FUSED: iSEAL OMNIBUS EDITION (A Military Technothriller)

by Jude Hardin

  She passed one of the nightshift employees on the service road. Nika Dunning. The night nurse. Cara smiled and waved, checking her rearview mirror a few car lengths later to make sure Nika made it in through the gate. She did.

  Once Cara was safely away from the property, she called Oberwand on her cell.

  “I got him,” she said.

  “You’re kidding. Already?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly follow the plan, but everything worked out. He’s in the passenger’s seat of my car, and I’m heading your way. I’m assuming you have my final payment ready, along with the bonus.”

  “Of course. The money is in my safe.”

  “Good. I’ll be there in an hour. And by the way, there’s an admiral named Lacy who has the power to destroy the implant just by uttering a secret phrase. I thought you might like to know about that.”

  “Lacy. Okay. Yes, that’s significant. I’m assuming our captive is in standby mode. Is this correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take the pistol out the glove compartment and shoot him in the heart,” Oberwand said.

  “You want me to kill him? Why? Once you remove the BCI, he won’t remember—”

  “Just do it. Trust me. I’ll tell you why later. He’s going to be very dangerous if you don’t terminate him immediately. I want to hear the gunshot before you hang up. Do it now, please.”

  Cara didn’t understand why Oberwand wanted this guy dead, but she guessed he had his reasons. Anyway, it was nothing to her. All she cared about was the money.

  Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached over and opened the glove box. Then, in an instant, she felt a warm hand clamping her right wrist and a cold 9mm barrel kissing her right cheek.

  “Easy with that,” Cara said.

  MK-2 let go of her arm, but he kept the gun pressed to her head.

  “Just drive,” he said.

  A few seconds ticked by.

  “Hey,” Oberwand said, his tinny voice rising from the cell phone on Cara’s lap. “You there? What’s going on?”

  MK-2 grabbed the Samsung Galaxy S4 with his free hand and slammed it against the dashboard, crunched it like a handful of potato chips. He lowered the window and let the wind suck it to the pavement.

  “That’s my phone,” Cara shouted.

  MK-2 closed the window. “Not anymore.”

  Silence.

  “Now what?” Cara said.

  “Take a right up here at the light.”

  Cara stopped at the light, took a right on red. Two blocks later, MK-2 instructed her to steer into the parking lot of a restaurant that had gone out of business, a grungy little hole in the wall called Mike’s Grill.

  “Are you going to kill me?” Cara said.

  “Drive around back.”

  There was a service door at the rear of the building, and a dumpster Cara could smell even with the windows up. Rancid meat, rotten vegetables, dirty diapers. Nearby residents must have decided to make it their own after the restaurant tanked, she thought.

  At MK-2’s direction, she backed in behind the steel monstrosity and killed the engine. With the lights off now, she could barely see the steering wheel in front of her.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she said again.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Cara spoke authoritatively: “Because I’m no longer a threat to you, and you’re not a murderer. Think about your primary and secondary directives.”

  “I know my primary and secondary directives. But you’re forgetting that I can also act independently, depending on the situation. So I would suggest that you drop the attitude—if you want to live.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Who am I?” MK-2 said. “What’s my real name?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Aggerson didn’t give us that information. It’s a confidentiality issue. We didn’t have the need to know, so he didn’t tell us. As far as everyone at CereCirc is concerned, you’re name is MK-2.”

  A jaundiced streetlight reflected dimly off the towering red and white sign at the front of the restaurant.

  Mike’s Grill.

  MK-2 must have thought it was close enough.

  “My name is Mike,” he said. “From now on, you can call me Mike.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why did you lie to me before? Where is Dr. Aggerson?”

  “He’s back at the facility,” Cara said. “In bed. He passed out from drinking too much.”

  She paused for a beat, trying to think up a feasible story that might placate him for a few minutes. Or, she thought, maybe it would be best to just go ahead and give it to him straight, everything except the part about the ice pick in Aggerson’s throat.

  The truth would be fine at this point, she decided. Whatever it took to buy a little time. There was a GPS tracker mounted to the chassis of her car, and she knew that Oberwand’s people would be coming to rescue her soon. Five more minutes, tops.

  And Oberwand’s people had plenty of firepower to put MK-2—or Mike, as he wanted to be called now—down for good.

  “Go on,” Mike said. “If Dr. Aggerson is back at the facility, then why am I here?”

  “What I told you earlier is true. Part of it, anyway. Oberwand wanted to steal the BCI and copy it. He hired me to kidnap you, and he planned to surgically remove the device when I brought you to him.”

  “He told you to shoot me in the heart. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mike nodded. “I believe that,” he said. “Do you want to know why Oberwand told you to kill me?”

  That caught Cara off guard.

  “Sure,” she said. Anything to stall for a couple of more minutes.

  “There’s a self-activating micro-switch in the brain-computer interface that gets triggered when I’m exactly one mile from the CereCirc Solutions research facility. Dr.Aggerson installed it in case there was an abduction attempt. He was a step ahead of you. Your friend Oberwand must have known about the switch, or at least suspected it. That’s why he wanted you to shoot me. He figured I was going to wake up automatically at some point.”

