by Mat Nastos
To say Carl Anderson shrunk beneath the withering gaze of his boss and his boss’s boss would be an understatement. His entire body seemed to go flaccid and threaten to collapse in on itself. For several excruciating seconds, Anderson was unable to speak. The perspiration stains beneath his armpits grew to engulf his entire Wal-Mart purchased pale blue polo shirt, and Kiesling was convinced the man’s breathing had stopped altogether.
“Mister Anderson?”
A hand on Anderson’s shoulder and the sultry voice of Kiesling’s executive assistant brought the man back to life. “Tell them what you told me, Carl. It’s OK.”
Smiling up at the lovely Ms. Roslan, Anderson exhaled a deep breath, turned to lock eyes with his boss, and launched into his explanation
“You’re one-hundred percent correct, sir. We should be able to track Designate Cestus up to within six feet of his location—closer than that when we’ve got one of the Sentinel-class satellites keyed into his signal and located in geostationary orbit. And you’re right again about the point-of-view camera systems installed in the occipital lobe of each of the prime units, such as Designate Cestus or Gauss. We viewed footage from Designate Gauss earlier—watched his fight with Cestus upstairs…”
“Yes, yes! I know all of that, Mister Anderson,” interrupted Kiesling, growing more and more annoyed with the little engineer with each passing second he rambled on. “Now tell me something I don’t know. Tell me why, with all of the little toys you tech boys love so much, we cannot locate the damned Cestus unit? Tell me.”
Kiesling’s voice nailed Anderson to place. The poor man’s eyes darted to each face in the room, trying to gain some sort of support or sympathy from those present. Unfortunately for Carl Anderson, none of the thirteen people seated around the large mahogany table would hold his gaze—not Security Chief Doherty, nor the May Brothers from the weapons lab with their matching goatees, or even Anderson’s best friend from the computer lab, Hal Hefner. No one met his pleading, desperate eyes. The only thing that held him in place, kept him from bolting from the room in terror, was the firm, reassuring grip of Ms. Roslan. The feel of her nails, polished a deep red, sliding along his shirt, and the intoxicating smell of her perfume wrapping Anderson like a warm, protective, lavender-scented blanket, helped him press on in the face of his employer’s anger.
“Um…right, Kiesling, sir. Director Kiesling, sir, that is,” Anderson cleared his through and jumped head first into the rest of his debriefing before the head of Project: Hardwired allowed the obvious range in his face to explode. “With the Abraxas Hub still down, we can’t see anything. We couldn’t find the man if he were standing on the other side of that door there.”
“When our network goes down in Washington, we just have someone in IT reboot the system,” chimed Fountain. “Can’t someone just flip a switch and turn the computer back on?”
Ms. Roslan jumped in to cut the Representative’s line of thought off, “The Abraxas-configuration is infinitely more complex than your little office PC, Congressman Fountain. The secondary node here in the building takes up an entire floor, and the main Abraxas Hub in Houston covers a city block. It’ll take a near army of technicians three days to get the system back up, and a week before it’s running at full capacity.”
“They have twelve hours,” ordered Fountain, with crossed arms and as commanding a scowl as he could muster.
“Twelve…” started Anderson, stunned.
“Hours…?” finished Ms. Roslan, furious. “Are you insane, man? This isn’t the Enterprise and he’s not Scotty!” she spat, jerking her thumb down at Anderson.
The little engineer shrunk down again, uncomfortable at being the focus of everyone’s attention once more, and a tad hurt by the sexy executive assistant’s comment. Anderson knew he wasn’t a Kirk, a Spock, or even a Sulu, but had always pictured himself as the ‘Scotty’ of the team: often being able to beat even the most insane of deadlines imposed upon him by the powers-that-be. If he was forced to be a “red shirt,” he wanted to be the one that survived.
Fountain interrupted Anderson’s Roddenberry-dreams.
“Best put your little bitch on a leash, Kiesling, or I’ll have her put down,” working himself up to a self-righteous froth, Fountain continued, “I’m of the mind to have this entire operation shut down for all your incompetence.”
