Blown Circuit

by Lars Guignard

  Regarding my father, my feelings were more conflicted. The news of his alleged affair with Kate had not been something I had wanted to hear, but nevertheless, I felt that much closer to getting him back. With that in mind, I decided to focus on the positive. It might not be a job complete, but it was a job well done, and it was within the warm embrace of that comforting thought that I allowed myself to fall into an exhausted slumber.

  For a precious few hours I slept the well-earned sleep of the weary, and then, when I awoke, I was greeted by a new mission and a new day.

  Thanks for reading.

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  BLOWN CIRCUIT

  A Michael Chase Thriller

  by

  Lars Guignard

  ***

  Copyright (c) 2012, 2013 by Lars Guignard

  Published by: Fantastic Press

  www.fantasticpress.com

  Inquiries: fantasticpress@gmail.com

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-9877753-7-5

  Version 2013.06

  ***

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, information storage and retrieval, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, brands, locations, media, corporations, institutions, organizations and incidents in this novel are the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication and/or use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  E-Book License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ***

  Thriller

  Lethal Circuit

  Paranormal Mystery

  Brood

  Middle-Grade Magic Adventure

  Zoe & Zak and the Ghost Leopard

  Zoe & Zak and the Yogi’s Curse

  About the Author:

  A former television writer, Lars Guignard is a graduate of both McGill University and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Lars's work can be seen on television screens across the globe in series as varied as Beastmaster, Big Wolf on Campus, and Mentors. A member of the Writer's Guild of Canada, Lars's work has also been produced for film and published in magazines.

  Ever since attending high school in the Indian Himalayas at the age of fourteen, Lars has been an avid backpacker and traveler. Lars now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest where he is busy completing the third Michael Chase thriller for release in 2013.

  Connect with Me Online:

  My blog: www.larsguignard.com.

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  A Chinese satellite is on a crash course with Earth.

  It contains enough plutonium to irradiate a large city.

  And that's the good news...

  Michael Chase is a twenty-six-year-old backpacker, a recent college grad, an amateur. He flew to Hong Kong to find his missing father. Four hours later, he's running for his life. The Chinese Secret Police want him dead. The Conspiracy wants him dead. And the one person who he thinks is on his side, may want him dead too.

  If Michael is going to live, he'll need to find a hidden piece of Nazi technology lost since World War II. And he'll have to do it before anyone else. Because if he doesn't, a little plutonium is going to be the least of his problems.

  Readers praise LETHAL CIRCUIT:

  "Rockin' fast-paced thriller!!! Strap yourself in for a wild ride as backpacker Michael Chase gets caught up in the world of spies and secret agents." - Connaisseur -- 5 Stars

  "A Pulse Racing Thriller!" - Soundograph -- 5 Stars

  "Lars Guignard keeps you hanging at the end of each chapter!" - David Trail -- 5 Stars

  "A high-octane spy thriller with a great twist ending." - E.J. Whalen -- 5 Stars

  Gripping -- Complex Characters -- Full of Surprises!

  “This is thriller entertainment par excellence! In this way reminiscent of Stieg Larsson, in others of Robert Ludlum and Michael Crichton, Lars Guignard brings his own polished voice to the thriller genre to stay." - Jeffrey W. Vanke -- BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE BERLIN DECEPTION -- 5 Stars

  LETHAL CIRCUIT is the first in the Michael Chase thriller series. It has been on the Amazon Bestseller Technothriller List since its release.

  Read an excerpt from LETHAL CIRCUIT.

  LETHAL CIRCUIT

  By Lars Guignard

  1

  HONG KONG

  CHUNGKING MANSION. Even the name sounded decrepit. Twenty-seven stories of decaying concrete apartment block that made the worst housing project in America look like the Hilton. The truth was, Chungking Mansion wasn’t so much a residence as a third world city stuffed into a condemned building occupying some of the most valuable real estate on the planet. Why it still stood was a bureaucratic mystery, but the prevailing theory was that it had taken the place of the old Kowloon Walled City which had been razed years previously.

  The old Walled City had been a historical anomaly: an unclaimed property lying in the no man’s land between Chinese and British jurisdiction that had grown into a tangled web of vice and commerce the likes of which the world had never seen. There was no law. There was no order. There was only humanity run amok in a group of structures that had slowly but steadily grown into one another until they became one and the same: six and a half acres of madness, fourteen stories high. The old Walled City had finally met the wrecking ball, but its displaced residents had needed some place to go and that place was Chungking. In a word, Chungking was hell, Hong Kong style. It was also home to some of the finest South Indian curry on the Pacific Rim. It was this curry and the ice cold beer that accompanied it that added up to the long trough style urinal Michael Chase now stood before.

