FUSED: iSEAL OMNIBUS EDITION (A Military Technothriller)

by Jude Hardin

  Something.

  The men who’d abducted her from her hotel room had found the phone number Mike had written down, the number to the Shell station at 3rd and Biscayne, and one of them had pressed the barrel of a pistol against her head while the other asked a series of questions.

  “Where is the telephone that belongs to this number?”

  “I don’t know,” Nika said.

  He slapped her. Hard.

  “Where is it?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know,” Nika repeated, the tears falling from her eyes like raindrops.

  “It doesn’t matter. It will be easy enough to find out. When were you supposed to call? I need the day and time. Tell me now and we’ll end this business mercifully.”

  “You’re going to kill me?”

  “Of course. But whether it’s quickly or slowly is up to you.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Nika said.

  And she didn’t. She knew that the men would be able to trace the number to the payphone at the Shell station, and that once they knew the location, they could just stake the place out until Mike showed up. She knew all that, but she refused to make their job any easier for them.

  Now she would pay the consequences.

  And she was okay with that. She’d known for a long time that her punishment would come.

  If anything, it was overdue.

  Because as horrible as all this had been, it still didn’t count as the worst time in Nika Dunning’s life. Not even close. That shining bright oozing red boil of a nightmare would never be eclipsed, no matter what.

  She thought about it now, as she’d thought about it every day since it had happened. It was the kind of thing that would never leave her. It would follow her to her grave, and perhaps beyond. It was hard for her to imagine that even God could forgive such a thing.

  When Nika was fourteen years old, her brother and sister went missing one afternoon. Gwendolyn was five, and little Jason only three. They were the first children from their mother’s side of the family to have been born in America. They were special. They had American names. They were going to do great things in this country!

  And on that sweltering August day nine years ago—one of the hottest on record for St. Louis, Missouri—Nika was supposed to have been watching them.

  “We want to go swimming,” Gwendolyn had said. “Take us to the pool.”

  “Not today,” Nika said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m busy. Now take Jason and go play in your room.”

  “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “I am while Mom and Dad are away. Now go!”

  Gwendolyn rolled her eyes, turned and skipped away, those long blonde pigtails of hers bouncing adorably as she took her little brother by the hand and led him to her room.

  “Come on,” she said. “Nika’s being a real buttmunch today.”

  “A real buttmunch,” Jason repeated.

  The community pool in their gated neighborhood was only a couple of blocks away, but Nika wanted to finish all the laundry and get everything put away before Mom and Dad returned from their weekly tennis match. They’d signed up for mixed doubles in the local USTA league, and the Saturday outings had become a regular thing for them.

  Nika was always left in charge of the kids, but she didn’t mind. Mom and Dad paid her well, and they even gave her a nice bonus when she finished washing, drying, and folding all of the family’s clothes for the week. Nika had started a savings account, and she figured she would have enough for a good used car by the time she turned sixteen. It would have been fun to take the kids to the pool, especially on such a hot day, but she wanted that bonus. She couldn’t wait to have her own car.

  She descended the stairs to the basement and loaded the washer with another basketful of dirty laundry. The clothes in the dryer still had another ten minutes to go, so she decided to give one of her friends a call while she waited.

  She sat on a plastic lawn chair there in the cool basement and talked with Nancy Brighton about the boys they’d met at the skating rink last weekend. Would those same guys be there again tonight? Nika and Nancy could only hope.

  When the dryer buzzed, Nika said bye to Nancy and got back to work. She pulled the warm clean clothes out of the dryer, stuffed them into the basket and carried them upstairs.

  She dumped everything on her bed and started sorting, still thinking about those boys at the skating rink. She liked the one named Greg. Tall and handsome. Nice hair. Nice smile. And he played guitar in a band. That was so cool! Maybe he would ask her to skate this time. She’d been thinking about it all week, hoping that he would.

  She picked up a stack of shorts and tops and carried them across the hall to her little sister’s bedroom, expecting to see Gwendolyn and Jason playing there on the floor.

  But they weren’t.

  And when she went out to the hall and called for them, they didn’t answer.

  Maybe they were in the family room playing videogames.

  But they weren’t.

  Nika walked to the kitchen and opened the door to the garage to make sure they hadn’t wandered out there. The big two-car bay door was open, the first sign that something might be seriously wrong.

  Because Mom and Dad never left it open when they were away from home.

  Nika trotted through the garage and out into the hot sunshine. She ran to the sidewalk, looked left and right, but the kids were nowhere to be found.

  Then she saw the pair of swimming goggles at the edge of the driveway. Apparently they’d started walking toward the pool, despite Nika’s instructions to stay inside.

  Nika took off after them, running as fast as she could, but when she rounded the bend at the first intersection, she saw that she was too late. They were lying on the pavement, both of them, victims of a hit and run. A car must have turned the corner too fast, clipping them and then leaving the scene.

  Nika had learned CPR in her ninth grade health class, but as she performed the mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing and the hand-over-hand chest compressions on one and then the other, she knew in her heart that her efforts were futile.

  They were gone.

