went dark.”
He nodded again. “So I went dark. I strapped both bodies in the truck and popped them both in the head. I figured it would keep the local authorities from looking too close. I found some kind of phosphorus accelerant in the truck of the guy who came to meet Hobbs, so I put it to use. I doused the inside of the truck with it, then I lit them up. I figured, since the SUV was armored, it would burn long and hot. Certainly hot enough to obscure any trace of their DNA. I even tossed my Zippo in to seal the deal.”
Cyrus shook his head. He knew how much his friend cherished that lighter. Using it to sell the charade was the work of a desperate man.
“The real bitch of it was that I never got to interrogate Hobbs or his partner,” Boone lamented.
“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that,” Cyrus offered. “Odds are good that they were just one-off hires working on a compartmentalized, need-to-know basis. I’d wager they were just like the guys who tried to hit me on the train, or even here,” he said looking around the bar. “Mercs, just hired to do a job. Disposable and clean as far as their employer was concerned.”
Boone met Cyrus’s eye and nodded slowly. “Makes sense,” he reasoned. “You would be dealing with the same sort of thing on your end. You weren’t able to take one of them alive?”
Taking a pull from his beer bottle, Cyrus offered a rueful chuckle. “I’ll tell you this much. Whoever’s behind this knows where to shop, because they’re hiring some of the most hardcore, cut-throat bastards on the market. Not one of them has gone down easy. It makes it hard to get information when your opponent won’t stop fighting until he’s dead.”
Cyrus had specifically declined to comment on the two rogue members of Dargo’s team who were still locked away in the subbasement of the compound. He didn’t have much faith that either man would know anything useful, and he didn’t want to listen to Boone tell him that he needed to find out what they knew before Dargo did. As far as Cyrus was concerned, that part of the mission had come and gone. His priorities had changed. Not that he expected his mentor to understand that.
Boone huffed. “Well…at least we’re still alive.”
Cyrus smirked, then raised his bottle. Boone clinked his against Cyrus’s, and they both took a drink.
It was almost a half hour and three drinks later before Boone broached the subject Cyrus was waiting for. He’d actually been eyeing the clock to see how long it would take.
“All of this trouble over Voss’s work?” Boone said. “Is it even worth the effort?”
Slowly pulling the corner of the label back from the bottle in his hands, Cyrus considered the question. After a few moments, he cast a glance at Boone and gave a slight nod. “Our intel suggested he was in the early stages of his research. We were wrong.”
Boone leaned closer. “Are you kidding me? Has he started testing?” his voice was nearly a whisper.
“You could say that.”
“Have you seen the data?”
This was the moment of truth. By telling Boone that he’d been tagged with the neurological agent upon his first entry into the compound, he would be putting himself and Doctor Voss in a potentially life-threatening situation. It was a virtual certainty that the Coalition brass wouldn’t react well to the knowledge that one of their agents had experienced the memory recording procedure. It was impossible to tell how they might react, or the potential consequences—though time and experience had given him a fair amount of insight.
“Seen it? I’ve lived it,” Cyrus bluntly admitted. “I was in bad shape when I arrived at the gates of Voss’s compound. Worse shape than I expected, actually. I’d lost a lot of blood, and I had a serious infection. But that’s essentially why they let me through the gates in the first place. I needed immediate medical care and I couldn’t wait. So they let me in.”
Boone watched Cyrus as he explained, but it was clear that he wasn’t following.
“Shadowlight—Voss’s memory recording protocol—stage one, is a neuropeptide tag that’s injected into the bloodstream. It acts as a sort of marker, tagging the starting point for memory capture. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I was treated for the gunshot wound and the infection, I was also tagged.”
A faraway look crossed Boone’s eyes. He set his beer aside and leaned back on his stool. Cyrus could imagine all of the considerations that were flooding his mentor’s mind at that moment. Not one of them was good.
Turning, Boone looked at Cyrus. A grave countenance had gripped him. “Tell me how it works.”
