Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  “Doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid,” said Cole. “The transmitters have to be looked at directly by the optic receivers. Reflections are useless.

  “It’s your mother’s blood that courses through your veins, so naturally she passed Crane’s special little transmitters on to you.”

  “If that’s the case,” said Ben, “how come Crane hasn’t come after me? If my body is full of his transmitters, and I’m so valuable to him, why hasn’t he zeroed in on their signal and picked me up?”

  “That would be down to me,” said Cole. “Before I left the facility, I isolated the frequency that they operate on. I reset them and encrypted the new one. He couldn’t track you because he couldn’t get a fix on you.”

  There was a knock on the open door. Erikson was standing there. “It’s the call you’ve been waiting for,” he said, then turned and walked away.

  A huge satisfied grin formed on Cole’s face and he stood. “I need to take this,” he said. Halfway across the floor he stopped and turned back to Ben. “Don’t hate your mother for not revealing herself to you, or the key to how she did it. She didn’t want you to know, because she was protecting you. She wanted to keep you hidden from men like Crane,” he said.

  “From men like you,” said Ben.

  “Come on,” laughed Cole. “You’ve been cooped up here long enough. Fresh air is just what the doctor ordered. Let’s go for a drive.”

  21

  “Give that to me again,” said Powell as the truck swerved in and out of the traffic, running a red light on Biscayne. “And this time, Dice, please try to use words I understand.”

  Dyson held up a fragment of the material he had spent as much time as Powell would permit him analyzing.

  “Okay. My initial suspicion was that this was some kind of insulating compound. One that acted as a jacket around the bodies containing the nanotransmitters, so preventing the signal from getting out.”

  “But it’s not, I take it,” said Powell. “Bottom line: is this going to help us find Cole?”

  The word from traffic on the black SUV with the tinted windows had been positive, but not as positive as Powell had hoped. They had identified a truck fitting the description, one that had made the return trip from Central Miami out into the Glades and back within the two-hour timeframe. The department had managed to track its journey all the way to Miami Port.

  At that point the trail went cold.

  There was apparently some problem with the traffic cameras in the port area that they were having trouble rectifying. Although appearing to be in full working order, all the units were recording was scrambled gibberish.

  The area in question covered some twenty square miles and housed a lot of properties of different shapes and sizes. Derelict warehouses, storage lots, factories, disused and fully operational, and a handful of semi-occupied apartment blocks. Hundreds of buildings, any of which could have provided a hiding place for Cole and whoever it was he was running with.

  “Turns out it isn’t the actual material itself that prevents the signal from passing through,” said Dyson, “but what’s housed within it: a version of the same nanotech present in the blood sample, but reverse-engineered not to emit a signal, but rather jam one.”

  Powell didn’t respond. The concept Dyson was talking about wasn’t new to him. The same thinking had been employed at The Nest to hide the invisibles they were protecting from Cole.

  Where that thinking led him, he didn’t much care for. Because only one person could have supplied Cole with such a material. And they were supposed to be dead. The same way as Ben.

  “Bear with me,” said Dyson, hoisting an aluminum briefcase up out of the foot well and on to his lap, opening the lid as they rolled into Miami Port.

  “I did a little re-engineering of my own,” he said. “Cole, or whoever he has working tech for him, was sloppy. Used the same algorithm to encrypt the jamming frequency as they did to cloak the nanotransmitters.”

  “And you cracked it.”

  “Let’s just say we’re going to send out a little signal of our own,” said Dyson.

  “And jam the jammer,” said Powell.

  Dyson tapped away on the keyboard housed within the case and then triumphantly tapped his right index finger on the enter key.

  “We’re in business,” he said. “This unit has a range of a mile in all directions. Once we’re in range of anyone with nano-modified blood flowing through their veins, the screen here should light up like a Christmas tree, whether they’re shielded by this stuff or not.”

  Morgan slowed. “There’s only one way in and out of this place. Want me to call in for police back-up to cover the exit?”

  “Negative,” said Powell. “I’m sure whatever supposed glitch is affecting the traffic cameras in the area is down to Cole. While the traffic department might not be able to see us right now, I have a feeling he will. A convoy of police units showing up will set his alarm bells ringing.”

  ***

  What was the point in being a field medic if you never got to go out in the field? Burke hated being left to mind the house like this. Especially when it wasn’t necessary. The building was locked up tighter than Fort Knox. He had specced and installed the system himself. It was airtight.

  He was better than this.

  Even though he was the only one amongst the team, apart from Cole, with even the most remote amount of knowledge of the areas they were delving into, he was still made to feel like a spare part in the operation.

  Cole had dashed off with Kane, Erikson and the subject, without a word to him about where they were going, or what they were doing.

  Trusting Cole was not advisable. Nothing out of his mouth was to be taken at face value. Burke had taken the precaution, call it an insurance policy, of procuring some GPS trackers and fitting them to all of the vehicles in Cole’s lock-up the last time he was left in the base alone like this. It was in his interest to know where Cole was always.

