Noah Wolf Box Set 2

by David Archer

  Monique looked into his eyes and nodded once. “I’ll be in touch.” She turned and walked back to the car, got into the back seat, and said something to the driver. The car started again and drove away, down the road Noah had just followed to get there.

  The other cars stayed where they were for at least five minutes, and then all of them started up and drove away at once. Noah waited until they were out of sight and then got back into the Charger, started the engine, and put it into gear. He drove slowly down the road, and all of the other vehicles were gone before he got back to the highway.

  He turned left and headed toward Berryville, driving sedately and thinking over the conversation he’d just had. He was almost halfway back by the time he realized that his thinking was becoming cloudy, and it was at that point that his vision began to blur slightly. He shook his head to try to clear it, but it didn’t help. He saw a gravel parking lot ahead on his right and slowed the car quickly so that he could turn in. He got it stopped and parked, then opened his door to climb out, but his legs seemed to be weak. He couldn’t manage to get up out of the driver’s seat, so he simply sat back and took out his phone.

  His eyes would not focus, as he tried to find the icon that would ring through to Sarah. He shook his head again, desperately trying to think, but it only made him dizzy. The phone slipped from his hand as he fell back against the seat.

  The last thing he managed to see was another car pulling in just in front of his own, but then everything went dark. His thoughts continued for a few seconds more, as he realized that she had somehow poisoned him when she touched his knee.

  Noah Wolf, who had never experienced any kind of regret, suddenly wished he had called Sarah before attending the meeting. He would have liked to have been able to say goodbye.

  * * * * *

  He wasn’t dead. Noah knew that he was alive because the dead can’t hurt that badly. Something seemed to be running around inside his head, smashing on his brain with a large hammer. In all of his life, he had never felt a headache like this one.

  He opened his eyes, but it was dark wherever he was at. The darkness was complete, and he could tell no difference with his eyes open, so he closed them again. It didn’t help with the pain, but it allowed him to concentrate just a bit more of his attention on his other senses.

  He was lying on something hard, he could tell that. He tried moving his hands and found that they were not restrained, but he was too weak to attempt getting up. The surface under his hand felt like wood, and he suspected that he was lying on the floor.

  He breathed in quickly through his nose. There was an odor, something familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. He stopped trying to recognize it and simply thought about what it might remind him of. By letting his thoughts run free for a moment, he glimpsed a quick mental image of a flower garden. He suspected there were either flowers growing nearby, or else he was in a funeral home.

  He turned away from that line of thought and listened, straining his ears for any sound. There was something, some kind of rhythmic noise, and it dawned on him that he was hearing the sound of an electric motor. It sounded like a big one, but he couldn’t be sure.

  A wooden surface, the smell of flowers, and an electric motor. He tried desperately to put those things together into something coherent, but nothing would come. He decided it was time to force his body to cooperate, so he began to struggle up to a sitting position.

  A wave of nausea struck him, and he fell back. His head hit the floor, and he was gone again.

  A loud creaking invaded his consciousness and forced him to wake. The pain was much less, now, and bearable. He opened his eyes and saw that light was coming through a doorway some distance away, and someone was walking toward him. From the shape and stature, he knew that it was Monique.

  “What…” His voice cracked, and he worked his tongue a bit to generate some moisture in his mouth. “What the hell is going on?” It still sounded rough, but he got the words out.

  “There’s a reason,” Monique said, “why those few people who know who I am have never betrayed me. Would you like to know that reason? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so you might as well just listen.” She knelt down beside him and put a hand on his left arm. “There’s an amazing bit of technology that’s out there today, something most people would never have heard of. You know how they can inject a microchip into you, something that can carry a lot of information about who you are, your finances, your medical records, all that stuff? Well, that’s not the only thing that’s been developed for injection. Do you feel the soreness in your armpit? If not, don’t worry, it’ll come. We just injected you with a little insurance. The needle was kind of large, almost two millimeters in diameter, but it allowed us to implant something into your muscle. It’s lodged right beside the artery that comes through your shoulder, the one that feeds all the blood to your arm. It’s a very tiny but very powerful explosive device, and it contains a microchip that can receive a radio signal from any of a number of satellites overhead. If it receives that signal, which is heavily encrypted, then it will detonate. The force of the explosion will tear most of your arm off and will rip that artery to shreds. You would bleed to death within barely over a minute, and nothing anyone could do would save you.”