“Parts of it are extremely complicated,” Cyrus admitted. “The tagging agent was administered through a standard subcutaneous injection along with broad spectrum antibiotics, so we can be sure that the tag isn’t something we can disable like a conventional bug or germ. But technically it’s a neuropeptide, with a number of attributes that have more in common with a prion. It has the unique ability to cross the blood-to-brain barrier. That’s rather unique, as I understand it. Neuropeptides and prions are both protein based, so it makes a lot of sense, actually. It’s similar to the way Mad Cow Disease makes its way to the brain only, thankfully, this isn’t fatal.”
“It could be,” Boone warned. “Depending on what Voss learns from your recording.”
“Yeah,” Cyrus said with a sigh. “I was blindsided in the truest sense of the word. But there’s good news. The neurological recordings are monsters. World-class monsters. They require hardcore computing power to download and process before they can be played. So while the tagging agent can be easily replicated, the recording hardware is the barrier to entry. And right now, there’s only one system in the world that can download and process the recordings.”
“Let me guess,” Boone said with a grunt. “It’s safely locked away somewhere deep inside Voss’s HQ.”
Cyrus nodded. “For now that’s a good thing.”
“Have you thought about what Monica will do when she finds out you’ve been compromised? Wait—. Has Voss downloaded your recording yet?”
“Yeah, this morning. But it’ll take at least forty-eight hours to process the data he captured,” Cyrus lied. “It’ll take at least that long for the computer to crunch the raw data.”
“Well, that’s something. It gives us time to figure things out.”
“The way things are going, we’ve got a lot to figure out.”
“You’re telling me. We still don’t know who’s trying to kill us. That would be a great place to start.”
They sat silently for a little while, both consumed with their own worries. But Cyrus had an agenda, a specific direction he needed this particular conversation to travel, and he needed to see it through before they were sidetracked.
“There’s one more positive aspect to the tagging procedure,” Cyrus clarified. “You can’t just go and tag someone without them knowing. Well, they did it to me, but now I know what to look for.
“The first day I woke up after being tagged, I felt like hell. I didn’t think too much of it since I had a small hole running straight through me, and an infection that was equally end to end. But it wasn’t the normal fevered, infection kind of shitty feeling. Every muscle in my body hurt. It was like I’d been hit by a truck. Every joint in my body ached to the point where I didn’t want to move.
“I wrote it all off as symptoms of a nasty infection. But once I found out Voss had used the tag on me, I started reading up on the little bits and pieces he’d told me. That’s when it all made sense. In addition to the infection, I was displaying classic flu-like symptoms. It turns out that you can’t just shoot a protein into the body’s bloodstream. It’ll be attacked as a foreign body and destroyed by the immune system. That’s why a virus is used as a delivery vehicle. The neuropeptide compound is piggy-backed on top of some sort of viral agent—something the body can
’t destroy before the payload is delivered.”
Rubbing his eyes, Boone raised a hand and tipped his head back in thought. Cyrus knew he needed a moment to consider everything that was flying at him. He would understand the generalities of the science as they were explained, but it was a lot of information to process.
When Boone spoke again, Cyrus knew he was reading his friend correctly. “Bearing in mind that I only understood half of what you just said, it does sound like good news—and maybe bad, depending on who’s using it. With symptoms like that, anyone who’s been tagged should stick out like a sore thumb,” Boone reasoned.
Cyrus realized that he should feel guilty for fabricating many of Shadowlight’s particulars, but strangely he didn’t. The flu-like symptoms were a smokescreen. He just hoped he hadn’t overplayed the details.
Chapter 23
The Cuban
11:29 pm
Making no effort to hide her amused smile, Lucy delivered another round of shots. She met Cyrus’s eye and offered the barest hint of a nod. Without a word, she turned and headed for the far end of the bar. Boone watched the woman with curiosity but held his tongue until she was out of earshot.
“She’s into you,” he said with a rueful grin. “I swear to God, kid…every damn place you go… What is it? I sure don’t get it.”
