Project- Heritage

by Rob Horner

  “They’re getting over-confident,” Debbie observed, noting a distinct lack of any monitoring equipment. The woman looked as though she was sleeping. There was no intravenous drip of Diprivan to keep her sedated, no straps to keep her bed-ridden, and no electrocardiograph package to monitor heart rate, pulse oximetry, and blood pressure. The combination was a favorite trick of the facility as it set a precedent for the waking patient. If you woke up in what looked like a hospital bed, tubes in your arms and wires on your chest, it made you receptive to the suggestion that something bad had happened.

  “Nope, just a little smarter,” Billy said. “The bed has a patient alert activated. Once her weight leaves the bed, it will alarm.”

  “Anything you can do?” Debbie asked.

  “Nope, this isn’t something hackable. It’s a hard-wired alarm, might even have an audible component in the room or on the same floor, plus it’ll definitely alert the security station on the second floor even if they won’t be able to see anything different.”

  “Nice. New tricks,” Debbie said.

  “Yeah, but old furniture,” Brian replied, nodding to the nightstand.

  “That won’t be the same weight as her,” Debbie said.

  “Shouldn’t matter,” Brian said, looking at the foot of the bed, where a small LED display should have shown the patient’s weight. The display was dark. “They didn’t weigh her. And look at this,” he added, pointing to a single red button with writing next to it.

  To deactivate the bed alarm, press and hold the red ALARM button until it glows green.

  Brian looked up at Debbie, who smiled and said, “It can’t be that easy.”

  “What?” Billy asked.

  “Apparently, the bed alarm can be turned off from the bed itself,” Brian said. “At least that’s what it looks like.”

  “Well, go ahead and try it,” Billy said. “I’ll watch the rooms. If they come running, jump into a different one. But hurry up. The guy in the john just set his magazine aside.”

  God, that’s so creepy, Brian thought. Cameras in the bathrooms.

  Debbie reached down and pressed the button. After about 3 seconds, the ALARM button changed from red to green.

  “No movement,” Billy reported. “Get her out of there.”

  With Debbie’s help, Brian maneuvered the middle-aged woman into a Fireman’s carry. Groaning as he rose to his feet, he found her weight manageable. He wasn’t relishing going down two flights of steps with her, but he should be able to handle it.

  “I’ll cover us,” Debbie said, pulling a Beretta Px4 Storm chambered for 9mm rounds from her lab coat pocket as Brian started for the door. Debbie rushed around him and out into the hall.

  “Hurry,” she said, checking left and right before turning back to the stairwell.

  Brian grunted under the woman’s weight, wishing he were twenty years younger. It wasn’t that she was all that heavy—if anything, she was small and compact, in remarkable shape—he was just too old for these games. He’d been spoiled being able to use the elevators.

  He followed Debbie back to the stairwell. His back cried out at every heavy step from the third floor back to the first, and the trip seemed to take an eternity, but Billy had done his work well and no one came after them.

  “I sent them to check out a motion detector alarm in one of the lab stations,” he chuckled. “Motion sensors are some of the easiest things to hack.”

  “Since you’re having so much fun,” Brian grunted, “I call dibs in the van on the next run.” He sighed audibly as they left the building and the cool air outside the facility stroked his face.

  “Hope you didn’t forget anything, sweetheart,” Billy remarked as he locked the glass doors behind them.

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, running ahead of Brian to make a place for the woman in the bed of the truck, surrounded by dirt and covered by the light tarp.

  The bored guard recognized their truck as they pulled to the guard post, pushing the button to raise the black and yellow striped bar before Brian came to a complete stop. A few minutes later and they were back at the visitor’s center, transferring the woman from the truck bed to the more comfortable confines of the van.

  “Piece of cake,” Billy said, gently laying her head and shoulders onto the carpeted floor.

  “Where to now?” Brian asked.

  “Our place,” Debbie answered, moving to jump into the driver’s seat.

  Billy lingered by the open back door of the van as Brian stepped out, his soft brown eyes intent upon Brian’s face. “You really think she might know something, don’t you?” he asked his friend gently.

  Brian started to answer, then hushed as a soft moan came from inside the van.

  “Sounds like Sleeping Beauty is waking up,” Debbie observed.

  “Must be the fresh Illinois air,” Billy added.

  “Let me,” Brian said, pushing past the taller man, climbing back into the van’s interior.

  Slowly, as if fighting every step of the way, the woman opened her eyes. Brian was prepared for any of several different reactions to the presence of a strange man by her side.

  But there was one reaction he hadn’t counted on.

  “Mmmm, my,” the woman mumbled, blinking her eyes furiously in the dim light.

  “Shh,” Brian said. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

  “I…you? No, but like you…like…you look just like your son.”

  Brian’s heart leapt within his chest, and he would have started questioning the woman immediately, with no care for her comfort. But her few words had exhausted her. Her eyes slipped closed and her breathing slowed as she fell back into her drugged sleep.

  Chapter 19

  Experiments

  1

  “Damn it!” Agent Travers shouted, separating each syllable with a slam of his fist. The small table in the break room of Watchtower jumped.

