by Jude Hardin
There was a queen size bed that hadn’t been made and a dresser and a little round table with one vinyl chair beside it. Smudges on the walls, cigarette burns on the green shag. Everything was old and cheap, and someone had emptied a can of air freshener in a failed attempt to mask the smell.
“Home sweet home,” Kelly said.
Slick jumped to the floor and started exploring. He seemed particularly interested in an insect that had scurried under the vanity sink, just outside the bathroom.
Mike set his bags on the table. “You have a decent job,” he said. “Why are you staying in a dump like this?”
“Long story. Let’s just say there’s a female involved.”
“How’s your ear?”
“Better.”
Kelly had taken some pain tablets on the way to the motel. He walked over and flopped on the bed, grabbed the remote from the nightstand and switched on the television. The reporters on CNN were already talking about the explosion and the plane crash, trying to ferret out some facts among the early rumors and speculations. The White House was neither confirming nor denying the possibility of a terrorist attack.
Mike wished he knew where Nika was staying. He wanted to talk to her now, see if she’d been able to ascertain the admiral’s identity. The sooner Mike could get the MK-2 out of his skull, the better, and the admiral was probably the only person who could make that happen.
Mike walked to the door, secured the deadbolt and the swing bar. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in the room.”
“It’s not like I get a lot of company here.”
“If anyone knocks, let me know right away. Okay?”
“You know, it would be nice if I knew just a little bit about what’s going on.”
“You’re better off not knowing. By the way, you want your uniform back?”
Kelly glanced away from the television, gave Mike the once-over. “You’re joking, right?”
Mike grabbed some soap and shampoo from the bags on the table, along with a hand mirror and some shaving supplies and a change of clothes. He walked to the bathroom and closed the door and locked it. He set his pistol and the remaining cash on top of the toilet tank, stripped off the soiled and tattered Jock World jersey and the pants and the jacket and turned on the hot water. He wet his face and slathered on some foam and used the hand mirror to shave. When he finished, he parted his hair with his fingers and looked at the tiny surgical wound on top of his head. It was nothing. It had practically healed already. It looked like he might have scratched his scalp with a fingernail. Nobody would ever notice it unless they were looking for it, and even then they would probably need a magnifying glass to see it clearly. It was never going to be an issue. Mike just hoped that whoever ended up removing the implant did as good a job as Dr. Aggerson did installing it.
He climbed into the shower and let the steaming hot water wash over him from head to toe. He scrubbed his hair and then the rest of his body, noticing some bruises and scratches here and there, nothing serious but enough to cause some soreness by morning. His phenomenal brain power aside, he was still just a man, flesh and blood, no more than that.
A good thing to keep in mind.
When he climbed out and started toweling off, he heard a loud crack, the sound of wood splitting, followed by the hissing snaps of suppressed semi-automatic pistol rounds.
Dodging a single bullet from a .22 was one thing. This was something else altogether. Mike grabbed the Ruger, knowing there was more than one shooter out there, knowing he needed to hurry. As two sets of footsteps advanced toward the bathroom, he yanked the door inward and stepped out naked and fired twice. Both men dropped to the floor, dead before they knew what hit them.
Mike ran to the door they’d smashed through, saw right away that it was ruined, that there was no way to close it now. He propped the vinyl chair against it, just so passersby wouldn’t be able to peek into the room.
Kelly Williams was still on the bed, but he was full of holes now. There was blood everywhere. On the walls, on the ceiling. The room looked like a scene from a horror movie.
“Meow.”
Slick. The gunmen hadn’t seen him. Or maybe they had, and he just hadn’t warranted their attention.
“We have to get out of here,” Mike said.
“Meow.”
Mike checked the men’s pockets, but neither of them was carrying identification. No money, no car keys, nothing. These were professional assassins, but Mike had no idea where they’d come from. Oberwand? The CIA?
And whoever they were, how had they found him at Fred Johnson’s Motor Lodge?
Mike hurried into his new clothes. With a great deal of effort and a toy mouse stuffed with catnip, he finally managed to coax Slick inside the backpack he’d purchased at the superstore. He crammed a bag of 9-Lives and a twelve-inch turkey sub and a few other necessities into the front pouch, donned a hat and a pair of wraparound sunglasses, pulled the chair out of the way and slinked out the door.
Sirens in the distance. There was a crowd of motorcycle people hanging around outside the pancake joint across the street, smoking cigarettes and passing around a bottle of something. Their eyes were on the motel, but none of them made a move to come and see what all the ruckus was about. The door being kicked in. The gunshots. They were keeping their distance, and Mike didn’t blame them. It wasn’t their business. They were content to wait for the cops and watch the show as it unfolded.
Only there wasn’t going to be a show. Not if Mike had anything to do with it.
He walked around to the other side of the motel, trying to look as normal as possible at two-something in the morning wearing a Memphis Redbirds baseball cap and a backpack full of cat food.
And cat.
