EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum

by Shane Stadler

The sphere seemed to have a bulge on one side. “How big is this thing?” McHenry asked.

  “About 25 meters in diameter,” Finley answered.

  Stunned, McHenry said, “That’s enormous. How can that thing survive at that depth?” He knew no one had the answer. There were no known structures of that size that could survive the hydrostatic pressures at that depth – unless it wasn’t hollow.

  “We need a profile shot,” McHenry said and grabbed a communicator device from his pocket that resembled a small cell phone. He pressed a button and spoke into it, “Get us to max depth, and 200 meters east of our current position. Go slowly – one knot.”

  “We have another 100 meters on the array. Shall we go to max depth on that as well?” Finley asked.

  “Yes, drop it when we’re stationary,” McHenry replied. “Take images as we move.”

  Finley nodded and said with apparent hesitation, “They might be blurred.”

  “Do it. The more data we have the better. We’ll get better images when we’re stationary.”

  The first new image formed on the screen.

  “That’s not too bad,” Finley commented.

  The coloring made the object look very spherical, with no evidence of a bulge. A few minutes later, the next image appeared and the asymmetry was on the opposite side.

  “That’s odd,” McHenry said, twisting his head to view the screen from a different angle.

  The next image showed the bulge in the same place, but more pronounced. And the next even more pronounced, and slightly tapered.

  A few minutes later, McHenry was informed that they had reached the desired location, and Finley turned to look at him.

  “Lowering the array to maximum depth,” Finley informed.

  Finley repositioned the array and took an image. At first, what came up on the screen was baffling. But they quickly figured it out: the bulge was a misperception caused by their angle of view from above. It was actually a long stem that propped up the sphere from below.

  “How far does that thing go down?” McHenry asked.

  Finley responded by color-enhancing the image. The answer was obvious.

  “The son-of-a-bitch goes all the way into the floor,” McHenry gasped. “That’s another 2,000 meters.”

  “Twenty-five hundred, sir,” Finley corrected, and looked at him wide-eyed.

  “How in the hell was that constructed?” McHenry asked, again knowing there wasn’t an explanation. “We have the images?”

  Finley nodded.

  “Go silent and pull up the array,” McHenry instructed. “Then get the data ready for transmission. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  They’d again have to risk detection by taking the North Dakota to transmission depth to send the image files. He wondered if his superiors in Washington were expecting what they were about to get.

  3

  Saturday, 9 May (12:03 p.m. CST – Southern Illinois)

  Will shuddered as he passed the Marion maximum-security prison. The cold blue structures of the complex were unimpressive from the highway, but the razor wire glittering in the sunlight like strings of tiny mirrors reminded him of what was inside. At the time, it was the closest he’d ever come to hell. Marion Prison was as close to being a corrections facility as a slaughterhouse was to being veterinary clinic. He was convinced a well-behaved person might emerge criminally insane from such a place. He’d started along that track during his short stint there.

  Twenty minutes later he passed the exit for Cordova, Illinois, where he’d spent six years of his life as a university physics professor. His thoughts turned to his ex-fiancé, Pam. They’d been engaged and living together for a year when he’d been arrested. The anger of her betrayal still burned in his chest. She’d turned on him the instant she learned of the allegations that he’d raped and tried to murder a teenage girl. It was the most cutting, irreversible insult that could be leveed upon a person. And her betrayal had affected the trial: it probably put the jury over the edge to convict him.

  He took a sip of soda and chewed ice to get his thoughts to dissipate.

  A few minutes south of the Cordova exit, the billboards and trees thinned out. To the west, a mile off the highway, the light poles of the football stadium he’d visited the night of the arrest loomed above a dense grove of pine trees. It was the crime scene. It was strange how different everything seemed in the sunlight. During the past two years his mind had made it out to be a much darker place. But there was darkness in everything, from the most beautiful tropical beach where a mother’s child had drowned, to the magnificent house where a man comes home to find his family murdered. The sunlight couldn’t hide such things. Each place was different for everyone.

  He steered his thoughts to something more positive. Baton Rouge would be a welcomed change. The night before he’d dreamt of crawfish and gumbo – a stark difference from his usual nightmares. Escaping the unseasonably cool Chicago spring would also be a plus, and his new abode was touted as a vacation resort.

  He shifted in his seat, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and tilted his head sharply to the left and right, stretching his neck muscles. His new arrangement was not sustainable: how long did the FBI plan to keep him there? He had no legal or operational knowledge of how to engage in an investigation. He’d only been trained to keep himself safe.

  He suspected the FBI had given him the mobile phone more to track him than to contact him. He’d play along for the time being. After the Israeli’s warning, it was best he went off the grid for a while. But the isolation would serve a purpose other than keeping him safe. A feeling of urgency was building in him to explore his new abilities and the hidden world to which they’d given him access. The current situation would give him the opportunity to do this.

  A road sign indicated that Memphis was 245 miles south. He’d stop there for the night.