  Right now, the Yukon – Cole made a rule of never using the same vehicle twice in succession – was moving north toward Fort Lauderdale. Cole must have had a good reason to drop everything the way he did and haul everyone, including his most delicate, prized possession, with him. His gaze drifted across the wall of screens summarily taking in the reports and readouts displayed on each of the monitors.

  It looked like he had worked out the bugs in the blood replication process. He hadn’t informed Cole of it yet. He wanted to be sure before he did. Without the subject, he had been fumbling around in the dark. Surely Cole knew that. It shouldn’t really have come as such a surprise when the process failed the first time around. But now that he actually had the blood from the subject to work with, all the barriers were coming down hard and fast.

  The screen he was fixated on now was monitoring the latest replication test. The process was near complete. If it was successful they would have no more need for the subject. There would be enough of the compound to go around for everyone.

  Including him.

  Burke had not yet had the privilege of experiencing invisibility. But he would soon.

  A flashing red dialogue box appeared on the screen opposite. Burke read the message and then had to do so again to make sure he was seeing it right.

  Impossible.

  The shield transmitters built into the wall insulation of the building had crashed. Or been made to crash.

  His pulse quickened and he checked himself. Only someone who knew what they were looking for, and who had the means to look for it, posed any kind of a threat to them. And the chances of such people being in Miami Port at this very point in time were less than remote.

  There were a million rational reasons why the shield had failed. But he hadn’t time to think of them now. He needed to get the jamming equipment back online as quick as he could. When he did, it was going to be a good idea to re-encrypt the frequencies they operated on, and maybe those of the nanotransmitters in the blood products too. Just as a precaution.
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  Before he could, the lights went out and the monitor screens turned black. He wanted to come up with sensible reasons why this had happened too. But he didn’t much like the ones that were coming into his head.

  There was a heavy thunk as the emergency lighting came into play. The monitors flickered back into life and Burke almost breathed a sigh of relief, until he registered that the feeds to the screens had been interrupted.

  He pushed away from his console and remained absolutely still, listening. For anything.

  Then he remembered.

  What a fool.

  The back-up system. A secondary network of cameras he had installed that worked independently of the building’s main power source and used their own batteries.

  He connected in time to see three men, who were not Cole, Kane or Erikson, moving through the basement. Burke’s blood ran cold as one of them pointed at the entrance to the maintenance room.

  The jammers had been compromised.

  It was the signal in the subject’s blood.

  It had to be.

  The subject may not have been here, but his blood was.

  The big guy on screen used a shotgun to blow the lock out of the rusty maintenance room door. If they got through into the lab, no time would be wasted in wasting him when they found no sign of the subject.

  Burke’s eyes darted over to the security door separating the intruders from him and then back at the screen. If their intention was to breach it, they were going to need a hell of a lot more than a shotgun. As Burke tried hard to reassure himself of this, the man swung his shotgun around on to his back and came out with just such a thing, fixing a shape charge in place.

  Burke’s desire to get the hands-on field experience he had been craving left him. In a few seconds, it would be right here in the room with him.

  Move.

  Hiding was going to be the only way to survive this, but with operators this thorough, there was zero chance of not being found. But what if…

  There was a ping sound from his console. The blood replication process was complete. Another batch of test compound was ready. Ignoring all proper laboratory etiquette and process, Burke pulled open the door of the unit and started filling an injector pen with the compound. He didn’t bother to measure it out properly. It spilled over the top sloppily. The invisible liquid poured over his fingers and trickled down his arm.

  Burke jabbed the pen into his forearm and pressed the button. He felt a slight pinch, but not much else. He didn’t know if he would, or if he was supposed to. A sobering thought slapped him in the face. The nanotransmitters were present in the compound.

  What was the point? He would be more easily found invisible than visible with those things in his bloodstream.

  Unless.

  There was no time to lose.

  He dropped the injector pen and stripped out of his clothes, stuffing them unceremoniously into a drawer as he did so. He didn’t want to leave a trail behind.

  Burke started for the medical wing and was almost to the door when the blast from the explosion hit him in the back. It wasn’t enough to knock him to the ground but it gave him the impetus to move faster. Burke cast one glance over his shoulder. There was nothing but a cloud of dust where the door to the basement had been. The intruders would be through in a second.

  He scampered through into the hallway on the balls of his feet and broke into as much of a sprint as he could muster for the scan suite. He powered the machine up, knowing it would be minutes before it was ready to go, and grabbed the remote, fumbling with the buttons, trying to punch in the sequence for a full body scan. Then it struck him that he was still as visible to the naked eye as he had been sixty seconds before.

  He should have been under by now.

  He held his fingers up to the light, hoping to see signs of transparency or translucence. But there was nothing. Or rather there was something. Everything. All of him.

  Burke felt sick to his stomach. He could hear the men’s voices now, getting closer. They were shouting all-clear signals to each other as they worked their way through the rooms.

  There was a tinny clank. He turned his head to the side and saw a small metal cylinder resembling a can of deodorant roll in through the open door spouting a plume of smoke. A large man in a breathing mask stalked in after it, sweeping the room with a submachine gun. A small but blindingly bright tactical light was fixed to the underside of the barrel.