  Cara wondered how Mike knew all that, but she didn’t bother to ask. Aggerson must have included information about the BCI in one of the programs he loaded earlier.

  “Well,” Cara said. “I have to admit, Dr. Aggerson is quite the clever fellow. A self-activating micro-switch. Who knew?”

  “You killed him, didn’t you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The BCI is also equipped with an internal polygraph. I’ve been scanning your body every time you speak. Your heartbeat and respirations increased slightly when you told me that Dr. Aggerson passed out from drinking too much. Also, your palms got a little sweaty.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “There was an elevation in the sodium molecules on the fleshy parts of your hands. So tell me the truth this time. Who is Oberwand? Where can I find him?”

  A pair of headlights came tearing around the corner. The vehicle fishtailed and accelerated and finally screeched to a stop a few feet from Cara’s front bumper.

  Plumes of white smoke rose from the hot tires. Two very large men climbed out of the black SUV, their ghostly silhouettes emerging through the vapors, their automatic rifles aimed at Cara’s windshield.

  Everything was going to be fine now, she thought. The cavalry had arrived just in the nick of time.

  Then, without warning, the two men opened fire.

  3 hours and 58 minutes before the blast…

  As soon as he’d seen the SUV’s headlights, Mike had opened the passenger’s side door of Dr. Cara Skellar’s Toyota Camry and had rolled out onto the pavement. Now he was standing behind the overwhelmingly odorous trash receptacle as two men pulverized the windshield with automatic rifle fire.

  AR-15s. Mike could tell by the rhythm of the reports. When they finished shooting and started advancing toward the Camry, Mike stepped out from behind the dumpster and fired two
shots from his Ruger 9mm, the semiautomatic pistol he’d taken from Dr. Skellar’s glove compartment. Both men dropped to the asphalt.

  Mike walked over and took a good look at them. He already knew they were dead, but he wanted to check the accuracy of his shots.

  There was a tight red hole the size of a dime at the center of each man’s forehead. Perfect, Mike thought. He was happy that Dr. Aggerson had taken the time to calibrate his motor skills. He didn’t feel bad for the men. They were enemies, and they had gotten what they deserved.

  He walked back to the Camry, looked inside. Pieces of Dr. Skellar were all over the interior. What a waste, Mike thought. Such a brilliant woman. But she was a spy, and she’d murdered Dr. Aggerson. Mike was almost sure of that now.

  And she would have killed Mike as well, at her boss’s request.

  Oberwand.

  An Internet search had resulted in over 64,000 hits, but the people or companies referred to were all in foreign countries. There were no listings for anyone named Oberwand in the United States of America.

  Mike reached in and grabbed Dr. Skellar’s handbag from the back floorboard, knelt down and dumped the contents on the pavement beside the car. Breath mints, lipstick, a tampon. Some other stuff. Nothing significant. Nothing about Oberwand.

  Mike wanted Dr. Skellar’s CereCirc ID card, but it wasn’t there. Then he saw that it was on a lanyard around her neck. He hadn’t noticed it before. It was ruined now, just like the rest of her attire. Full of bullet holes.

  He opened her wallet and took out the money. Five hundred and twenty-seven dollars. He left everything else there in a pile. Driver’s license, credit cards, filling station receipts, everything. He had no use for it.

  He thought about taking the SUV, but he figured it had a tracking device on it, same as Dr. Skellar’s car. Best to leave it alone.

  One of the would-be assassins was wearing a black leather jacket. He took that. He needed a place to hide the Ruger.

  He started walking. He needed to get back to CereCirc. Someone at the facility would be able to figure this out. Surely there were other doctors there who could remove the BCI.

  Mike just wanted to be normal again. He wanted to know his real name and where he’d come from.

  When he made it out to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, he saw a police car turning into an alley half a block away. The car abruptly braked to a stop, backed out and sped toward him.

  Memphis Police Department. Mike knew that the officer would arrest him. No choice. Mike was carrying a gun, and there were dead people behind the restaurant.

  Would it be best to go on in and try to explain things to the police? Mike initiated an instantaneous and simultaneous analytical scan involving three hundred and seventeen separate algorithms, and they all came up with the same answer: no.

  The iSEAL program was top secret. He couldn’t tell the police about it, and they wouldn’t believe him even if he did. iSEAL? Sure, pal. And I’m Robo-Cop. Nice to meet you. They would label him paranoid schizophrenic, lock him up in a psych ward somewhere until the doctors either cleared him to stand trial for the murders or declared him criminally insane. Either way, he would be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

  The BCI wouldn’t show up on ordinary radiological scans, so the authorities wouldn’t know that Mike had been telling the truth until he died and they autopsied his brain. If they even bothered.

  And the scab on top of his head from the surgical incision wasn’t proof of anything either. It was basically just a scratch. 6mm. A quarter of an inch. It could have been caused by anything.

  And, as if all that wasn’t enough to dissuade him from telling the authorities about the implant, there was a blinking red light in the holographic display over his left eye now, along with a message marked URGENT.

