by Jack Soren
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Dead Lights
Coming Summer 2015 from Witness Impulse
June 15, 0230 hours
Cry-Stasis Foundation
Houston, Texas
IT WAS THE strangest kidnap and recovery mission Hoyt Randall ever had.
He peered through the binoculars down at the cookie-cutter industrial plaza that looked like it had been designed by an architect with a LEGO obsession. Five businesses were held within the repetitive tan stucco frontages, accented with a burgundy sawtooth pattern, identical bushes in front of the smoked glass doors set into each entrance. The light stands in the empty parking lot provided just enough illumination to discourage amateur thieves, but not enough to dissuade a professional. Nothing moved. All was still.
Hired by Arlo Perez and his wife, Hoyt was here to retrieve their daughter, Linda.
Hoyt fingered some notes into his forearm-mounted computing device before he put the binoculars away, pulled a black balaclava down over his face, and stood up. Dressed all in black and wearing latex gloves, he double-timed it down the hill, coming to rest behind the sign that said “Cry-Stasis Foundation.” He checked the area one last time, then he jogged across the parking lot. When he was halfway, he slowed to a walk and stopped looking around.
This is ridiculous, he thought. You could break-dance across this parking lot in fluorescent yellow and it wouldn’t matter.
Hoyt went around the back of the plaza, counted units, and took out his lockpick kit. After selecting the right tools, he inserted the picks into the lock one at a time, rotated them, and popped the lock in less than thirty seconds. He put the picks away, withdrew his automatic pistol, and entered the building.
Linda Perez had been gone for almost six months, now. She’d gone willingly, but that wasn’t unusual in Hoyt’s experience. Her parents wanted Linda back. They had plans for her.
Inside, Hoyt let his eyes adjust to the minimal lighting before checking the floor plan on his forearm device. Then he noticed that the security camera up in the corner wasn’t even connected, network wiring hanging down from its base. He moved to the next area and saw the same thing again. Cooking inside his mask, he pulled it off and wiped his eyes before stuffing it into his waistband. A few corridor turns later and he was at his target, two large metal doors that gleamed even in the low light.
Hoyt pushed through the doors and felt like he’d walked into a science fiction movie. The room, about the size of a high school basketball court, had a couple dozen shiny chrome tanks around its perimeter. A weird hiss and hum throbbed from the ten-foot-tall cylinders.
“Jee-zus.” Hoyt holstered his gun and slowly walked halfway into the room.
He hadn’t really known what to expect, but this wasn’t even close to what he’d imagined. The Perezes had said Cry-Stasis had their daughter’s body. Hoyt had assumed it was some sort of cult that was blackmailing them after their daughter died. It never even occurred to him she was a Popsicle waiting for the future.
And the size of the canister was going to be a problem. He approached one and rapped on it. A solid thud-thud-thud sounded. He perused the pressure gauges on the outside of the tank, along with cabling and tubing. The temperature gauge read –320 F.
This was not going to be—
Hoyt’s chest tightened as he finally noticed an extra device on almost all the canisters. Unlike the cryonic hardware, these he recognized. They were magnetic, timed charges. And with the Semtex each of them had packed inside, someone was trying to put this place on the moon.
“No!” Hoyt yelled as he turned and ran toward the doors. The red digits on the charges were all synchronized and counting down—finishing counting down.
8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2. . .
He was still ten feet from the doors when the rockets launched. The blast wave slammed him through the doors, metal shards from the destroyed canisters slicing him to ribbons before what was left of his body slapped into the far cinder-block wall with a wet crunch.
Hoyt was dead long before he came to rest. Just as dead as the frozen body parts that peppered him on the wall.
THE WOMAN WHO had watched Hoyt enter the building had not stopped him from going to his death. Death was a necessary part of life. Stopping someone from dying would be the greatest irony for her. She stepped from the shadows once the explosions had stopped, dressed not unlike the late Hoyt, save for the bright red hair that peeked out from the sides of her black hoodie.
She ran to the front of the building, pulling a can from her pack as she did and shaking it. It sounded like a rattlesnake in a tin can. She then wrote on the wall with orange spray paint. When she was done—sirens just starting to sound in the distance—she tossed the can aside, took out her phone, and dialed.
“It’s done,” she said in Japanese.
She put her phone away as she ran back to the bushes. She wheeled her black Ducati motorcycle out of its hiding place. Straddling it, she lowered her hood and shook her flaming hair back from her Asian features before pulling on her gleaming black helmet. She revved the motorcycle’s engine a few times and then sped off into the night. Behind her the flames illuminated what she had written on the front of the building:
DEAD LIGHTS.
About the Author
JACK SOREN was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Before becoming a thriller novelist, Soren wrote software manuals, waited tables, drove a cab, and spent six months as a really terrible private investigator. He lives in the Toronto area.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Dead Lights copyright © 2015 by Martin R. Soderstrom.
THE MONARCH. Copyright © 2014 by Martin R. Soderstrom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780062365187
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062365194
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