The R.E.M. Project: A Thriller (The Ocula Series, Book 2)

by J. M. Lanham

  Still, it did look like he was about to pass out, and that was a good thing. A great thing, actually. Because once he and the rest of the goons occupying the facility were out for the count, she could get to work.

  Chapter 34:

  Hail Mary

  He was supposed to wait for Fenton’s radio call, but Paul had been sitting in the same place for almost an hour now, and he was getting antsy. Even with the door open to a steady high-altitude wind, the communication shack at the top of Skyline Mountain was stagnant with thick, hot air that made it feel like breathing in a sauna. It was loud inside, too, but Paul had already acclimated to the sound of grinding hard drives and spinning exhaust fans that had quickly become little more than background noise.

  He turned his wrist to check his watch. It was 3:17. Plenty of time for Donny’s dream to get through. The plan had been to avoid radio contact until Fenton could confirm that Donny’s eyes had calmed under their lids—a sign that he had completed the first R.E.M. sleep cycle of the session induced by Ocula (while the average person dreamt several times a night, only to remember the last dream before waking, lucid dreamers like Donny always found the first dream to occur immediately after falling asleep the most profound).

  Fenton hadn’t made the call yet, and Paul was tired of waiting. He turned the volume up enough to hear the static over the noise in the room, then played with the squelch to get it just right. “This is Paul. Fenton, do you copy?”

  Static.

  “Fenton, this is Paul. Do you copy, over?”

  Finally, the static stopped and Fenton came through in trademark walkie-talkie distortion. “Hey, Paul. I read you loud and clear. Had to step out of the room before answering back.”

  “Donny still sleeping in there?”

  “Yeah, man, but I’m pretty sure he’s not dreaming. At least not now. Dude, you should’ve seen his eyes. It was like he was having a seizure or something. Is that how everyone looks when they’re dreaming? If so, man, that’s just trippy. I’ve never seen anything like that before . . .”

  Impatiently, “Yeah, it’s weird all right.” Paul hadn’t called to make small talk; only to get the confirmation he needed that Donny was through dreaming for the time being. He quickly began to walk back the steps that had channeled the transmitter’s power supply into the high-frequency antenna. If Claire was going to get her signal out, they would need to get the original transmitter back online.

  This was the part of the plan Paul liked the least.

  That was because it was the one part that based the most crucial steps moving forward entirely on assumptions. Had Claire made it safely inside? Was she out of harm’s way? Had she made it to one of the protected rooms in time, or had she been incapacitated by Donny’s dream that rode the antenna line down into the facility before streaming into the minds of anyone not behind a wall of electromagnetic shielding?

  They had no way of knowing—one of the realities of being in a facility meant to stay hidden from the rest of the world. Sure, Kovic and Ramírez had secure lines out to communicate mission progress to Langley, but Claire couldn’t count on those to reestablish contact once the rest of the facility was unconscious on the floor—there simply wasn’t enough time.

  But that’s just the way the plan had to be. Donny took the pill at 2:55 and got to work. At three o’clock sharp, Paul flipped the switch on the tower so the hundred-foot mast of reinforced steel could pick up on Donny’s brainwaves and shoot them down two-thousand feet into the facility, debilitating anyone not protected from the intrusive signals. At 3:20, Paul was to shut off power to the radio-wave-receiving antenna, and route it back to the radio-wave-sending transmitter. That way Claire could broadcast the message before everyone else inside started to come to.

  As if that sequence of uncertainty weren’t bad enough, the worst part had been saved for last: getting the message out. The facility, in all its state-of-the-art technology combined with the power and pocketbook of the federal government, still relied on outliers to function. Seemingly normal people, school teachers and business owners and marketers and reporters, all with a unique (and unseen) genetic sequence that made them capable of accomplishing remarkable things, were the lifeblood of Skyline. Without them, the transmitter was just another hunk of towering metal, good for little more than broadcasting bad radio—and Ocula was just another sleeping pill.

