Omega Series Box Set 3: Books 8-10

by Blake Banner

  “Yes, of course I want.”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Original price. Five million. You cause me so much damage, I must mitigate.”

  “The CIA are offering me a damn sight more than that. I had a meeting with their representative today. You have to do a lot better than five million and excuses.”

  “Ten…”

  I laughed and went to stand.

  “Fifteen!”

  “You’re getting closer.”

  “Twenty is maximum I can offer.”

  “Try twenty-five and a ten percent stake in the casino.”

  “Five percent.”

  “Fifteen!”

  “OK! OK! Ten percent.”

  I sat smiling at him wondering how far I could push him. “We meet this evening. I’ll let you know where. You come alone. I’ll kill any man who shows up with you, and then I’ll kill you.” I gave a small laugh. “Though I don’t think you have many men left, have you, Gregor? You bring the contract and a laptop. You make the transfer, where I can see you do it, into my Belize account.” He nodded unhappily and I stood. “I’ll be in touch this afternoon. Be ready.”

  I left his office and trotted down the broad staircase, feeling better than I had that morning. In the parking lot I saw the pretty, cloned receptionist sitting on the fountain, smoking a cigarette. I said, “Did you do what you had to do?”

  She said, “Is this place going to shut down, mister?”

  “Probably, it’s running out of staff.”

  She sighed, dropped the cigarette and trod on it. I climbed behind the wheel and headed for home.

  I drove slowly, smelling the sea air and letting the breeze soothe my mind. Fifteen minutes later, as I parked the Zombie among the stilts beneath the house, I realized I hadn’t eaten since I’d had the donuts that morning. I climbed the steps, thinking about a good steak and a cold beer.

  I wasn’t surprised when I got to the terrace to find the door open and Emily gone. I knew Gregor didn’t have her. We were well past that, and I knew Rand didn’t have her either. He was too smart for that. So that left only one possibility.

  I smiled to myself and pulled a large, fat sirloin from the fridge and an ice cold beer. I figured I’d earned them.

  After lunch, I drove to Sweeny, a small, leafy town about twenty miles northwest of Freeport as the crow flies, but considerably farther by road. On the way, I made a detour past an arts and crafts shop in Freeport and bought some black lacquer. Once in Sweeny, I made my way to the post office on East 2nd Street, left my car in the parking lot and went inside to collect the mail I knew I had waiting for me in my PO box. It was a parcel, about two feet long.

  I took it outside and threw it in the trunk. I put the Eagles on the sound system and headed north out of town, with the band telling me I couldn’t hide those lying eyes. At State Highway 35 I turned west, through West Columbia and East Columbia and came finally to Angleton, where, with the sun turning coppery and the shadows growing long, I joined the 288 north to Chenango.

  A mile past Chenango, I turned onto a side road, followed it through broad, flat fields for half a mile and then plunged into dense, dark woodland for another mile. When I came out the other side, I was at a crossroads. The only signpost was a red one that said, ‘stop’. A cloud, the first I had seen in a few weeks, moved across the low sun. The fields ahead and to my right were empty, as was the road. A red barn two hundred yards away looked back at me with black, empty doors half closed. Everywhere, there was absolute stillness and silence.

  I looked to my left. The road went west, straight, as far as the eye could see. Another flat field spread out to the right of the road, dotted with copses of oaks and poplars. About half a mile away, dead center of the field, I could make out a low, modern, red brick building, maybe two stories high. I turned left and cruised slowly, looking for a gate that would give me access to the grounds. I found it half a mile up the road, with a small sign beside it that said ‘QPS.’ It was a tall, white, metal gate. I climbed out and went to inspect it. It was locked, and also secured with a chain and a large padlock.

  I went to the trunk, pulled the Maxim 9 from my kit bag and returned to the gate. I stood back, blew out the lock and then blew the padlock off the chain. The Maxim has a built in suppressor and barely made any noise. I put the weapon back in the trunk, pushed the gate open, drove through and closed it again behind me, looping the chain through the bars to look like it was locked on the inside. Then I drove toward the building.

  It was at the end of an asphalt drive, about a quarter of a mile from the gate. The building was unremarkable: a red brick, two story, oblong office block surrounded by lawns on three sides, with a large parking lot at the rear. The windows were all dark and the only access was through double plate glass doors that opened onto the parking lot.

  I left the car by the door, climbed out and sat on the hood, looking at the building and wondering if it had an active alarm system. If it had, it clearly wasn’t connected to the gate. I went and peered through the nearest windows. It was gloomy inside. I saw a large, open-plan room with maybe thirty partitioned cubicles, not a lot more. I went to the door and peered in through the glass. I saw a large reception area. There was a desk on the left, a flight of stairs and a couple of elevators straight ahead.

  I stepped back and a steel staple in the ground in front of the door caught my eye, and I looked up above my head. There, I saw a steel roller blind sitting in its casement. I wondered why it hadn’t been pulled down and secured. Something told me it had been, and then it had been rolled up again. I turned and looked behind me, across the parking lot. There were lawns, and then what looked like dense woodland. There was nobody for at least a mile in any direction.

