The New Authority Conspiracy (The Keeley Dorn Adventures Book 1)

by J. S. McClelland

  It wasn’t mine, either. Not at this point.

  “What is special about a Grey screenboard?” I asked.

  “Access. We can look at anything. Information not available to citizens is available to us.”

  “It wouldn’t provide you with the information you seek, in any case,” I said.

  He glanced at me quizzically. “Why do you think that?”

  “You said someone is helping me. That tells me all of your previous searching yielded nothing useful. So even if I did palm a Grey screenboard my records might be false or they might not exist any longer.”

  “That’s probably true,” he said. “So I need to go talk to my friend Skee. He knows who you are.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  His fingers stopped drumming. “Yes, but I’ll need to be careful.”

  “And then?” I asked, finishing my breakfast.

  “Until I know more, there is no in point making a decision.”

  The professional Flick had returned. His stony look told me any fanciful notions of him flying me to another city and kissing me goodbye with a friendly wave were just that, fanciful.

  “I understand,” I told him calmly.

  I observed Flick’s hands. They were large, the knuckles scarred. His nose looked bent at a very slight angle. It had apparently been broken at least once.

  I studied him while I considered my options.

  He met my eyes unabashedly and surveyed me in return.

  There was no question I would not be leaving this cabin refuge on my own. Not without access to transport. And I certainly could never hope to overpower him and take his helicar.

  The only path ahead of me at the moment seemed to include having this man on my side.

  “Flick,” I said. “Is that your name, or your tag?”

  He squirmed slightly. “My tag. Skee only talks in tags. That’s the way it is with all those enforcement guys.”

  “What is Skee’s real name?”

  “You know, I think its Steedman, but I’m not sure.”

  “What is your real name?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”

  I smiled playfully. “Is it Felix?”

  He turned to look at me fully. “No, it’s not.”

  “There is nothing wrong with Felix,” I said sarcastically.

  “Lying doesn’t seem to be one of your strong skills.”

  “It would be counterproductive to betray any trust you give me.”

  His smile faded and he flashed wary/skeptical.

  Too much, too much. I let my shoulders slump, demonstrating that I felt bad about the statement.

  “Sure,” he said evenly. “You wouldn’t want to do anything that would be counterproductive.”

  “I meant it would be disgraceful. You are taking a risk to help me and I know that.”

  He gave a tiny smile. Hopeful/cautious.

  I looked down at my hands. “I know that your work can’t be easy.”

  “If it were easy it wouldn’t be any fun,” he replied. “And I wouldn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “You enjoy challenges, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I enjoy doing things that other people can’t,” he said.

  His deeply blue eyes glimmered as he spoke, and underneath his flippant tone was genuine feeling. Flick loved being a Grey. He loved the freedom, the mobility.

  The excitement.

  But it was gone as quickly as it had appeared and he turned his attention back to eating, his expression neutral once more.

  Determining his regulatory orientation wasn’t going to be an easy task. His moods and thoughts changed rapidly. This man possessed incredible drive and confidence but seemed hampered with emotional volatility and he had a flash temper.

  I would need to pay particularly close attention to him to correctly assess his ruling focus.

  Greys obviously operated with a great deal of autonomy and it was prudent for me to exploit his empathy as much as possible. With this man helping me, my chances of survival doubled.

  As long as I didn’t say the wrong thing at the wrong time, cultivating him as an ally would be feasible.

  I parted my lips a fraction, widened my eyes slightly, and tilted my head toward him in a submissive gesture.

  He stared back at me unabashedly, his sharp look giving every impression of determined, but restrained interest.

  For an instant, I did find his intense examination pleasurable. Something about his appearance attracted me momentarily, but I let the feeling slip away and concentrated on the objective.

  At the start of our conversation, I had taken great care to pitch my voice higher, soften my tone, and tuck my elbows in, to accentuate my femininity.

  Words, expressions, gestures, and movements were my tools, and I intended to fully exploit each one.

  “Is what you do dangerous?” I asked. “Well, yesterday was, but is it usually so?”

  Power. Strength. Capability. That is what I see in you.

  I’d seeded the message. He was a Grey, but he was a man first. To exploit him I needed to appeal to his nature. Though he was difficult to read, instinctively I knew how challenging it was for a man to ignore flattery.

  “It’s dangerous,” he said. “But so am I.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  Grateful. Vulnerable. Trusting. See that in me.

  I crafted my body language to exude attraction, a small hint of fear and a great deal of reliance.

  He was looking at me without blinking, his pulse had accelerated and a fine sheen of sweat gleamed on his forehead.

  If he had been any normal man he would be carrying me to the bed at that moment.

  But he wasn’t a normal man. He had superior training and self-control cloaking him with a tough shield of suspicion. Difficult, but not impossible, to penetrate.

  It would take time, but with careful planning, a bond could be forged between us.

  My hope was that the bond would be forged quickly enough to get me out of New Dublin alive.

  “Helping me won’t be easy,” I said. “You are a great deal more experienced than me, and I could use some guidance. So, what can I do to assist you that won’t just slow you down?”

