He pulled himself along the wall for about two hundred meters and then climbed up on to the bank. He soon dried out in the strong sea breeze and, sure his feet would not leave prints now, started walking back in the direction of the city.
***
There was an upside to smelling as bad as he did. The two shoppers wasted no time in hoisting their bags up and moving off in search of new pastures. He watched them go in the reflection of the store window opposite, tracking their progress all the way past a smoothie bar, where he caught Erikson, sunglasses on, looking right back at him, sporting jeans and a casual jacket.
Blending in nicely.
Ben looked to the right to see Kane advancing toward him, dressed the same way, flashing that shark tooth smile.
Erikson moved in from the left with a slight limp. He had some scratches and bruising on his cheek. Was Cole with them? The answer came from behind.
“Ben.”
He swung around to see Cole strolling over.
Getting past Kane or Erikson wasn’t going to be easy. Cole presented the preferable option. Behind him, the hall led to one of the many exits.
Ben put up his hands in surrender. Cole smiled in victory. Ben seized the moment and delivered a punch to Cole’s solar plexus. The man collapsed to the floor like a cheap deckchair. Ben stepped over Cole’s stricken form and bolted down the hall.
A huge man in an even bigger basketball jersey got in his way, trying to see what the commotion was about, and copped an unintentional elbow in the face.
Ben only got a couple of wobbly steps further toward the exit when he felt something jab him in the shoulder like a bee sting. He put his fingers around and found something hard and plastic protruding from his skin. A tranquilizer dart. Ben pulled it out and kept moving, trying to ignore it, but it proved futile. Another two steps and he hit the ground too. His vision blurred and then disappeared altogether as the effects of whatever was in the dart took hold.
***
Ben opened his eyes and was met with a blinding white light and a blinding headache to match. He was nauseous, his forehead coated in a sheen of sweat. He tried to wipe it, but he couldn’t move his arms. His hands were stretched out left and right of him. He felt like he should be lying down, but he was standing. Or rather he was being held up.
He turned his head, almost vomiting with the pain in his temple, squinting, and saw that both his wrists were bound to the wall by thick plastic cuffs. A wide strap across his chest pinned him to the wall. His ankles were secured just as his wrists were.
“Drink?” a voice said.
Cole’s voice. Right in front of him, somewhere in the bright light. A thick plastic straw was inserted into the corner of his mouth. He gulped as much as he could through the straw before he had to stop to catch breath.
The lights dimmed to a much more bearable level. Cole materialized in Ben’s field of view holding a remote control above his head. “That better for you?”
They were back in the lab. No sign of Kane, Erikson or Burke.
“What do really want with me then?” Ben spluttered.
“This is all a question of evolution, Ben. And you are the key.”
“Me? Don’t you mean us?”
“Well we all have our part to play. But you can’t have a game of chess if you don’t have all the right pieces.”
“Chess,” Ben said. “So I’m a pawn?”
Cole smiled. “Far from it. Pawns are expendable. One can afford to lose them, indeed plan to lose them. You’re too valuable to be sacrificed.”
“That’s not the way it sounded to me.”
Cole looked around the lab. “You were in here last night. You overheard.”
“You’re damn right I overheard.”
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m afraid Kane’s impatience rubbed off on me a little.” Cole rubbed at his side. “Speaking of Kane, he was very impressed with the move you put on me. You know, the two of you could get on.”
“I doubt that,” said Ben, running his tongue around his mouth. It was bruised and cut. He must have bit the inside of his cheek when he went down after the tranquilizer.
Cole held out the water to Ben again and he shook his head.
“You never had any intention of helping me, did you?” said Ben.
Cole pulled up a stool behind him and sat.
“Depends on what your definition of ‘help’ is.”
“Stop talking in riddles, you know what I mean.”
“I haven’t told you anything you don’t already know yourself, Ben. Your life – what passes for a life, is a waste. You could be doing so much more.
“You could be rich, Ben, not living like a vagrant. It’s right there in front of you.”
“Money? What happened to making a difference? Showing the establishment where the real power resides? It was all bullshit, wasn’t it?”
Ben tested his wrists against his restraints. “Why this?”
“Right now I need your help, Ben, more than you need mine. And you’re going to help me. Whether you want to or not.”
Strip lighting buzzed into life overhead and Burke appeared at Cole’s side with a trolley. On it were several large syringes and vials.
Cole cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely forthcoming with you, Ben.”
“What a complete surprise,” said Ben.
“In fact I completely lied.”
Ben’s head was regretting ignoring his instincts the night Cole called out to him on the street.
“I know, I know,” Cole said. “I’m a scumbag. But see I thought it better to concoct a story that would have you come here of your own volition…”
“Rather than just have Kane haul me in,” said Ben.
Cole shrugged.
