by Jude Hardin
She pulled to the curb, opened the door, and climbed out. Her eyes were puffy and red. She looked as though she’d been crying.
“It’s you,” she said, a mixture of fear and confusion in her voice.
Mike tried to play it off. “You must have me confused with someone else,” he said.
“No I don’t. It’s you. You’re supposed to be dead.”
Mike continued walking toward the entrance to Jock World. Nika grabbed his arm from behind.
“Don’t do that,” Mike said. “I have to go. Leave me alone.”
“Just stop and listen to me for a minute. Please. I have reason to believe that you’re in great danger.”
Mike stopped. He was annoyed. He didn’t have time for this. He already knew he was in great danger. The cops. Oberwand. But maybe there was more.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“It’s a long story. I swear, I’m not making this up. Just get in the car and talk to me for a minute. I’ll take you to my house. You’ll be safe there until we can figure something out.”
Mike glanced inside Nika’s car. Another standard transmission. His hands were in the pockets of his new windbreaker, his right index finger on the trigger of the Ruger nine.
“I have a gun in my pocket,” he said. “Right now, it’s pointed directly at your heart. I need a ride back to CereCirc.”
“You can’t go back there.”
“Why?”
“You just can’t. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Great. So don’t talk about it. Just get in the car and drive.”
1 hour and 29 minutes before the blast…
Since the day she’d gotten a license to operate a motor vehicle, one of Nika’s greatest fears was being carjacked at gunpoint. Now it was happening—although the man beside her in the passenger’s seat wasn’t exactly a stranger. She didn’t know his name, or anything about him, but she’d pierced his vein with a needle and she’d drawn blood from him. She knew what his baseline EKG looked like. She could picture it in her head, the perfect sinus rhythm with a rate of sixty-two beats per minute. She knew he had a mole on his left shoulder, and a birthmark on his right leg.
So she had a connection with the man beside her, albeit a very clinical one.
“Where do you want me to take you?” she said.
“I already told you. Back to CereCirc.”
“You don’t want to go there, MK-2. I can promise you that.”
“The name is Mike. Just turn around. Do it. Now.”
“All right. You’re the boss.”
Nika made a U-turn, and then a right at the next light. Mike pulled the gun out of his pocket and rested it on his left thigh.
“I want you to tell me what happened at CereCirc tonight,” he said. “Start from the beginning.”
“I signed a paper,” Nika said. “Everyone in the building had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They told me if I ever said anything—”
“Cara Skellar is dead. She was a spy, and she tried to kidnap me. I have a strong suspicion that Dr. Aggerson is dead, too, that Cara killed him before she abducted me. So I already know quite a bit, Nika. If there’s more, you need to tell me. Maybe I can do something about it.”
“What makes you think you can do anything about it?”
“Aggerson was a genius,” Mike said. “You wouldn’t believe the things I can do.”
Nika was very nervous. She could barely drive. She hated this whole thing. She hated the idea of living a lie for the rest of her life. She’d been hearing conspiracy theories since she was a child, and she’d always wondered how many of them were true, how many people the government had bullied into keeping their mouths shut through the years. She didn’t want to die, and she didn’t want to go to prison, but she couldn’t imagine living with this knot in her stomach forever. It was as if some of the blood was on her hands now. Maybe Mike really could do something about it.
“I walked in and found the security guard with his throat slashed,” Nika said.
She told him about calling the code, about Dr. Aggerson not answering his pages, about the CIA waltzing in and taking control, everything.
“They’re going to blow the place up?”
“That’s what the agent said. I know. It didn’t make any sense to me either.”
There was a brief pause, and then Mike said, “They’re obviously trying to hide something, and I’m guessing it’s the fact that I was taken from the facility. It was never supposed to happen, and a lot of people are going to be in trouble if the president finds out that it did.”
“Why? What’s the big deal?”
“The MK-2 is the big deal. Do you know what could happen if it falls into the wrong hands? Do you realize what a powerful weapon this thing is?”
Nika shrugged. “Of course I don’t know as much about it as you do. Dr. Aggerson didn’t really talk about the specifics with any of us. We came in and did our jobs, and everyone knew not to ask a lot of questions.”
“I can see in the dark,” Mike said. “I can run faster than any other human being on the planet. I can fly airplanes and helicopters. My skills with a handgun are amazing. I can hit a target the size of a dime from a hundred yards. I have instant access to every military strategy ever recorded. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine an entire army of guys like me?”
Nika considered that for a few seconds. The implications were indeed staggering.
“The agent I talked to told me you were dead,” she said.
“Right. They need to make it look that way for the sake of damage control. They’re going to substitute someone else’s body for mine.”
“To buy some time,” Nika said.
“Exactly. Then they’ll locate the real me and make sure I disappear forever.”