  Mike moved the flashing cursor to the upper left hand corner of the display and clicked on the little envelope. He did it with his mind, as easily as he might have performed a simple math problem. 1 + 1 = 2. That easy.

  According to the message, there was a protective circuit built into the BCI that would deliver a lethal electrical charge to Mike’s brain if he ever divulged any classified information to anyone other than a select group of CereCirc employees.

  So that was that.

  Mike couldn’t tell the police anything, and there was only one person outside of CereCirc he could talk to frankly and safely: the admiral.

  The admiral. What admiral? What was his name? Mike didn’t know. He needed to find out.

  He processed all of this information and these questions in less than a second, approximately the same amount of time it took for the police car moving toward him to travel two feet.

  Juiced on adrenaline, he turned and darted back toward the parking lot, trying his best to stay hidden in the shadows. There was a four-foot hedge in his path, and he hurdled it easily. Even with the jump, he traveled a distance of one hundred meters in 9.46 seconds, which shattered the current world record. He couldn’t remember how fast he’d been before the implant, but right now he was the fastest human being in recorded history.

  The police officer had turned his siren on, and three other sirens wailed in the distance now. Backup was on the way.

  Mike made it to the SUV, opened the door and looked inside. Luckily, the bad guys had left the keys in the ignition. Mike climbed in and started the engine, saw the red and blue strobes rounding the corner and speeding into the parking lot as he jammed the truck in reverse and smoked the tires into a one-eighty.

  He passed the police car going in the opposite direction, made it to the street and took a right. Gunned it and started weaving in and out of traffic.

  80…85…90…

  He checked the side mirror, saw the cop a few car lengths behind. Still just one, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case for long. More police cars would be on his tail soon. The sirens were getting closer.

  So he would have them to contend with, not to mention Oberwand, who was probably worried sick about his men by now, probably checking on the SUV’s location with the tracking device. Oberwand would send more guys with more machine guns, so there was no way Mike was ever going to get far in his current vehicle, even if he managed to evade the police. He needed to ditch the SUV, and he needed to do it soon.

  Something started buzzing on the center console. A cell phone, identical to the one Mike had destroyed earlier. He picked it up and answered it. He didn’t say anything, just held the phone to his ear and listened to dead air for a few seconds. Finally, a voice on the other end said, “Greg, you there? What’s going on?”

  It was Oberwand. Mike recognized the voice from the call to Dr. Skellar earlier. Or rather the device installed in his brain recognized it.

  “Nothing’s going on,” Mike said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Mike.”

  “Mike who?”

  “Just Mike. You know, like Cher. Prince. Madonna.”

  “I can’t believe it. You’re the guy with the implant, aren’t you? Aggerson’s guy.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Where’s Greg?”

  “Was he the really tall one shooting the AR-15 at me, or the really fat one shooting the AR-15 at me? I guess it doesn’t matter. They’re both dead.”

  “Cara?”

  “You mean Dr. Skellar? Your boys shot her before I had a chance to. That was your plan, wasn’t it? You were going to take me and her out at the same time. Your guys were going to bring my corpse back to headquarters so you could cut my skull open and extract the MK-2. You owed Dr. Skellar a bunch of money, but why bother? You were done with her. You didn’t need her anymore, and bullets are cheap.”

  Mike checked the mirror. The police car was right behind him now.

  “Listen,” Oberwand said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  “I’m a United States Navy SEAL. I don’t work things out with criminals.”

  “You’ll never get away. You know that, ri
ght? I have more resources than you can possibly imagine. I’ll scour the earth until I find you.”

  “Good luck,” Mike said.

  He disconnected and tossed the phone back down on the console. The speedometer was pegged at 120, and the police car was approximately five inches from his rear bumper. Two more cars had joined the chase, their strobes flashing in the distance.

  There was a traffic light coming up, and it wasn’t going to turn green in time.

  Mike weighed his options: he could maintain his current speed and run the light, risking a collision that would probably prove fatal to him and whoever he smashed into at the intersection; he could slow down enough for the light to turn green before he got there, which would enable the other two police cruisers behind him to catch up, maybe even pass him and orchestrate a controlled crash to stop him; or, he could veer to the right and take the ramp that said BRIDGE OUT.

  After careful consideration and a thorough analysis of the current traffic conditions, wind speed, relative humidity, and barometric pressure, along with the horsepower and suspension capabilities of the SUV compared to that of the police cars, he decided on option number three.

  He veered to the right.

  And as he did, he heard the whirring blades of a helicopter overhead.

  2 hours and 52 minutes before the blast…

  Mike crashed through the reflective Department of Transportation barricades that said DO NOT ENTER. The wooden horses splintered into a million pieces, the sand bags securing them barely noticeable as the SUV barreled on through.

  All three of the police cars followed, but based on their performance specs and weight distribution relative to the current outside weather conditions and the twenty-four foot gap in the overpass under construction, Mike knew that they couldn’t make the jump. If they tried, they would crash. On the other hand, the SUV’s wide undercarriage would act as a wing, and the weight of the rear wheel differential would prevent the nose from dipping too far too rapidly—if the speed was right.