Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  It was a discreetly taken shot of Dr. Woods again. She was in a chamber of some sort, examining a woman who was lying down on a bench. Her wrists were marked where the leather straps had restrained her.

  The woman was striking. In her late thirties, maybe, with long blonde, almost white hair and a porcelain complexion. She looked embarrassed. Like she had been caught naked out in the open. Even though she was wearing clothes. The same fluorescent one-piece he had seen in the preceding photographs.

  The all too visible woman in the picture was his mother.

  “Oh that one brings back memories,” said Cole.

  Ben was so distracted by the picture that he had not heard anyone come up behind him. Kane and Erikson came into the laboratory. All three of them were still invisible.

  “That woman is my mother,” said Ben.

  “That it is,” said Cole.

  “Tell me,” said Ben.

  Cole stared at him for a moment.

  “In time. I’ll fill in the gaps for you, Ben. But not now. We only have a few minutes of invisibility left. And I don’t want to squander them. Help me give these two a few pointers; show them that true invisibility is as much about being silent as it is being transparent.”

  “Forget it,” said Ben. “Not until you tell me what I want to know.”

  “You see,” Cole sighed. “I was afraid you might pull some of this independently minded crap. So I decided to take out a little insurance policy.”

  Erikson walked up and tossed a small folder on to the desk. Its contents fanned out on the table in front of Ben, making his blood run cold as they did.

  “Some more photos for you to look at.”

  Cole stood there as Ben leaved through the topmost ones. “Now that I have your attention and, I’m sure, your commitment,” he said, “how about you help me with that training?”

  19

  “This is starting to wear thin,” Powell said to Dyson, kicking at the body on the ground. “We’re two steps behind. And we don’t have time.”

  Morgan jogged up to them. “There are three more. Two have had their necks broken. Cleanly. Swiftly. Expertly.”

  “What about the third?” said Powell.

  “Looking at the way he’s smashed up, my guess is he was hit by a car. There are tire tracks leading from the trail to the body and then back to the trail,” said Morgan. “Two sets. The first belong to some large sedan – more than likely the car that broke our guy in half. They stop about a half a mile up the trail where another vehicle was parked up in the trees. An SUV: same tread pattern as the one pulled out of the drink at the causeway.”

  Powell said nothing.

  “There’s that look,” said Dyson. “Care to share it with the group?”

  “The transmitters,” Powell wondered. “How come we didn’t pick up their signal until they were all the way out here? In the great wide open?”

  “You think it’s something to do with the vehicle,” said Dyson.

  “I’m certain of it,” said Powell. He swung around to Morgan. “The causeway wreck. Find out where it is. We need to go look at it.”

  Morgan went to make a call.

  “What do you make of these guys?” Powell said to Dyson, poking a toe at the body at his feet.

  Dyson knelt. “Military, at one stage or another. Mercs. Eastern Europeans maybe. They look it. Russian perhaps, judging by the smell.”

  Powell gave him a sideways glance.

  “Cologne,” Dyson smiled. “Expensive cologne. Smells like this one showered in the stuff. Russians. When they find something they like, they don’t believe in moderation.”

  “Right,” said Powell. “Not sure about your aftershave theory. But I’m with you on the mercenary assumption.”

  Dyson knelt over one of the corpses. He turned the dead man’s hand over in his own and looked at his knuckles. “No defensive injuries. Either whoever took him out was a complete ninja or just appeared out of thin air.”

  There was a moment of silence between them, nothing but the sound of the high grass rustling in the slight breeze.

  “I think it was a bit of both,” said Powell.

  “Really?” said Dyson. “That sound like something your boy would be capable of?”

  “Perhaps.” Powell shook his head. “He’d only kill defensively, I’m sure of it. Whoever did this, it was second nature to them.”

  “The ghosts?” said Morgan.

  “I don’t think so. If they were operational, they would have popped up on the radar long before now. Cole wouldn’t have been able to keep a secret.”

  Morgan came back over to them, slipping his phone into his pocket. “The wreck is at a pound back in the city.”

  “Let’s go then,” said Powell. “Dyson, you said the signal was garbled and diffuse when it popped up.”

  Dyson nodded.

  “That’s because you were picking up more than one body with transmitters in their bloodstream.”

  “Out in the open, out of the vehicle,” said Dyson, realizing.

  Powell nodded. “The vehicles are lined with some kind of insulating material that prevents the signal from being picked up. I’m guessing wherever Cole’s lair is, it’s lined with the stuff too. They probably drive the vehicles right into a garage and close the door behind them, sealing it in with them.”

  “Like an airlock. Clever.”

  “Cole’s clever alright,” said Powell. “His problem is he thinks he’s too clever.”

  ***

  “Have you any idea what you’re asking me to do?” the voice squawked from the speaker as Powell and his men left the pound. In his hands, Dyson was turning over a 6-inch square piece of the material he had cut from under the roof lining of the drowned Suburban. It looked like carbon fiber, only much heavier.

  “You want us to check every traffic camera in South Miami for SUVs with tinted windows.”

  “That’s right,” said Powell. “Leaving the city and then returning within the last two, two and a half hours.”

