by Jude Hardin
They’d begged him, but there was never enough time.
Admiral Lacy heard someone call for the defibrillator. A deep male voice. Calm and confident. It sounded familiar, for some reason.
It was the last thing he heard before losing consciousness.
40 minutes before the blast…
Still following from a prudent distance, Kelly Williams watched the beat-up old Range Rover slow down and take a right. He’d planned to do likewise, but a reflective sign at the turnoff said GOVERNMENT CONTRACTOR, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, NO THROUGH TRAFFIC.
Kelly had heard about some sort of research facility out this way, although he couldn’t remember the name of the place. He cruised on past the service road and pulled to the shoulder a hundred feet or so ahead. He switched off the lights and killed the engine, got out and propped the hood up to make it look like he was having car trouble. He grabbed his pistol from the glove box and started backtracking on foot.
His cell phone had been crushed back at Jock World, but he’d decided not to call the police anyway. He didn’t trust them. A friend of his had called in a tip one time and had gotten screwed out of the reward money. Some sort of technicality. Seemed like the cops were more crooked than the crooks half the time. Kelly figured the only way to get the twenty-five grand for sure was to bring the bad guy in himself, so that’s what he planned to do. Dead or alive, it didn’t matter to him. All he cared about was getting the reward.
And a little payback.
39 minutes before the blast…
Nika braked to a stop in front of the gate.
“I guess that car wasn’t following us,” she said. “They kept going straight when we turned.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Take the shotgun.”
Mike reached into the back seat and grabbed the twelve gauge pump, looked it over.
“I can’t take this,” he said. “There’s still a serial number on it. If I’m captured or killed, they might be able to trace the gun back to your ex, and then to you.”
“But you might need it.”
“Can’t take the chance. Anyway, I’ll be all right. I have a full magazine, plus some extra shells in my pocket. I’m going to get out now. Swipe your card and scan your thumbprint, and I’ll run inside when the gate opens. I want you to turn around and hightail it out of here as fast as you can, okay?”
“So I guess this is goodbye,” Nika said.
“No it’s not. I’ll talk to you Friday when you call that number I gave you. But I have to warn you, I might not be the same person. You might not like me anymore.”
“Who said I like you now?”
Mike leaned over and kissed Nika on the lips. It wasn’t anything he’d planned. It just happened.
“See you later,” he said.
Nika had tears in her eyes. “I was just joking, you know. I’ll still like you. No matter what.”
Mike kissed her again, then climbed out and stood by the gate. When it opened, he switched on his night vision and darted through and started running toward the giant steel and concrete structure half a mile away.
He glanced back and saw a single tail light fade into the distance.
Good.
Nika was out of danger, at least for the time being.
Mike stayed to the side of the road, near the trees, just in case there were guards posted on the property. The footing was unsure, with little hills and divots everywhere, so he couldn’t run at full speed. He kept a moderate pace, knowing his ankles would sprain as easily as anyone else’s.
He was about a hundred yards from the building when a voice from behind him said, “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”
His first instinct was to soar like a long-jumper, spin one hundred and eighty degrees, riddle the enemy operative with 9mm bullet holes while he was airborne, do another one-eighty, land on his feet, and keep running. In his mind, he saw it happen. He saw the man behind him die instantly. It would have been the easy thing for him to do.
But not the smart thing.
If he opened fire with the Ruger, he would draw attention to himself. More operatives would come, maybe more than he could handle. It was an unknown variable, and there was no point in risking a negative outcome. Instead, he would kill the man behind him quietly. He would do it with his bare hands.
Mike slowed to a jog, and then stopped completely.
“Looks like you got me,” he said.
“On your knees. Hands behind your head.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah, I know who you are. You’re the guy the cops are after. You’re the guy who tied me up and left me to suffer all night.”
Kelly.
The assistant manager at Jock World.
How he’d managed to escape was a mystery, but it was him all right. He must have been hiding somewhere near the gate, must have run in before it closed.
“I’m going to turn around,” Mike said. “Let’s talk this over.”
“Don’t turn around. Stay right where you are.”
“There’s an old saying, Kelly. Fools rush in where—”
“You think I’m playing? I’ll drop you where you’re standing, man. It don’t mean nothing to me.”
Mike got down on his knees and laced his fingers together behind his head, complying with Kelly’s instructions. There was exactly six feet and seven inches of grassy earth between them. Mike could tell by the sound of Kelly’s voice pinging against his eardrum. In most circumstances, it would have been a safe distance to hold a gun on someone.
But Kelly didn’t know who he was dealing with. From six feet and seven inches, Mike could have reached him before he had a chance to pull the trigger. Lights out, party over. He never would have known what hit him.
He seemed like a decent kid, though. Mike didn’t want to kill him, but he couldn’t allow him to jeopardize the mission.
