Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  Nothing in Qiang’s expression changed. It was as if Grange’s words hadn’t even registered.

  “Mr. Grange, how many years have you specialized in this field of study? Twenty?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Qiang nodded but didn’t take his eyes off Grange. “Right now the NSA is martialing all of its resources in an effort to find out where I have disappeared to. Have no doubt about it. Without the real Jamal available to block their efforts, the NSA will find me. They will find this facility. And when they do, all of your efforts to restore your Sleeping Beauty will have been wasted.”

  Feeling the strength drain from his body, Grange collapsed back into his chair.

  “So,” Qiang continued, “you are going to bring the latest iteration of virtual Jamal up to the Grange Castle computer center and activate it, exactly as we planned.”

  Qiang rose to his feet. “Mr. Grange, I have every confidence in the control mechanisms you have implemented. I’ll be expecting you within the next thirty minutes. Don’t make me come back down to collect you.”

  Grange watched Qiang depart, a new thought awakening within him. He just needed to delay the NSA for another day or two, long enough to create and test one final Jamal iteration. And on that holographic data drive, he would store the digital emulation of his own brain and that of Helen’s.

  Virtual Jamal shouldn’t be able to escape the containment mechanisms Grange had put in place before Grange finished what he had to do. Taking a deep breath, Grange rose to his feet and began the walk back to the Isolated Test Chamber. Yes. Everything would still be okay.

  CHAPTER 73

  Jack didn’t like sitting around twiddling his thumbs while he waited on the intel he needed to do his job. Luckily thumb twiddling wasn’t in his immediate plans. Outside the hotel room, darkness had fallen, leaving him and Janet sitting cross-legged across from each other, she at the foot of the bed, he at its head.

  “You ready for this?” she asked, concern etched on her features.

  “Last time changed something. I need to see this thing through to its ending. Worst case, it’ll leave me a blithering idiot.”

  Janet managed a smile. “Not much of a change then.”

  Jack closed his eyes and began his calming breath ritual. He fell into the meditation so rapidly that it seemed he had been pulled from a ledge and into the depths. This time there was no foggy London alley to greet him. Only Anchanchu, standing alone in a dimly lit stone chamber, his hood drawn back so that Jack could see his face, handsome and disturbing. The skin was mottled red and black, with the hint of what appeared to be gill slits down the sides of his neck, his small ears swept back and pointed. But what stood out most were his eyes. Whereas Jack had always thought them hidden in deep sockets, they were large and black, as if the lenses were all pupil. And within those black orbs, flickers of red and orange danced.

  When Jack stepped forward, Anchanchu did not run. Instead he reached out suddenly, clasping the sides of Jack’s head with both hands, sending burning tendrils of flame roiling through Jack’s mind.

  Feeling the door’s nano-material melt away from my body and then reform behind me, I smile with anticipation. On the far side of Valen Roth’s expansive gathering chamber, he sits in an ornate chair atop a short, pyramid-shaped platform, smiling his familiar false smile, the one intended to convey what a pleasant surprise my arrival is. His gravelly voice speaks in my mind, carrying with it an odd note of anticipation.

  “Khal Teth. It is late in the day for you to seek an audience.”

  I smile, coming to a stop in the center of a recessed section of the floor, five strides from the base of the platform. But tonight I have no intention of engaging the high overlord in conversation. When my will lashes out, it does so with mind-shattering force. Not enough to kill. Not immediately. First I will see this one grovel like a worm at my feet.

  But Valen Roth doesn’t crumble before me. Instead his smile widens as a vise tightens around my own thoughts, sending me staggering to one knee.

  IMPOSSIBLE!

  Then as my vision dims and narrows, I see the others who stand in a circle around me, the Circle of Twelve, and I realize they have been here the whole time, the power of their linked minds masking their presence from me, only revealing themselves once I attacked. And standing at Valen Roth’s right hand is Parsus, my brother!