  “I thought we made a deal,” Noah managed to croak out.

  “Oh, we did,” Monique said. “Let’s just say that I like to have a bit of insurance. There are only two things that could set off that device and kill you. One would be if I enter a certain code into the computer that holds the encrypted signal. Should I do so, it would explode within three seconds. The other is the one I’m particularly proud of, though. You see, there is another little device implanted inside of me. It measures my heart rate and keeps track of every beat. Should my heart suddenly come to a stop, it would wait about fifteen minutes to see if it was merely some sort of glitch, but if it hadn’t detected my heart beating again during that time, then it would instruct that same computer to send that signal out. That way, it becomes just as important to you that I survive as it is to me.”

  Noah looked at the dim image of her face and licked his lips. “Pretty smart,” he said. “You drugged me?”

  She waved her fingers in front of his face. “Some patches on my fingers. I put them on just before I got out of the car, because that stuff is extremely potent. It contains a natural solvent, so it passed right through the fibers of your jeans and into your skin. Once it got there, it was absorbed into the capillaries and carried into your bloodstream. We knew how long it would take to act and simply followed you. I was confident you’d pull over once you felt it start to take effect, and I was right. Then all we had to do was help our poor, inebriated friend out of his car and into our own. I had this little place prepared in a hurry after I knew we were going to meet. If you agreed to my offer, then I knew that I’d have to bring you here to put my insurance policy in place. If you had not agreed, then we would’ve simply killed you where you sat.”

  She stood up straight again. “We didn’t leave your car,” she said. “It’s sitting right outside the building. You might have to use your GPS to find your way home, but you’ll be fine. The effects will wear off the rest of the way within the next twenty minutes or so, and you’ll be able to get up and walk out of here. As for our arrangement, I’ll get everything sorted out, and then I’ll be in touch. As I said, it might take a couple of months. Until then, just keep doing your job so that no one suspects anything.”

  Monique turned and began walking toward the doorway, but then she stopped and came back to him. “Can you believe I almost forgot? There’s one other little thing you need to know about that device in your armpit. It measures the amount of pressure that your tissues put against it. If that pressure drops significantly lower than it was in the beginning, it will also cause the device to detonate. That pressure can only drop if someone is trying to take it out of you, though, so it probably isn’t a good idea to go looking for a surgeon. Be
lieve it or not, that little sucker has enough power that it could probably kill the doctor as well. You wouldn’t want to do that, now, would you?”

  She turned again, and this time she walked out the door and closed it behind her. Noah heard a car start and drive away, and then he began forcing himself to get up. He made it, but he was so dizzy that he had to stumble into a wall to stay on his feet.

  Although it was dark inside the building again, he was certain that the doorway was off to his right. He felt along the wall until he came to the corner, then followed that and found the door. It had a simple doorknob, and the door opened when he turned it.

  The Charger was sitting there, just as she had said. He staggered over to it and leaned on the front fender for a moment, then managed to get the door open and climb inside. Once he was there, though, he simply leaned back in the seat and waited for the worst of the nausea and dizziness to pass.

  And then he started the car and went home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was just past seven thirty by the time Noah got home, but Sarah hadn’t been excessively worried because she had known he was supposed to meet the mole that evening. When he pulled in, she stepped out onto the porch with a big smile and waited for him to climb the stairs.

  He smiled and pulled her close to kiss her, then kept an arm around her as they walked inside. At that moment, though, he dropped the act.

  Sarah had made beef stew for dinner, and they sat down at the table while he told them both what had happened. Sarah swallowed hard several times as he related the story, and Neil simply sat there and stared with his eyes wide.

