by Jude Hardin
But first he had to get inside the facility.
Like the front gate, the doors to the building were protected with locks that required positive identification. If you didn’t have a proper ID card and a recognized thumbprint, you weren’t getting in.
Or out.
This is where it would have been handy to have Nika along. She and Mike could have waited until everyone was out of the building, and then they could have gained access without incident. It was going to be more difficult without Nika, but by no means impossible. Mike would just have to enlist the help of someone else.
He waited behind the bushes as the CIA operatives trickled out of the building, some of them in pairs, some alone. One by one, the herd of sedans started thinning. When there was only one remaining, Mike made his move.
Standing against the concrete facade, he waited beside the back door until it swung open and the last operative started to step outside. Mike pivoted quickly and aimed his pistol at the man’s face.
“It’s you,” the man said. He wore black coveralls and a black knit cap and—for a brief moment—a startled expression.
“Let’s go inside where we can talk,” Mike said.
The man stood there with his hands in his pockets, the open door resting against his shoulder. Relaxed. Confident. He seemed to be weighing his options.
The way Mike saw it, he had exactly two: he could follow Mike’s commands and live to see another day, or he could ignore them and die in his tracks.
“We need to talk,” the man said. “But not in there. We can go to my car.”
Mike laughed. “You must think I’m stupid.”
“Look, I’m—”
“You’re expendable. All I need is your ID card and your thumb. The rest of you I can do without. It’s up to you.”
The man took his hands out of his pockets and pointed at his wristwatch. Mike zoomed in on the digital display. 14:36…14:35…14:34…
“There’s going to be a massive explosion in less than fifteen minutes,” the man said “If we go inside the building, we’ll both die. If you’ll let me help you—”
“I already know what kind of help you have in mind,” Mike said. “Not interested. Now put you hands behind your head, turn around, and walk back inside. I’ll be right behind you.”
The man didn’t put his hands behind his head. Instead, he slid them back into his pockets.
He locked eyes with Mike.
He was still thinking about it.
His upper lip didn’t quiver, and there were no beads of sweat on his forehead. Carotid pulse throbbing rock steady at sixty-seven. The man was a professional. He’d been trained to handle situations like this, to stare death in the face without flinching.
The watch was still visible, still counting down. 14:08…14:07…14:06…
Then, in super slow motion, a small caliber slug tore through the man’s right front pants pocket, fraying the cotton fibers as it exited and spiraled toward Mike’s chest. The bullet was faster than the speed of sound, so Mike didn’t hear the crack of the report until a split second later. Once again, he was amazed by the power of the MK-2 implant, by the extreme focus it allowed. To Mike, at that moment, the .22 hollow point seemed no more threatening than a feather floating in the breeze.
He bobbed to the side as the projectile whistled by. At the same time, he squeezed the Ruger’s trigger twice, drilling the man’s forehead and throat, both shots dead center, both hitting their marks like laser guided missiles.
The man immediately went limp and crumpled to the pavement. Mike lunged for the door, managing to catch it before it slammed shut. He grabbed the man by the ankles and dragged him inside.
There was a security camera mounted above the doorway, its green LED glowing like a malevolent little star. Mike aimed at it and fired. It died with a fading whine and a thin ribbon of smoke rising from its shattered lens.
The building had been evacuated, but Mike figured someone was monitoring the facility from a remote location. Someone in the CIA. Upper echelon, maybe even the director himself. Mike didn’t want to be seen, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, other than shoot the cameras as he noticed them.
He went through the dead man’s pockets, found an ID card that said Jefferson. No first name, just Jefferson. He unbuckled the digital watch from Jefferson’s left wrist and strapped it on his own. 12:24…12:23…12:22…
There wasn’t much time, and Mike couldn’t dodge a percussive blast the way he’d dodged the .22 slug. Twelve minutes. All he could hope for was that the CIA operatives had rigged some sort of common configuration, something that would show up on the BCI’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal program. If not, it was going to be tough to defuse the bomb in time.
He sprinted down the hallway, took a left and headed in the general direction of the chemistry lab. He saw three more security cameras on the way, shot them to pieces without slowing down, without missing a step.
There weren’t any color coded arrows or overhead signs or anything, and Mike wasn’t familiar with the layout of the building. No blueprints online, and apparently Dr. Aggerson hadn’t thought to add a facility map to the Mk-2’s programming. After taking several wrong turns and having to backtrack through the cafeteria, Mike finally made it to the lab.
11:22…11:21…11:20…
There was a sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, but the door wasn’t locked. Mike walked inside, and the smell of death hit him immediately. Four corpses on the floor, each lain in a slightly different position, each at a different location in the room. An estimate of where and how they would have landed after the blast, Mike thought.