  Burke shielded his eyes as the beam found him.

  “In here,” the gunman shouted.

  Five seconds later, another man entered. He stopped a few feet from the naked Burke and looked him up and down.

  “We interrupting something?” the man said, with an obvious smile behind his mask.

  A third man strode into the room excitedly. “Check this out,” he said. He held up the injector pen Burke had discarded.

  The second man stepped forward and grabbed Burke by the wrist. He twisted it with a force that made Burke surrender his arm easily, turning it over so that his captor could see the underside. The third one pointed the nib of the injector pen at the barely noticeable red dot on Burke’s skin.

  The smoke in the room was dissipating fast. The team leader peeled off his mask and took in the sight of Burke sitting on the table of the MRI machine, all ready to go. “What were you up to here?” he said.

  The leader gave the larger man the nod and he hoisted Burke up off the table with one arm, hauling him back through the doorway and down the hall into the main laboratory.

  “Make yourself decent so I can talk to you without throwing up,” the team leader said to Burke. “And hurry up.”

  Burke sloped over to the drawer where he had stashed his clothes and retrieved them. They were still half inside out. As he untangled them the team leader barked, “What’s your name?”

  “I’m not telling you,” said Burke. “You’re trespassing, this is a private facility. I want to see some identification.”

  The large man forced Burke down into a seat.

  “I want to see you with some clothes on. Now,” the team leader said. “You’re not getting any identification. You don’t deserve it. My name is Powell. And yours is?”

  “Burke.”

  “Don’t see much in the way of daylight, do you, Burke?” Powell said, taking in his pale skin. “Where’s Cole?”

  “Who?” Burke asked.

  “Don’t,” said Powell, looking down at his feet. “These boots are new. I don’t want to get you all over them.”

  “He’s out,” said Burke.

  “Out where?”

  “He didn’t say,” said Burke.

  “He take the boy with them?”

  Christ. The bloody boy. He knew discovering the kid the way Cole had was way too good to be true. He was nothing but a Trojan horse, throwing the door wide open to these guys.

  “Yeah, he’s with them,” said Burke. He was trembling. He had put it down to nerves at first, but it was getting worse. The shaking more violent, his breathing more erratic. Burke suffered with anxiety attacks from time to time. Maybe fieldwork would not be such a good idea after all.

  The one who had found the injector pen held the empty vial Burke had used to fill it up in front of Powell’s face. “The boy’s blood. They’re trying to clone it.”

  Burke tried to contain the shaking and nodded.

  “Who’s Cole selling it to?”

  “He- He tells me nothing,” said Burke.

  “You know what? I believe you,” said Powell. “I wouldn’t tell you anything.” He juggled the spent injector pen from hand to hand. “You shot yourself up with the blood product without diluting it first. Schoolboy error. No telling what effect it’s going to have on your body. I can see you’re already having yourself a bit of an episode.”

  The shaking was moving into Burke’s legs. His feet were skittering uncontrollably on the floor beneath his seat.

  “What were you up to with the scanner?” Powell said, like he was
thinking out loud. His eyes were probing Burke’s, searching. “Of course,” he said finally, a smile widening on his face. “Clever little boy. You were going to try scramble the nanotech with magnetics. Nice idea. That’s one I’ll have to remember.”

  Burke could see the other man behind the team leader, sat at his console, deftly negotiating his way around all of Burke’s security measures. He slotted a robust-looking portable hard drive into a port on the computer.

  “Get all of it, Dice,” Powell said without turning around, his gaze still fixed on Burke. “Then burn it. I know Anorak here probably has everything backed up somewhere, but it should slow Cole down some all the same.”

  Burke was beginning to worry less about what this meant to the operation and more on what it implied for him. If these guys didn’t kill him, Cole certainly would. Or at least he’d have Kane or Erikson do it for him.

  “Morgan,” Powell said to the big guy, beckoning him over. “He doesn’t look like much, but don’t give him an inch all the same.” He went to join Dice at Burke’s machine, while Morgan stepped into sentry mode.

  Burke noted how the man kept his distance, well out of arm’s reach should Burke try anything. Hardly an option unless Burke wanted to commit suicide. A blow from the butt of the shotgun in Morgan’s hands would kill him, never mind a blast from it.

  He couldn’t make out much of what Powell and Dice were saying. Their voices were hushed and only certain words were making it to his ears. Not enough to string together and figure out what they were up to.

  The shakes were subsiding, Burke noted, giving way to pins and needles. Not a sensation he normally experienced, even sitting in the same position in front of a computer for hours at a time. He shifted a little in his seat to try and free up the blood flow, his guard’s steely gaze tracking him all the way. But it didn’t help. In fact, now he could feel the numbness in his fingertips. He wiggled his extremities trying to shake the sensation, and glanced down at his hands.

  Burke had to bite his lip to stop himself from making a sound. Instead of fingers, he was seeing a computer-generated wireframe image of fingers.