  And therein lay Claire’s dilemma. Once Donny’s transmission stopped, the occupants inside the facility would start to come to. Slowly, she hoped, but there really was no way of knowing how much time she had to get the Asteria message out. Their only hope meant counting on another outlier to be prepped and ready to go—after all, Fenton’s hacked stack of insights had made it clear that’s what Project THEIA was all about. But if no one was there to perform, Claire would have to hook herself up to the machine, take the pill she had hidden in the lining of her bra, and get the job done herself.

  Paul knew that would mean eight hours of pure R.E.M. sleep. No escape. No way out. One go at the Skyline transmitter, and Claire would either wake up to the inside of a prison cell somewhere, or never wake up at all.

  They couldn’t let that happen.

  Paul walked back the final steps, then said, “Okay, Fenton. The transmitter’s back to normal. Claire should be good to go, over.”

  “All right, Paul. You’ve done everything you can. Now get your ass outta there, ASAP.”

  Paul stuffed the walkie talkie into his backpack and threw it over his shoulder, then left the communications shelter, planning to retrace his steps through the boulder pass and back down the mountain toward Dawa’s rendezvous point on Skyline Drive.

  But he soon found out that the boulder pass wasn’t an option.

  ***

  Inside the interrogation room, Claire let the commotion die down a bit before opening the door. The screams lasted only a minute or two; long enough for the people working inside to realize something was deathly wrong just before passing out. She put her ear up to the door and listened. Not a sound. She stepped out into the hallway like a deer methodically stepping out of the woods and into the open field, careful and wary of any hunters or threats that may have been nearby. One look down at Kovic and she realized the electromagnetic event was over—Donny’s dream had worked.

  She stepped over the field agent lying near the interrogation room door (who was still alive, but out for the count) and made her way back into the lab. The once-bustling facility had gone silent, muffled by powerful brainwaves that had worked on the medulla—the part of the brain stem responsible for controlling heart rate—to dramatically raise the blood pressure of everyone inside, right before dropping it off a cliff. Donny had thought of the idea in the car on the way up from Savannah. If he could use lucid dreaming to toy with the blood pressure of everyone left unprotected in the lab, then he could effectively knock them unconscious.

  Claire stepped over more bodies in white coats on her way to the control panel by the observation room. She couldn’t believe the plan had worked so well. Outlier dreams were notoriously unpredictable, so going after the most primitive part of the brain seemed to make the most sense to her. Other dream sequences required vivid input and heavy influence to target the frontal cortex—the part of the brain that made humans cognitive, responsible for everything from problem-solving and social interaction to memory and judgment. If Donny could simply get them to pass out, she figured, it would give her the best chance to get in and out alive.

  She stopped to look around the lab, then smiled, even laughed like someone who was completely surprised by an unlikely outcome would laugh, shaking her head in disbelief. She’d never expected the plan to work.

  The control panel of blinking lights and switches lit up the counter just below the observation room, with six LCD screens acting as window dressing above. Claire tried to process everything as quickly as she could, analyzing each knob and port and plug-in, and that’s when she noticed her.

  It was Mrs. Everly. Sh
e was on the other side of the glass, the poorly lit room brightened only by the tiny lights on the monitors and machines surrounding the hospital bed. Claire had to squint to get a better look. To Claire, the green glow of Mrs. Everly’s headset brought a little warmth to her soul in the cold underground bunker.

  It’s still on. The feed’s working.

  It was exactly what the team had hoped for. Fenton’s stolen Skyline files had revealed the facility’s primary method to ensure outlier dreams was controlled by uploading a steady stream of content to patients while Ocula was being administered. Claire remembered this from her time in Costa Rica all too well. No matter how hard she tried to fight it, how hard she pushed her mind to ignore the messages, they played out anyway, like thoughts she wanted so desperately to avoid—only to have them reoccur tenfold, over and over again, a broken record with no way to stop the music.

