“Used the same password for both files?” Jordan asked.
Coventry smiled. He shot two fingers at her, gunslinger-style. “Exactly. And both files revealed he had a thing for the ladies.”
“Meaning?” Jordan asked.
“They contain hundreds of photos. All women, very risqué poses. The kind of pics you’d see on dating sites but with a lot less left to the imagination. No names, just numbers and letters under each picture. The files look like they’ve been ordered according to age. The girls in Account 1 are young, I’d say eighteen to twenty. The girls in Account 2 are twenty-plus.”
“Has Hawkins packed up that computer yet?” Chris asked.
Coventry shrugged. “As far as I know he's still working on it. You know Hawk: one-part techno-geek, the other Sherlock Holmes. Give that guy a computer problem and he’s like a dog on a bone. He won't let up until he’s cracked it. Kid’s smarter than all of us on our best day.”
Jordan turned to Chris. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah,” Hanover replied. “We need to see those files.”
CHAPTER 8
DIAMONDS GLITTERED in the sunlight. Commander Ben Egan blinked the sleep out of his eyes. High above, dust particles glimmered and floated past grime-baked windows on lazy air currents like twinkling stars, one second exposed to the penetrating rays of the midday sun, disappearing into shadow the next.
The assault on his mind that had occurred hours ago had left him drained. When finally awakened out of his deep slumber he bolted upright, straight-backed against the wall, his finger positioned on the trigger of his weapon.
Although his physiological and metabolic requirements were unlike those of ordinary men, rest was still a requirement, as too the need to eat. He hadn’t consumed any food in the last seventy-two hours. Although the factory had served its purpose and proven to be an ideal hiding place he would need to be on the move again very soon. He would steal what he needed to survive.
Though the specifics of his assignments were sent to him via Channeler’s neural download, less important decisions such as when and how a target would be assassinated, the optimal points of ingress, egress and escape, and the most appropriate weaponry with which to carry out the termination were left to his discretion. Having successfully completed the Dowd, Harper and Rosenfeld assignments he would receive the next target instruction set shortly, namely name and location. To receive any additional information he believed to be vital to the successful completion of the assignment he simply had to think his request. Confirmation data would be downloaded to his brain the second arrangements had been made.
Egan wasn’t concerned about being tagged or identified by public security monitoring systems when he moved about in public. His biometric enhancements extended beyond his neural augmentation to the energy signature of his physical body. His aura - invisible to the naked eye – could become illuminated at will, making him appear as if he were an entity consisting of pure light energy, blurring the contours of his body to such a degree that he would be wholly unrecognizable by even the most sophisticated biometric detection system.
Ben Egan had been required to give up everything in his life to become DARPA’s most covert operative. The official cover story reported him as being killed in action during a black-ops mission in Kandahar; the sole victim of a rocket-propelled grenade. He accepted that lie to become the first scientifically-augmented soldier in US military history; an opportunity that had proven impossible to resist.
As a career soldier, Commander Ben Egan had learned to deal with the mental, emotional and physical stress of evaluation testing. For the majority of candidates, the grueling elimination protocols of the Project Channeler selection process had proved to be insurmountable. For Egan, it had been a walk in the park. As fellow members of Delta Force washed out of Channeler’s Critical Evaluation process he sailed through it, often to the disbelief of the medical team, his fellow soldiers and his superiors. Ben Egan’s ancestors had gifted him with a DNA of inconceivable genetic pedigree which had been recognized, harnessed, and refined early in his military career. During physical endurance evaluations, it was suspected that his heart and lungs might be oversized; a theory later confirmed with the aid of magnetic resonance imaging. His heart was capable of beating at a near impossible two-hundred-and-fifty times per minute and pushed an extraordinary volume of blood and oxygen throughout his body to feed his extremities. This seemingly inhuman advantage capitalized on muscle efficiency so greatly that it permitted him to achieve incredible feats of physical endurance with ease, such as the ability to traverse even the most inhospitable terrain at record breaking speed. His body was remarkably resistant to physical and cellular stress. He could not recall a time in his life when he had been ill; a fact substantiated by both his civilian and military medical histories. His high hypertrophy cell expression provided a significant advantage in physical strength. Even when faced with the duress of the battlefield he remained unnaturally calm. His body functioned at such a low metabolic rate that he was capable of going for days without the need for food or sleep yet remaining quick-witted and mentally sharp. Quantitative sensory, cold pressor and pressure threshold testing confirmed his ability to withstand pain at levels exceeding five times those of the most elite-level soldier. He had proven himself to be devoid of fear and emotionally immune to even the most horrific conflicts encountered during his tenure with Delta Force. Ben Egan took immense pride in knowing that his God-given gifts, coupled with his ground-breaking neural interface augmentation, made him virtually unstoppable. He had been transformed into the ideal soldier, the perfect killing machine. His field trial handler, Dr. Jason Merrick, had warned him to be prepared to experience minor annoyances such as random physical or sensorial shocks - experiences that to this point in his life had been utterly foreign to him. These were to be considered normal responses to ‘high range’ remote testing; part of the three-stage Initiate-Measure-Evaluate study being conducted by the scientists at Dynamic Life Sciences in order to learn more about the field readiness of the Channeler technology and his response to it. Being the first of his kind, the scientists had even given him an acronym - GENESIS: GEnetic Neurally-Enhanced Subversive Intelligence Supersoldier - and reminded him that the successful completion of phase one field testing would qualify him for advancement to Channeler’s sister-study, code named LEEDA: Life Extending Epidermal Defense Augmentation. Controlled by the fight-or-flight response of his sympathetic nervous system, LEEDA would be automatically deployed when his brain confirmed a physical threat was imminent. The epidermal cells of his skin would be flooded with a compound DARPA scientists had invented; a derivative of spider silk, similar in structure to nano-cellulose and Kevlar, yet organic and a thousand times stronger. When released, his skin would be rendered virtually impenetrable by any known weapon. Post-assault, his cells would instantly purge themselves of the chemical, reverse the process, and return his skin to its normal state. The LEEDA project would also slow his aging process to a rate significantly less than other humans, thereby extending his usefulness as a military weapon for decades to come. The promise of further enhancement to his already genetically superior body and computerized mind with near superhuman abilities fed Egan’s ego like methamphetamine to a drug addict. Channeler field testing would soon be complete. He was anxious to advance to the LEEDA project as quickly as possible.
