“The warden has issued a lockdown because of the murders,” Parker said.
Bannon interlaced his fingers on his chest. The doctor was probing. The best thing was to relax, to let his body recover from whatever drug they’d administered to him while he’d been out. He wondered for a moment if they’d given him “truth serum.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You’re being uncooperative today. Why is that?”
“You’re the doctor. You tell me.”
She set the iPad on her knees and stared at him. He liked that. She had pretty eyes. He thought about kissing her.
Guilt stabbed his chest at the thought. He scowled, and he noticed that he wore a wedding ring. The scowl intensified. Why couldn’t he remember his wife? What was wrong with his memory? What was going on? This…something was out of place.
Parker tapped her right thumb against her nyloned knee. Leaning minutely forward, watching him closely, she asked, “Does it bother you the three enforcers were raping the youngster?”
Bannon swung his feet off the couch as he sat up. Everything went blurry. He kept himself from panting, although he opened the top button of his shirt.
“Lie down,” Parker said.
Bannon would have shaken his head, but that would have hurt just then. He gripped the edge of the couch. He wanted to stand up and walk out of here. Something bad was going to happen if he stayed. He could feel it.
“Do I have to call Security?” she asked.
A feral feeling flared in his chest. It gave him strength, and it cleared away some of the dizziness. She said Security. In a prison, one called them guards. If these people brought guns… Guards didn’t bring guns into a prison so the prisoners couldn’t take them away. Guards only came armed if it was a full tactical lockdown, where everyone got their shotgun and went in armored.
“Bannon?” she asked. “Can you hear me?”
He swiveled his head and stared into her eyes. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re a violent offender. We’re trying to help you with your antisocial behavior.”
“There’s more to it.”
“What makes you say so?” she asked.
Something changed in him, a switch in his mind. It gave him strength and resolve. She must have seen it in his eyes or on his face.
“Look!” she cried, pointing at the door.
Bannon looked, but nothing happened to the door, nothing changed. He heard her chair scrape back and he heard her nylons rustle. She was trying to get away from him.
With a grunt, he shoved off the couch and staggered after her. She reached the desk, pressed a button under the oaken top and flung open a drawer. She pulled out a stun gun.
Although groggy, Bannon moved faster now. She tried to touch him with the stun gun. He slapped her hand and the device flew away to smack against the wall.
“Bannon,” she said. It was all she had time to say.
He clutched her soft throat, took another step and slammed her against the wall. Two diplomas hit the floor, one shattering. Her reading glasses were skewed at an angle on her nose and her eyes bulged outward with fear.
“What did you inject into me?”
“Medicine,” she wheezed. “You need to lie down.”
Bannon tightened his fingers as he pressed his body against hers, keeping her from kneeing him in the groin.
The doorknob rattled. Bannon looked over his shoulder. The door flew open and two bulky guards in Kevlar vests burst into the room. They aimed Tasers at him.
“Let her go!” the first guard shouted.
Bannon roared, not because he was out of control, but to frighten them into thinking he was violently enraged. At the same time, he swung Dr. Parker around.
The guards fired the Tasers. The prongs pierced Dr. Parker’s lab coat and dress, to embed in her flesh. Powerful jolts of electricity flowed into her. Bannon had already let go. Parker grunted, and she flopped onto the office floor, with her legs sprawled and her dress in disarray so he saw pink panties with little red hearts.
Bannon was woozy, but his adrenaline was pumping. He stepped over Parker and charged. The nearest guard had the wit to drop his Taser. As the device hit the floor, he tried to pull out his baton. Bannon slammed his right elbow into the guard’s throat. It catapulted the guard off his feet. The second guard roared like a linebacker, and he tackled Bannon from the side. Bannon twisted, bringing up an open palm. He slammed the palm against the guard’s chin, snapping the head back. They hit the carpet together.