  It was a horrible reality of Ocula, but in this case, Claire hoped she could use the little green and glowing head-mounted display attached to Mrs. Everly’s face for the greater good (the greater good being a necessary distinction, since the wrongfully- imprisoned Mrs. Everly was the unfortunate catalyst necessary for the plan to work).

  A USB port was grouped among a dozen other ports below the touchpad in front of her marked CONTENT SELECTION. Claire almost let herself feel stupid for asking aloud whether this was where the content was uploaded. Her finger found the touchpad and swiped it, looking around to see which screen was affected.

  There. Right above her, above the observation room window was the main screen—the screen she could work from. Now we’re cooking with gas. She leaned back on the counter and hiked up her leg, taking her foot in her hands and pulling down on the loose flap of rubber making up the sole of her shoe. The hidden compartment for the jump drive was Fenton’s idea, and Claire wondered if the only shows the kid had watched in the grimy hotels he’d been staying in for the last six months were Get Smart reruns.

  She took the drive, flipped it open, and stuck it in the control-panel socket. The folder icon that appeared on the monitor above was labeled HAIL MARY (the unofficial name the group had given the operation). Claire double-clicked it. Inside were two files Fenton had created on the ten-hour drive up from Savannah to the Virginia mountains: one labeled CIA, the other titled ASTERIA.

  Compared to the head-tracking, motion-sensing stereoscopic programs that the most state-of-the-art virtual reality headsets deployed, Fenton’s movie-maker versions were primitive and crude. But they were still confident they could be uploaded into the headset prior to administering Ocula to get the point across, at least in the Asteria video. The CIA compilation was a little trickier, but they were short on time and resources, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  A few clicks in, and Claire had located the program responsible for launching Project THEIA. It was the program that ran content through internal systems straight into the outliers’ headsets; monitored vitals like blood pressure and heart rate, even neural activity; and robotically released Ocula into the patient’s IV at the time designated by the people behind the control panel.

  Claire looked at both files—one for the CIA, one for Asteria—and knew she had a choice to make. She could buy into Kovic’s diatribe about national security and looking out for the American people and public health and all that mess, or she could launch Fenton’s CIA program—a program that could potentially expose every human rights violation the agency had shared with Asteria over the last two years. Or, she could run Fenton’s rather incriminatory video.

  Either way, Asteria was going down. But was launching both programs necessary at this point? Kovic’s little spiel had stuck the same way a timeshare salesman pitched a bullshit deal. She knew it was just that—a pitch—but the charismatic field agent had almost convinced Claire they were on the same team; they could work together to take Asteria down; and they needed to leave the CIA’s involvement out of it.

  Yes, Claire was almost convinced.

  Almost.

  Chapter 35:

  Damage Control

  Paul couldn’t get out of the communications shelter fast enough. He grabbed his gear and shut the door behind him (as if someone would’ve complained he was letting all that hot, stagnant air out), then turned to walk back toward the narrow boulder pass that led down the mountain.

  That’s when he heard it. A plunk on the metal wall of the communication shelter, then the report. He looked over and saw a curl of smoke rising from the bullet hole a mere foot from his head.

  Shots fired. Just run.

  He never got a good look at the silhouette blocking the mountain pass—just the black semi-automatic handgun pointed in his direction, firing shots in rapid succession, a wave of bullets whizzing by his head as he rounded the corner and dove behind the temporary safety of the communications shelter. The shots continued as Paul backed up tight against the rusty metal wall of the building separating him from the shooter. Breaths were shallow and panicked; his hands trembled like a man who’d had one too many cups of coffee.

  This was not a good time to be nervous.

  Life or death, Paul. Get a fucking grip. He fumbled to loose the gun from his hip, finally busting the latch on his holster, bringing the pistol up to chest level and chambering a round. Just as he’d hoped would happen before his attacker moved any closer, Paul heard a few fruitless clicks of the trigger, followed by silence.

