Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  Walking around the tank to a closed panel on the wall, Grange placed his right hand on the scanner. Three seconds later, the panel slid open to reveal several controls and a large circuit breaker switch. Grange took a deep breath and then pulled the breaker switch down with a solid thunk. The lights on the control panel went from green to red.

  He turned to stare at the now thawing cryo-cylinder, blinking away the tears that blurred his vision. Then Steve Grange spun and walked out of Helen’s crypt, his purposeful stride propelling him toward the ITC.

  He had finally released his lover’s body. Now it was time to restore her beautiful mind.

  CHAPTER 81

  An anonymous e-mail tip had led Special Agent Taylor Greene’s team to the hotel where they had rearrested Janet Blanchard and Jack Gregory. In all of his twenty-three years in the FBI he’d never encountered anyone quite like them, even though he’d thought he’d seen pretty much everything this world could throw at him.

  Janet Blanchard was tall, lean, and drop-dead gorgeous. Throughout this new round of questioning, she had calmly maintained that she was a federal agent working for the Department of Homeland Security and that the nature of her assignment was highly classified. Taylor had always been good at reading people and despite all the evidence to the contrary, he sensed a kernel of truth in what Janet was telling him. But she was also hiding something. A recheck of Blanchard’s ICE credentials yielded the same results as it had when he’d run the original background check two days ago. ICE had no record of a Janet Blanchard in its personnel database.

  Jack Gregory, on the other hand, had the feel of a ticking time bomb. The man radiated an easy self-confidence that caged a dangerous intensity that threatened to claw its way out. The agent who had strip-searched Gregory had called Taylor down to the holding cell before allowing Gregory to don his orange prison uniform. The reason for that call had been immediately obvious to Taylor.

  The man’s muscular torso was covered with scars front and back. Some were old bullet wounds, but the vast majority were knife scars. There were so many that it seemed as if he must have been hung by his hands and tortured. When Taylor had asked Gregory about them, the man had merely smiled and said something about the Geneva Conventions being loosely interpreted in certain parts of the world. When Taylor had looked into Gregory’s eyes, he’d known that there was no hope of extracting any information from this man.

  A deep search of the FBI database and public records returned nothing on either one of these two suspects. They might as well have been ghosts. To Taylor, that meant that some powerful government entity, not necessarily American, had purged that information. It was one of the things that made him nervous.

  The fact that Taylor had just released the body his agents had discovered at the farmhouse where he’d first arrested Blanchard and Gregory didn’t make him feel any better. The government agents who had shown up to collect the corpse had taken it directly to Moffett Federal Airfield and put it on a government aircraft bound for Andrews Air Force Base. Taylor knew because he had checked.

  Without a body, he had no case against these two, and he was pretty sure that they knew it. Even with evidence that their release order had been faked, clearly they hadn’t faked it. They’d been in his custody at the time that order had been received. Christ, he’d dug up a bag of worms. Why in the world had he been so keen to rearrest them?

  But Taylor knew the answer to that question, even as he considered it. Two nights ago, he’d let Janet Blanchard get under his skin with her smug taunts that he lacked the clearance or the need to know anything about her, her partner, or their mission. And Taylor’s irritation had left him wide open to being manipulated by whoever had sent that e-mail tip.

  The knock on his open door brought Taylor’s head up in time to see Special Agent Curt McLees step into his office.

  “What is it?” Taylor asked.

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  The tightness in his gut acknowledged that Curt was probably right.

  “Spit it out.”

  Curt laid some papers on his desk.

  “This came in a few minutes ago. Another release order along with an angry note from federal judge Julius Richter demanding a written response as to why we have failed to comply with his original order.”

  Taylor riffled through the papers in growing disbelief.

  “But the original order was a fake.”

  Curt sucked in his breath. “Actually, that’s my second piece of bad news. As soon as I got this, I made another check. It turns out we were wrong about that too.”

  Taylor pounded the desk with his fist and rose to his feet to stare down at the shorter agent.

  “What? How the hell can that be?”

  “Well,” said Curt, “it looks like someone has been screwing with us and using our office to disrupt a high-level, classified operation.”

  Taylor could hear his teeth grinding. The realization that he had been played twice in the last couple of days left him furious and embarrassed. But the real pisser was that Janet Blanchard had been right all along. The U.S. government had determined that he had neither the clearance nor the need to know anything about what had just happened here. And they weren’t even going to give him the opportunity to find out.

  CHAPTER 82

  Caroline Brown watched Jamal Glover being wheeled into the NSA War Room and the sight made her physically ill. Levi Elias pushed the wheelchair up the ramp to the lone Scorpion workstation atop the multitiered hierarchy that was the Dirty Dozen’s domain. Long ago she’d watched the horror movie Pinhead, but now she saw its physical manifestation and it left her weak in the knees. Who could do something like this to a fellow human?

  As Jamal passed in front of her, she caught his eye. There was that familiar knowing gaze, backdropped by a sadness that shook her to her core. This man, who had been her archnemesis, now laid his filleted soul on a slab before her. Dear God, it made her feel so small. In that look, in that moment, Caroline’s life flashed before her eyes. She hadn’t wept since her parents had divorced, but suddenly she felt hot tears cascading down her cheeks. Caroline made no attempt to hide her emotions.

