FUSED: iSEAL OMNIBUS EDITION (A Military Technothriller)

by Jude Hardin

  Mike wasn’t even sure he had a family, but he probably did. If so, they certainly weren’t looking for him. They would have gotten the news by now, the news that he had died in the line of duty.

  Or some such nonsense.

  Because of the sensitive nature of the research at CereCirc Solutions, Mike’s family would have been notified discreetly, and they would have been told to keep any sort of memorial service private. The rest of the world didn’t need to know the details of the incident, or the names of the victims. It was all top secret, and it would stay that way for years.

  Not that Mike would recognize his own real name if he saw it, anyway. They could have published his obituary on the front page of the New York Times, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to him.

  He wondered if he would ever see his family again. He guessed that if he and his mother really did cross paths at some point, she would probably faint from the shock of the encounter.

  Paula delivered the shot of whiskey to Mike’s table.

  “You have time to sit here and talk for a minute?” Mike said.

  “Well, we’re pretty busy right now, so—”

  “It’s okay. Whenever you get a little break.”

  “All right.”

  Paula went about her business, and Mike sat there and sipped on his shot of whiskey. When the after-work crowd finally started sifting out, Paula came back and slid into the other side of the booth. She had a tall plastic glass with a straw sticking out of it. Some sort of soft drink, Mike guessed.

  “Is it like this every night?” he said.

  “Pretty much. Most of these guys are regulars. We get a younger crowd on the weekend. So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “I’m looking for a man named Oberwand.”

  “Who?”

  Mike spelled it for her. “He’s a criminal. I have reason to believe he might have some sort of underground complex in the area. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

  “Are you a cop?” Paula said.

  “I’m working undercover, so I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me. You have a picture of this man you’re looking for?”

  “No, but I can show you a picture of one of his accomplices. Do you have a computer here somewhere?”

  Paula reached into her pocket and pulled out her smart phone. She handed it to Mike, and he accessed the photograph from a news agency’s website. It was the man who’d been driving the car near the Shell station at 3rd and Biscayne in Memphis, the one who’d ended up with the engine in his lap.

  “It’s not a very good picture,” Paula said. “He looks kind of familiar, I guess. But the photograph’s so blurry, I can’t say for sure. Too bad we can’t scan it and run it through some of that fancy facial recognition software everyone’s been talking about. I was reading about it the other day on—”

  “Let me see the phone again,” Mike said.

  She handed him the phone, and he locked in on the man’s face. At first, nothing happened. Then, after a few seconds of intense staring, a holographic grid appeared in front of Mike’s visual field, along with a list of options.

  Dr. Aggerson had come through once again.

  “What are you doing?” Paula said.

  “Just a minute.”

  Concentrating on the man’s face, Mike was vaguely aware of Joe calling Paula to the bar, of her scooting out and walking away from the table. By the time she returned, Mike had what he needed.

  “Joe says my break is over,” she said.

  Mike handed her the phone. “Here’s a better picture,” he said. “He goes by several different names, and sometimes his hair is a different color.”

  “I know I’ve seen him somewhere. Is it all right if I ask Joe?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Mike said.

  He rose and followed Paula to the bar.

  11

  The door creaked open, allowing a wedge of light to slice through the room.

  The man in the hooded sweatshirt walked in.

  He held a pillow in one hand, and something else in the other. Nika squinted, tried to make out what it was as her eyes adjusted.

  Then she saw it. A syringe. A large one. 50ml. She’d used similar ones at times in her nursing practice.

  “What’s that for?” she said.

  “For your comfort. To lay your pretty head on.”

  “Not the pillow. The syringe.”

  “Ah. Nothing to worry about. Just a minor little procedure, and then—”

  “What kind of procedure?” Nika shouted. She gripped her blanket and curled into a fetal position on the mattress.

  “I’ll need you to spread your legs again,” the man said. “And really, you must calm down. There’s no point in getting agitated. It’s a waste of time. Mine, and yours.”

  “What’s in the syringe?” Nika asked, although she already had a pretty good idea. The man was planning to impregnate her. For what purpose, she didn’t know. She didn’t know anything anymore. Everything about her current existence was driving her to the edge of insanity. The isolation. The extreme brightness followed by extreme darkness. The silence.

  And the uncertainty of it all. That was the worst. Not knowing what sort of horror was coming next.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” the man said.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  The man put the syringe in his pocket, walked to the head of the cot, jammed the pillow down over Nika’s face and held it there with both hands. Nika couldn’t breathe. Not even a little bit. She squirmed and thrashed and struck out at the man with her fists, but it was no use. The man was too strong. Nika was going to die.

  “Are you going to cooperate now?” the man said, his voice muffled by the heavy foam pillow. “If so, hold one finger up for me.”

  Nika raised her arm, pointed toward the ceiling with her index finger. She didn’t have much of a choice. If she didn’t do what the man said, he was going to kill her. She wasn’t afraid to die, but it couldn’t be like this. She couldn’t bear being smothered.

  The man eased the pillow away from her face, and Nika sucked in a big delicious lungful of air.