  The voice groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Do you have any idea how many vehicles are likely to fit that description in the South Miami area?”

  “I’m guessing it’s in the thousands,” Powell answered.

  “Yeah,” said the voice, flabbergasted. “Thousands.”

  “I guess you better get started then,” said Powell, hanging up.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked Dyson, nodding at the material in the tech’s hand. “Think there’s anything in it we can zero in on?”

  “You mean see if there’s a property in the shielding that will lead us to what it’s protecting?” laughed Dyson.

  “Is that a yes?” said Powell.

  “It’s a definite line of enquiry,” said Dyson. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “Major Powell,” said Morgan. “Those guys.”

  “The dead ones?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to double-check it, but one of them, I think I know who he is. Or was. His name is Victor Kuzin. Came across him in Iraq last time out. Ex-Spetsnaz. He was freelancing for a PMC, training their operatives in counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist techniques. As hard-as-nails guys go, this guy was the hardest. Invisible or not, whoever took Kuzin out would have to have been as good, if not a better operator than he was.”

  “It would seem Cole has recruited some freelancers of his own,” said Powell. “Decent ones. Expensive.”

  “But what the hell was a Russian private contractor doing out here in the Miami Everglades?” said Dyson.

  “I crossed paths with Kuzin five years ago. The world has changed a lot since then. Everything’s shifted sideways. He could have been working for anyone,” said Morgan. “Kuzin wouldn’t have come cheap, so I’m guessing it’s for someone with very deep pockets.”

  “Deep enough to be in the market for what Cole is selling, which in itself is worrying enough,” said Powell, “but not as worrying as what they might want it for.”

  “Terrorists,�
� said Morgan. “How do we know the deal has not already gone down?”

  “This was a first meet. A demonstration by the looks of things. Nothing has changed hands yet,” said Powell. “We need to catch up with Cole before it does.”

  20

  The photos had been tucked into the frame of the mirror while Ben was asleep, to remind him, to taunt him when he woke up.

  He put his hand on the end of the bed to steady himself as he studied the pictures.

  Six-by-fours. Dozens of them. Run off in some chain store, fast turnaround photo-processing lab.

  And every one of them featured the same person.

  Freya.

  Sat on the train.

  Through the window at her desk in work.

  Sitting in a coffee shop having lunch.

  “The blind,” said Cole from the doorway. “So predictable. She does the same thing at the same time every day. A pure creature of habit.” He looked at his watch. “Quarter past three in the afternoon. She’ll be sat at her desk. No question. She doesn’t take a bathroom break until half past.”

  Ben was silent. He was thinking how screwed up it was that the second he almost allows someone into his life, they’re immediately used against him.

  Cole padded on into the room soundlessly, deftly. He was visible, in his bare feet and wearing something that resembled a motion capture suit, like the ones Ben had seen in behind-the-scenes documentaries.

  He had once thought about how valuable an asset he would have been on a movie set. The money he could have saved the studios on special effects.

  Cole registered Ben’s gaze.

  “It’s not easy teaching grunts in a couple of weeks something it’s taken you years to master,” he said.

  “The photos. On the computer,” said Ben.

  “I thought they might interest you. I’ll let you in on a secret. Burke didn’t sit you down at that machine by accident. I wanted you to discover the pictures for yourself, draw your own conclusions.”

  “The way you asked about my mother when you already knew her. Used her. She was the guinea pig at the facility. Not you,” said Ben.

  “Some of what I told you, Ben, is true. I may not have been a subject at the research facility. But I did escape from it and I am still very much on the run.”

  “You’re a scientist.”

  Cole shrugged indifferently. “I was the leader on the project.”

  “The project? The project to do what? And how did my mother come into it? Were you putting her through what you’re putting me through now?”

  Cole shook his head. “Eve was special. She was the original of the species. The genesis.”

  “So there are others,” said Ben.

  “Not the thousands I said there were, no. But there were others. After a time.”

  Cole took a seat and gestured to the bed for Ben to do the same. “Your mother was discovered by accident. Literally. Holed up in an apartment block in Seattle. It wasn’t her fault she was found. It was the architects responsible for the apartment block.

  “Did you know that the Seattle Fire Department was one of the first to be equipped with thermal imaging cameras?”

  Ben shook his head once.

  “They’d been in widespread use with law enforcement and the military across the country for years, but they were just too expensive for the emergency services. Guess someone at the Seattle Fire Department thought it was a purchase worth splashing out on. It was one that paid for itself in spades when there was a gas leak in an old apartment block. A huge explosion destroyed much of the building. The parts that survived, the occupants were trapped in their apartments by debris. That’s where the thermal imaging camera came into its own. They managed to pinpoint, identify and rescue 22 people before discovering one person, who was not on the building’s register, trapped in a basement pocket. When they eventually burrowed down and broke into the space…”

  “There was nobody there,” said Ben.

  “Oh there was someone, all right, or some thing, there, trying as best as it could to hide in a corner. But see your mother was covered in dust from all the rubble and debris. She had tried her best to clean it all off, but it was no use.”

