by Jude Hardin
Mike checked the cupboards and the refrigerator. There wasn’t much. Mostly snack foods and supplies to make coffee. A few cans of beanie-weenies and some tuna and a box of saltines. Not exactly gourmet, or even a balanced diet, but it was better than nothing.
He grabbed some aluminum foil and fashioned a food dish and a water bowl for Slick. He still had some cat food in his backpack, so he poured out some of that and filled the other makeshift bowl with water from the faucet.
“What do you think?” Mike said.
“Meow.”
“Yeah, I know. But it beats the street, doesn’t it?”
“Meow.”
Mike opened a can of tuna and sat at the table. He ate from the tin with a plastic fork, munched on some crackers, drank some Pepsi from a partial two liter that had gone flat. He could have gotten a better meal at the local homeless shelter, but he was trying to keep a low profile. A photograph of his face had been posted on CNN the other night, and no telling where else. The picture was blurry, and Mike had been wearing a fake mustache at the time, but still. Every shelter in the country probably had a copy of that photo by now, and if someone recognized him and alerted the authorities, he was doomed.
He wasn’t Superman.
He couldn’t catch bullets with his hands.
And he sure couldn’t search for Nika from a jail cell.
Mike finished with the fish and crackers, stood to clean off the table, lost his balance and fell back into the dinette chair. The room was spinning, and he felt sick to his stomach. At first he thought it might have been the food, but when his left eye went totally blind, he knew something else was going on.
He put his head down on the table, thinking this was it. He was going to die. Maybe a blood clot had broken loose, causing an ischemic attack, or maybe the interface had shorted out or something. He felt himself fading, and then he was bombarded with sounds and images from a different time and place.
He was sitting on a carpeted floor with a little girl. Blonde hair, blue eyes, skin as fair and fine as a porcelain doll. In this alternate reality, this dream or hallucination or whatever it was, Mike was fifteen years old, and the girl was three. There were several coloring books and a box of crayons on the floor between them.
“That’s beautiful,” Mike said, referring to the little girl’s artwork.
“I wish I could do it as good as you.”
“You’ll learn. You just need to keep it between the lines.”
“What do you mean?”
Mike picked up a crayon and tried to show her.
Then something snapped, and he became lucid in this other world, realizing that the girl might be able to give him some information.
“What’s your name?” he said.
She laughed. “You’re so silly.”
“No, really. What’s your name?”
“I’m tired of coloring,” the little girl said, ignoring the question. “Let’s do something else. Want to play hide and seek?”
“Sure. But first, tell me your name.”
“Becky,” she said. “Now close your eyes and count to ten while I go hide.”
“Wait. What’s my name?”
“Quit being so stupid.”
“Please, just tell me my name, and I’ll play with you for the rest of the day. We’ll play any game you want. Or we can color some more. Please.”
But the little girl had disappeared already. She’d run off to hide, and now it was up to Mike to find her.
He blinked, and suddenly he was back inside the singlewide trailer in West Memphis, Arkansas, his head and arms resting on the Formica tabletop.
Slick had jumped onto the table, and he was rubbing his whiskers against Mike’s hands.
Mike looked up and stared into the cat’s green eyes.
“That was incredible,” he said. “I almost had it. She knew my name, but she wouldn’t tell me. I need to go back there. I need to find her, and ask her again. You hear what I’m saying, Slick? She knows me. The little girl. She knows me.”
“Meow.”
“A lot of help you are.”
Mike felt fine now, as though he’d taken a nice long nap. The dizziness was gone, as was the nausea. He got up and cleared the table, making sure everything he’d moved was returned to its original place.
When he put the Pepsi away, he noticed a calendar on the wall by the refrigerator. It was Monday, October 31, and someone had penciled the words Daddy’s Birthday inside the square for that date.
Apparently, Daddy had been born on Halloween.
That explained the white cardboard box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, Mike thought. It was a birthday cake. Mike had tried to take a peek inside the box, but someone had secured the lid with a piece of transparent tape.
Mike didn’t want to leave any signs that anything had been tampered with. The trailer would make a nice place for him and the cat to sleep every night, a place to prepare meals and make phone calls and whatnot. Sort of a clandestine headquarters.
So he’d left the cake box alone, worried that the tape might strip off some of the cardboard if he peeled it back.
But now that he’d seen the calendar, the dessert in the refrigerator could only mean one thing: Sidney was planning on coming back sometime today to retrieve it.
“We better get out of here for a while, Slick.”
But as the words left Mike’s mouth, he heard the rattle of the heavy steel chain securing the gate outside.
3
Oliver Fennel, the Associate Director of Paramilitary Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency—the ADPO, for short—hung up the phone, ending his brief conversation with the President of the United States of America.