From on the floor, the second guard unsnapped his stun gun. Bannon knocked the device out of the man’s hand. He scrambled faster, elbowed the guard as the man tried to get up, slowing him, and Bannon reached the stun gun first.
“Emergency code one!” Parker shouted in a hoarse voice from on the floor.
The guard came at Bannon. Bannon used the stun gun on the man’s neck, dropping him. Then Bannon regarded Parker.
“Please,” she said, “don’t hurt me.”
Despite the dizziness and continuing disorientation, Bannon heard hissing, and he smelled something in the air. As she stared at him from on the rug, Dr. Parker passed out.
“Gas,” he whispered. He held his breath and ran toward the door. The guards might have locked it, but then again, they’d seen him holding Parker hostage and might have acted too quickly to lock it. Therefore, instead of hurling himself at the door, trying to smash it down, he tired the handle. It turned. He dashed out and found himself in a corridor.
This didn’t feel like a prison. It didn’t smell like one, either. He strode past pictures on the walls. After taking a turn, he noticed the scent of perfume in the air. He passed an open door where a woman typed rapidly on a keyboard. She turned to him and there was fear in her eyes. She seemed familiar: tall, brunette hair and shrewd eyes. For some reason, he was sure she could sing well. A name popped into his mind.
“Susan,” he said.
She shook her head. “You must have me confused with someone else.”
Bannon entered the room and closed the door. He’d heard pounding footsteps and the jangle of weaponry. Someone hurried down the corridor toward him, more guards likely.
She turned away from him, reaching for a drawer. He beat her to it, flinging it open and pulling out a small gun.
On Susan’s computer screen, he saw Parker lying in her room with the two unconscious guards.
“Show me who’s coming down the hall,” he said.
Susan looked up at him. He put the gun to her forehead.
“Don’t—”
“Show me,” he said, pushing the barrel of the gun against her, shoving her head back.
She typed, and the screen shifted to the corridor. A heavy man in a black suit ran with a drawn gun. Beside him came a uniformed guard holding a pistol.
Outside the closed door, Bannon heard them pass.
“What’s the heavy man’s name?” he asked, pointing at the screen with his gun.
“I—”
“If you lie, I’ll kill you.”
Susan glanced at him sidelong. “Karl Sand,” she said.
The name didn’t mean anything to Bannon. “Is he in charge?”
Susan looked at him in surprise.
Bannon knew he’d made a mistake, but he didn’t know what or how.
“Listen to me,” she said. “If you give yourself up—”
“Quiet,” he said. He needed to think and he didn’t have any time to do it here. This Karl Sand and guard would find the others unconscious. Ah, he knew what to do. “Gas them,” he said.
“I don’t know how.”
“Gas them now.”
“There isn’t any way to do that.”
“Why were you typing so furiously before I got here? I’ll tell you why. You were putting in the override codes. Gas them like you tried to gas me.” They had to have reached the door to Parker’s room by now.
“Look—” she said.
“Times up,” he said, cocking the ham
mer.
“No! I’ll do it. Give me a second.” And she typed, her fingers flying over the keys.
“Show me on the screen.”
She did. The screen flickered and Bannon saw the guard crumple to his knees and then the heavy man, this Karl Sand.
Good, good, things were going more smoothly now. He’d been a prisoner but this place didn’t feel like a prison. So what did that mean?
“Show me the outer cameras,” he said.
Susan didn’t bother with any more lies or evasions. On the screen, Bannon saw the parking lot, cars and he saw a glimpse of Great America. This definitely wasn’t San Quentin. Someone had transferred him here, it seemed.
“Parker was trying to erase my memories,” he said.
Susan hesitated and then nodded.
He couldn’t trust this woman, and he had to get out of here. He had a gun. He opened the drawer and rummaged around, finding another magazine. He could stay and poke around, risking recapture, or he could flee. Should he take this woman as a hostage? No. He needed to move fast. He needed to be alone in order to think things through. He was certain they were trying to erase his memories, in particular the one of Justice Blake and the man’s treachery on the bench.
