Jarrod withdrew the black substance and hoisted the corpse over his shoulder. As he left the room, he said in a dispassionate voice, “Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of the body.”
3
Ashley Forest, South Carolina
As Felicity North walked up the long, gravel driveway, she felt her shoulders tightening involuntarily. She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. The danger was real, but her job was too important to run away from. She stepped onto the porch, which looked worn and weathered from a distance, but was actually brand-new. The composite boards didn’t bend beneath her weight, and she could barely hear her footsteps as she approached the front door. As usual, her palms started to sweat. She wiped them on her jeans before reaching for the doorbell.
“Hello, Ms. North.”
She startled, clenching her teeth and balling her hands into fists. Still facing the door, she said. “Will you please stop doing that?”
“You have my apologies. Eric Larson is still convalescing, and I didn’t want you to wake him. The door is unlocked if you would like to go inside.”
Felicity didn’t look back—the sight of Jarrod’s overly-muscled frame and fluctuating skin color always put her on edge. And on one occasion, she couldn’t see him at all. He had used his armor to become invisible and observe her from a distance, only reappearing when ordered to do so by Kayla Larson. She turned the doorknob and stepped inside then removed her shoes in the foyer.
The house was large but not ostentatious. The furniture, floors, and shelves were rugged and utilitarian, but Kayla’s tasteful application of shabby-chic decor made the home feel inviting. After hanging her coat on a reclaimed barn wood rack, Felicity turned the corner into the living room and settled into a recliner.
Jarrod followed behind her, making so little noise that he seemed to float an inch above the carpet. He wasn’t wearing any clothes—the only thing covering his body was a layer of skin-tight ebony armor. As he walked, he reminded Felicity of an anatomical diagram—with every muscle and sinew clearly visible. He crossed the room, opened a wooden chest, withdrew a terrycloth robe, and covered himself. Jarrod no longer understood the concepts of modesty or propriety, but he had honored Felicity’s wishes when she asked him to cover up during their last meeting.
A door closed at the end of the adjacent hallway, and Kayla Larson stepped into the living room. “Good evening, Felicity. Can I get you something to drink?”
Felicity brushed aside a streak of blue that she had dyed into her platinum blond hair. “The usual, please.”
Kayla nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. She returned a moment later, carrying a beer and a chilled glass. She set them both on the end table beside the recliner. “I’ll be in the bedroom if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Larson.”
Kayla wrinkled her nose. “I’ve told you before, it makes me feel old when you call me that. Kayla is just fine.”
Felicity shrugged. “Sorry. You can blame my mom for that.”
Felicity had grown up in a small town, just south of the Minnesota border in Iowa. Her mother was kind and loving, but strict—setting moral standards that Billy Graham would have struggled to live up to. But she was a good teacher. Felicity’s father had been a pipefitter, an outdoorsman, and a Navy veteran, and even he had learned the finer points of etiquette under the woman’s watchful eye.
Kayla’s lips twisted into a half-smile. “I’ll rub off on you if you spend enough time here.”
“Obviously.” Felicity grasped the beer can and held it up.
Kayla took a step back. “Goodnight, Felicity, and good luck.” As she turned away, she glanced back at Jarrod and let out a mournful sigh. “Goodnight, Jarrod.”
Jarrod didn’t respond. He remained motionless until she left the room then took a seat across from Felicity on a sturdy sofa.
Felicity studied him for a moment. She hadn’t received many details about the “incident,” only that Jarrod had killed someone. And the entire point of these therapy sessions was to teach him restraint, so Santiago Torres had ordered Felicity to make the eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Baltimore to Ashley Forest as punishment.
She sighed. It wasn’t punishment, really—that wasn’t Director Torres’s style. This was an emergency house call. And Felicity’s sole responsibility at the Hillcrest Trauma and Rehabilitation Center was to treat Jarrod’s condition, so she couldn’t really complain. But it was a long drive.
Director Torres had promised to relocate her to Charleston Air Force Base, where she could use the Secure Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIF’s, to send her reports and receive instructions in return, but the orders had stalled at the Pentagon. Officially, Jarrod didn’t exist, so strings needed to be pulled to justify her transfer.
Cracking open the beer and pouring it into the glass, Felicity said, “Why am I here, Jarrod?” She felt comfortable speaking frankly with DARPA’s ill-conceived science project—none of their conversations were ever recorded.
Jarrod’s spine was ramrod straight, and he sat with his palms resting on his knees. “I am not certain, though I can infer with reasonable confidence that you were sent here by Santiago Torres.”
Felicity exhaled through her nose. “Good guess. But what I really mean is, what did you do that made Director Torres decide to send me here?”
Jarrod gave a stiff nod. “At 1321 this afternoon, I killed a man named Solomon Patel.”
She lifted the glass to her lips and took several large gulps. The alcohol and carbonation gave her a pleasant dizzy sensation as she set the glass aside. “Describe the incident to me.”
“I had been assigned to observation by Thomas Ward. I monitored Solomon Patel from within the Watchtower and came to the conclusion that Patel had arrived at the security firm under false pretenses.”