  Suddenly the depth of my betrayal shines clear and bright, stropping the razor’s edge of my anger until I lash out with it, but to no good. As the strength ebbs from my limbs, I slump to lie facedown on the floor, a thin line of spittle leaking from the corner of my mouth onto the cool surface beneath my cheek.

  Behind me, four guardians enter, lifting my paralyzed body to carry it between them. So trapped are my thoughts I am only dimly aware of the passage of time. When they lower me, it is not to lay me on the ground. Instead they place my limp body faceup inside a shining metal cylinder decorated inside and out with ancient glyphs, glyphs that I recognize.

  A scream claws its way from my mind and this scream is allowed to echo out of my head and into the minds of the circle that closes in around me. For I have violated the One Law and for that sin I will be punished as no other Altreian has been punished for thousands of cycles. Stripped of my memories, my body entombed in suspended animation, my mind will be cast out into the void to endure an eternity without feeling, cut off from all sensation and emotion. While my body endures, so will my mind. And inside this chrysalis cylinder, my body will live on forever, waiting for a mind that will never return.

  The Circle allows me an extended moment of horror, amplifying my mental screams until they leak from the judgment chamber to echo in the mind of every Altreian citizen inside the Parthian.

  And then there is silence.

  And then there is nothing.

  Anchanchu . . . no . . . Khal Teth removed his hands from the sides of Jack Gregory’s head. He sensed no fear in this man, just a sudden understanding . . . maybe even pity.

  Khal Teth identified with that. He pitied himself. But he remembered everything . . . a life that had been stripped from him. Somehow, through all the millennia of his banishment, he had held onto a fragment of his psionic abilities. That fragment had drawn Khal Teth to the human race and eventually to Jack Gregory, a man who strode the thin strands of destiny, a man who was destined to change everything.

  Khal Teth now understood something else. In addition to depriving him of his memories, the Altreian Circle of Twelve had placed subconscious wards in his mind that were intended to prevent him from bonding with other species, like he’d managed to do with certain humans. Because he’d sensed that Jack Gregory was special, those wards had forced Khal Teth to take actions that were supposed to get Jack killed. And Khal Teth had almost done it, almost destroyed his one chance at restoring his memories.

  Now Jack Gregory stood in front of him, watching him struggle to process this flood of new information.

  “I want to modify our arrangement,” Jack said.

  “Yes?”

  “No more trying to control me.” Jack’s face grew hard. “I control me!”

  “Even if I agree, the feedback that amps up your emotions and intuition will still be there. I can’t stop my desires from bleeding over.”

  “Fine.”

  “And I want something in return.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “There will come a time, as your life expires, when it will be possible for me to reverse our roles, a chance to take back what was mine. It is not something I can do alone. The chrysalis cylinder blocks me from my own body. But it cannot block you.”

  Jack Gregory stared at him, and Khal Teth felt the suspicion in the man’s mind. Why wouldn’t he be suspicious? Khal Teth had kept some of the bond’s side effects secret from Jack when he’d forged their original agreement.

  “Onl
y if my death comes about naturally or as the result of my personal choices. If you try to take me early, I’ll know it and then our deal is off.”

  Khal Teth smiled, aware that it probably looked less than reassuring on the face of his Anchanchu projection. “I agree to your terms.”

  Jack Gregory did not extend his hand. Instead he growled out one more caveat as he faded out of their joint vision.

  “And from now on, stay the hell out of my dreams!”

  CHAPTER 74

  Caroline Brown noticed the anomaly and paused. Impossible. Levi Elias had informed her that Jamal Glover had been recovered and transported to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. So why was she suddenly seeing Jamal’s digital fingerprints spreading across the Web like wildfire?