Slick was squirming around now and vocalizing his displeasure at being restrained. Luckily, there were several layers of fabric between his claws and the skin on Mike’s back.
Motel 2
There was a taxi parked outside the CigsMart where Mike had bought the Gatorade and water earlier. The driver had dozed off with the engine running.
Mike tapped on the side of the door. The cabbie jerked awake and rolled the window down.
“You still making runs?” Mike said.
“Where you want to go?”
“It doesn’t matter. A hotel. Somewhere.”
“All right.”
Mike opened the rear door, gently slid the backpack over to the middle of the back seat. He climbed in and closed the door and took a deep breath. The driver put the car in gear, steered to the exit, took a right out of the parking lot.
“There’s a Shell station at Third and Biscayne,” Mike said. “I want to stay somewhere close to that.”
“Somewhere close to the Shell station. Okay.”
“Somewhere reasonable. I don’t have a lot of money.”
“What’s in the bag?” the driver said.
“Pardon me?”
“The bag. Is that a cat I hear?”
“Yeah. So I’ll need a place that allows pets.”
There was no traffic to speak of, and it only took the driver about ten minutes to make it across town. He was good at timing the red lights, and Mike appreciated that.
The money was getting tight. Mike’s little bankroll had dwindled to three hundred and twenty-eight dollars and some change. It would only last him for a couple of days, which meant he only had a couple of days to figure everything out. Then he would be on the street.
And the street was a very dangerous place for him to be.
His only real hope at this point was Nika. He was depending on her to come through for him.
Friday at seven.
He hoped the time would go fast.
There was a Days Inn up on the right. The driver signaled to make the turn, but then he saw the NO VACANCY sign and gunned it on up to another motel at the next intersection.
“This all right?” the driver said. “The gas station you’re talkin
g about is right around the corner.”
It was another independently owned motor lodge, but it looked a little nicer than Fred Johnson’s.
“Fine,” Mike said.
He paid the driver, got out and walked to the office and checked in. $49.99, plus tax. He paid for two nights, slid the clerk an extra ten for a room on the second floor with a view of the street.
The room was nothing special, but it was clean and everything seemed to be in good working order. Mike gave Slick some food and water, bought himself a bag of chips and a candy bar from the vending machine to go with his sandwich.
He longed for a hot meal, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. There was a twenty-four hour diner across the street, but he couldn’t risk going in there and being recognized. Until he talked to Nika, he would have to make do with whatever he could have delivered to the room.
After they ate, Mike hung the DO NOT DISURB sign on the door, brushed his teeth and turned back the sheets and climbed into bed. Slick jumped up and padded around and purred for a minute and then curled into a spot beside Mike’s leg.
The remote was on the nightstand. Mike picked it up and switched on the television, watched an old movie called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was a good movie, but Mike couldn’t keep his eyes open.
When he woke up, it was daylight outside. The little digital clock on the nightstand said 10:07. He’d slept about six hours.
He switched the television to CNN. They were talking about a man who’d led police on a high speed chase last night. They showed video of the unfinished highway ramp and the helicopter wreckage. The men who’d burned in the crash still hadn’t been identified, and neither had the copter itself. They still didn’t know who owned the aircraft. It was still under investigation.
And the man responsible for the carnage was still at large, they said. They posted a drawing, a composite put together by a police sketch artist, but it didn’t really look like Mike. The eyes were wrong. And the mouth.
The city of Memphis had upped the reward to fifty thousand dollars, and of course dozens of people were jamming the phone lines with tips that would ultimately lead nowhere. Like they always did in cases like this.
After a panel of lawyers discussed the kinds of punishment the fugitive might be facing—life in prison for reckless homicide, maybe—they switched to the story about the explosion at CereCirc and the 737 that had gone down nearby.
Five bodies had been found at the research facility, but the names of the victims were being withheld pending a federal investigation. Everything that had anything to do with CereCirc was hush-hush, classified, but the news agency had been given a partial list of those who’d perished as a result of the plane crash, and one of the passengers was a United States Naval officer named William B. Lacy.
An admiral.
Mike hopped out of bed and started pacing around the room. Was William B. Lacy his admiral? Probably not. The name didn’t ring a bell.
It was probably just a coincidence.
But if Lacy was the second and final link in Mike’s chain of command, then the only remaining connection to Mike’s former life was gone now, and so was the possibility of ever returning to anything that remotely resembled normal.
Mike had to know, and he had to know now.
He accessed the Internet with the MK-2 and read everything he could find on Admiral William B. Lacy. His education, his military background, his current assignment as the Chief of Naval Personnel.
Lacy was an expert in marketing and management. He had absolutely no experience with the high tech world of implantable microprocessors. He’d never served in a combat role, and there was nothing on his resume that would indicate an interest in the iSEAL program. No connections to Special Forces whatsoever.
Still, Mike had to wonder.
And he kept wondering until Friday evening when the payphone at the Shell station finally started ringing.
Fennel
Oliver Fennel had problems.
