by Jude Hardin
The speed was crucial.
According to Mike’s calculations, the SUV needed to be going at least 122mph to sail over the gap and land safely on the other side.
The speedometer only went to 120, but Mike didn’t need that anyway. He knew his exact speed without looking. The BCI calculated the information continuously. All Mike had to do was turn the function on by thinking about it. The BCI used satellite signals for its calculations, which were a lot more accurate than anything installed at a car factory. And of course Aggerson had included a switchable internal jamming device that prevented the BCI from being tracked. Mike turned that on as well.
Right now the SUV was traveling at 121.2, and the gap in the highway was a little over half a mile away. Mike was almost certain that he could reach the proper speed, make the jump, and leave the police cars behind. It was the helicopter he was worried about. There was no way to outrun it.
But maybe there was a way to outsmart it.
Mike wanted to try something. He switched off his headlights, and for a brief moment there was nothing but blackness in front of him. Then, with a slightly jarring sensation, the way you feel when you bend down to tie your shoelace and stand up too quickly, everything turned green.
It was as if Mike had donned a pair of infrared goggles. He figured Dr. Aggerson might have included night vision in one of the programs he’d loaded, and his hunch turned out to be correct.
Now, once he got to the other side of the gap, the police helicopter would have a tougher time spotting him. The SUV was a lot more maneuverable than the copter, and it would be practically invisible unless the searchlight was shining directly on it. Mike felt confident that he could make some quick turns and shake the aerial tail.
Of course everything depended on him making the jump first.
121.7…121.8…
Mike concentrated on the road ahead. Another quarter mile to the gap, just a few more seconds.
Then he saw the second set of barricades. Positioned several feet in front of the break in the concrete, they represented one last warning to anyone stupid enough to have made it this far. They threatened to ruin everything. Would they slow him down enough to compromise his landing? He didn’t know, but it was too late to do anything about it now. If he slammed on the brakes, he would crash through the guardrail and careen off the edge and land on the highway below. He would die, and a slew of innocent motorists would die along with him. There was no choice. He was committed. He had to go through with the jump.
The barricades were one thing, and now he could see that takeoff velocity was going to be an issue as well.
His speed had dropped to 121.6.
122 was the absolute minimum.
Anything less than 122, and there was a risk that the front tires would catch on the far edge, causing the vehicle to flip repeatedly until gravity and friction finally brought it to a stop.
Anything less than 122 meant death.
As he approached the barricades, the speed dropped even further.
121.5.
The SUV was getting slower rather than faster.
Mike glanced down and noticed that the temperature gauge had crept into the red zone. The engine was hot. That explained the loss of power.
But there was no stopping now. There was nothing he could do but hope that he’d made a mistake, that his calculations were off just a hair.
But they weren’t.
As he crashed through the barricades and went airborne, as he sailed in an arc toward the other side of the overpass where the unforgiving concrete resumed, he could clearly see that they weren’t.
2 hours and 43 minutes before the blast…
Admiral William B. Lacy had flown to Washington earlier that afternoon, and now he was sitting in a private office with Oliver Fennel, the Associate Director of Paramilitary Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Fennel was forty-seven years old, slim and trim with salt-and-pepper hair and a winning smile. Gray suit, white shirt, striped silk tie. Every time Lacy had seen him, he looked as though he might have stepped straight from the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine. Fennel avoided media attention, but when it was necessary, he came across well. He’d served in the first Gulf war, the one they called Desert Storm, and he was generally respected among Washington’s elite.
The CIA had naturally shown a great deal of interest when Admiral Lacy first told them about the iSEAL program, and Fennel had allocated a substantial sum from his domestic branch budget to help fund the research. He was excited about it, and into it up to his teeth, and he wanted to be kept apprised of any new developments. He wanted to be in the loop every step of the way.
“I talked to Dr. Aggerson just a while ago,” Admiral Lacy said. “The surgery went well, and he was planning on installing some of the software as soon as he got off the phone. If you want me to, I can give him a call now and see how it went.”
“Yes,” Fennel said. “Let’s give him a call.”
Lacy reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, but before he had a chance to punch in Dr. Aggerson’s number, someone started banging on the door to Fennel’s office.
“Enter,” Fennel said.
A slim young man wearing a dark suit and a grim expression walked in and handed Fennel a sheet of copy paper.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But I thought you would want to see this.”
Fennel skimmed through the text on the paper.
“You can go,” he said to the slim young man.
The agent exited the office and closed the door.
For the first time Admiral Lacy could remember, his friend Oliver Fennel looked shaken.
“What is it, Ollie?” he said.
“It’s bad. Clive Aggerson is dead.”
Bad wasn’t the word, Lacy thought. This was horrible.
“What happened?”
Fennel scooted his chair closer to the desk and started keying something into his computer. While he was doing that, Admiral Lacy pulled out a tiny brown glass bottle, unscrewed the top, extracted one of the little white tablets, and placed it under his tongue. All in one quick, discreet motion. The pain wasn’t very bad yet, but he figured it would be best to nip it in the bud.
