Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  Ben felt itchy. He found the strength to pull himself up in the bed. “You injected me with it?”

  “You were born with it already in your bloodstream. You have thousands of nanotransmitters, basically as invisible as you are, floating around inside your body. The glasses I equipped Kane and the others with are fitted with a receiver which relays a pretty realistic shape and outline of you to the lenses.”

  “So they see me.”

  “In essence, yes.” Cole took the auto injector pen from his pocket again and held up in the light. “The compound Kane and Erikson have been given, in addition to the nanotransmitters, contains a microscopic version of the same technology in the glasses. Once in the bloodstream, the receiver finds its way to the brain and attaches itself to the optic nerve.” Cole tapped his temple. “After a mild headache, hey presto, the host is able to see other invisibles.”

  “But only those with the nanotransmitters inside them.”

  Cole nodded.

  He jabbed the injector pen into his wrist. In the time it would have taken Ben to say you’re disappearing, Cole had. All that remained of him in the real world were his clothes, shoes and pen.

  “What I said about us forming a partnership still stands. Ben, we’re just at the beginning of an amazing journey. One which I really think you should be on the plane for.” He took off his jacket and draped it over his invisible arm. “I need to go over some preparations for an important meeting. You rest. Rebuild your strength.”

  And my blood supply, Ben thought.

  The door opened and Cole left, closing the door behind him. Did he really intend to bring Ben in on whatever he was up to? Or was it a ruse designed to convince Ben to stay while they drained him of his blood every couple of days?

  One thing was for sure. Handing the power of invisibility to people the likes of Kane was like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child.

  Somebody was going to get hurt.

  16

  “Nothing,” said Dyson. “There’s still nothing.”

  Powell was finding it hard to contain his frustration. “I thought this was going to get faster.”

  Morgan was watching him. “Could Cole have encrypted the frequency again, using a different algorithm?” he said.

  “Possible,” said Powell, “but not likely. He’s shown no signs so far of being that cautious, if he’s prepared to walk around in broad daylight bundling men, invisible or not, out of crowded shopping malls.”

  “Well then how can the signal be just gone?” said Dyson.

  “The subject could be dead,” said Morgan.

  Morgan had a point. It was a logical explanation. The transmitters would die if the host did.

  Powell put up a roadblock in his head, tried to stop the thought from crossing his mind. He had resigned himself long ago to the fact that the subject was deceased. For him to discover Ben was still alive yesterday, only to have ended up dead today? He didn’t want to go there.

  “When I was a kid in Colorado,” said Morgan, “My grandma loved soap operas. Hated TV though. Preferred listening to them on radio. Thing was though, she lived in a valley, so had to have a massive aerial receiver fitted to the roof of the farmhouse to pick up the signal. I swear the thing must have been sixty foot tall. What I’m saying is, maybe that’s where our boy is. In a valley.”

  “In Miami?” said Dyson. “This is Florida, not Colorado.”

  “Hold up,” said Powell. “We got something.”

  A small, animated icon of pulsing concentric circles had appeared on the map of Florida.

  Dyson whirled around to the screen and started tapping away furiously at the keyboard. “Well now. Looks like someone just strapped a sixty foot aerial to our boy’s head.”

  Powell leaned in and peered at the screen as the satellite imaging software zeroed in on the signal and the location of the transmissions.

  “Signal’s diffuse. Like it’s spread out over a wide area,” said Dyson.

  “Which is where?” said Powell.

  “South of here,” said Dyson. “Way south. Deep in the Glades.”

  “Saddle up,” said Powell. “Looks like we’re going to get our feet wet.”

  17

  Mir mopped his brow with a handkerchief. The air conditioning was up full blast and the humidity inside the car was still winning out.

  What a wretched place this was.

  When Cole had informed him the demonstration would take place in Miami, Mir didn’t exactly think it was going to be on South Beach, given the nature of what he was going to bear witness to, but surely there was somewhere a little more hospitable than this. There was nothing for miles around but swampland.

  He had just spent the longest hour of his life being driven through it. Tall grass, which hardly moved at all due to the complete absence of any kind of breeze. And water. Wide expanses of it. Green. Foul smelling. Crawling with animals he wanted to have no business with.

  There were alligators.

  And he had read an article in a local newspaper only that morning about the explosion of Burmese pythons being discovered here. Burgeoning because of all the exotic pets being discarded now that their owners could no longer afford to keep them.

  Even so, Mir couldn’t take sitting in the car any longer. He saw his driver check him in the mirror as he let himself out. The hot air hit him like he had just stepped into a furnace. Sweat immediately formed at his hairline and trickled down his face.

  The other men who had accompanied Mir here today had been in position out in the heat for almost half an hour now.

  It wasn’t that Cole was late.

  Mir was early. He always was. It was just one of the many precautions he preferred to take. Like bringing along more men than was necessary.

  He had checked Cole out. The man had no paramilitary links or history of dealing in weapons. Just developing them. Mir’s new employer had received information that Cole was touting what he billed as the perfect weapon, and arranged a meet for Mir to check it out firsthand.