Dr. Aggerson had sustained injuries to his throat and left eye. His right eye was open, making him look like some sort of ghastly winking mannequin. Dr. Skellar’s face was pocked with bullet wounds, but she’d been cleaned up and dressed in a fresh set of clothes, an outfit identical to the one she’d been wearing when her own people opened up on her with machineguns. The guard had an extra mouth where the midline of his throat used to be, and the other corpse—the one that was supposed to represent Mike—had an exit wound through his upper lip, apparently the victim of an execution-style shooting in the back of the head.
It was a grisly scene, but Mike didn’t have time to dwell on it. He looked around, trying to figure out what the operatives had done, trying to see if there was any way to disassemble the contraption in time.
10:18…10:17…10:16…
There was a workstation in the center of the room, an island of sorts, with a deep sink and four chrome gas jets branching from a half-inch feed pipe. Black epoxy resin countertops for experiments, cabinets underneath for storage. As Mike faced the station, there was a cell phone on his left, a silver flip-top with five thin wires snaking out of its housing.
Five wires, five different colors. Red, yellow, blue, black, and white. The wires looped through an aluminum junction box with a red LED display mounted to its top plate, the countdown synchronized with the watch Mike had taken from Jefferson.
From the junction box, two larger wires—one red and one black—ran behind the faucet, terminating with alligator clips attached to a square of plate glass. Beneath the glass was a 2000ml beaker filled with dark green liquid.
The CIA operatives had staged what appeared to be a normal experiment, one that Dr. Skellar had been excited about, maybe, one that she’d anxiously demonstrated to the only other people still in the building—even the security guard, which wouldn’t have ordinarily made any sense.
But today, maybe for the first time in CereCirc’s history, the employees were given alcohol. They were given champagne for the big celebration, and there were two empty bottles right here in Dr. Skellar’s lab.
So the CIA had all the bases covered. Four people had remained in the building after the party, and they’d decided to have a little party of their own, a little fun with chemicals and electric current and methane gas.
Methane.
Suddenly,
Mike realized that the foul odor filling the room wasn’t entirely due to the corpses. There was a gas leak somewhere, and it was obviously a key part of the plan to blow the roof off the place. Apparently, once triggered by either the cell phone or the electronic timer, the explosive flash from the gas would act as a catalyst for the solution in the beaker, the green liquid, whatever that happened to be. Obviously something highly volatile, something capable of incinerating the chemistry lab and maybe the rest of the building as well.
Quite an ingenious set-up, Mike thought. The media would generate all kinds of wild speculations on one side, and the conspiracy theorists would have their say on the other, but nothing could ever be proved or disproved, because the victims and the evidence surrounding them would be burned to ashes.
Case closed.
In order to preserve the evidence, Mike needed to stop the explosion from ever happening in the first place. The families of the deceased deserved to know the truth, painful as it was, and the people responsible for the carnage deserved to go to prison.
And then there was Mike’s family, assuming he had one somewhere, who deserved to know that he was still alive.
8:55…8:54…8:53…
Mike felt dizzy, short of breath. He walked to the door and propped it open with a stool, trying to allow some of the gas fumes to escape.
There was an urgent message on the holographic display. The oxygen saturation in Mike’s blood had dropped to eighty-four percent. Normal was one hundred. He stepped out into the hallway, took a few deep breaths, got the dangerously low number up to ninety-two. He felt better, but he knew it wouldn’t last. He walked back into the lab, hoping he could finish the job without passing out.
Or getting blown up.
8 minutes before the blast…
Oliver Fennel, composing an email and only halfway paying attention to the CereCirc security cameras cycling on his other monitor, heard one of the channels go to static. He turned and stared into the screen, wondering if the building had exploded already.
But Jefferson, his team leader, had promised to call as soon as he got to the other side of the gate, and it was unlike him to forget a thing like that. In fact, it was unprecedented.
Fennel manually switched the monitor to another channel, and the picture returned, strong and clear. Just a glitch, he thought. Some sort of temporary transmission problem. He set the program to automatic and went back to typing.
But a few seconds later, it happened again. Another channel, nothing but snow. He picked up his cell phone and punched in Jefferson’s number. It rang four times, and then went to voice mail.
“What’s going on over there?” Fennel said. “The security channels keep going out. Call me.”
But then, as the system cycled once again to a different camera, Fennel saw what was going on over there. Nathan Brennan—or rather the man who used to be Nathan Brennan—was in the lab leaning over one of the countertops, and he appeared to have some sort of tool in his hand.
Fennel grabbed his phone and called Madison, one of the other operatives on the explosive ordinance team, the second man in charge.
“Where’s Jefferson?” he said.
“He was the last man out of the building. I’m assuming he’s somewhere behind me.”
“He’s not answering his phone. And don’t you think it’s just a little odd that you haven’t heard the explosion yet.”
“Well, now that you mention it—”
“I need you to go back,” Fennel said.
“Back to CereCirc?”
“Yes, back to CereCirc. The human test subject we’ve been looking for is there in the chemistry lab, and he’s trying to defuse the nice little bomb you guys engineered.”
“That nice little bomb is going to blow the facility to Kingdom Come in about eight minutes,” Madison said. “There’s no way I could make it back there in time.”