  “How come I never read about this anywhere? I would have seen it in one of the papers, surely,” said Ben.

  “Please,” said Cole. “When the whispers got out in the immediate aftermath of the gas leak, it didn’t take long for the ‘appropriate’ authorities to get wind of it.

  “They were quickly able to explain away what the firefighters thought they had discovered, putting it down to the hallucinogenic properties of some of the sub-standard components present in the exposed wall insulation.”

  “How convenient,” said Ben.

  “To be honest, thinking about it now, it was a genius course of action. If she had been outed, if the media had been allowed to learn the truth, she would have become a circus freak.”

  “What did happen to her?”

  “She hadn’t escaped the building collapse unscathed. Your mother had incurred injuries. She had a dislocated shoulder, some fractures, a concussion, smoke and dust inhalation. She needed proper medical attention, so she was taken to a place suitably equipped to deal with her; with a person of her nature.”

  “The facility,” mused Ben.

  “It was the only place that fit the bill really. Super-secure, well hidden away from prying eyes and ears. An easy place to be forgotten about. Nestled in a secluded area in the Nevada desert.

  “Eve was well cared for. She got the treatment she needed, that she wouldn’t have been able to get for herself if she hadn’t been found. But I think what surprised her was how she was treated at the center.

  “We didn’t see her as an exhibit or a lab test subject. And we didn’t ‘imprison’ her either. When she had recovered from her injuries, Eve stayed with us of her own volition. She had lost her memory as a result of the concussion. No recollection of anything before the explosion.”

  Ben nodded. He knew that already.

  “But I never did quite believe her,” Cole continued. “She was too quick, and it was way too convenient, to have no memory of who she was or her origins. I always got the impression she was covering.” He laughed. “But we got what we wanted out of her eventually.”

  “Her secret,” said Ben.

  “It’s not what we expected to find, but under pressure she couldn’t contain it.”

  “Pressure?” Ben probed.

  “You’d want to see some of the operators the D.O.D. brought in. Specialist interviewers they called them.”

  “They tortured her?”

  “They didn’t have to. Just the thought of being electrocuted shocked her into revealing herself. Turns out it’s all a classic case of mind over matter. That was when it was discovered she was pregnant,” said Cole. “She was keeping more than one secret from us the whole time. The idea of subjecting her unborn child to a few hundred volts didn’t do much for her, clearly.”

  “Who?” was all Ben could say.

  “Who was the father?” said Cole. “That, she would not reveal. It was no one within the project, if that’s what you’re wondering. Know that. The doctors did the math. She was pregnant before she came to the facility.

  “Weird, isn’t it, how she loved you so much, yet never taught you how to change between states. That must burn you up,” said Cole.

  It did. Immeasurably. But Ben wasn’t going to let Cole see it.

  “As a scientist, it was like the sun coming up for the very first time. The discovery of an invisible human being was one thing, but one that could flip between the two? Oh, the possibilities.

  “Course, when the D.O.D. got wind, they saw them too. Locked the facility down. Wrested control of the project away from me. And brought in one of their top boys. A guy named Crane.

  “He just happened to be heading up a stealth weapons development program at the time. Of the close quarters kind. See, back in the eighties, it was all about
two superpowers divided by an ocean. The game was long range. All about avoiding radar detection.

  “Battles these days are being won and lost in the field, up close and personal. You’ve got insurgents camped out in windows and dug into hillsides using hundred-dollar rocket launchers to bring down fifty million dollar helicopters. Radar invisibility doesn’t matter in those situations. But a soldier that can’t be seen? Well, talk about having a serious upper hand.”

  “They thought they could have invisible soldiers,” said Ben.

  “And I thought I could make them for them,” said Cole, “but they didn’t trust me. They didn’t trust anyone. Crane brought his own team of scientists in to supervise mine. And me. First thing they did was come up with a more long term replacement for the overall we had Eve wear to keep tabs on her.”

  “The transmitters,” said Ben.

  “Crane was paranoid. By this stage Eve was not happy. She wanted to leave the facility. But he wasn’t having any of it. She was his property now. He knew if she managed to ditch the jumpsuit and get outside the walls, finding her would be next to impossible. He drafted in a leading light in the world of nanotechnology, who had already developed a prototype of the transmitter before coming to the base. It was just a matter of adapting it. The nanotransmitters, once introduced into the bloodstream, disperse throughout the body.” Cole pointed at the skin suit he wore. “Each of the transmitters behaves like a sensor point on a motion capture suit. The signals are received by an optical unit and rendered into a three-dimensional image of the subject.” A pair of the wraparound glasses hung from Cole’s collar. He held them out to Ben. “See for yourself.”

  Ben put them on. There was a heads-up display in the center of the lenses, like one he had seen in footage from the cockpit of a fighter jet. It gave a read-out of the ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure. Ben brought his hand up in front of his face.

  He had seen the shape his bare foot left in wet mud, and pressed aluminum foil around his fingers, gotten an idea of how big his hand was and watched his fingers move. But this was so much more.

  He scrambled to his feet and looked in the mirror, but saw nothing.