There was a horrible aftertaste in Ben’s mouth. He ran his tongue around his gums, worked up a well of saliva, and spat it out on Cole’s shoes. “All that kindred spirit bullcrap. You and me are nothing alike.”
Cole knelt and wiped his shoe with a handkerchief from his pocket. Burke cleaned an area on Ben’s forearm with cotton wool and held up one of the syringes. Cole gave him the nod.
“You couldn’t be more right,” said Cole. “I’m nothing like you.” He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and came out with an auto injector pen. He held it up for Ben to see. “As far as I am aware, you do possess the ability to make yourself visible. But the fact of the matter is, I have neither the knowledge nor the desire to help you make it happen. My interest lies only in doing the opposite. For that I need-”
“My blood,” said Ben.
“Burke’s alleged specialist subject is cloning and replication. But alas he has come up short.”
Burke took a deep breath, doing his best to let Cole’s comments wash over him as he drew blood from Ben’s arm.
“He tells me,” Cole continued, “that we’ll get there eventually. In the meantime, I have a deadline to meet, which means we’re going to need more of your blood than I first envisaged. Quite a bit more actually.”
Burke placed the syringe down on the trolley and picked up another.
“See, the thing is,” said Cole, “there aren’t as many of you guys out there as I led you to believe. In fact, you’re the only one I know of running wild. I did have a few other specimens, but they’re, shall we say, drying up.”
Burke put a second full syringe on the trolley and prepared a third. There were two dozen more there waiting in line.
“Just take enough. Understand? Enough,” Cole said to Burke. He turned back to Ben. “We’ll catch up again later.”
Ben watched Cole all the way to the door, then turned his attention to Burke as he pressed another needle into his arm. Whatever way the wraparound glasses worked, they must have enabled him to see not just Ben, but also his blood.
“So how much is enough, exactly?” asked Ben.
Burke’s eyes glanced up at him and then away again.
“A pint? Two?” said Ben. “I
know when they donate blood at the clinic, that it’s less than a pint. Any more than that in a two-month period is unsafe.”
“Yes, well you will have noticed that this is not a clinic,” said Burke in a monotone voice, cutting him off.
“Right you are,” said Ben. “So I gather from that you’ll be exceeding the recommended donation then.”
“I’ll be drawing only the amount we require.”
“Require for what?”
“For our requirements,” Burke said flatly.
“And how much is that exactly?” said Ben.
“Two,” replied Burke.
“Two pints?”
Burke didn’t answer.
“Two liters?”
Burke’s eyes met his.
“But that’s almost four pints,” said Ben.
“Almost.”
“That will half-kill me.”
“It’s definitely a possibility,” replied Burke, “without the proper treatment. But then we’re going to provide you with that. You’ll be the subject of what is medically referred to as a Class 3 Hemorrhage. I’ll be drawing roughly forty per cent of the blood circulating in your body. Your blood pressure will drop. Naturally enough. Your heart rate will increase. Your breathing will become labored. You’ll be severely agitated. Simple brain functions will be impaired. But it will all be tightly monitored and controlled.
“Believe Cole when he says this is a last resort. You’re much too valuable for him to want anything to happen to you.”
After that, Burke didn’t say another word, even when Ben pushed him. Ben grew more tired as even more blood was drawn. It got so he was finding it hard to hold his head up.
Then everything went black.
Yet again.
14
“Sounds like the guy with the hematoma ran into our boy,” Morgan said to Powell. “Or rather our boy ran into him.”
A guy in an oversized replica Miami Heat vest that stretched down to his knees sat on a bench, being tended to by paramedics. He was swaying a little, holding an ice pack to his forehead. When he took it away there was a breath-taking lump the size of a golf ball over his eyebrow.
“Says there was a bit of a commotion. Some guy got knocked down,” Morgan continued. “He tried to get a look and something banged into him. Hard. Felt like a person, but he didn’t see anybody. He had his hands in his pockets at the time, so his head broke his fall.”
“Ouch,” said Powell. “More like the fall broke his head.”
The entire mall had been put on security alert as soon as news of men running about waving guns around broke. The reports had drawn all representatives from all sections of law enforcement and the various government agencies. But it was the unconfirmed reports and the unusual statements garnered at the scene that had brought Powell and his team on the scene, thanks to the ‘specialist information gatherers’ Colonel Crane had monitoring communications across the region.
Dyson jogged up to the two men. “CCTV came up trumps, Major.”
“What have we got?” said Powell.
“I think you’re going to want to see this for yourself,” said Dyson.
***
Powell watched the screen in the security office intently.
A man with his back to the camera doubled up and collapsed to the floor in a heap. A split second later, two men wearing wraparound sunglasses raced into frame. One of them pointed a handgun past the man on the ground and pulled the trigger once. He secreted the weapon away in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket and helped the man up from the ground, turning him around to face the camera.
“Cole,” said Powell.