  “Please,” she said, coughing, gasping. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  “That’s my girl.” He tossed her the pillow. “Put it under your buttocks, and then spread your legs like you did before.”

  Nika raised her hips, slid the pillow underneath her. She slowly brought her knees up and opened herself to the man, sobbing as she did so, feeling more helpless and humiliated than she ever had in her life.

  She felt the man’s hand on her genitals, spreading her labia apart with two fingers. She opened her eyes, and through a haze of tears she saw him reach into his pocket and pull out the syringe. It was about five inches long and as big around as a garden hose, and it had been filled to the halfway point with a cloudy liquid. A solution of saline and semen, Nika assumed.

  The man eased it inside her, the rigid plastic cylinder shockingly cold as it advanced toward her cervix, toward the innermost region of her most private part.

  How could this even be happening? How could anyone possibly be so cruel?

  She took a deep breath, trembling, sobbing, passively awaiting the injection, hoping he would go away and leave her alone afterward, hoping the insemination would fail for one reason or another.

  But if it did fail, he would do this again. He would keep trying until she became pregnant. She knew that he would.

  Nika almost wished she’d allowed him to snuff her out with the pillow. As horrible as it would have been to suffocate, at least it would have been over by now.

  But as the cold plastic thing went even deeper, her emotion suddenly changed from fear and sorrow to one of extreme rage. She decided, then and there, that she was not going to allow this to happen, no matter what. It was going to be him or her. She knew that she would probably die, but at least she would go down fighting.
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br />   The man pressed his palm against the end of the syringe, and that’s when Nika saw her opening. Before he had a chance to push the plunger and inject the solution, she reared back with her right leg and nailed him in the groin with her heel. She gave it her all, kicking through the man’s crotch as if trying to break a board. There was a slight crunching sound, and a red hot bolt of pain shot from Nika’s ankle to the top of her skull.

  She wasn’t sure if she’d fractured the man’s pelvic bone or her own foot.

  The man doubled over, heaving, retching, moaning, and something skittered across the floor as he fell sideways. Nika pulled the syringe out and tossed it aside, and then she grabbed the blanket and climbed out of bed and darted for the door. There at her feet was the man’s brushed steel cigarette lighter. She bent over and picked it up, thinking it might come in handy, wishing it was a gun or a knife or a club or something.

  She peeked through the door, looked both ways, saw nobody. Left or right? She had no idea where she was, or where she was going, so the choice was totally random.

  She decided to go left.

  She hurried down the long corridor, past a glassed-in laboratory of some sort, limping a little on the cold vinyl tiles, her heel sore from the impact of the kick. The end of the hallway doglegged to the right, and as soon as Nika made the turn she saw the shiny stainless steel doors of a single elevator shaft.

  Beside the doors there was a plastic button with an arrow pointing upward. It was the only choice, which told Nika that she was either on the ground level or in the basement. She thought about pushing the button, but then she saw the door marked STAIRS at the other end of the hall. She ran that way, thinking it would be the quickest route up to the next level, and that there would be less chance of running into someone.

  She yanked the door open and started climbing as fast as she could. Her foot was getting worse. It was throbbing, and it was starting to swell. Every time she put weight on it, a fresh surge of electric agony pulsed through her entire body.

  For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, she thought. Newton’s Third Law. If her foot was broken, then the man’s pelvis probably was too. Or maybe she’d ruptured one or both of his testicles. Maybe he was dying on the floor. She hoped so. She hoped that she had killed him, that another human being would never have to endure his torture.

  Gripping the rail and using her one good leg to hop with, Nika finally made it to the top of the stairs. She opened the door, expecting it to lead to another hallway, hoping to find an exit to the outside world.

  If only she could make it outside, she thought. If she could make it beyond the walls of this prison, everything would be okay.

  But the door at the top of the stairwell didn’t lead to another hallway.

  That was not where it led at all.

  12

  Joe delivered a glass of beer and some sort of tall frothy cocktail to a couple sitting at the far end of the bar. When he walked back toward the register with their money, Paula tried to flag him down.

  “Hey, babe,” she said. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  Joe opened the register, made change, slammed the drawer shut. The man with the fresh glass of beer gestured for Joe to keep it, so he dropped the coins and the one dollar bill into the wine carafe he was using for a tip jar.

  He took a quick look around, then turned to Paula and said, “What?”

  “Who is this guy?” she said. “I know I’ve seen him in here.”

  She handed Joe the smart phone. He pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and gave the photograph a long look.

  “Who wants to know?” he said.

  “That would be me,” Mike said. He stepped up to the bar and introduced himself.

  “You a cop?”

  Mike held his index finger up to his lips.

  Joe nodded, understanding that Mike needed their conversation to be discreet.

  “If you scroll down, you’ll see a list of the man’s aliases,” Mike said. “Recognize any of them?”