  For his part, Lieutenant Barnes reclined in his chair, unimpressed by the agent’s anger. The long day yesterday following a sleepless night Friday night had left him physically and mentally exhausted. He’d managed to catch a few hours’ sleep in this same chair, while upstairs first Lisa, and then the weekend night shift technician Lawrence, blistered their fingers tapping into every street camera they could find, every ATM video monitor or convenience store security feed, trying to find Travis’s Focus.

  Aside from bank cameras at the Navy Federal Credit Union branch Travis and Sherry visited yesterday morning, they hadn’t found anything. It was obvious from the bank feed that Travis and Sherry were closer than any of them had been led to believe. Honestly, no two people, having just met, would stay so close, like they feared being separated.

  The problem lay more in the area being searched than with any special knowledge or skill of the subjects. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, Virginia Beach wasn’t a technological mecca of government paranoia. There weren’t traffic cameras on every streetlight, and store security cameras were often props, not recording anything. Even the hotels didn’t have to make their camera feeds available without a warrant. And you couldn’t get a warrant to search a hotel’s security feeds without knowing which hotel’s feeds you wanted the warrant for.

  Agents Black and Kirkson had driven out to Chick’s Beach, then to The Strip, walking through parking lots, looking at license plates, but came back empty-handed around midnight.

  Captain Ortega had been waiting for them when they first returned to Watchtower. After taking one look at the poor woman Agents Black and Kirkson held between them, he’d made a phone call to facilitate her transfer somewhere else and then disappeared. He’d driven back to his temporary lodgings, apparently wanting nothing more to do with the situation. Barnes sleepily wondered if that made the Captain look more like a strong man backing out, or like a coward afraid of getting too far in.

  Stifling a yawn that might have angered the agent further, Barnes wished he’d had more sense than to become involved in this ludicrous ass
ignment when it was offered three years before. Now, all he could think of was finding a plausible excuse to leave the building so he could jump in his car and make his way to the airport. He had until five p.m.

  Rubbing tired eyes, Barnes wished it was all over. It was only a little past five in the morning. God, was that all? And just look at the agent! Even though Travers had to have been awake just as long, the man looked fresh out of the shower. Perhaps that was something you developed with years of practice as a secret agent. Whatever the case, Barnes found himself hoping he never developed the ability.

  The other two agents were still upstairs, bothering Lawrence to no end, so why was Travers down here keeping him from sleeping? Stifling another yawn, Lieutenant Barnes resigned himself to one more day with the rude and unstable man. Let him rail, if it made him feel better. Robert’s role in the whole catastrophe was soon to be over. That knowledge gave him what was known to military personnel as “short-timer’s attitude.” Why should he invest too much of himself in something that would soon be out of his hands forever?

  Sighing again, Barnes grabbed the loose reports Travers had provided on the subjects. If he wasn’t going to be allowed anymore sleep, at least he could dig into the full profiles on his two wayward sailors. Flipping through more than a dozen pages—everything from birth records to high school transcripts—he looked for the psychological reports. If any clue was to be found, it would be hidden in these pages.

  “And there you go!” Travers shouted, waving at hand at the papers. “Looking at those damned reports. I don’t know why I agreed to even let you see them. I tell you, they’re running scared. They don’t know what to do, so they’ll do nothing. Come noon, they’ll call me, and then we’ll have them.”

  “And if they don’t?” Lieutenant Barnes asked.

  “Then I’ll get the kill codes from the captain and pick up their bodies wherever they fall,” he replied irritably. “Either way, those reports won’t tell us shit!”

  Resisting the impulse to snort in derision—though the thought of seeing the agent’s reaction almost made him do it anyway—Robert continued to peruse the results of extensive hours of mental evaluation.

  Sherry’s report was an interesting read. Though highly intelligent, off the charts above average, she fell right in line with the intuitiveness ascribed to women. She appreciated fact but had an uncanny knack for finding truth within conjecture, often without enough evidence to support her decision. Once formed, it would take irrefutable proof to make her change her opinion.

  Chuckling, Barnes was able to see why the idea of giving her a fake husband should have been rejected from the start. No matter how elaborate brainwashing techniques became, there was no way they could have given her strong enough assurances that her marriage was real. It would have had to look and feel real. Perhaps a better actor than Agent Frazier could have made it work. As it was, with her documented resistance to change, all it would take was one clue things weren’t right and the whole mesh of woven lies would unravel like a badly tied knot. Considering the bank images of Travis and Sherry together, that appeared to be what happened.

  Travis’s evaluation was more troubling; he was the more dangerous of the two. Extremely intelligent and intuitive, able to adjust to rapid changes in circumstance with the agility of a tightrope walker practicing on a line tied between two fishing boats, he was a natural problem solver. If it was possible, he would consider it; and if Agent Travers and his team disregarded a possibility as inconceivable, they better make damned sure it was, because you could bet Travis would think of it.

  On the surface he appeared spontaneous, but the reports showed his spontaneity had a high probability of being the most direct, most efficient solution to a given problem. The only apparent fault in his psyche—if one could call it a fault—was his unshakable faith in his values, those beliefs instilled in him by his parents. Maybe it was the exhaustion playing with his head, but Barnes pictured Travis as a knight in a bygone age, a defender of justice following a code of chivalry.