Cyrus pulled one of the shot glasses in front of himself, and pushed the second over to Boone. They’d been drinking and catching up for some time, and while Cyrus was feeling no pain, he could see from the glazed pinch of his friend’s eyes that Boone was way ahead of him in that regard. “It’s all in your head,” Cyrus said quietly before taking the shot glass and downing its contents in a single swallow.
“Bullshit,” Boone slurred before downing his own shot. “Maybe you don’t see it—or maybe you just don’t want to. I think you put a part of yourself on a shelf when you left your girl all those years ago. That’s why you had to come back now. You had to see if she still feels the same about you. I know you sure as hell feel the same way about her.”
Unable to pull his eyes away from the surface of the counter before him, Cyrus considered his friend’s words and wondered why the observation frustrated him so deeply. Boone was right, of course. But it was the fact that Boone knew about it at all that bothered him more than anything. It was a consequence of coming back now, when he was on the clock. He should’ve done it once he was done with the Coalition.
And with that alcohol-fogged thought, Cyrus realized for the first time what his subconscious had been trying to tell him since the start of the mission. Things just weren’t right—the job just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. He’d been lied to and manipulated by his superiors. They would say whatever was necessary to keep him in line. And while Boone might be right, that he was made for this type of work, doing it for the Coalition was becoming a problem. Cyrus simply didn’t want to do the job if he couldn’t trust the people he worked for—or with.
“What’re you thinking?” Boone asked.
Popping from his slow epiphany, Cyrus raised his head. His eyes instantly moved to the mirror on the wall behind the bar and scanned the room to their backs. Such routines were muscle memory, or reflex. He really was hardwired for this kind of work. Interestingly, he’d also noticed that the more they drank, the less Boone was minding their surroundings. That wasn’t like him. He was tired and worn. Even his hard won instincts had frayed with time and fatigue.
Catching Lucy’s eye from her position at the far end of the counter, Cyrus signaled for another round. Sure, the booze dulled Boone’s instincts more than the stress and fatigue, but that was another thing that his one-time mentor would’ve previously admonished. A lot had changed with his friend over the course of the last several months. Cyrus had been away for most of that time, so maybe coming back and seeing Boone as he was only made it that much more obvious.
“Another round, boys?” Lucy asked.
Boone shook his head in a delayed response. “Not for me,” he slurred.
Cyrus was watching Boone in the mirror’s reflection and fought a mischievous smile when he saw his eyes wobbling with each shake. “Yeah,” Cyrus said. “Why not?”
Lucy was watching Boone carefully. Clearly she didn’t think he was alright. She shot Cyrus an, are you sure? glance. Cyrus nodded and gave her a quick wink. Shrugging, she departed to prepare another round of shots.
“I don’t know where you’re putting all this, kid.” Boone leaned heavily on his elbows, putting the weight of his upper body on the bar to keep from teetering on his stool. A goofy sort of grin had spread across his face. It was an expression Cyrus had never seen before. For the first time since meeting Boone three years earlier, Cyrus wondered if this was what it looked like when Boone finally relaxed and decompressed.
The sight made him feel guilty for what he was doing to his friend. Still, he was doing what Boone taught him and following his gut. Things weren’t adding up, and a voice in the back of Cyrus’s mind was telling him things that the logical part of his mind—even his heart—wouldn’t dare to examine.
Lucy placed the last pair of shots before them and then made herself scarce. Cyrus couldn’t blame her. She was grateful for what he’d done to stop the gunman earlier in the week, and he was taking advantage of that by asking her to do something she couldn’t understand. Still, all she had to do was serve the drinks. Adding a little something extra to Boone’s was a small favor, but it was asking an awful lot.
“I’m surprised you’re still here,” Boone said without turning to Cyrus. “I figured Monica would’ve cut her losses by now and called you back to HQ. Too many dead agents with nothing to show for it. She’s not the type to roll the dice and keep you in the field.”