  Mir, unlike Cole, had many links to various nefarious groups and a long and checkered history in paramilitary and terrorist operations.

  This Cole individual seemed like a very intelligent man. If he didn’t know what he was getting himself into, then he hadn’t shown it so far.

  The heads of Mir’s men panned left and right in the distance like security cameras watching for signs of movement.

  Mir sighed and reached into the car, coming out with a pair of high-powered binoculars. The first thing he noticed when he put them to his eyes was that one of his men was not there. Where there were four heads visible over the tall swamp grass two seconds before, there were now only three.

  Mir’s right hand man, Kiryakov, reacted, stepping forward. Mir could see him depress a button on the radio mike inside his collar, trying to raise his comrade. Kiryakov waved an order to one of the other men, who began jogging back toward Mir and the car. Kiryakov brandished his gun and started for the missing man’s position.

  Before he had gotten a few steps, something upended him into the knee-high reeds with a splash.

  Mir zoomed in to see Kiryakov crawl to his hands and knees, then witness his man’s head snap around violently. He collapsed into the grass, lifeless.

  Automatic gunfire rang out and Mir dropped the binoculars from his face to see the man who had been returning to him was down too. The fourth man, the one who had been closest to him was firing indiscriminately across the grass in bursts as he stumbled backwards through the grass to the car.

  The engine roared into life with a throaty growl, all the signal Mir needed to get in. He had no need to close the door behind him. The speed at which the vehicle took off did it for him, as the driver headed for the last surviving member of Mir’s attachment. Instead of slowing as it closed in on the man, the car accelerated.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mir screamed at the driver. The car hit the man at the knees, the force of the impact flipping him on to
the hood and into the windscreen, shattering it, and then over the roof. The body tumbled past Mir’s window in a broken heap into the swamp as they set a course back to the dirt track.

  Mir pulled himself upright using the driver’s headrest for purchase and peered around it. The driver was slumped forward, his head banging against the window frame, his arms hanging down limp by his side. All the same, something was controlling the steering wheel, somehow directing the car on what looked to be the shortest, most direct route back to the road.

  Mir reached for the door handle.

  “Please stay in the car,” a voice said. It was very familiar. Mir had spoken to its owner many times in the last few weeks.

  “Cole?”

  “Mr. Mir,” the voice said. “Very pleased to finally meet you in person.”

  Mir felt his hand being squeezed. He looked down at it and saw the skin around his knuckles painted white by the outline of a hand. He squeezed back.

  “Good firm handshake you got there,” said Cole. “So, did you enjoy the show?”

  The car ground to a halt on the dirt road, the tires skidding on the loose stones. “I told you what I had in my possession was the perfect weapon. Your target will never see you coming. And when you do arrive… they won’t even know you’re there.”

  “Very impressive,” said Mir. “Hard to fight what you can’t see.”

  “Some would say impossible,” said Cole.

  Mir was indeed impressed. And somewhat puzzled. “Why do you wish to sell this capability, Mr. Cole, and not keep it to yourself, for your own ends.”

  “Money is my only ends,” replied Cole. ”Do we have a deal?”

  Mir nodded. “We have a deal.”

  “Excellent. I’ll be in touch then with the details of the transfer. Have a good day.”

  With that, both the front and rear passenger doors of the car opened and Mir was left on his own.

  He sat there for what must have been a full five minutes, unsure if he was on his own or not. Had Cole and his invisible associates really left the scene or were they watching?

  Mir chuckled to himself.

  For the first time in a long time he was scared.

  Here was a weapon, which had the power to strike fear into the most fearless men.

  The price was exorbitant, yes, but what did he care? It wasn’t his money.

  Mir got out of the car and heaved the driver’s body out on to the dirt, the man’s neck expertly broken, just like the others, by a silent, invisible assassin. Mir stepped over the body and climbed into the front seat. He dialed his employer’s number, planting his foot on the gas pedal. He had a serious commission to earn, which had now increased greatly given there was less than half the number of men to divide it out amongst.

  ***

  “What a rush,” said Kane staring at the tips of his fingers like he was Spiderman having just discovered his powers for the first time.

  The second of the specialist Chevy Suburbans Cole had fitted out was navigating its way back toward the city. “You sure we’re doing the right thing just giving this away?” Kane continued.

  Cole had been waiting for this.

  Even in the digitized, distorted view of Kane afforded by the optic sensors, he could see the wide eyes in the former Special Forces man’s trigger-happy face following the demonstration to Mir.

  “Who said anything about giving it away?” Cole answered. “Besides, it’s not as if we’re handing over our entire stock of the compound. We’ll keep a little in reserve for when needs be. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  Kane’s smile widened. “I guess it’s up to you then to keep Benny boy properly motivated.”

  Cole said, “There is something I have in mind.”

  18

  How big was this place? Ben had thought the facility beneath Cole’s apartment extended simply to the laboratory concealed behind the maintenance room. But it was far bigger than that. It looked like he had half a hospital back here. There was another recovery room just like the one he had woken up in behind the next door along the hall. Then there was an examination room, and the scan suite where he had been given the MRI.