  Travers lurched to his feet and left the room. A few seconds later, his heavy tread was audible climbing the metal stairs. Finally. Lieutenant Barnes let the pages fall back to the table and lay his head down on his arms.

  The only good thing that had happened—and Robert wasn’t convinced it was a good thing even though it beat the alternative—was the news that Victoria Galer had reached the facility in Illinois unharmed. Everything seemed to be happening in Illinois. Too much.

  He yawned.

  Heavily sedated, Mrs. Galer was scheduled for her…reprogramming…later in the day. This time her memories would correspond completely with Sherry’s so there could be no chance of a second meeting. Barnes shuddered at the plan to relocate the woman to the West Coast, just to further decrease her chances of affecting Sherry’s future. So much trouble to a woman who’d done nothing in her life worse than be a good mother. But at least she’d live.

  He wasn’t so sure Sherry would be so lucky.

  2

  The jangling of the hotel phone jolted Sherry out of a contented sleep. Groaning, she opened her eyes, her first thought one of regret that they’d requested a 6:30 wake-up call. Travis sat up beside her and reached for the phone on the nightstand.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled thickly.

  The sheets rustled again as Sherry rose to a sitting position, turning her tousled head toward Travis. Leaning toward one another, they began the day with a kiss.

  Waking up beside Travis was like coming awake in heaven. Sherry couldn’t believe so much had happened so fast, with more still to come. She wouldn’t trade the night they’d shared for anything in the world. It wasn’t just the sex, though that had been so close to perfect her body glowed with heat just thinking about it.

  He was there for her in a way no other man had ever been. He didn’t shy away from the lazy talks she wanted to engage in after making love but seemed just as talkative. It was that, and so many other things, that bonded them closely together.

  It was also their power, limited when they were apart, yet so potent when they were in contact with one another.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Travis asked as Sherry smiled at her inner monologue.

  “Just thinking about last night.”

  “Which time?”

  She laughed, knowing he was aware her thoughts were not on their sexual escapades, but rather on the tests they’d run after the shared bath.

  “Ah,” Travis said, following her thoughts, “you’re remembering the lights.”

  “Among other things,” she replied, disentangling herself from the sheets. Moving to the dresser, ignoring the distracting thoughts Travis transmitted concerning the attractiveness of her rear, she tried to focus on what they’d learned.

  The blowout of the overhead light provided numerous ideas and theories concerning their abilities. While holding hands and concentrating, they could alter the voltage and current running through the blue lines. They imposed their collective will on a line running to a light switch, jumping the natural open behind the panel and turning on the wall lights even though the switch was set to off. Easy as that had been, they found easier to exert control over things already turned on. Without having to concentrate on keeping the lights lit, they could dim or brighten them by varying the amount of power running through the wires. In a similar fashion, they turned on the television, flipped through the channels, and changed the volume, all without touching the remote control.

  In the limited time before they crawled into bed, they hadn’t come up with a reliable way to determine if they had any power to alter the green lines indicating transmissions, but even if they could only affect wired circuitry, it was still a potent discovery. Considering their enemy’s prolific use of technology, they might be able to come out ahead, assuming they could learn to use their power effectively.

  Unfortunately, no matter how powerful they seemed to be when joined physically, they were limited to mental communica
tion when apart. There were no lines in the air or running through the walls. They couldn’t hear other people’s thoughts, and they couldn’t affect anything.

  “What’re you doing?” Travis asked, also rising from the bed and moving to Sherry’s side. Glancing at him as he approached, she smiled approvingly at his trim physique. Though he couldn’t be called muscular, he was very well-defined, every line indicative of strength.

  “Glad you approve,” Travis said with a smile. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I was going to go take a shower. Care to join me?”

  “Is that all?” he asked lightly.

  “It’ll have to do,” she replied, projecting her awareness that time was short. They had just over five hours left before they had to contact the nasty agent, though she didn’t begrudge the time spent sleeping. If all the time they had left together were these five hours…

  “That’ll be enough of that,” Travis said softly, his voice almost a growl, as he pulled her into an embrace. “We’re going to beat these guys, no matter what.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Sherry asked and was surprised to feel herself on the verge of tears. Damn it! She’d cried—and laughed—more in the past twenty-four hours than at any other time she could remember.

  “I’ll gladly take credit for the laughter,” Travis said lightly.

  Sherry couldn’t resist his irrepressible good humor. Even though she knew he was reading her thoughts, she smiled at his choice of words, her fears fading in the face of his solid reassurance.

  Drawing back and letting his hands fall to her waist, Travis looked into her eyes and asked, “You mentioned a shower?”

  Sherry gave in to a snort of laughter that drew an answering smile on his face. “Let’s go.”

  “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Travis replied, removing his hands and turning to the curtained tub. “Just don’t go trying to hog all the hot water like you did the blanket last night.”

  Sherry laughed, responding that the blanket had been kicked to the foot of the bed, and was therefore an invalid argument.