Since Dr. Clive Aggerson and his human test subject for the MK-2 brain-computer interface had died in the explosion and subsequent fire at the CereCirc Solutions research facility, the program to assess military applications for the technology was on hold for now. In fact, with Aggerson gone, it was doubtful that the iSEAL program would continue at all—at least in the foreseeable future. Aggerson had developed the device and all the software that went along with it, and the best hackers on the CIA’s payroll hadn’t been able to access any of his password-protected notes and schematics.
Be diligent, the President had said. Stay on it. Keep trying. It would be a terrible shame for all that research to go to waste…
And it would, Fennel thought. It would be like Leonardo Di Vinci owning the only key to an otherwise impenetrable vault that contains the Mona Lisa. Leonardo dies, the painting dies with him.
And that’s exactly what had happened with Aggerson and his masterpiece, the MK-2 brain-computer interface. A terrible shame indeed. In fact, shame wasn’t even the word, in Oliver Fennel’s opinion. It was downright despicable that a scientist of Aggerson’s caliber had encrypted his notes so deeply. Now it would take years—maybe decades—to get back to the point where they’d been just a few days ago. Aggerson had been the only scientist in the world even close to using human test subjects for an implantable interface with military applications, and now he was dead. Despicable.
But really, that was the least of Oliver Fennel’s problems. The staged explosion had gone off as planned—with the exception of Brennan showing up and killing one of Fennel’s operatives, of course. That wasn’t supposed to have happened, and it had taken some frantic last minute arrangements to make it appear as though another CereCirc employee had been inside the building. As for everything else, Fennel had placated the President for now, but the ultimate success or failure of his little cover-up depended on several more elements falling into place.
First of all, he needed to find Nathan Brennan and make sure he disappeared forever. That was priority one. The fact that Brennan was still out there, that he was even still breathing, threatened to blow this whole thing wide open.
Brennan was calling himself Mike now. Fennel knew that much.
Fennel had accessed CereCirc’s security videos from t
heir offsite host, and he’d seen some of the things Brennan—Mike—was capable of. Amazing stuff.
The MK-2 had blanked Brennan’s memory up to the point of implantation, so he’d chosen a name at random. Whatever. To Fennel, he would always be Nathan Brennan, even though very few people knew the test subject’s true identity. Dr. Aggerson had known, and Admiral Lacy had known, but they were both dead now. And of course most of the world—including Brennan’s family—thought Brennan was dead now too. He’d died in the explosion at CereCirc. Only Fennel and a handful of operatives knew the truth, and that was the way it needed to stay.
Finding Brennan had proven to be quite the challenge, and apparently Fennel had some competition in the matter. Someone else was looking for Brennan, someone with substantial resources, someone with absolutely no qualms about killing people to get what they wanted.
A competing corporation? A terrorist group? An enemy nation?
Fennel didn’t know.
But he knew he had to find Brennan before the other party did. If the MK-2 fell into the wrong hands, the results could be devastating—for Fennel, for the United States, and for the world.
So as soon as he disconnected with the President, Fennel made another call, a call he’d promised himself he would never make.
Blake Howitzer answered on the first ring.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice as flat and dry as a desert.
Fennel could picture the fat jagged scar on the right side of Howitzer’s face, the result of a bar fight when he was in his early twenties.
“It’s Ollie,” Fennel said. “I need your help.”
There was a long pause, and then Howitzer said, “Oliver Fennel? How did you get this number?”
“That’s not important. I have a job for you.”
“Not interested.”
“It’s going to be worth your while, I can promise you that. Seven figures, and it shouldn’t take more than a few days.”
“Still not interested.”
“Come on, Blake. Let me just tell you what it is.”
“Why me? I’m sure the CIA has plenty of men and women capable of carrying out whatever it is you have planned.”
“I can’t use my own people for this,” Fennel said. “And I can’t use any of our regular civilian contacts. Too many eyes on us right now, from the oval office on down.”
“Sounds like a problem all right. Now I’m going to hang up so you can call someone who cares.”
“Just hear me out, Blake. And don’t forget, you owe me a favor.”
Howitzer went into a laughing fit that culminated in a grinding congestive cough.
“I owe you a favor?” he said. “I think you have it backwards, Ollie. You want me to refresh your memory on that deal?”
“You’re still alive. That’s the favor I’m talking about.”
“Whatever. I’m still not interested in any sort of—”
“Eight million,” Fennel said. “Cash.”
That got Howitzer’s attention.
“Make it ten,” he said. “I’ll think about it for ten.”
“You don’t even know what the job is yet.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll do almost anything for ten million dollars. Talk to me, Ollie. I’m a busy man, and you’ve already wasted over two minutes of my time.”
“There’s a private jet waiting for you at North Florida Regional,” Fennel said. “I’ll need you to be on it within the hour.”
“I can do that.”
Fennel gave him a quick rundown, and the two men struck a deal over the phone.
Everything was going to be okay now.
With Howitzer on board, Nathan Brennan was as good as dead.
4
Mike coaxed Slick into the backpack, darted into the bedroom closet just as the deadbolt on the front door snicked open. He hid behind a rack of winter clothes, hoping the heavy fabric would act as a sound barrier if the cat decided to get vocal.