  Whereas she and her team of cyber-warriors had been making rapid strides in tracing the vehicle that had delivered Jamal to the Hayward, California, laboratory, now those traces had been wiped from cyberspace so rapidly that it startled her. Caroline had never seen anything like it. And as the intra-team chatter over their headsets informed her, neither had any of the other members of the Dirty Dozen. Even worse, she was encountering the same interference with her attempts to trace Qiang Chu.

  When Levi Elias summoned her to Admiral Riles’s private conference room, Caroline’s concerns escalated. In the year and a half she’d worked at the NSA, never before had she been invited out of the cyber-warfare realm into that of the operational planners. Just walking that hallway made her so self-aware that it seemed as if everyone was either staring at her or studiously avoiding doing so.

  When she stepped inside the small room, Levi ushered her into one of the eight swiveling office chairs arranged around the conference table and then took a seat beside her. Also seated at the table was Dr. David Kurtz, the NSA’s wild-haired chief computer scientist, and a sharp-featured woman whose gray hair was pulled back into an uncomfortably tight bun, a hairstyle that told Caroline a lot about the woman’s personality. Admiral Riles sat at the head of the table, his intense gray eyes shining in stark contrast to the former Naval Academy football star’s affable face.

  Admiral Riles spoke first. “Hi, Caroline. I believe you’re familiar with Dr. David Kurtz.”

  Across the table from her, Dr. Kurtz nodded his head.

  “And to his right is Dr. Denise Jennings, who heads one of our top research efforts.”

  Dr. Jennings leaned forward and extended her hand and Caroline awkwardly shook it. The fact that Admiral Riles hadn’t clarified what Dr. Jennings was working on made it clear that Caroline lacked the security clearance or need to know what it was.

  “Okay,” Admiral Riles continued. “Levi asked for this urgent meeting so I’ll turn it over to him.”

  Caroline swiveled her chair toward Levi.

  Levi directed his gaze toward the two computer scientists on the opposite side of the table.

  “I asked for this meeting because of something our cyber-warfare team has encountered during the last hour of operations, something that has raised enough concern among the group that they appear to be confused about how to counter this new threat. Rather than try to describe what they are seeing, I will have their team leader explain it.”

  Levi’s nod passed the meeting’s baton to Caroline.

  She cleared her throat, felt a rush of adrenaline momentarily fog her brain, and then focused her thoughts on the problem at hand.

  “As background, you need to know something about how I pinpointed Jamal Glover’s location in support of the effort that successfully rescued him early today. For reasons I don’t yet understand, Jamal was actively engaged in the recent cyber-attack on San Francisco, as well as subsequent diversionary tactics designed to mask his location from us.”

  “You know this for certain?” Dr. Kurtz asked.

  “In the time that I have worked with him, I have noticed that Jamal Glover has a number of unique traits that are evident in his work. You can think of the collection of those traits as his personal signature, although I doubt that he is even aware of it.”

  Dr. Jennings raised her left eyebrow. “How is it that you were the only one who was aware of this signature?”

  “It’s no secret that he and I share a rivalry that is less than congenial. I made it a point to study him.”

  “So you admit that you’re not exactly a neutral observer when it comes to Jamal’s activities?” Dr. Jennings continued.

  Caroline felt her face flush, but continued. “Yes, but that’s irrelevant. My point is that I found Jamal by tracing that signature back to its point of origin. Jamal’s rescue proves that I wasn’t blinded by bias. Our current problem is that approximately one hour ago, I started seeing new cyber-activity bearing Jamal’s unique style. And lots of it.”

  Dr. Kurtz stroked his chin. “Is it possible that this was some sort of batch script that Jamal created earlier and is only now being executed?”

  “Not unless that script is sophisticated enough to automatically recognize what our team is doing on the fly and move to counter us. The hack is happening faster than anything I’ve ever seen, even faster than Jamal could do it.”

