The Persona Protocol

by Andy McDermott

  ‘Seems like that’s what you were trying to do anyway,’ Adam countered. ‘Baxter wasn’t shooting at my tyres. Did you order him to kill us?’

  Harper ignored the question. ‘You should think about what you’re doing, Dr Childs,’ he said instead. ‘If you back out now, I’m prepared to be lenient.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll just drop the whole matter and I can go home, right?’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘Not exactly. But there’ll still be a possibility of your seeing merry old England again before you die of old age in a federal prison. You get one chance. I’d recommend that you take it.’

  ‘And I’d recommend that you take your offer and shove it up your arse,’ Bianca replied, drawing a quick smile from Adam – and a glare of furious outrage from Harper. ‘You’ve done nothing but bully and intimidate me ever since I arrived in the States. Well, not this time.’

  ‘It’s easy to act tough when your boyfriend’s pointing a gun at someone, huh? You think you’re Bonnie and Clyde? Well, remember how it ended for them. It’ll go the same way for you.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she told him. ‘No offence,’ she added to Adam as she secured the strap.

  ‘None taken. Okay, sir,’ he said to Harper as he lifted his foot from the other man’s chest, ‘get up and sit in that chair over there.’

  Harper scowled. ‘Like hell I will—’

  Before he could even finish speaking, Adam’s foot came down again, grinding brutally against Harper’s ribcage. The white-haired man tried to scream, but all that came from his mouth was a choked gurgle. ‘You know what I’ve been trained to do,’ Adam said in a low, level voice. ‘This is nothing. I can make you beg to feel this good again.’

  ‘Adam, please,’ said Bianca, fearful of how far he might go. ‘Don’t.’

  He reluctantly eased the pressure. Harper drew in a deep, whooping breath. Adam bent down and pressed the gun against the gasping man’s head before dragging him across the room and dumping him beside the table.

  Bianca hurriedly fitted the second cap as Adam kept the gun pointed at Harper’s face. ‘Okay, it’s ready,’ she announced.

  Adam took the Neutharsine injector from the medical case. ‘Keep him covered,’ he said, handing her the gun. ‘If he moves, shoot him in the leg.’

  ‘What?’ she protested, regarding the weapon as if it were toxic. ‘I can’t do that – I’ve never used a gun in my life. I’ve never even held a real one before!’

  ‘It’s easy. Hold it with both hands, point, pull the trigger.’

  ‘But I might kill him!’

  ‘Aim for the outside of his thigh. It’ll minimise the chances of hitting a major blood vessel. But if he’s smart,’ he continued, as much for Harper as for her, ‘he’ll keep very still. Like you said, you’ve never held a gun before. You might easily rupture the femoral artery – or blow his balls off.’ Harper’s face twitched at the prospect. ‘Just point it at him and count to thirty.’

  She was about to object further, but Adam put the injector to his neck and squeezed its trigger. He dropped on to a chair as the Neutharsine swept through his system.

  This time, it wasn’t just erasing a borrowed persona. It was erasing him. Bianca had coaxed memories out of him during the wait for Harper to return home, trying to ensure that at least some of what he had rediscovered would remain . . . but it wasn’t enough. The sensation was almost physically painful this time, a lifetime being neurochemically torn away before he had even had the chance to experience it again.

  And his feelings were being eradicated too. The resurgent pain of the grief and guilt that had almost destroyed him ten months earlier was fading . . . but so too were all the flashes of brightness to which his thoughts of Michael had led him. His brother, father, mother, other family members, friends, lovers – countless moments of happiness, love, pleasure, laughter, warmth, joy . . .

  All leeching away, flattening to bland cardboard. Nothing left but second-hand descriptions of emotions, not the emotions themselves.

  Michael was gone. He knew he had once had a twin brother, closer to him than anyone else, and that his loss had been shattering. But he could no longer remember how his brother’s death – or his life – had made him feel. It was merely a fact.

  Another emotion rose in him. Anger. Not for what he had lost, but that it had been taken from him. Stolen. He opened his eyes, seeing the cause of the anger. Harper.

  ‘Thirty,’ said Bianca, the gun still shaking in her hands. She glanced at Adam. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, trying to control his feelings. He stood. ‘Give me the gun, then inject him.’ She passed the weapon back to him with great relief.

  ‘Dr Childs!’ said Harper. ‘This is your last chance to save yourself. You’ve got your whole life in front of you – don’t throw it away.’

  ‘Adam had his whole life ahead of him too, until you threw away his past,’ she responded, taking the other injector from the case. It was loaded with a vial of Hyperthymexine.

  The Admiral eyed it with concern. ‘Wait – aren’t you going to do an examination? What about all the measurements you need to take? If you get the dose wrong, it could kill me!’

  Bianca smiled sardonically. ‘I’ve done a whole four transfers from unwilling subjects now; I think I can wing it. Six foot two, about ninety-five kilos, wouldn’t you say, Adam?’

  ‘Call it ninety-eight,’ Adam said.

  She looked Harper up and down, then adjusted the dial. ‘Yeah, that’s probably about right. Sitting at a desk all day adds a bit extra, no matter how hard you try.’

  The DNI was caught between fury and fear as she crouched beside him. ‘If you get it wrong and you kill me, it’ll be on your hands. You’ll be a murderer, Childs! I read your file – you went into medicine to save lives. Is that what you want? To be a killer?’

  ‘Like you?’ Adam said, voice cold.

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone in my life!’

  ‘Not yourself. But you gave the orders – to people like me. I want to find out what other orders you gave.’ He nodded to Bianca. ‘Do it.’

  ‘No!’ Harper roared, trying to scramble to his feet. Adam kicked him back down. Before he could recover, Bianca fired the injector into his neck. His yell was abruptly choked off as his entire body convulsed.

  Adam quickly returned to the chair as Bianca tapped the keyboard.

  ACTIVE: PERSONA TRANSFER IN PROGRESS.

  With more nervousness than usual, she flicked her gaze between the flaring colours on the screen and the two men before her. Guessing the drug dose really was a gamble; there was leeway in Albion’s overly theatrical calculations, but not so much that some degree of accuracy was unnecessary. She had estimated Harper’s height and weight as best she could, but if the dose of Hyperthymexine was too low, it could affect Adam’s ability to access the stolen memories.

  If it was too high . . . Harper was right. It could kill him.

  But the readings on the screen seemed in line with what she had seen with Zykov, al-Rais, the Russian pilot and Qasid. Reassured, slightly, she removed the vial from the injector and replaced it with one of Mnemexal. Adam did not want Harper to retain any memory of their visit – though it would be impossible for him to dismiss the cut on his head. She eyed the tiled kitchen floor. Maybe they could make it seem as if he had slipped and banged his head, as they’d done in Macau . . .

  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 po
inted 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 on to the table and hurried after Adam.

  They reached the front door and rushed outside. The drive 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 only take a few minutes to arrive. He pictured the neighbourhood 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 south-west.

  The obvious exit route was north-east, 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 handbrake turn. Bianca shrieked as she was thrown against the door. He straightened out and headed south-west.

  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 towards 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 got what he came for.

  45

  The Traitor

  The Mustang was parked outside an apartment building on a tree-lined street in Washington’s north-western quarter. It attracted no attention from passers-by; 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 memorised 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 honour 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 sup
posed to be a set-up 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 secondly, 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, realising 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 civilisation 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!’