“What about someone else on the team?”
“Everyone except Jefferson left the property before me, so they’re even farther away than I am. Anyway, we totally improvised that whole setup over there. That guy’s not going to figure it out. Not in eight minutes, not in eight years. I don’t care if he does have a computer for a brain. Not going to happen.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Positive.”
“There’s still a problem,” Fennel said. “If he dies in the blast, there’s going to be an extra body to account for. Which means one of the other employees will have to disappear tonight, one of the ones who signed the non-disclosure agreement.”
“Just give me a name and address,” Madison said. “We’ll make it happen.”
7 minutes before the blast…
Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of Admiral William B. Lacy’s mind, he knew that he was dying.
Lacy had never been a religious man, but there was a bright light beckoning him now, and for some reason he knew that the distant orb would lead him to a place of all-encompassing love, a realm of compassion and forgiveness and everlasting joy far beyond anything the physical world had to offer. There was nothing to fear, this light seemed to be telling him. Come. Follow. Be. Forever.
Still, he wasn’t ready to go. It just wasn’t his time. Not yet.
In his mind, he spoke to the light, tried to bargain his way into staying in this world a little longer. He would spend more time with his family, and less time at work. No more alcohol, no more overeating. And, perhaps most importantly of all, he would not go through with this insanity, this cover-up being orchestrated by the CIA’s Associate Director for Paramilitary Operations. As soon as he got back to Memphis, he would call the president and tell him everything. He would face certain repercussions himself, but that was okay. It was the right thing to do. The best thing for him, and for the United States of America.
As Lacy lay there pleading to his higher power, a jolt of electrical current passed from one side of his chest to the other. Suddenly, his eyes opened and his lungs filled with oxygen.
Sweet, beautiful oxygen.
He was back!
There was a young woman leaning over him. She looked down and smiled.
“You gave us a real scare,” she said. “For a minute, I though we’d lost you.”
Admiral Lacy felt embarrassed about being on the floor. Silly, but he couldn’t help it.
“I need to get up,” he said, his voice muffled and distorted through the plastic oxygen mask.
“No, I think you better just lie there for now. We’ll be landing soon, and an ambulance is meeting us on the tarmac. The paramedics will carry you out on a stretcher and take you to the hospital.”
“Thank you for saving my life.”
She put her hand on his arm. “I’m going to be right here with you until we land,” she said. “Just close your eyes and try to take some deep breaths.”
Admiral Lacy felt fine now. He didn’t think he needed to go to the hospital. And of course there were perfectly rational scientific explanations for what he’d experienced a few minutes ago. The bright light had been a hallucination brought on by hypoxia. There was nothing mystical about it, nothing otherworldly. Just brain cells starving for oxygen.
And now that Lacy was back in his right mind, he knew the promises he’d made to be nothing more than sentimental deathbed nonsense. For one thing, his sons were practically grown. They didn’t want to hang around with the old man. They had their own interests. Marla did her wifely duties, and she was there for him at parties and other events where it was appropriate for him to have a woman at his side, but otherwise they didn’t really talk much anymore. She did her thing, and he did his. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked, and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t keep working forever.
The food and the booze? Lacy did need to lose some weight, but there was no point in getting all stressed out about it. No point in going overboard. A little bourbon never hurt anyone, and a man who says no to lobster says no to life.
The cover-up was anot
her story. Admiral Lacy didn’t like being a part of it, but it was pretty much out of his hands now. Fennel would take care of the problem, and then everyone involved could rest a little easier. It would always be there, a dirty little secret, but like everything else the scars would eventually fade. And when you got down to it, ignorance really was bliss sometimes. What the president didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him.
Lacy felt great. He was breathing a lot easier, and his vision was back to normal. If his condition kept improving, maybe they wouldn’t even have to admit him to the hospital. Maybe he could go on home and sleep in his own bed tonight.
The admiral was resting comfortably there on the floor now, his head and feet and arms propped on pillows, the pain in his chest completely gone.
Everything was going to be all right now.
Everything was going to be just fine.
6 minutes before the blast…
Mike had been leaning over the countertop for several minutes, cutters in hand, trying to make an educated guess about exactly which connection to snip. Of the five insulated wires coming out of the flip phone, only two were necessary to detonate the bomb. Of the remaining three, two were probably dummies, and one was probably the hotwire to a collapsing circuit—a series of relays held open by a continuous trickle of low voltage. If the hotwire to the collapsing circuit was cut, the relays would close, and then BLAMMO! No more CereCirc.
And no more Mike.
My primary directive is to defend the constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the best of my ability. My secondary directive is to survive, at all costs, while attempting to maintain my first directive. My country and I are one. A strike against me is a strike against the United States.
Mike’s first and second directives were clear, and not open to interpretation. He wasn’t allowed to take foolish risks. He wasn’t allowed to willingly sacrifice his own life for the sake of a mission.
Any mission.