  Caroline took a deep breath. “Prior to this event, our team had identified the van that was used to deliver Jamal to Quantum Biodynamics in Hayward as well as the motorcycle that Qiang Chu stole after he dumped the pickup in Petaluma. We were in the process of using the license plate recognition database and traffic camera data to track down both of these vehicles when all of that data suddenly disappeared. Again, Jamal’s signature was all over it.”

  “But Jamal Glover is en route to Walter Reed Hospital.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could someone else copy Jamal’s hacking style?”

  “I might be able to, but I’d have to concentrate on it and it would slow me to a crawl.”

  “So,” Dr. Jennings asked, “what do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Caroline said, hating the admission. “The speed with which this thing is responding to our attempts to bypass it would seem to indicate that it is automated. But automated with Jamal’s traits? I’ve got no idea how that could be done.”

  “Can you counter this thing?” Admiral Riles asked.

  Caroline hesitated.

  “Maybe,” she said, again hating the words that were about to follow. “But I’ll need Jamal’s help to do it.”

  Dr. Jennings started to speak but Admiral Riles lifted a hand to cut her off.

  “Thank you, Caroline,” Riles said, his gray eyes steady on her face. “I know you need to get back to the War Room to help your team so I won’t keep you any longer.”

  Understanding that she had just been summarily dismissed from the grown-ups meeting, Caroline again felt a flush of annoyance. But she bit her lip, rose, and walked out the door, hearing it close and lock behind her.

  In essence, Riles had just told her, “Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on your way out!” But the bad part was that Caroline didn’t even have Jamal here to take it out on.

  CHAPTER 75

  Jack awoke with his head in Janet’s lap, luxuriating in the feel of her fingers gently combing through his hair. Apparently after the lucid dream, he had fallen into a deep sleep. The fact that Janet had not felt the need to wake him was a good sign. The fact that she was still sitting here in bed with him, stroking his head, was a better one.

  When he looked up, he found Janet’s brown eyes smiling down on him.

  “It’s not often that I get to see you so peaceful,” she said.

  Jack grinned and stretched. “Peaceful is my middle name.”

  As he sat up, Janet’s expression turned more serious. “You ready to talk about it?”

  “Tell you what—let me shower; then I’ll tell you all about it over Chinese takeout. How does that sound?”

  “Good. I’ll join yo
u.”

  “For takeout?”

  “That too.”

  Seeing the mischievous glint in her eyes, Jack swallowed hard. Clearly the new deal he’d just made with Anchanchu hadn’t reduced the raging passions within.

  Janet stood. Then as Jack rose from the bed, she stepped close and wrapped her arms around his neck, her parted lips barely touching his as his arms encircled her slender body, pulling her close. When Jack’s hands slid down to her tight ass, Janet’s warm breath whispered in his ear.

  “I’m ready for that shower now.”

  She stepped back, removing her black pullover top and letting it fall to the floor as she turned and walked toward the bath. Their suite in the Holiday Inn Express had both a Jacuzzi and a shower, but the shower wasn’t huge. They didn’t need it to be. Warm water sluiced over their naked bodies as Jack pressed Janet back against the shower wall, her strong legs wrapped around his waist, her firm breasts pressed tight against his chest as her body arched into him.

  With his breath gasping forth in audible pants, Janet’s soft mouth and gently thrusting tongue shut it off, driving Jack toward hyperventilation. Her low moans rose in volume as she caught his lower lip between her teeth. Then, as her body spasmed powerfully, Jack felt a jolt and tasted copper as her teeth bit down on his lip.

  Writhing within Janet’s entangling limbs, time slowed to a crawl, and if Jack could have made time stop, if he could have locked them within this moment for eternity, he would have. But he couldn’t.

  Clinging to her as though he feared she might fall if he let go, Jack felt the joy of this woman bring a smile to his lips. Seeing his grin, Janet dabbed the trickle of blood from his lower lip with her fingertip, then pulled back to look into his eyes.

  “What?” she asked, her own smile parting those beautiful lips.

  “I hear the takeout is overrated.”

  “Room service then?”