Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  The woman observed him. He thought of the wireframe image of himself he had seen at Cole’s infirmary.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  Ben looked at Cole. He felt he should look for some blessing from him before divulging anything to this woman. But to be honest, it didn’t look like Cole was the one in charge anymore. And while she may have had not had the power to control Ben’s state of visibility, there was every reason to believe she could exercise the same physical attack she had outlined to Erikson on him if she so wished. He did, after all, have the same nanotech in his bloodstream.

  Strangely, though, he felt safe with this woman. There was something very familiar about her.

  “My name’s Ben,” he said.

  She mouthed his name like it was a word she had never heard before, and turned to Cole. He said nothing in reply.

  “This… is such a surprise,” the woman said to Ben. She just stared at him, then snapped out of her reverie, opening the back door and sliding in on to the bench beside him.

  “We can’t go anywhere just yet,” Cole snapped. “While your powers of sight are unrivalled, Sophia, your hearing appears to be shot.” He pointed a finger at the roof. The repetitive beat of chopper blades had joined the sirens of the approaching police and emergency services. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re surrounded.”

  “Noticed? I made sure of it,” she said. “I didn’t want you leaving without me.” She produced a deck of identification laminates and tossed them to the three men. “These should see us out just fine.”

  “FBI IDs,” said Kane, reclaiming the driving seat from Cole.

  “There are only three,” said Erikson.

  She flicked at the one she already wore on her lapel and said, “It’s not as if Benjamin here is going to need one.”

  Ben straightened up in his seat. Not even his mother had referred to him as Benjamin. Only one person ever had. And the last time he had seen her, she was holding on for dear life to Jason as the supposed safe house in the Louisiana swamps was overwhelmed by floodwaters.

  “Dr. Woods?” he said.

  She smiled back at him as Kane eased the Yukon out on to the shoulder. “Call me Sophia,” she said, squeezing his shoulder.

  Kane guided the SUV out through the police cordons easily on to the off-ramp, the counterfeit laminates Sophia had provided them with working perfectly.

  “Turn left,” she said at the bottom of the exit.

  “Where are we heading?” said Cole.

  “The expressway.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said, busying herself with her wrist computer.

  Less than five minutes later and two more one-word instructions from Sophia, the Yukon was cruising west on the expressway and into the darkness of the Everglades Conservation Park.

  “Kane,” said Sophia.

  The man stared into the rear-view mirror at her. She didn’t look up from the screen. “Kane, Nathan James. Former Green Beret. That’s interesting. Isn’t it, Cole?”

  Cole said nothing.

  “Two stints in Afghanistan. One in Iraq. After discharge, six years in the service of Private Military Contractors, leading bodyguard detail for diplomats and international business figures.”

  Kane’s eyes were on the road, looking in the mirror only to survey the traffic behind.

  “You look comfortable behind the wheel,” she said. “You do the driving on a lot of those missions?”

  Kane only grunted in reply.

  “We’re being tracked,” she said.

  “There’s no one on us, lady. I’ve seen nothing on the road. And nothing in the air.”

  “Be that as it may, we are being followed,” Sophia answered.

  “Mir tagged us,” said Kane.

  “No,” said Sophia. “Mir was working for me.”

  “Was?” said Erikson.

  “He’s dead now. Along with what was left of his men. I don’t think they were quite as good as he claimed. I’m hoping you gentlemen will fare better,” she said. “The team who were after you, that Mir warned you about. He missed one of them.”

  “And that’s who’s right behind us,” said Cole.

  “Yes, and not very far at all I would guess,” said Sophia. She double-checked her screen. “Kane, slow down if you would and turn off at the next exit.”

  Ben caught Kane smiling in the rear-view. “He after the kid?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I can’t let that happen. It’s why I’m keeping you alive.”

  Kane’s smile faltered.

  The road quickly became a dirt track sheltered by thick, overhanging trees.

  “I want him to think we’re heading somewhere,” she said.

  Kane did as he was instructed without a word. Ben did nothing but be the best-behaved passenger in the world. Whenever he chanced a glance at Sophia she was staring right at him, a look of calm disbelief on her face.

  The track’s surface deteriorated into a series of ruts that caused the vehicle to buffet violently.

  “Okay we’re running out of road here,” said Kane. The track was narrowing, tall grass and sharp branches brushing the side windows of the Yukon. “We have nowhere left to go.”

  “You want me to hop out while we’re rolling?” said Erikson. “I can bring up the rear when he passes, hem him in. End it right there.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Erikson. I don’t want to kill our friend. Not yet anyway. I want to follow him.

  “Stop up ahead just around this bend, Kane, then kill the lights and turn us around.”

  “We’ll be sitting ducks,” said Kane.

  “Hardly matters,” said Erikson. “If this guy wants the kid, he’s not going to open fire. And besides, between the tracking chip on the vehicle and the transmitters inside us, he’s got a trail of glow-in-the-dark breadcrumbs to follow us wherever we go.”

  Sophia tapped a command on to the screen on her wrist. “Not anymore.”