Mike told her about some things that had happened earlier, about a police chase that ended with a helicopter crash, about a man named Oberwand who was trying to steal the MK-2, about a self-destruct program that would fry his brain if he divulged any classified information to anyone other than a select group of CereCirc employees.
“So the cops are looking for you, and this Oberwand guy is looking for you, and now the CIA is looking for you as well. And they all want to kill you.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Mike said. “And the only outsider I can talk to safely is some admiral whose name I don’t know.”
“So what do you hope to accomplish by going back to CereCirc?”
“Initially, I wanted to get back there for personal reasons. I wanted to get this thing out of my head. I want to be normal again, Nika. I want to know who I am and where I came from. But the whole place is a crime scene now. Dr. Aggerson and the security guard were murdered, and I need to stop the CIA from destroying the evidence.”
“Do you really think you can defeat the CIA?”
“I can try. My first directive is to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and right now the CIA is an enemy. I have to try.”
“This is all just so surreal. I wish there was a way I could—”
A black sedan pulled up beside Nika’s car, mirroring her speed. The sedan’s passenger side window came down, and a man aimed a pistol at Nika’s face.
“Hit the brakes!” Mike shouted.
Nika stomped on the pedal just as two muffled shots were fired. One of the bullets grazed the windshield, and the other must have missed completely. She skidded and fishtailed, barely keeping the car under control, her instincts kicking in as she steered off to the shoulder, narrowly escaping a collision with the furniture truck behind her.
She looked ahead and saw that the black sedan was turning around.
“Now what?” she said.
“Who was that? Who’s following you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to have to lose them. Just do exactly what I tell you to do.”
“Here, you drive,” Ni
ka said, unbuckling her seatbelt.
“I can’t,” Mike said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t drive a stick. I never learned how.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Are you going to go, or are you going to wait for that guy to come back and shoot at you some more?”
Nika jammed the car in first gear and eased back into traffic.
“What should I do?” she said.
“Stay in the right lane. Turn at the light.”
Nika did as instructed. “Do you think it’s the CIA after us already?” she said.
“Maybe. They might have followed you when you left CereCirc. They might have put a team on all the employees who signed the agreement.”
“Why would they do that?”
“To make sure everyone goes straight home, and not to the nearest radio station or something. I’m sure they have photographs of me, so when they saw me getting into your car—”
“I’m in danger now too,” Nika said. “You realize that, right? I signed a paper promising to keep a secret for the rest of my life, and I didn’t even last an hour. Not that I’ll ever make it to an interrogation room or anything. Now that they know you’re with me, they’ll just eliminate me too. It’ll be easy enough to make it appear as though I was killed in the explosion with the others.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “I never should have brought you into this.”
“Well, you did. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t all that keen on living with the big cover-up on my conscience anyway. But you’re going to have to help me now. You have to stay with me until we’re free and clear—if that’s even possible at this point.”
“They’re right behind you. Slow down a little bit.”
“Slow down?”
“Yeah. Try to keep it at forty.”
Nika eased off the accelerator, the sedan’s bright headlights only inches from her rear bumper now.
Then, without saying another word, Mike opened his window and climbed out of the car.
1 hour and 14 minutes before the blast…
Mike scrabbled onto the roof and lay flat on his stomach, facing the car that was following them. He kept his head low and his toes tight against the lip over the windshield. He was equipped with the infrared, a program that allowed him to see in low-light conditions, like a cat, but he also had a program that shielded his eyes when the light was too bright. He accessed that one now, and suddenly he could see past the blinding halogens and through the black sedan’s windshield.
He zeroed in on the occupants telescopically.
These were not CIA operatives. He could tell that right away. The driver was morbidly obese, with long greasy hair and a beard and multiple piercings in each ear, and the passenger had a shaved head and a tattoo of a snake on his neck. They might have been undercover cops, or some kind of bounty hunters, but Mike didn’t think so. Not enough time had elapsed for those types to be on his trail yet.
No, these were more of Oberwand’s guys. Had to be. And there was only one way they could have known that Mike was traveling in Nika’s car now: a second spy.
Oberwand must have planted someone else at CereCirc, someone who’d informed him about what was going on there now. Subsequently, Oberwand had decided to tail all the workers home. He’d arranged for a bunch of his thugs to follow every single employee out of the facility, on the off chance that one of those employees would lead him to the MK-2, and he’d gotten lucky.
Or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it.
Mike fired two shots in quick succession. The first one hit the passenger in the center of the forehead, killing him instantly, and the second one went through the driver’s left cheek and blew the side of his face all over the back seat and rear door panel.
Mike’s second shot had been off a hair, but it wasn’t his fault. The driver’s reflexes had caused the sedan to swerve slightly when the first report rang out. So the second shot had been a little sloppy. Not that it mattered. The driver was just as dead as the passenger.