Fennel continued his conversation with Lacy as he typed.
“Some kind of security breach,” he said. “They’re still trying to sort it all out. The guard on duty was killed, and Aggerson was found in his apartment with an ice pick in his eye. And that’s not even the worst of it. Our test subject is gone.”
“Brennan is gone? Do they think—”
“They don’t know, but that’s the way it looks right now. It appears that maybe something went haywire with the BCI, and our boy went on a killing spree. One of Dr. Aggerson’s key staff members is missing as well, a chemical engineer named Cara Skellar.”
Admiral Lacy stood. He grabbed a tissue from the box on the desk, dabbed the sweat from his forehead.
“This is terrible,” he said. “I need to get back to Tennessee right away.”
“Sit down, Bill. We need to work this out together.”
“What can we do from here? I need to get with the doctors and the tech guys at CereCirc and figure out how to disable the MK-2 remotely and bring Brennan in. Do you realize the kind of destruction he’s capable of? If he’s had some sort of psychotic episode, there’s no telling what he might do.”
“You’re going to have to let us handle it,” Fennel said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know what I mean.”
Admiral Lacy sat back down in the chair.
“You’re going to kill him?” he said.
“We have no choice. Think about it. That little device in his brain is loaded with enough classified information to fill the New York Public Library. Not to mention the device itself. If it ever fell into the wrong hands—”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Lacy said. “He was never supposed to have left t
he facility. We were going to do our little four-week trial, keep the grant money coming for further research, keep the program alive until all the kinks were worked out. This just wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“But it did happen, and now we have to deal with it.”
Lacy shook his head. “We can’t just kill him. We need to see what the president has to say.”
“You’re kidding, right? You must not like your job very much. If word gets out about what really happened, heads are going to roll, my friend. Specifically, mine and yours. That’s why we can’t just bring Brennan in, even if he’s innocent. Once he ventured beyond the secured perimeter of CereCirc Solutions, the damage was done. The only way to fix it now is to make it look like it never happened.”
“So what are we talking about here? A cover-up?”
“That’s exactly what we’re talking about. The president doesn’t need to know any of this. I’ll send some people to CereCirc, and we’ll make the whole thing look like an industrial accident. An explosion. That’s what the headlines will say. That’ll be the official explanation. Four people died, and their bodies were blasted to pieces and burnt to a crisp.”
“Four?”
“Aggerson, Skellar, Brennan, and the guard.”
“You’re going to kill Dr. Skellar, too?”
“No choice. We need to make it look as though she was there when the accident occurred.”
“What about the autopsies? Won’t the coroner be able to determine that these people didn’t really die in an explosion?”
“You’re talking to the ADPO, Bill. Just let me worry about that.”
Admiral Lacy didn’t like the idea of a cover-up, but he knew Fennel was right. If the president found out that a working prototype of the MK-2 brain-computer interface had been out on the street and unguarded for one single minute, he would fire them both immediately, no questions asked. Lacy might even lose his retirement, something he’d been working toward for twenty-five years.
As it stood, his life depended on the president not finding out about the breach.
“All right,” he said. “Where do we start?”
“I’m issuing orders via email as we speak. Everything encrypted, of course. I’m going to send some men into CereCirc, and everyone who entered the facility tonight is going to be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They all have top secret clearance already, so it shouldn’t be a problem. While that’s going on, I’ll have another group out looking for Brennan and Skellar. We’ll get the papers signed, get everyone off the property, and then stage the explosion.”
“What if you can’t find Brennan and Skellar?”
“That’s irrelevant. We’re not going to bring them back to CereCirc anyway. The corpses found there will be doubles.”
“I’m not following you,” Admiral Lacy said. “What about the real Nathan Brennan and the real Cara Skellar?”
There was another knock on the door. The slim young man in the dark suit walked in again, handed Fennel a second memo, left the office without saying anything.
“We lucked out,” Fennel said. “Skellar’s already dead. We found her—along with two Caucasian males we haven’t identified yet—in a vacant parking lot in Memphis. My people are there doing the clean-up now. No cops on the scene yet, so we’re good to go.”
“What about Brennan?”
Fennel stopped typing. “We’ll have him by morning,” he said. “We’ll retrieve the MK-2, and then we’ll make sure his body is never found.”
2 hours and 42 minutes before the blast…
All four tires of the SUV bottomed out, slamming against the wheel wells and compressing Mike’s spinal column like an accordion. But the rubber held. None of the tires popped. The vehicle stabilized and continued toward the bottom of the ramp at 110mph.
Mike’s calculations had been spot-on, but the engineering diagram he’d accessed through the contractor’s website had been off by six inches. The schematic had listed the gap as twenty-four feet long, when in reality it was only twenty-three and a half. Close enough for government work, Mike thought. He was happy that someone had made the mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe the contractor had rounded everything up to jack the price tag. Whatever. If the gap had really been twenty-four feet, as advertised, Mike would be dead now.