  Here I am. Obedient. Helpful. Eager.

  “Nothing. Wait,” he said.

  He broke eye contact, stood up, and hastily cleared away the breakfast dishes.

  “Skee is due back this morning. Until he gets to his station we can’t do anything. When he is off mission I will communicate with him. After I’m satisfied he’s given me enough information about you I will make some choices about what happens next.”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  He looked suspicious of my helpful compliance.

  “I would like to be an asset, not the reverse,” I said. “So, how do I accomplish that?”

  He walked to a cabinet across from the table and opened it. He pulled out a small screenboard, palmed it to activate it and handed it to me.

  “This has access to almost everything our Grey facility has and, since I’ve palmed it, you can use it safely. Ask it anything, and search for anything, while I’m gone.”

  “Gone?”

  He glanced out the window and stared straight ahead. “I need to scrub the surveillance of the incident yesterday. I came close to killing one of those guys and that needs to be addressed. I can’t do my job here. This place is only a hideaway. I need to go in.”

  He was lying. This was no refuge, but he wanted me to think that.

  “I understand,” I said. “How long will you be gone?”

  “Maybe six hours. There is plenty of food here, and you can sit on the deck but don’t go into the jungle. There are snakes everywhere.”

  “I see.”

  He filled a cup with water and slugged it back. “I’m not joking about the swamp, Keeley. Stay inside. It’s only for a few hours and then I will take you on a paddle boat into the mangroves.”r />
  “I’ll stay here.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “Good.”

  I smiled with sad eyes. “See you in a few hours.”

  He gathered up a black satchel and headed to the door, bounded down the steps two at a time, and made his way across a gravel path and down to a small pond where a floating helipad platform supported his vehicle. He climbed inside and shut the hatch, not bothering to look back to see if I was watching.

  He knew I was watching.

  His helicar lifted off and I stood in the open-air bedroom and observed him flying away.

  I turned to look at the interior of the cabin and studied it for a moment.

  There wasn’t much time.

  Six hours. He’d indicated that was how long he would be gone. That meant I had perhaps three to perform the search.

  I hastily braided my hair to keep it out of my face and took off my clothes.

  It was likely that Flick had managed to locate me the day before in the city using some sort of tracking device. Probably that device was on the back of my dress, surreptitiously applied when I’d sat down at the hotboards desk. It was the only logical explanation for his sudden arrival during my abduction.

  He was tracking me, and the only thing that he’d had access to that afternoon had been my desk and the chair, so it stood to reason I’d applied the device myself when I’d sat down. I didn’t want to waste time looking for some tiny gadget on my dress, and tampering with it might alert him somehow.

  It made sense to replace my black attire with one of Flick’s shirts instead. He would not be tracking his own clothes.

  I rummaged through a basket containing dirty clothing, snagged a grey short-sleeved shirt, and pulled it over my head. It fit me like a dress.

  Then I began the process of examining the cabin.

  I ran my fingers over each wall carefully. There were no hidden joints, concealed cracks, or unexplained panels on the surface of any of them.

  The floor was a more difficult matter as each board could have concealed a small compartment containing a lever or switch to activate a trap door. I tapped the boards, listening for changes in pitch or thickness.

  Nothing.

  After nearly an hour I satisfied myself that the interior of the cabin was not special in any way.

  The exterior lacked anything out of the ordinary as well, and after searching the jungle behind the structure and examining the ground thoroughly, I abandoned the cabin and the surrounding area and moved to the front.

  Nearly an hour and a half had elapsed. I needed to move.

  Flick, or someone, had constructed a stone pathway leading to the pond. The path descended two short flights of steps and ended at the steelfoam platform bobbing on the surface of the water.

  I walked up and down the stairs three times, checking for seams, cracks and unusual buttons or levers.

  Nothing.

  Low waves lapped the pontoons beneath the pad, creating a rhythmic sloshing sound and I turned my attention there.

  The helipad platform was very interesting. Constructed of steelfoam, it was possible a man could have built it alone, but something told me that was unlikely.

  It seemed wrong to me, somehow. Too sophisticated.

  The water was murky and obscured the bottom of the pond.

  I paced the surface of the platform, peering down fruitlessly. It was too difficult to see from a standing position, and finally, I lay on the steelfoam pad and stared directly down into the cloudy water below.

  I conducted a grid search around the edge, which took an agonizing amount of time since I needed to wait for direct sunlight to shine through the sporadic cloud cover and provide enough light to see the shadows on the bottom. I crawled my way around the platform and examined the water carefully. After proceeding in that fashion for perhaps three-quarters of the way, I finally found what I was looking for.

  A bright beam of sunlight illuminated the blue-green water just enough to reveal a small dark sinkhole on the bottom of the pond, perhaps three meters deep.

  This was it.

  I stripped off the shirt and left it in a wad, took a deep breath and dove.

  Though the air temperature was pleasant the water shocked me instantly, and I had to fight to avoid sucking in a reflexive breath.

  Fortunately, I seemed to know how to swim.