“You must’ve suspected I was still operational. You came here looking for me,” Cyrus said, avoiding the point Boone was trying to make.
His friend looked at him. Boone’s eyes were glazed but there was concern there. He licked his lips and took an unusually long time to organize his thoughts. “She ordered you back, didn’t she.”
Cyrus found it amusing that he hadn’t asked a question. It was a statement. Boone knew him that well. Cyrus shrugged and refused to meet his eye.
“Well…that’s why I’m here,” Boone said simply.
“Even though you went through the trouble of faking your death?”
“All the better, actually. That way I could keep an eye on you—well, Voss’s place, with no one really watching out for me. No one ever sees a dead man coming.”
Cyrus smiled. Yeah, fair point.
“Besides, I didn’t figure you’d pull the ripcord on this one, even if you were ordered home. This one’s personal for you. That’s never a good thing.”
“Personal or not,” Cyrus countered. “If we pull the plug now, we’ll have lost a lot of good people with nothing to show for it. If I don’t see this through, we may never know who’s behind this.”
Boone sat silently, taking a long look at his young contemporary. “That’s one of your character flaws…one that I respect most,” he admitted. “But it’ll be the one that gets you killed.”
Chapter 24
The Motel California, Rivven Rock
8:13 am
Boone woke up face down in a puddle of his own drool. Even as he blinked the sleep and grime from his eyes, he knew something was wrong. He propped himself up on an elbow and the room around him spun like a violent tilt-a-whirl. The contents of his stomach first churned and then quickly began to roil as his body threatened to expel everything where he lay.
Jesus.
He settled for rolling onto his back and letting the room spin unseen beyond closed eyes. He sensed the unpleasantly soft mattress and the bed’s hideous, threadbare duvet beneath him. Not only was he fully clothed, but the bed was still fully made. He swallowed hard and made another half-hearted and failed attempt to sit upright.
Last night was a blur…
Struggling to recall why he felt so ho
rrible, Boone realized he had no memory of returning to the hotel room. In fact, the last thing he could recall was drinking with—
Oh…that sonofabitch…
Girding himself in preparation, Boone slid upright and sat at the foot of the queen-size bed. Spreading his knees wide, he fought for equilibrium in a spinning world. His sense of balance warred with his better judgment as he smashed his eyes shut and reminded himself that the room was, in fact, stationary. The thundering cacophony taking place inside his head was unlike any headache he could ever recall. There was a stabbing pain behind his eyes—a throbbing spike being twisted between his temples and in his ears—and then there was the intense searing sensation that ran from the base of his skull, down a neck so stiff he could scarcely turn his head.
Boone hadn’t had so much to drink in a long time. Not since college, in fact. While he could vividly recall some world-class hangovers, none of them compared to this. He knew he’d more than overdone it, but somehow the consequences seemed out of proportion to his excess. Was he just getting too old to tie one on like he had back in the day? What would Cyrus look like in comparison? He had drunk every bit as much.
Cyrus…
His eyes flashed fully open and Boone became completely alert for the first time. He fought back the nausea and the stabbing pain that came from the small bit of light filtering through the drawn curtains at the far end of the room. He was alone. His gun and two spare magazines sat on the small, crooked table a few feet away. There was a short dresser made of cheap imitation wood along one wall beneath a large discolored mirror that was bolted to the wall, and the floor beneath his feet was as worn as the bed.
Looking down at his feet, Boone wiggled his stocking-clad toes and noticed for the first time that he’d been relieved of his boots. He winced. Even his feet hurt.
With his weapon secure and in clear view, plus Cyrus missing, Boone reasoned that he must have rented the room after their drinking marathon the night before. Still, he had no memory of it. In fact, he had no memory of leaving the bar. Maybe he was just too old for this kind of foolishness. He was, without a doubt, regretting it now. Still, it had been a relief to catch up with Cyrus while getting up to speed on his side of the case. He could recall that much, at least.
Rogue Faction Part 2: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book Three Page 19