“Show me more,” he said, meaning through the security cameras.
She proceeded to do just that. As she did, he studied the building’s layout and glanced around the room. He struck her several seconds later, setting her unconscious on the floor. Afterward, he gagged and tied her. Speed was essential. He was certain the authorities in San Quentin had already been alerted to his escape. The police must know by now, too.
Bannon grinned mirthlessly. They had taken him here to neuter his mind, to rob it of memories and to hide what the state had done to his wife and daughter. No. He was going to find—
He sat down and began typing, and he soon discovered the Justice was on vacation near Pebble Beach. The fact this information was here proved he’d been right in his original estimate.
Bannon erased the information, shut down the computer and put a wet cloth over his mouth and nose. Then he opened the door and hurried through the corridor, escaping his captors.
-15-
In Washington DC, the Controller sat in his wheelchair. He sat beside a window, one that gave him a view of the Potomac River and the national cemetery beyond.
The Controller sighed. His name was Henry Griffith. He was bald and had old, liver-spotted hands. In one of them, he clutched a cell phone. Karl Sand was going to call soon and report on his failure concerning Bannon. His daughter, Dr. Parker—she had changed her last name many years ago—had already filled him in about what had happened.
Griffith ran the secretive Anti-Terror Squad, or ATS, and reported directly to the head of Homeland Security. He ran the government-licensed assassins, ran the people who trained and programmed the killers and ran the cleanup teams who took care of loose ends.
Griffith knew Karl Sand was good at what he did. The CIA should have never let the man go. But they had. Their hands had been tied because of their protocols. Seven months later, Griffith had quietly added Karl to the team. ATS worked deep in the shadows, hidden from even Senate oversight and thus could accept damaged goods like Karl.
Homeland Security was a vast umbrella organization that included 187 federal agencies and departments. President G. W. Bush had signed off on ATS back in 2004, creating the black ops organization, tucked well out of sight. By the time Karl joined, ATS had developed an effective new way of creating clandestine agents to be inserted into targeted organizations. A memory-creating drug helped agents develop perfect cover identities. The identities had even held under torture. With further experimentation the drug had aided neurologists and psychiatrists in fashioning entire new personalities for agents. What it amounted to was that Day Tripper 7—as the drug had been nicknamed—fundamentally altered the agent’s mind.
The neurologists and psychiatrists of Day Tripper 7 had joined hands with a Department of Defense science effort to enhance warfighter reflexes.
Griffith sighed again, wondering as he had many times before if he had done the right thing with Bannon. He was the first of a new breed, a former Delta Force hero who now possessed quicker neural impulses than normal. The impulses were only fractionally quicker, but it meant Bannon thought faster and more accurately than ordinary people, and he had reflexes like a twenty-year-old professional boxer.
Worse, Bannon had escaped—again. Maybe the altered agents were too good. Maybe it was time to retire all of the altered assassins. Maybe Karl was right about that.
Karl Sand…was the escape his fault? Was it time to get rid of the man? They would have to wait now to deal with Justice Blake.
In his wheelchair, Griffith scowled. This was insufferable. All his carefully laid plans—ruined!
The operation to kill Chief Justice Arthur Blake had originally been Griffith’s brainchild, but now Karl lusted for it even more. Griffith wasn’t sure why. His own reason to eliminate the Justice was simple: to chop away dead wood and allow the President of the United States to pack the High Court with the right people. In this case, the right Justices would repeal meddlesome laws that interfered with the policing of America. These days, there were too many legal guns, too many licensed gun owners and too many laws hindering the police and critical Federal agencies from doing their tasks. In short, too many constitutional rights.
This was the Twenty-first Century, not the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Century when frontiersmen with Kentucky rifles or Winchesters had carved an empire out of the vast North American continent. Then rugged individuals wielding freedom, rifles and their own initiative had conquered the wilderness. It had been an age of adventure, the Gold Rush, land grabs and hard years of homesteading.