  Instead, she moved to her Scorpion workstation on Jamal’s lower left. As she slid into the zero-G couch and brought her systems online, a single thought filled her mind.

  Time to kick some digital ass!

  Jamal settled gently into his Scorpion’s zero-G couch, assisted by Levi Elias. The special neck brace designed to keep his head from touching the headrest made it awkward and more than a little uncomfortable, but Jamal ignored his discomfort. Levi had told him that the NSA believed that the Chinese government was behind these attacks. The bastards he was after had killed Jill, performed illegal brain surgery on Jamal, and then forced him to unknowingly attack his own country. Worse, based upon the evidence he was seeing on his workstation, Jamal feared that his enemies had now unleashed a virtual copy of himself on the Internet. If that was the case, the mad scientists must have been deceiving his replica in a manner similar to how they had controlled him.

  No matter what kind of containment protocols the Chinese were using to control virtual Jamal, they were playing an incredibly dangerous game, one that Jamal and the other members of the Dirty Dozen had to defeat as quickly as possible.

  On the big screen that dominated the far wall, a picture appeared, one that made his mouth go dry. It was the same man he’d encountered in his house eight days ago, the man who had murdered Jillian. Immediately above the photograph was a name. Qiang Chu. Their sole mission was to locate this man and assist the tactical team that was on standby to take him down before he could escape from the country with a copy of virtual Jamal.

  Jamal shifted his attention back to his own displays, pulling the image onto his leftmost window. Accessing Qiang Chu’s complete dossier, Jamal displayed it in an adjacent window, taking a few momen
ts to commit the contents to memory. This man was the key. The NSA mission matched Jamal’s obsession: kill Qiang Chu.

  But to achieve that, Jamal was going to have to defeat a digital clone that was undoubtedly orders of magnitude faster than he was. Fortunately, Jamal wasn’t going into this battle alone.

  As his eyes scanned the other Scorpion workstations arrayed on the tiers below, his eyes met those of Goth Girl, and in her dark eyes he saw an outrage and anger that augmented his own. Jamal lifted an eyebrow in acknowledgment, then shifted his attention back to the task at hand, a grim smile compressing his lips into a tight line.

  Qiang Chu was already a dead man. He just didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER 83

  “We’ve got incoming.”

  Bobby Daniels’s voice in Spider’s earpiece brought him to his feet, his movement matched by Harry and Bronson on the other side of the dining room table that they’d been gathered around.

  With weapons drawn, they moved to take up positions beside the front door and windows.

  “Never mind,” Bobby said over the radio. “It’s Jack and Janet.”

  Peering out through the blinds, Spider watched the black SUV pull off the dirt road, just before it entered the driveway to park in the trees that surrounded the property. Sure enough, Janet Price and Jack Gregory climbed out and made their way toward the latest safe house. Another rural house, this one was located near Petaluma, where Qiang Chu had ditched the stolen pickup truck before disappearing.

  Not having much to go on, Spider had decided to go to ground near the spot where their quarry’s trail had ended. Although it was possible Qiang had doubled back, it didn’t seem likely. He would be trying to avoid the high camera density associated with urban areas, so the sparsely populated wine country had natural appeal.

  Spider stepped out onto the west-facing front porch and watched the two members of his team walk up the driveway, the setting sun casting their long shadows out before them.

  “How was your visit with your new FBI friends?” Bronson asked from Spider’s right.

  “Lovely chaps,” Janet replied. “Shared a spot of tea.”

  “Been a while since we’d seen them,” Jack said, picking up where she left off. “Was nice catching up on old times.”

  Spider shook hands with the two, glad to have them back in the fold, then motioned toward the front door. “You ready to get down to business? We just got word from Levi of a probable target location.”

  “Probable?” Janet asked.

  “NSA’s working on confirmation. Apparently they’re running into some technical glitches that they’re having to work around.”

  Janet raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound good. Aren’t they supposed to cause technical glitches for the bad guys?”

  “And,” Jack added, “the NSA track record over this past week isn’t exactly blowing my skirt up.”

  Spider shrugged. He’d had the same thought, but this wasn’t about doubt. This was about commitment.

  “They have their job and we have ours. We’ll just do what we do.”

  Jack Gregory locked eyes with Spider’s, and the team leader felt as though those eyes reached into his very soul. That was fine with him. He and Jack had learned to trust each other in Pakistan, and Jack’s slight nod confirmed that their blood-forged bond remained intact. The respect of the most dangerous man he had ever met meant a lot to Spider.

  Following the group up onto the porch, Spider glanced toward the woods that encroached on the north side of the property. As expected, Bobby’s sniper hide was invisible. Satisfied, he walked through the door and back to the dining room table with a large paper map spread out next to a tablet computer.

  Spider placed his finger at a point on the map just west of where Mount Veeder Road teed into Dry Creek Road, in the heavily wooded hills ten miles north of Sonoma.

  “NSA has traced a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that they believe Qiang used in his escape from Petaluma to this location.”