  I made up my mind, collected the Smith & Wesson 500 from the trunk and blew out the lock from the door. The 500 is a hand-held cannon and made a hell of a noise. I put it back in the trunk and sat for a while on the hood, listening. There was no alarm in the building, and there was no wailing of sirens approaching from Angleton. There was just the quiet and the stillness of late afternoon. I thought that was really interesting. So I went and pushed inside.

  It was about as unimaginative on the inside as it was on the outside. The ground floor was taken up with the reception, two very large, open plan areas which were connected by plate glass doors, and along the inside wall, four rooms with large tables, which were presumably intended for meetings and conferences. Both of the large, open-plan areas contained approximately thirty cubicles, each with a computer terminal. I tried switching a couple of the units on, but they were dead. Windows all along the far wall looked over empty grounds flanked in the distance by tall, dark poplars. The feeling of isolation was total.

  I went to examine the conference rooms. Each was identically nondescript. I flipped one of the switches inside the door and, as I had expected, the lights came on. I smiled. The roller blind was up, the alarms were off, the power was on, but the computers were down.

  I made my way back to reception and climbed the stairs to the upper floor. It was much like the ground floor, except that there were no conference rooms. As downstairs, there were two big, open-plan areas with cubicles, connected via plate glass doors, but at the back of the second room, there was a collection of offices, eight of them, all told. I inspected each one in turn until I found what I was looking for. They were all abandoned, empty, devoid of everything except the desk, the chair and the dead computer, but the fourth one I went into was different.

  There was a mattress on the floor, with bedding and, on the desk, as well as the computer terminal, there was a laptop attached to a black box by a short cable. Against the wall, there was a small fridge. When I opened it, I found beer and pizzas, and coke. There was also a microwave oven and a sports bag full of clothes.

  This, then, was where Jerry had lived and worked. This was the place from which he had contacted Gregor, and later the CIA. This was the place from which he planned to org
anize and conduct his auction. There could be little doubt he had both the skill and the equipment to avoid having his IP address discovered. And the last place on Earth they would ever think of searching for him was right in the building where the NPP had been made.

  Here, at last, was concrete evidence of something.

  I went to the elevators, called one and when the doors hissed open, I examined the buttons. There was the ground floor and the second floor, where I was, and then there were two basements, and each basement button required a key. I had seen no stairs leading down, and there was no underground parking, so the only access was via these elevators. Two got you twenty that those basements were the labs where Jerry and Emily had developed and tested their device.

  I returned to the office, sat in Jerry’s chair and went methodically through the drawers until I found what I was looking for: two small keys that would fit the buttons in the elevators. Then I sat for a while with my ass on the desk, smoking and thinking. Finally I picked up the phone and called Rand.

  “What?”

  “Do you know where I am?”

  “What do you think? I spend my time tracking you on GPS?”

  “I know you wish you could. I’m at the QPS factory.”

  “Oh…”

  “You want to hear an interesting story?”

  “Always. It’s what I live for.”

  “Then you do exactly as I say. Deviate one jot and you wind up with nothing but egg all over the Company’s face. Deal?”

  “What can I say? Deal.”

  We talked for another five minutes, then I called Emily. It rang twice and she answered on the third ring. She didn’t say anything for a moment. I waited and finally, she said, “Lacklan, I’m sorry. Are you mad at me?”

  “No. Listen, there’s something I need you to see.”

  “What? Where? I woke up and you were gone.”

  “That’s not important now. I need you to come to the QPS building.”

  “… You mean out by Chenango?”

  “Yes, Emily, where you used to work.”

  “But it’s all closed up now, and vacated.”

  “I’m aware of that. I need you to come out here. How long will it take you?”

  “I don’t know, twenty minutes?”

  “Where are you?”

  She was quiet for a bit, then said, “I’m at home. The carpet is still stained…” She began to cry. “Lacklan, I can’t take much more of this…”

  “Call your father. Tell him to pick you up. I want you both to come here together.”

  “Why, Lacklan? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll expect you in at six. That gives you plenty of time. You’ll find the door open. Go upstairs to the offices. I’ll be there waiting.”

  I hung up and immediately called the Colonel. He answered on the first ring, like he’d been waiting by the phone.

  “Lacklan!”

  “Emily is going to call you in a moment, Colonel. I want you to pick her up from wherever she is and bring her to the QPS site.”

  “The QPS… why? That place is closed down.”

  “I know. There is something here I need you to see. You and Emily both.”

  “Very well. Is everything OK?”

  “Sure. I’ll expect you in at six. Not before, and don’t be late.”

  I hung up, spent a moment running through things in my head and called Gregor. When he answered, he was lisping.

  “You break my nothe, and two teeth I have lotht.”

  “Count yourself lucky you can still talk to complain. You know where the QPS building is?”

  “Yeth, I can find.”

  “Be here in…” I looked at my watch. “Be here at six fifteen. Bring your laptop and be ready to make the transfer. If you follow my instructions to the letter, you leave here with the box. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yeth. I make tranthfer to your account in Belize. Twenty-five million, and contract, ten perthent of profit from cathino.”