He’d left the police cars behind, but the helicopter was right on top of him now, the beam from its search light glowing eerily and ominously through the SUV’s tinted sunroof.
When he got to the bottom of the ramp, he took a right, and quickly ran out of pavement. He was on dirt now, and it was mushy from the rain earlier. He switched on the four-wheel drive and weaved through some heavy construction equipment, his headlights still off and the infrared vision still on.
“There’s nowhere to go,” an amplified voice from above said. “Stop the vehicle and surrender now. I repeat: stop the vehicle and surrender now.”
Mike kept the gas pedal floored, but the tires were caked with mud and the SUV was still running hot and its speed was topping out at 81.4mph. He accessed some satellite photographs on the Internet, zoomed in and saw that there was a residential neighborhood two miles northeast of his current position. He headed that way, hoping that more police cars wouldn’t be waiting for him when he got there.
The dirt turned to scrub grass, and Mike could see a stand of woods half a mile ahead. He scanned the horizon, saw a path that had been cut, but it was narrow and he wasn’t sure the SUV would make it through. He went for it anyway. It was his only chance to lose the copter.
As he got closer, he made some measurements and compared them with the dimensions of the vehicle. The SUV would fit without scraping against any trees, but only barely. There was less than an inch of clearance on each side.
The trail had probably been cut for an ATV or a golf cart or something, Mike thought. He could imagine teenagers buzzing through to the construction site on evenings and weekends, making it their playground while the workers were away. He wondered if he had ever done anything like that, back when he was normal. He wondered if he’d ever had any fun.
As he entered the mouth of the narrow two-track, he accessed the satellite photos again, saw that the woods were only about a hundred yards deep, saw that there was a tract of power lines on the other side of them.
He crept through the woods at 30mph. With heavy bumps and ruts taxing the SUV’s suspension every inch of the way, and with tree branches scraping the paint off the fenders and door panels, there was no way to go any faster. He finally made it to the clearing on the northeast side, saw the berm and the concrete pilings and the heavy steel framework. Just as he was wondering if the helicopter pilot would notice the high voltage cables in time, there was an agonizing electrical hum followed by a bright flash and an explosion that rocked the earth.
Mike braked to a stop and climbed out of the SUV. The helicopter, engulfed in flames now, dangled from the overhead wires as Mike stood there and looked on in horror. Then, seemingly in slow motion, the lines snapped and the smoking black husk came crashing to the ground in a violent heap of broken glass and twisted metal. It broke into two pieces, the tail rolling one way and the fuselage the other.
A flaming human figure emerged from the wreckage, ran a few feet and then collapsed facedown. Kicking. Screaming. Mike hurried toward the man, intending to help him, but the heat was too much. An impenetrable wall radiated from the crash site, a searing partition approaching 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no way Mike could get through it.
Several of the power cables dangled from their supports, whipping and sparking and hissing, still pulsing with thousand of volts of electricity that had nowhere to go.
This was terrible. Mike had never meant for this to happen. He’d never meant for any police officers to die. These were the good guys, doing their jobs, trying to protect the citizens of Memphis. Mike had only wanted to get away from them, get back to CereCirc where someone could help him get this thing out of his brain.
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He’d made a mistake. He should have noticed the power lines sooner. He should have noticed them the first time he accessed the satellite photographs.
But he hadn’t. Even with all of his enhanced abilities, he was still only human.
And humans screwed up sometimes.
Mike felt bad for the officer smoldering fifty feet in front of him. He felt bad for the pilot, and for whoever else might have been on board when the copter exploded, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Those men were gone. They were dead. All Mike could do was continue onward and hope to avoid any further confrontations.
The copter was blackened from the flames, but there was still a faint outline of the N number below the rotors. The FCC identification number.
Mike did an Internet search and discovered that the aircraft didn’t belong to the Memphis Police Department after all. In fact, there was no record that it belonged to anyone. The number simply didn’t exist.
Oberwand?
Maybe.
At least no cops had died. Mike felt a little better about the situation now.
He decided it was time to abandon the SUV. He thought about taking the cell phone, but he figured Oberwand would be able to track that too. So he started walking, carrying nothing but the Ruger 9mm, the cash he’d taken from Dr. Skellar’s purse, and the clothes on his back.
He clicked open the Internet again, mapped out a route to CereCirc using side streets, back roads, and corn fields. He felt like a proper fugitive now, knowing the police would be searching every nook and cranny in an effort to locate him and take him down. He doubted there would be any warnings. They would shoot first and ask questions later. Not that he was overly concerned about his own safety. He was more than capable of taking care of himself. He didn’t want to run across any of them because he didn’t want to kill any of them. It was as simple as that.
But he would if he had to.
He was a United States Navy SEAL, and his current mission was to return to base. He couldn’t allow anyone to stop him, not even the good guys.
He trotted along the berm for half a mile and then climbed it and crossed over to a neighborhood that had been darkened by the power outage. No streetlights, no homey yellow incandescent glow from any of the windows.