“Now what?” Mike said.
“Now get all the way down on the ground. On your belly.”
“I’m guessing you’re after the reward money, but I can tell you right now that you’ll never see a penny of it.”
“Why won’t I? What’s going to stop me? I got you now. There’s not a—”
“When the police find out what really happened, they’ll let me go. In fact, they’ll probably give me a medal.”
“What are you talking about? You’re a fugitive, man. You caused a police helicopter to crash. People died because of you.”
“It wasn’t a police helicopter. Maybe that’s what the initial news report said, but it wasn’t. The copter was private. I’m pretty sure it belonged to a man named Oberwand.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you everything, but I can promise you this: you’re going to be in big trouble if you don’t let me go.”
“Get down on your belly like I told you to.”
“You’re making a big mistake.”
“Do it!”
Mike got down on his stomach. A few seconds later, he felt a knee pressing into the middle of his spine, along with the cold barrel of a pistol pressing into the back of his neck.
With his free hand, Kelly reached into Mike’s jacket and pulled out the Ruger 9mm. He tossed it several feet off to the side.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Mike said. “But I will if I have to.”
Kelly laughed. “You had your chance back at the store.”
“Let me guess. You’re going to tie my hands now, and then walk me back to the front gate. Your car must be parked somewhere past the service road. You’ll drive to the police station and turn me in, and in a few days you’ll collect your little reward.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not going to work.”
“Sure it is,” Kelly said, but as he was saying it Mike rolled to the left and grabbed his wrist and twisted the gun out of his hand. In an instant—no more than a single h
eartbeat—the two men had switched places.
Mike was amazed by his own speed and agility. His lightning-fast movements were like something out of a comic book.
“Still think it’s going to work?” he said.
“How’d you do that, man?”
“Good question. I could tell you, but then this wouldn’t end well for either of us. You want to live, Kelly? I’m assuming you do.”
“You’re some kind of freak.”
“Yeah, well, we all have our problems. Now that you know what I’m capable of, and now that your career as a bounty hunter is, how should I put this, over, I was thinking maybe you would like to help me out a little bit.”
“Help you with what?”
“There’s going to be an explosion in that building over there. I’m not sure when, but it’s going to happen. Tonight. My job is to stop it.”
“Maybe I should just go on home.”
“That’s what you should have done, but it’s too late for that now. That option’s off the table. You have two choices, Kelly. You can help me, or you can die.”
“Can I think it over?”
“Very funny. Okay, here’s what I want you to do. There are two pairs of wire cutters in my right flap pocket. I’m going to give the big pair to you, and you’re going to hike through the woods here until you get to the fence. Then you’re going to cut a hole in the chain link, big enough for us to crawl through when I get done inside. You’re going to wait for me, and then we’ll run to your car together. Sound simple enough?”
“Why don’t we just go back out the way we came in?” Kelly said.
“Because the gate closed and locked automatically, and there’s no way for me to get it open. I don’t have a CereCirc ID, and my thumbprint hasn’t been uploaded to the scanner. That’s one reason I brought the cutters.”
“Always thinking ahead. That’s what I like about you.”
“I’m going to let you up now. You’re going to cooperate, right?”
“Like I really have a choice,” Kelly said.
Mike stood and brushed himself off, and then he helped Kelly up from the ground. He gave him his gun back, and he gave him the large pair of wire cutters he’d taken from Nika’s garage. He kept the smaller pair for himself.
“After you cut the hole in the fence, you’re going to be tempted to run off and leave me,” Mike said. “Don’t do it. I know where you work, and I know what kind of car you drive. I’ll find you, and I might not be so generous next time.”
“You could have killed me back at the store, and you could have killed me here. Why didn’t you?”
“I have a feeling you’re a little bit lost, Kelly. Like me. You’ve had a rough start, but I think there’s still hope for you. And I could use a friend. They’re kind of hard to come by right now.”
“You really are some kind of freak. Let me get on over here and do my job before you try to hug me or something. I’ll be waiting by the fence.”
“Great. I’ll try to be quick about it.”
“You do that,” Kelly said. “I don’t have all night.”
Mike went one way, and Kelly the other.
Game on.
32 minutes before the blast…
In Washington, on a computer screen spliced into CereCirc’s security system, Oliver Fennel watched as his explosive ordinance experts constructed a makeshift bomb from the materials on hand in the chemistry lab. Nothing foreign could be brought into the facility at this point, nothing that would tip the fire marshal that the explosion had been rigged. There were beakers and burners and solutions and powders, element charts and scales and computers and formulas written out by hand on a dry erase board. Everything you would expect to find in a scientific laboratory.
And there were four corpses on the floor.