Now there were urban jungles breeding neo-barbarian hordes, peoples who had little conception and scant appreciation for civilization and civilized behavior. There were multicultural peoples in the country with their own ideas of government and justice. There were terrorists of many stripes, moving like viruses through the body politic, ready to explode bombs, plagues and who knew what else. Constitutionalists spoke about armed rebellion. The internet, cell phones, jets, cars—the world shrank at an alarming rate and the national debt squeezed like a boa constrictor. It was time to increase taxes, but that would likely choke prosperity out of the nation. Then the riots would begin—race riots, tax riots, free education riots…A nation gorged on high expectations and free entitlements would rage when the belt-tightening truly began. The mess in Europe should have proven that to the lawmakers.
Griffith shook his bald head, knowing the truth about that.
The lawmakers were opportunists. They pushed the problems down the road of time. As long as the Great Storm didn’t hit during their time in office, they were happy. They could see the problems like everyone else. But they knew that if they ever attempted to truly fix the problems, that they would be promptly voted out of office.
Therefore, it fell to the true patriots to solve the dilemma.
Griffith sighed as he weighed the cell phone in his gnarled hand. Chaotic forces swirled throughout the country. The forces threatened to explode into mass violence. In times like these, a heavy hand would serve best. The age of the individual was over. The State and the policeman would keep evils at bay through tightening laws and sole possession of deadly force.
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Blake hadn’t been able to see that. He believed in the old ways, the Constitution and other prehistoric rituals. Freedom, it was an outdated concept that simply meant chaos in the day of nuclear weapons, biological horrors and terrorists.
I am the surgeon who removes the hated cancers. No one loved the scalpel that cut into flesh, but he or she loved surviving.
The cell phone rang. Griffith glanced at it. Karl Sand phoned. Hardening his resolve, Griffith answered.
“Well, where is Bannon? Have you recaptured him yet?”
“Sir,” Karl said. �
�I’m not sure you going to believe this.”
“The way you say that, I’m sure you’re right.”
“We have reason to believe that Bannon plans to kill Blake.”
Griffith looked up at the ceiling. “You’re correct in your assumption. I find the idea preposterous. Find Bannon and bring him in. It’s time to retire him.”
“Should I send Max after him then?”
“Your decisive intent is noted,” Griffith said. “For a man in your line of work, that is good. In this instance, I want to retire Bannon to an institution. My stepdaughter would have preferred it that way.”
“Yes sir.”
Griffith scowled. He wished he hadn’t brought that up. It was Bannon’s fault his stepdaughter had died.
A fierce headache began in his frontal lobes. Griffith rubbed his forehead. Every time he recalled receiving the news…it had soothed something vindictive in him putting Bannon into the assassin program. It had also soothed the grim anguish by doing it in the manner he had. But to just order Bannon’s execution…no, he didn’t want to do it just yet, not this way. He had other plans for the man.
“Sir, we put a tracking nodule in Bannon before his escape.”
“My…my daughter has spoken to me about that.”
“Parker was putting the finishing touches on Bannon, sir. We had planned to release him two days from now. Sir, the implanted memories have taken hold is what I’m trying to say. There’s no reason why we can’t go ahead with the task.”
Griffith hesitated. If Bannon assassinated Justice Blake, it would mean the end of both of the Justice and the altered assassin. ATS couldn’t afford Bannon to survive the hit. Griffith hated the man for killing his stepdaughter, or for being the reason of her death.
The headache throbbed, and Griffith suppressed a groan.
“Sir?” Karl asked.
The headache… Griffith concentrated. Yes, he had to make the best of the situation. He wanted Justice Blake gone. The man was a gadfly and Blake would never stop handing down his infuriating decisions. If this was how Bannon died…so be it.
I, Weapon Page 10