  The place was air conditioned to freezing point. Shivering with the cold, he pulled his IV over to a locker and found a dressing gown inside. Putting it on was easier said than done, given the line coming out of his arm, but he got there.

  No one seemed to be about, but that couldn’t be the case. No way Cole was going to want to give him the opportunity to escape again. The ceilings all had small black domes protruding from them like blisters.

  Tamper-proof surveillance cameras.

  Ben caught his breath. He still wasn’t one hundred per cent recovered after his ‘donation’. He held on to the IV stand tightly for support and continued his shuffle along the hall, its castor wheels clicking over the grooves between the tiles.

  He pushed through, with no thoughts on stealth, into the lab area. The overhead lights were off. All the large plasma screens on the far wall were powered up and each was devoted to one of the men on Cole’s team. Their names, including Cole’s, were displayed at the foot of the displays. The vital statistics of each man were being relayed live.

  Ben counted three screens. One each for Cole, Kane and Erikson. He looked around the room and saw Burke looking back at him from a console, his face illuminated by the glow from his computer screen.

  “How you feeling?” Burke said. His tone was cold, uninterested.

  “Okay, I guess,” said Ben and looked at the screens. In addition to the men’s heart rates and respiratory readings, there was a countdown clock, which he guessed was a calculation of how many minutes and seconds of invisibility they had left, while a panel in the corner of each screen was a live feed of what each man was seeing. Burke was plugged into the optic nerves of each of them via the nanotech Cole had told him about.

  Ben wandered around the room, browsing, garnering a surreptitious, watchful glance from Burke every time he changed direction or inspected something too closely.

  He shuffled over to the exit panel and checked over his shoulder. Burke was transfixed on some on-screen procedure. Ben hovered his palm over the keypad and quickly tapped in the code he had seen Kane use before.

  There was a short, dull, negative sounding tone. The exit remained sealed.

  Ben wasn’t surprised. He had tried it more to confirm what he already suspected more than anything else. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was in any condition to make a break for it right now.

  He checked over his shoulder again. Burke wasn’t looking in his direction but there was a smug grin on his face. Hope you got a kick out of that, Burke.

  Ben shuffled back. The IV stand snagged a metal tray on one of the brushed steel tabletops and brought it crashing to the ground, its contents spilling across the floor.

  Burke jumped up, annoyed, and gathered everything up from the floor. He returned it to the tabletop and turned to Ben with a sigh, held him by the shoulders and steered him to a seat two stations over from where Burke himself was sitting. He pressed the spacebar on the keyboard with a vengeance and woke the computer from its slumber. He keyed in a password to get past the lock screen. “Here,” he snapped. “Why don’t you look at some videos or something? It’s what most kids your age waste their days away doing.” The man brought up a browser window and loaded YouTube, then muttered something else under his breath and went back to his duties.

  Around the browser window, the computer’s desktop was lined with folders, all of which were labeled with overly self-explanatory names. INVENTORY. PERSONNEL. VEHICLES. The one named ARCHIVE caught Ben’s eye and he double-clicked it. Inside there was only one sub folder labelled CLEAR.

  Burke was still transfixed on the screens, which right now didn’t seem to be doing much. The men were driving. Two of them were looking at the road ahead while the third was looking out the side window at passing traffic.

  The CLEAR folder contained dozens of photogr
aphs. It was like a scrapbook. There were many similarly posed shots of a group of people celebrating. They looked like scientists. There were lots of white lab coats and serious looking suits and ties.

  Several pictures in, Ben stopped.

  Amongst the faces, he recognized Cole. He looked younger than he was now, by about ten years or so. There were fewer lines on his face and his hair was fuller.

  The facility.

  It did exist after all. Cole had constructed a story about escaping from it. But he hadn’t been incarcerated there.

  He had been working there.

  Ben saw more faces he recognized. They looked just as they had when he was a child. They were the scientists and doctors from The Nest. And Jason. He was dressed in a green uniform, his chest covered in medals and military awards.

  Many of the photos appeared to have been taken without the subjects’ knowledge. Jason had not posed for any of the shots the way Cole and some of the other grinning scientists had.

  And neither had Dr. Woods.

  The first time Ben spotted her was in a shot taken through a window. She was speaking with a figure that was wearing a one-piece, fluorescent jumpsuit. The entire body was covered, even the hands. The only part of the body not hidden by the fabric was the face, which was obscured by a pair of large dark goggles.

  Ben stifled a laugh. Dark goggles. The signature eyewear of the classic H.G. Wells Invisible Man.

  Completely disguised or not, Ben knew exactly who the person in the picture was. It was his mother.

  Eve.

  The outfit was just as Cole had described. She was stitched into it. A design that ensured staff at the facility would know where she was at all times.

  Ben found more photos of his mother, taken over a quite a length of time judging by the changes in dress and hairstyle of the people in the pictures with her.

  Then he chanced upon an image that stopped him dead in his tracks.