He was pleased with his progress.
He hoped his superiors were as well.
The old furniture factory in which he had taken refuge was the largest of the dilapidated buildings occupying the abandoned business park; crypts of concrete and rusted metal left to die in an asphalt cemetery.
Decades earlier, before the industrial death knell sounded announcing the end of their usefulness, businesses such as the old factory had thrived. Theirs was an era when pride of workmanship still mattered and a company’s ability to supply its community with stable jobs at fair wages was as much a source of corpor
ate pride as its requirement to turn a profit for its shareholders. However, years of steady economic decline soon favored price over quality, and the day finally arrived when the last of the company’s chesterfields, dining tables, chairs, bookcases and china cabinets were transported away in railcars on tracks that had served the companies within the abandoned park for decades, never to return. Doors had been closed, windows shuttered. For many of the former employees their small piece of the American Dream had decayed and died along with the building.
As Egan rose to his feet from behind the cover of the shipping pallets he elicited a furious response from above. Startled out of their sleep, dozens of pigeons took flight from the steel rafters. The zealous expenditure of energy lasted only a few seconds before they soon circled back and resumed their resting places on the metal beams.
Needing a better understanding of the factory layout in the event a quick escape should become necessary, Commander Egan climbed a rusty iron staircase to what had been the second-floor offices.
The first and largest office occupied half the north-east section of the building. Judging by its furnishings, he assumed it had been the production manager’s office. A massive calendar, its pages yellow and brittle with age, corners curling outward from its wooden frame, was mounted on the largest wall of the room. Boxes for each day of the month were marked with notations referencing the production requirements for the coming weeks and months. The final notation, dated October 4th, 1962, read CLOSED.
Three filing trays on a wooden desk spoke to the last days of the life of the once grand plant. The first, labeled FORWARDING, overflowed with work orders identifying the items scheduled for manufacture and the various stations through which the raw materials would pass: wooden components to the kiln, for drying, then on to the sanding, gluing and varnishing departments; sofa spring assemblies to the fabrication shop; fabrics, cotton batting and leather to upholstering stations; completed pieces ready for final approval to the Inspector’s benches. Detailed notes accompanied each of the work orders. Testifying to the pride the company had taken in its work, the forms bore the approval signatures of each station manager before each piece was permitted to move on to the next stage of the manufacturing process.
The second tray, marked COMPLETED, contained twenty such work orders, each stamped and dated, with authorized signatures and rail pick up dates scrawled on the bottom of the forms.
The third tray, labeled FIRST QUARTER 1963, was empty.
Like the factory walls on the first floor this room too had been vandalized. Water-damaged blueprints, musty trade journals and accounting ledgers lay scattered about the room. Smashed out spun-steel fluorescent fixtures hung lopsided from the ceiling on broken metal chains. The cancer of decay that had metastasized throughout the building had claimed this room too, with terminal results. Painted floorboards had peeled, buckled, turned black with mold and rotted away in places. The front legs of a wooden drafting table stood precariously close to a gaping wound in the middle of the floor. Egan stood beside the yawning maw and looked down upon the serpentine conveyor system snaking its way through the factory. The floor sighed and moaned underfoot, then cried out as it surrendered to its diseased state and gave way, taking the doomed drafting table with it. Egan jumped back, aware that even his unique gifts might not permit him to recover from a twenty-foot fall resulting in impalement. He heard the old wooden table hit the floor below and smash into pieces.
The close call served as a reminder that securing the van was his immediate priority.