Two sets of footsteps walked inside, one set much heavier than the other. Probably a man and a woman, Mike thought. The MK-2 allowed him to hear extraordinarily well, even through the sweaters and scarves and jackets.
“You want something to drink?” the man said.
Mike figured it was Sidney, the guy who ran the day labor business.
“We don’t have time,” the woman said. “The party starts in an hour, and we still need to go by the liquor store. Just get the cake, and I’ll get the present. Where’d you put it?”
“In there, on top of the dresser.”
The woman walked into the bedroom.
Slick had started squirming around inside the backpack, but he’d been quiet so far. Mike hoped he would stay that way for a few more minutes.
“You didn’t wrap it?” the woman said.
“Didn’t have time.”
“We have to wrap it, dummy. We can’t take an unwrapped present to a birthday party.”
Mike heard Sidney stomp into the bedroom. “What did you say?”
“I said we can’t take an unwrapped present to a—”
“Before that. Did you call me stupid?”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Sid. It’s just that—”
There was a loud smack, the sound of a palm hitting a face, followed by sobs from the woman.
“Don’t ever call me stupid again,” Sidney said.
The woman replied with a series of muffled whimpers. It sounded as though she’d fallen to the bed and buried her face in a pillow.
It was all Mike could do to stay hidden. He wanted to go out there and beat Sidney to a pulp. Jerk. A guy like that needed to be behind bars.
“Meow.”
Apparently Slick didn’t like what was going on outside the closet any more than Mike did.
“Did you hear that?” Sidney said.
“I’m not talking to you. Go away. You hurt me.”
“No, really. I thought I heard something. It sounded like a cat.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Come on, baby. Don’t cry. I’m sorry. You know I love you.”
“The side of my face is all red, Sidney. I can’t go anywhere now.”
“Just cover it with some makeup.”
“Like that’s really going to work. No, I’ll just tell everybody I ran into the doorjamb on my way to the bathroom last night. I’ll just use that one again, okay? How many times you think they’re going to believe that stuff, Sid? Your family must think I’m the clumsiest woman on the planet.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“My dad used to call me stupid. I get crazy when—”
“All right. Let’s just forget about it and go have a good time for once. We’re going to be late now as it is. You got any wrapping paper around here?”
“In the closet,” Sidney said.
The bedsprings squeaked as the woman got up and headed that way. Mike switched his night vision on, looked around, saw the roll of paper leaning against the corner to his right, nestled in there with some other junk. Tennis racket, collapsible fishing pole, cheap tripod. He grabbed the paper and set it against the door a split second before the woman opened it.
“Wow,” she said. “It was right here in front.”
“Huh?”
Sidney had walked back to the kitchen.
“Never mind,” the woman shouted. “You know this is Christmas paper, right?”
“It’s all I got. Don’t worry. The old man’ll be so drunk by the time we get there, he won’t notice anyway. I shouldn’t have gotten him anything.”
“He’s your father. It’s not like he turns sixty every day, you know.”
“Whatever.”
“Got any scissors?”
Sidney and his girlfriend spent another ten or fifteen minutes bickering back and forth about this and that, but they eventually got the package wrapped and left the trailer.
Relieved that he hadn’t been caught, M
ike exited the closet and let the cat out of the backpack.
“That was a close one, Slick.”
“Meow.”
Mike checked the refrigerator to make sure that Sidney, after all the drama, had remembered to take the birthday cake. It was gone, which probably meant Mike was safe for the rest of the night.
He walked to the bedroom, decided to lie down and rest for a few minutes. He was tired, and he needed some time to think.
The pillow was still wet from the woman’s tears.
5
Nika curled into a ball on the thin, uncomfortable mattress. She could hear the hinged top of a cigarette lighter clicking open and shut, and she could feel the man’s eyes boring through her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way,” the man said. “Your choice. I need you to lie on your back and spread your legs.”
“You’re going to rape me?”
“Of course not. Just a quick examination.”
Nika started sobbing uncontrollably. “Why?” she said.
“Because I said so. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll have to call for my helpers to hold you down. Again, it’s your choice.”
Some choice, Nika thought. Humiliation in front of one creep, or several. At least he had gloves on. That was something.
She turned over and stretched out on the mattress.
“Just get it over with,” she said.
“Knees bent, legs spread apart.”
She complied, and the exam only took a few seconds.
“Now what?” Nika said.
“Since you were such a good girl, I’m going to let you keep the blanket and the water. Someone will bring a food tray in a little while.”
“I need a bath.”
“We can arrange for that as well,” the man said. “I have to go now, but I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Can’t wait, Nika thought.
The man exited the room, leaving the wooden chair he’d brought, slamming the metal door behind him as he walked away.
Nika expected the light to come back on, but it didn’t. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the blinding overhead fluorescent or the cave-like blackness. Each was terrifying in its own way.