  4

  Saturday, 9 May (1:10 p.m. CST – Baton Rouge)

  Zhichao Cho trembled as he stared at the package on his desk. He could hardly believe it had taken so little time to acquire. His stomach twisted with the idea that maybe they hadn’t gotten everything.

  He turned the heavy box so he could access the seams, cut the packing tape with a utility knife, and tore open the flaps. Each item he extracted had been carefully wrapped in plastic, and he arranged them on the table in three piles: bound documents, file folders, and two data storage drives. It was the latter that captured his interest.

  Dates and numbers were written in red marker on a piece of paper taped to the top of each drive. The latter indicated the number of the treatment room in which the video had been recorded. He extracted the one with the earliest date from its case, and connected a cable between it and his laptop. A few seconds later he started the first video.

  Cho squealed in delight when the first image appeared. It was the first time he’d seen a subject inside an operational Exoskeleton. Before he’d acquired Syncorp, the company had provided him with still images for demonstration purposes. They never had access to actual treatment footage. That information was highly classified and only available to authorized government personnel.

  The video showed an overhead view of a man inside a horizontally oriented Exoskeleton positioned a few feet above the floor. The time rolled at the top right of the screen: the recording had started at 6:33 a.m. After about a minute a door opened and a middle-aged man and a young blonde woman, both dressed in white coats, rolled in carts filled with tools and gadgets. When they reached the Exoskeleton, a bundle of tubes and cables lowered from the ceiling. They connected them to receptacles on the carts, and the man grabbed a device that looked like an electric toothbrush and pressed a button on its handle. The device responded with a high-pitched whine that he immediately recognized. They were dentists.

  The ensuing torture was nothing like he had ever seen. The dentists carried out procedures without anesthetics, and he found himself envying them. Cho had carried out some fairly gruesome things himself during
his rising years in Chinese intelligence, but nothing under such extreme and controlled conditions. What he was witnessing was how it was supposed to be done.

  For over two hours, the drilling and screaming was interrupted only to allow the subject to regain consciousness after passing out. Cho yawned, and then stood and stretched his legs as the video continued. What was he supposed to be looking for? The video had been deemed important for some reason. Did he miss it?

  He walked away from the desk to a counter where an electric teapot steamed away. He selected a bag of green tea from a jar, put it in a cup, and filled it with hot water. When he returned to the computer, the blonde woman was on the floor and the dentist was standing over her, trying to help her to her feet. What the hell happened? Did she pass out?

  He reset the video to the point when he’d gone for tea. The man backed away from the subject and let his assistant take over.

  The woman selected an instrument and approached the subject, but before she even touched him, her head spontaneously jerked to the side and she fell to the floor, landing hard. It looked unnatural, as if she’d been struck on the side of the head.

  Cho replayed the scene a dozen times. This was what he was supposed to see.

  He went the computer keyboard and navigated to the file folder with the video files. The file names indicated they were all footage of the same subject: Number 523.

  5

  Saturday, 9 May (3:41 p.m. EST – Washington)

  Daniel closed the file he’d been reading for the past two hours and slapped it down on the coffee table. He sat on the couch, put his hands on his head, and massaged his temples with his fingers. What was he expected to do? Thackett had made it clear: nobody knew what was happening. In the meantime, he and Sylvia would work on the problem, guided by the grandmaster of all Omnis, Horace. But he and Sylvia would have to come up with their own, unbiased conclusions without knowing how Horace came to his. It wasn’t clear that Horace had a logical path to his conclusions, whatever they were. Daniel suspected the man was working on a gut feeling.

  He unwrapped a granola bar, took a bite, and chased it with a sip of water. Something bothered him: if Horace was who Thackett said he was – the country’s greatest intelligence resource – then the old man’s identity had been compromised. He wondered now if he and Sylvia would have to be eliminated once they’d served their purpose. Through his many years of classified research, he’d often crossed cases of preventive assassinations. So it was a possibility. Or did they trust him and Sylvia? After all, they’d eventually need someone to replace Horace.

  Daniel sighed and shook his head. What was he going to do, quit?

  The new project had elements that made it different from all the others, including a facet he’d not before experienced: time pressure. It was as if there was a race to solve some big puzzle.

  He choked down the rest of his snack, picked up the file, and got back to Operation Tabarin.

  He’d concluded that the Brits and Americans had initiated their respective operations as a response to something, and their response had to be related to the war effort. The Americans had initiated their mission after the war ended, so to whatever it was that they were responding had persisted after the war.

  Up to this point, he hadn’t turned up anything more than background information. However, he did find a clue in a Royal Navy logbook from a reconnaissance vessel that had been deployed in the southern sea before the war had begun. The British ship had followed a German vessel, called the Schwabenland, to Antarctica. No details were given about the reason for their suspicion of this vessel, nor anything they’d discovered about it.

  Daniel submitted a requisition for top-secret documents and emailed it to the appropriate CIA address. He’d have all the available information about the Schwabenland in the morning.

  He twitched. The urgency of the assignment had his mind tumbling with adrenaline. What he needed was a nap. Instead, he turned on the electric teapot on the windowsill. He hoped some tea would sooth his nerves and ready him for the long hours ahead.