  26

  Powell was rusty. Being more focused on the mission than his operational readiness, that whole episode had taken much longer to play out than it would have five years ago. Fitness and reflexes faded, but instincts died hard. He had seen off, what he had guessed, were bargain basement guns for hire at best - which made it hard for him to process the scene he had found on the freeway.

  Morgan was slumped at the wheel arch of a Prius two spaces back from where the Yukon had just pulled out. He had bled out, quickly, stabbed by someone who knew just where to stick a blade for maximum effect. How they had managed to get that close was the question. There was no one as skilled and dangerous in close quarters hand-to-hand combat as Neil Morgan. Given the standard of the mercenaries Powell had dispatched, it had more likely been one of Cole’s men, given how close it had been to their vehicle.

  Or perhaps it had been someone Morgan had believed presented no threat.

  What a mess.

  His whole team wiped out in a matter of minutes.

  Men he respected not just as colleagues, but friends.

  The time for mourning would have to come later.

  He pulled Morgan’s body to one side and climbed into the Prius. He had gotten too close to fall behind now. Without his specialist field and tech operatives, he was seriously on the back foot, limping instead of running.

  Still, limping was better than nothing.

  On the way up the freeway, Dyson had installed the same tracking software Burke had been using to keep tabs on Cole and his team on Powell’s smartphone. He mounted it in the cradle on the dashboard of the Prius. He kept his eyes on the unfamiliar road and threw a glance at the screen every so often to see where the little pulsating red circle was.

  Right now, he was following it down a dirt road through a leafy canopy, deep in a conservation area in the Glades. It was conceivable that Cole had a second base of operations. In fact, if experience had taught both Cole and Powell anything, it was almost certain. But out he
re? It was one thing operating out of a faceless warehouse in the docks where it was easy to blend in. Out here in the swampland a building the size he needed would have stuck out like, well, a building. Even owning it lock, stock and barrel wouldn’t have prevented inspectors from the nature and conservation departments showing up every so often to sniff around.

  The condition of the road worsened to the point where it was nothing more than a series of exposed roots and deep furrows. Powell almost hit his head off the roof as the car bounced over them. If he had known this was the type of terrain the trail would have taken him over, he would have commandeered himself something more environmentally aggressive than a Prius.

  The ride was so unforgiving that the dashboard toys – the entire cast of Toy Story – had worked themselves loose and thrown themselves on to the floor in some kind of mass suicide.

  Emerging on to something resembling a straight, Powell checked the phone screen to see where the little blinking red disc was on the map.

  It wasn’t there at all.

  He stared at the screen for a moment, expecting it to pop up. But it didn’t.

  Not good.

  He took his foot off the gas as two conclusions immediately entered his head.

  One: The Yukon had entered some kind of shielded area, insulated with the same material Cole’s Miami Port base had been, nullifying the signal from the nanotransmitters.

  Or, two: He had been made. Baited and led here. If the men Cole had at his disposal were good enough to deal with Morgan, they were good enough to assume they were being followed. It was a safe bet at this stage that they had figured out their vehicle was fitted with a tracking chip, and now they were using it to their advantage. The absence of their blip on the GPS scanner then meant something else instead. They had just disabled it.

  And up ahead somewhere in the dark, they were waiting for him to come to them.

  Powell on his own against a car full of highly trained, possibly invisible, ex Special Forces mercenaries, plus another altogether more adept invisible that, he hoped against hope, could now be in league with them?

  No, he didn’t think so.

  It was time to regroup, revise, improvise.

  Powell killed the headlights and stopped, slamming the Prius into reverse. He prayed the thing would have the power and the traction to turn him around and get the hell out of there before they came looking for him.

  27

  The headlights of the approaching vehicle were bouncing up and down through the trees like ping pong balls.

  Then they were gone.

  “Whoa, what happened?” said Kane.

  “He’s on to us,” said Cole, turning around to Sophia.

  “He’s going to run,” said Kane.

  “Go after him,” she answered.

  Kane powered up the Yukon and put his hand to the lever on the steering column.

  “No,” said Sophia. “No lights. I don’t want him to know we’re following.”

  Kane grunted and the car moved out of the bush and on to the track.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” said Cole.

  Sophia nodded. “I saw him back on the freeway.”

  Cole squinted at her in what little light there was in the cabin. “Powell,” he muttered with both anger and trepidation invoice.

  She turned to Ben. “As in Major Jason Powell.”

  Jason.

  Of course. If Dr. Woods – Sophia - had managed to survive the flood and find her way back to him, it stood to reason someone with Jason’s training, and the only person apart from his mother who he had ever fully trusted with his life, could have too.

  “Hope you remember the way you came,” Sophia said to Kane.

  “I’ve driven in the dark plenty,” he answered. “Doesn’t mean I’m good at it but,” he added, as branches smacked off the windscreen.

  Cole sat inanimate in the passenger seat. That was just what he had been reduced to now. A passenger. All his big talk was gone now with Sophia on the scene.