  Joe took another look. “Randolph Waterbury,” he said. “That might be it. He called himself Randy, used to come in around two or three in the afternoon. I tried to strike up a conversation with him a few times, but he was the kind of guy who didn’t like to talk much. He drank vodka martinis straight up. I do remember that. Very dry, no olives. Never said much of anything to anyone. He just sat here and drank his Stoli and stared at the TV.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Mike said.

  “I really couldn’t tell you. It’s been months. Maybe a year. I don’t even know.”

  “Did he ever bring a friend in with him or anything? A woman, maybe?”

  Joe shook his head. “Never. He was a total loner, that guy. Always paid cash, but then he always wanted a receipt. Like he was going to claim it on his taxes or something.”

  “Interesting,” Mike said. “Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Mike started to walk away, turned back and said, “Oh, there’s just one more thing.”

  He asked Joe if there was a dentist anywhere nearby who would do some work for cash under the table, someone who would fill a tooth and then burn the x-rays afterward.

  Joe gave him a name.

  13

  Being severely claustrophobic since childhood, Nika Dunning had never actually seen the inside of a cave.

  Until now.

  It was an astonishing sight, altogether unexpected, this rocky formation on the other side of the door at the top of the stairs. Like staring into the portal to another world.

  She stepped over the threshold and into a dark and narrow passageway. When she let go of the door, it closed by itself, leaving her in a black and engulfing void.

  Naked except for the blanket draped over her shoulders, her pulse pounded and her fingers trembled. Respirations rapid and shallow and tight, as if she were trying to breathe through a drinking straw. She recognized the symptoms. She was having a panic attack. It had happened a couple of times before, once at fourteen when she fell off her bicycle and hit her head on the sidewalk and had to get an MRI of the brain, and again at nineteen on a haunted house ride at an amusement park. The emergency room doctor ended up sedating her for the MRI, and the attack had subsided on its own after the two-minute ride.

  But this was different. The symptoms were even more severe than she remembered, for one thing. And there was no medicine to take this time, and no end in sight.

  Nothing but blackness.

  The cigarette lighter. She’d forgotten that she was holding it. She clicked it open and thumbed the flint wheel. There was a spark, followed by an orange flame, a bright flickering plume of light that bathed the area in a warm and primitive amber glow. This is how ancient people would have seen this space, Nika thought. She kept expecting to see drawings of bison on the walls and hunters with spears.

  She tried to take a deep breath, tried to comfort herself into believing everything was going to be all right. But there was a solid rock face to her left and a tunnel leading to more blackness to her right, and the thought of walking into that dark suffocating hole made her want to scream. To make matters even worse, the tunnel looked to be no more than four and a half feet in diameter, its ceiling too low for an adult woman of average height to walk through in an upright position. Nika was petite, but even at five-two she would have to lower her head and bend her knees to navigate the passageway, and with her bad foot, walking was difficult enough already.

  There had to be another way out.

  She turned around and tried to pull the door open, but it had locked automatically behind her. A pushbutton mechanism guarded reentry, and of course Nika didn’t know the code. She stabbed at the buttons and jerked on the knob, but it was no use.

  Lightheaded from panting, she stooped down and limped forward and entered the mouth of the cavern. The only other choice was to stand there and wait to b
e recaptured, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Anything would be preferable to that. Even hobbling painfully into the abyss, as she was doing now. And yes, even death. She would find a way to kill herself before she would ever go back to that room, before she would ever allow the man in the hooded sweatshirt to touch her again.

  One step at a time, she told herself.

  The cigarette lighter started getting hot in her hand, so she clicked the top shut and limped along blindly, using the cold rock wall to her right as a guide and a crutch. The darkness was frightful. She immediately wanted the fire back, but she certainly didn’t need to add burned fingers to her list of injuries, and it would be better to conserve as much fuel as possible anyway. She didn’t know how long the lighter would last, or how long she would need it.

  Her right foot felt as if someone had smashed it with a hammer. She could barely put any weight on it, which made her forward progress excruciatingly slow.

  One step at a time.

  After traveling what she guessed to be twenty feet or so, she decided that she couldn’t take it anymore. The pain had become unbearable. She folded the blanket, dropped it to the floor, and sat on it. She thought about giving up, about curling into a fetal position and waiting there until someone came for her. Actually, she was surprised that someone hadn’t caught up to her already. She knew that the man in the hooded sweatshirt wasn’t alone in the complex. Surely he would have notified someone by now—unless he really was dead.

  Nika considered that for a moment. Maybe he was dead, or at least unconscious. Maybe there was still hope.

  She thought about giving up, but she didn’t. She held the lighter with her teeth and started scooting along on her bottom, using her hands and her good leg to propel herself forward. It was slow, but not any slower than walking had been. The floor of the tunnel was smooth. Someone had done some work on it. The people who used it all the time probably carted things in and out, so they needed the surface to be fairly flat and regular. Maybe they even used recumbent bicycles or motorized scooters to go back and forth from the complex to the outside world. That would make sense. Nika couldn’t imagine grown men duck-walking such a distance on a regular basis, unless they had a fulltime chiropractor on board. She laughed at that, covering her mouth and giggling like a school girl, giddy from fatigue and from hyperventilating.