From the top of the staircase, Egan surveyed the production floor below. The massive steel door of the wood drying room had been left open. The faint effusion of pine, cedar, poplar and maple still redolent in the old room created a perfumery of sorts: a pleasant aroma in stark contrast to the damp, musty air of the building. Along the west wall, exhaust tubes from the cutting, tooling, sanding and varnishing rooms rose to the ceiling and connected to the central air exhaust and filtration systems. The rooms along the east wall were fewer in number and significantly larger. Judging by the discards of fabric and plastic wrap on the floor these areas had been dedicated to fabrication, upholstery and shipping preparation. The southernmost section of the factory, once the staging area for the shipping of orders and receiving of raw materials, remained largely unencumbered.
Egan descended the iron staircase to the first floor and inspected the drying room. The cavernous chamber did little to mute the sounds of the old building. Ambient noises, faint pulses of life still left in the dying building, echoed off its walls: the occasional murmur from the unsettled pigeons perched high in the rafters; floors creaking under the shifting weight of gravity; the pop and click of metal in window frames as they expanded and contracted with the heat of the sun. Free at last from the geriatric grip of its decrepit metal frame a pane of glass fell, shattering on the concrete factory floor.
When he had found the dilapidated factory in the pre-dawn hours he had parked the flower delivery van in front of the drive-in doors of the shipping and receiving dock. Fortunately, the van had not been spotted by an overnight police patrol. Had that been the case the authorities would likely have run the plates, confirmed it as stolen, and entered the building to inspect the premises and determine if the thief was hiding inside.
Too risky. He needed to move the van inside the factory.
Egan closed his eyes and listened. He thought he could hear faint whispers coming from the kiln drying room. Ghosts of the old building perhaps.
He stepped out of the chamber and listened intently. Whispers became words. Words assembled into muted voices.
Clearer now, distinct.
One-hundred feet away, maybe less. Closing fast.
A commotion from the south end of the building now, outside the receiving doors.
Directions being issued.
No, not directions...
Orders.
The van had been had found. Which meant it was only a matter of minutes before the outside voices would come inside in search of him.
The safest place for him to be right now was where he had spent the night; hidden in the dark corner at the north end of the factory, behind the makeshift barricade of wooden shipping pallets.
Egan returned to the corner and peered through the stacked slats. The wall of the factory brightened as the back door opened and the shipping area filled with sunlight.
Six silhouettes made entry against the light.
Two men at first, then four more, spreading out quickly, moving fast.
He observed the men and waited.
The strange metallic band on his wrist began to glow.
CHAPTER 9
THE INTERCOM crackled. “General, I have Colonel Hallier for you on COMSEC.”
“Send it down the hall.”
“Right away, sir.”
“And call Dwight Hammond. Have him meet me in Briefing Room 1, ALPHA priority.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brigadier General Allan Ford picked up the EYES ONLY file folder from his desk and walked down the hall to the briefing room. The urgency with which Hallier’s message had been relayed to him was disconcerting. He re-read the transcript subject line: Situation alert. Level A1.
The fact that the alert had come from Quentin Hallier bothered him. The Colonel was not the kind of man to sound an alarm without justification. There could only be one reason important enough for him to send the message using his ALPHA emergency identification: a problem had arisen which posed a threat to national security.
General Ford closed the briefing room door and opened the COMMUNICATION SECURITY video feed. Hallier’s face filled the screen. Behind him, Dynamic Life Sciences security staff were busy escorting scientists and staff on to buses destined for Joint Forces Training Base Los Alamitos.
Commander Dwight Hammond entered the room. Ford motioned to join him in front of the monitor.
“General, Commander,” Hallier said.
Ford replied. “Why
do I get the feeling you’re about to ruin my perfectly good day, Quentin?”
“Sir, I’ve ordered Dynamic Life Sciences be placed in lockdown. One of its scientists may no longer be operating within protocol.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Dr. Jason Merrick.”
“Team leader on the Channeler and LEEDA projects?”
“Correct, sir. Confidence is high he may be responsible for an attack that occurred at the facility a few hours ago. Two scientists are dead, both members of his research team. Poisoned, according to DLS’s Biohazard Response Team.” Hallier removed the metal band and empty vial from his pocket. “He left these.”
“The Challenger and LEEDA prototypes,” Commander Hammond offered.
“Yes, along with this photograph.” Hallier read the message on the back of the picture. “We have no idea what All Will Pay means, or what he wants, but I’m assuming it’s not good. We need to locate him immediately.”
“Did Merrick kill those men?” Ford asked.
“That’s how it’s starting to look, sir.”
“How soon can you get back to DARPA?”
“If it’s all the same to you, General, I’d like to stay on site until the facility is secure and the staff is en route to JFTB Los Alamitos.”
Ford nodded. “Very well.”
“One more thing, General. We approved Merrick to go forward with human trials for Channeler and LEEDA.”
“And?”
“Commander Egan is the control subject. If Merrick has other plans for Channeler and LEEDA, and he’s turned Egan...”
“Egan shouldn’t be a problem,” Ford interrupted. “He’s chipped. Locate him and bring him in.”
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