  Michael stifled a cough as he undid the fly of his cargo shorts. He’d stepped off the plane from Seattle less than four hours earlier and already he thought he might have picked up a case of tuberculosis. No worries, he thought, he was twenty-six and in the best shape of his life. A run of antibiotics and he’d be fine. What mattered now wasn’t what disease he might have contracted, or how quickly the beer had run through him, or even how sharply the climbing pack he wore over one shoulder dug into the small of his back. What mattered was that he focus his attention on the task at hand.

  Because Michael hadn’t flown eight thousand miles to take a leak. He had much more serious business to attend to and right now every ounce of that business revolved around his urinal mate, the man slouched over the trough two feet to his left. One hand poised on the grimy cracked subway tile, the other in his pants, the older man went by the name of Shanghai Larry, and as he stood there, his tired Eurasian features twisted into an alcoholic stupor, Michael reflected that the moniker could hardly be more appropriate. Salt-and-pepper hair curling just above the tops of his ears and a perfect mole on his chin, if anybody had one foot on Bond Street and the other on the Bund, Larry was the man. The restroom door opened, flooding the shadows with light, and Michael steeled his nerve. It was now or never. Zipping back up, he turned to Larry and uttered the w
ords he’d traveled so far to say.

  “I know what you did,” he said. “I know that you killed my father."

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE RESTROOM door, the woman listened intently.

  She was tired, but she suspected that if there was any truth to what she had overheard, her evening had just begun. She stepped away from the door as a third man entered the restroom. Unlike the men inside, this man moved deliberately. As if he had something important to do. Something more than relieve himself. The woman knew she needed to get closer. She slipped in the swinging door before it shut. Now, as she stood in the outer vestibule, a five foot partition wall providing just enough cover to hide her from where the men were lined up at the trough, she praised her instincts. Even if she was wrong about the third man, there was definitely something up with Michael. Something a whole lot bigger than he had previously let on. She listened intently to Larry’s reply.

  “That’s a hell of an accusation, Sport.”

  “It’s not an accusation. It’s a fact. You were the last to see him alive. You two had some kind of issue. You owed him money.”

  “Doesn’t mean I killed him.”

  “Get real, Larry.”

  “Listen, Sport, I know this is a difficult time for you.”

  “Cut the Sport shit. If you didn’t do it, who did?”

  Larry ran a hand through his thick head of hair. “Pay attention, I’m serious here. It’s looked bad for me from the beginning. But I’m not your man. I never was. And I can prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Your dad —”

  “Yeah, Larry?”

  “He sent me this.”

  Michael forced himself to breathe as Larry zipped up and reached drunkenly into his jacket pocket. He had noticed their new urinal mate, a powerfully built Chinese man with a pock-marked face and zebra striped hair, but paid him little heed. His concern now was Larry—Larry who had pulled a cell phone from his pocket and was lazily tapping its dirty touch screen. When a video finally began to play on the phone’s display, the first thing Michael noticed was the lack of sound. Apparently the volume was off. The next thing he noticed was that the man on the screen was his father. He was bearded and looked very tired, black circles under his eyes, but it was his dad, anybody could see that. Then, before he could get a better look, all hell broke loose.

  Michael had caught a glimpse of the lean, tan woman entering the restroom behind him. He was well aware that her name was Kate, but that didn’t concern him at present. What concerned him was how quickly the man with the zebra striped hair had managed to interject his stout frame between Larry and himself. In that moment Larry seemed to recognize that something was very wrong because he pulled the cell phone back. Then, Zebra bent to his side and Michael saw what looked like a tattooed snake wrestling a tiger inked to the base of his muscular neck. A quarter second later Zebra had produced a black alloy butterfly knife from the depths of his long leather jacket. Michael stepped back. Zebra unfolded the knife in a smooth flick of the wrist, pressing the two halves of its blade together to form a lethal weapon.

  What happened next was fragmented. Michael saw the glint of the blade under the flicker of the fluorescent light. He heard Larry let out a blood curdling moan. Then he saw the phone slide across the grimy tile, followed by Larry’s collapse to the floor. Blood covered Larry’s white French cut shirt and more was flowing out. Even in the poor light Michael could see that he had been stabbed in the heart, and though he immediately brought his hand to Larry’s chest to stem the bleeding, his attention was torn. Zebra, a mere ten feet away, had stooped down to pick up the cell phone. He wrapped his fingers around it, idly scooping it up like he had all the time in the world. And that’s when the woman smashed him on the head.