“Such as?”
“He claimed to seek help in locating his children, who had been missing for approximately seventy-two hours. But he was, in fact, responsible for their disappearance. He was most likely seeking help from investigative firms as a ruse, in order to appear innocent.”
Felicity nodded. “Guilty until proven innocent by the media. I know how it goes. What did you do next?”
“I entered the interview room and injected thirty grams of metamaterial into the sutures between his facial bones in order to encourage a confession. When he provided the desired information, I expanded the metamaterial and separated the bones. The pressure and brain trauma resulted in his death.”
The acid in Felicity’s stomach began to churn, and she held a closed fist against her mouth. After several moments she took a deep breath and said, “That’s disgusting, Jarrod.”
“The psychological stress induced by the injection of metamaterial into bone tissue was deemed sufficient to elicit meaningful intelligence. The information Solomon Patel provided can be used to locate the remains of his children. This will provide their mother with closure and cease the need for further search efforts.”
Felicity leaned heavily against the recliner and shook her head. “Couldn’t you have gotten the information without killing him?”
“Yes. But allowing him to live would endanger Thomas Ward and his entire company.”
She held up a finger, signaling for him to stop while she chugged the remainder of her beer. To say she wasn’t qualified to treat Jarrod would be an understatement. Under normal circumstances, DARPA only hired the best and brightest scientists. Most of the employees at the Hillcrest Trauma and Rehabilitation Center were prodigies and pioneers in their respective fields. But a group of terrorists had assassinated hundreds of scientists at universities and defense research facilities across the country, forcing an adjustment to DARPA’s recruitment standards. They needed trained professionals, but they were willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find them.
Which was exactly where they had found Felicity. At Hillcrest, she was surrounded by engineers, physicists, neurologists, and biochemists with multiple P
h.D.’s. But the only degree she could append to her name was a Bachelor’s in Neuroscience from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She had planned to continue her education, but before she could begin post-graduate studies, her father had suffered a fatal heart attack. She returned to Iowa and took a dead-end job at a laboratory to help her mother pay the bills.
Then, only a few days before her twenty-fourth birthday, the entire world changed. A secretive terrorist organization known as Katharos unleashed an unprecedented series of attacks and plunged the United States into a financial panic. She’d lost her job as nearly every laboratory in the country was commandeered by the government in an attempt to revive the crippled DARPA.
Money became scarce, and Felicity had been forced to sell her car to pay the bills. When the money ran out again, she became desperate. In a strangled economy, financial institutions were rarely forgiving when it came to late mortgage payments. She had lost all hope when a woman knocked on her front door.
The woman introduced herself as an investigator from the Department of State. The U.S. government was conducting background investigations pro-bono, and Felicity had qualified for top-level clearance. After asking a few questions, the woman left, promising Felicity that someone would contact her in a few days.
The phone rang less than thirty minutes later. Felicity was offered a job in the Pentagon, and she accepted. The following days were a whirlwind of activity. She was flown to the Pentagon for in-processing then to Atlanta where she trained with the CDC for two weeks. After that, she received orders to go to Fort Meade in Maryland. There, in soundproof rooms, she learned the nation’s darkest secrets and signed non-disclosure agreements by the dozen. She had barely caught her breath when she received a new, peculiar set of orders. She was to report to the Hillcrest Trauma and Rehabilitation center in Baltimore.
After wandering the halls of the CDC and spending days in the SCIF at Fort Meade, Hillcrest was underwhelming. On the bright side, she was finally working in her field, assisting a psychologist who treated veterans with mental illness. At first, her main job was to ferry blood samples to the labs and bring coffee back from the break room, but she was given more responsibility each day. Before long, she was transcribing recordings from clinical interviews and even sitting in on group therapy sessions. It was obvious that Hillcrest was undermanned, due to some sort of political upheaval. But Felicity was happy to contribute and thankful for the generous paychecks she received on a weekly basis.
Then, ten days ago, everything changed. The new director of Hillcrest, Santiago Torres, introduced himself to her and asked her to accompany him to the basement.
She wasn’t aware that Hillcrest had a basement, but she didn’t feel like she could refuse the Director’s request, either. She followed him to a discreet room at the center of the building and stepped onto a glass-walled elevator. The “basement” was actually a massive DARPA laboratory, hidden beneath hundreds of feet of earth. That day, she saw advanced technology that was beyond her wildest dreams—magnificent and terrifying instruments of war. Even her time at Fort Meade had not prepared her for it.
At the end of the tour, Director Torres led her to a secret room within the underground laboratory. He showed her videos on a computer tablet—videos of a dark creature committing horrible acts of violence. Then he told her that the creature was the result of a project he had been a part of. Project Nerium.
He told her everything about Jarrod Hawkins, and Katharos, and the technology war being fought across the globe. He described the recent terrorist attacks in New York and Albany, and a weapon that had the power to eradicate all human life on earth.