  Jason and Gwendolyn were gone.

  The paramedics came promptly, but there was nothing they could do.

  The police interviewed all of the nearby residents, but nobody had seen anything.

  Four days later, the Dunning family buried their two youngest members. Everyone told Nika that it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better.

  It was her fault.

  She never should have taken her eyes off of them. She never should have stayed in the basement, waiting for the clothes to get dry. The noise from the washer and dryer had prevented her from hearing the automatic garage door grind open.

  Nine years and dozens of counseling sessions later, Nika still blamed herself.

  If only she hadn’t been so concerned with earning extra money for a car…

  If only she hadn’t had boys on her mind…

  If only she’d never made that call to Nancy Brighton…

  Because of Nika’s neglect, Gwendolyn and Jason Dunning had been robbed of their lives. It was impossible for Nika to rationalize that away, or to wrap it in an imaginary box and shove it to the darkest recesses of her mind, as the psychologist had suggested.

  After the tragedy, Nika had immersed herself in her schoolwork, studying late every night—even on weekends—and evading her friends when they called or stopped by. She continued these habits through college, where she graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in nursing.

  She found a job at a hospital right away, progressing from a medical/surgical floor to the ICU and then the trauma unit. She wanted to become a flight nurse someday, and when she heard about the job opening at CereCirc Solutions, she thought that the groundbreaking research study going on there might make for a good addition to her resume.

  And now here she was, in some sort of dungeon, w
ith a concrete floor and a concrete ceiling and moldy sheetrock partitions thin enough to hear the agonized cries of her fellow prisoners. Her steel cot, the only piece of furniture in the space, had been bolted to the floor in the center of the room, so she couldn’t even push it into a corner. There was no escaping the incessant hum of the overhead fluorescent light fixture, or the occasional howls of terror from next door.

  No food, no water, and it was impossible to sleep. If Nika’s captors were trying to drive her insane, they were doing a good job of it.

  Just as she thought she couldn’t tolerate the glaring brightness for one more second, the light went out.

  Abruptly.

  Completely.

  The sudden darkness sent stabbing pains from one side of Nika’s skull to the other. Multicolored dots danced in front of her eyes.

  The heavy steel door creaked open and slammed shut.

  Nika curled up tighter, trying to hide her face and her private parts as a pair of hard-sole shoes clacked in and stopped in front of her bunk.

  A tiny sliver of light bled in through the gap at the bottom of the door, and when Nika’s eyes adjusted, she could see that the man had brought a wooden library chair into the room with him. Reeking of cigarette smoke, he sat there in the shadows staring at her, his breath coming out in short little wheezes, his facial features hidden by the darkness and the raised hood of his sweatshirt.

  He threw Nika a blanket.

  “How are you?” he said.

  Nika unfolded the coarse wool cover and draped it over the front of her body.

  “Thirsty,” she said.

  “Here. Take this.”

  The man handed her a plastic bottle. She screwed the cap off and took a long drink, the water trickling past her parched throat and landing in the pit of her stomach like a cold ball of lead.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Nika said.

  “You’re all right. Just don’t drink any more water right now. You have to drink it slowly after going without for so long.”

  “Why are you doing this to me? I don’t have any information for you.”

  “Irrelevant,” the man said.

  He stood and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves.

  2

  In West Memphis, Arkansas, past the water tower, a mile or so east of the railroad tracks on U.S. 70, there was a portable sign in front of a strip mall that said DAY LABORERS WANTED.

  Mike decided to check it out.

  He walked past the General Dollar and the Radio Shack and a pizza place called Mario’s, stopped at a narrow storefront with a homemade sign taped to the plate glass window.

  JAY’S TEMPORARY SERVICE. APPLY WITHIN.

  Mike pushed his way through the swinging glass door and stepped up to the counter.

  Waited. His tooth was killing him. It had started hurting yesterday, one of the molars on the lower right side. Unfortunately, the MK-2 brain-computer interface hadn’t been programmed to block pain except in extreme emergencies. The tooth needed to be fixed. Mike knew that, but he didn’t have any money for a dentist. He didn’t even have money for a bottle of aspirin.

  After walking the streets and thinking about it for a couple of days, he’d decided that trying to find the man named Oberwand—the man who’d been trying to kill him and steal the device implanted in his brain—was an exercise in futility. Oberwand could be anywhere. All Mike had to go on were the dying words of one of his associates, a man whose pelvis had been crushed by an engine block.

  There’s an underground complex on the other side of the—

  And that was it. The man died mid-sentence.

  On the other side of what? Mike had thought the river, possibly, and he’d walked across the bridge, but after talking to numerous drug addicts and prostitutes and bartenders and cab drivers, he’d started to wonder if such a complex even existed. Maybe the dying man had fabricated the whole thing.

  Mike had decided that the best course of action might be to turn everything down a notch and let Oberwand come to him. Oberwand had been good at tracking him so far, and there was no reason to believe that the trend wouldn’t continue. Mike would persist in exploring the underbelly of West Memphis, albeit at a less vigorous pace, searching for clues to Oberwand’s whereabouts, but the more likely scenario was that Oberwand would find Mike first. Oberwand still wanted the MK-2, and he would keep coming after Mike until he got it. That much was certain.