“I need to switch to this other video clip now,” said Dyson, grabbing the mouse and clicking the pointer on the video window stacked beneath the current one. “This is from the camera further along, facing the exit.”
Cole had recovered enough to be moving under his own steam. The shooter and the other guy were crouched face to face. It was hard to see exactly what they were supposed to be doing. It looked like they were preparing to lift something.
Something kind of heavy.
Except there was nothing there.
They finally stood and walked off toward the exit at pace, the largest of the men walking awkwardly, one hand outstretched for balance, as if he had a keg of beer over his shoulder.
“You were right,” Powell said to Dyson. “I did want to see that for myself.” He took the mouse and directed the cursor back to the first clip. He shuttled through it to the point where the guy had drawn his weapon. He maximized the window on screen and enlarged the image as much as he could before it started to break up and pixelate, then dragged the play head across to the point on the timeline where the weapon was discharged.
“No muzzle flash,” said Powell.
“And no suppressor,” said Morgan, a former recon sniper with a deep knowledge of firearms. “That’s not a handgun,” he said with some certainty. “It’s a dart gun. Fires tracer darts, tranquilizers, that sort of thing.”
“Get the gear,” Powell said to Dyson. “He went down when he fell.”
“There could be blood,” said Dyson.
“I’m counting on it,” said Powell.
Dyson didn’t wait to be told twice.
An hour later, they had exactly what they were looking for back in the truck. The computer was analyzing a scraping of what they had determined to be human skin, along with a minute amount of blood, both invisible to the unequipped eye.
Powell and Dyson watched as data, an endless succession of numbers and letters, scrolled down the screen. The progress bar at the foot of the screen implied that the ninety-seven per cent mark point of the process had been reached. The final three per cent flashed past suddenly and a dialog box appeared on screen to signify a successful result.
“Here goes,” said Dyson.
He sat down at the keyboard and opened the file that had been output by the computer. He browsed down the document with his finger hovering an inch from the screen.
“There,” he said with a mixture of relief and excitement in his voice.
Powell moved closer.
It was a number.
“We’ve got it?” he said.
“We got it,” said Dyson. Powell watched as his tech backed his chair away from the keyboard and turned to the workstation behind, booting up a piece of software that Cole would have had in his possession as well, but up until this point had been the only one able to use.
The key lay in the invisible blood sample. It contained thousands of microscopic transmitters that operated on an encrypted frequency, one that had been deciphered and then re-encrypted a long time ago by Cole. The transmitters were supposed to be out of commission, but by the manner in which Cole and his men were able to track and capture their target, this was no longer the case.
Encryption, in itself, posed no great threat to an operator as adept as Dyson, but to break it he needed one of the transmitters in his physical possession to disassemble.
He was now tapping away feverishly on the keyboard. On the screen was a live satellite image of the Miami area. Dyson was refining and fine tuning the search as the computer homed in on the location of the transmitters.
The first thing that showed up was their panel van, appearing on the satellite image as a pulsating red circle. It had taken almost two hours just to triangulate the position of the transmitter they had in their possession. But Dyson could now calibrate the scanning program using the readings he had taken. Locating the remainder of the transmitters, the ones inside the invisible Cole had nabbed at the train station, would be much quicker.
15
Ben woke with a start and sat up. He couldn’t see anyone, but there was someone in the room with him. He sensed movement to his left and then received a hard, backhanded slap across the face.
“Oh, did I wake you?” a voice said.
Ben rubbed his eyes, and peered around what looked like a small private room in a hospital. Onl
y there were no windows, no potted plants.
“I asked you a question,” the voice said. The words were followed by another smack across the cheek from an open, calloused hand.
“Kane?” said Ben.
“I got to say, Benny boy, I could get used to this. This ability, this power, it’s wasted on the likes of you.”
The door burst open and Cole came in, very visible, and very visibly angry. “Knock it off! Get back to your training, Kane. You need to learn a whole lot in a short space of time. Time, which you have pointed out, is in short supply.”
“Relax, relax,” said Kane, the sounds of his feet padding across the tiled floor as he exited the room.
“I’m sorry,” said Cole, grabbing a chair and dragging it over next to the bed.
“For what? Selecting such an array of assholes to work with?”
“How are you feeling?” Cole asked, leafing through the chart at the end of the bed.
“Save the small talk,” said Ben. “You made him invisible, using my blood.”
“Not entirely. But your blood is a major component of the compound we use, yes.”
“How is he able to see me all of a sudden without those fancy glasses? You don’t need them,” said Ben.
“Well therein lies the key to our success, Ben. You familiar with nanotechnology?”
“Tiny little robots?”
“Close. It’s the engineering of functional systems at a molecular scale. In a word: miniaturization. On a scale so minute, it can’t be seen with the naked eye. Nanotechnology. Your blood: it’s full of it.”
Mr. Clear Page 8