“Shut up,” came Kiesling’s voice from beneath lowered eyebrows.
“What did you say to me?” gasped the gray-haired politician, unsure if he had heard the man correctly.
“I said: sit down and shut up before I have you thrown out of my building. Or shot. Or both.”
Standing up and stalking over to the seated Kiesling, Fountain nearly popped in anger, as all of the exposed skin from the rim of his cheap buttoned-up collar to the top of his thinning steel gray perm turned beet red.
The man was so furious he was almost unable to get words to form on his saliva coated lips.
“I’ll have you all fired!” Fountain showering everyone in his vicinity with rage-fueled spittle as he worked himself up. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” inserted Kiesling flatly. “You’re the third liaison we’ve had from the capitol in the five years since we began.”
The director of Project: Hardwired stood up so he could stare down at the much shorter, slighter Representative from California.
“The first, Representative…” Kiesling looked over at his assistant for back-up.
“Robert Liefeld,” completed Ms. Roslan, smiling at Fountain with all the warmth of a piece of maguro at a sushi bar.
“Yes, Liefeld. Thank you, Ms. Roslan. Representative Liefeld, died rather suddenly of heart failure, I believe,” behind him, Ms. Roslan nodded in confirmation, and Kiesling continued, never removing his eyes from the Congressman. “The second, Representative…”
“Jacob Kurtzberg.”
“…Kurtzberg. Boring little man, originally from New York. The Bronx, I think,” another confirmation from his assistant kept Kiesling going. Unnoticed in the background, Carl Anderson smiled to himself, pleased to be free of the director’s attention. “Died in an arson fire at his lovely home in Encino, along with his wife of forty years and their dog, Kirby. It was a terrible tragedy. Did they ever catch the man who did it, Ms. Roslan?”
“No, sir.”
“It would be a shame if something happened to you, Congressman Fountain.”
The two men locked gazes, eyes drawn tight, each fighting for dominance.
Fountain blinked first. “Are you threatening me, Director Kiesling?”
With a smile as real as that of a leading man posing for pictures on a red carpet splitting his perfectly chiseled features, Kiesling responded, eyes never once leaving the politician’s face, “No, Congressman Fountain. I’m just explaining who you are and what your importance is to this project. The latest in a line of easily replaceable little men.”
A quick shift in his glaze was all Kiesling needed to do to signal his security chief to move behind the now shaking Michael Fountain.
“This isn’t over, Kiesling,” stammered Fountain. “Not by a long shot.”
Dismissing the man with a wave of his polished right hand, Kiesling fired back, “It is for now.” Then, to Security Chief Doherty, he finished, “Mr. Doherty, please make sure Congressman Fountain gets back to his hotel safely. We’d hate for anything to happen to him before his flight back to D.C. tomorrow.”
Kiesling strode confidently over to stand next to Ms. Roslan as Doherty exited the well-lit conference room with the skittish politician in tow.
In a low voice only she could hear, Kiesling whispered to Roslan, “Get a unit to keep an eye on the good Congressman Fountain. Set up a phone trace and monitor anyone he speaks to. It’d be a shame if he decided to make any sort of rash decisions with regards to our project.”
Nodding, Ms. Roslan disappeared in a cloud of clacks from her high heels.
Carl Anderson almost voided his bladder as his boss
’s firm hands clasped down on his shoulders, voice prodding him on, “Please continue, Mr. Anderson.”
Knocking out a lump in his throat the size of a large cat, Anderson closed his eyes and continued.
“With the system still down, we’re blind on our own. If we can get clearance from the FCC to commandeer a few satellites, we could begin scanning for the power core located at the base of Designate Cestus’s spine,” Anderson ventured a quick glance back over his shoulder when he felt the pressure of Director Kiesling’s powerful grasp disappear. Seeing that his boss had stepped back a couple of feet, Anderson spun in his chair and continued, “The core gives off a large enough radioactive signal that we’d be able to track him pretty easily. I’ve got a work up of what we should have the eyes in the sky look for.”
For the first time in hours, a genuine smile crossed Kiesling’s face as he took in the tech’s information.