  “And, Gregor, you come alone. You bring your boys or try any smart moves, things get very ugly. You better be very clear about that.”

  “I clear.”

  “Half an hour.”

  I had about an hour to prepare. I went downstairs, climbed in the car and drove to the gates. I removed the chain and pulled them back enough to admit a vehicle. Then I drove back to the building and parked outside the door. I opened the trunk and took out the parcel and a couple of other things I thought I might need, including the 500. I carried everything up to the office and spent a quarter of an hour preparing the room, after which I opened the parcel, checked the contents and put it into the desk drawer.

  Then I checked my watch. I had half an hour before Emily and the Colonel were due to arrive. I used it to go to the elevators and try the keys. They worked and carried me down to the basements.

  As I had thought, they were two labs. I didn’t have long to inspect them in any detail. But in any case, the equipment in them, which all looked like cutting edge, high-tech electronics, was such that even a detailed inspection would have told me very little. I spent about ten minutes in each, did what I needed to do, and then rode the elevators back to the top floor. There, I flipped on the lights in the areas with all the cubicles and settled to wait. From where I was sitting behind the desk, I had a clear view right across to the elevators and the stairs, and the windows at the far end of the building, fifty or sixty yards away.

  At a couple of minutes past six, as the last of the light was fading from the sky outside, I saw Emily and the Colonel appear, hesitant and unsure, at the top of the stairs. They looked oddly small and vulnerable in that large, bright space. They looked around for a moment, hesitated some more, and then moved across the big room, Emily slightly ahead of the Colonel. They vanished from sight for a moment and then appeared again, large in the doorway. They both stood, looking around the office as I watched them from behind the desk. Emily asked:

  “What is this…?”

  I held her eye a moment and said, “Come in and sit down.”

  They were still hesitant, but after a second, she came in and he followed. They sat, staring at the mattress, and the microwave and the fridge, though Emily’s eyes kept returning to the laptop on the desk.

  The Colonel said, “What is this about, Lacklan? What’s going on?”

  “I was hoping Emily would be able to explain that, Colonel.”

  “What?” He frowned and stared at her.

  Her face was rigid. She was staring at me fixedly. “What are you doing, Lacklan?”

  “What is this room, Emily?”

  “I trusted you.”

  I laughed. “That’s funny, because I never trusted you. That might be because every time you open your mouth, it’s to tell another lie. Answer the question. What is this room?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re lying.”

  The Colonel blustered for a moment. “Now hold up there, Lacklan!”

  I sighed and reached down. I pulled open the drawer, took out the black, featureless box and placed it in front of me on the desk.

  “Pandora’s box. What do we do with it? Do we open it? Do we leave it closed? Do we hand it to the federal government? Do we hand it to the CIA, the Russians, do we auction it and live happily ever after on the proceeds? What should we do with Pandora’s box, Emily? Shall we unleash what is inside it?”

  She had gone very pale. There were beads of sweat on her brow and she kept swallowing. Her eyes were riveted to the box. I glanced at the Colonel.

  He was frowning hard. “What is that?”

  I shrugged. “Right now, it’s a box. Maybe Schrödinger’s cat is inside it. Maybe the cat is dead. Maybe it’s alive. Everything is possibility until we open it. Isn’t that right, Emily?”

  She still didn’t answer. The Colonel turned to her and said, “Emily? What is all this about?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Emily, what is this all about?” I placed my hand on the lid. �
��This is mine right now. What I do with it depends to a large extent on you. I am not going to charge you millions of dollars for it. Right now, all I want is information. Tell me what I need to know, and you can have the box, to do with as you please.”

  She was trying to read my eyes, trying to see if I was lying or telling the truth. The Colonel’s face was starting to flush red. “I think you need to start explaining yourself, Emily.”

  I said, “This room. It’s where Jerry was working from, wasn’t it?”

  Her voice was barely a whisper. “Yes…”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “If I tell you, will you give me the box?”

  “If you tell me the truth—and I will know if you’re lying—if you tell me the truth, you can have the box.”

  She nodded. “Jerry was using this place to organize the auction of the NPP.”

  Eighteen

  The room was silent for a long moment. Then, she pointed at the laptop.

  “That’s his computer. He had developed a device that rerouted him all over the planet once every fifteen seconds. So it was impossible to trace where he was. He was quite brilliant at IT. But he was a fool when it came to dealing with people. Gregor wasn’t, and he managed to manipulate him into a face to face meeting. I told you that already. Jerry was as arrogant as he was brilliant and he was convinced he could pull off an act where he pretended to be from California. Obviously Gregor had him followed, and before long, they had established he was from Freeport, and that he knew me. It didn’t take them long to find out that we had both worked at QPS…”

  She left the words hanging. I nodded a while. “So before you could proceed to the auction…” I waited and she filled in the gap.

  “Yes, before we could proceed to the auction, we needed to find a way of getting free from Gregor.”

  “Before we get into that, just tell me a little about the basements.”

  “What about the basements?”

  “They are labs, right?”

  “Have you been down there?”

  “Would I get a different answer if I hadn’t?”