The enemy vehicle went into a spin, leaving the pavement and rolling onto its side and landing on its roof at the bottom of a roadside drainage ditch. Flames shot up from the chassis, and then a ball of fire and smoke rose skyward in a sudden and violent percussive roar.
Mike climbed back into the seat beside Nika. “You can go fast again now,” he said.
“That was amazing. How did you do that?”
“I don’t know. It seemed as natural as breathing.”
Nika had a death grip on the steering wheel. Mike wished he could get her to relax, somehow. She was making him nervous.
“Okay,” she said. “Now that we know the CIA is on our trail—”
“It wasn’t the CIA,” Mike said.
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah. Those guys were private. I could tell by looking at them. Oberwand’s hired help. So we can continue on to CereCirc.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Yeah, but we need to get a different car now. Those guys probably called your make, model, and tag number into the boss. He’ll send more men with more guns. So we’re not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. I could steal a vehicle easily enough, but one call to the police and we’d be marked again.”
“I know where we can get another car,” Nika said.
Mike liked the sound of that. It meant she was on board now, part of his team.
“Where?” he said.
“At my house. I have an old Range Rover that I take camping sometimes. It’s not much to look at, but it runs.”
“Where’s your house?”
“Back the other way, but it’s not far. Just a couple of miles from Jock World.”
“All right,” Mike said. “But we need to hurry. If Oberwand has your tag numbers, he has your home address as well. He’ll probably send some guys to stake the place out.”
Nika slowed and pulled off onto a side street, turned around and headed back toward Kirby Parkway.
“I have a gun at my house, too,” she said. “A little extra firepower couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Absolutely. Bring a bazooka if you have one.”
Mike took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few seconds, happy that he had an ally now, but knowing that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better.
1 hour and 8 minutes before the blast…
The fact that Kelly Williams had been born double-jointed didn’t seem to be helping him at the moment. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t wriggle free from the shoelaces binding his wrists to his ankles. He was in good shape, but he was already starting to get cramps in his thigh muscles, and his shoulders felt as though they were slowly but surely being pulled from their sockets.
Kelly had tried to relieve the pressure by turning from side to side, but nothing seemed to help. He was in pain, and the thought of tolerating this extremely uncomfortable position until ten o’clock tomorrow morning made him sick to his stomach. Somehow, some way, he had to get loose.
He knew there was a pair of scissors in the manager’s office. File cabinet, bottom drawer. He’d been back there earlier, and there was still more work to do, so he hadn’t bothered closing the door.
It was against policy to leave the office door open like that during business hours, but there usually weren’t any customers after nine thirty or so anyway, and Kelly had wanted to get a jump on his closing paperwork. He did it all the time, and he knew for a fact that he wasn’t the only one. He’d seen the manager do it, as well as the owner. It was just too much of a hassle to pull the keys out and unlock the door every five minutes.
Ironically, everyone’s general disregard for that particular rule might have ended up saving Kelly’s life.
If he could get there.
It was a long way away, but he figured it was his only chance. He started scooting that way, inch by painstaking inch.
It took him about five minutes
to make it out of the shoe department and into the golf clubs. The office was all the way on the other side of the store, just past the big rack of baseball gloves. There was an aisle of camping and fishing gear on the way, including a variety of knives, but they were all in those blister packs that were impossible for ordinary human beings to open, even under optimal conditions. You needed a survival knife to get your survival knife out of the package. It was ridiculous. There was no point in even thinking about trying to get one of those knives.
Kelly was about halfway to the office when he had to stop and take a break. The guy with the gun had taken his clothes, everything except his boxer shorts, and the tile floor was rubbing his chest and abdomen raw. He was sweating profusely, leaving a trail of wetness from one end of the store to the other, and the muscle cramps had gotten worse. He lay there breathing hard for a few minutes, thinking it might have been a mistake to try for the office, thinking there was no way he could make it.
He’d been shouting for help occasionally, but he was all the way at the back of the store, and even if someone just happened to be walking by at this time of night, they probably wouldn’t be able to hear him. Maybe he should have used his energy to move closer to the front door in the first place, although it was even further from where he’d started than the office. And it was locked. And it wasn’t likely anyone would be close enough to hear him anyway.
No, he’d made the right decision. Onward, he thought, rolling up his figurative sleeves with fierce determination. He’d come this far, and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like excruciating pain stop him.
He looked up. He could see the baseball gloves now, and the turn that led to the public restrooms and the water fountain and the manager’s office.
The fountain. If he ever managed to free himself from these bonds, it was going to be his first stop. He was thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. Every cell in his body was screaming for water. He’d sweated out what seemed like gallons already, and he still had a long way to go. As an athlete—an all-state running back on his high school football team—he knew the importance of staying hydrated, and he’d started wondering if he would even make it through the night. Probably not. If he couldn’t get free, he was probably going to die.