“Good work, son. Very good work,” grinned Kiesling. “Hefner,” bellowed the director of Project: Hardwired in order to get the computer tech’s attention off of whatever he had on his computer screen. “Get the information from Carl here and take care of the satellite situation yourself. We don’t have time to ask for permission.” To the two May brothers, TJ and Jason, he added, “Mr. May. Other…uh, bald, Mr. May. Put together a briefing on all the improvements from the nano-tech upgrade Dr. Ryan did to Designate Cestus. We need a plan of attack for taking down one of the deadliest weapons on the planet without destroying the information in its head.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the good-looking Jason May as his bald brother, TJ, grabbed a thick folder from Anderson and passed it to the effeminate Hefner. The trio quickly hurried out the same doors recently vacated by Doherty, Roslan, and the Congressman.
“What else have you got for me, Carl?”
Spinning back to the laptop resting on top of the dark wood table, Anderson quickly tapped through a series of commands, pulling up a series of grainy images on the large flatscreen monitor mounted in the rear wall of the conference room.
“If you’ll take a look at the screen, I’ve got some footage from the external security camera feed.”
Dropping down into the seat next to the computer tech, Kiesling tapped his large Harvard class ring on the varnished table top, indicating Anderson should start the show.
For a few absolutely silent moments, the pair of men watched the events of Malcolm Weir’s escape play out on the high resolution TV monitor.
The image of the off-white car leaping into frame before them caused Kiesling’s ice blue eyes to go wide in surprise.
“Stop,” commanded Kiesling. “Who is the man in the car?”
Already ready for his employer’s question, Anderson removed a series of images from a manila envelope and slid them over. A number of the photos were obvious print-outs captured from the cell phones of onlookers on the street, but one was a blow-up of the driver’s license of a rather intense-looking man with a beard and shaved head.
“David Anthony Zuzelo,” Anderson read from a piece of stark white paper.
“That’s just a name. Who is he?”
Anderson went down his checklist.
“David Anthony Zuzelo. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Age thirty-four.”
The name still meant nothing to Kiesling. “What is his link to Designate Cestus?”
Getting excited, Anderson slid over another folder, this one containing college transcripts and a yearbook from the University of Boston.
“That’s where it gets interesting. Zuzelo was college roommates with Malcolm Weir,” getting an annoyed look from Kiesling, Anderson quickly corrected himself. “With Designate Cestus. From all indications, the pair were inseparable up until Cestus enlisted into the army. But they continued to keep in touch until about five years ago.”
“What happened then?” Kiesling’s curiosity was piqued.
“We don’t know. Zuzelo vanished. Fell off the face of the earth. He hasn’t popped up anywhere since. The guy’s a bit of a nut-job. A conspiracy theorist. He follows UFOs, hates the government. Real paranoid type.”
A baffled Kiesling quizzed, “How did this ‘paranoid nut-job’ know where to find us? This base, Project: Hardwired, even Cestus’s existence, it’s all top secret.”
“Phone records show he received a call about fifteen minutes before Designate Cestus went rogue and made a beeline for our location.”
“Who made the call?”
Taking a second to grab a slip of computer-printed paper from one of the stacks in front of him, Anderson leaned over and handed it to Kiesling timidly.
Confusion played across the director’s face as he read the contents of the sheet. “This says the call came from a cell number registered to Malcolm Weir.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Anderson. “A number disconnected a year ago at the time of his acceptance into Project: Hardwired.”
“Do you know where the call came from?”
“Six thirty-three West Fifth street.”
The need for another Vicodin began screaming from the back of Kiesling’s head as realization hit him squarely between the eyes. “That’s our location…”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s going on here, Anderson?” asked Kiesling quietly, his famed confidence shaken to the core.
“My best guess is that somehow Designate Cestus’s original personality construct, that of Captain Malcolm Weir, has been restored,” Anderson flipped an old photograph of Malcolm Weir dressed in his US Army Ranger’s uniform to over to Kiesling. “Weir is back and he reached out to someone he thought could help him escape.”