Now, sitting in the recliner, Felicity absently rubbed the pair of black lines on her wrist. She had been infected, just like millions of other people, with an experimental gene drive—a biological weapon with the ability to rewrite DNA. The lines were a harmless proof-of-concept, but their significance could not be overstated. If Katharos had the power to rewrite the DNA of millions of people in a few short weeks, they had the power to alter the course of human history.
The fight against Katharos was virtually hopeless. And Jarrod, the most advanced weapon to ever haunt a battlefield, had been sidelined because of his volatility. Before he could join the Hillcrest black-ops team, he needed to prove that he could restrain himself. Santiago Torres had assigned Felicity as Jarrod’s therapist. The Director claimed that she was perfect for the job—not because of her intellect or credentials, but because she cared for her patients. He’d been watching her lead group therapy sessions, and he was certain she would mesh well with Jarrod.
Of course, he made it clear that her participation was strictly voluntary. He would never force her to come face-to-face with a killing machine. But how could she refuse? The fate of humanity was at stake, and DARPA’s ringer wasn’t even in play.
Though she didn’t share the Director’s confidence in her abilities, she knew she would do everything in her power to “fix” Jarrod. Even if it killed her.
Taking a deep breath, she sat forward and focused on the human weapon. For the moment, his eyes were sky-blue and his skin was only slightly tinged with gray. “Let’s forget about whether your actions were right or wrong. When you killed that man, did you feel like you had a choice?”
“Yes. I followed every decision-making parameter pertaining to the situation and selected the most viable option.”
“What if there had been a way to find the children without harming the man or endangering your friends? Would you have chosen that option?”
He shook his head. “Based on the available data, there was no other option.”
“Stay with me, Jarrod. I’m asking you; do you wish there had been another way?”
“Wish…” Jarrod repeated softly.
“That’s right. If, somehow, you could go back in time and change the sequence of events, would you do it?”
Jarrod’s head jerked sharply to the right then settled back into a neutral position. “Yes. I would choose…not to be born.”
The answer was heartbreaking, but Felicity had heard it before, so she pressed on. “That’s not an option. Not today. What else would you change?”
“I would kill Patel before he killed his children.”
“That’s a start. But in the end, he’s still dead, and you’re still a killer. What if you could stop him from killing his children without harming him in any way?”
“That is an unlikely outcome. It would not reach the decision-action threshold.”
“We’re talking about a theoretical scenario here, Jarrod. If you could talk him out of killing his children, would you?”
A beat, then, “No. The risk of him killing the children later would be too great. I would kill him anyway.”
She smiled, knowing she had backed him into a corner. “Deedee claims she never wants to see you again, Jarrod. And that will never change unless you stop killing people. How does that affect your…” she made circles in the air with her hand, “decision-making threshold?”
Jarrod shifted in his seat, which Felicity took as a good sign. The human weapon, who was nearly impervious to pain, was visibly uncomfortable.
“I do not know.” He gripped his head with both hands. “I—I don’t know.”
Felicity leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Good. That means we’re getting somewhere.”
4
September 23rd
Hillcrest Trauma and Rehabilitation Center
Baltimore, Maryland
A year ago, every seat in the observation room would have been filled with surgeons and nanotechnologists watching the breakthrough procedure. Now, Santiago Torres watched the surgery alone. He wrung his hands together as he peered through the one-way glass, praying fervently for the woman on the operating table. Agent Janson would survive the operation—he had no doubt about that. His concern was not for her body, but her soul.
The men and women on the Hillcrest security teams grieved the loss o
f Agent Ford in their own ways. Some of them were angry. Some of them cried. Others shrugged it off as an occupational hazard. Ford hadn’t been the most popular shooter on the teams. He was the best marksmen, without a doubt, but not the most likable person. Of everyone in the sprawling underground complex, Ford had only formed a close relationship with one person—Janson.
And her feelings about Ford’s death were impossible to read. When she spoke to San, her voice held traces of longing and grief, but San couldn’t help but wonder if it was all an act. He could sense rage and determination beneath her disconsolate mask. Ford’s death had given her a sense of purpose.
But why? As far as she knew, Ford’s killer had died in a drone strike. San, Eugene Carver, and Felicity North were the only Hillcrest employees who knew Jarrod was still alive, and they understood the importance of guarding that secret.
San gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself up. He stretched for a moment, alleviating the tension that had built up after hours of sitting, then he stepped closer to the observation window. Up close, he could see his reflection. The umber skin had more wrinkles than he remembered, and the salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper. The stress of the past eighteen months had taken its toll. Even so, he counted himself lucky. Unlike so many of his friends, he still had his health, his family, and his life.
At the back of the room, a steel door slid open, gliding along steel ball-bearings. Eugene Carver stepped inside and descended the stairs, bypassing the tiered seating and moving in next to San. He studied the operating room for a long moment then said, “How is she?”
San nodded at a holographic display beyond the surgeons. “Her vitals are steady, and Doctor Wagner is almost finished. He should be easing her off the anesthetic soon.”
Heir to the Nightmare Page 2