  Janet raised her eyes from the map. “What confirmation do we have that this isn’t another setup?”

  Spider switched to the tablet, pulled up a flyover view, and swiveled it toward the others gathered along the opposite side of the table.

  “High-resolution satellite imagery has confirmed that the motorcycle is parked near the steel shed on the west side of this house. The house belongs to Victor Jimenez and his wife, Bianca. This being Saturday, they won’t be at work and they don’t own a motorcycle. Also, they aren’t answering their cell phones or their home phone. The NSA has confirmed that both of their cell phones remain inside the house.”

  “What about remotely accessing them?” Harry asked.

  “Already done. But even with the cell phone flashlight turned on, the cameras don’t show anything useful. One appears to be inside a pocket and the other is definitely inside a purse. From the sounds being picked up by the microphones, a TV has been left on in another room.”

  “What about computers or other network-enabled devices inside the house?”

  Spider shook his head. “No luck there. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Jimenez get their TV signal through a digital antenna and they don’t have a Wi-Fi network. Besides, if Qiang Chu is in that house, you can bet he would have disabled anything like that.”

  “But he left their cell phones on?” Janet asked. “Why would he do that?”

  “The NSA thinks it was intentional. Qiang knows the NSA can remotely turn on cell phones that have been powered off. And this is less suspicious than destroying both cell phones. Qiang just had to place them where they were useless to us.”

  “Or,” said Bronson, “Mr. and Mrs. Jimenez are hunkered down in front of a movie marathon and don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “The motorcycle parked outside makes that unlikely.”

  For several moments the others studied the map and passed the tablet around, each one taking the time to zoom in on the house from various angles. They were all highly experienced professionals, and Spider didn’t rush them.

  When they finished, Jack was the first to speak. “So what’s the plan?”

  “At 0200 hours, local, we’ll go in cross-country, dark and quiet. I’ll establish an overwatch position, here.” Spider spun the street view so that it showed the front of the house as seen through the trees from the distant Dry Creek Road. “From there I can provide covering fire and alert you if Qiang tries to leave the house from the front or sides.”

  Shifting back to the map, Spider pointed to a spot farther to the northwest where Dry Creek Road forked and looped across a narrow bridge.

  “Harry, I want you, Bronson, and Bobby to park your vehicle in the woods here. At that early hour, I don’t expect any traffic on that narrow road. Just in case, though, set up a flashing detour barrier to block the one-lane bridge, and then make your way southeast along Dry Creek so that you approach the Jimenez house from the northwest. Once you’re in position to see the house through your night-vision goggles, move into an assault position. Notify me when you’re ready.”

  “Wilco,” Harry said.

  “Janet. Same procedure. Set up the roadblock right before the bend. You and Jack come in along Dry Creek from the southeast. I want everyone in position for a 0230 assault. Once I give the go order, Harry and Bronson will toss flash-bang grenades through the front windows, wait three seconds, and then assault through the front door. Bobby will stop anyone who tries to get out the back.

  “Janet, you and Jack will hit the east-side bedrooms. Same thing. Follow your flash-bangs through the bedroom windows. Coordinate your movements over the radio but do not penetrate farther into the house or you’ll catch Harry and Bronson in your cross fire.

  “If I give the abort command, get out immediately and haul ass back to our rally point, right here.” Spider indicated a wooded hilltop a quarter mile south of the Jimenez ho
use.

  Spider straightened. “Any questions?”

  Janet met his gaze. “I assume our friends at Fort Meade will keep the police out of the area once things get hot.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Remember, this is one dangerous bastard,” Jack said. “Now let’s go kill him.”

  Spider grinned and switched off the tablet. “Alright everybody. Gear up.”

  CHAPTER 84

  Jamal ran both hands up over his smooth scalp, digging his fingers into the tight curls of his hair. He stared at the data cascading across his Scorpion workstation’s multiple displays in amazement. What the hell had just happened? Thirty seconds ago he had been progressing through his task list at high speed. Then, a new presence had appeared on the network to undo several of the hacks he’d just completed.

  Clearly it was more than one presence. From the information he was seeing it was clear that he was up against a team of highly trained hackers, their actions coordinated by someone almost as good as Jamal knew himself to be. It had been so long since he’d felt challenged that the unfamiliar feeling brought a smile to his lips.

  Jamal’s focus sharpened and when his fingers returned to the keyboard, he threw himself into an attack that turned into a rapid sequence of blocks, parries, and misdirection spoofs that slowed his opponents’ progress to a crawl. Then, ever so slowly, he felt the tide turn in his favor.

  The leader of the attacking force shifted tactics, using techniques Jamal recognized with surprise. Crap. How was that possible? He’d invented several of these tricks and he damn sure hadn’t shared those secrets with anyone. However it was something else that he observed that set alarm bells clanging inside his head.

  Long before Jamal had attended MIT, he had earned membership in an elite group of hackers known as Enigma. But unlike its cipher-machine namesake, this Enigma had never been penetrated. His membership in Enigma was one of the few secrets Jamal had kept from the NSA, despite the lifestyle polygraphs to which he was regularly subjected. He knew it was stupid, but his membership in the secret fraternity empowered him at a level that felt superhuman.