  Of course there was a possibility that Oberwand had killed Nika already. If so, he would pay the ultimate price. Mike would do everything in his power to make sure of that.

  And if Nika was still alive, Mike would be the happiest man in the world.

  He loved her.

  He didn’t know anything about himself yet, but he knew that he loved Nika Dunning.

  If she was still alive, he would find her and rescue her. And if she’d been harmed in any way, the man named Oberwand would wish he’d never been born.

  The clerk behind the counter, a man wearing black-framed eyeglasses with lenses as thick as hockey pucks, finally looked up from his computer screen and said, “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Jay?”

  “Yes. Is there something—”

  “I need a job,” Mike said.

  Jay gave him the once over. Mike was wearing a pair of khaki cargo pants, a brown long-sleeved knit pullover shirt, a Memphis Redbirds baseball cap, and the New Balance cross trainers he’d taken from Jock World a few days ago. Sunglasses, three-day beard. There was a backpack slung over his shoulder. Its contents included two pairs of heavy cotton socks, two pairs of boxer briefs, some grooming and bathing essentials, a dark blue windbreaker, and a black cat named Slick.

  “What kind of work were you looking for, sir?”

  “What kind of work do you have?”

  “Well, tell me a little bit about yourself. What are your qualifications?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sir?”

  “I can run really fast. I can nail a moving target the size of a dime from a hundred yards with a handgun. I’m a great bowler, and I’m a champion at the game Trivial Pursuit. I know practically everything there is to know.”

  “Sir—”

  “The sign out at the street says day laborers wanted. I don’t have a home address or an ID card. I need the kind of job that doesn’t require those things.”

  “Ah. You want to talk to Sidney. He’s in the gravel lot behind the shopping center. Singlewide mobile home back there.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mike turned to walk away.

  “Hey, Sidney’s long gone. He usually locks up a little after lunchtime. You’re way too late to find any sort of work today. If you want a job, you should be there at the trailer tomorrow morning by six o’clock. The earlier the better. The decent gigs usually fill up fast.”

  “I need money now,” Mike said. “I haven’t eaten in two days, and I don’t have a place to stay.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you, brother.”

  “Yeah. Can I borrow a paperclip?”

  “Sure.”

  The guy pulled a box from under the counter, pinched out a single Acco jumbo and handed it to Mike.

  “Thanks.”

  Mike walked outside, turned the corner, saw the fenced-in gravel lot behind the strip mall, headed that way.

  There was a padlock on the gate, but unfortunately it wasn’t the kind you could open with a key. Or a paperclip. Mike thumbed the combination dial, rattled the chain in disgust, walked around to the rear of the lot.

  “Hang on, Slick. It might get a little rough here for a minute.”

  “Meow,” the cat said from inside the backpack.

  With three strands of barbed wire on top of the heavy chain link, the fence was approximately seven feet and two inches tall at its lowest point. Mike still had the wire cutters he’d taken from Nika’s garage, but he didn’t want to damage the fence. Someone passing by might notice and call the cops.

 
He stood there for a minute and sized up the situation, assisted by the MK-2’s General Knowledge program.

  Using a technique called the Fosbury Flop, a man from Cuba had broken the world record for the high jump back in 1993. 2.45 meters. Eight feet and one quarter inch.

  So it was humanly possible to jump that high.

  And if it was humanly possible, Mike could do it.

  There was only one problem. Athletes jumping for sport had a nice thick pad on the other side of the bar. Mike had a gravel lot. Softer than concrete, but not by much.

  Still, the jump was doable, Mike thought, as long as he could land on his feet instead of his back. So along with the track and field maneuver, his jump would have to include some heavy duty gymnastics.

  All in a day’s work.

  He retreated a hundred feet or so into the weedy area behind the lot, secured his backpack to his shoulders, took off running, turned and leaped into the air a few feet before he got to the fence. Arching his back and thrusting his weight forward at the peak, he sailed over the barrier with relative ease. Once he’d cleared the barbed wire, he did a somersault in the air and landed on the other side with both feet on the ground.

  He looked himself over, somewhat amazed by the acrobatic performance, wondering what other seemingly impossible stunts the MK-2 might allow him to do. If nothing else worked out, he supposed he could always get a job with the circus.

  “Not bad, huh Slick? I think that was a new world record.”

  “Meow.”

  “In fact, I think I invented a whole new sport. Extreme high jumping.”

  Mike walked to the trailer. He used the paperclip to pick the lock on the front door, and then he slid it under the doormat so it would be there if he needed it again.

  He stepped over the threshold and switched on the overhead light.

  There was an office area in front with a counter and some desks and some file cabinets. Behind all that, through a narrow doorway, there was a small bedroom and a bathroom and a galley kitchen.

  “Meow.”

  Mike set the backpack on the floor and unzipped the compartment where he’d been keeping the cat. Slick climbed out and stretched, and then he started padding around and exploring the area.