  He’s out.

  Paul leaped out from behind the building and met his attacker, face to face, less than twenty feet away. Startled, the man looked up, eyes wide on his fear-crossed oh-shit face, empty clip on the ground, the fresh clip still in his hand. Busted.

  Then Paul fired.

  It was pure survival instinct. He shot without thinking; he didn’t have time to. The reality of at least three bullets punching little red blotches into the man’s chest before knocking him on his ass didn’t set in until much later. But in the moment, Paul didn’t hesitate. A man was trying to kill him—life or death. And Paul wasn’t one to roll over. Six rounds in and the man was already lying on the ground, face up, his last pained breath a mist of blood spatter rising from his mouth and creating a little red cloud that puffed into the air.

  Paul’s ears rang from the gunfire. But as he stood there over the body, listening intently for any signs of life elsewhere, he picked up on more noises coming from the south on the other side of the boulder pass.

  Voices. Human voices. And they were headed his way.

  He popped his pistol’s clip release and checked his rounds. Only five left. Fuck a duck. He could make out more voices now, and there were at least two more goons making their way up the boulder pass, on their way to kill the outlier who had (unbeknownst to them at the time) just killed their colleague in self-defense.

  Trying his luck in the southern boulder pass would be absolute suicide. He pivoted and searched for another way off the mountain. In front was the communication building, with the transmitter tower just to the east. Unfortunately, the eastern side of the summit was a two-hundred-foot cliff no man or woman could navigate down without the help of a rope and a harness. He looked west. More boulders.

  His only option was to take his chances to the north, past the tower and communications building, where the plateau at the summit dropped off into a steep grade of crumbling hillside that would have probably been easier to sled down than to run.

  But Paul didn’t have a sled, and once again, shots were coming from the south.

  No time to think. Just run.

  ***

  Dawa sat in his car, windows down and engine off, waiting for Claire and Paul to meet him back at the rendezvous point near the entrance to the national forest. At first, the only sounds coming from the woods were serene. Peaceful. Like fat cardinals chirping to peers while sagging down small branches, or gentle gusts of wind that offered up just a hint of fall in between the idle stretches of the still and humid mid-August heat. Sounds of nature filled the air, and for a moment Dawa
could close his eyes and breathe it all in and forget about the worries that had burdened him from the moment Donny Ford showed up on his doorstep.

  Then he heard gunshots.

  He knew the distinctive POP-POP-POP of semi-automatic gunfire well. 9mm handgun, thirteen-round clip. Over the years, Dawa had become an expert at Name That Tune: Shots Fired Edition. He imagined that’s what working Atlanta Homicide for so long did to a person.

  But it was still hard to tell where the shots were coming from. Dawa swung the car door open and stepped out into the secluded two-lane road to get a better listen. Up the mountain, maybe a mile or so away, the sporadic firing continued. Paul, he thought. He is in trouble.

  Dawa instinctively lunged forward, gun in hand, as if he were about to bolt up the hill and go rescue the man, but a single step in and he stopped short. By the time he made it to the top, he would be too late—especially with the spare tire he’d been packing around his waistline for the better part of six months. He racked his brain, searching for a better way to help. Was there anything he could do besides stand there and wait for the shots to cease?

  If he had a moment to worry, it didn’t last long. A car emerged from around the bend in the road ahead: a black sedan, windows tinted, speeding toward Dawa. Surprised, he quickly jumped out of the way just as the car came to a screeching halt where he’d been standing just a foot or two from his own car.

  Startled and pissed, he reached for his badge, holding it out firmly as he approached the driver’s side window. “Where did you learn how to drive? You could have killed me!”

  The window came down, and Dawa stepped back. The man inside wore sunglasses, a black suit, his hair cut high and tight. He began to speak, and Dawa noticed a distinct scar from an old cleft pallet surgery. “Dawa Graham, I presume?”