Nodding grimly, Kiesling ordered, “Locate Zuzelo. Do whatever it takes. Co-opt whatever resources you need. Ms. Roslan will help you. Find the man and bring him in.”
Bolting up from his seat, Anderson began gathering the paperwork and materials scattered across the table. Excitement bubbled up from deep within his belly—this was going to be his big break.
“Yes, sir. I’ll find him.”
Leaning back in his chair, Kiesling called out to the ratty little computer engineer, “Any ideas where Designate Cestus…where Malcolm Weir might go now that his original personality has returned?”
“Weir had a fiancée before he joined the program, but no other immediate friends of family to speak of.”
“Get a GMR team out to keep an eye on her, just in case,” called Kiesling as Anderson headed for the door. “And, Mr. Anderson…”
“Yes, Director Kiesling?”
“Make sure to use Designate Gauss. I’m sure he’ll be itching for a rematch with Cestus after their little tussle. Just make sure he keeps Weir’s head intact for the good Dr. Ryan to take apart.”
CHAPTER 8
One of the things Malcolm Weir had always hated about Southern California was that even in mid-Spring the weather was hot. It was only 6:30 a.m. and the sun was already beating down relentlessly from its position high in the cloudless, clear blue morning sky. While the Southern-grown Mal absolutely adored a good hot day, nothing messed him up more than warm morning.
And this morning, deep within the suburban setting of Thousand Oaks, California, was going to be a very warm one. Much to Mal’s distress.
Crouched down low in the passenger seat of Zuz’s half-wrecked, barely-running Nissan, Mal quizzed in a voice not quite as hushed as he had intended, “Are you sure this is the place?”
Waiting for his friend to respond, Mal took another look at the ranch-style home just down the block from where the car was parked. His human eyes could tell nothing about the house, aside from noticing it had a well-manicured lawn with sprinklers that had gone off at precisely 6:22 A.M., and excellent curb appeal. Mal could also see a large red SUV parked off to one side of the two-car driveway, with a small oil stain hinting that a second car with some minor transmission issues normally sat next to it. Very little set it apart from the 8 other homes on the block that contained it or from the one hundred other ones that had sprun
g up in the development around it.
His “other” eyes revealed quite a bit more.
The house had been built ten years earlier, having been sold off by its original owners, Sara and Roy Zamora, nine months ago. The new buyer, and current resident, was one Marc Morrell.
Architect’s plans, electrical diagrams, building permits, and other information were all relayed to Mal by his inner voice, but none of that was as interesting to him as the name on the cable and utilities bills: Kristin Meyer-Morrell.
Mal grumbled mostly to himself as he called up marriage records for the couple, confirming that his former fiancée did, indeed, live at the residence.
With her new husband.
“Aw, hell.”
Before Mal realized it, his right index finger elongated into a rather nasty spike and, somewhere in his distress-caused distraction, he’d unconsciously carved a series of deep scratches and grooves into the hard plastic covering of the car’s dashboard.
Scooting a stack of forgotten papers and discarded fast food wrappers, the cyborg hid the wounds he’d inflicted on the vehicle. A quick glance at the opposite side of the interior showed Zuz, so caught up in examining the laptop he had propped up against the leather-wrapped steering wheel, he was completely oblivious to the maiming of his sole mode of transportation.
Mal looked at his friend for a moment, watching his eyes dart back and forth as a seemingly endless array of information scrolled across the screen in front of him, the harsh light reflecting off of the thick glasses he continually had to slide back up his nose and illuminating his face in a sickly glow. The man hadn’t looked up once in the entire time they’d been sitting and watching the house.
Heck, once he figured out how to pull down information from the computer system inside Mal, it had been almost impossible to get Zuz to focus on anything else. Mal had been convinced they were going to crash numerous times on the nearly two hour trip out from the warehouse.
The man was like a fat kid in a candy store and Mal couldn’t completely blame him. It wasn’t every day that one of your oldest friends called and asked you to pick him up from out front of a top secret government agency and help him escape from the aforementioned agency after it had turned him into a killer cyborg. Heck, even trying to put that sentence together correctly was more than enough to crash Mal’s newly computerized brain.