Five bodies had been recovered from the smoldering ruins that had once been CereCirc Solutions.
Not six.
Five.
One of those bodies had been found near the back door, and since Jefferson was missing in action, it was safe to assume that the extra body was his.
Which meant that Nathan Brennan had made it out, and that he was still at large. Otherwise, there would have been six charred corpses instead of five.
Fennel had a dozen operatives looking for Brennan in and around Memphis, with orders to shoot him on sight, but so far they hadn’t produced any solid leads.
Brennan was still out there, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Admiral William B. Lacy had died in a plane crash that couldn’t possibly have been an accident. It would take months to sort everything out, and the general public might never know what really happened, but Fennel felt sure that the plane had been shot down and that Lacy had been the primary target.
Fennel had no idea who was responsible for the crash, but it was a safe bet that the attack was somehow connected to Lacy’s involvement with the iSEAL program. With Aggerson gone, Lacy had been the only person in the world who could have disabled the MK-2 without killing Nathan Brennan, and that information had somehow been leaked to someone outside the intelligence community. A competing corporation, or a terrorist group, or an enemy nation. Whoever it was, they obviously had substantial resources, and they obviously had no qualms about killing people to get what they wanted.
So along with everything else, Fennel was now burdened with the task of finding and eliminating the party responsible for killing Admiral Lacy.
And Lacy wasn’t the only one they’d killed. At approximately the same time the 737 went down, someone knocked on the door of the Memphis hotel suite Fennel had set up for his engineers, someone posing as hotel security.
The hit was professional all the way. Phony credentials, uniform, badge, everything. The bogus security officer waltzed in with a .22 caliber revolver, and two very accurate head shots later, the operatives who’d been working on Aggerson’s digital schematics were dead on the floor.
The diagrams for the MK-2 were missing now, but Fennel wasn’t especially worried about that. If his guys couldn’t hack into the password-protected circuitry, nobody could.
But the fact that the schematics were useless created another problem: whoever had stolen them would go after Brennan now.
And if they got to him before Fennel did, if they killed him and copied the device, there was no telling what kind of trouble it might cause.
Trouble for Fennel.
Trouble for the United States of America.
And trouble for the world.
The Phone Call
Mike lifted the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mike. I just wanted to call and say goodbye.”
It was Oberwand. Mike recognized the voice. He had gotten to Nika somehow. It was the only way he could have known to call this number at this time.
“Where is she?” Mike said. “Where’s Nika?”
“Charming young lady. But I’m afraid she’s not really relevant to your situation anymore. Kind of a shame. The two of you would have made a cute couple.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m almost certain you already know the answer to that question,” Oberwand said.
“You want the MK-2. But why? For what purpose?”
“I’m almost certain you do not know the answer to that question. And that you never will.”
“There was a plane crash last night,” Mike said. “I’m sure you heard about it.”
“Of course. Such a tragedy.”
“There was a man named William B. Lacy on board, an admiral in the United States Navy. He was my connection, wasn’t he? He was my last chance at finding a way out of this. You wanted him dead, so you shot the plane down. You killed almost three hundred people just to get Admiral Lacy, to make his death look as random as th
e others.”
“Seems like you have everything figured out,” Oberwand said. “At least you think you do.”
“In your diseased mind, you think you’re some kind of super villain or something. In reality, you’re nothing but a punk, a terrorist, a lowlife scumbag with some resources and an agenda. Two of your men killed Dr. Skellar Wednesday night, and two more came after me in a helicopter. Now you’re holding Nika hostage, knowing that I’ll—”
“We don’t need a hostage, Mike. For what? The drama? Hostages are for amateurs. Holding someone hostage would put a wild card in the mix, and we’ve decided not to take any more chances. We’re going to get what we want whether you cooperate or not.”
“What are you saying? You killed her already? If that’s the case, I’ll never stop looking until I find you. And when I do, you’ll be—”
“It’s been nice chatting with you, Mike, but I really need to get going. Or should I say you really need to get going. Bye now.”
There was a click, and the line went dead.
Mike let go of the receiver, left it dangling by its cord. He stepped away from the payphone’s grungy little privacy hood and looked around. The CigsMart was a busy store at a busy intersection. Oberwand’s guys wouldn’t try anything there.
But they would try something.
Soon.
Mike turned and started walking back toward the motel. Baseball cap, fake mustache, wraparound shades. He stayed on the sidewalk, in the open, hoping the heavy traffic would work in his favor, hoping Oberwand’s assassins wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a move in such a public place.
But they were.
When the car came, it came fast.
From the rear window on the passenger’s side, a man with a pistol in each hand started pumping bullets in Mike’s direction. The guns were equipped with suppressors, like the ones used to kill Kelly, but they made enough noise to turn some heads.
It was a balmy October evening, and there were a lot of people out and about. They were shopping and going to the movies and trying to decide where to eat dinner and where to go afterward. It was Friday, and they didn’t have to be back to work until Monday. They were happy. They were in the mood to celebrate.