  Zebra went down in a slow motion thud. Like he’d been switched off. And then for a second, maybe more, all was quiet. Michael couldn’t be sure what the woman had used to hit him, but it was irrelevant. The net effect was that Zebra was now splayed out unconscious on the filthy bathroom floor beside Larry, blood trickling down from behind his left ear. Michael was uncertain of the number of men who next entered the restroom. All he knew was that they wore turbans and that upon seeing the carnage they ran out as quickly as they had come in. The men gone, Michael knelt on the floor. He lifted a blood soaked hand from Larry’s heart and placed two fingers on his neck to check his pulse. He was silent for a long moment before looking up at the woman who stared down at him from the corner of the room.

  “He’s dead,” Michael said flatly.

  The woman nodded, eyeing Zebra warily as she stooped down to pick up the bloody cell phone. She had barely grasped it in her hand before the sound of her breath was drowned out by a shrill fire alarm. It was followed by what sounded like movement on the floors below and then the pounding echo of jackboots in the stairwell. She cast her gaze at Zebra’s tiger-snake tattoo before redirecting it to the broken bathroom window.

  “Follow me,” she said. “Follow me or die.”

  2

  IT WAS A good twenty-five-foot drop from the broken bathroom window to the trash strewn roof below. But it was survivable. Michael knew because the woman had already jumped. So he jumped. Off the window ledge. And down. Michael didn’t know how long he was airborne, probably less than a second, but the landing was as he had expected, jarring but manageable. He landed on his feet, hitting the refuse pile just as the woman shook herself free of it.

  The trash was maybe two feet deep and damp. It had obviously rained recently. Michael had no idea why Chungking’s residents chose to dispose of their refuse as though the Middle Ages were alive and well, but he didn’t care. Not right now anyway. Besides, it was mostly packaging and fast-food wrappers; the odor emitted not so much fetid as sweet, creating the illusion that whatever he was trudging through was no worse than a freshly fertilized field. A long-tailed rat scurried through the trash in front of him and Michael made every effort to turn his mind to pleasanter thoughts than the plague.

  Michael was six-three and weighed in at about a hundred ninety pounds, but even with his lean strength, trekking through the deep trash was no cake walk. He picked his way after the woman carefully, thankful for the heavy-duty trail running shoes he wore. Then, as the woman stopped abruptly at the far wall, he followed her gaze down. Between the masonry wall of the adjoining building and the roof he stood upon was a fourteen-inch crack extending at least twelve stories down. A drain pipe threaded down the crack to what Michael could just make out as the alley below.

  “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  The woman simply eyed the bathroom window. There were voices up there. Movement. Then a beam of light swept the roof.

  “Get down.”

  Michael ducked under a wet cardboard box, but he wasn’t quick enough. The flashlight beam hit his back and a shrill scream rang out in Cantonese. The woman didn’t bother waiting. Michael looked up to see that she had already disappeared into the crack between the buildings. Then, without further warning, the report of a pistol cracked through the night air. Michael rolled toward the roof’s edge. Though he was loathe to do so, he saw little choice but to descend. Pulling the backpack from his back, he tossed it between the buildings. The pack was too wide at first, but with a good shove he was able to get it to fall. The beam of light bounced back and forth across the roof. There were more shots now, but they were scattered. Obviously the shooters didn’t have a bead on him yet, but Michael didn’t want to stick around until they did. He pulled his lanky frame up and over, grasping the cast iron drainpipe as he slipped his body into the crack. A natural athleticism had always been a part of Michael’s life, but the bullets were something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. They added an element of urgency to the proceedings he could happily do without.

  The drainpipe was wet, water overflowing from the gutter above. He had heard his backpack hit the ground, the four or five seconds it had taken it only emphasizing the length of the descent ahead
of him. He could no longer hear the shouting above, but now, as Michael crept down the crack foot by foot, gray water streaming down the walls, he felt like a river was closing in around him. Michael had an issue with tight spaces. He didn’t like the label claustrophobic, but it didn’t make it any less true. Nine years ago now, Michael had endured an experience that had changed him. That event still haunted him and even though he knew rationally speaking that the walls on either side of him were fourteen inches apart and barring any unexpected earth movement, they would stay that way, it didn’t matter. What would happen if the walls narrowed to the point that he was no longer be able to move down? Working against gravity, he’d no longer be able to climb up either. He would be stuck there, caught between two slabs of wet concrete twelve stories high, and the feeling chilled him to the bone.

  But Michael also knew that he had to get to the bottom before the men with guns. Add to that, the woman was nowhere to be seen. He had to assume she had made it to the street below. It couldn’t be far now. So, taking hold of the drainpipe with both hands, he retired the downward stepping motion he had been using and simply hung in the crack, lowering himself down the drainpipe hand over hand. It was quicker this way. Much quicker. And just when Michael began to fall into a rhythm he felt the world open up around him. The rear wall of the crack fell away and Michael found himself in a covered alley. He slid down the last few feet of the drainpipe landing next to the woman who stood immobile, the noise of the street audible from the end of the alley.