  “There has to be some way to get it out,” Sarah said. “Some way that doesn’t kill you. There simply has to be.”

  “I agree,” Noah said, “but it’ll have to wait. For now, I’ve got to stay in character on this mission and make sure Monique thinks I’m going along with our agreement. I can’t risk blowing either end of this thing, not right now.”

  Neil shook his head. “The thing is, that gadget’s got to have a disarm code. If we could figure out what it is, we could simply shut the damn thing off, and then any doctor can take it out.”

  “Yes, but how do you figure it out? I thought about that on the way back here, but what if putting in the wrong disarm code simply tells it to explode?”

  Neil scowled. “And that’s exactly how I would design it, if it were me. Dammit, Noah. This just can’t be happening.”

  Sarah reached over and touched Noah’s hand. “So we just act like it’s not there?”

  “For the most part, yes,” Noah said. “The only thing I want to do is try to keep you on my right from now on. If it does go off, the rest of my body should protect you unless you’re right there under my left arm.”

  Sarah just looked at him. “Do you think I’d want to live if that thing goes off?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Noah said. “I just can’t risk you getting hurt or killed at the same time. From now on, you walk on my right, you sleep on my right—we usually do it that way anyhow, but I’m going to be a lot more conscious of it from now on.”

  “Oh, damn,” she said. “How can you be so freaking calm about this? Noah, I know you well enough to know you’re not going to let this stop you from killing her the first time you get the chance. You understand that that would be suicide for you? Right?”

  “Again, it doesn’t matter. Eliminating the mole, eliminating the risk that she represents to America, is far more important than my life.”

  Sarah looked into his eyes for another moment, then got up and stormed down the hall. Noah heard the bedroom door slam shut as he turned to look at Neil.

  Neil put up both hands in a defensive gesture. “Hey, I get it,” he said. “Thing is, that’s not just part of your team that stomped off down the hall. That’s your wife, Noah. She’s not going to take this logically, no matter how you try to explain it. All she sees is the fact that if you kill this woman, she ends up a widow.”

  “I understand that,” Noah said. “Her emotions aside, it doesn’t change the fact that Monique’s death is still a necessity.”

  “Okay, fine, I get that. The only thing I want to say is that we’ve got a little bit of time. You said it’s going to take her a couple months to get this set up and get back to you, right? Well, I’m going to encode this whole freaking disaster and send it off to Molly. I figure, between me and her, we’re bound to come up with some way to either shut that thing off or get it out of you without it blowing up.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Noah said. “Despite the fact I’m willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission, I don’t have a death wish. I’ve always said that the world is better with Sarah in it; I assure you, I’m fully aware that she feels the same way about me. Maybe even more so, she feels things that I don’t. Believe me when I say I’m holding out a lot of hope that you geniuses can come up with an answer before I have to put a bullet in that woman.”

  Neil just stared at him for a moment, and then he put his head in his hands and looked at the table. “Geez, Noah,” he said. “Why do you have to give me headaches like this?”

  Noah said nothing but got up and walked down the hall. He tapped on the bedroom door and then tried the knob. It turned, and he opened the door and stepped inside to find Sarah lying on the bed, sniffling as tears soaked into the pillow she had shoved her face into.

  “Neil thinks he and Molly can come up with an answer,” Noah said. “I think they can, too. Until then, I simply want to take some sensible precautions. Okay?”

  Sarah didn’t move for a few seconds, but then she rolled over and looked up at him. “Don’t ask me not to be close to you. Don’t ask me not to put my arms around you and hold you close. Don’t ask me not to make love to you—don’t ask any of that. I don’t know how, but somehow we’re going to beat this thing.” She wiped the moisture away from her eyes. “And then you’re going to kill that bitch, and I’m going to watch when you do it.”

  Noah looked at her, and then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Can we go eat dinner now?”

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  ALSO BY DAVID ARCHER

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  NOAH WOLF THRILLERS

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  In Sheep's Clothing (Book 3)

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  Balance of Power (Book 7)

  Time to Hunt (Book 8)

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  Unfinished Business (Book 17)