Aggerson, Skellar, and the security guard were still in their work clothes, and the replacement was dressed in the same outfit Petty Officer Brennan had been wearing when he’d left the facility. Black sweats, a black t-shirt, and Adidas running shoes. Even though it would all go up in smoke soon, every detail needed to be perfect. Just in case.
Only a handful of people knew about the cover-up, most of them CIA operatives. If word ever got out, it would be the worst scandal in United States history. But word was never going to get out. Fennel would make sure of that.
The explosion was only phase one of the plan. Phase two involved finding Nathan Brennan and making sure he was never seen or heard from again. Phase three was a little trickier, but it had to be done. Nothing could be left to chance.
Fennel looked at his watch, wondering what was taking so long. He’d hoped the job would be finished by now.
He picked up his cell phone and called the team leader, code name Jefferson.
“Why aren’t you finished yet?” Fennel said.
“We’re almost there. Not an easy assignment, sir.”
“How much longer?”
“We should be out of here in fifteen minutes. We’ll clear the building, and then I’ll detonate the device from a couple of miles away.”
“Detonate it with what?”
“A cell phone and a blasting cap,” Jefferson said. “And before you say anything, don’t worry. It’ll all be consumed in the fire. Everything in this room will be reduced to ashes.”
“You’re sure of that? Even the bodies.”
“There might be some bones, but nothing identifiable.”
“What about teeth?” Fennel said.
“They’ll disintegrate at around twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s going to get a lot hotter than that in here. Trust me, when all is said and done, there will be no histological evidence. No DNA samples, nothing to compare to x-rays.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear.”
“I’ll be the last person to leave the building,” Jefferson said. “I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m outside the front gate.”
“One more thing. I’m assuming you have a backup if your little cell phone detonator fails for one reason or another.”
“Of course. There’s a timer on the device. Right before I leave, I’ll set it for fifteen minutes. If unforeseen circumstances prevent me from making the call, or if the call doesn’t go through or whatever, we’ll still be in business. This building is going to explode tonight, no matter what.”
After disconnecting with Jefferson, Oliver Fennel called the hotel room in Memphis where his engineers were analyzing the MK-2 schematics. An operative going by the name of McKinley answered on the second ring.
“Just checking in,” Fennel said. “How’s it going?”
“I was about to call you. I’m afraid I have some bad news. We found the jammer circuit, but the only way to access it is through a password-protected portal located deep within the central processor. So unless Dr. Aggerson wrote that password down somewhere, there’s really nothing we can do.”
“I don’t understand. You guys hack into password-protected systems all the time.”
“That’s true. But this password was never used. It was strictly for emergencies, and it probably never existed anywhere outside Aggerson’s head. It’s there, in the processor, but it’s so heavily encrypted that there’s no easy way to break it open. We don’t even know how many characters it has, or what combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. And it’s not the only circuit like that in the device. There are dozens of them, all with different passwords, making the schematics practically useless. We’ve started running sequences, but—”
“Are you telling me that we’re not going to be able to track the device tonight?”
“Sorry, sir. Our supercomputer over in Oak Ridge will spit that password out for us eventually. But it could take years.”
Fennel didn’t have years. He needed for Brennan to be dead ASAP. At least by morning. Every minute he was out there—every second—added to the enormous amount of weight that was on Oliver Fennel’s shoulders now. The ultimate success of the cover-up depended on finding B
rennan and making him disappear.
But then the CIA had been doing things like that long before the advent of microprocessors and satellite positioning systems.
“We’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way,” Fennel said. “I’ll start circulating some photographs, along with any other information we can dig up. Fingerprints and whatnot. He was in the Navy SEAL program, so there should be plenty.”
“Again, I’m really sorry we couldn’t do more, sir.”
“You tried. Let me know if anything changes.”
Fennel clicked off, turned his attention back to the computer screen. He had access to every security camera on the CireCirc campus, and he’d started cycling through them to get an overall picture of the interior and exterior spaces. So far, everything looked perfect. In less than thirty minutes, everyone in Memphis and the surrounding area would hear a great big boom.
And phase one would be complete.
29 minutes before the blast…
Mike crept along the side of the building, staying in the shadows, trying to avoid any security cameras. When he reached the northeast corner, he crouched behind some shrubs and watched the parking lot. Most of the employees’ vehicles were gone, replaced by eight nondescript sedans, none of which had been there earlier when Mike had left with Cara Skellar. Government vehicles, Mike thought. CIA.
Dr. Aggerson’s car was still there, along with two others. There was an old Dodge Neon that probably belonged to the slain security guard, and there was an exact replica of Dr. Skellar’s car, minus the bullet holes.
Mike’s goal was to get to the chemistry lab, assess the situation, and—if possible—defuse the explosive device.