  My first dive produced nothing. I ended up blindly flailing around in the dark, only locating a slimy log and a thick clump of vegetation. I swam back to the surface and gulped air.

  Time was short. I needed to work faster.

  My second dive brought me to the sinkhole and I discovered that it wasn’t a hole at all, but a dark circular area that was blocked by some sort of metal cover.

  I blindly groped along the edges of the cover and my hands detected a protrusion.

  It was a mechanical lever.

  I pulled the lever and nothing happened. It refused to move. I struggled, yanked upwards, braced my legs against the metal cover for stability and heaved. At last, the bar twisted free and I pulled until it pivoted ninety degrees.

  I shot to the surface and sucked another lungful of air. Then I dove down and swam hard for the circle.

  A series of bubbles erupted from the area, indicating that the metal cover had slid aside to reveal an opening.

  I felt along the edges of the opening and realized a metal tube, large enough for a single person to swim through, descended below the muddy bottom of the pond.

  I swam into the tube, guiding myself along by feeling the smooth edges. It angled down, and then abruptly became horizontal, and after more than five meters of desperate swimming the tube turned up sharply.

  My lungs were straining by the time I groped my way out of the tube and popped to the surface into near total darkness. Soft dripping sounds echoed all around, and I noticed faint illumination coming from somewhere close by. I was inside an underground cavern.

  Dim, artificial light glimmered ahead and I swam cautiously through the water until my eyes adjusted.

  This wasn’t a cavern. I was inside an arched, hidden room.

  The cave, or bunker, wasn’t large. Maybe ten meters across at the widest point and only about three meters high.

  Light pulsed from the back wall, glowing a rhythmic pale blue. The gleaming light emanated from approximately two dozen regularly spaced circular objects that almost looked like they were floating in mid-air, and I wiped water from my eyes so that I could see them more clearly.

  There wasn’t a great deal of light, but it was enough to determine what I was looking at.

  The steelfoam walls and ceiling enclosed a floating platform positioned at the back of the bunker. Three rows of black lockers, stacked two high, lined the back wall. Each locker had a coded security dial, and it was those dials that pulsed with light. They looked like encrypted combination locks, and my fractured memory told me they would be incredibly difficult to open without the access codes.

  A steel ladder bolted to the surface of the platform, provided the means to climb up, but I didn’t dare.

  The moment my hand touched the ladder, Flick would be notified of my presence here, of that I was certain. It was inconceivable that the platform was not fitted with an alarm.

  Treading water, I scanned the lockers intently, noting their scope and dimensions, and comparing their size and shape to objects I’d seen recently.

  The lockers obviously didn’t house woodworking supplies.

  Whatever was down here was dangerous, and someone wanted very much to keep it a secret. It was the only explanation for the amount of effort needed to construct and conceal this place.

  The lockers were the same height as the long weapons the rapid-strike enforcement squad had carried, and I understood instantly the purpose of this bunker.

  I swam back to the exit as quickly as possible. Gulping air, I dove down, slipped back inside the tube, and swam with all my strength.

  Just as I broke the surface of the pond I heard
the engines of the helicar in the distance.

  Flick was coming back.

  At speed.

  The helicar engine wailed like an angry hornet.

  I sucked in a huge breath and dove back down to close the tube. Thankfully the lever operated more smoothly this time and the bunker cover slid shut with another series of bubbles.

  I swam back to the helipad, snatched the shirt from the platform and held it over my head as I paddled toward the bank. My legs and arms felt four times heavier than normal as I reached the shore, pulled myself up out of the pond, and scrambled to my feet.

  He would notice a trail of water on the steps and I had to take the time to skirt the path and struggle up the grassy bank instead.

  I used the shirt to towel off as I ran to the cabin, and by the time I reached the front door I wasn’t dripping any longer, so at least there wouldn’t be a trail of wet footprints across the floor.

  I hid the damp shirt beneath the other soiled clothing, and though it was possible he would discover it later, there was nothing I could do about it.

  I managed to rinse off in the shower quickly so I didn’t smell like pond water, dry off with a towel, and shimmy into my dress just as the helicar landed on the platform.

  There was no time to braid my hair, so I pulled it into a ponytail and looped it into a hasty bun, securing it tightly with a tug. Hopefully, it would not glisten with moisture too noticeably.

  The screenboard Flick had left for me had long since faded into an inactive mode, and I left it where it was, choosing instead to pull a chair over to the bedroom windows and position it facing the outside.

  Ostensibly, I was bird watching.

  I took a steady, measured breath and concentrated on slowing my pulse. I lowered my eyelids as if I was sleepy, and leaned my head back against the chair as though I’d been there for hours.

  Flick bounded up the steps before the engine of his helicar had completely shut down, and I saw instantly that he seemed agitated.

  As he came through the door I took one last deep breath so that I wasn’t still winded when he addressed me.

  “Keeley?”

  “Here,” I answered.

  He stopped abruptly, saw me and strode over, searching my face frantically. He turned his eyes into the trees and systematically examined them. Whatever he saw satisfied him and he looked back at me with an unexpected expression.