  “I see him,” said Kane.

  Ben leaned to one side to get a view over the driver’s shoulder. He could see nothing out there but two tiny red taillights in the darkness.

  “Whatever he’s driving, they’re the wrong wheels for out here,” said Kane.

  Sophia joined Ben in looking through the windscreen. “God bless your eyesight,” she quipped. She shielded the display on her wrist, to stop the screen illuminating the interior and giving away their position if Jason was being mindful enough to check his rear-view, which he probably was.

  “Erikson,” she said.

  He answered her with nothing more than a look in her direction. “Former Marine Recon.” She was reading from his military record. “Sniper. Twice winner of the Wimbledon Cup for marksmanship. Care to give us a demonstration?”

  Erikson hesitated for only a moment, then reached over the seat and unfolded the canvas cover from the trunk space. He came up with a rifle. It was a long black, deadly looking weapon with a collapsible stock.

  Sophia produced a wallet from which she handed Erikson a single, curious looking bullet.

  Erikson eyed the round. “What’s this?”

  “A taste of his own medicine, that’s what. The round contains a multipurpose tracker.”

  “He’ll know we’ve shot at him.”

  “I would think he’s expecting it.”

  Erikson pulled back the bolt and held out his hand for the round.

  Sophia said, “Ever shot at a moving target from a moving vehicle?”

  “I’ve hit moving targets from moving vehicles.”

  He fed the round into the weapon and opened his window. “How we for trees?” Erikson said to Kane. “I’d like to keep my head attached to my body.”

  Kane moved the vehicle and changed his line. “I’ll give you all the clearance I can.”

  Erikson poked his head and torso out through the open window, then sat himself up on the sill. There was a heavy clunk on the roof as he settled the rifle on its bipod.

  After a couple of seconds he dipped his head down next to the passenger window and shouted in. “This isn’t going to work. Stop the car.”

  Kane braked hard.

  There wasn’t a sound except the rumble of the SUV’s idling engine and the Prius struggling over the terrain in the distance. Then there was a loud crack overhead and the Yukon rocked on its springs. Erikson dropped back into the cabin, already breaking down the stock of the rifle.

  “Well?” probed Sophia.

  “Hit,” he said.

  Kane put the truck in gear as she went to her screen. Two seconds later: “Indeed it was. Nice shooting.”

  Erikson’s face was expressionless. No thank you. No acknowledgement. No big deal.

  “Nice strong signal,” said Sophia. “We can afford to slow it down now, Kane. Keep our distance. If he thinks he’s lost us, he’ll lead us where we need to go.”

  ***

  In the half hour since she had walked back into his life, it was clear to Ben that far more than Dr. Woods’s hair had changed in the intervening years.

  Something Ben’s mother had once said came back to him.

  People change.

  It was as if the Sophia he had known had swapped roles with the Jason he looked up to. While she seemed to have made the distance between her and the government agency she once worked for wider, he had narrowed it right up.

  Jason had come to clean up. To erase the last remnant of that whole episode.

  Him.

  Sophia’s hand was squeezing his shoulder again. “You’re safe with me.”

  Cole cast a furtive look over his shoulder, his eyes darting between Ben and Sophia, wary of whatever bond might be rekindling between them.

  Ben played back her last four words in his head. You’re safe with me. He was surprised and, in a way, disappointed in himself.

  He found himself believing her.

  28

  So much for the most fuel-efficient car on
the road Powell thought, pulling into the gas station. He stepped out of the driver’s seat on to the forecourt and caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the metal surround on the pump.

  His face was caked in blood, as was his sleeve from when he had examined Morgan.

  On the run in to the city, Powell had doubled back and run decoys just to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

  The Prius had taken a bit of a battering after its off-road excursion. As a result, it was making some curious crunching noises. By now, potentially, the car would have been noticed missing and reported stolen from the freeway.

  Powell scanned the large forecourt to check if there were any likely substitutes to take its place, and then thought better of it. The Prius was anonymous, what with so many people being fuel expenditure as well as environmentally conscious. All he really needed was a new set of plates to throw law enforcement off the scent.

  The driver of the 300C in front scowled as Powell flipped open the hybrid’s fuel cap.

  The man hoisted up his trousers as close as he could to the base of his not inconsiderable gut and marched off with purpose to pay for his gas. Powell tracked him every step of the way. Inside he spied a hot food counter and deli. Judging by the way the driver stopped to take note of what was on offer, no doubt he would be returning with more than a fuel receipt, giving Powell more than enough time to do what he needed.

  He fished the multi-tool out of his pocket, then left the pump nozzle jammed into the Prius as he set about relieving the Chrysler of its license plates.

  Where he may have blended into the background in the Prius before, now he would be invisible. The thought, for an instant, made Powell smile.

  When he got to his feet after fixing the new plate to the rear fender of the Prius, he saw a puncture mark in the trunk. He thought he had heard someone taking a shot at him out in the wilderness. But it wasn’t a bullet hole in the bodywork. Something else.

  Like a dart.