  6

  Saturday, 9 May (7:58 p.m. CST – Chicago)

  Lenny Butrolsky leaned his throbbing right shoulder on the wall of the balcony of his 19th floor hotel room. The even pressure spread the pain around so that it wasn’t all in one place.

  The sweet Chicago night air was poisoned intermittently by cigarette smoke that wafted up from a lower balcony. The enormous red moon dominated the cloudless sky above the Great Lake despite the lights of the city. The glittering ripples in the water made him think about better times, and the uncertain future.

  He dialed the number on his secure mobile phone. A man answered after one ring.

  “It’s done,” Lenny said, referring to his latest target, Kelly Hatley.

  “We know,” the man responded. “The funds will be deposited within 24 hours along with the first installment for your next job.”

  “Instructions coming by the same method?” Lenny asked.

  “Yes,” the man replied and hung up.

  Lenny put the phone in his pocket and looked out over the water. Hatley had been taken out with a simple injection into her I-V. He felt hollow inside when he thought about her – she was in her late twenties, at most. Although, he thought, by virtue of her choice of employer she was no angel. He grinned and nodded as he took a deep breath. He could say the same for himself. But his actions damned him much more than anything the woman had done.

  The Hatley job had been easy. He preferred it that way, as would anyone in his profession, but he’d become more aware of risks now that he was considering retirement. Maybe he’d just do a few more jobs. It seemed he could get all the work he wanted. He suspected his handler got orders directly from the former CIA Director, Terrance Gould, who’d been desperately trying to dispose of Red Wraith personnel since his untimely removal four months ago.

  Lenny was uniquely suited for such a cleanup operation. He’d been intimately involved in the project – he knew the major players, what they did, and what they looked like. It was fortunate for Gould that many of the most threatening people had already been eliminated – either by Lenny, or killed in the explosion at the Red Box. But there were others.

  His phone buzzed. It was a text message indicating that a new email awaited him in a secure account. They never actually sent emails – it was too risky. Instead, they wrote drafts and saved them so that someone else could log in and read them. Afterwards, they were deleted. He navigated to the email account and read.

  His next target was a Dr. Martha Epstein. Lenny immediately made the connection to her Red Box alias, Dr. Smith. She was a psychologist who had interacted with every patient as they entered the program. She knew what happened there, and could make connections to others, including Gould.

  He read on and swore under his breath. He had to go to Flint, Michigan. The woman didn’t have the common sense to get out of the area, and now he’d have to return to the place where he’d already carried out multiple hits. Even though it would be difficult to link him to any of those jobs, it was downright risky.

  So far, all of his targets had been Red Box personnel. Was someone else eliminating people from the Long Island facility? he wondered. He knew the man who had held the security post there, a position equivalent to his at the Red Box. That man had been well connected in upper government circles, whereas Lenny had been linked directly to the project head, Heinrich Bergmann. He bet that the other man was conducting cleanup operations of his own. Perhaps they’d cross paths.

  The jobs would get increasingly more risky, and Lenny thought about upping his fee. But he’d wait on that until he had enough in the bank to quit the business. Besides, it was the former CIA Director who had arranged for his escape from the hospital. That was risky. Perhaps he owed the man some work.

  7

  Saturday, 9 May (10:45 p.m. CST – Memphis, Tennessee)

  Will ate a late dinner of Memphis-style ribs in the hotel restaurant and th
en went up to his room. No matter how nice they were, hotel rooms could be some of the loneliest places on earth. Like most things, it depended on one’s state of mind.

  He stepped through a sliding glass door onto the room’s seventh floor balcony and looked out over the Mississippi River as a barge drifted under a bridge. He leaned against the railing and admired the stars shimmering in the night sky. They were brilliant despite the large red moon and lights of the city. Each star represented the possibility of a different world, but it was the blackness between them that gave him a sense of the infinite, the eternal, and, for some unknown reason, hope.

  His phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen: it was Denise.

  “I miss you,” she said before saying hello.

  His chest tightened.

  “I should have gone with you,” she said.

  Will wanted her with him, but it would have been selfish. “It’s only temporary,” he assured her. Even though that was true, he wasn’t certain where he’d go next. Maybe he’d be in even deeper cover and be out of contact with her completely.

  Her voice changed to a professional tone as she filled him in on the status of his civil case, and then on their hunt for Red Box personnel. What she told him next made his mind reel.

  “Kelly Hatley passed away,” she said.

  He was speechless. The young dental assistant was sadistic and she deserved what she got, but it was also saddening. He felt cheated: he’d wanted her to survive so that she’d be confronted with her crimes and sent to prison.

  “When?”

  “Last night. She was overmedicated. She was murdered.”

  So it had started. He imagined a food chain with the government at the top hunting down all Red Wraith personnel. The upper-echelon Red Wraith figures were second in the chain, taking out the lower-ranked personnel before the FBI caught up with them and offered deals for their testimonies.